The sight of a blank page is intimidating, even in dark mode. There’s endless possibilities, and the longer you pause to construct your first sentence, the longer you’ll procrastinate writing anything at all. You cannot say you’ll start writing once the first sentence is perfect because guess how many years you can procrastinate off that one?
Sometimes I’ll go back and add a better sentence at the top if I think of one, because the slug on Facebook is important. Sometimes I don’t. It all depends on how much of a diarist and how much of a traditional writer I want to be that day. I do not compare myself to people like Ernest Hemingway (because he’s a novelist, not because I’m that talented); rather, I see myself more as a Dominick Dunne character from Vanity Fair. His only title was “Diarist.” His job was to go and sit in the back of famous court trials and write about them. I don’t write about trials, but some of my pieces (like the ones after the spy book talks) are reminiscent because I’m just taking in the whole room at once and writing it down. I would rather sit in the back and notice things.
Not that I can’t be a ham and make people laugh. I do that all the time because it’s how I know to relate to people. I often cover up how I’m feeling by trying to make the other person spit out their water. If they’re focusing on the fact that I’m funny, they won’t notice that…….. The list where that ellipsis lives is long. However, I think of that as The Leslie Lanagan Show, and being quiet in the back is my natural personality. For instance, when I was watching Jonna I was blogging the whole time. I just didn’t have my computer in front of me. When she’d say something I wanted to use, I’d make a note of it, etc.
I didn’t want it to be perfect, because I wouldn’t be brave enough to publish if I thought I had to aim that high. I just wanted to represent her accurately, always a challenge with people who are still alive, because you are not in their heads. You can only write your impressions of what they said, not what they were thinking at the time. I did not want to write something that made her wonder if I was even in the same room.
Twice, I have written things to be proud of, and I am. I think the biggest thing is that I wrote them like I write every other blog entry, as if Jonna and Tony aren’t my favorite writers in the universe and untouchable heroes, simply other characters in my weird little life. Because of The International Spy Museum, it’s kind of true. I met Jonna after Tony died, and we struck up a bit of a friendship.
The concept that she’s another character in my weird little life and not a deity is sort of alarming, frankly. I mean, who even am I?
Why do I keep saying things like this if someone like her knows my name?
It’s an issue.
I honestly think that the more known people are, the more they appreciate being treated like characters in my weird little life. That they want to be known as themselves, so they don’t have to be “on.” For instance, I would think it was way more interesting to meet Kamala Harris when it was just me, my sister, and some good music. That’s because I don’t care about the vice president as much as I care about her, if that makes sense.
Most Democrats have the capability to become characters in my weird little life because of my sister. She’s a lobbyist, so she lives in Houston (I’ve said this before, but new readers, etc.) and works in both Austin and DC on state and federal legislation. In her previous job, she had several states in her “territory,” and Maryland was one of them. We got to go to Annapolis and ended up in a regatta. We also found a great restaurant called “tsunami.” You really want the pork belly ramen.
I tend to eschew the spotlight, thus wanting to get to know the people Lindsay knows, just not in a place where everything is top volume and overwhelming. Cocktail parties are exhausting for me if it’s a lot of people I don’t know. I go into shutdown fast, selectively mute so that I couldn’t say anything even if I wanted to, because it would come out as stuttering while my brain lags like an Apple ][ e.
My thoughts come just as fast in person as they do when I’m writing. However, when I am writing, I can handle that volume of information coming at me because I can process it through my fingers at 90wpm. My brain cannot translate information into speech at half that rate. I get intimidated quickly and just stop trying. If it’s important, they’ll e-mail me….. Or, one can hope. Sometimes it backfires because it seems like I’m not interested in talking to people, and that’s not the case. I just like to take in my surroundings and read the room before I jump into it.
I’m not shy in the slightest. I have just made mistakes by not reading a room before, especially with my line cook loud mouth, that have made me reticent to talk first. In short, I’m trying to prevent problems before they come up rather than popping off and then having regrets. And by “popping off,” I don’t just mean anger. Sometimes it’s humor that makes people think “what the fuck is wrong with you?” The neurodivergent sense of humor is kind of dark, anyway. Then add line cook, where we’re all some kind of fucked up (I promise), and the differences between us and our neurotypical peers becomes even more stark, because we’re gathering in groups. You just don’t see it, because you don’t see that the kitchen is for misfits…
As Anthony Bourdain points out, it is a tribe that will have us…… And we know it. We are not built for office work or polite company. We are built to be aliens- because we are that different and also few people are educated enough about ADHD/Autism to really be able to understand it. One of the reasons that we seem like aliens is that none of our behavior makes sense to anyone neurotypical, and it’s always on us to adapt. There is a power imbalance that is unbreakable because neurotypical people have an air of superiority over “special kids.” We know it, so rates of anxiety and depression skyrocket when you also have ADHD/Autism. Not being able to navigate the world like a normal person takes its toll whether we’re talking about our personal or professional lives.
Autistic people have trouble in interpersonal relationships, even among each other because if you’ve met one autistic person, you’ve met one autistic person. It does not present in everyone the same way, and I often think after many hours of study that the kind of ADHD that presents in women and the kind of ADHD that presents in men is so different that women are probably at the autistic end of the spectrum and men aren’t so much. Their ADHD presents as aggressively hyperactive. It’s not that women don’t display these tendencies as well, because I was married to a woman like that. I just think that the “male” presentation of ADHD is more accurate, and that the kind of ADHD that only makes you stare out the window and get lost in your own little world is more likely to be autism. Therefore, the criteria is the same for all genders. It’s not that there’s more autistic women, it’s that more autism is being caught. There hasn’t been much research on autism in women, because there are so many women that are struggling and only hear “you don’t look autistic.” I get it.
But please know that because I am autistic, I can predict with 90% accuracy whether someone else is, according to science (really). Neurotypicals can’t, because they don’t have the pattern recognition. They aren’t looking for the same things, because people tend to equate autism with severe retardation. If you are high IQ, you fall through the cracks. People understand autistic people who rock, scream, etc. They do not know what autism looks like after years and years of social masking.
Here’s my pattern recognition and how it might differ from yours:
Your gait
The number of different foods that you eat
How many times you have to go to a private place during a party for some sensory deprivation
The way you talk, because there’s a specific patois to neurodivergence- conversations are spaghetti code
The speed at which you talk- if Aaron Sorkin and Amy Sherman-Palladino have nothing on you, you may be autistic/ADHD 😛
The look in your eyes when you’re overwhelmed
Seeing stimming that other people wouldn’t notice- for instance, adults condemn a fidget spinner, but not knitting your eyebrows……. and it’s the same exact idea for calming yourself
How often it seems like “you’re just not there”
When you are dialed into a special interest, and what happens when you’re facing drudgery
How clean people’s houses are, because all neurodivergent people suck at sticking to systems and live in piles- no judgment because if you came to my house you’d see the same exact shit you do
Living in piles and yet knowing where everything is- because we don’t fit into your systems, we make our own
The way you write an e-mail, because again, a specific patois- which may or may not match your voice in person
The way you talk about your task list when it’s clearly overwhelming, especially when it’s already overwhelming and it’s three things.
How well you can multitask
How well you remember what you’ve heard vs. what you’ve read- most autistic people take in things through sight
Whether you make eye contact, and whether it looks like you’ve been trained into making eye contact as opposed to it being completely natural
Perceiving social masking instead of genuine comfort…. If you have to appear at a party, you’re ready to go long before anyone else (it’s a universal “you,” but it’s me)
These are not all the criteria, but it’s a good start. This last one is just “et al.”
I am not the expert, I just have lots of education because I made time for it. I also have the lived experience so that when the MDs and PhDs were talking, I could understand my past behavior in a completely different way. It’s interesting that there are so many tie-ins.
A lot of people who are neurodivergent are INFJ as well. In order to be “The Counselor,” there’s so much that goes into it…. Mostly introversion unless you’re in front of a crowd. My examples for this are writers and ministers. With ministers, it’s easier to connect to a thousand people than it is to go to a cocktail party. With writers, they’d rather sit in their offices til Jesus comes than do a book talk. All of the publicity is a necessary evil, not what an author really, really wants to do.
Authors who seem arrogant are generally one of two things….. Trying to fake it until they make it, or they’re not really artists. They’re trying to sell books, and they know it’s not very good….. But it doesn’t matter because people will buy it anyway. For instance, all those non-fiction books on how to get rich without really trying. It’s not pulling pain out of you as a writer, which is what makes it art.
When you write crap, you’re never going to see the real point of being an author, which is to wrestle your demons- even in fiction. For instance, Mary Shelley poured her heart and soul into “Frankenstein” to talk about her relationship with Lord Byron. The book was never intended to start the sci-fi genre, and yet it did. Sometimes I wondered whether she identified more with Frankenstein or Jenny. Either is a hot take.
Jenny has never appeared on screen, but she’s someone who was raised with Victor as a brother and then somehow weirdly engaged to him. She was accused of something she didn’t do, and went to the gallows. The reason she didn’t do it is that the monster did.
It looks different when Lord Byron is the monster.
And now all the fright is over, because the page is no longer blank. On the other hand, to quote another marvelous author…… “Tomorrow, AND tomorrow, AND tomorrow AND tomorrow…..”
The sight is relentless, and turns pain into beauty…. But that’s only by going by and seeing the other days where the pages have not ended up empty. In order to understand my future, I have to understand the past.
It gives me the insight to make “The Sight” not so intimidating.
I like feeling other people’s feelings if I’m close to them. When I’m in the grocery store or a crowd, it’s too much. I tend to put on my “doctor hat” in public because it allows me to act as if I have clinical separation because no one actually wants to know when you’re upset. If you have my URL, you know when I’ve been upset. But again, I don’t talk about this stuff anywhere else, because the things I talk about would just be bombs in the middle of a conversation, and I have found that people don’t like it when I’m speaking to them directly.
Sometimes I’m in so much pain that I don’t phrase things correctly and it comes off as if I feel worse than I actually do (by being snappish, etc.); I don’t have the time to craft a sentence in person that would convey it. I don’t do as well with conversation and get flustered. I’m overwhelmed, up to my eyeballs, and I’m always sorry when I cannot remain calm and sugar coat my way through everything.
But that’s with my friends. That’s where I need to dig deep and try to remain calm because those relationships are very important to me (whether they believe it for not). I am trying to develop coping mechanisms for having hard conversations so that I don’t get rattled. Most of the time, I feel meek and mild-mannered. Then, I’ll get angry about something and not know how to handle it. That’s when my fuse gets lit like a firecracker- this confusion- and I cannot even think straight. I am lost to the rest of the world until I can regulate my emotions again. I have talked while I was in that state. It doesn’t end well.
Which is typical of an autistic meltdown and I’ve had too many in front of other people that ended in disaster; they didn’t know I was autistic and neither did I. However, if they did know I was autistic, that’s still not an excuse for my words being uncontrolled. It’s just context.
It’s a way to bridge the communication gap so that I might be able to give someone empathy, not to try and excuse away my behavior. No one should stay with anyone no matter how bad it gets. I explain what was going on and that might give the other person empathy. It will help us both move on from this problem and solve the next of the same kind from ever beginning. But that is dependent on whether the other person sees me as making excuses. I know a lot of other people do, but it’s the kind of information I’d want from them in order to move forward. I’d want to know why they did what they did. Without that context, I will not be able to see why you’re struggling in the future. I will not know what to notice.
But because people don’t think like me, they think of me as justifying something when it can’t be justified. Not everything I do makes sense, both from a processing disorder and a mental illness standpoint. Therefore, they’re missing what I’m saying and I’m not getting what I need. When I don’t know what you’re thinking and what you expect from me, I will spin out trying to find it. I also spin out trying to find out how people’s brains work in general, because if I know how they take in information, I will give it to them that way. However, people rarely give me the information I give them because they think of it as making excuses…….. when the context heals the situation. God is in the details for me, that my light bulb moment is realizing why you did what you did and having empathy for it. Most people cannot open themselves up to me the way I can with them. They do not want to dwell on their own details, food for thought as we sit together and try to work out a conflict.
But until I learned I was autistic, I couldn’t put my finger on why I was so angry that this miscommunication happened all the time. Why did people think I bugged them for details because I was trying to hurt them? I found out later that this is pretty typical of autistic kids, and in retrospect, I definitely was one.
I couldn’t explain why I felt the way I felt. I didn’t have words for things like “demand avoidance.” I didn’t have words for things like “meltdown” and “burnout.” I didn’t have coping mechanisms to remain calm and be nice through all of that happening in my body when someone was frustrated with me because I was either asking them a ton of questions they didn’t want to answer or giving them so many details it was overwhelming.
In a lot of cases, they were just campaigns to convince someone of my worth, and it took learning that to go on this journey of self-acceptance. Once I started talking to autistic people and reading their stories, I realized that I wasn’t actually an alien. My sensory issue is other people’s emotions. It overloads my brain and I am constantly trying to give the people I love the room I want to give them because I feel the same amount of emotion bleed out in the mall as I do being alone with Zac.
I don’t need a break from feeling open and vulnerable to him, and people who are just as close to me. It’s the having to defend myself from being everyone’s fixer/pleaser because the ills of the world bother me just as much as the problems I have at home.
If you’ve ever had a fight with your partner in public and I saw it, I took it in. Probably tried to fix it until I checked out. If the store isn’t busy, I’ll ask the worker how their day is going and really listen to their answer. I can tell when they’re bullshitting me. It all matters.
It all contributes to the amount of spoons I have for going out. I really do have to make sure I sleep deeply, because my body cannot repair itself from that kind of psychological toll without it.
It is also my job to learn to handle my relationships with care, but because I didn’t know I was autistic before, I know that I have to do it differently than most people. I have to learn to regulate my emotions better than I have in the past, and that has to come through my own therapy/writing. However, I also have to learn how to translate better to people who aren’t like me. That I am not asking invasive questions because I mean them to be invasive. I am analyzing what you said because I was really listening to you and took it in.
I’m sure that eventually, I’ll learn to handle it all.
How do significant life events or the passage of time influence your perspective on life?
As a blogger, I have a perspective on life that is more accurate than most, because I cannot tell myself in the moment how something happened 10 years ago unchecked. I will go back and look. I do not have any moral superiority, because I can only go back to what I was thinking at the time, not another person’s thoughts. Therefore, it’s not “I’m right on the principle.” It’s “I’m right in that this is what I told you, and this is what you said at the time.” People confuse the two, because it’s “throwing things back in their faces.” To me, it is Brené Brown 101. I am checking the story you are telling yourself, because my blog made me check the one I was telling me.”
People think that I am pointing out that they’re lying. No, it’s “now you’ve told me two different stories and I need you to explain why your thinking has evolved.” I don’t care why there are two stories. I’m autistic and I want to know how everything works in your mind. I do not need judgment and I haven’t given any. I am asking for information, and people do not like that (as a general rule).
I complain about bosses who say “explain to me how this happened,” and then when I proceed to explain an autistic amount (which is, granted, neurotypically exhausting), they’ll reply, “I don’t need your fucking excuses.” I complain because I do not understand asking for information and refusing it. In short, I do need your fucking excuses. I just don’t call it that because I’m not going to judge you on your answers. I just want the whole story when you think I should pick it up on my own. That’s because there are social expectations everywhere that I cannot pick up, and you are setting me up for failure by “knowing” what I’m going to do next because of them.
My perspective also changes because I take in information through reading and writing, so I retain a lot of what I write, and what I go back and read here later…. which I often do because nothing spurs something I’m going to say like taking an old thing I said and turning it upside down and backwards because new shit has come to light.
If I didn’t, I would sit in anger and bitterness all the time. In short, this blog is my “Let It Go.” I’m not going to do it in a moment, but you’ll see the process as I make my peace. There’s very little that’s truly important in life, and you’ll begin to see what I think is and isn’t. And mostly that I am vulnerable enough to admit when I’m wrong, both when I see it in myself and when I yield to another person.
But I will never appreciate the phrase “throwing it back in my face,” because that’s an autistic trait, to see pattern recognition in everything, including behavior. When I am pointing out pattern recognition in relationships, I am actually trying to make us stronger by saying, “this problem has come up six times now- why does it always come up in the same way? It always hurts me. How can we make it stop?” The other person always makes it about them, because me noticing pattern recognition is more offensive to them than fixing the problem. The “how dare you” aspect is strong in a lot of my friends.
I notice my own patterns of behavior accurately and I love it when other people can do it for me. You also have to be strong enough to deal with criticism because I know what I will tolerate and what I won’t; it’s not because I’m trying to hurt you. I know me. What will make me feel better and what won’t. If you cannot hear me on those things, I do not want a relationship with you.
This is the standard by which we should all run our relationships. “How do I feel when I am with you?” If I constantly feel invalidated, I am not going to stay. You cannot hear me, and when my problems fall on deaf ears and yours never do, then I’m out. For instance, if you are vulnerable with me and tell me about a problem going on in your life, I will listen until you are ready to stop talking. Just vent for hours if you need it. I expect the same of my friends, because I do not want to be someone’s emotional dumping ground when they’re upset and too busy to take my calls.
I get that I’m a lot. What I don’t get is how many people refuse to acknowledge that they’re the same. All people are a lot. To love someone is huge, because you have to accept a whole lot of good and bad behavior without blinking. That’s why I do not believe in love at first sight. Infatuation and sexual attraction? Surely.
I don’t think you can say you love someone until you’ve wanted to smother them in their sleep with a pillow AND ALSO would give them an organ AND ALSO take care of them if they were sick, travel with them, and smile through family functions even if you didn’t want to go because even if they don’t, you feel like half of them hate your guts. You don’t love someone until you’re willing to clean up their vomit….. because you partied too hard OR you’re going through chemo.
If you don’t know how I learned that, you don’t know my writing. I cannot be in love with Supergrover because she is not capable of loving me that way. I cannot love Supergrover because she won’t let me. And by that I mean that she will listen to my problems about other people all day long, she’ll read my adoration and love with that intensity, but she will not address problems in our relationship.
It makes me feel like she’s here for the dopamine and not for the long haul. That can’t be me anymore. I want reciprocity, and I was tired of not getting it in the slightest. It doesn’t matter how I feel about her, that I would do all of these things as a yellow string and not a red, that who she is as a person was never dependent on her ability to switch hit. That I could have been a support person for both her and her husband, because I’m interested in keeping them together, not being a wedge.
I am not a jealous ex. If you’ve read “Outlander,” I’m Lord John Grey. John could learn not to want Jamie sexually, but he could not learn how to let go and not love him anymore.
We have a lot in common, me and Grey.
It took me six or seven tries to get into “Outlander,” because I wanted to read it. I always read my favorite people’s books, the ones that shaped them. However, I couldn’t get past the rape scene in the first few chapters. I had to read it, get distance, and try again. Once I made it over that hump, I inhaled the whole series up to that point in like, 11 or 12 days. I held all my calls and “Buy Next” is dangerous if you’ve ever been to the Kindle Store.
That’s because representation matters. If you want to read my two recommendations in stories for understanding who I am, they are, it’s “The Giver” by Lois Lowry, first of all. Great series, but you only need to read the first one for representation of me. There is no more important character to me in the world than that because I think both The Giver and The Receiver are INFJ. The way that The Giver explains information is very much the way an INFJ would, and the way The Receiver takes in information is very much an INFJ on the flip side. I use their titles and not their names because I think that tradition has continued in the world of Same for a hundred or two hundred years. They are The Keepers of the Memories.
The only ones in their community who are allowed to feel.
The only ones in their community whose brains work differently than everyone else’s because of it.
Not understanding anyone else when they can’t feel, can’t explain how they feel.
When they do feel, their emotions run as deep as the scene where The Giver gives The Receiver the concept of war.
You cannot imagine what happened in my heart and brain when The War Daniel had his hands on my back. Honesty about war is too much for everyone who hasn’t been there and is hearing what it is like for the first time. Daniel had a particularly rough emotional time of it because he had an experience where he won a piece of fruit salad that most people win posthumously, coming through unscathed, but a near miss by a fraction of a second. Daniel was in the Navy, a medic embedded in a team of Marines. The Marines’ mission, and therefore Daniel’s as well, was to make sure there was no violence at an event where they were giving out vaccinations. About a hundred people were gathered that day (in my memory- it might have been a little more or less).
A terrorist had rigged up a five year old child with explosives and had a remote detonator so he could throw the child in the middle of the crowd and blow it up. Daniel caught it out of the corner of his eye and shot the terrorist before the child exploded, saving the entire crowd. If the child was already wired and no one had caught it already, it was a near miss by seconds. Daniel also, presumably, was not the one in charge of watching for terrorists, just had his eye out because he did have responsibility. Yet he was a medic, one of the people who was giving vaccinations at the time. I think that makes his actions even more amazing, because there’s two things at work. Being able to notice both the people he was vaccinating and his complete environment, and being able to react before anyone else in both directions.
It was a memory that cost me a lot of spoons, but with perspective it helped me grow more than anything in the last, I don’t know, decade? It deepened my love for all people who have been to war, down to a Starbucks clerk I noticed was a Navy Corpsman. It’s the reason Daniel was embedded with the Marines in the first place. They don’t do medicine or travel. It’s amazing how much crossover there is, and rivalry because of it. People think the Marines are the toughest, and they do absolutely nothing to dispel this.
I had to bring in a little humor to the situation, because I realized that as I was getting deep into the combat aspect of my story (not being in it but feeling my partner’s emotions about it so viscerally), that when I tell The War Daniel’s story it doesn’t lose power. It feels like he’s touching my back every time I hear it in my head. The War Daniel was (is?) one of the loves of my life. The timing was just off. That being said, I have no idea how he feels about me now having broken off our engagement, but he hasn’t cut off contact. We’ve e-mailed each other once, but unfortunately I didn’t get it until a month after he’d sent it. I think it led him to believe I was uninterested in him. But, if he hasn’t been reading, he wouldn’t know that. I prefer it that way, to be honest. That if he doesn’t want to know how I feel, then I have my answer because in order to know me, you have to know my writing as well. I am a range of people depending on our experience.
Being online friends and in real life friends is totally different, because I understand things differently in person than I do in writing , and therefore present myself differently because of it. I am just not going to waste time on a man who doesn’t care how I feel……… because I’m not shut down. And neither was he, in the beginning, when it was all the rush of having known each other as children and him saying “I’ve been in love with you for 36 years.” I do believe that he meant it. I really do.
That’s because in the beginning, he could lay it out for me. That’s because he was on medication to control his alcoholism and drinking one beer to avoid the shakes so he could come down naturally and at home before he admitted himself to rehab. Therefore, his emotions were stable. When he started rehab, he was a different person and we started nitpicking each other. Because he was in rehab, there was no way to have an in person relationship for a while, and our engagement fell apart.
But here’s what I know. If he was serious that he’s been in love with me for 36 years, then it’s always been me and he’ll get off his ass or he won’t. But it’s not a matter of love, it’s a matter of pride.
Does he think he deserves the love of his life or not?
What he could lay out for me is that he knew he was fucked up, and therefore encouraged me to keep seeing where my relationship with Zac went, because he couldn’t be there for me in person and he needed someone “on the ground.” It helped that he found Zac charming and wouldn’t have been threatened if we wanted to stay together when he got home. That he did want the life we envisioned, which was living overseas if we were able and having our daughter, Cora, join us if she wanted. We even wanted to live in a country with protections for trans women, like Thailand, because she currently lives in northeast Texas and doesn’t know what a life without that persecution is like.
Our job was to be there for Cora, and when our relationship fell apart, we lost that ability to tag team as co-parents, which we absolutely were. Cora and I still have a relationship on our own, but I don’t tell her how I feel about Daniel because she’s not the monkey in the middle. I am happy to talk to her about cats, her fictional worlds that would be famous if she puts them out there, us both being queer and having that experience, etc. It is enough, that she can always reach out to me because I’m her “queer mom.” We are emotionally available to each other even when The War Daniel and I are not. Again, our relationship reminds me so much of The Giver, because The War Daniel was the first person to touch me with the memory of war the way Lois Lowry set up imparting all memories by The Giver putting their hands on the backs of The Receiver. However, I know that I was the right Receiver for him because I’d had the experience of listening to so many other people with complex problems that I was ready for it. And before he touched my back with war, he touched it with love.
It’s the perspective that made me believe I’d done a lot of things right in my life. The War Daniel was the first person that made me turn my attention from Supergrover, because he showed me everything I wasn’t getting from her that I needed to function in our relationship. She went too long between touching my back with good memories instead of bad. I deserved a lot of criticism and anger in the moment, but being forgiven made me think there was a future that wasn’t really there.
In my world, forgiveness meant something opposite from what it meant in hers. That loving someone meant forgiving them honestly and completely so that we can talk about our issues again, because we can both be vulnerable without fear of the other’s emotions. I feel that Supergrover was scared of my emotions because she wasn’t used to dealing with them on her own. Therefore, she could not give me what she didn’t have, and could not admit it. It was an unbreakable power imbalance, because we could not move past anything by actually resolving it. We just kicked the can down the road. There were two reasons I had to love her as a whole person, and love her husband that way as well. We all needed each other, and we all turned on each other as well (I mean, I assume that they’re a team on this one- that he probably wouldn’t want to go for beers).
It would have been a better situation all the way around if we’d sat around a table in a relaxed manner and actually talked about what was happening. That I couldn’t undo what had happened, she was it for me on multiple levels, and her husband would know why better than anyone else. That I didn’t liken it to polyamory because I thought I could weasel my way into some sort of weird unicorn hunting them. I likened it to polyamory because in the poly community, close emotional relationships matter just as much as romantic ones because we’re all talking about priority and time, not whether we’re banging during said established date. It’s not the kind of love, but the kind of attention.
I have not given her that place in my life, my first priority, because I am who I am. I have given it to her because I’m a writer and she’s a muse- in her world, problematic. I am not calling her out on being a bad person, just bad at not having realized this before. She’s not a bad person, it’s a bad situation. Therefore, what I have always been trying to get across is not “I am scolding you.” It is “this is a real problem for me and we need to talk about it. Here’s what I think.” If you don’t reply with what you think, not my problem. I’m not going to encourage relationships with people that go on the defensive every time I try to express an emotion. But because Supergrover is my muse, the one who puts me in the mood to write, not encouraging a relationship with her was never going to happen. If we didn’t submit to each other, we were fucked. I began to pontificate on how she felt, but she wouldn’t pontificate on how she felt in response. She’d blame me for telling my story when it was off from hers, but didn’t correct any of my assumptions. Our relationship became perfunctory, the way I learned in “The Giver.” My feelings were evident and hers were not. She said “you’re not the only arbiter of our relationship” and once called me a dictator. She didn’t realize that I’d be telling a different story if I knew what hers was. I wasn’t the arbiter of our relationship, I was waiting on her input………… that never came.
In Lois Lowry’s world of Same, their communities not being able to feel, down to being given shots to repress their sexualities, is mandated by the government and everyone is used to it.
In the real world, people have a choice to be locked down or not, and most people do because it’s so much goddamn easier.
And less worth it, which I think the book makes an excellent example in showing it.
I don’t think you notice those messages until you go back and read YA in adulthood. I think that’s why books like The Giver and all other science fiction stories that have Christ figures are such hits. Everyone wants to know how being able to feel changes the world, and they see that bravery in media, but not in them. They’re drawn to the media that does it because they cannot find it in themselves, yet are inspired by it. It is admirable, just not for them.
For instance, if Supergrover already had all the people in her life that she wanted to do those things for her, that was fine. I would be in her life to whatever level she would accept. Even if she never wanted to meet me in person, that was also acceptable because I can say just as much in writing as I can through other senses, if not more. But, as I told her 10 years ago, “a hug would be a nice goddamn thing.” It was great when she agreed with me, and I promise you there was a time, even if there’s not now.
It is the most important I’ve ever felt in my life.
The fact that she gave me that gift, even once, is more than I can take in. I just had to give myself The Tiffany Talk before I could be vulnerable with her again, because I needed space to get over my crush and get on board. Because I was so in love with her, I got resentful and bitter that I needed to separate myself from her for two reasons. The first is that I was married and feeling like total ass about myself because I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror. The second is that there’s a reason I was so in love with her. No one had ever put my mind in hyperdrive like that- made me care about the world and not just my little piece of it.
I just realized something, and now I’m making me cry. When we began, she was my Jamie Frasier, and Dana was my Frank. Thankfully, it was a totally different situation, but those are the only literary characters I can think of that accurately represent what it was like to be married to two people at the same time. The difference is that Dana and I loved each other deeply and fiercely. I didn’t find out that I needed Supergrover because Dana was capable of being toxic until much, much later. I learned that I was poly by going back and reading what I’d written about both women 10 years ago, how it was possible to love two people with such rabid attention and not have boundaries on either. We did have boundaries that helped me be safe, I just ignored them all because I was under every kind of stress you can possibly imagine and I became more mentally ill than I’ve ever been in my life.
Now, I realize that I have been The Receiver the whole time……….. with perspective.
All of it spiraled into me checking myself into Methodist Hospital, because I believed that neither my psychological nor psychiatric reactions were correct, and that my behavior was driven by both not having the emotional tools to deal with that amount of enormous emotion at once as well as not the right protocol.
Dana, Supergrover, and I all have massive life stories. It wasn’t the romance of it all that put me in the hospital. By then, I was already in it for the long haul with both of them. Hearing both of their stories bonded me to them in a way I’ve never felt about anyone else, and why I’ve made the decision not to enter a monogamous relationship ever again. It’s not that I cannot be monogamous, it’s that if it happened once, it could happen again. I am not going to bet against the house and end up wrecking my life at 46 the way I did at 36.
I lost a stable life with both of them because I spiraled out, but because of the already established long haul relationship, I never stopped hoping that Supergrover and I could, in a sense, start over once I got better. She’s not vulnerable enough for that, because it would require talking about a lot of uncomfortable things. If we’d ended up as partners, those uncomfortable conversations would have been different, but no less important. In a lot of ways, I am glad that I did not end up married to her, because what I learned from spiraling out is that if it hadn’t been my crush on her, it would have been something else.
Those intimate conversations wouldn’t have happened no matter how our situation turned out. I learned this by going back and reading my own work, because her emotional reaction to everything is to lightly move past it if it’s not all that serious and full on attack when she feels threatened.
It’s why “She’s So Mean,” “Your Love is My Drug,” and “I Believe in Love” (Matchbox Twenty, Ke-Dollar Sign-Ha, and Indigo Girls, respectively) have been my favorite songs since their release. “Your Love is My Drug” is particularly sentimental for me in two ways. The first is my connection to Supergrover, because our adrenaline was that hyped on many levels, and the second is that Dana and I danced to it at Lindsay’s wedding.
Accidental polyamory, but ok……………
Incidentally, my favorite meme from that Facebook group is when a guy texts another guy who is dating his girlfriend and he gets pissed about it. He says, “relax, bro. She is dating both of us. You are my boyfriend-in-law.”
Relatable. It’s how I think of Zac’s partners. That I’d hope they’d never react poorly if I reached out to them, because I don’t think of them as threats in the slightest. I get irritated with Zac about our relationship, which is different. The conversation we had about his newest partner was about me being jealous because he treated her completely differently than he did me, and it was particularly egregious for a number of factors.
My jealousy had absolutely nothing to do with his partner. It had everything to do with how Zac behaved, which, in the poly community, is called “being a bad hinge.” I was calling him out in love, because I want the best for him. I was also standing up for myself, because I am an older partner who can absolutely lay in his lap….. I also refuse to be a doormat on the other end of the equation. Zac prevented me from doing that from the beginning, because this is the first time he’s ever been a bad hinge and I had to call him on it. He established that the partner who never called him on anything was the worst because he couldn’t respond to their needs if he didn’t know them, he was bad at communication/getting back to people, etc. Therefore, the person who never called him on anything never got their needs met because they weren’t taking up room.
His honesty floored me because he’s the first partner who’s ever laid that out for me before we ever got intimate. Generally, that’s something I figure out after being with them long enough to pick up those things on my own. How much I care is dependent on how much I love you. If I don’t love you, I won’t call you on anything. That’s because I don’t want to do anything to make the relationship worse.
I have abandonment issues, and it’s something I’ve known since I was 14, because I knew even then that it was a core memory.
My emotional abuser was always as honest with me as I am with everyone else (about most things). I appreciated it at the time because as I found out through a Facebook meme, “you don’t like powerful women because they’re powerful. You like powerful women because you’re autistic and they’re direct about what they want.” It’s a terrible match, because they’re direct about everything except their emotions.
I have a feeling there are a lot of ASD/ADHD people trapped in that cycle, because we’re programmed to throw truth bombs whether you like it or not, and emotionally avoidant people HATE THAT. They would rather follow social convention and get mad when you ignore it. Social convention is nice, but it’s not kind.
What is kinder? Zac laying out everything for me beforehand, or surprising me later? What if he’d led me on for months before telling me that he had other partners? He could have, because telling someone that you’re dating other people is not required when you haven’t had the talk about whether you’re exclusive in the first place. I don’t feel like it’s a conversation you have on the first date, necessarily, because you haven’t even found out if you like the person well enough that you want to sleep with them.
Although if you do know on the first date, then that definitely is a first date conversation. You will wreck both parties, otherwise. One is disappointed because they found a great connection, the other is furious that they thought they might get a love story and they were actually one of many…… because most women are programmed to believe that when someone shows interest in you, that means that means We Are Really Starting Something™ from the moment we start texting.
The reason I say women are programmed to think that is that I was programmed to think that from a very young age, so I can relate. I also have found that if you express that you’re not interested in being exclusive from the first day forward, they’ll stop talking to you because they want that fairy tale so bad.
I was single for seven years, happily so, because I was more interested in Supergrover’s emotional support than I was interested in finding a red string. That’s because Dana’s trump card was punching me in the face, and I needed those seven years to recover. There was no way in hell that I would trust anyone that much, because I didn’t trust myself. I participated in us spiraling out to that degree, and by writing it all down I got perspective on the way I behaved and why.
That’s because I could go back and read it later without having the emotional attachment to my words because I was still struggling with the same problem. Looking at your own behavior with an omnipotent third eye is invaluable, whether you’re writing it for publication or secretly at night.
I choose to publish how I feel because I find that as I’m learning myself, other people learn themselves in turn. It’s what my personality is designed to do.
I’m an INFJ.
Like The Giver.
I love whole people, not just superficial attraction.
Like Lord John Grey.
Perspective on my life comes from other writers. Maybe yours will come from what you read here.
Here are my two favorite quotes about writing.
The first is a teacher asking a little girl who her favorite writer is, and she says, “me.” After writing since grade school and being 46 now, I cannot say that I am a great writer. I can say I’m my favorite author. It is one thing to love your characters when you see them in fiction. It is quite another to love your friends in real life so much more when you can see how you’ve both changed each other over the years. The second is “one day you’ll be someone’s favorite author.”
I hope that my friends realize that as I pass down memories like The Giver, they’re the reason I can do it, my reason for living because my experiences make my writing so much richer and deeper. I have been compared to Dooce, The Bloggess, David Sedaris, and a lot of other comedic writers. I can express things comically because perspective means I can laugh later, while having felt like Sylvia Plath in the heat of the moment.
I just realized that I told you that I had to give myself “The Tiffany Talk,” and I didn’t explain what that was. I then realized I couldn’t describe it better than I did the first time, so here’s a link to a sermon I preached at Bridgeport that I believe is the best I’ve ever done- and not because I’m that great.
This is an entry that delves into both making a brand, wandering off into video games, and then explaining why. It’s all of me. Skyrim in particular. Wanting to spend time alone, and wanting to be a writer. Writing and video games are more soothing to me than going out because of sensory overload…….. I feel like this might resonate with other ADHD/ASD/AuDHD people.
We need to talk about it. You and me. That’s because WordPress is also a community of authors who like to share in hopes of going viral. If you go viral on the Internet, there is a better chance you’ll get name recognition before you:
Ask for a book deal that includes an advance; the publisher can see with numbers how popular you are and that gives them a huge indication as to how well the book will sell beforehand. Dooce and The Bloggess both hit the New York Times because so many people were invested, less so after she became an influencer, but in her books, she was still just as raw and real as she ever was at the beginning of her blog.
Getting a book deal over someone else because you’re good at social media is very much like getting a role over someone else in a TV show or film because more people follow them, the younger the better.
In terms of age, I seem to have two markets locked up. These are the same people who like Martha Beck, Glennon Doyle, Abby Wambach, and Brené Brown. I cannot break down my analytics as far as I need because those are paid plugins if you don’t run your own server, my next move if I were to make one.
I don’t have to use WordPress, and I can add analytics and search optimization into my HTML documents for free instead of paying $99/year for the professional version of WordPress (that doesn’t include the plugins for analytics, those are paid separately), or a business account, which is $300/mo…. and the plugins you need for analytics are also paid separately even though you’re forking over way more money than these things actually cost.
There aren’t many more features that you get in the business account itself except the ability to basically do what you want with the code (leading to more monetization and they’ll let you keep the money… ads in the free tier make the money go to Automattic (in honor of Matt Mullenweg, also HSPVA. I don’t know him, and my relationship with him is still complicated. He made my job a lot harder once WordPress hit it big and started running almost 30% of the web at one point.).
I also know that with WordPress Business I would get enough subdomains and e-mail addresses; it’s more functionality like Google Education, making blogs with a lot of authors easier to manage.
That being said, I can find something open source and code it on my own. What I lose in that transaction is that I don’t know two things.
The first is whether WordPress is still available in its original form, where you install it on your own server without installing their ridiculous “app store.”
My perfect version got wiped out about 8-10 years ago and was replaced by a block system that lets you know nothing about HTML, and more specifically, layers and Cascading Style Sheets.
This is because WordPress used to have a feature where you could put a layer on top of the text and have it “float” so the text wrapped around it closely, except for the amount of padding you code into it.
I could also sort of “edit” the picture on the fly by making borders to separate the text from the image even more without having to add it in an image editor. CSS will do that on its own.
What I did do in an image editor was cut down the file size, because if you upload a 4 MB image and tell the web browser to scale it down, you could make a sandwich in the time it will take that image to load.
On a related topic, this is why I’m saying once and for all that camera phones are getting too intense for the average user. Apple and Android both require so much space for pictures and now there’s not really a way to turn down the quality so you have to edit it later, even if the shot was perfect in the beginning.
I wonder if absolutely any of this is tied to wanting to upload your pictures and then when it runs out, sell you server space……. because neither Apple nor Samsung nor Microsoft nor Amazon is uninterested in moving everything to the cloud because you’ll never lose it, and you’ll pay what the market will bear.
Those are your grandkids and the house might burn down (this is not fictional…. Lindsay and I lost most of our first family pictures to a house fire in 1990, because we gave some of them to our grandparents. The rest were smoke damaged and stuck together because they were wet.). It’s the reason I would buy server space if I didn’t have my own storage…. and even then, I have a 6TB backup drive I can use through USB.
I don’t have to keep anything on my boot drive except Skyrim, because an M.2 drive has the best loading time, but since I’ve added an SSD, the loading time is fast enough that I can store the large textures on my “scratch drive.”
As I was saying the other day, I have a new mod for Skyrim that will make your computer take it easy on your VRAM by unpacking all the textures beforehand to decrease loading time because of the extraction running on the CPU. If I had a media workstation, it would have enough dedicated RAM that I wouldn’t need it, but shared RAM is so much different that this is a game changer. I am now wondering if I buy a bigger SSD, it would work for other Bethesda games as well. Fallout 4 is just as huge an undertaking for my computer….. and yet, I still haven’t gone back to it because I don’t like the interface. The one time I went into town and got a decent weapon, and even remembered to pick up the ammo for it, it wouldn’t fire.
So, I did what any of us would. I toggled God Mode so I could take down a Deathclaw with a 10 MM pistol, and live to tell about it. I know people don’t appreciate it that I’ll actually admit I toggle God mode in tough situations, but I don’t care about winning and losing. I care about the writing. Besides, the story of a Deathclaw being taken down by a woman without any real armor and a pistol is much funnier than “I was so overpowered I killed it in one shot.” I did that in Fallout 3 already. Not as funny.
I just hated the interface, because it was made for console and adapted to PC. I couldn’t get the hang of it. If I’m ever interested in seeing what happens, I’ll catch it on YouTube. At least I can find out if a mod is interfering with that weapon firing or whether it’s not supposed to work and you’re supposed to find something else.
I’m still autistic when I’m playing a video game. I don’t do well with surprises at not being prepared. So, I don’t watch videos with any spoilers until I get what the best start is and a few of the high level weapons you can find easily before you find yourself shooting and pistol-whipping a Deathclaw.
In Skyrim, the best moment I’ve ever had was when I realized my magic had come up enough that I defeated one with conjuration spells and a bow that appeared when I cast it, I wasn’t carrying one on me.
This is because in the past, I’ve kind of played a weenie, what most people think of when they think of the stealth archer build. That’s because you’re so overpowered, even in the early game, because a sneak attack counts for more damage than shooting an arrow when the victim can see you.
However, since I’m so late in the game, I’m adept at any build. There are just the weapons I like carrying, and the ones I don’t. When I leave my player home (the one place you can store your stuff and know it will always be there when you get back), I am only carrying about 76 pounds of supplies. I carry a truly overpowered bow and sword, but no shield because I have a spell in my other hand, generally conjuration because that adds extra followers.
Speaking of followers, right now I have Lydia (with her dialogue extension) and Lucien (with a patch for Lucien to interact with Lydia). Lucien also interacts with other followers, but only the previous version of Kaiden supports those patches and Anniversary Edition won’t work with it. If I find out that Creation Club sucks, I’m downgrading.
Serana also has interactions with Lucien, Lydia, and Remiel, who is a Dwemer specialist and a ton of fun. We’re going to go and get her right after Serana becomes my follower.
I haven’t gone to get them yet, but I also have “Khajit Will Follow,” which comes with three in one, Inigo (who has interactions with all followers), Auri, and Hoth.
The reason for this is simple. My favorite mod in the whole game is “Legacy of the Dragonborn.” It comes with a Safehouse that can be modified so that your followers’ rooms are personalized to them with “Safehouse Plus” and its follower room patch. I can’t wait to see all of it, and I just got the key to the safehouse.
Plus, Remiel has a plugin for Legacy of the Dragonborn, so I can invite her to be a part of “The Explorer’s Guild.” She’ll freak because she’ll find more Dwemer shit than I will.
I’m also thinking about downgrading because some of the mods have not been updated and some have. This mostly affects dependencies, because one mod is looking for the old file name when it’s been renamed in the Anniversary Edition. So, you can’t really decide which mods you want to install. It matters so much what version you’re actually on.
I do not think that I am capable of live-streaming Skyrim unless it was a comedy show. I am so bad at this game, and yet I still play it because of the writing…. particularly Lucien’s, because I’ve just downloaded him and he’s hilarious. We’re supposed to warn the Jarl that a dragon is attacking, and Lucien’s voice is very posh. So, it makes you fall over with laughter when you walk into Dragonsreach and he says, “let’s chat to the man in the big fancy chair.”
Kaiden is the one I’ve spent the least time with, but I’m liking him more and more. His dialogue is sometimes clever, and I think it will get better once the main storyline with him starts. I know this because I sort of got a spoiler, an overhaul for his house…. so I know he eventually finds something.
When I get to Skyrim, the first thing I buy is a player home. I don’t do any quests, I start crafting potions and weapons. That’s because there are potions for smithing that give the weapon more damage, and then you can enchant them with very strong magic effects to decrease the time it takes to get through anything.
I’ve added a mod called “Summermyst,” which comes with all new enchantments without changing the current spell or enchantment perk trees (my problem with Ordinator, etc.). I’m excited because I just got my second favorite. It’s called “Death Shroud,” and when people get within 25 feet of you, their lifeblood starts draining. It is, unsurprisingly, found on vampire armor.
There is already a “fire damage” enchantment, but the one from Summermyst is much better. It’s called “Fire Damage Lingering.” When you hit them with that, they start burning at the rate of X per second (depending on strength of enchantment). If they aren’t dead when you shot them, they will be shortly.
I have something similar on my bow right now, shock damage and shock damage lingering. It will hit everyone in the vicinity with shock damage at X per second.
I also have armor enchantments that my followers cannot go without. I will not let Lydia within 25 feet of me if she doesn’t have a “muffle” enchantment on her boots. I make sure they all have it, because it keeps them from setting off traps…… on Lydia’s, I also fortify “sneak” instead of one-handed attacks.
Lydia is the only one I make all the weapons for because I’ve seen her use everything she picks up on her own except magic. So, depending on what armor I make for her, I make her every weapon that line offers. If they don’t do enough damage, they will when I’m done with them.
The other thing I do is that in addition to armor enchantments, I make them all jewelry… necklace, right and left hand rings, earrings, capes, and hoods. This is because you can wear all of that if you’re not wearing a helmet and each item can be enchanted. A ranger hood makes a very good head armor when the circlet is just worn for the enchantment.
I do all of this beforehand so that they’re armored for the late game as well. I do not know if they’re marked essential or not, because they’re all incompatible with a follower manager because they run their own scripts.
Speaking of which, I found the coolest one (to me) because my second favorite Marvel hero after Black Panther is Dr. Strange. I think it’s funny that my first and second favorites are my personality. The first is fighting for social justice, the second is the humor of watching Dr. Strange in the hospital and having known a thousand doctors just like him.
Anyway, I found this mod called “Strange Runes.” When you cast a spell, it takes a second. The original animation is still there, but when the spell is ready to cast, it throws out a bright rune in the color of your spell.
Also, I have to admit that it’s a lot of fun going to Apocrypha and collecting all the black soul gems because who hasn’t thought of putting Nazeem in one and using him to enchant something as cheap and worthless as his personality.
For instance, after I am the Thane of Whiterun because I killed a dragon and absorbed its soul, and the whole city supposedly knows who I am, and I am in and out of the palace almost every day for a while, that dick still says, “do you get to the Cloud District often? What am I saying? Of course you don’t.”
When I’ve defeated the boss dragon and saved the world, then beat the Dragonborn before me, even then everyone treats you like crap unless you overhaul all the dialogue.
I have single-handedly built two towns, and have hired guards. However, because the guards don’t have any different dialogue after all that happens, even in my own house, where I am basically the laird, I still hear “speak, Elf.”
But this time I’ve added a whole bunch of mods that overhaul dialogue, from Interesting NPCs to AI overhaul as well. Plus, I’ve added “Settlements Expanded” and a whole bunch of things that make the cities bigger, thus more people to talk to as I’m walking along.
I’ve also added a new quest mod I didn’t have before called “Project AHO.” I haven’t started it, again, not much time. But I found out that one of my favorite characters is in it (Neloth) and I couldn’t resist, even though people were talking so much shit about it on reddit. I don’t use reddit for opinions, ever.
However, Neloth is coded as a bitchy queen, and treats his assistants like he’s Murphy Brown and Christina Yang all rolled into one. I need more dialogue from him, and it will be worth it in the end, I think.
There are also so many dwemer mods in which Remiel has dialogue that I’ve gotten those, too. The few hours I’ve played with her are priceless because she’s a bookworm like me.
And that brings us completely back around. My “brand” is bookworm. I am really lost as to how to take myself to the next level, but also know I’m ready for it…. both the collaboration and the dedication to my writing time.
The reason I write about Skyrim is that it makes me stand out to Skyrim fans. The reason I write about any media and include lots of media references is that my fans aren’t just American. That’s why I say things like, “if you aren’t familiar.” It’s not because I’m trying to speak down to any of you. It’s because there are going to be many, many readers who don’t give a shit about installing Skyrim but like hearing the way I talk about it.
The gamers will get all the inside jokes, and we all win.
But in order to be able to do all that, I need help. Share me on Facebook when you find something you’re comfortable sharing. I know not everything is comfortable or easy. But to the extent that you’re able, it would really help me for you to subscribe to “Stories That Are All True” on Facebook, because that’s where I put my author page content, and the way I’ll eventually get paid- through blog posts and memes and being a Facebook “rising creator.”
I get more shares and followers on WordPress than I do anywhere else, because that’s an audience that already likes to read. It helps me when you’ve read something you liked because people are more likely to take the time to read something if you’ve vetted it first.
I’m also not the friend you don’t want to warn someone about, because you might bring them in on an entry about history, but who knows what you’ll find the longer you dig into mine.
One of my readers, Susan, really got to me in one of my latest entries. In saying this, I mean that it made me think, not that it wounded me in any way. I turned it over and over in my head, because in order to understand why I’m okay with Zac having multiple relationships and me being unsure about whether I will in turn is not because I am scared of managing multiple relationships in person.
I am AuDHD. When I am with someone, I am truly present and in the moment. What I am not good at is getting back to people and being responsible about the feeding and upkeep of a relationship. But Zac being poly takes the pressure off me because he has a lot of the same thought processes as me. He hasn’t defined “neurodivergent,” but in my case……
As Zac’s roommate would say, “the ’tism is real.”
I do not know that when I am not with that person, I would remember to keep them in the loop. This is something that Zac and I have in common, because we understand each other on a truly deep level. We say “how dare you attack me like this?” a lot.
But the point is that neither Zac nor I feel possessive of each other in a way that would impede on our other relationships, because we’re both the kind of people with no executive function.
But in order to understand how I got here, you’d have to understand a journey that started when I was very, very young.
In my childhood, I was told that someday a man would come and he’d be everything I’d ever want. As it turns out, this was true. Even though we broke up, I wouldn’t trade my relationship with Ryan for anything in the world. We took a break for a while to give each other space, but that lasted all of a few years. Now, the chord that runs between us is major in terms of music and close in terms of geometry.
Our schedules haven’t lined up to see each other, but that hasn’t stopped us from chatting online or on the phone when he’s on his way to work. It’s been a while, but it doesn’t matter. We pick up right where we left off, because we both have such tender feelings about each other when we tap into our memories.
I do think that we were both really going through something and needed the experiences of being with the other people in our lives, especially because now Ryan is a father, his son in on the jokes in which I share. What I do not think for a moment is that I didn’t get that fantasy while it lasted.
At the same time I was dating Ryan, I was dealing with all the problems that my emotional abuser put in my head, because I’m autistic and turning those problems into solutions becomes a full-time job. I drifted from Ryan because even if she didn’t mean to do it, she still opened the door to my sexuality by giving me her college journal. It doesn’t matter whether she just didn’t proof it or whether it was on purpose because the effect was the same.
She became a monotropic thought process because I realized that for as many red flags as this woman had, I was on board.
This is not what I think now, but at the time I realized that I was good at active listening, good at pattern recognition on things she didn’t see, and genuinely made her feel better about herself. Nothing about her opening up to me physically was threatening because my excuse was that for a lot of history, our age difference wouldn’t have mattered a damn.
I did not realize it was emotional abuse until I was 36 years old.
Therefore, one of the reasons my relationship with Ryan was so incredibly perfect is that because we met at summer camp, I was away from this woman long enough to connect with someone else in a major way.
Therefore, I spent a lot of time with Ryan before the emotionally abusive relationship overshadowed everything else. If I use the same murder board as Zac’s friends, where my yellow strings are just as important as my red, I’ve been poly since I was 14 years old.
I never had a relationship after Ryan where I could make someone else my first priority, because even though I wasn’t with this person all the time, the monotropic thought processes didn’t go away in her absence. I have a feeling I’m giving a lot of clarity to a lot of people right now……….
So, when I dated my first girlfriend, she was there in the shadows. I’ve never had a relationship where someone isn’t lurking in the shadows, affecting my thought processes to the point where I’m taking my eye off the ball.
I lost being married to it, because when the emotional abuser went away, what I missed most about her were the years we were separated and writing letters to each other. It did a lot to heal the fact that she wasn’t in love with me, but definitely did want me as a yellow string (when it was convenient).
That’s because when we were only writing letters to each other, I had a secret world, an inner landscape to whom I’ve given very few people access. I don’t judge people by how well we get along in bed, but by how well we get along out of it. That’s why my platonic relationships are so important to me. I do not need the safety and security of a full-time boyfriend because I’m trying to be my own person. However, I do know that there is someone in my corner that I could call in any kind of jam. He might not be able to do anything about it, but he would to the best of his ability; I know that because of how I’ve seen him treat his friends over the last year.
Editor’s Note:
To Zac-
I see you. I take in a lot. They’re confused. We are not.…….. xoxo
Here’s where I also stopped believing in monogamy. So many women advertised it on their dating profiles that when I was looking for a partner, I didn’t know what any of the hell all that meant….. then, as I was doing the reading on polyamory, I started learning about AuDHD. Through the combination of all those subreddits, I could listen to other people’s experiences without replying.
I have found so many people that have been on my same pipeline, which runs thusly:
INFJ
ADHD
Coming out as queer
Autism (as a comorbidity)
Nonbinary
Polyamorous
There is a huge crossover between being queer (either through sexual orientation or gender) and neurodivergent. It’s not a circle, but the Venn Diagram is solid.
There is a huge crossover between being autistic and being INFJ, the personality that’s already a thousand years old when they’re born.
There’s a huge crossover between the number of autistic and queer people who have decided gender is not a thing.
And we all recognize that getting our neurodivergent brain is never going to happen, so we adjust our expectations on what can be expected of us in a relationship.
It hasn’t been my outlook on relationships for my whole life. I was single for five years when I met Zac, single for seven before I actually asked him out, and after a year am finally comfortable with how polyamory works and I’m a fan.
However, I would never have thought about it if I was hurting another relationship to do so. For instance, I wouldn’t have asked Dana to open our relationship because it would have hurt both of us…… we both would have felt like we were losing something with each other, not gaining…….. and when we were with other partners, they didn’t like us at all because we really only talked to each other, like we were the main characters instead of our girlfriends.
Part of this is true, part of it is that for a lot of our relationship, we weren’t in the same city; it was a big deal when she called, which added to our partners’ ire. I don’t blame them. But Dana and I would have been better off as friends from the beginning, because we were great at that. Once we dragged our whole family into it, things began to get messy.
I would have given anything at one point for that relationship to last the rest of my life. Just so many things went wrong so fast that staying monogamous was the least of my worries. I had to get out for my safety, and even if we’d had counseling, when you get hit by someone, you don’t take the chance it happens twice.
I’m never going to be one of those people who likes putting all their eggs in one basket anymore, because what I’ve learned is that it’s better for you to have more than one person to fall on. Your entire world doesn’t walk out the door at once. I still feel this way about Supergrover, because the way I wrote to her was so regimented that it feels like a bit of a loss….. not so much because of her, but because I’m having to reroute a lot of impulses. In some ways, I’ll never give those up,because I see things that remind me of her all the time.
Polyamory is a system adjusted to me, rather than me having to fit into yet another system in which I have to social mask my way through it. It’s easier not to social mask in front of Zac because since we’re both neurodivergent, he’ll always have empathy even if he can’t have sympathy.
He said something to me that meant a lot, which is that our relationship is not “cutesy.” I don’t want that type of relationship because it leads to “acting as if.” I’d rather have emotional bravery and he’s shown me he has it.
So, in short, it’s not that I never wanted a marriage that lasted decades. I could have pictured it with Ryan, Meagan, and Dana. It just didn’t work out that way. I think it ultimately turned out better than I could have imagined. In no world would I have gotten the space to write what I needed to write out of someone jealous, because they simply would have tried to sabotage my writing time because spending time together is obviously the most important thing in my life, and any time away from each other means that I need room to cheat.
That leads to the millions upon millions of partners justifying why it was right to go through someone’s phone. I feel like if you can’t trust your partner to the point where you feel you need to go through their phone, your intuition has already given you an answer…… and doesn’t make you judge, jury, and executioner when you have no moral leg to stand on invading someone’s privacy.
You don’t have to confirm how someone else feels. You have to confirm how you feel in therapy, because you’re not going to change someone else.
I have done too much trying to change people in the past by writing about them, and not because changing people works. People have to want to change from the inside out, and sometimes hearing how I really feel about something puts new light on what their behavior is doing to me, and it creates an understanding that wasn’t there before.
In a relationship, I find it’s more helpful to lead from the back. That if I lay out my insecurities first, you’re more likely to open up to me in return because I’ve made it look not so scary.
Here’s where things get tricky, though. The first is that I make it look easy. In order to lay out my vulnerabilities first, I had to learn how to do that over years. It is not something I learned on the fly, it is something I’ve learned over my whole life.
I’ve always been an observer to human behavior, and I remind myself of Dominick Dunne when he used to write columns for Vanity Fair, covering the trials of the “rich, and the very, very rich.” In some ways, I feel like I’m trying to be Rachel Maddow, weaving my experiences in and out so that my emotional connections and how they come together are as researched as my intelligence special interest turned up an autistic amount.
This is because it’s one thing to get a soundbite from someone, and rare to get an essay, particularly one that goes through an entire range of emotions about one person. Understanding that range of emotion in a person is very important to communication with them, because it gives them more context on me than I will ever have on them.
However, just like with my readers, I have a bubble with them, too. Just like I invite my readers to be vulnerable in the comments, I invite my friends to be vulnerable by opening up to them in person (as well as I can without stumbling over my words because it’s verbal). People tell me things and both love and hate it. I do not stop writing about someone when I’ve said something that they haven’t liked. I’ve stopped writing about them altogether because they’ve proven that they aren’t supportive of me as a writer, because doing that doesn’t look like only being adored. You’ll get your moments, I promise you. But you won’t get all of them, because no one can.
We are divine in our messiness, not in our ability to keep things under control.
All of my thought processes combine to make me “messy,” and honestly one of the things I started wondering when I started exploring poly was whether it was actually fair to be this intense all the time around one person. No one can be my everything because they’ve all burned out under that plan.
But again, I believed the fairy tale. In some ways, I got it.
But there came a point when the dream just changed.
I’ve written about this before, but one of my best dates with Zac was when he’d just gotten a fiction prompt on robots, and we bounced ideas off each other as we were going through the grocery store. I was very emotional when he came up with a great line, because it was then that I knew I wanted to be with him for as long as he’d have me, because my love for him is limitless. There’s nothing he could do that would scare me away, and the fact that he’s poly doesn’t scare me, either, because all of our relationships with him are completely unique and separate.
I’m also not trying to scare him by saying that my love for him is limitless, because my platonic relationships run just as deep. I wouldn’t feel less love for him if he decided we were better friends than partners, or I did. You have partners that you’re romantic with, and partners that you’re not. One of Zac’s friends has a literal murder board because their red and yellow (romantic and platonic) strings are just as important to them. Emotional intimacy is important, and sometimes more important than sex. Think of all the straight women with kids who move in together so that their kids still have two parents to handle them.
To me, that is polyamory because you’re not showing your boyfriend any less attention than the co-parent (I’m assuming these women still date). Once you get to a relationship where you’re living together and taking care of a household and raising kids, wouldn’t it be harder to break up all that to move in with someone else the kids don’t know? Does it make it any less of a serious relationship when you’re not having sex?
What I have learned over the last year is that Zac is my orange string. I want him in my life to whatever level he’ll accept, and right now, everything is working out perfectly for us because I am obsessed with writing to the point where I go off the grid. Zac is so busy that he doesn’t get freaked out when I don’t reply right away, wouldn’t wander around worrying that I’m dating someone else (if I was dating anyone else, he’d be thrilled and not threatened). He’s bisexual. He doesn’t want anything but the tea.
That being said, I love our orange string and I don’t know how much I want my own time to be divided. It is not that I feel this Protestant urge to be monogamous and I’m hoping from Zac that this will turn into something more….. a something more that cannot be there. All of his relationships are secure, so that would be pointless and something a traditional woman would do. I am anything but that.
A traditional woman would be trying to weed out all the other partners so that they got more time than everyone else, hoping to eventually change Zac into something he’s not. They’d be jumping up and down to show why they “deserve the rose.” I see it all the time.
What I also see is men who have attractions to other women and instead of cheating, will ask their wives to open the relationship. The wife agrees, and one of two things happens.
The first is regret. Sometimes on both sides, sometimes on the wife because she agreed to it under duress (the first red flag it’s not going to go well).
Here’s the second. Men get controlling and jealous, wanting to shut the relationship down into monogamy when they realize how much easier it is for women to get multiple dates than men. They stop being confident that they can meet someone else, so instead of working on themselves, they start working on either forcing their wives to break up with their other partners, or trying to sabotage their other relationships so that the partner will realize “they’re the only one left.”
Here’s the third. There are heterosexual couples who are called “unicorn hunters.” The reason they are is that this type relationship blows up the most frequently, and works so incredibly rarely that it’s practically fictional.
Generally, both women are bi, so they want a female partner because it works out for both of them….. but they don’t treat their “unicorn” as a real person. They’re just there for the pleasure of a couple, because their hierarchy is so entrenched. If the couple has children, the “unicorn” quickly feels like the maid and the nanny……… because in reality, that serves the couple perfectly. Use the unicorn and emotionally abuse them. Treat them like an employee, but don’t pay them.
But that’s not the only dynamic. If the unicorn is dating both of them, the couple divides because they start fighting about time and it gets nasty quickly…… that’s because the unicorn is either not dating or “not allowed to date.” Why would they be allowed to take time off and be their own person when they need them to be chief cook and bottle washer?
The other thing that happens frequently is that couples try to find younger women and the husband abuses both women. That’s because the wife sees the power imbalance early and the younger woman doesn’t, because she doesn’t have enough life experience for that. So, one woman is too afraid to rock the boat and the young woman is too naive to leave. Eventually, they band together. But that takes time.
In absolutely all of the reading I’ve done on polyamory, there are two things that make a difference in how successful your relationships are in the future.
The first is not being in a relationship at all when you start thinking about polyamory, and not getting into a relationship hierarchy at all. You have the ability to see that all of your relationships have this dynamic and no one is mourning something they’ve lost while also trying to integrate new partners into their lives.
Failing that, you have to find a poly-friendly therapist and work out all your issues before you just decide to casually say “I think we should open our relationship,” especially when you find out that the reason one partner wants poly is covering their ass because they’ve been cheating for months. It happens more often than you think, and it’s devastating. Better to break up immediately because you will not get over lying and cheating. That’s not poly, that’s lying and cheating.
The best way I’ve ever heard polyamory phrased is that I own Zac like he’s my neighborhood, my favorite place and not my favorite possession.
The reason I’m pouring my heart into him is not so we can be more to each other in terms of time, but more to each other in terms of quality…… because here’s what I see, and I told him this. “You’re about to go on a journey, and I want to be there for all of it.” Plus, I’m getting closer with his other partners, and that feels good, too. It feels like being a part of our weird little family rather than Zac and me cocooning to the rest of the world- what has happened in every one of my monogamous relationships. They’ve been so intense that I didn’t have the time I needed to be present with all of you.
He hasn’t counted up the months as to what I mean by this, so he underestimated by a large margin what I actually meant. I am not directing him in the slightest, I am excited to see what’s going to happen for him.
What I mean by “weird little family” is that like all families, there are issues and jealousies that pop up (over time, not feelings….. all our relationships are separate except for the few times a year we’re all in the same room). I do not know why, but I believe it is because two of us live in Virginia, but people believe his latest partner is the one before me.
Even I thought that until I counted it up.
So, I laid out all my feelings about all of this to Zac, and it was the most healthy conversation I’ve ever had with anyone….. because he’s used to having these conversations all the time. Negotiating boundaries is hard, and we do it well.
He said something that I really needed to hear, to the point that I almost cried. I said something about how our relationship is easy because when we have something to work out, it’s a few minute conversation and not making things bigger than they really are by holding everything in.
My beautiful boy looked at me and said, “I think you should take a lot of credit for that, because I don’t think I’m that way all the time. I think you bring it out in me.”
It was the first time in a long time that someone had told me that I was also good at negotiating boundaries, and again, something I really needed to hear.
Then, he cuddled me and I felt safe…. because I’d brought up a problem, and we talked about it until it was quickly over. What made me feel safe is that he never once invalidated my feelings, just called me on my logic and reassured me when my perceptions were off. That he’s in it for the long haul, too.
But again, this is not about a competition. This is about making what we have solid in and of itself. If I’m bringing out something in Zac that he actually likes, then I hope he knows how often he does it for me.
I am afraid that getting lost in this relationship would cost me something else, and I’m not doing that ever again with writing time.
I don’t just have this project going, I’m doing the hard work to learn fiction as well. What I’ve learned from Jonna & Tony Mendez is that there is a world of difference becoming a respected author and being picked for Oprah’s Book Club.
I know I want the first, and I think I want the second, but the stimulation of all that scares me to death. But ultimately, it’s not on me to decide whether I’m well-respected or Oprah’s Book Club-level famous. It’s up to you, my readers.
Because I’m already good at non-fiction, perhaps I should release one of those, first. I feel that when I write about history/intelligence operations, I do it the way Rachel Maddow does…. by combing through the research and putting together the story so that it’s compelling, when you really can’t make research do that.
For instance, count them up. How many hours of research do you think that Brené Brown did on shame and vulnerability before she published her first book? Did her first TED Talk? I met her in either 1999 or 2000, and she was working on it even then. Again….. count them up.
Editor’s Note:
Even though I met Brene a very long time ago, I don’t want you to think we’re best friends or anything. We spent some time together when she was in the Master’s program at the Graduate School of Social Work, so she was a student/TA who I lovingly call “one of my kids,” what I called all the students/TAs in the GSSW because I was the supervisor of their computer lab for a year before I started web development. Meeting her was a million to one, and I didn’t even recognize her name when her books started coming out. I thought, “that looks like one of my kids” when I saw her first TED Talk. So, I contacted her team to make sure our dates lined up, and it was indeed the same person. That being said, she wouldn’t know me from Adam….. but she might….. one day. 😉
Now that I think about it, I probably have enough material for a book on shame and vulnerability right now. You could write it with this year’s entries alone, but it would be better with edited versions of the last 10 years, because this is the decade in which I’ve grown the most.
I really had to look at what I was doing in all of my relationships, and when I hit 45 and realized there were only 20 years left until I was older than my mom, all of my qualms about standing up for myself went out the window. I started vomiting up emotions at an alarming rate, because a lot of it was old information in new context and new information with no context.
I feel that everyone has seen this shift, and thinks that I’m only angry. No, I think I’m experiencing the rage older women get when they realize just how much bullshit is in the world and just how much of it will not be solved while they’re still living.
You realize just how little things matter on a grand scale, that of course you should work for social justice, but you can’t burn yourself out on it at the expense of time with your family and friends. I feel this way about any community event.
I see this all the time in church members because I grew up as a United Methodist preacher’s kid. They come to a Sunday worship, and have a meaningful experience that they’ve never had before. Then, they start coming regularly and pretty quickly get involved with committees up to their eyeballs because this church is the coolest thing they’ve ever seen. But it’s not sustainable, and people burn out after six months to a year.
I keep tabs on my religious friends because of it, because they’re the ones that will tell me it’s been three Sundays and they’re already in charge of something…. most people don’t join committees as fast as they realize that churches are hosting a special event. They get put in charge of that one event and it’s not that hard, so they sign up for a few more.
Then they join a committee without dropping all the special events, and they realize, “oh my God. We’re at church all the time.” People really don’t like to talk about their feelings, so I can only think of a few times in my life when I knew why someone left…. in those cases, it was pretty obvious. Most people just ghost because they wanted something so bad that they started excluding other things that were important to them- and that’s okay.
Churches love Marthas, and they tend to take advantage of them. Don’t forget to be Mary some of the time….. or as I phrased it in a sermon, “Don’t Just Do Something…. Sit There.”
And that’s how I feel about Zac. We have the moments where we don’t just do something, we sit there. We have quiet moments where when a problem comes up, we aren’t reactive. We hold space for each other without getting defensive. We are honest about the important things- vulnerability, honesty, negative feelings on both sides, and really being able to take all that in because either we’re walking and talking (being mobile makes me thoughtful), or we’re lying on a bed/couch where we’re already comfortable.
I don’t choose moments to talk to him based on how important my need is, but when I can sense that we’re both in a relaxed mood. I don’t tiptoe around him because I think he’ll get mad, I actively look for the moments in which he has the bandwidth to hear me. It’s one thing to have a conversation in which you are totally focused on each other, and another when you’re both slammed and overstimulated up to your eyeballs. We’re both neurodivergent, so I know how to look for those things.
I don’t want to trigger a meltdown or a burnout, or to irritate his anxiety that I’m pulling away…. because I’m finally convinced he doesn’t want me to do so. Because his other partners live so much further than me, I think he feels like it’s an imposition on me to make the trip, because he’d think of it as a drag and I think of it as free, unencumbered writing time on the train both ways.
And, just like with Sam, I’ll never have another partner who hates it that I don’t drive. If I need to get somewhere fast or need groceries, I have an Uber account and I know how to use it. If I have the time, I want to be on the train because it is just enough stimulation through movement (I wear Bluetooth cans to keep out the rest) to provide a lot more creativity than normal.
My creativity is knowing that Zac is not a red string or a yellow. He’s both, and as I’ve kidded him before, “I prefer burnt orange.
Our relationship feeds my writing not in being able to write about it, I just understand it better because I write about it. The real reason is bigger than that. We have the same commitment to each other- to be brutally honest all the time (because we’re neurodivergent, so we’re likely to do that, anyway).
I want him in my life because he makes me a better me than I could be on my own, because our friendship is so strong. I have never wanted a relationship that transcends his others, or even impacts them.
But I also know that I deserve the right to take up space, and I learned that Zac appreciates that I can do it without making it hurt…. or at least, trying not to make it hurt. Some truth bombs are just hard, and you can’t go around them, because if you did it would be detrimental to both of you.
I’m also finding out the differences between being with a man and being with a woman, because this is the first serious relationship with a man I’ve ever had- in that it has lasted so long, not that I wasn’t Zac-serious about the other, Matt.
There’s only been the three, and Ryan was 7th-8th grade, so every bit as emotionally intense without the drive of our hormones kicking in- mostly (Hi, our parents!). All of our friendships have been as strong as mine with Zac, it’s only that Zac and I have been together much longer than Matt and I were, and approaching being together longer than Ryan and me.
We were unusual for kids. I was with him for a year and two months, and I will never feel that way about anyone in my life. That’s because our relationship never complicated itself with sex. It was always a good time, and still is. We still want the tea on who each other’s dating, how work is going, all that. Plus, I trust him more than I do anyone else, because we met when I was 13. We both made relationship-ending mistakes, but his was so easy to forgive because at the time, I no longer believed I could love him the way he deserved to be loved (bullshit, bullshit, bullshit- thanks a lot, lesbians. But I’m not bitter. #eyeroll).
What I have learned from my experience with Ryan is that a red string can certainly become yellow, and I knew that was typically true of lesbians. I didn’t know it was true of men as well, but it so is, especially since we’ve both dated women. I think men trust women that have dated women more, in some cases, than straight men and women because of the outside perspective angle. I can take gender roles out of something and explain the dynamic that’s going on in their relationship…. and then whether they realize that’s what I’m doing is on them.
What I find is that men will absolutely take on female roles if they understand what they’re doing to their wives when they don’t. But, they won’t hear it from their wives, and they won’t hear it from their male friends, because they’re all stuck in the same heteronormative bullshit institution.
The best comment I ever got on my marriage article was “I didn’t know the writer was gay until the end.”
That’s kind of because I write, like another reader said, “a 15 year old boy……… and his mother.”
And on that note, I think my love for Zac is clear and why. He shows love every day to his “twinkie bitch boyfriend by sending me pictures of himself dressed for work every day, and at least a few times a week, a picture of Oliver, who is a dog, as well.
I think that’s my favorite nickname now, Twinkie Bitch Boyfriend. Zac is the first person I ever told I thought I was nonbinary, because I knew he would know what I meant, that I never wanted to change anything, I could just see both sides of my brain working at once. It’s not a slam to say I look like a tweaker at a club, he’s honoring what I told him……. that I’m so female, and so not.
I just need a better twinkie bitch boyfriend haircut, which I usually achieve by going to a stylist with either a picture of Matt Smith and asking them if they can make me into The Doctor, or taking a picture of Robert Pattinson and saying, “can you make me a sparkly vampire?”
I love both actors, but Robert’s haircut in Twilight suits me. Speaking of which, I love the Twilight movies because the people who wrote the script were a fuck ton more talented than Stephanie Meyer and also the movies have terrible moments which make them even better popcorn films.
Which I’ll have to watch, since I promised Zac “Slow Horses…” because he’s my orange string.
Stories That Are All True 