Tag: nonbinary

Productivity

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 4 Comments

Today’s daily prompt is about times in my life that I’ve felt productive, and this is a great time to ask me about it because I don’t think I’ve ever been more productive writing-wise, and I don’t want to be known for anything else.

It’s been a transformation of enormous proportions. I have been pulling myself inwards, thinking about my directions and distractions. What and where are they? Why do I fail when I am so motivated by hearing other people talk about success? It’s all about dealing with the gap between knowledge, emotion, and communication. I do hear people, and I do take in emotions. However, I don’t do it at the same rate or speed because my pattern recognition is different. There are literally different pathways to your conclusions than to mine. I am not a sociopath, cut off from all my emotions. I show all of them very well in writing. I show them very well in person, although I am much less likely to tell people what I think in person because it’s hard for me to verbalize it. If something feels like a threat, I go mute. I do not stop taking everything in. My mind decides “we’re not going to do speech today.” And we don’t.

Part of being so much into chatting online vs. getting together is because I don’t experience those gaps in between trying to say what I think and trying to verbalize it. It is why I now think that Supergrover is my puzzle piece by now, because she’s had unfiltered access to my brain for 10 years without once hearing a stutter as I figured out how to put words in my mouth. I solve the problem of stuttering by taking time to think before I speak, because most of my stutter is just lag. Damn lag.

Therefore, people who know me would probably say “you don’t stutter.” I don’t when I’m not choking on buffer overload (and as you get older, the amount of RAM decreases). When people are talking to me, the thing that you are reading right now has not stopped. It is running underneath my speech. Therefore, I have multiple trains of thought running at all times, and picking one of them in order to speak slows me down by quite a large margin.

It also depends on how many other sounds are competing with your voice in the room. I like very intimate conversations because I can really only process one voice at once. I am never trying to “get people alone,” because I don’t have to. I go off to be by myself and the other introverts adopt me because they see it’s okay to be overstimulated… Or someone is concerned and now the person that’s concerned about me is in my bubble. Either way, it’s not about my personality. My personality is “when you’re overwhelmed, find somewhere quieter.” That’s how I got Bryn. She has always been in my corner because we were the introverts trying to get away from the noise. We talked to each other in quiet spaces because we could hear ourselves think.

I remember myself at that age (19) and just realized that my haircut now is the closest it’s ever been to when I was that young. And yet, I really don’t look much different except a few gray strands and a few more wrinkles. Some people say that they don’t feel any older. I do. I feel ancient- partly because I see how I’ve grown, but partly because I’ve been middle aged since I was nine. I have never talked like a child, ever, which is why in our family no one imitates things I said when I was little. No one. I have been very precise with language since I learned to use it; it just so happens that most people excel at conversation and I excel at taking a second to think of a reply and chatting back.

Supergrover once told me that it was clear I often said things before I thought about them, and I believe that is true. It has to be, because I’m ADHD. But at the same time, I think she was also talking about consequences that a naurotypical person would see coming, but not a neurodivergent one. I don’t mean issues of clear right and wrong. I have that. I mean being able to divine consequences and/or their feelings out of thin air, and our relationship was only using 7% of what went into communication in the first place. A good example of this is thinking I’m being the bigger person by laying out my vulnerabilities first. She took it not as “this is what Leslie is worried about,” but as “Leslie needs to guilt me about something.” Meanwhile, I think I have said something perfectly logical and she thinks I’m trying to hurt her. It’s unsustainable, because I do not want her to feel guilty.

I want her to see that these are the problems we need to resolve so that we can move on, because I can imagine that some of the things I think and feel do indeed make her feel guilty, but making her feel guilty was not my intent. I think she thinks I want to punish her for what she’s done, when she’s the most precious thing in my life. The fact that she thinks that I feel such negativity is overwhelming, and I feel like I’ve proven that within myself I was not asking for anything huge. She reassured me that I do come up in her mind all the time, and that was that. That she didn’t have to drop out of her life and appear in mine. That I was worried our relationship was truly lopsided and I was on the wrong track. It was a half a line in an e-mail, not a day at the beach.

Wanting to do things together is dreaming because she doesn’t have the bandwidth, but I didn’t make it clear that I was just dreaming, so she thought I was being demanding. If I was demanding, e-mails wouldn’t have been enough to sustain a relationship for 10 years. When I throw ideas out there and they’re not for her, she becomes part of the problem by not saying “eh. I don’t think meeting in person is for me.” Or whatever. She’s never said anything like that, so I’ve always treated her like a normal person. And in fact, I believe she sees me the same way. That’s because I was preaching at Bridgeport during the pandemic and she told me to send her a link. She didn’t get to come because something came up, but the fact that she told me to send her the link made my heart beat eighty times faster and I did very well that day.

However, I didn’t know she wasn’t able to come until after the service (Zoom), so I still put a reference to her in it because it tends to make people laugh to themselves. I also thought it would make her laugh to be an atheist and think “a preacher mentioned me in a sermon today.”

And the thing is, I wasn’t disappointed in the slightest because she was genuinely sorry that she couldn’t make it because what came up was really important- not that I’m not, but I’m not her only friend and I’m not a member of her family, unless you count the space in her head I’ve been renting all these years.

It feels very much like a constant running version of “All of Me.”

I do not know whether she would be Lily Tomlin or Steve Martin, but as I’ve seen Steve Martin age I actually think we’re more alike, despite Lily and me both being queer. I love comedy, but I also love zoning out and doing my own thing, like buying art and writing novels/screenplays. I have a feeling that Steve Martin is a neurodivergent introvert as well….. That stage presence is an affectation for EVERYONE who is in any way creative. You get to see us live, you don’t get to see us in the practice room.

You don’t get to see the thousand pictures I took before I got to the good one……………. Except you do.

I write in bulk, so how many of these entries do you think I think are amazing? Not all of them, I assure you. I feel like I spend my days work shopping ideas, throwing them around in my brain and trying to word it so that I understand them. If I can understand them, then mostly so can other people. I get lost in my own head and forget transitions a lot of the time, but that’s what it’s like to get a blog and not a book.

You are not getting the finished product, you are reading my notes. I am a different writer outside this blog because when I am writing for publication, I tend to clean it up more. Not only that, if it’s important I get someone to edit me (A friend or a Fiverr). By “important,” I mean anything I’m turning in to a contest or I’m being paid, like a book review. Even if I don’t get a salary, the book is the payment.

I took a break to make breakfast, and now I don’t remember where I was going.

The stove is gas.

The stove is gas.

The stove is gas.

I have to keep pinching myself when I say it. It has made me cry several times, both because having a gas stove is such a a good thing and because there are All-Clad pans to go with it. I remember every moment of learning to cook just by the way the pan feels in my hand. It’s too professional not to trigger me in a good way. David hasn’t seen me flip mushrooms or anything, but he has come home and say it smells good. What he’s smelling is butter. A lot of it.

Now that I have All-Clad, I’m back to cooking like I’m in a restaurant. It’s good, because I don’t eat very often, but everything I do eat is loaded with calories. Most days, it’s eggs and toast. Today, I made oatmeal.

I started with a couple tablespoons of butter, oatmeal, and chia, flax, and hemp seeds. I sauteed all of it until it was brown, then added water, Mexican vanilla, and sugar. It sat on the stove for about five minutes (steel cut, but microwavable so it doesn’t take long on the stove) and then I added some peanut butter and dried cranberries to finish.

Then, I let it sit while I was cleaning the kitchen, because I like oatmeal to cool so that it breaks apart in chunks. It took me about 15 minutes to clean up, at which time I took the liberty of pouring some almond milk on it.

Now, the whole house smells like brown butter, and I am very, very pleased. I wish I had made a larger pan, because I like steel cut oatmeal warmed up in the microwave rather than buying quick oats. These were some I’d ordered off of Amazon years ago and I’m still using them up because I didn’t know I was ordering six boxes of six. Normally, I buy Irish steel cut oats and it takes about half an hour. For my money, now that I’ve cooked with microwavable steel cut, it’s fine. It tastes the same when you put the amount of ingredients in yours as I do in mine. I didn’t do it this time, but last time I sauteed pumpkin seeds for oatmeal as well.

Generally people who say they don’t like oatmeal haven’t had what I consider oatmeal. It’s watery, or soupy, or whatever. Mine actually looks like cereal. Plus, the grains all taste better after they’ve been sauteed in butter first. Pretty much anything tastes good sauteed in butter, but get exponentially better with sugar, vanilla, and dried fruit.

I need to go to the grocery store at some point today, but breakfast was just “throw it together.” I like to go to the grocery store when I’m full, because it helps my impulse control…… But not too full or nothing else will look appealing. I will go to the grocery store, walk around, and leave. I get overwhelmed at too many decisions. It is literally why I have a standard order on Uber Eats and I just hit reorder. If they don’t have something, I discuss substitutions. I do not want to go through decision fatigue with every single item.

The only thing I know I want today that I haven’t gotten in a while is toilet paper. Hayat always bought all of ours, I didn’t have to get it myself. So, I get to pick out my own. This is exciting for me. You have no idea.

Before David left for church, he told me I could put my office in the sun room. He said that no one uses it, and that it’s kind of cold. I told him that was fine. I could get a little electric heater if I had to. It’s nice to have a place to write that’s not shut up in my bedroom. I’m having trouble transitioning into having a whole house again. My housemates and I stuck to our rooms and rarely came out. Therefore, I’m usually in my room. I think David thought I was unhappy and that’s why I’m shut up in here. Nope, it’s that I only think of myself as renting one room.

I have seen David visibly relax over time, because since he’s also neurodivergent, having someone move in with him was VERY intimidating. It was intimidating for me, too, but not in the same way. He’d never rented out his space before, so he didn’t know what to expect from anyone at all. I’ve had housemates in every living situation since college except a spot here and there. Once I lived in a junior efficiency by myself. All of the others, I was either in a relationship or I had housemates. Once, I had a one bedroom in a retirement community. I was in my 20s and I was delighted. They didn’t legally discriminate, they picked up the trash door to door, there were two pools on the grounds and I was the hottest person at both of them….. I mean, what was not to like in that situation? 😉

They stopped doing things for the residents after a while. At first, we all had breakfast together every Sunday morning on the landlord’s dime. That stopped, and then picking up trash door-to-door stopped. The only thing left that marked it as a retirement community at all was a bus that went to several shops around the area. In Houston, I drove, so I didn’t use it. Basically, though, what made it unique was gone.

I am trying not to do that to myself. To give pieces of myself away so that I am no longer unique. I am also not trying to be invulnerable, to actively disconnect myself from my emotions so that things hurt less. If I felt less, I wouldn’t have so much inspiration to write, because I wouldn’t think my life was worth remembering.

Smiley

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What are your favorite emojis?

I have jokingly called Zac “Smiley” since we met. That’s because George Smiley was John Le Carré’s main character and Zac is not in a big three letter, but he works in both military and civilian intelligence roles. I was delighted one day when I said something in voice dictation like, “you’re adorable, Smiley.” Siri wrote:

You’re adorable 😊

So, if I had to pick one out of all, it’s the OG. I was around when it began, and I use/say it almost as much now as then.

I feel like I use emojis the way they were intended, which is to indicate which lines are jokes… not a mode of communication. To me, that is like saying “I need 300 words on my desk by 1500, but make sure it’s in Wingdings.” Therefore, I hardly ever use emoticons that I can’t type.

It’s not fun to me to stop and insert imagery like a web designer. I will add emojis at the end, but only sometimes. Mostly I am concerned about getting you an answer, not picking pictures.

My other top two are a winking face and a smiley with the tongue hanging out because they’re easy to use at 90 wpm. I also try not to use them in every single paragraph. They are decorations, not cake. My feelings may have more to do with the creation of the web not being what maintains it. As in, I may be telling you things that no longer apply. In my background, they were lifelines to ensure that you let someone know your intent in a chat room, because an emoji transcends language. I get that going to pictures is nothing new and hieroglyphics are valid, but that’s not how we did it in the beginning. I’m not advocating we go backwards. I just haven’t had a situation where I needed to stop talking and use emojis instead. It has never come up.

I also don’t expect other people to be writers, so I am not telling you what you should do, either. I am saying that my habits are built from having specifically a desktop since I was eight. It was a different feel not to have the Internet on all the time, like a utility. You might have only been able to chat for a few minutes before someone accidentally picked up the phone. The phone lines carried both data and voice just like the internet does now, but picking up another phone in the house would drop the data connection and you would be “kicked off.” I have to explain this because not all my readers are my age.

I wish I could remember more of those early conversations, because I didn’t realize how quickly my day to day life was changing. My watch has a faster processor now than my desktop had back then.

I have a watch that would have genuinely been helpful at CIA during The Cold War, and I would not doubt that they had something like an Apple Watch long before we did. It’s not because I think there’s a deep state or anything shady. It’s that with all the technology research CIA does, a computer that’s capable of sitting on your wrist like a Pip-Boy can’t be an original idea. Jonna used to take calls from her staff after “Get Smart” and “Dragnet” from officers saying, “can we do that?”

But there’s a second reason, and that’s that during one of Jonna’s talks, she said that they do such specialized things that one person will spend their entire career on one thing, like batteries or cameras. That’s because once an asset got to the place where they were supposed to plant the bug, it had to last a long time, because who knows how long it will be before we can get into that room again? And in fact, she was talking about “The Americans,” the scene where the maid hides the bug in Caspar Weinberger’s clock.

(I thought it was really funny that Ollie North consulted on “The Americans. It’s just the richest ending to that story I could imagine, because it was a major one. I remember it and I couldn’t have been even a teenager yet.)

We, the people of the chatrooms, have conversations exactly like this because we’re always looking for the next new thing, computer-wise. Zac and I have a Chinese Wall on technology, because he knows I’m interested and I’ll ask way more questions than he could possibly answer. The only thing he’ll say is the history of something if it’s UNCLASS. Like, “we have stuff that looks similar.” If he says “looks similar,” that’s kind of my cue to go read a book. 😉

I have never been in a chatroom where we weren’t discussing computers or the chessboard at some point. I have no doubt that I’ve met half of Anonymous by now. I know for certain I’ve met one. I didn’t even have to catch him at anything. He took some Ambien and came to my house because he still couldn’t sleep……… Then I didn’t sleep for three days.

However, he was the kind of hacker you want. Someone who’s a hacktivist on the good guys’ side. White hats do exist.

In all of my years on the Internet, it’s been as nonbinary as everything else about me. I got sucked into the world of hacking, but I don’t hack. It’s kind of the way Lindsay is woven into the queer community in Houston even though she’s cis and straight.

Oh, and I should write this down. “Enby” is short for nonbinary. It’s the gender that most fits me, and yet I don’t care if people think I’m male or female. Pronouns are not about respect to me, because I think it’s more important for me to know who I am than anyone else. Pronouns are a non-issue because I don’t make them one. The easiest thing is just to say “they” if you don’t know, anyway. It’s funny how my gender often depends on how people perceive me, which most of the time is female, but when people don’t look closely, I’m always a “sir.” Neither bother me in the slightest.

(And for the record, if you misgender me, just apologize and move on….. Because you didn’t misgender me and I’m not offended. Plus, I do not need your entire history with trans people as an apology. I’m sure your nephew is great.)

The truth is, though, lots of people on the Internet are nonbinary by now, whether we like it or not. The Internet has changed the rules of the game because you become disconnected from your physical body during emotional intimacy. It’s not that way for everyone, obviously, but it’s a good observation of most. For instance, “straight guys” trolling gay chatrooms because they’re curious and don’t want anyone to know they’re chatting with other queer people at night.

And most of the time, that comes off as rage bait. It’s very popular to come into a gay online community and start asking things like “so which one’s the wife?” And you watch a mix of insults go by because it’s our space.

It is also true that a disproportionately large neurodivergent community exists on the web because we built it. I have always worked with other autistic people without being able to identify it for myself, because I did not know that I was social masking, first of all (in a way that other people don’t), and I also didn’t know that you can have a full range of emotions and pick up all social cues and guess what? That’s not what autism is, either. It’s a criteria, but it’s not all of it.

Being autistic is absolutely why I gravitated toward Linux. It wasn’t to play around with Linux, necessarily. Part of it was learning Linux, and it was exciting because I could do things that very few people my age could do. The better part was a group of people who could understand me in my own language, which for years turned into me being the only woman in many rooms (because that’s mostly how I’ve presented at the office, although we all kind of look nonbinary in  Oregon because we’re all wearing the same Columbia jacket we got on sale last summer at REI.

I wouldn’t have learned any of the things I’ve learned about myself without an Internet connection, because I didn’t have many queer friends growing up locally in Texas, but I had a ton of them in Australia.

So, I suppose the easiest way to say it is something you’ve heard all your life, so I hope it makes sense.

“My kindom is not of this world.”

😉

Just Me and the Boys

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

People who have known me my whole life have seen me in makeup and heels, with curled bangs and either waved or crimped hair (really). My hair is very thick and stick straight. Without a waver, I would have had no body in my hair at all. Now, I keep it short so I don’t have to worry about “body” to make it look good. So, you see, my hair has never been a part of my feminine identity. I just wanted to wear what A) I thought looked good B) fit into the category of not really showing my body in any way.

I am not a prude, I am autistic and want cloth to make me feel secure and help me move better (my cerebral palsy/hypotonia/lack of 3D vision are also tied to autism). Therefore, I am usually wearing trousers as opposed to shorts, and if I’m not wearing a long sleeved shirt, it has to get really damn hot before I’ll even think of taking off my hoodie.

Bryn and Dave coming to visit is a perfect example. Since we’ll be going to museums, that means jeans and a t-shirt with a hoodie or a jacket. That’s because it might be cool outside, but it will definitely be cold in the air conditioning. They want to go to SPY, and when Bryn told me that, I said, “the SPY museum? I’m not familiar.” For new readers, they should just count out the middle man and give me an apartment out back.

The last time I went, I got a long-sleeved boys’ t-shirt (size large fits so perfectly on me because the shoulders look tailored to my frame and the sleeves don’t go over my hands). It’s navy and has three stripes across the front with a spy in a hat carrying a briefcase is running through it, as well as International Spy Museum stacked on the stripes. It’s one of the coolest shirts I’ve ever seen, and says “Washington, DC” down the sleeve. The only thing it doesn’t have is the official logo of the museum on the sleeve, and personally, that’s what makes it for me.

When I first moved here, the spy museum was on F Street (now it’s at L’Enfant Plaza) and I loved it because of the Shake Shack across the street. It was also more intimate.

Here’s the most embarrassing thing that’s happened to me at the museum which makes for hilarity later:

So, at the Spy Museum, the introduction has changed. On F Street, you walked in and there were plaques with all these different covers on them. You had to choose one and use it throughout the whole walkthrough. What they did not say is that it is sort of a computer based training sort of thing, where you have to remember the details of what you’ve heard and answer questions about them.

I’m lightly panicking because I am only a tiny bit known for my acting ability and I wouldn’t know the first thing about magic (that’s how Tony and Jonna pulled off their tricks- using the same concept as you would use on stage, and in an intelligence officer’s case, their stage is their area of operations).

I decide that because of my frame, my best shot at this is an 18-year-old male from Britain called Colin.

So there I am, walking around like a jackass…… I’m trying to figure out an accent, mannerisms, walk, the whole nine yards.

Then, I got inside the museum and therefore the first computer, and I nearly fell on the floor laughing.

That was the day I bought a t-shirt that said “Argo @#$% Yourself” in black with the museum logo on the sleeve. Then, years later, I got a picture of him wearing the same shirt from Jonna and it made my year because he’d already passed and I wondered if he even knew about them.

Later, I learned that he and Jonna were on the board of the museum, so I’m pretty sure he knew about them.

God, I hope that they make more Mendez movies. I would love for Hollywood to make a mashup of “The Moscow Rules” and “In True Face.” That’s because since “Argo” won best picture, that story has already been told. The ones during The Cold War have not. I assume that Hollywood will get it together.

Rule #1

Assume nothing.

Rule following gets you nowhere in my line of work. In the world of “go big or go home,” this is the only place I feel truly comfortable doing so, because it’s such a part of me. I’m not very physically capable, but I can throw together a sentence or two. I love that other people love my candor and honesty because it shows me every day that I do not have to please anyone. People will show up every day to hear what I say no matter what it is.

That being said, they will always have to come to me. I am not Shonda Rimes.

:::stares in Grey’s Anatomy:::

“It’s an American tendency to ruin things a little bit so we can have more of it.” -The Good Place re: ice cream vs. frozen yogurt

I am strong enough to take massive criticism by ignoring it. That’s because for every person that says my writing is terrible, there’s one who thinks I’m the best blogger they’ve ever read. Or, in this day and age, they think long form Internet posts are new because they’re too young to remember 2001, which is when I started my old blog, “Clever Title Goes Here.” I sometimes wonder if I’d have done better staying under the same name, but now that it’s been 12 or 13 years since I tanked Clever Title at my own hand, I’ve gotten back any potential “customers” I lost. My web stats aren’t enormous, but they aren’t small, either. I have to compare my audience to congregation size, because then a small number of people looks ENORMOUS.

Today, I had web stats on my post a minute and a half after I published it, and a like three and a half minutes later. That means someone is reading me AS SOON as the entry comes out. And then, my watch buzzes all afternoon because JetPack doesn’t tell you every time someone visits, but every time someone notices you inside the WordPress community. Therefore, an astounding number of my readers are people who are writers just like me.

Including, apparently, my boyfriend….. Who didn’t tell me he had a blog until we’d been dating a year. A year. A YEAR, people. It’s been the most helpful thing I’ve ever experienced, being written about rather than writing about someone else. I don’t have to cut off any one of my limbs to see Zac’s blog entries about me, he’ll link to me and I’ll get what’s called a “ping back.”

Because I got a ping back instead of a note from Zac that he’d answered my daily prompt entries with one of his own, I thought I was meeting this great new local blogger, and my friends will think I had as big a “dumbass attack” as I actually did when I didn’t know his userid….. MrWould.

Speaking of which, Zac is not a super fan. He surfs and reads me occasionally, but we don’t obsessively read each other’s writing. It feeds me because I actually get to tell him about my life and add more detail than I can here because we have more modes of communication- like talking. Sometimes I forget that I actually do need to see people’s eyes… Or in the case of a video chat, their legs. 😉 If you haven’t seen them stand up in three years, it’s been too long since you’ve seen ’em.

There’s a lot to be said in a hug that can’t be voiced, and I need to remember it. Keep it. Write it down.

I just did, but I hear a particular voice in my head when I type it. Supergrover and I have a favorite “influencer” on Instagram, so when I heard the voice in my head, I thought of SG! and laughed.

Ah, where were we? (When I think of her personality, I go a little starry-eyed…..)

My audience size is not influencer size, but that has less to do with my talent and more to do with the fact that less people are willing to read long entries at all. I had a guy in r/washingtondc ask me “do people still have blogs?” This is why Jaz called me “prehistoric,” I guess.

I am, however, known. People who have much stronger voices than me have liked things I said. My favorite so far has been “Picoult, that line slayed. I’m stealing it.” The heart was worth its weight in gold, because she was my mother’s favorite author in the whole entire world.

We were also both watching the first trans woman we’d ever seen on Oprah Winfrey, and I told her she hadn’t aged a day since then (I think her autobiography was published in either the late 90s or early 200s) and what was her secret? She said, “moisturize.”

That trans woman was Jennifer Finney Boyle, co=author with Jodie Picoult on the novel “Mad Honey.”

I’ve met Anne Lamott, David Sedaris, and Jonna Mendez. Therefore, I have met my top three favorite authors so far, and I hope to continue meeting them as I acquire good books. There are some I need to get on it faster than others………. I learned that lesson hardcore when I got to DC just as Tony Mendez stopped doing public appearances because of the Parkinson’s. I missed him by mere months.

There are just so many reasons I wish both Dana and I had been here before 2015. That being said, I would not have wanted to wait any longer to see that we were capable of physical violence when we were both melting down, because then I could say honestly that we were not good for each other without putting blame on either one of us. Neither one of us are all bad or all good. There had been a storm brewing for quite some time at that point, and I believe that the only reason we didn’t survive is that we didn’t listen to ourselves whisper, so we listened to ourselves scream.

If you ignore a problem, you think it goes away and it doesn’t. It accrues interest in a bank account you can’t access because you won’t. No one wants to go through the pain of introspection- not even me. It is truly a feeling of “Feel the Fear, and Do It, Anyway” (Susan Jeffers’ groundbreaking book). This is because the more I explore the internal mechanisms of my brain, the more I feel comfortable in my own skin. My bullshit detector has grown in full force, because I have found my own north star and internal compass. Sometimes, it’s devastatingly wrong, but it’s still my compass as opposed to trying to earn someone else’s or give mine away.

My goal is a movie deal based on my novel, and I think I can pull it off if I work very hard. But it is not time for writing fiction yet in terms of a work in progress. That is because I don’t have all the main story points worked out. I don’t have to work out highlights, but transitions. Where the peaks and valleys are, because I’m writing about war. I have to learn the ins and outs of what means victory and what means defeat. That’s because I don’t know whether the book will end with an L or a W. For instance, a country that wins a war but is bombed within every square inch doesn’t feel like a win to them once the real work of rebuilding sets in. Yet no one ever seems to remember how much work goes into rebuilding something and think, “maybe we shouldn’t blow things up.” I know that war is diplomacy through other means, but it seems like people could try a little harder than “obviously, we cannot reach a conclusion so let’s just start killing each other; whoever gets the most shots in is the winter.”

We can’t all be Elizabeth McCord.

So, in my quest for world peace, I am also thinking about scaling. I cannot go from not knowing how to write fiction at all to producing a book quickly. I am soaking up master classes from everyone I can find. Brandon Sanderson put his whole semester of “Intro to Science Fiction” at BYU on YouTube. There are lots of others, but so far, this playlist is my favorite.

Brandon actually says in the first lecture that this is not just for science fiction writers. He’s going to throw everything at us and we can take it or leave it, from plot, setting, and character to getting it sold.

Zac is also a good resource in this because he submits fiction to contests. On one of them, I was in the writer’s room. “We” got some good feedback. I didn’t help write the whole story, but offered suggestions he took and it made me feel like a million dollars.

I am so rich you wouldn’t believe it if words of assurance could be legal tender. I have so many friends across the world……………….

And also you. 😂😂😂

Kidding, kidding.

This has been a marvelous tangent (realizing what irritates me about Tolkien- I am in this picture and I do not like it. #unsubscribe #block #report), The point was supposed to be about my being nonbinary, and I went from clothes into sensory issues to God knows what and here we are, back at the place where we started.

I wear boys’ clothes, yet comfortable with my femininity. People have expressed this to me in a variety of ways, most of them unprintable. A taste of this would be “you look like a boy, but you….” I’ll let your mind finish that sentence because this is not a family show and you know that already.

My point is that when I started really trying to examine my gender, I realized I saw it on me, but not within me. That how much of each gender I feel might show up in my clothes, accessories, etc. but I have no official attachment to either.

I am very aware that I sound male on the Internet and I use it effectively by saying things a woman would say “in a man’s voice” online. More men pay attention to me that way, and I do not mean that I am inviting male attention. I mean that I have both sets of social masking and I flip from one to the other depending on who is with me. When I am alone, I am stereotypically male. You can see it in my tone even in this entry. My brain is mostly male. I just don’t have any attachment to the male or female body, which is why I am not trans or cis. I feel like it’s a good place to be, because if I had to have a double mastectomy, I would be relieved. All of the sudden, my shirts would hang right. I don’t mean I am unhappy in my body, I am saying that it doesn’t matter what gender I look like because it’s not really a part of my reality.

So much of gender expression is automated by society…. But do people really sit there and think about the fact that they’re cis all the time? I would think it wouldn’t come up unless it was a question people genuinely needed to ask themselves. What cis people don’t understand is that they don’t have to understand. They just have to treat nonbinary and trans as a non-issue. As a redditor posted, “I don’t know French, either, but I respect it exists.” Just because you don’t know something doesn’t make it invalid. The people making it invalid are people who don’t know Jack or shit about gender because they never had to doubt it.

I know I sound like every computer geek who’s ever lived….. And most of them are male. Therefore, I have social masked men my entire career. I also like the Texas old guy patois, and I slip into it easily online because I slip into that patois when I’m not speaking vocally.

I don’t like my voice, so therefore I don’t phrase things like a woman very often. For some reason, hearing the pitch of my own voice makes me act more like a woman than I feel in my head.

Social masking.

My voice is also higher in a recording than I would like it to be, and eschew that, too…… Unless the notes are already high and I need the help.

It always sounds better in the room than on a recording when I sing, because when I’m on a recording, you’re not taking in my emotions. I have a lot of emotions, even in Latin.

I actively run away from my voice because it’s a trap. I don’t sound the way I want to sound, and I don’t want to lose my top range, either. I often think I would think about my childhood a lot less if my voice was deeper, and only the people that were there would understand that tone matters, that dropping an octave makes the note feel so much further away…. Not so extremely loud and incredibly close.

I need a breath after that paragraph.

In this case, it actually would help to be able to cry out from the deep instead of the waves. I got very, very, very lucky that the chord ever resolved at all. Otherwise, I would have been a lovesick teenager chasing after someone who didn’t want me.

Which is what I think about, when it’s just me and the boys.

The Next Logical Conclusion

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Now that I know I’m autistic, what do I do?

It’s quite daunting having to reparent yourself with the skills needed to deal with an autistic kid, only you’re 46. It takes so much energy to be you and parent you at the same time, and I’m sure this resonates with a lot of people. The best part of being an adult is that there’s no one to tell you to go to sleep. The worst part of being an adult is there’s no one to tell you to go to sleep.

There’s no one to tell you to pack your lunch. And there sure isn’t someone to tell you to take a shower. Because parenting yourself is something that “you should already know how to do by now,” and is squarely in the wheelhouse of demand avoidance and a desperate need to fake themselves out of it with social masking. It seems unhealthy and codependent, but having someone to social mask is literally combatting meltdown and burnout. It keeps our routines stable so that we don’t spin out mentally/behaviorally. I believe that exactly all of my problems with Supergrover stemmed from meltdown and burnout, it’s just at the time, I didn’t know how to voice that. I could not tell her “this is too much, I’m overwhelmed.” I would not back down. Meanwhile, my disability is working overtime to prove that I can help her, support her, all that. She has different friendship needs than most people, and I was trying hard to show that I knew why and respected it. In fact, most things she thought of as “crazy” were about respect, but you can’t help a little old lady across the street if she doesn’t want to go. She’ll bang her purse on your head.

There’s already a perfect end to her story in my head, and it’s more than I would ever hope for in this lifetime, but not impossible. It’s a phone call. She and Michael are telling me that we have an important event to attend. Or maybe it’s just the two of us- who knows whether said event would be as important to him as it is to us. That’s because the event in question would be honoring someone who thinks the world of both of us.

But right now, I need to disconnect. I remembered that I had some tags on Supergrover’s public page, and I untagged myself so that they weren’t public anymore- not even I can see them. I’m not worried though, because our relationship has never lived on Facebook. It’s been in the quiet moments of the night, where a blank page starts off as intimidating, and then feels like a blanket.

As I’ve said, I write about Supergrover to calm myself. Echologia to bring me down when I feel shortness of breath, heart, and brain race. That’s why everything swirling around me is creating shutdown in terms of not knowing where to start. I defeated it last night, but I’m not sure I have the energy to do as much today as I did yesterday. I’m what you would call “indoorsy,” so when I suddenly have to exert as much will and energy as possible when I don’t have it, the wind gets knocked out of me pretty fast. Going to the gym would make my body stronger, but it would not stop me from getting lost in my own little world and falling off the elliptical. I have done it thrice.

With my kind of autism, I take most information in through sight. I can observe and note human behavior, but my processing differences make it feel like a double standard. How do I know how other people act when I am nothing like them? Learning to social mask. “I think I can remember how to act like someone else I know.” I do not pick up the morals in a situation if they are opposite to my finely tuned sense of justice. I pick up how someone else has dealt with a situation. And because I’m imitating someone else, it feels like the only time I use my real voice is here.

But the reason you can’t claim you know me based on my writing is that you cannot see my third dimension, all the thoughts that don’t end up here. There’s a lot more I can’t say than I can, and the things I can’t say are harder than the things I can, and with the little knowledge I do have, that makes me cry and shake enough.

It’s not because I’m a naturally depressed person. It’s that digging down into yourself and looking at your worst flaws is the worst job on earth. I wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t constantly rewarding. More people identify with my writing than don’t, and for the people who don’t identify with it, or have a problem with something I’ve said, they’re free to bring it up with me…….. or not. But I already know that if you’re covering up a feeling, you’re going to treat me differently and have the audacity to say my perception isn’t real.

For instance, I could never tell where I stood with Supergrover because sometimes she was like a loving aunt/big sister character in my life, and at others, she said really hurtful things like “you only know random factoids about my life.” I knew this was bullshit, just a dart.

I know this because all of the sudden, when it was my story to tell, did she start having a problem with the things she has told me. So, which is it? Am I the person that only knows random factoids about your life and you aren’t worried about anything I’ve told you, or is that the brave face you put on when you know I’m entitled to my own stories? I know this because she told me I was entitled to all of my feelings, while also raging that I’d let go of information she would have liked to keep quiet and it was incredibly hurtful.

I don’t just know random factoids about her life, because if that were true, she wouldn’t spend time analyzing my work to make sure she’s still unidentified. She’s said many times that her story ceased to be mine and long time ago, so I thought nothing of writing about our mutual trauma because it is indeed what handfasted us. I couldn’t explain anything without explaining it first. Otherwise, I just look like a lovesick teenager chasing after someone who doesn’t want me. This is not correct, and it never will be. We’ve both loved each other to the best of our ability, and love isn’t enough when you both need to stop treating each other as if they’re trying to trying to fight you all the time.

It was gaslighting, and a lot of it, but not because she was a narcissist. She was afraid, and there’s a big difference. The gaslighting was pretending for years that we were fine.

Morgan Freeman: They were not, in fact, fine.

If I take everything literally, that you have no worries about what you’ve told me and you haven’t, that your stories aren’t mine anymore, etc., do I actually deserve her ire in this case?

It would be helpful to know so many things. How many people know she’s Supergrover, for one. How much detail do I need to hide because more people than just me know that identity? Who is my audience that directly affects you? Why are you waffling on whether I am a straight up problem or not? If I’ve caused someone pain, I want to know the specifics. Otherwise, I will spiral out for days and days trying to figure out what it is that I’ve said that they’re mad about.

She comes by it honestly, because for us to really engage, we’d need some time to ourselves, even if it was asynchronous. She doesn’t often have time to write letters that are anywhere near the length of mine, so I think that she thinks I always expect that of her, too. I don’t. But if I’ve had a specific need go unaddressed for years, I only want the problem to be resolved, not assurance that you have read every single thing I’ve ever written. Ignore the rest, it’s all chatter. But it really got to me when she said that I was so demanding of her time and ability to give of herself, when I have been saying for 10 years that I do not deserve her and I will take what I can get.

Anything above that is off limits, but when you don’t give me any limits, I’m going to dream that way. I wasn’t “being demanding,” I was dreaming of a time where she naturally had more bandwidth- retirement. But, you’re going to think that I’m demanding of your time if you never tell me what your boundaries are. She said that three words were all she could manage until I called her on her bullshit for months. That she had to stop not giving me information and blaming me for what writing came out of it.

A lot of this is wrong and misguided because we didn’t have any boundaries. A lot of this is wrong and misguided because I was using one concept for another. A lot of this is wrong and misguided because I said I could read facial expressions and body language. But not when I constantly get “all is well, you’re worried about nothing……..” right up until she’s so angry that being apart is better than being together.

I don’t think I was wrong for bringing up a problem so we could solve it. I did think it was a problem that I couldn’t make heads or tails of her feelings until she said enough words that I knew my anxiety was for naught. But how could I know that without any information at all? It was so confusing, and why I resigned the game. I was tired of constantly being confused. For instance, “you have absolutely NO idea what I’m dealing with,” scaring me away from writing at all…… and “I have had the choice, countless times, to stop what I was doing and didn’t.” Telling me you’re that busy while also running from me is unacceptable. It’s a coverup, and very conditional love. If I don’t walk on eggshells because you’re mad and won’t tell me that, then I can just fuck right off. Is that in any way a fair and balanced relationship?

How do I make you happy if you don’t seem happy with anything?

And by making her happy, I don’t mean that I have the capability to change people from within (although I have been told I do help). She has to find those changes within herself, because I’m not here to suss them out for her. Why she can’t be open and honest and has to stick to the people-pleasing schtick is on her, and I finally saw her get out of that rut……..

She stroked my ego mightily, and my chest puffed up. When she told me that she couldn’t control anyone’s reactions, she quoted me directly without realizing it. Or she did and she was trying to hurt me by throwing my own words in my face……….. and I turned out to be teary-eyed and impressed. I’ve always had the motto “help her, anyway.”

So, when I saw the same behavior in Daniel- get angry at someone for bringing up a problem instead of acknowledging there is one- I was out and quickly. The relationship with Supergrover destroyed me, and I didn’t want another 10 years of fighting a battle that someone needs to fight on their own. It’s not my job to tiptoe around anyone. When I told Supergrover that I had issues I wanted to talk about, she said that I should find friends who didn’t bring issues into my life. There is no such thing. It was Daniel’s first answer as well. If we can’t solve this in five minutes, our relationship isn’t worth jack or shit. It’s too much. If there is a battle inside someone, even two minutes of vulnerability is too hard and it hurts too much. They won’t let go because they’re afraid of losing control, but life doesn’t make sense until you realize you never had any control in the first place.

If I could tell Daniel what I know about my story, the most private parts, he would shit himself for saying I that “just because I wrote in bulk doesn’t mean I write anything of substance.” This is because I’ve never met anyone who could play “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” quite like SG. And she thought I wrote something of substance. I will take that ego boost over anything else that happens in my career. My ability to write could be taken away tomorrow and I’ll know that I accomplished every single one of my goals.

The first was to be seen and heard.

The second was to have people who identified with me that would tell me when they liked something and when I was an asshole with a God complex. That’s because I don’t have to take a single piece of your advice, but that doesn’t mean I won’t hear it. I will be angry and defensive at first, so I usually pop off and regret, another thing I’m learning to manage, because my response is always different than a knee-jerk reaction. But sometimes I write down my knee-jerk reactions because they’re important to prove to me later where I need to grow.

I also think that Supergrover and I should have a conversation about “painting my feelings as fact,” because I could write the way she wanted me to if I understood what she meant. And the reason I’d defer to her is that she was a writing major…….. and yet somehow still thinks of me as “the talent.” I do not know how to write in a way that doesn’t make anything look like a fact, because I am narrating a plot as well. She’s whipped my ass into shape as a writer before, so I have no doubt she could help me with this, too. However, I will do some research on autobiographical writing and see if anything resonates with what she said that gives me a little more context than wondering how and when I’ve been an asshole.

I play AITA all day long with myself, because it’s the fight within me of “say nice things” and “no one forced you to come here.” As I’ve said, the people in my real life knowing what I think of them is their choice.. If they want to be here, welcome. If you always have a problem with what I say, I encourage you to change the channel….. because seriously. Who even am I? Who cares about my opinion?

The only person that really should is me, because it informs how I feel about myself.

How I feel about myself this minute is that I’m proud I handled my move all by myself so that it is free to me- as in, I’m just going to hand my deposit and leftover rent directly to Colin on day one, and my rent hasn’t gone up, so I don’t have to make up the difference.

With Silver Spring, I have gotten two miracles in a row. Hayat and Colin were both the first people I called, and they both turned out to be right for me. Towards the end of April, I’ll have been here a full nine years, and I’m only missing it by a week.

I know from experience that we still might get one more light snowstorm, because when I arrived here in late April of 2015, there was snow on the ground. It was melting, but still. It had snowed on like, April 20th or something. I think I arrived on the 23rd.

Hayat texted me that it feels like it was just yesterday she picked me up at the Metro. I understand the sentiment, because in some ways, it really feels like I just got here. In others, this has been the longest 10 years of my life…… but so necessary in terms of growth and development that I cannot trade them. If I hadn’t become a blogger, I would not have seen autism coming. I would not have seen being nonbinary coming. I would not have seen how any of my friends affect my life, from besties to the smallest interaction.

It’s small interactions that get me the most, because I’m the worst at casual conversation. If I did something weird in front of you in 1993, don’t worry. I’m still thinking about it.

While I pack my “going to Zac’s” bag and try not to flip out that we’re seeing Jason Moran tonight. If I’d had time, I would have ordered a Senators baseball cap for the event, because Duke Ellington’s first job was selling peanuts at games, where he got to know Teddy Roosevelt peripherally because every once in a while Roosevelt would ride his horse down to the field.

So, if you ever doubt the power of living in Washington, remember that a middle class black kid from DC became friends with the President of the United States…………………. long before integration was even a thing.

In fact, that’s the perfect analogy for my life. I have the brain that’s capable of seeing patterns in world conflict like a president, but I have only managed to convince the people around me that I’m selling peanuts.

What I have learned through living in Washington is that people prefer to be treated like they’re all alike on a human level, and revel in friends who aren’t obsessed with who they are and what they can do for me, a classic Washington stereotype. Republicans sniff each other’s butts by asking how much they make.

People do that to me sometimes. Someone asked me how much my sister made, and it was so fucking rude. But, we were at one of Lindsay’s work events, so I didn’t want to go apeshit. I just said, “she’s a Democrat. Aim low.” The truth is that I only know she makes more than me. That’s it, because I don’t ask those questions, and she usually doesn’t volunteer that information except when she’s telling me what a job potentially will pay her if she gets it. I always tell her to aim for the stars, because not only does she travel, she eventually wants to live in a different state where the cost of living is a lot higher than Texas. She doesn’t know how she’d do it, it’s a pipe dream because she doesn’t often think about moving. But, every little bit helps when you are trying to save up for a dream.

I will use DC as an example because she doesn’t want to come here, so it’s not giving away where she’d look if she was actually interested in leaving Texas.

In DC, MD, and VA, buying a house here is ridiculously expensive, and the closer you want to “inside the Beltway” or “downtown living,” the price skyrockets exponentially. An apartment in the city is going to run you about $2500/month. Even in Silver Spring, you won’t find an apartment for less than $1,000…… maybe, maybe if it’s an efficiency. However, management companies are ridiculously relentless in raising rent, so you’ll be paying over 1k/mo in no time if they advertised cheap rent to get you in the door.

And, for $2500/mo in DC, you still only get a white box, especially in neighborhoods that aren’t riddled with crime. If you are in an area with violent crime, depending on where it is, you’ll still pay $2500 because it’s walking distance to the Metro or something like that. Housing does not go down when DC is only 60 sq miles.

Buying a house might be a little cheaper if you have the funds to renovate. You can get a good deal if it’s just a lot with a barely standing building. The land is the expensive part, not the construction.

But then you have to live in DC, and some of their laws are just plain strange. It’s weird that things come through the Senate, because DC’s needs are thrown under the bus by pork barreling.

Like, the bill will be something like “$15/minimum wage” or whatever it is that will do the city good, and someone will put a total ban on abortion in the bill. So, the bill gets struck down and the Republicans say “they wanted this minimum wage so bad, and then they didn’t even want to compromise.”

Make someone else look like that bad guy, because nothing you’ve done has ever elicited a reaction.

Global and national are the same as local.

Generally, if a person will react in a certain way, a country will also act like that. It’s a chessboard, and I see patterns all the time.

The important part is to just keep stitching. The quilt will come together eventually.

Or, with autism, maybe it never will. But I am not interested in turning myself into a person I was never meant to be.

Every Day Blogging

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

It’s starting to stress me out that you can’t answer a blog prompt against, because I don’t really have a topic to start from each morning. Today wouldn’t have been a good one, anyway, because I don’t have any more morning/night rituals now than I did the first time around. The point still stands, though, that it was night to have a jumping off point and a tag everyone starts with every day, #dailyprompt and #dailyprompt-x, the number advancing every day. Well, since I have both tags for all of the prompts from last year, that’s why they already look like they’ve been answered this year. I’m sorry I’m on about this, it was just the main thing that kept me from being lazy and not posting something that day.

But yesterday wasn’t about laziness. I skipped yesterday because I was in burnout mode. I was more overstimulated than I’d been in a long time, because my schedule was all messed up. I needed time to recover and I took it. I slept, mostly. I am not as young as I continue to think I am.

If I have learned nothing from going to psychiatrists and psychologists over the years, it’s that medicine and therapy absolutely work and are valuable……… but so are sleep and sobriety. I don’t practice total abstinence from alcohol, because it’s okay to enjoy it once in a while. It’s just that if I am taking an antidepressant and drinking a depressant, I have not made any forward motion.

When I was in the restaurant business, I drank a lot more because that’s what we did after work. But, then after Dana got her DUI, we went to all these classes on medicine and alcohol (legally required for her, I just drove). It sent MY brain on fire. When I realized what was actually going on in my brain when I drank, I had a light bulb moment. It just didn’t feel like an every day sort of thing anymore.

Therefore, when I worked in a pub here in Silver Spring, I rarely drank. Occasionally I took them up on a beer, but they also had Maine Root Mexican Cola. That won nearly every night. It was a pub. None of the drinks we served had ice except for soda. With the choice of a room temperature beer or a cold soda with ice after a 12 hour shift on grill, it was a quick and easy decision. Give me the cold one.

I have shifted my focus into accommodating who I actually am instead of who everyone told me I was. Whoever I thought Leslie Lanagan was, I cannot say from before. I can only say that I saw the expectations in front of me and found all of them easy for a short period of time, and all of them untenable long term. I learned who my real friends were when I stopped social masking, and Doc was the first person who recognized it before I said it. “Do you think the authoritative part of yourself comes from you feeling more confident in confiding in me?” Yes, 100%. The more you allow me to be me without social masking, the more I want to talk to you. The more I want to open up to you.

I can only speak to the fact that the more I get to know myself, the more I learn how wrong I’ve been. Treating myself as perfectly mentally stable and perfectly physically able, just lazy and a drain on society has nearly killed me several times. I know that because I can only treat myself that way so long without realizing it’s not producing results.

Once I started being kind to myself, I could be softer, as well. That’s because I was living under everyone else’s expectations of what I should be able to do. I was not raised to be neurodivergent, and in some respects, not raised to even be fallible, either, because that is opening the kimono. The parish doesn’t get to live in the pastor’s house.

I didn’t “choose to air all of this out on my web site” re: Supergrover. I decided she wasn’t worthy of listening to my story anymore, because she’d told me she was tired of it. That did not mean there was no more story to tell. She just asked to stop listening to it. There’s so much context she’s missing, and what bothers me is that she told me that I’d aired some things she wanted to keep private, and in no way did I know any of that. When I started explaining, I went by the timeline of her e-mails, especially the ones where they said that her stories weren’t mine to carry anymore, that everyone already knew. She didn’t tell me any of it- no anger, no disappointment, no hurt, no anything. She just let it fester and wandered further from me. The thing I needed most was intimacy, but she didn’t want to give it to me. Not my call. It’s perfectly valid. But so is my hurt if that is her response. I am not saying that she did anything wrong. I am only saying that it is not her responsibility to have my reactions for me. If she wants distance, it’s just a different way of ending the game than I would have done it, but I get the same result and cannot be angry about that.

She says it’s a lot, that every letter is so dense. And at the same time, I don’t think she’d be as obsessed with reading my letters if they weren’t so deep and chewy. What brought us together has driven us apart.

Therefore, I went to my only other safe space in writing….. the part where it’s just me in my room, thinking to myself. I am writing these as letters to me in the future, which is why I cultivate this web site as what my friend Kristie called “my pensieve.” I am a really rare breed, I think….. someone who’s willing to let another person read their autistic mind in real time. I think it’s important, because generally, autistic people aren’t raised to be autistic. They know how their neurotypical adults handle the world, but they have no clue how an autistic person does it. And then add to that the large number of older women who are getting diagnosed now because it was entirely missed in their childhood due to having social masking beaten into them early. That social masking, those expectations, are what make an autistic person feel like an alien.

That’s because I am an aggressive taskmaster with myself, authoritative and stern without love because in addition to not giving myself empathy, I am a relentless perfectionist who doesn’t give a fuck about my feelings. I haven’t cared how bad I’ve made myself feel for not being perfect since I was born, because that’s how the outside world has treated me for years as well.

With autism/ADHD, you never “get it together.”

The Point at Which the Dream Changes

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

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 Am Not Normal -or- “Hi, My Nickname is ‘Way Too Much.'”

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What’s the first impression you want to give people?

I have bigger problems when people think I am normal than when they don’t. This is because neurodivergent and neurotypical people have two different perspectives, and the neurotypical person (also referred to as “allistic”) is always going to assume I am just like them because majority is implied– neurotypical. I do not have to start every conversation with “hi, my name is Leslie, and I’m an autistic (‘hi, Leslie’),” but I do not think it would hurt if I did. When I do not, people can see that I am irregular, but they can’t put their finger on why.

I have cerebral palsy so I move and look different, but not by so much that you’d think “neurodivergent and physically disabled.” My biggest issue in life is not looking disabled or autistic enough, because I can say it all I want and there’s still going to be a look of disbelief when I actually show people I’m not Bruce Almighty. I would rather people love me backstage, because my social masks are worth nothing. It’s valuable to go through the process of an official diagnosis just for confirmation that you’re not crazy. You’ve done the research and you believe you. It is only when you believe that you know more about your own brain than other people do that they push back. Why do you think you’re the authority on telling other people who you are? “You don’t look autistic” is my favorite. I struggle with imposter syndrome because of it, or I did……….

I actually do think I look autistic now that I know. Like, I just looked around one day and realized my closet was serving Young Sheldon realness (also “Old Sheldon” realness due to all the long–sleeved t-shirts)……. which is also serving Jim Parsons realness because we are both Houston gays of a certain age (he’s older), and our accents are nearly identical when we fall back on them. If you met Jim and me together, it would seem like you met two people who have always known each other, and I mean it. That boy knows what HATCH is, maybe thought about going. For all I know, Michael has a picture of him somewhere.

Michael and I met at a Houston gay club, then found out we were both HATCHlings and he starts going through a photo album on his phone. Complete strangers, except not…….. I was in his pictures. I was in my 30s and the pictures were taken when I was 18 or 19 and he was still in diapers (15). In short, Jim Parsons has the same accent as the gays who raised me. I love him like he personally vouched for me at The Ripcord…… because that’s what you do at the end of the night in Houston if you’re with the boys.

When I’m with “the boys,” I feel more comfortable in a club, gay or straight. That’s because the club is an unfamiliar environment with lights and sounds that are way too fuckin’ loud, but the boys feel like home when the club doesn’t. My favorite memory of clubbing in Houston is the night I went to JR’s in a white t-shirt, jeans, and red leather CFM pumps. It was a great outfit, but within two hours I thought I’d never be able to walk again. My friend Brian knew that I could hardly stand up, so he carried me to my car. I looked like the butchest fairy princess on record.

Looking like a butch fairy princess is also a neurodivergent trait, interestingly enough. Neurodivergent people have loose definitions of gender and sexuality. The spectrums between gay and straight, male and female, mono and poly are all enormous, why I call it “Avatar state,” and you probably will, too, if you’ve seen Avatar: The Last Airbender (not the movie- skip it).

“How dare you make me, a bisexual, choose between two or more things?” #bumperstickerwisdom

I identify with Toph because she’s physically disabled (blind) and coded as autistic in her bluntness. This was even more apparent in Legend of Korra. But, of course, that is not acknowledged because There is No War in Ba Sing Se. Problems do not go away if you sweep them under the rug, and get worse the longer you ignore them. Local is national.

We were engulfed in flames, the embodiment of our own ignorance because the former president going after John McCain for being a POW never even raised an eyebrow. FUCK those people. How could you not see that and the former president’s treatment of the mentally handicapped thinking, “this is surely a leader?” People who think the former president is Jesus have never recognized he’s actually Brian…….. but they know he’s the Messiah. They’ve followed quite a few (I’m not convinced God wanted George W. Bush, either…… but they were).

I am not nearly as furious at the former president’s supporters as I am at the people who stood by and did nothing, and there are a ton of them. Voting participation is usually less or right at half in a presidential election, and you have to pay people to show up for the mayor/city council/state leg, dog catcher, etc. I believe that is actually an elected position in West University because my math teacher in 10th grade was mayor and I think I remember her mentioning it.

OMG, now *that* woman was a monotropic thought process…………. Where were we again? 😉

I do not know how people see me the way they do, I just know that it is the same way that people have looked at others who have raised me. I am not dissimilar from a pastor or an opera singer, because that’s what was modeled for me. I have a stage presence every bit as big as theirs, and I never want to use it ever again, because it’s everything about me that’s not really there. It’s the end of the movie, and I’m stepping out from behind the curtain……. while everything is still in color. I am trying to stop the desaturation, or at the very least, turn up the shadows to make stunning, stark grayscale photography. I have said “pay no attention long enough.”

Perhaps Jack Ryan’s archetype can’t be autistic easily, which is why it was easy to let go of that dream. I don’t think I could have taken the pressure cooker, even as an analyst. Some analysts are even forward-deployed, and though I think it would be exciting, I know through talking to Zac and Daniel that it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. They both got to explore, they both went through trauma. Both are figuring it out with me.

I have an alternating lateral isotropia which makes one eye focus while the other eye drifts. I have no 3D vision. I don’t always have the correct social masks and say things that people just don’t say in a conversation. They don’t know how to address the elephant in the room….. how to tell me that I’m weird because I obviously don’t already know.

People gloss over my limitations all the time and I am brutally honest about them. Others think I’m shitting on myself and placate me, later realizing I was right and they resent me “because I didn’t tell them.” They still feel snowed because they were seeing me through their filters and not the ones I told them existed. In essence, what is happening is that my social masking is so good, so practiced, that when I say I’m autistic or ADHD it is dismissed. I am not special. Most women with autism/ADHD face this to some extent. It’s more often for me having been raised in a fish bowl because I am skilled at making things look fine (while everything is actually on fire).

Other people seem inversely weird to me, and I could not put my finger on it, either. Until now, I’ve thought I was an alien, taking refuge in science fiction (dear God how did I not know this was coming…… I’m basically Mac and PC [John Hodgman and Justin Long]). Come to find out, it’s because people have been asking me to do things way beyond my capability and I’ve let them down because “I didn’t know any better.” It is never that I told them I was ADHD (haven’t had to tell an employer I’m autistic), explained that it meant I had limitations, and you didn’t look it up. I am only responsible for half of a conversation, and I have never been good at holding people accountable for their part. I hate and am also too weak to stand up to authority most days.

The thing is, though, I run a tight ship with an order all its own, which generally looks like there has been some sort of struggle. I desperately need structure and hate authority simultaneously, because my system is in collaboration with no one and I am lost in my own little world– no one is capable of helping me maintain it; I couldn’t explain it if anyone offered. It’s comfortable in my mind, but it also feels like waiting for God to make Eve when I don’t have a sounding board. According to Zac, this might take a while (he’s an atheist). It’s an apt description because the most beloved trees in my mental garden touch upon knowledge of humanity and the divine.

I think deep thoughts and ask the real questions of myself every day. “Why am I like this?” is a constant refrain, but not a pejorative. Fuel to keep the fire going. Writing is working and I’m getting further along in my healing journey, like just now realizing that I was programmed to look for people like my 10th grade teacher because I was already chasing a cougar (she was young, but I was 11 years younger). Oh my FUCK have I just played a huge hand in making myself feel better and someone else worse, just not her. All the archetypes that came afterward, Supergrover the last and most precious in a line because I’d never met anyone like her, and I never will again. It is all just so sad- one f the reasons I’m isolating because I don’t want to take out grief or anger on others. She calmed me and won’t let me calm her. Somehow, we’ve become a part of each other’s heartbeat despite actively disliking each other and stuck in a loophole-less Massey Pre-Nup.

Relationships like ours don’t happen often,, where both people are just too much for the other because of our different outlooks on life. We actually have little in common if you look outside our thoughts. We track together, but “for all our mutual experiences, our separate conclusions are the same.” We are in different social, professional, and relationship situations, with the difference being an absolute power balance and not one we made. Alternatively, there is no such situation in which I wouldn’t just roll with it. You need snacks? Ok. You need me to steal something? Ok. I’ll be at the National Archives by eight. LET’S DO THIS. My inner Nicholas Cage is struggling to get out. 😉

Just text me first.

I grew through wanting bugs to be features and realizing I couldn’t just release the beta as official and publish a patch later…. I am not Microsoft, and she is not Windows…… but her e-mail address does mark her as having had a 56K modem that came with a proprietary CD (Compuserve, Wow, take your pick- not even AOL? Really?), because that’s the only way you would have gotten an e-mail address that ancient, and yes, I am making fun of her. That’s because she’s basically “Windows 98 and the Plus Pack!” years old.

It would have been fun teaching her terms like “mommy save,” the idea that women only have one personal folder and it is the desktop. You know it immediately because you sit down at the computer and the icons are layered (we also have what we called “12:00 flashers,” ’cause every appliance in their house is always blinking 12.). And that line isn’t making fun of her because A) I don’t know what her desktop is like. II) I was making fun of my users and my own mother from “back in the day.”

My mother assumed that if it plugged into the wall, I could fix it. This is not untrue if we’re talking about a desktop/laptop/tablet/phone. I, like Daniel Stern, have no concept of how to program a VCR. “The cows can tape something by now.” My mother once flew me from Portland to Houston because it was cheaper to house and feed me for a few days than it was to call the Geek Squad and I provide better service. I am sure that she did want to see me as well, but she got a bargain, ijs.

All of these things combine to make me dig down on every topic. I’m creative. I like writing. I like computers because they enable me to write. I like tablets because they allow me to write anywhere with a minimum amount of effort. It genuinely seems like the longer I say silent, the more the words flow.

In Scotland, I can find no record of it, but my parents tell me that they chose my name because it meant “quiet spirit.” Today I realized for the first time just how much they actually nailed it.

There are lots of bugs, but the feature is me. The best impression I can give is that I allow myself to take up room in the world because I am not frightened of yours. Be as big as you are.

I’m trying.

Barbie and Me

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 4 Comments

I saw “Barbie” this morning and I ugly cried all the way through it. I wanted my mom, or at the very least, the numerous friends that have mom energy holding me up in her stead. The first thing that made me cry is that Barbie has always been the ideal woman, which means that I’ve hated her most of my life. I’m genderqueer, and people that generally love Barbies don’t love me. I didn’t become “Weird Barbie.” I was born that way. The tears flowed into the ugly cry when Barbie listens to The Indigo Girls in her car. The second is that Weird Barbie was coded as lesbian (haircut, Birkenstock, etc.) Seeing all the Barbies accept her in the end was magnificent. Weird girls are their missing demographic. That’s because my reaction to Barbie has always been that it teaches women what a woman is and is not. That has never included people who look like me. There is no genderqueer/nonbinary Barbie. There is no lesbian Barbie because I’m not sure they could do that without breaking the rules of the Barbie universe.

It teaches straight, cis, hetero women that I am not a woman as well, because I don’t have “girl interests.” I don’t think like a stereotypical woman……….. anymore. I have felt all the body shaming, queer shaming, gender expression shaming, and all that comes with it. When I was a teenager, I got called fat at 130 pounds and took the most dangerous diet pill on the market to combat it. Phen-phen didn’t do anytihng for me, but it made me feel like I was doing something about how I felt rather than sitting there and feeling sorry for myself.

I haven’t always been this small, but it’s a whole ball of wax on its own. I do not recommend my diet plan to anyone ever at all. I have to take Adderall XR sometimes. I take drug holidays from it a lot because I cannot stand the appetite suppression. I’m small because I can go two days before I remember I haven’t eaten anything, and not because I want to. When the situation is dire, food doesn’t sound good at all. Even the thought of it makes me nauseous. I have said this before, but I’ve cried in a grocery store because I had to feed myself for a week and I couldn’t find anything that actually sounded good.

Drinking isn’t a problem, so I try to load up on protein shakes because they’re easy on my stomach when I’ve developed a block against eating. The worst it’s ever gotten was that I was down to 110 pounds. I arrived in DC looking like a heroin addict and I was totally sober. That wasn’t all due to medication, though. I was under a lot of stress with the divorce, the move, the homesickness, the everything. DC is my city, but it still took a while to reestablish myself.

I’ve gained weight, and I can’t decide if I look better or worse, but I feel better so the weight is staying. I already deal with feelings of inadequacy because I’m so small that most of my clothes are from “The Children’s Place.” I wear a large in boys,’ and the reason I put up wtih tags on my clothes that advertise that fact is because I like men’s clothes better, but even the small is too large in some brands.

It harps on my self-esteem to an enormous degree because when my sister and I are walking and talking around the city, it looks like a grown ass woman and her weird little nephew (this is not far from the truth of our relationship, tbh). It’s been a process to just accept what I like. Who cares if I buy kids’ clothes? They fit better, and that’s most important. If I buy an Oxford from a men’s shop, the shoulder seam will go halfway down my arm and it looks like I’m wearing my granddad’s clothes (this is not fucking awesome). So, in order to look like the clothes were made for me, I like the expensive stuff. All the stuff your sons will grow out of in a New York minute will last the rest of my life. My favorite brands are Nautica and Tommy Hilfiger. Thanks to all your sons, I can buy a $50 Tommy H Oxford on e-bay for six bucks. At Goodwill, kids’ clothes are practically free. 😉

The Children’s Place is a new favorite because they sell basics in a ton of colors.

It comes with a price, though.

Women and men look at me like I’m an alien most of the time until we start talking. Then, they’re drawn in by my personality. I’m one of those people that can talk to anyone about anything. Two things about that. The first is that I know a little bit aboout most things, if not everything. So, I can seem brilliant long enough to fool people. 😉 The second is that like I’ve said before, I have a Southern pastor vibe, so people tend to spill things to me that they wouldn’t share with anyone else. I’ve had people tell me the worst stories of their lives on the Metro. I once talked to a bus driver in Portland that confided in me that he was five hours sober now (that was terrifying). And if you don’t want me to know something, don’t tell me because I’m bad at forgetting things. I won’t tell anyone what you said, but I will write about reverberations from it. I don’t have the right to tell other people’s stories, but I do have the right to talk about how their lives have bled into mine. So, if said bus driver runs across this, I still remember and it was 26 years ago. It was a long ride, PDX to Lewis and Clark. I honestly felt llike I had to keep him talking because I wanted to observe his speech patterns to know whether he was tellling the truth about being sober or if I needed to get the hell out of Dodge.

Being the type person that everyone wants to tell their secrets to has a cost as well.

I have unconsciously been everyone’s pastor without going to divinity school and everyone’s counselor without a license. If you’re the sort of person that is currrently writing this off as bullshit, I had to give up all of that because my secret-keeping ability was at full capacity and I was living the lives of the people I’d heard instead of my own. All my energy was pouring into them in every conversation. I was conserving approximatelly zero percent for myself. When you’ve always been that person and you learn to negotiate boundares, you get “PNG’d back to Langley” (slang for treating an officer as a persona non grata and giving them a desk job, very much like the old dude in “Slow Horses.”). This is because people who are used to getting everything they want from you all the time now think you’re an asshole because you’ve realized that they’ve expected you to be there for them, but they have their own boundaris intact and you don’t. So, they’ll dump on you as hard as they can and won’t be there to help you pick up the pieces because they’re not stupid enough to give away as much energy as I do.

This is a universal problem, and knows no boundaries. Most relationships are like this. One is the leader, one is the follower. Generally, this is because women are taught from birth to be fixer/pleasers in relationships with men, who certainly have their boundaries in place because no one calls them on it. Same sex couples have the same issues, particularly lesbians, because the role of fixer/pleaser becomes muddled there when you’ve been enculturated the same way. I wasn’t raised to be queer, therefore I have all the heteronormative bullshit internalized homophobia that most if not all queer people carry their whole lives because there is no escape.

So.

I can deal with being thought of as Weird Barbie, but I will not play the game. Zac knows he’s my equal. He would never in his lifetime tell me to do anything. He’s the one who will show up for me. I got that relationship because I knew enough to want it. Why wouldn’t I want to find someone emotionally unavailable to please when that’s how male/female relationships are set up in the first place?

Doesn’t matter if it’s a wine and yoga pants girlfriend or a U-Haul girlfriend, we’re going to have that shitty, enculturated reaction to each other if we’re not careful. We can either do everything to please each other because that’s what we’ve been taught to do, or we can have it out. My choice now is to have it out, because even if there’s a fight of thermonuclear war proportions, it’s still better than holding everything inside and feeling like there’s no room for me no matter its size. I will not stuff anything down because I know what it does to my mental health when I do. I feel absolutely worthless. If there’s no blame to be had, I’ll make it up just to torture myself a little better.

No one on earth can hurt me worse than I can. And “Barbie” showed me that my feelings aren’t unique or special.

I am, though.

We’re Trapped and We Should Lean on Each Other

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been thinking about relationships with men a lot lately, because the one I have with Zac is the gold standard now. This is because in terms of men who know how to be emotionally available to women without losing masculinity, watching him a master class. I am picturing him having a very busy day and hoping this makes him smile and relax for a minute.

This is because Zac is everything I want to be, and I’m not sure he even knows it. I am quietly learning to accept that I’m nonbinary and pansexual not because of anything but wanting to make sure the horsepower thrills me before I buy the whole car. Alternatively, I want someone I can grow with, so that the shell stays pristine in my mind because I was there when they started looking at cherry pickers.

I’m not going to change my pronouns, because gender expression means nothing to me. People say all kinds of things to get my attention and it’s always the tone of voice that matters. What I mean is that I see such a difference in gender with the way my mind presents in stream-of-conscious thought. I was raised to be a preacher’s kid, and that is an acting job. What other people do not know is that if you are born into a family with a public facing parent, you have been accepted to a company to which you never applied. People deal with this in different ways. I deal with it by being a wallflower in person and Anthony Bourdain here.

When I say I’m trying to be Anthony Bourdain, I mean it. I have taken on his writing style because it’s useful, and I do that with every writing voice I need. When I write about the kitchen, I need his authority, because we are roughly the same level. I am not treating him as Anthony Bourdain, star of Food Network, Travel Channel, and CNN. I am treating him as my boss who is like every boss I’ve ever had. I know him. We’ve met. Here’s what Anthony would tell you if he was here.

I am so proud of Leslie I can’t breathe because she had the balls to dress down a chef when he put knives in her sink.

That’s because he knows that he is fallible, possibly more than everyone else the way that doctors who acknowledge their humanity will tell you that you actually don’t want a shot from them, they’re terrible at it because they don’t do it all day. You want an ER nurse.

Bourdain was not a great chef, and I don’t know that because I’ve judged him on his food and talent. I know that because he told me that in Kitchen Confidential. He told me that he was a journeyman line cook who rose through the ranks to become chef, and that resonated with me because it said to me that Anthony didn’t have anything I didn’t.

I am awed by his humanity, and that is what makes him divine.

The relationship I have with Anthony in my head is very much like any of my Internet relationships except the possibility of meeting on the ground was cut short by an enormous amount of time. What I do know is that we would instantly bond. It wouldn’t take a drink. That’s because I’m already in Anthony’s tribe….. a tribe that would have both of us.

Relating to guys on that level is just what I do. If we’re in the same tribe, we bond and it’s on like a house on fire. When I bond with men who are in relationships, I become “The Girl Whisperer,” and I don’t do anything but let them talk it out. They know what they want. They just don’t have the clarity to see it.

Alternatively, here’s something hilarious. Lesbians act like men and they fucking hate it. They write it off as us being militant and angry, but never at the fact that we are matching style and structure. Some of thinking that lesbians are angry means they can dish but they can’t take it. They’ll start to feel things they can’t handle because no one has ever taught them to feel anything because of our childhood socializations. When they start to feel things they can’t handle, that’s when the rage starts.

When your protector mode runs up against mine, everyone else is going to see some shit.

Nowhere is this more evident than a lesbian and her father in law. Her father doesn’t think I can take care of shit, and he will tell me that daily in thought, word, and deed even after 25 years. The best I’ve ever gotten from any girlfriend’s parents is mild annoyance at my existence. Whenever I tried to change that pattern, it ranged from “you’re the girl that made my daughter gay” to “you don’t have the right to an opinion here because I’m her father and I don’t understand lesbians so I’m just going to have to assume that I’m responsible for her until she dies.” Fathers don’t even assume daughters can take care of themselves, so why would they think I am capable of doing something his daughter isn’t? The truth is that we do have trouble taking care of ourselves because the system isn’t built for us. Even if laws have changed, attitudes haven’t…… and if we act mean about it, that’s our problem. We should have just laid there and thought of England.

So, as a writer, I never believed that I could take care of anyone until I got some kind of deal going, and I was realistic enough to believe that I needed to support myself if I wanted to be a blogger. It has just taken an enormous amount of time to be able to figure out how I can do that, because eating and writing are equally important as much as I might think they’re not. My ire does not lie with writers who are kidding themselves. Sometimes people do go off on a pipe dream. My problem is that when creatives say they’re willing to work for peanuts so they have time to do something else, that’s not seen as valid because I’m supposed to be accumulating wealth every second of every day.

I have an idea big enough to attract comic book artists, movie directors, and other writers. In the right hands, it’s worth millions and I know what I have. If I take my focus off of it, I need to sell the idea. But then I face having my idea executed badly. I want to be free to be there for the whole process. To write the book and see if readers like it. To accept a movie deal if it is offered. To make my friends last forever as their fictional versions. They don’t think of that when it’s just a blog. But they’ll damn sure know if they were in something like Black Panther.

My job is to believe they could be….. and it affects my relationship with men to an enormous degree. I’m not the dog they need to kick, so I teach them pretty quick not to come up in my yard unless they’re willing to let me hold the leash.

With Zac, I just get to be myself, and we both trade off holding Oliver’s leash when we’re on the same hike.

Doctor Who Knows? Who? Nose.

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 5 Comments

He can’t leave. He’s The War Daniel.

I am not saying he did or did not leave. I am saying that I am wrestling over what kind of impact I’ve had and continue to have on someone I love to a nearly desperate, crazy amount. I just don’t show it. I haven’t seen his body in years, but I see his soul on paper multiple times a day, just bleeding out in front of me while I go blurry with teary eyes and back into my own history, particularly with alcohol. I’ve never truly had a problem, but I used to be really bad about counting and timing because if it had ice in it, I wanted some. I have literally gotten drunk by accident. I helped it to continue, but originally the loopiness came on because I was thirsty. I know how that plays out in an alcoholic’s eyes.

This is my experience from what my AA friends have told me, particularly the ones I’m closest to, but reflect a lot of people there. They can’t watch you sip. They can’t watch you take a drink and sit it down and walk away, then come back. It has nothing to do with cravings, or at least, over time it’s not about that. Over time, it’s shame. You have done something they could not. You left a drink on the table and walked away.

Something broke in me when Dana got her DUI. However, the way it broke let light in. When she was asked to go to these classes on alcohol and the brain, I went with her and sat in the back. I was in my 30s, it was like doing an extra rotation after going to medical school in the backseat of a Lexus.

I don’t diagnose anything, but I know a million symptoms and how they connect. I recognize things like shingles by the pattern. I can recognize the emotional fibromyalgia of trauma. As a resource, I am a great friend. I have the capability to listen and an acute awareness of when you are above my pay grade, Clown Shoes. The closer you are to me, the more I hug and kiss you while I tell you that you’re not only clown shoes, you’re all three rings and a big stripey tent……. and I wouldn’t have it any other way. All my friendships are this deep. I love my friends until they can’t take it. Literally. There have been meetings, most of them on what to do about me. 😛

Add alcohol rehab onto major trauma, and it’s just like real fibromyalgia. You might never get rid of it. You just have to manage it. My poet friend Wendy said this to me a hundred years ago, and it’s how I express this idea now that I’ve ripped her off verbatim for like 15 years…… She wrote me an e-mail that said, “you don’t have to love it, Leslie. You just have to live it.”

This is what I think to myself when I’m thinking about rehab and everything that goes with it. The semicolon and the ampersand, if you will. In fact,The War Daniel is the semicolon itself, and the ampersand is all that comes with him. Everything about who Daniel is contained in one punctuation mark (Full Stop and Keep Going), and everything that’s important to him in another. I have nicknamed it the “andhausen.” Daniel and his daughter will fall on the floor laughing at that.

I want to give it to them, because their word for the best of the best of the best is actually a suffix on the end of a word. For instance, Doc and Cora are Dochausen (or Danhausen) and Kidhausen, or Corahausen. Cora is not my daughter’s name. It’s from Coraline, Neil Gaiman’s novel.

[Incidentally, my favorite movie is now Argohausen. Bryn is going to love that. She calls me Rev. Argo. I did her wedding. I have literally married her. Just not to me…. I’m a Rev. in the Church of The Latter Day Dude because none of my friends wanted to wait until I finished grad school to do a ceremony I’ve had memorized since I was like, nine.]

Here is my own best of the best of the best. Daniel is “The War Daniel.” Cora is The Doctor’s Daughter. Do you see it now? Do you SEE IT?

The War Daniel is from Doctor Who. The War Doctor without an MD…. He’s not a fan, but says he wants to be. I hope when he sees John Hurt he will remember who he is. HE IS THE WAR DANIEL. I told him that if anyone needed a clarification, not to say to a Whovian that it was my own way of saying that he was my River Song, and that he wouldn’t even know for a few years what that even meant….. also that he could make very, very large men weep in the street, particularly in the UK.

I didn’t want to be married to this Doctor. I wanted to be married to all of them. I wanted the young boy. I wanted the teenager. I wanted the man he is. And I am so curious to find out what happens next. Literally I will watch this next regeneration that chooses the same face and hope to God he remembers that his companion is me. I’m your Amy, and you’re my Rory. You cannot even imagine how that feels. That out of nowhere, Rory Williams showed up…. and Rory is a nurse.

That’s just the Doctor Who connection. We haven’t started on MASH yet. Sorry, it’s not spelled right because my 8 key isn’t working, but you get it. Saying that he’s Hawkeye and Honeycut and Winchester and Potter all rolled into one is an understatement, because they never really got bombed. But all of these medical characters mean something to me, Hawkeye in particular. I have said for a long time that it was rough being a Hawkeye in a Frank Burns world…… and then Hawkeye showed up on my Internet front porch.

As Jill says, “you are really not subtle about hiding Daniel from all your friends. You only have one friend named Daniel on Facebook, and his last name is Williams.” Given that I think he’s part Rory, his last name counts. I was never trying to hide him. He told me that he’s an open book. I am sure that he is looking for a PowerPoint presentation on his flaws that’s just not going to come until I’m not punching down anymore. I want him fighting fit.

Yes, I’m terrible about hiding things. I should learn to leave so many less breadcrumbs than I actually do. But this is not one of them. I will wait and change my relationship status based on two things. The first is staying out of Facebook Jail long enough to do it, and whether or not this miracle occurs. I only own half.

Because here’s what I see. I see a writer that should be teaching how to write war fiction or journalism. It seems like everything I know politically boils down to David Halberstam’s books. I know I’m marrying The Best and the Brightest. If he were alive, he would approve… and probably retort that it will get better…. it’s just The Coldest Winter. The War Daniel has Pulitzer Prize talent. What he does with it is completely up to him. It’s just that the raw talent is there.

He’s also electable. He could do any job in this country, including president, because the US elects war heroes all the time. I know him. He would turn down POTUS in a heartbeat to get right to Veterans’ Affairs. The first time I brought it up, some light came into his eyes and he said, “I could help my brothers.” I’m just talking about his character. That’s the man I want to marry. I don’t care if we stay on the beach and do nothing. It’s not about that. It’s about seeing options and choosing from them (not always saying “this is the very best bad idea we have, sir. By far”).

Like choosing to have a daughter.

I have been “Other Mother” for a little while, and I have to say, I really enjoy it. Falling in love with a child is a whole different ball game. Here’s how much different. I am going to make you bawl, because I’m about to make myself bawl for like the 30th time so I am telling you, get the Kleenex.

Cora and I were talking about trans pain vs. queer pain and how they’re different and how they’re the same. I told her I felt like she was overfocusing on her own pain and that it might be holding her back from empathy.

Holy God I have never seen anyone turn around this fast. The next day, she was talking about getting new driver’s license, passport, etc. We were talking about names. I said, “Cora, I want to change your deadname for you a little bit so that you can think of it as someone else’s name, and only two people in the world know what it is…. and in fact, I would be very surprised if it was information retained. Is that okay with you?” She said, “sure.”

This may be telling tales out of school, but it needs to be.

“When Meagan and I were planning our own future, we picked baby names for our future son and daughter. Your deadname was going to be the same name as my own son should he have appeared, and isn’t it crazy that I named my son your deadname and your father, who I will remind you I have known since I was seven, thought of the EXACT SAME NAME for his kid.” It wouldn’t be a thing if it was a common name.

It is, but I wanted it spelled differently, and he picked the same spelling I wanted. Not so much “isn’t this eerie…. we’re mated now based on that one fact.” No. Bullshit. I just meant that great minds think alike. This time, really. An INFJ and an INTJ belong together. No one else can stand us. This has been proven to both of us time and again. 😛

Meagan proposed to me when we were 18. It was just as ridiculous as agreeing to marry someone who was going to rehab, but I said yes, anyway…… like two months before she noped back to Canada and found someone else. What is different about Daniel is that he is everything she’s not. She was a romantic who didn’t really think things through, and I could say the same about myself now except I’m almost 20 years older now and I’ve learned from my mistakes. He is a seasoned combat veteran and doctor. I will put his street creds up there with any trauma surgeon in the nation. His stitches may not be art, but you’ll live. If that kind of person can’t be trusted with my heart, it will only be due to incompatibility and/or timing. Not that he’s not the right person- for me or anyone else.

The first lesson in being older is don’t marry someone you think you love but underneath realize they’re kind of a jackass. Marry someone who wears their jackass proudly, like I do (and like many of my friends also do, because I wouldn’t love them as much if they didn’t).

Here’s why being a jackass is important to the story. I’m not the same person I was when I was 18, but I’m grateful to her, the woman I was. She protected me from me. She was a musician, yet alone. She found ways to disappear. She’d been outed at school and humiliated. It was ninth grade. By 12th, I’d had enough. I just wasn’t that smart. I did everything right, and I still got dumped in a terribly humiliating way, which is completely forgiven a hundred times over because her friendship has been so valuable… but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t hell on earth back then.

In present day, after we’d talked about The Struggle, I told Cora everything about my name and why I hate it so goddamn much. Leslie is fine. The D is no longer with us. It humiliates me to even think about changing the name my mother gave me now that she’s dead.

Cora, in her empathy, said, “I have a name that I’m not using. Would you like to have it?”

When your child says something like that, their name could be Osama and you wouldn’t blink. I actually think Osama would be a cool name for me, based on the movie about the girl who had to become genderqueer on purpose to fool the Taliban into believing she was worthy of education and training. She’s adorable, and she has my heart…. and if Daniel and I ever travel to the Middle East, you can bet my gender non-conforming ass that I will carry her picture everywhere and say, “See? I’m like her. I’m just ancient.”

When I loved my name, I wasn’t ashamed of who I was. I was lonely. It was Meagan or nothing. I would have died rather than choose nothing, for only the simple fact that Southern women are sold a bill of goods that only one person will fulfill their every need until they die… forever and ever, to God be the glory, Amen.

I do not believe that. I believe that The War Daniel and I have woven through each other’s timelines, and because it’s always the future, there’s never a conflict…. no moments of “fixed point in time. I’m so, so sorry.” I also believe that being married to Dana was also wonderful, and being with Kat was adequate. It just wasn’t all wonderful, all the time…. and neither is this. It’s just a much bigger gamble. If I win, I win big. If I lose, I still played a part in keeping my friend alive.

Relationships can be built. Regenerations are a fairy tale told to children, and they work so wonderfully well because you do the same thing your whole life…. instantly recognizable on the outside. Completely different on the inside.

Same software, different case.

It was an astounding offer, one that could only be made by someone with childlike wonder and innocence. Someone who’d been beaten down by the world every bit as much as me. Her trauma might be more prevalent nowadays because people don’t understand the ideas of transgender or genderqueer as easily as they accept queer sexual behavior. I don’t know why it’s such a mystery that people have a spectrum of sexual behavior and gender identity, but it’s becoming more nd more true every day. I am just a regular queer, but people have been coming at me 20 years longer than they have Cora. Cora’s 24. She has no idea. None. I don’t think she even knows how big a sacrifice it is. To hear her deadname come out of my mouth, to see her letter where mine used to be… it’s too much for me. I can’t do that to her, even if it wasn’t her real reaction. I can’t take that chance. To be that careless with a deadname would be devastating if it hurt after the fact. I see her pain, she sees mine. I am sensitive to it in all ways.

Daniel and I might want to foster/adopt kids in the future. The first thing I did was ask Cora if it was okay. The girls (important, because our idea was getting children out of impossible situations, like being betrothed to a Talib fighter who is 47 years old) would be at least a decade younger, possibly more. It was important that she see my dreams as clearly as I saw hers, and we talk about them.

Last night, I remembered almost 20 years ago, curling up with the thought of my wife and my son….

I woke up this morning thinking of my daughter. The D is no longer with us, but only physically. I have a right hand ring that’s him all over. A claddagh with skeleton hands. My daughter and I are bonding without him, which is a very good thing for all three of us. You can’t be in love, or even think you love an alcoholic/addict until you’re ready to think about murder. We need each other. If for nothing else than going to Finland so he can stand out in one of FORTY BAZILLION FORESTS and take the band pic. It’s Finland. There’s only one.

Why yes, he did want to move to Helsinki at first. I’m glad you asked. I believe that I have talked him down off the ceiling by agreeing to go and live there for a little bit and see if we like it. As I was telling Zachausen the other day, “I’m using the Internet wrong. I don’t think I’ve even adapted to the reality that Air BnB is a thing we could do.” It’s just not all about us (Zachausen can come, too).

I got Cora at such an incredible time in my life, the part where she’s young and doesn’t have anything figured out and doesn’t know shit about Civil Rights or where we came from in terms of people like JFK, RFK, MLK, Bayard Rustin, and all of the best and the brightest Halberstam talked about. Talked about how three of the brightest stars in the Civil Rights firmament were all assassinated and how Bayard Rustin was out of he closet for ALL OF IT. MLK knew. Baptist preacher. Knew his top advisor was gay and didn’t give a damn, because he wasn’t perfect.

She also doesn’t know that Jesus isn’t perfect yet, but I will definitely disabuse her of that notion. Dude who killed a fig tree just because there wasn’t any fruit on it is not the picture of mental health you see before you today… you know, the one that’s white. What, like he’s the only baby born in Israel with French features? Seriously. Explain it to me like I’m five. Everyone around Jesus was brown. Get there faster.

I’m not pulling for her to choose Religion or Not Religion. Just that it’s a spectrum as well. One of the funniest things that The War Daniel has ever said was when he was angry, so it was not appropriate to laugh as loud as I wanted to… because it wasn’t Doc making me laugh. It was the characterization of “show me someone who can keep their anger in check when they’re angry and I’ll show you Jesus Christ.” I fell out thinking about how many tax collectors of the day might have taken exception to that.

Every day, I know more about Jesus just by being me. I’m not saying I’m divine, I’m saying that the Historical Jesus posited by Marcus Borg is very much like me. Being the son of God and a preacher’s kid can’t be all that different, right? Jesus was born to the Source. I was born to upper management. We were both baptized, but I’m going to bet that since he was an adult and I was an infant, he peed on John a lot less than I peed on Bishop Crutchfield.

But when you are baptized with the power of the Holy Spirit, stand up. Don’t you dare think you are any less than it is or Jesus was. We were never meant to be Jesus. Jesus was always meant to be us.

The writing that comes out of me when I’m thinking of Daniel and our daughter is better than anything I’ve ever written in my life, and it’s not all here yet. Some of it is praying The War Daniel to DC or Baltimore.

Some of it is praying we just make it through tomorrow and tomorrow without reliving yesterday.

Who knows? Who…. nose.

A right hand ring to show sup

Karen

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

My conversations with Daniel in preparing content are tough shit, and I am so glad that I’m a blogger because of it. When I go all up in my feelings, I have a place to express them without having to think about what he’s going to think when he reads the entry. It’s a mixture of fear and excitement, because if you get PTSD from combat, those are generally the only two emotions in a story.

And then there are things that make me bleed out, like telling Daniel why I have PTSD and Daniel explaining to me why mine was so much worse than his…… Daniel’s enemies were clearly defined. Mine were turncoats, both of them, at a time when I was too little to know that wasn’t okay and took it on as all my fault.

One of the things that’s so different with our two cases of PTSD is that I cannot define triggers before they happen. I’m fine one minute, and inconsolable the next. He actually has enough self awareness to say that he doesn’t like the sound of popping popcorn, because “that’s what M4s sound like when you put them on fully automatic.” He can do something that at this point, I cannot. He can tell me what his triggers are, and I can avoid them. I have tried to quantify what a trigger means to me for nine years, and I haven’t really come up with a good solution.

The biggest trigger I have is smell. Whether it’s my abuser’s old perfume, or the air smells just the way it did when I was standing there with that journal, asking what certain things meant. I think that is true for all trauma, the way the smell of the smoke in our recent house fire took me back to the one my family had when I was 11.

Music doesn’t bother me, generally, but there are a few choir pieces and opera arias that I have put away. If I’m in a church choir that is doing one of the pieces that for me, acts as a trigger, I don’t sing that day. I don’t even go to rehearsals that contain it.

One of the things that I’ve done for the last probably, ten years that I refuse to do now is minimize. Everything that has happened to me is now being given its full meaning and weight. I am no longer trying to make it look lesser than, that things weren’t as bad as I thought. In order to know how bad it was, you cannot just know my side of the story. You have to know the life story of the woman who emotionally abused me as well, and how that pathology affected me. I can only tell my story and a teeny, tiny part of hers. There’s so much more you will never find on this web site that you would find if you looked in other areas. For instance, none of our mutual friends except Dana has ever talked to my dad about what I was like as a teenager.

I can think of a few more I’d like to have him school. Some because I still don’t understand their reactions, some because I just want my people to know who I really am without pretense or bullshit.

I am coming into my power. I am 45 years old. Either this year or within a few years half of my life will be over, using my 92 year old grandfather as an example. A whole lot of shit I used to care about doesn’t even exist now in terms of my focus.

Like getting all upset because Daniel is in love with me and I know it. He has been for 36 years. Let me get this straight. A military doctor wants to be with me, and he’s telling me up front that he’s an alcoholic and has PTSD and is going to rehab to change himself and just wants another writer to lie next to in bed with both our laptops going…… and I’m going to freak out because he’s male and not female? I got this picture in my head of Jonna and Tony Mendez writing “The Moscow Rules” on a king-sized bed and thought, “why not?”

Here’s why I didn’t freak out, and it’s all my trans friends’ fault (I’m really grateful and I’m teasing). I realized that there was just enough man in me to be absolutely terrified that a straight dude wouldn’t like me AS A PARTNER. Straight dudes love me in general. Instead of thinking of myself as a bisexual woman, I had to game this relationship out as a trans man. This is because I knew that Daniel had never been in a gay relationship before, and so his reaction to my gender identity would never be negative, he just might be confused. I needed him to know that I express as male sometimes, and that has to be okay with him. Luckily, it very much is.

But this is just the beginning of a very, very long story. Please do not think that I have lost my fucking mind. Daniel doesn’t start rehab until January 5th. He lives in NE Texas. There is no possible way we will even see each other until his rehab is over, and that could take up to a few months. We’re talking about living separately for at least a year, because if he moves to DC we might screw ourselves over by skipping dating and just moving in. It wouldn’t be a deliberate screwover- DC is expensive and it might seem tempting to have one household “since we want to be together, anyway….” Eyeroll………

My perfect picture of Daniel and me is that we visit each other a few times in 2023, and then think seriously about stability after 2023 is over. This does not mean that we won’t be in contact at all, just not physically sharing the same space. Rediscovering each other through calls and letters for a year before going all in.

I am also not saying that Daniel is my forever person. I am saying that he’s one of them. Maybe it will be this fairy tale in which I suddenly transform into the perfect heterosexual wife. However, my money is not on that. My money is on Daniel becoming so important to me that he becomes a priority, and it is too damn early in our relationship to put constraints on what that actually looks like. Just be happy for me that I have someone that loves me and is in my corner. That if I get into a Situation, it’s handled. Don’t look into the future and try to pigeonhole us as friends or married. Let us decide that over the next few years on our own.

I am turning a corner in my sexuality. I am less sure about my gender than I ever have been, which has made me flexible about everything else. I was telling my friend Zac that I was feeling very non-binary, without the need to come out or change pronouns. How that plays out in my relationship with Daniel is that I feel like a partner, not the archetype one sees in their minds eye of a “wife.”

I have also been a wife before, but not to a man. My definition of “wife” comes from that context, and I don’t know enough about men to know whether my definition and theirs is similar. My saving grace is that Daniel is attracted to my personality. I don’t think he would have been attracted to me if I was male on the outside, because sexual orientation is a thing. But what I do know is that if I look at myself in the completely genderqueer, genderfluid, non-binary but doesn’t give a crap about pronouns kind of way, Daniel still loves that person.

I’m not becoming less. He’s becoming more. He’s opening himself up to the possibility of not being with the picture and definition of “woman” he’s always known.

It took me back a bit. All of the sudden, someone from my past reappeared, and I want to talk to her “privately.”

Dear Karen,

I remember the first time I saw you like it was yesterday. We were out in the sun at Chuy’s on Westheimer, and I was completely suckered in by your preppy attire. I mean obviously, my wife teased me about seeing you and running into a door for like four years. What might have seemed schoolgirlish actually made me relax and find peace within myself. You were the first woman I’d ever met who identified as straight and also wore men’s clothes without making it a big deal. Nine times out of ten, it was men’s styles in a women’s cut. Every time I looked at you, I saw a little more of who I wanted to be on the outside. I saw a style that fit me on someone else.

You might think it’s because I thought you looked like a lesbian. Actually, that’s not it at all. I saw the way your husband looked at you and realized that I was putting too much emphasis on my clothes. That what I wore wasn’t advertising anything. That if a straight woman could out butch me any day of the week, then wear whatever I want. Nothing about my wardrobe says that I am seeking attention from men or women.

I know this because now I’m divorced, it’s eight years later, and now a man wants to be with me. I said yes. I said yes because I looked at you on that warm April day, and knew that he would love me no matter what. I saw a style that fit me on someone else.

Best,
Leslie