I’m Just Not Capable Anymore

May 23, 2024 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Daily writing prompt

What personal belongings do you hold most dear?

When I was 11 years old, my parsonage burned to the ground five days before Christmas. All our stuff, including our new presents, were in it. As a result, I don’t treasure anything. I don’t have that luxury, because I realize that anything could be gone in less time than it takes for the fire department to arrive. I can say that my necklace that has my mother’s fingerprint on it is dear, but would I really be surprised if it disappeared? No. It’s the nature of stuff. My mother is not in the necklace, so I am not attaching her memory to this particular thing. I don’t need things to remind me of people, but they are useful. I wear the necklace every day, and gifts from my friends surround me so that I think of them all the time. It also means a lot to me when Zac and I have matching bracelets, even when they were $3. Every time I look down at my wrist, I think of him when I see the rainbow of our friendship bracelets and the maroon of our nautical rope ones.

Plus, now I’ve been through two house fires. At Wire Ave., we had a professional electrician drill into a live wire in our basement, nearly sparking the gas main and taking out the whole neighborhood. That’s the kind of situation where you realize death is no harm, no foul. There’s literally nothing I could have done about it, and death would have been over before it really began with that kind of TNT. There are only so many events that you can prevent in life. Sometimes, you have to fold and say “the plane is going down.” However, I do not think that I would have even seen the gas main blow. Gravity’s rainbow ends in disaster whether or not you see the arc in the sky first.

It seems like I’m complaining, but I’m actually advocating for minimalism. You cannot believe how much it has helped my mental state to have all my books, newspapers, and comics on my Kindle instead of as kindling. There are practical ways to solve all of these problems. It’s just unfortunate that you don’t think of them until after the house fire is over. Everyone’s library is invincible right up until it isn’t. And in fact, there is a very popular novel that has probably told you the exact temperature at which books will burn since high school. Gotta keep that temperature below Fahrenheit 451.

I am sure that Android tablets and iPads also burn, but which is more expensive? The iPad/Android or the 2700 books I’ve downloaded over time?

All of this being said, I believe that my books are my most important possession. The autographed copies of all the books from Team Mendez might go up in flames, but I won’t have to re-buy the digital copies. Their words are more important than their signatures, and as I joked with Jonna, “if I didn’t have a hardback, I’d just let you sign my screen.” Her Js are pretty adorable, and I think it would be hilarious to learn how to copy her signature only because Tony taught an entire room of people at the Spy Museum how to copy Vladimir Putin’s. I unashamedly made it though high school because legit no one could tell when my mom signed something or I did. My dad’s signature is a pretty lost cause, but my mom’s was just classic teacher handwriting. And in fact, forgery is one of my favorite things about espionage because I love FONTS. Forgery, to me, is literally figuring out someone’s personal font. I just don’t show people that I do it, because I’m not trying to hurt anyone or get away with anything. It’s just an exercise to see if I can. See a Tony Mendez magic trick, do a Mendez magic trick, teach a Mendez magic trick. I wrote it just that way because the axiom in medical school is “see one, do one, teach one.” Themes in my life present themselves over and over. I have a feeling that my blog is a direct result of trauma and creativity. Here are my two roots:

The fire has made it where I feel more comfortable blogging, and more comfortable with e-mail altogether; all my personal letters that hadn’t been sent burned. Then, later on, my mother’s air conditioner flooded the back of my closet, and I lost all my journals as well. In those days, it was devastating. I was absolutely over the moon about my emotional abuser from ages 12 to about 20, when things became more complicated and the trauma of it all kept me from enjoying her. That doesn’t mean that losing all the letters and journal entries I wrote about the situation weren’t important to me back then. I had not made the connection that it was emotional abuse yet. I just swallowed all her bullshit whole. How could I not? I was a child.
I watched Doogie Howser, MD religiously as a child. No one knew that show better than me (at the time, anyway). I have always been fascinated by child prodigies, and this was right up my alley. Because of my emotional abuser, I cried through similar movies like “Little Man Tate.” It was a salty, bitter cry because it was like I’d been taken out of the safe environment of my parents’ shelter and dumped into a family where I didn’t know shit from Shinola.™ Watching Doogie write on his computer for the last three minutes of that show changed my entire fucking life. In fact, I sent a version of this as a Tweet to NPH, and I hope he sees it. That show was just as traumatic for him as my own coming out story. We helped each other. Between Doogie/Wanda and Barney/Robyn, you can see how much he’s absorbed about playing straight. He had to for just as many years as I did, I just didn’t have the pressure of being on TV. But tell me, truly, how is being a queer in the 1990s and also being on TV different from being a queer person who is also the child of a minister? It’s not a different situation, it’s a different scale. Neil’s career could have tanked if he’d come out when he was on Doogie, because back then, no one believed that children understood things about themselves. It is only now that people are starting to respect their children’s choices, because being who they are is a part of letting them individuate. If a child is brave enough to say they’re queer, they’re queer (lumping gender and sexuality issues together as one community), they are. No one in the current society who is also of sound mind and body would call themselves queer if they didn’t absolutely have to in order to survive their lives without shame and blackmail. Institutional homophobia and transphobia are going to take eons to get out of the fabric of the American experience, because our country is currently a theocracy run by the most hypocritical heretics I’ve ever seen in my life. Jesus is not your homeboy.

:::stares in non-denominational:::

I am dabbling in exegesis over the many pericopes in the New Testament over Jesus’s enlightenment (“Pericope” is theology speak for “an extract from a text, especially a passage from the Bible.” Some people say “peri-cope,” but I think it’s actually “per-ric-oh-pe.” I have no idea if I’m right, it’s just how my dad has always pronounced it and he’s a professional (you take Greek and Hebrew when you do a Master’s in Divinity). Let’s take a simple one and unpack it.

Matthew 15:21-28

Leaving that place, Jesus withdrew to the region of Tyre and Sidon. A Canaanite woman from that vicinity came to him, crying out, “Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me! My daughter is demon-possessed and suffering terribly.”

Jesus did not answer a word. So his disciples came to him and urged him, “Send her away, for she keeps crying out after us.”

He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”

The woman came and knelt before him. “Lord, help me!” she said.

He replied, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.”

“Yes it is, Lord,” she said. “Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”

Then Jesus said to her, “Woman, you have great faith! Your request is granted.” And her daughter was healed at that moment.

Here is what Matthew was trying to prove, in my opinion. The first is that Matthew was a Jew trying to convince other Jews that this was indeed the Messiah they were looking for. He approaches it from a number of aspects, including lineage. More importantly, it shows the exact moment in which Jesus changes his mind. He decided that the moment the woman showed such faith, gentiles were as worthy of salvation as Jews. Matthew was a man on a mission from GOD, trying to bring the receipts. I admire that in a person.

One of the reasons I trusted David implicitly the first time I met him is that bad people don’t love their dogs so much they get a DNA profile of them (Jack is half terrier, half chihuahua. This means that he is a very tall chihuahua with a lazy, I don’t give a fuck attitude. It’s quite refreshing because chihuahuas are known for being little hellions….. similar to what my grandfather used to call “101 Damnations.” They’re as aggressive and energetic as little dogs, because they were bred to run next to fire trucks. I would only get a Dalmation if I started training for a marathon, because one of my friends offered to take him jogging. They went five miles and DJ (said dog) wasn’t even tired out when they came back. Because we couldn’t manage to beg, borrow, or steal good behavior out of him, we ended up giving him to the runner. He died not long after of an astrocytoma (star shaped tumor in the brain that was impossible to extract). I couldn’t believe that he had cancer and was still running five miles a day. Interesting how everyone deals with illness differently. Some people cater to it, some people pretend it doesn’t exist. No way is right, it’s just that some people view rest and relaxation as the way to cope with illness, and some view keeping busy right up to the end as their calling.

I would like to believe that Jesus would have given the runner a dog and a healthy brain. That he didn’t have to choose. I liked what they chose to call him, especially in retrospect having lived in Oregon……. “Otis Spotford.”

Speaking of which, before we change to a different topic, Supergrover and I have this thing about naming our dogs and it makes me laugh. It comes from when Daniel and I were engaged. “Check this shit out and get mad with me (joking). You need to go and set that boy straight. He wants to name his dog “Ozzie” instead of “Virginia Woof!” (it’s always serious if I use an exclamation point. They are of the devil most of the time.) If I remember correctly, and I am paraphrasing, she said he was only on thin ice, but “Virginia Woof” was damned clever. Ok, that’s the kind of stuff from her I live for. Having a good line in front of her is the gold at the end of the rainbow. Supergrover also said that she disagreed with “Virginia Woof” and thought we should call them “Sidney Brisdog.” That made my day because I thought, “you get me.” “Alias” is my favorite show of all time. I would give goddamn anything to work with Jack, Sidney, and Michael. But if I’m really honest about my relationship with Supergrover, I’m not Francie. I’ve been Will Tippet this whole time. Quietly pining away and trying to put together the pieces of why this attraction kept coming up for me over and over when I could clearly see how pointless and stupid it was. My brain chemicals just flooded, like you do.

Speaking of which, when she said that she got something out of my writing whether I painted her in a bad light or not, I thought for the literally 4,000,000th time that it was such a shame she never let me marry her and have her babies. It’s the hottest thing you can ever say to a writer. I love your writing whether it’s good to me or not? Come the fuck on. Who has that kind of support as a writer, when the traditional line about them is that “writer” is code for “unemployed.” My favorite retort comes from Brandon Sanderson, who waited YEARS to get this moment. This dude came up to him and asked him what he did at a cocktail party. He said, “I’m a writer.” The guy said, “oh, so you’re unemployed.” Brandon looked him deadass in the face and said “I hit the New York Times Bestsellers List last week.” It was the equivalent of walking up to Stephen King and asking him if he needed money. Shiiiiiiiiiat. If God ever smiles upon me in the best way possible, that “best way” will be getting that moment as well. Here’s why:

I had a complex about Dana’s parents. That because I was female and queer and desperately in love with their daughter, we had something wrong with us. I was right to be paranoid, because they were absolute total dicks to both of us. The reason I tanked “Clever Title Goes Here” over blowback is that my sister-in-law ripped me a new asshole for writing about it and my skin was too thin to tell her that I owned my own story and to fuck all the way off. It’s the worst decision I’ve ever made in my career as a writer, that not telling her to fuck off. She silenced not only my voice, but my popularity as well. Wil Wheaton *used* to read me. *Used to.* Now, it’s one of the sources of my rage and a tape I’m working to solve. In some ways, it already is because I’ve gotten over the hurt. I can’t forget how it made me feel.

One of the biggest fights I’ve ever had with Dana was talking to her about how much it hurt me to watch her jump up and down for a type of approval she was never going to get, and she needed to stop. She needed to go low contact because of what it was doing to her self-esteem. In my mind, once you get married, you are individuating from your first family. That what God has put together, let no man put asunder. That meant she didn’t get the right to cater to them and ignore my discomfort, because she should have stood up for me and I became the family problem. They were lucky to get a daughter-in-law like me, because any time an in-law joins a family they shake up old family patterns and it is not often pleasant. An outsider can see dysfunction better than someone living in it. An INFJ sees what it will take to solve it. But they didn’t recognize themselves as lucky, because they never saw that I was trying to make their dynamic healthier and happier. They just thought I was stirring up shit for the fun of it.

This presented itself by me complaining to Dana’s ex-girlfriend, a beautiful diamond of a woman because she helped me navigate all of this having known the subject intimately. I told her that I was going to have to win the Pulitzer to get them off my back, and she joked, “oh, don’t worry. They’ll find a problem with that, too.” Empathy went a very long way in dealing with them, because it set off my autistic rage a lot. Supergrover can testify to that without blinking, because I told her every goddamn thing about my relationship with all of them that I possibly could, because I was constantly emotionally overloaded by them treating Dana’s sexuality like a problem to be solved and treating me like a loser dumbass. I was not trying to isolate her from her parents like a control freak narcissist. I was trying to isolate her from her parents because her mother told me that Dana was never going to get what she needed from her because of her limitations in understanding Dana’s sexuality, so it was better for her to go find someone else. That motherfucker didn’t say that in front of her daughter. She said it in front of her protector, mediator, and advocate….. words that will mean a lot to Dana because they come from The Book of Common Prayer. I viewed her as taking care of the sick, the friendless, and the needy. I have never told her that in person, because I thought it would hurt too much. I had to carry that pain for a long time until I was able to write about it. That gave me enough strength to kick her parents out of our house because I never would have done it if I’d known they couldn’t afford a hotel. For the first time, I got tired enough to raise my voice, because I was tired of tiptoeing around total emotional disaster on everyone. I said, “you come in here and you eat our food and you drink our drinks and use our utilities all while disrespecting me and my wife?” They got so angry that I yelled at her dad to “sit down.” He didn’t, but he sure fuckin’ thought about it. Sometimes, the only way to deal with a bully is to push back. He’s a lawyer, and the ace up my sleeve is that I am twice as obnoxious about the law as he ever could be and I have cornered the market on the asshole archetype because I’m a paralegal in the state of Texas. Come at me with Con Law or TRCP and I will instantly try to own your ass. But you can’t argue with the Religious Right. You just have to ignore them. I could. Dana couldn’t.

Jesus wept.
John 11:35

The more stress that piled onto Dana, the worse her physical health got….. making the connection that she broke out in hives for absolutely no reason at all in the middle of all our fights regarding all of this led to a lot of rethinking medicine; the reason I needed Supergrover so desperately to talk it through no matter how we felt about each other at any given moment. She won’t be my dragon and rush in when someone has hurt me when it’s her, but GOD HELP anyone who messes with me; she is quite capable of fucking you up in ways you’ll never see coming. It is delicious when it is not directed at me, and the thing she thinks I hate is the thing I crave. I want to crawl inside her brain to see how it works more now than I did almost 11 years ago, because we are equally taken by each other’s writing and she has very good stories when she’s willing to share them. The blessing of my life is that she may not want to meet me in person, but she likes crawling into my brain to see how it works, too. The curse was that she didn’t like doing it anymore. And even though she started a fight when she did it, it was not lost on me how sweet it is that she heard me. Tell me your feelings and step up, so she did. The disaster was not letting me respond and saying “I see how it is. What Leslie has written, so must it be.” I was telling her that I was allowed to have a reaction after I heard her out, not that what I was feeling was more important than her and “my opinion is fact.” She accused me of “rope-a-dope” when she went out of her way to hurt me after telling me to move on with my life. It’s unforgivable in most cases, but not for her. I love her too goddamn much and we’ve been through hell too long to give up now. But the ball is not in my court. She was the one that hurt me first by covering up her feelings that she was wigged out I was attracted to her by accusing me of something I didn’t do. It screwed us up and cost us time, not having an honest conversation. I handled it really well, and then as reality set in I had to create fantasy to get away from reality. But not fantasy, exactly. It was giving a story to information I couldn’t use with information I could. I can use our personal issues to illustrate what’s going on with us to drag her privacy issues into it.

The reason she’s so angry is because we’ve never had an honest conversation about boundaries on my blog, and she waffles between letting me be real and telling me that what I think is fucked up and all wrong without telling me what’s fucked up and wrong about it. That it’s lazy, childish, reductive, you name it. All the while ignoring that she’s feeding the pattern by getting angry and not just laying it out there because she’s frightened as fuck to do so. She needs to see that I see her so clearly because of an interview I saw with someone in her field that would punch her in the gut if she saw how much I truly picked up from it. That tape runs deep on how to handle her, and because she’s an IQ fan and I’m an EQ fan, I mean it like she’s my asset and I’m her handler, not that I try to emotionally manipulate her to get what I want. I am trying to be the tough love that she is to me (strident, pull yourself up from your bootstraps, I’m not going to do your emotional work for you kind of love), but I make mistakes all the time. Jim Mattox comes to mind. “I may be rancid butter, but I’m at least on your side of the bread.” If Supergrover’s last letter is any indication, this quote is relatable to her as well. I’m not innocent of this, and neither is she.

Editor’s Note:

Jim Mattox was the Texas AG (D) when I was a kid, and my favorite story in life about him comes from either my first political science professor or his wife, depending on who was teaching the class that day; I’ve slept since then. Anyway, when Mattox was AG, he was a drunk. He was out at a bar one night, and decided that he needed to sleep it off. He goes out to his car and gets in the backseat. The next morning as the car is being driven away, Mattox wakes up and says “My name is Jim Mattox. I’m the Texas State Attorney General. I’m a little hung over. Could you turn the radio down?” Mattox had gotten into what he thought was his car……………………………. #shatnerellipsis

She lights up my life all the time, and if I haven’t said that enough, I’m sorry- both to her and my audience, which are one and the same thanks to the fact that she’s chosen to stick by me no matter what. I think I have, but she has focused on the negative for so long that even if I haven’t said it in those exact words, she wouldn’t have retained it as much as something that cut deep. What she never understood is that I was trying to lance a boil, not irritate her. Patterns repeat, and I am never trying to hold someone to the past. I am explaining to them that the longer the bad pattern goes on, the less I want to engage because they’re hurting me. It’s a lost cause when you’re trying to be vulnerable and ask for solutions, and you become a problem because of it. I became the only friend who ever called her out on anything whether that’s true or not. How can she get through life without having conflicts with people?

Sometimes I wonder if she knows that I get so vulnerable I cry and shake when I go to that place of writing about her. That 10 years ago, I wrote to her, “sometimes I have to take off my glasses to wipe away the tears when I write to you,” and it wasn’t about anger. It was about my hopeless romantic showing up in my writing as a style. I wanted her to feel as precious as she is.

She fits into my theology very well, because she doesn’t believe in a higher power, but she does believe in paganism. It’s her theme. She loves the idea of Outlander, which eventually spoke my language. I couldn’t make it past the first rape scene until I learned that it was a fantasy built on Doctor Who (seriously. Diana Gabaldon is a Whovian, and she based Jamie on Jamie McCrimmon, a Scottish companion when she was a kid. She invented her version of time travel by watching Doctor Who as a child). The fact that we are both obsessed with novels that cover the same things from different ends of the spectrum is the perfect representative of our communication differences. In effect, I speak “Doctor Who” and she speaks “Outlander,” not realizing that both of our points are valid because they come from the same source.

They say that these are not the best of times
But they're the only times I've ever known
And I believe there is a time for meditation
In cathedrals of our own
Now I have seen that sad surrender in my lover's eyes
And I can only stand apart and sympathize
For we are always what our situations hand us
It's either sadness or euphoria

So we'll argue and we'll compromise
And realize that nothing's ever changed
For all our mutual experience
Our separate conclusions are the same
Now we are forced to recognize our inhumanity
Our reason coexists with our insanity
And though we choose between reality and madness
It's either sadness or euphoria

How thoughtlessly we dissipate our energies
Perhaps we don't fulfill each others fantasies
And as we stand upon the ledges of our lives
With our respective similarities
It's either sadness or euphoria

-The Gospel of Billy Joel, Glass Houses

“So we’ll argue and we’ll compromise, and realize that nothing’s ever changed. For all our mutual experience, our separate conclusions are the same.” ARE YOU KIDDING ME. It takes a very special artist for me to feel like they are speaking to me only, and he got me with “cathedrals of our own.” I hope that when Supergrover reads me, she realizes that not only is she entering my sanctuary, in it she has the concept of sanctuary. When I’m around, no one can touch her. She is the ideal child of God, the fallible hero, the atheist who is actually Jesus to more people than me, or Moses if she’s more toward the Jewish persuasion. I don’t know how she identifies. Wherever her faith background lies, it’s not the same now as it was when she was a child. Being able to joke about that particular topic is one of my favorite joys in life because of another friend I knew from the same faith background.

I told this other friend that I was impressed about one thing and one thing only. That it’s one of the few religions in which there is documentation all the way from the beginning that has eyewitness accounts. Without missing a beat, she said, “yes. Documentation all the way back to when he made it up.”

It is my hope that eventually everyone in that religion will just self actualize and say, “it got weird,” and move on with their happy little lives. Tom Cruise could probably use that advice (not the same, but relatable).

You do you, but okay.

Speaking of which, that was another phrase that irritated Supergrover when it was a reference to another blog entry in which I explained that “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and render unto God what is God’s.” That it was like telling the religious establishment with the snarkiest voice possible, “you do you, but okay.” It was not personal. It was me speaking truth to power. I was just being as snarky as Jesus, and repeating a line I hope gets stuck in people’s heads, because it’s emotional shorthand for being kind and taking no shit. BOUNDARIES. I tend to say small things repetitively because they do the most good. The music of the phrase makes it speak louder in people’s minds because they remember it. “You do you, but okay” means to me that you can uphold the system if you want, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good one.

People pleasers do not realize that catering to everyone’s needs and trying to anticipate them is actually more problematic than open and clear communication….. in essence, trying to render unto Caesar and render unto God and you can’t serve both. Speak truth to power. Please, please, please hurt my feelings rather than keeping it in. I only ask that you think about the problem long enough not to give me a knee-jerk reaction, because I’m making the commitment not to react to it and I don’t want to regress.

Red mist rage while I can type with my eyes closed is not a productive use of my time, and is feeding into my autism to an enormous degree because once I’m overstimulated, it’s meltdown time. I learned this from Harry Wales in “Spare,” because I don’t know if he feels red mist rage because of autistic meltdown or PTSD, but it doesn’t matter. It’s the same kind of neurodivergence because all of the above alter your thought processes and they’re your new normal. You have to learn to cope with them, knowing that your first reaction will always be wrong. Always. You’re wired to shut down and protect what you have left, not to open up and share your pain so that someone else can see it and help without asking. For people pleasers, you always have trouble getting them to express what they need because they don’t want to look like an imposition. Most of the time, it’s because people have been taught that they’re needy in childhood. You think you’re being a hero by keeping everything inside and you’re just burning yourself out constantly and with PTSD, not being able to regulate your emotions.

It was inextricably interrelated in my mind, and I’m not sure that anyone could prove me wrong. Harry, like Kathleen, Dana, Daniel, Zac, Bryn, and Supergrover (and even Franklin, my companion at Wire Ave., to some extent) are all affected by trauma that’s above my pay grade and always has been. That being said, because I grew up as a preacher’s kid, my first instinct is to minister them. Especially because Zac and Supergrover are atheists, I feel that approaching them with spiritual lessons without attaching religion to it is helpful in our communication; I’m talking about energy and not dogma. Sometimes people need an osteopath, not an MD. They’re the people I can think of as a good example of why the Mayo clinic is such a wonderful resource.

They treat the mind/body connection as so real- in a way that other doctors’ offices and hospitals don’t. There is also no national infrastructure for health integration, because mental illness is treated so differently from physical illness, as if mental illness isn’t also coming from a diseased organ (separating out processing disorders from depression and anxiety. The reason the brain is diseased is that it uses the very best lies against you to get you to off yourself because the brain is hell bent on protecting you and thinks that’s the answer. It needs medication and therapy to not feel “extremely loud and incredibly close”).

Editor’s Note:

“Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” is one of my favorite books in the entire world because I have such a personal connection to it. Not only was I living in Alexandria at the time and heard the plane smash into the Pentagon while the paintings and windows rattled from three miles away, my birthday is September 10th. My extremely loud and incredibly close moment is perfectly expressed from that book……… That “The Best Day” transitioned into “The Worst Day.”

I have felt exactly that way about health integration for a very long time. The less Dana really meant she was forsaking all others, the problems with her family would just get worse. And they did. She started developing depression and again, hives for “no reason.”

All of this culminated in disaster when Dana invited her mom and dad to come and stay with us. It was great, up and to a point. They even let us sleep together in our own bedroom…… at their house, their solution was to get a room with twin beds so they could keep their imaginations intact. That’s why we never visited. My general rule is that if I ask for your opinion and help in a relationship, please give it to me straight. If I don’t, BUTT THE FUCK OUT because this is my marriage, not yours. But in every family, it is not the in-law’s job to deal with their partner’s family. My partner fell down on the job, and that played a large part in our divorce as well. I needed Supergrover to cope with that kind of pressure. I still have that love and devotion from her in large part because she’s wonderful at giving me advice in other relationships and I hang on her every word. My frustration is that she’ll work on all my relationships with me except ours, and it’s the most important because I tell her everything and she doesn’t tell me what she hears.

I was actually very humbled when she sent me her thoughts, not because they were good or bad, but because they were there. I only ended the interaction when it became too painful to continue. We were making great progress, and then she exploded like a firecracker when I really hadn’t done anything to deserve it. As I told her, “don’t let me be the asshole out here all by myself.” Then, it was her turn to recognize that she was indeed the asshole. I sent her a message immediately that said “you are forgiven. Honestly and completely.” I knew she wouldn’t get the reference because it’s a line from Doctor Who, but that didn’t matter. I needed to feel the connection between Eleven and River Song to convey how I really felt about her. I will never be in love with her ever again, but because of my past with her and how much it affected me, I view her as an emotional support partner more than anyone else. It’s just not my decision to accept it or not. So far, it’s been a mixed bag. I was so happy I cried when she said, “you’re right. My first instinct was “LET ME GRAB MY PURSE. THAT MOTHERFUCKER.” If you get the reference, you’ll see how funny it really was.

I have no doubt that Dana’s dad would have thought I was brilliant if I was male. That’s because even though he tolerated me, I hung on his every word because he was a Marine and all of his stories have stayed inside me all this time. They’re just not my stories to tell. The one that I can tell is because it made me laugh. When cell phones first came out for intelligence officers (earlier than to the general public, I would imagine), the Americans knew how they worked, and the Russians didn’t. They thought they had privacy and couldn’t be tapped if they used them in their cars. I laughed so hard I was sagging in my chair. It does not surprise me in the slightest that my model for a perfect partner for me is military and intelligence (not as big an oxymoron as one might think) because I loved those stories more than I’ve ever loved anything. He sat there and fed my autistic special interest all day long. The thing I love about military/intelligence men (not because I prefer men, because I haven’t met many women in the service and only a few retired spies. Men are the ones that tell me these stories. I love all of them, from the motor pool to pulling a gun on a Colonel because he was being a racist bastard and that was the only thing they could think of to deescalate the situation- by making it clear just how serious being racist in the military actually is.)

My personal view is to baby myself, because I find that when I do, I am more able to show people that I love them, because my boundaries are not so overextended that I disengage. I don’t mean boundaries in terms of keeping people out because of their emotions, but boundaries on how much I want to hear at once. I like it when people ask me if I have the bandwidth for a call before they do it. I like it when people say they have serious shit to talk about and do I have the bandwidth to let them vent? As we say in Texas, “you better ‘redneckcognize.”

Because when people respect my boundaries, I am so much more comfortable bending them because I respect them so much in return. I will go above and beyond when people go above and beyond for me. I recognize Supergrover’s sacrifice, but she has not recognized mine as such. I think I’ll be waiting a long time, because if she was going to do it, she would have done it by now.

If she wanted to visit me, neither hell nor high water would keep her from it. Why did she snipe at me on the anniversary of my mother’s death instead of hugging me? I think it would have gone a lot further than making me angry as fuck for a very long time.

And in fact, the thing I invited her to do with me was on Mother’s Day. I only have this loose connection to it anymore, and I did not realize that’s what I was doing. Of course it was important for her to be with her family that day. But she didn’t say no. She agreed to mull it over.

Progress.

I have just been too intimidated and too humiliated to say flat out, “okay. This has gone on long enough. Only meeting in person will break our toxic cycles because we have no frame of reference to each other besides each other. There is no context to our relationship and seeing each other out in the world will give that to both of us.” The fantasy and the reality need to be managed, not ignored. I will absolutely die mad about that, because I got in very hot water over it. I didn’t ignore it, she did, then came down hard when she decided I should have known not to lay out what was really going on in my head and that her very specific secrets were not fair game but an overarching thousand foot view of the problem from all angles was.

I did not want to be the lovesick teenager anymore. I wanted to explain that there was a solid reason I felt like my heart turned into an 808 drum, that her love was my drug and that has proven to be true for almost 11 years. What kind of person thinks that deep a love is just a game I’m playing to fuck with her? What kind of person ignores how hard it was to say goodbye to her and Michael and instead, berate me for writing things like it? Or just telling me that she was incensed by some entries and touched by others, never telling me which ones touched her so that I didn’t have to be so afraid. I could know the boundaries I was crossing instead of guessing all the time to get my story out there.

I have caused a lot of hurt, but it has never been intentional. My story is for people all over the world, not direct letters to people. People would see my writing a lot differently if they viewed it as an episode of “The Moth,” “Morbid,” and “Risk!” (“Risk!” Is storytelling, but mostly adult content. Caveat emptor. I just love it because it’s hilarious.) People being able to read my writing and assess it like I’m Harriet the Spy are so close to the point, but it’s whizzing right by their faces.

I use my life as an example to others, both of what to do and what not to do. I allow myself to have a full range of human emotion, and not to dumb it down to protect other people’s comfort, because it’s not for them.

It’s all for me. As I work through my childhood and adulthood, I see the patterns that no longer serve me, and I have found that it was finally easier to leave the cocoon than stay in.

She’s still my precious, precious six year old. I’m just choosing to love her from over here……. until she realizes it’s not actually that far.

Looselie, Based on Actual Events

July 28, 2023July 29, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What’s the story behind your nickname?

I remember my mother telling me that my first word was “peaches.” Because I was physically developmentally delayed, I absorbed everything mentally and emotionally. When I started talking, I went from “peaches” to “car keys” to my dad teaching me how to say antidisestablismentarianism and beta hemolytic streptococci. I know I’ve said this before, but even as a child I was a grumpy old man. I was the OK, Boomer of Parker Elementary School.

But by far, the greatest moment of my education was in the parking lot at Wal-Mart. I had *just* learned to read, so I was maybe three and a half or four. We got out of the car, and my face lit up.

WE SELL FOR LESS

I am such a grammar nazi that I didn’t even notice they had the audacity to spell my name wrong (My legal name is Leslie in case you didn’t know that). I don’t know if it happened afterward or if it had happened before and I am just blending memories, but I went from Les to Lesser to Looselie. That last one is probably my favorite.

I didn’t have another nickname until I got to HSPVA, when my friend Scott called me his “personal Leslian.” At first, I wasn’t into it. But when it stuck, it stuck. It didn’t matter whether I liked it or not. It was better than when I was in the closet and people teased me about my name like my parents picked my orientation before I was born and named me as such. I have never wanted to stab anyone more than when they called me Lesie on purpose just to see if I’d react.

Hold down the madness, Caroline. Hold down the madness.

I swallowed a lot of homophobic behavior because my school didn’t do shit to keep me from being bullied. In fact, when I told my high school counselor that I was being bullied, she asked what I did to provoke them. I did what I always do. When I left PVA, I took Creative Writing and roasted them over the coals. My teacher read it, and I got an A, but she said it was too personal to share with the class. That didn’t make me feel so hot. I spent five pages telling her how I felt about being closeted, being outed, being bullied, etc. and it was a TEACHABLE MOMENT. It was also 1995. It ain’t happening. Not in Fort Bend County. Probably not anywhere. But I had the courage to lay it out there. I was trying to change hearts and minds, which was probably limited to the English department so I’d be the most humiliated.

That’s because I got really close to one of my teachers, came out to her, and she had me transferred out. I think she thought I had some weird thing for her, but she was kind of a bitch which why I liked her. As in, I liked being AROUND her. Really not my type. I just needed a safe adult and she fucked me.

That’s because the class she transferred me into was doing the things we’d already done that semester. Because of transferring from PVA to Clements, I was on a third reread of “Of Mice and Men.” Not going to lie. Still hate it.

I was the only out kid in the entire school, and there were almost 3,000 of us. That led to a lot of choice nicknames, which is why I am so internally shut down when I hear a straight person say the word “queer.” I am having to do an enormous amount of work to turn off that reflex because the younger kids coming up have embraced it. To them, it’s a real word. To me, it’s the same thing as calling me a faggot to my face. Which even though I’m female, I got called a lot. I even got called that in elementary school. I “started showing” when I was in fifth grade. That’s when the real fear starts.

The moment you realize that homosexuality is wrong and yet “you have it” is the gravity’s rainbow of sexual orientation. You can hear the whistle as the bomb aims for your brain. You’ll spend the rest of your life with some form of internalized homophobia, and in the beginning, you’ll wrestle with God and all their angels. Some people try and pray the gay away. I didn’t. I knew enough to know that people around me needed to change, so I prayed for that.

That’s because I learned very quickly that this was an airplane crash sort of feeling. Once the plane starts going down, you know nothing will stop it. I could feel attraction to women everywhere, and not in terms of sex. In terms of wanting their energy. I liked having older women around me because the girls in my class treated me like a freak show. Not going to front. I was. I was in a different kind of hell than everyone else. Older women don’t have mean girl streaks.

No one questioned it because they thought I had the vocabulary and the emotional range of an adult……. when the reality was, “sort of.” I was a teenager in a weird relationship with a 25 year old. So, my brain grew rapidly with lots of blind spots. I think I’ve figured out the wrong way to address every one of them so far. I’m starting to fix it, though. I’m a work in progmess.

I don’t remember her giving me a nickname, because she’d always say “this is your middle name callin’ you.” I do remember my boyfriend’s dad (not yours) called me “Lester.” I did not like it because I thought he was making fun of me for being genderqueer. He probably was, a little bit, he just didn’t know. It was the 1990s. I didn’t even know. I just felt weird about it because I knew I’d be a husband in one way or another and he could see it. I was in that stage where all the adults gossipped about me when they thought I was out of earshot. Churches do a great job of making you feel spectacularly inferior because you’re a sinner and you’re going to hell, but of course we knew you were gay when you were five. That Happy Meal is missing some French fries.

Nicknames turned to Very Knowing Looks that they thought I couldn’t interpret. They made snide comments about how much I look like kd lang, and I do actually look like her. I get it. But it was their tones of voice. They were not trying to tell me that kd was pretty and I looked like her. People don’t realize that I sense energy and read microaggressions. I can read both sides of your face.

It makes me feel better about the state of the world than if I couldn’t, though, because I can always find truly authentic friends. I can also protect my energy, because I can tell when conflict is coming. What I am not so good at is remaining calm when I feel it. I have trauma reflexes, and I’m trying to turn them off. I do believe that if you’re a reader, you can see that my life has not always been easy. I have come by all of those reflexes honestly.

It has made me a completely different person than I would have been, and I can’t say I’m grateful for that right now. My trauma reflexes pushed away the person I love most in this world. Not woman. Person. Supergrover is one in a billion. Yes, I’m certain. Yes, I know how large a billion is. Still holds up.

I loved her hard, like a Boston marriage in the 1800s, teachers who just loved books and wanted to forego all the romance- but keep all the intimacy. I could tell her anything. She gave me a name. Goddess Jana, of the moon. It made me cry because it was so perfect. Of course she was writing to the moon. I was writing to the sun.

When she said it, my sister’s voice was in my head.

When I was nine and Lindsay was three, we went on a cruise to Mexico. There was a talent show one night, and tiny baby Lindsay started singing.

Somewhere out there…. beneath the pale moon light, someone is thinking offffff me, and loving me tonight……

If the sound of a three year old baby singing that song doesn’t make you cry, nothing will. If you’re not familiar, it’s on the soundtrack to “An American Tail.” The singer is a little boy. In the animated movie, he’s a tiny mouse with a hat that’s too big….. I think a metaphor for my childhood, really.

One of the reasons I loved having a virtual relationship is another line from the song. “And when the night wind starts to sing a lonesome lullaby, it helps to think we’re sleeping underneath the same big sky.” It didn’t matter where in the world either one of us were. The sun and the moon would always dance.

I still think that way, because I’ve given up hope that anything will get better, but I also don’t want to put her back on the shelf, because the character is what I have left. I am afraid that my memories of her will fade, so I have to put them down somewhere. It’s not an experience I want to forget. I do not want to lose my Raggedy Doctor.

She didn’t seem to realize that she was losing her Amy Pond.

I really couldn’t think of a better way to categorize our relationship than Doctor/Companion…. except we’re American. It’s apt not just because our feelings were platonic. It’s apt because even though the story of the Raggedy Doctor is in the Matt Smith era, her personality is The Fugitive Doctor. Namaste AND don’t try me. 😛

I should put in here that The Fugitive Doctor is a wonderful, lovable character lest she runs across this. She doesn’t watch the show, so “fugitive” might raise an eyebrow. It’s so much fun to use these analogies, like a mom and dad who speak Spanish in front of their kids so they can have private conversations….. except now you guys are collectively one parent. You choose. I’ll take the one you don’t want.

I think it was about a year ago when I mentioned a Doctor Who gift I got for my nephew, she told me that she “didn’t watch The Doctor.” I laughed and then said, “it would be confusing to me if you did, because you’ve told me you don’t watch Doctor Who for :::checks watch::: nine years.”

She has read what is basically the spin-off in terms of ideas, Outlander, so she does like time travel stuff. It’s workable. If I think Doctor/Companion, I also think Claire/Roger. In fact, I don’t think even she’s thought of that. I’m a preacher’s kid and I have monocular vision. I was so happy that I got to tell Diana Gabaldon how much Roger meant to me and have her respond on Twitter (shut it)….. and I just realized that Amy Pond is The Doctor’s mother-in-law, so neither one of us can escape that description.

I would give an arm and a leg to see her face when she realizes I just called her my mother-in-law. We’re first children. I’m betting “old person” has been apt since she was born, in some sense, anyway. When you’re the oldest, you’re sort of a child. You’re also sort of a junior partner at the firm because you manage the associates.

Also being first children, we are both used to being right and not having to argue about anything because our opinions are law. I wish she could have seen my face at “be careful painting your feelings as fact,” because I got all that shit from her. If she ever goes back and looks, she’ll see a solid progression. It’s not that I intentionally did it, it’s that when I was writing, I was thinking about her. My words in her writing voice. Kettle. Black. You get it.

Nearly every time, if I sounded too much like her, she’d call me a judgmental dickhead. At first, it was funny af. After a few years, it felt relentless. It was all in tone. But every once in a while, if I listened close, I heard a full orchestra playing our song. What is it? All of them. They’re the chords that run between us.

Maybe I should buy something that reminds me of her. I could go to Wal-Mart.

THEY SELL FOR LESS

This.

May 25, 2023May 25, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Do you have any collections?

Doctor Who is by far the biggest fandom in my life, so I have t-shirts, an adult coloring book (get your mind out of the gutter, it’s just difficult af), and many things I have loved and lost over the years. At Alert Logic I had a TARDIS USB hub that makes the sound when The Doctor has on the emergency brakes. Someone stole it off my desk and took pictures with it all over Houston, then brought it back and sent me the pictures as “Sexy’s Day Out” or something like it. It’s an IT company filled with employees who are all obsessed with sci-fi. Back then, I also identified as Hufflepuff. I figured that’s what most clerics would be, and the clerical description fits because it’s not my job, it’s my personality.

I was nurtured to be that, and not because anyone else wanted it for me. I took it in by osmosis, and am very, very good at pastoral care when I have no emotional connection to the person. The problem is that even one session of pastoral counseling would make me take that person’s pain on as my own. Working in a doctor’s office gave me more clinical separation, but not enough. As an INFJ and highly sensitive person, my emotions were too large even after learning to tamp them down. I would be a horrible pastor or doctor, and not because I wouldn’t be good at it.

I would be incapable of refilling my own cup with energy, because Mrs. Jones is having an affair and her husband doesn’t know it, Mr. Smith is a teenage basketball player who wrecked his knee and his NBA dream is gone, and several Karens want to decorate my house before I get there. It’s always the Karens, because the parsonage is generally the Dear Aunt Sally collection, because parishioners furnish the parsonage with whatever they have on hand. When people have money, they have furniture they want to discard. Let me say for the record that I’ve loved all of it. I’m talking about the negotiations that happen when several families want to get rid of their old bedroom set at the same time.

The best house for me was the parsonage in Sugar Land, because it was gorgeous and in a great neighborhood, plus the church offered to let me paint my room any color I wanted. I chose pale yellow, and decorated my room around Elizabeth Arden’s Sunflowers perfume bottle. I wish I’d thought to get a Van Gogh print………..

In the living room, we had long couches arranged in an L, which created the perfect solution…. Lindsay and I had equal space.

My desire to be a pastor didn’t really come from preaching, though that’s the easiest part of it. It came from going to weddings and funerals from a very young age, learning what it takes to execute them as a leader. I listened in on conversations as much as I could, trying to wrap my brain around the heuristics that run in one’s mind as they try to figure out what to say.

My dad leaving the church impacted me in different ways, but one of the positives was getting away from that environment and looking back on my experiences to see if pastoring was what I wanted to do or what I had done. I decided, in the end, after years of discernment, that I felt a calling but not any drive or passion about it once my mother died. Before she died, it was being full of confidence that I’d succeed and regret….. and not because of other people. Because of my reaction to them.

It was more than being overloaded by other people’s emotions. It was feeling like I couldn’t help them unless I turned mine off. I don’t like doing it because it makes me seem colder than I really am, because people don’t see you protecting your own energy. They see you as distant. And even recognizing when people are saving energy is hard, because when you do, it doesn’t make them want to open up to you… they see their problems as too much for you when it is literally your job. I didn’t want to be a leader and for people to see I was a mess. It’s not interesting when I’m a private citizen, but pastors are known on a much bigger level than that. I’d like to be only capable of handling my own situation poorly rather than inflicting my pain on everyone else. I had enough of that in Portland to last my whole life, and not because I did it. I watched someone else do it and decided that wouldn’t be me.

The final nail in the coffin for the dream of me being a pastor was having watched said pastor go through the loss of her mother and what it did to the people around her. It changed her whole personality and the way she interacted with parishioners. No one would deny this that was in the room, even her, because it wasn’t all negative. The reason it had such a big impact on me is that my mother died, and my personality completely changed as well. The way forward was to write about my God moments here, and let people decide if they wanted to hear them. I could also keep my clinical separation intact, because sitting alone and writing is so much different than being responsible for your emotions while you read.

It’s also grief knowing you’re not stable enough to be that kind of leader when you know you were born to do it and would have been fantastic in some respects. I can’t say I’d have a really good handle on all of it, because I suck at admin and finance. I now wish I’d become a psychiatrist, but I also don’t have a great relationship with math and science, even though reading about them is absolutely amazing. I just have no talent with them myself. How I would have been a GREAT psychiatrist is being able to integrate therapy, but only on a superficial level, and medical school would have been the perfect answer because it would have beat enough emotions out of me that I could have functioned better with patients than getting a license in counseling. I can spend fifteen minutes with you, because that’s not enough time to uncover your deepest trauma, and that’s not a psychiatrist’s job. Medication is just a safety net. Psychologists are the real heroes.

I was born to be that person that listens to you for an hour and helps you relieve your pain, and realistic about how much it would wreck me over time. I know within myself that if I’d become a licensed professional counselor that I would be very much like Doc Martin. He was a world famous surgeon, and just one day developed a blood phobia and stopped. I have a feeling that I’d be the same- counseling people until it was too much and one day just walking away- seemingly out of nowhere because it’s not one thing. It’s compound interest.

Therefore, when I think of collections, I think of this web site, the legacy I want to leave behind. It’s not perfect. There are entries that are angry beyond belief, and entries that show my inner angel as well. For me, the first step to resolving my issues was realizing that I have an entire spectrum of emotions, and I didn’t need to berate myself so hard for the negative ones if that wasn’t my focus. That if I used my mistakes to learn, they wouldn’t be in vain. Therefore, I am relentlessly driven to understand myself (like all INFJs), laying it all out here because other people might say, “I’m going through something similar.” I am preaching the Gospels by living them, not standing on a platform and punching down…… my problem with Evangelicals in its entirety.

Who among us has the power to tell anyone they’re going to hell for any reason? Our religion is based on forgiveness. The Bible is also like the Constitution. There are many, many lessons we can learn from both, and let’s not confuse that by making people who’d be freaked out at the sight of a dishwasher the system administrators of our lives.

I picked up a great line from the Archbishop of Canterbury last week, because it’s fundamental to understanding this web site. In the Bible, there is no argument over the existence of God, there are only people’s reactions to God. What that means to me is that my Gospel is as relevant as Mark’s on a superficial level. That’s because who is to say that Mark’s reaction is more important than mine? He was just a dude.

I also make arguments for the reaction to God, not the existence of them (singular they to indicate nonbinary). I have said over and over that my God is the space inside me that tells me what to do…. That God lives in me, not the traditional Grandfather in the Sky. God runs through every piece of nature, because it’s not about whether God is present, but whether we are.

Having a relationship with God doesn’t require them to show up. It only matters that you do. God also brings many names. I believe in all of them. Allah, Ganesh, and Ra are all the same “person.” That’s because again, spirituality is based on your reaction to the divine, not because it’s really there. Wiccans tap into magic and nature the same way Christians pray and Buddhists meditate.

In that way, spirituality and magic are inextricably related. Even the Episcopal Church calls it “the mystical body of Thy Son.” That’s because when we access that spiritual place within us, we don’t know exactly what happens….. God is not the Actor, God is the Responder. When you get what you want in life, it doesn’t mean that God is a line cook at Waffle House. You don’t just order smothered, covered, chunked, and topped. The decks are random, and you just have to play your hand. God is what helps me decide whether I’ve won, and not by serving up the right answer. God is the place where I am allowed to struggle.

God can give me all the attention in the world when no one else should have to take on what you’re thinking and feeling. In that way, it is like an imaginary friend. There is no better comfort than an objective listener like a therapist, and when you don’t have it, your brain creates it. So, whether you believe that God is a figment of your imagination or a living deity, it still helps to pray. My philosophy on God is very, very much like AA. God’s function is to get your ego out of the way, so make it whatever you want. Your kids. Pepsi. Whatever.

How God helps me in particular is wrestling with other people’s emotions without the inconvenience of their feedback, because it’s not time for it yet. It’s time for me to struggle on my own until I’m not feeling uncertain anymore. It is because my feeling is that God is big enough to be your punching bag, and your very real friends aren’t. The argument for prayer is exactly the same as watching a candle flicker until it is still, trying to control it with your mind. The flame is a visual representation of your thoughts. If there is a grandfather in the sky, the way that image helps me is praying to someone with a tremendous pedestal so that they can see everything and how it works. It doesn’t help to believe they own the chessboard, but it does help to think about how objective a view God has.

Where organized religion comes in is that Jesus didn’t come here to comfort the distressed, he came here to distress the comfortable. (He was the embodiment of power with, not power over, and people hated him for it. He bitch slapped them with words, so they killed him. Seems legit.) No man is an island, so people gather to spread that message. It’s great when your community is focused on being Jesus, and not taking his message and turn it into the same one reflected by the people he hated. If Jesus saw the degree to which his name was used to justify wars, he’d have people’s heads, theologically speaking. Jesus and I are the same person in that our battle plans only include a strongly worded letter. And even when he chased the tax collectors from the high temple, I think the Gospel would have mentioned him physically whipping them. His answer was not violence, and for me, his message is concrete. If you have to fight people, use intelligence and not violence.

And people wonder why I love CIA and Doctor Who the same amount. Please. There’s even crossover, because both CIA and MI6 have been in Doctor Who over the years. Men in Black is the perfect marriage of Doctor Who and MI6, because their hierarchy is based on British intelligence, for some reason. But I swear to God, if you look at the way CIA and MI6 started, it is a stunning portrayal of both.

It’s also funny to me to think of Jesus as an asset and God as a case officer. I’ve been trying to put together a sermon for years on the ex-fil op it took to get Jesus away from Herod, but I just don’t know enough jargon to make it as hilarious as it ought to be. It could be argued that God gives Jesus alien intelligence…. and that did make me laugh…. this is because there is a direct correlation between God and The Doctor, or who we think God should be. We want God to be the person that shows up and saves the world just before everything ends in disaster, and not that disasters happen and anger at God is some people’s first reaction…. or more acutely, that they think God is angry with them, when that is literally impossible.

When God is angry at you, it’s not God who’s telling you what you’re doing is wrong. It’s you. If you feel anger at God for your situation, you’re angry at the world and attributing it externally, mostly because people don’t like to believe they’re capable of negative reactions and own their actions as much as they should because it makes them feel like a bad person…… not that they’re trying to let go of their own guilt and shame because surely they didn’t cause something bad to happen. God did. In no way do I mean natural disasters. As far as I can tell, Hurricane Katrina was caused by air and water- not gay marriage.

No, I am talking about the damage we cause other people without thinking, because when you don’t pray (the function, I don’t care about semantics), you don’t see anything from a third person view. You don’t talk about what your actions might have done to someone else, and that’s the best reason to pray, because it is literally the forgiveness of sins through the practice of forgiving yourself and trying to do better in the future. It all comes from you, raising your self confidence because emotional resilience is key to survival. Alternatively, if you always do what you’ve always done, you always get what you always got.

Praying is a way to change that dynamic. Most people repeat the same patterns over and over because to embrace one’s true self causes conflict. You’re not acting the way you always did, and it’s uncomfortable, especially when other people are used to being able to intrude on your space and now they aren’t. Most people don’t think of relationships as a privilege. That someone is giving you their time, so treat it as sacred. Notice when people aren’t doing the same for you. Don’t let resentment build. If people don’t want what you want, acknowledge it and walk away. If someone also values your time, they will make no mistake about letting you know it.

But you just can’t make those decisions based on never looking at what’s really going on and counting on external validation of your behaviors, because then you’re not in control of your emotions. You’ve put it in someone else’s hands. I am firmly on the side of internal validation, and deeply in control of how other people make me feel because I talk about it. Prayer flows from me without ceasing. Just like Jack Lewis in “Shadowlands,” I can’t help it. I look at what other people are doing to me and how I need to change every minute of every day, but I can only do that in isolation with a 50 foot view. I don’t base my relationships on what people think of me, but how much they value my contribution to their lives, because I have a concrete idea of how long I’ll feel like I’m a problem before the relationship is too fraught.

It took too many years with my beautiful girl because as I’ve said before, she did so many things that made me light up from the inside that I believed we were building something and tearing it down simultaneously, and over time, the idea that we were tearing it down won because it was so confusing. We both proved to the other that we’d step in front of a bus for each other, no questions asked. I thought I was part of her support system because she didn’t have a partner, but when I found out she did, he was immediately folded in. He could also call me at 0200 and say something’s up. I was embarrassed that I didn’t know, because I had this wrongheaded idea that gender and sexual orientation were relative on the internet because without context, neither of you are thinking about the other’s body. Intimacy comes from sharing pain, not visual cues. This is because it had happened to me before, so that heuristic was way off when it came to her. This is the most mortifying thing ever…. I thought she was the same way because she said that if she was religious, she’d be pagan. I’d also never met a pagan woman who wasn’t bi, and now that thought makes me laugh so hard I can’t even breathe. That is because my pagan friends bear no resemblance to Outlander. God, I’m an idiot, but that’s the funniest reaction I had to something serious…… but if there’s something serious about it, it’s that we love the same things. Outlander is based on Doctor Who.

Even Jamie Fraser is named for one of The Doctor’s companions. So, we don’t love the same books/shows, but we love the same concepts when we tap into our God moments. For her, they come from magic, for me, they come from spirituality and faith…. not in God/earth magic, but in us and our reactions to them.

You can find evidence of it in everything I write, my collection and legacy that I existed…….. and hoping mine is the story that sticks.

A Precious Hour -or- A Long Way to Go

April 5, 2017April 5, 2017 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

As you can imagine, now that my grandfather has lost my grandmother, he is quite lonely for any kind of companionship. My father told me as much, and said that the best time to contact him was at 0900. So, after staying up late last night doing crossword puzzles, I dragged my happy ass out of bed and went downstairs to get a Big Gulp of black iced coffee.

[Editor’s Note- you might think that going to a coffee shop and ordering a quadruple espresso is where you get the most bang for your buck…. not so. Because regular coffee sits in the basket so much longer than espresso, a simple large drip packs almost 300mg of caffeine. You’re welcome.]

Because I knew he was lonely, I did everything I could think of to keep him on the phone, and we talked for an hour. As much as I enjoyed talking to my grandfather, I was also proud of myself. Not only did I reach out to another grieving person, I called someone. When he picked up the phone, I could tell that he’d been crying, and I wasn’t about to try and get him to stop. I told him right away that although it was not the same losing a spouse and losing a mother that I could definitely feel his pain. I know, darlin,’ he replied… and I was grieving with you when it happened.

As time wore on, we changed to less loaded subjects so that we could both relax and enjoy each other. I learned a lot about my family history, and his own. For instance, I did not know that before he worked at Lone Star Steel as a public relations manager, he was also a copy editor and photographer for a daily newspaper in Longview and a weekly magazine in Greggton. There were two funny stories about that.

His editor told him that for every writer, eventually their ignorance was going to show… but don’t let it in my newspaper.
His editor’s other advice was never to use three words when one will do… write it tight. I told him that I had not mastered that part of it. Ever. It seems as if my personal motto is why use one word when a thousand will do?

After we talked about writing, we delved into genealogy, and that is the moment where the hairs on my arm stood up.

No, seriously.

My grandfather’s side of the family originated in County Tipperary and moved to Boston, eventually settling in Bristol, Rhode Island. I can’t remember exactly how many great grandfathers this was ago, but the year was 1847. Originally, my grandfather wondered how in the hell he got his wife and six children to America. Thought he must have stolen the family silver or something to pay for passage… but no.

Most of the land was owned by absent Englishmen. Eventually, the Englishmen were worried that the peasants were going to die off due to disease and/or famine… and honestly, didn’t want the responsibility of taking care of the Irish anymore. So, the whole famn damily was offered passage to the United States in exchange for indentured servitude for two years in the lumber industry. I said to my grandfather, that’s not bad. Most of what I’ve read about indentured servitude was more like seven years. He said, well, it might have been seven, but his legs were cut off in an accident.

“Lucky.”

I am really bad with names, so I think it was my ancestor John Lonergan (no, I didn’t misspell that), who settled on a plantation in the wilds of North Carolina and raised a rebel militia to fight with General Washington.

In short, with the exception of my family being Irish and not Scottish, Diana Gabaldon could have been writing about my family. Talk about the things I dinna ken…

It really took me a minute to recover after that.

My grandfather also told me that another one of my ancestors, I think his name was Thomas, was murdered by a gang. I asked my grandfather if Thomas was somehow involved with the gang, or whether he was just an innocent bystander. He said that in those days, the Irish were treated as awfully as the Africans, and after becoming somewhat wealthy, gained a target on his back. He was an Irish immigrant who managed to buy a house for $300, and, of course, was stealing an American job… so he had to die.

It’s amazing to me how much Thomas’ story is so relevant today.

Perhaps it’s not as far from Tipperary to Sheboygan as we think, and I feel lucky to be a part of the people of faith that are rising up to fight injustice against immigrants, because my own past is full of it. The border is different, but the mental walls that have been built are the same.

We don’t need a physical wall to reinforce horrible treatment of immigrants. Those walls are already eight feet thick in the minds and hearts that need to tear them down.

Looking deep inside ourselves is the only way forward, and I can’t think of anything more introspective regarding the treatment of immigrants as learning the hardships encoded into your own DNA…………..

Amen.
#prayingonthespaces

2016 in Review -or- It Wasn’t All Bad

December 31, 2016 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

2016, while it had its awful moments, has also been very good for me as I have learned who my friends are. Help has come where I least expected it… for instance, when Susan heard that my mother died, she was Johnny-on-the-spot with the e-mails of support and just checking in to make sure I was okay. I can’t help but be a tiny bit jealous that her mother is still alive and mine isn’t, but the take-home message isn’t my jealousy. It’s to treasure every moment she has left. One of the last things I said to her on the subject was do me a favor. The next time you see your mom, hold her for one second longer than you ever have.

Truthfully, I don’t remember much of the year before my mother died. It wiped out everything, because my world just tilted, and in some ways, exploded as blindingly as Alderaan. Princess Leia couldn’t go home again, and neither can I… but only in some ways. Of course I still have a place at my father’s table, but I will never sit next to my mother on the piano bench, her page turner and carrier of melody when she’s trying to learn an accompaniment for a singer.

Now that everyone has been told, I can let the cat out of the bag that it’s Bryn’s wedding I’m doing, and although I am extraordinarily nervous about going back to Portland, I am willing to do it for two reasons:

It’s Bryn’s day, and it’s what she wants. I want to marry her, and as I said, with one signature she’ll have proof I did. It will be a significant milestone in our relationship, one that we’ll both remember for the rest of our lives, and I don’t argue with brides.
Getting ordained over the Internet, while a bit sketchy in my book, might lead to other weddings once people realize I’m actually good at it. I liken it to when I was a trumpet player and had to play Trumpet Voluntary for honorariums because that one piece is how trumpet players eat. Of course, marrying my best friend and her fiancée is her wedding gift. I am talking about the possibility of weddings in the future that will help pay for college and grad school…. you know, the one where I am ordained by the UCC. I don’t think of it as more valid, just more accredited.

2016 was not the wedding, but the ask, and it meant more to me than diamonds.

2016 was also the year of making friendships that go deeper than surface pleasantries. I really opened up to Dan & Autumn, as well as Pri-Diddy. I am only a little bit closer to Dan for two reasons. The first is that Pri-Diddy is off on an adventure, and the second is that Dan’s mother is dead as well. She wraps me in hugs when I need it, those that last a second longer because she recognizes that particular brand of pain…. the fire pit that seems to be The Neverending Story.

Opening up to Pri-Diddy has been more about forward motion and where I go from here. She has been relentless in her support of me, whether it’s dropping going back to work and concentrating solely on school, or putting me in touch with people who could help me get jobs that would allow me the type salary to graduate without much debt.

2016 was becoming Christ Congregational’s Writer in Residence, literally, because I have an office and a red Swingline stapler. I am proud to be their “webmistress” and look forward to all the social media responsibility that comes with it. Matt asked me if I was capable of editing a book, and I told him that I’d never done it before, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t, because I am ruthless with a red pen. Here, you get all my thoughts, all over the place, but you don’t get what I am truly capable of in terms of academic and formal writing. It’s a different type completely… this is just one style, rarely crafted but vomited logorrhea. I am positive that I could do better with this web site if I did first drafts and second drafts and outlines and all that shit, but I think the blog would also lose character as I craft a narrative instead of just truly telling you what I’m thinking on a moment-to-moment basis. Even my marriage article was stream-of-consciousness, and took approximately 15 minutes to write, which is why I was so blown away by the response… and I am so sad that it didn’t work for my own.

2016 was about letting go. Letting go of Dana, letting go of Argo, letting go of anyone who thought I was crazy for opening up to someone over the Internet and developing real feelings about a virtual relationship. Though neither of those relationships worked out, the lessons I learned were invaluable and I carry them in my heart, pondering what I could have done differently so that anyone new I meet isn’t tainted by my past moods and behaviors. I had to learn to let go of rage and anxiety about those situations and just chill the fuck out. So far, it’s working. It was working before my mother died, but afterward, I realized what was truly important and what wasn’t, and decided to live in love instead of fear. I don’t always manage it with everyone, because I am quite socially anxious with people I don’t know. But anxiety about them and where our relationships have ended up is mostly gone, and they live in my memory with fondness instead of enmity…. again, most of the time. It’s a spectrum that lives in my heart and my inbox.

2016 was the year of finding the Outlander phenomenon, because I read all the books earlier than that, but not the immense fandom that lives on Facebook and Twitter. It was also the year of watching Season One of the TV show, where it cut me deeply and I had to stop. I’m not finished with Season Two because of it. Seeing that level of pain on the screen rather than reading it gutted me like an axe, as well as reading a soldier’s tweet that she’d been through the PTSD sex scene and realizing that those things happen all over the place and not just in fiction. I didn’t cry while I was reading the book, but the TV show and that tweet undid me for days on end and it took time to recover. Still taking time.

Perhaps in 2017 I’ll catch up, but in 2016, it was just too much.

2016 was getting more distance from Diane and realizing I was indeed capable of leaving her behind in a way that I never thought possible… because the break happened years ago, but it took awhile to settle in and make it really, really real. If I ever run into her again, which is possible, I know to be guarded and polite, Leslie Lanagan.™ There’s nothing in the world that would make me open up to her again, as hard as it was when my mother died. The tapestry of memories that included them both was large and somewhat depressing, but what lifted me out of it was knowing just how many people have come forward and said that they knew what she was doing wasn’t right or sane. Even “she didn’t mean to” is no longer a valid excuse. As my father would say, mean not to. This year has been learning to breathe through that anxiety with a little less labor, but especially since we are both musicians, there are still certain pieces that leave me in pieces, too…. although not as many as they used to, which is progress in my book.

2016 has been learning to breathe for all my friends that work for the Obama administration, because they’re all out of a job once Trump is in office. Living in DC has introduced me to several of them, and they are not forgotten in my mind as they go through this transition. As for my other friends that work for the rest of the government, believe me when I say that the rebellion has begun, trying to figure out how to make the bureaucracy work even more slowly than normal to avoid upending a number of good policies, both foreign and domestic.

This year has also been about me learning to be a lover and a fighter all at the same time, taking on going to meetings where the county government covers things like race relations and police brutality. People of faith have to speak up, even when it’s difficult. I know within myself that I am capable of so much, and if I get arrested for peacefully protesting, there are a number of people willing to bail me out of jail… a talk I never thought I’d have to have, but police brutality extends to people who are just sitting there. It may not be getting worse, just filmed, but there it is. I have a feeling that there will be a lot of protests this year over a multitude of things, including what we are doing militarily, but soldiers, listen up. I will never, ever, ever disagree with the boots on the ground. I couldn’t be more proud or more thankful for your existence. However, I will gladly disagree with your Commander in Chief if he is using you for inane or dangerous purposes. My Jesus wouldn’t stand for it, and neither will I.

Most of all, I have learned that no matter what I do, good or bad, there is nothing that will ever separate me from the love of God, and the whole host of faces I use to talk to them (using this pronoun because God is genderless). I have sat in so much silence and prayer, trying to find my still, small voice that it is emerging in a big damn way.

2017, stay tuned.

Forever Plaid

November 26, 2016November 26, 2016 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 1 Comment

I wish I could recall with clarity the first time I met Bryn. She was a charter member of Bridgeport, so I am sure that first meeting would have included something tweenage. That was back in the day when I was going to Susan & Diane’s for all the parties of the millenium, which usually included a week or two at church. We’ve talked about this, and though neither of us realized when the other appeared on our radar, Bryn does remember the first time we really talked. We were both trying to escape the noise of the party, and snuck off on our own, and as we dove deeper, her friend love attached itself to me… I just wish I’d realized it at the time and taken more advantage of the opportunity to become closer before we actually did.

In those days, I thought Diane and I were better friends than we were, and I tended to stick to her at parties because I thought that they were the only chance for us to be able to talk, because it wouldn’t be long until I flew home. Sometimes, she seemed annoyed by this and left me wondering why. Sometimes, she was over-the-top affectionate and I just lived for those moments, because it was a throwback to old inside jokes, and sometimes, the deep intimate bonding that occurred between us as I came out and she was molding herself into the success she is today. I was always confused as to why it wasn’t consistent, why she wasn’t that affectionate all the time, and I realized that sometimes in public I was a way to prop up her own ego… she could say that she mentored this young girl all the way from the time she was 12 until now. When I wasn’t useful in that capacity, I was annoying. It took me a very long time to realize why. If I hadn’t spent so much time ruminating on everything I’d done wrong that had pushed her away (because it was all my fault), I would have remembered this gargantuan moment in my life.

A conversation is not just a conversation between Bryn & me. We are both deeply introspective, and are now beginning to see the galaxies that live within us… inner landscapes in which we’ve had to hold hands tightly to explore. I’m beginning to think she is my Silent Bob hetero-lifemate and I know for sure that she would be pleased at that reference… although that does make me Jay, and I’m just as introspective/introverted as Silent Bob, too. So pretend that Silent Bob is Silent Bob’s hetero-lifemate and that pretty much matches our hetero-lifemate and wacky lesbian neighbor marriage nicely.

The only thing that throws a wrench in that plan is that I am now a neighbor in the cloud. I won’t go back to Portland for exactly the same reason I won’t go back to Houston (unless my dad gets sick or something… the only reason I’d be comfortable there… I wouldn’t have time to worry about anything else). DC makes me new, one day at a time, because I don’t have any teenage memories here. I’ve always been an adult in DC, with no trace of where I’ve been emotionally under a tremendous amount of abuse so that when I drive around the city, I panic. Mostly not to an extreme, but sometimes. It depends on how strong I’m feeling that day.

In that way, I need to practice self-care by staying away from those memories and at the same time, be upset that I don’t live close to Bryn anymore. The two aren’t mutually exclusive. It is a letting go of that dream, a small grief on its own, because I cannot imagine Bryn picking up and moving here. God, in God’s own infinite possibilities, lets me believe that there’s one chance in a million, because life never knows what it’s going to throw at you until it arrives.

Bryn is perhaps the person I wish the most lived in my neighborhood, so that AM coffee became a thing, or dinner once a week. Three hours is one hell of a time difference, but we make it work through messaging and FaceTime. It’s just hard to upload coffee and/or the palate cleansing course. The care package I received from her had a dark green blanket in it, a plaid- warmer than all three of my blankets put together.

When I called to thank her, she said something I will never forget.

That blanket was really just a fabric scrap that I found at Joanne’s while I was listening to The Drums Of Autumn, and it made me want to send you my plaid to wrap around you and keep you warm.

I couldn’t stop crying, because through the magic of close friends, my Jamie comes in all different packages. I thanked her for giving me the kindest part of him…. and I’ll bet that if you’ve read the Outlander series, you know what an enormous gift she sent me emotionally… That person that says “it’s ok that our emotions are large because we’ll always be there to catch each other.”

I must have done something excellent in a past life for which I’m being rewarded “posthumously,” and feel the need to say that I am as careful with her heart as she is with mine.

And there will never be a time in which I can say I didn’t marry her. With one signature, she’ll have proof.

Stuff Happens

October 3, 2015October 3, 2015 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Today my friend Scott Lynch posted an article about Jeb Bush’s response to the shooting in Oregon, which was “stuff happens.” I get it. He’s caught up in NRA votes he doesn’t want to lose, but he also showed his ignorance of the situation in unparalleled ways. His friend Nathan left this video reply:

It was the best reply he ever could have given, and if you take a look at the comments on the video, there are a lot of people who agree with Nathan’s assessment. The first comment at the top right now is, “Jeb, if you’re listening, it was ‘stuff happens’ when we decided to kick your ass.”

I have friends in Roseburg and a bigger number of friends who grew up in Roseburg and moved to Portland as adults. So my heart is with all of them tonight, because Roseburg is the kind of town where that stuff doesn’t happen… as are all of the small towns that never saw it coming. One might not be surprised to hear of a school shooting in Bed-Stuy or Third Ward, but in tiny communities the fear is bigger because the reason they live in small towns is that crime is expected to be lower.

Gun control is not a sticky subject with me. I love guns, but I wouldn’t own one. I just like to buy rounds and go and rent them at the range. I like the loud crack, the feeling of the butt on my shoulder, the smell of spent rounds. To me, it is like going to the batting cages. I know within myself that I am a terrible shot, and it is more likely that I would have a gun wrested away from me than I would have a chance of protecting myself. In fact, that’s what most studies show… that you have to train long and hard to actually be able to use a gun in a high pressure situation like a home invasion. Inexperienced marksmen in terrifying situations are not calm enough to calculate a shot, and if you miss, you are likely to be shot with your own firearm.

However, I have no problem with training to be that good. I have no problem with former soldiers who carry sidearms using the proper certifications. When Volfe and I were together every day, he made a point of teaching me how to shoot, how to clean a shotgun/rifle, and all of the rules therein. With monocular vision, I am the type person that needs scattershot in hopes that I will hit something. My favorite time out on the range ever was shooting the fuck out of an old Dell computer. It was a bullet for every user with a stupid question who called me from their car.

The problem is that there are too many people like me who enjoy shooting, but do not put the time in to be excellent under pressure. For instance, I couldn’t hit a moving target to save my life. I especially couldn’t hit one running at me, especially if that person was armed as well. I know my limitations, and there are too many people who don’t and buy firearms for their homes, anyway.

I don’t think that the answer to school shooting is more gun legislation, necessarily. I’d have to read what was proposed to see whether I agreed with it…. because the things that school shooters do are already illegal. Schools are getting smart and putting real police on the grounds, ready to interrupt that kind of situation… and at the same time, putting cops in the schools leads to, unfortunately, racial profiling and kids that get into the system and can never get back out, because real cops are called in for minor infractions and sentencing is traditionally heavier on black students. It is a clusterfuck of massive proportions, because of course there need to be armed cops on school grounds. There have been too many school shootings to ignore this new reality. But where does school administration end and policing begin? When do you get sent to the principal’s office and when do you get arrested?

I went to a symposium at Howard University where Jeffrey Thames and several others spoke about this very thing- one case study was a policeman handcuffing a black five-year-old for a five-year-old sort of crime… something that when I was in school would have led to in-school suspension or being expelled for a few days, not an arrest record. And the bitch of it is that studies show that white students still get these type punishments while black students do not. This is just an editorial- you’ll have to do the research on your own, but I promise it is out there and it is frightening.

To change gears, where does mental health enter into all of this? Even people without a history of mental illness have got to have something loose in their heads if they think that shooting up a school is the right answer. How do we solve the underlying problem so that this doesn’t keep happening? Like I said, I am not sure that Congress can do anything- what these people do is already illegal.

I also do not think it is right or sane to own anything more than a handgun and/or a rifle, and I go back to United States v. Miller for this very thing. It was a case aimed at sawed-off shotguns, in which the court ruled that it was not in keeping with regular military equipment and therefore not necessary in a militia situation… the very thing for which the Second Amendment provides.

The interpretation we constructed in Con Law my junior year is that the founding fathers never could have conceived of such an instrument, and I extrapolate that to all firearms in that category. For instance, it is not necessary to keep an uzi in your home, particularly if you are not trained on its use. To me, that is a sign of mental instability all on its own. What kind of situation would possibly present itself in your home where you would need that kind of fire power? To me, that situation lives in your head, and not in reality.

The problem is not in the legislature. The problem is much deeper than that. Perhaps if mental health care were more readily available, the people that feel those sorts of threats in their heads can be talked off that kind of ledge.

If you really want a lesson in the Second Amendment, I suggest reading the Outlander series from beginning to end. It goes from the Jacobite uprising in 1745 all the way through the militias that won the Revolutionary War, and how the colonies handled militias that provided their own weapons. Particularly in the colony of North Carolina, there was no real government in place *but* the militias, because it was so wild that it was sparsely settled and people had to travel long distances for police and government, anyway.

We have to find a way to separate needs from wants, and fantasy and reality. I do not believe that can be done with a one-pronged approach. There has to be a mental health component to gun ownership, because no one is coming to take your guns, as long as you own them responsibly. And by responsibly, it means that if you have children in your house, you cannot have a way for them to get curious and get a hold of your guns on their own. Hiding the key to the gun safe somewhere in your house is not the answer, because your kids are much smarter than you think.

I also believe that gun ownership also depends on terrain. For instance, more fire power is going to be needed to protect yourself in rural Alaska than suburban Texas. If your house is being robbed, that’s one thing. If your house is in danger of being taken down by a bear or a moose, that’s another. Also, are you trying to protect your home or are you literally trying to feed yourself for an entire winter?

All of these questions might make a great interview before you buy a gun in the first place. If legislation is involved, to me it would be creating a way to talk to gun owners about what they’re trying to do with them.

People who steal guns are another matter entirely. Any law on the books is going to be broken, anyway. It is obvious to me that some of these problems start in childhood and compound. Perhaps the answer is more akin to raising healthy adults, and focusing on the way to do it right.

I don’t have a problem with guns. I have a problem with criminals…. because you know…..

Stuff happens.

The Luxury of Laughter

July 14, 2015 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

The Saturday Night Live episode right after September 11th featured Rudy Giuliani. In it, the cast asked him, “is it okay to be funny?” Completely deadpan, he looks at the camera and says, “why start now?” The crowd just breaks up, and I thought of it today as I was eating a late lunch and contemplating my next steps in terms of career ladder and home life.

Lately, my writing has been about my mourning process in the wake of losing both Argo and Dana simultaneously as our toxic triangle caught on fire, hot as a funeral pyre in the middle of a battlefield… just thermonuclear war as all of us knew we were going down. My thought process is different than theirs, because I know that even though all of us have stuff to own in the fight, I threw the first match. It’s taking longer to get over that fact than anything else. I beat myself up quite handily; I’m good at it, too. At night the “if onlys” eat me alive. I take medication to sleep because if I don’t, my mind will wander down every fight we ever had and it’ll be 3:00 AM before I finally succumb… which is not good, because I like to be up by 5:00. There’s a quiet to the morning, before everyone wakes up… a stillness only present when the “the moon has gone down and the sun has come up.” It is the point at which I feel the most hopeful for my future and for the future of St. James and All Sinners, the religious organization that I will die trying to build.

I feel that because I trashed my relationships with both Argo and Dana at a time when I needed them more and not less, the only answer is for me to pour my energy into creating something lasting, a legacy made in honor of the gifts they gave me because I can’t go back and undo anything. Diana Gabaldon has a great scene in the Outlander series (don’t remember which book because I am currently inhaling them) where Jem is responsible for making sure that the chickens are safely in their coop at night. He forgets, and a wolf destroys them. Jamie’s response is that “nothing will ever bring back what was lost- all you can do is feel like you’ve paid for it.” That is where I am today. Nothing will ever bring back what was lost. All I can do is feel like I’ve paid their kindnesses forward and forgiven their mistakes…. which, in theory, will allow me to forgive myself.

Taking responsibility for what I have done has given me a little more compartmentalization. I realized it was okay to be funny again. I don’t have to mourn all day, every day, as much as my brain leans into it. I am finally arriving at some modicum of peace with myself, because I have a plan of action and am past the stage where all I can manage is getting up, getting dressed, and going to look for work. I mean, that is something, but after that, I just come home and collapse. There’s been no room for fun. I haven’t made it, with the exception of having dinner with Pri Diddy and Elena the other night. We broke out a bottle of Old Overholt and just sat around and talked- my favorite entertainment because Pri Diddy is into self-actualization and I… well, I’m getting there. Mostly thanks to her help.

I have a psych appointment on the 28th, which I don’t know if I’m looking forward to or not. Getting to know a new psychiatrist can either be amazing or horrifying, depending on which doctor you get. Some like to do med checks only. Some do integrative care- therapy and meds. It’s a crapshoot as to which one you’re going to get, and there’s always the chance that your doctor will look at your protocol and call your last doctor a quack. That’s happened to me, too, and my general response to that is “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” The meds I’ve been given since I was hospitalized work great- the gabapentin was a smart move. I thought there was nothing I could do about my anger issues, and I’m just not able to get rattled like that anymore. That’s because my idea of threat has gone way, way down.

Part of the threat to me was e-mail only with Argo, because there were so many times that because I couldn’t hear her tone of voice (she’s pretty succinct, anyway), I thought she was getting snippy and she wasn’t. She’s just not as touchy-feely as me and I didn’t allow for the differences in our personalities. I’d just get pissed and fly off the handle. If I had everything to do over again, I would have called her. I would have Skyped her. I would have done something to get a feel for her real personality instead of trying to infer it all. However, if you think that picking up the telephone was easy for me, you really haven’t been reading that long. In fact, it took gathering up every bit of strength I had just to send her a voice mail attached to an e-mail. As I have said before, I am a lot bigger on the page. I didn’t want her to hear me that small. I just knew for sure she’d had a bad day, and I wanted to give her real comfort instead of just typing in black and white.

To date, I have never heard her voice. We talked about talking, and yet, it just didn’t happen. Mostly because it got weird relatively fast. Our brains connected, and my emotions weren’t far behind. As you can imagine, it did not go well for me.

Still sitting on that one… working it out… mulling it over…………………….. praying on the spaces.

But at least now I allow myself to be funny.

It’s a start.

Crater

June 17, 2015 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Every so often, I can hear the earth thud when my words drop, and I just stare at the crater that they’ve left. This was confirmed for me when Argo wrote to me (a relatively long time ago) that she could hear the sonic boom from my last post. Those are the entries that frighten me the most, the ones where even my better angels fear to tread. There are days when I battle nausea just to get the words out, because I know I have to put them on paper, damn the consequences… because if I don’t, I will continue to be the same person I always was, not remembering how I felt in the moment because there is no record of it.

I have said many times, Fanagans, that this blog is not for you. It is for me, and you are invited.

You see my imperfections as extremely loud and incredibly close as I do, but there is something else I must explain. My writing life lags behind my actual life. I have trouble describing an experience as it is happening. I need clarity from the passage of time to even bring words to emotions. Falling in love with Argo’s words while I was still married to Dana is absolutely the worst thing that has ever happened to me in my entire life. I accept that I was the cause, and saying “happened to me” is a misnomer. I am only talking about the consequences here, and not the pawns I moved. Dana was my best friend. How could I betray her like that? And yet, I did. I own it. It was a mistake. A big one, the fallout is massive as I pick up the pieces and try to arrange them into a different mosaic.

Moving to Silver Spring is the best thing I could have done, because my friends live in either DC or on the Virginia side. I am an hour away from any one of them, forced to sit in my silence as I recover from the mess I’ve made.

Every day looks the same now. I send out resumes for big jobs and little ones, because even working at Safeway requires an online application. Usually, if the job is for a store, I will go and meet the manager before I submit the application so that he/she will remember my name when the online app comes across. However, I have not gotten many bites. I am extraordinarily overqualified on paper to bag groceries, but how do you explain to the manager that’s exactly what you want? To be lost in repetition, because that’s really all you can handle right now, and you’ll be good at it, because muscle memory will take over rather than having to get lost in my head.

I would do anything not to get lost in my head for eight full hours a day.

I take my Kindle everywhere I go, because public transportation takes a long time, no matter where you’re going. Right now, I am lost in the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon, the Voyager novel specifically. I wish I could say that I get lost in the story, but there are too many parallels for me to ignore my own life as I read. I do not want to spoil anything for people who are just now getting into the series thanks to the TV show (Starz), but my take on it is that once I got past the betrayal of one love for another in Outlander, there’s another one later on in the series that smacks of home, too.

Home.

What a foreign concept now.

In my head, home is still with Dana on some days, because it was so stable. We had a passionate relationship for many years, right up until it wasn’t. We broke up the minute we got to Houston, because she betrayed me. Flat out. I won’t say why, but I will say that the fissure it caused was enough that when we got back together, I forgave her, but I didn’t forget. Our relationship limped along under its own weight because I wanted to heal and move on from the damage that was done, but I couldn’t. It was too much, too fast… and I would like to believe that she knew it. I would like to believe that betrayal was her way of saying “I want out,” but not telling me directly. I was angry… so angry that I told her to leave- go back to Virginia if she wanted. She had enough of her own resources to do whatever she wanted, and I do not know how or why we worked it out, because it happened so fast. It will take years to untangle that knot in my head.

Truth be told, we were exhausted. Both of us in our own way. I’d been through a tempest in the realization that I’d been emotionally abused as a teenager and still wasn’t over it. It slayed me. I talked about it over and over and over while ignoring that it was isolating her. I was folding into myself, and the only one I would let in was Argo. I told her straight out that I was writing to her because I thought Dana had already been given her fair share, and a fresh set of eyes/ears on the problem was necessary. I was leaning on Argo because Dana was beginning to tell me with her actions that I was too much to handle, and later said those words out loud.

I reeled at those words, because in terms of “too much to handle,” I have not cornered the market. Dana and I are equal in terms of the emotional problems we have, but I will talk about them. Dana will not, even to me, and in a relationship, that is everything. Everything. She wanted to break up because she was happy in her bubble, and I was exploding mine.

And please keep in mind two things- I am not writing about Dana’s reality. I am writing about my reaction to her. Her story is not mine to tell, I can only tell you what I was feeling. She told me a couple of weeks ago to stop writing lies about her on my blog. I told her that if she thought I was writing lies to get her own blog. This is not her place to vent.

It is mine.

Her perceptions are never going to line up with mine. Never. That’s why we broke up. We weren’t seeing eye to eye on anything, and instead of opening up to each other, we destroyed the relationship instead. I look at the way Jaime and Claire interact in Outlander, and know that I am ready to have someone that will bare their soul to me without reservation. I am not interested in a relationship with someone who cannot reflect on themselves. I am also not interested in being in relationship with someone who views me as scary, which was Dana’s excuse for all the reasons she kept things from me.

The reality is that yes, I am scary sometimes, because I can almost guarantee that in letters and conversations I can go deeper than you. I have a dark passenger, Dexter-like in its intensity and execution. Not many people can handle it, and I am tired of interacting with those people.

It’s not that I won’t. I am just tired. Exhausted, even.

People who are not in touch with themselves force me to hide a lot of who I am, because I know that they aren’t ready or willing to hear me where I am… to love me for all my drive and passion and not make me force it down.

In terms of deep friendship and romance, Dana and Argo were both the wrong choice at the wrong time. I say it was the wrong time, because perhaps later in life this will not be so; they both walk with thick armor, intense but not emotionally so. Their upbringing was the classic WASP stuff and deny. To talk about issues rather than pretend they don’t exist is as foreign to them as language immersion in Klingon.

The difference between Dana and Argo is that when I began writing, I struck a chord with Argo. I do not know what went through Dana’s head, because she didn’t really talk about it until we were leaving each other behind. I cannot speak to it. With Argo, she latched on to my words and told me so. That they gave her strength because I could be open in a way that she could not. It was an enormous compliment, just enormous. Those compliments carried me through the darkest time in my life so far, because it wasn’t just that one.

I have said before that she is not a God person. When I told her I was starting a church, she said she thought it was awesome and that she didn’t believe in God, but she did believe in me.

When she hurt, I prayed, and she said she thought of me as her “pinch hitter.”

My self-esteem grew, and so did the fissure with Dana… not because of my feelings for Argo as much as not knowing how to relate to the person I was becoming. In retrospect, I think I knew Dana was pulling away, and even though it wasn’t right, I leaned toward Argo to heal from it.

Because even though Argo wasn’t a lesbian and wasn’t in love with me, she loved my words… and I loved her for it. At that time in my life, it wasn’t so much needing external validation. I wasn’t looking to her for that. She was the one that kept up the attaboys when I was willing to throw down on this web site. As I led, she followed. As I told her, “your words are balm.” Lip balm. She was the Dr Pepper Bonnie Bell Lip Smacker of Stories That Are All True.

And as I wore this lip balm, my words got stronger. I revealed a lot about myself that I couldn’t talk about out loud, but somehow had no problem releasing quietly over the Internet and letting people react on their own. I learned that this was how I needed to get through life. I needed to work on my own shit and let people have their reactions away from me, because their reactions were not mine to own.

My actions were mine to own.

I have learned so much about who I am by reading this web site in retrospect, giving myself time to heal from the “sonic boom” and reading with compassion for the person that I was… because then I have enough separation from the damage that I’ve caused to read as if these stories happened to someone else. As a perfectionist, I would never berate someone else the way I thrash myself in my own mind.

There are no words that would adequately express my sorrow over the way I’ve treated my family and my friends, but I hope these words will help. Behind my enormous ego, I am just a fourteen year old girl, development arrested and trying to cover for it. So if you’ve ever thought my actions were childish, you’re right. I am just now learning how to adult.

If you have been abused in your life, sexually or otherwise, that statement may resonate with you. In the hundreds of abuse survivors I’ve physically met and talked to over the Internet, it seems as if we are all arrested at the age we were when the abuse occurred, and if we’re older than that, we’re all covering for it. We’re all learning how to adult far past the age when it should have occurred naturally… not because we are malicious, but because we are unprepared.

There have been times in my life that I have lied pathologically to escape punishment to avoid further emotional abuse… not to hurt anyone, but to put up a shield between me and the rest of the world… emotionally holding my arm over my face and saying “please don’t hurt me anymore.” Nothing should ever be able to penetrate my cave, because it is not safe out there… or at least, that has been my reaction to everything until now. It took lowering the boom on myself to really see what was wrong.

Because if you can’t see it, it’s not there.

It’s in the crater, the one you can choose to explore if you are brave enough to hike downward, not knowing where the strength lies in pulling yourself back up. The thing is, though, as you work through your own issues, you discover your own worth, and that is the earth that fills in the hole under you so all of the sudden, you are back on level ground.

Amen.

Mo Buidheag @writer_DG

June 15, 2015 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 1 Comment

Dear Diana,

Your words are with me all day, every day; they whisper on the wind as I am walking. In my head, when I think, “cannot” has become “canna,” and “mo chridhe” has replaced every endearment I use. This is because Jamie has become the embodiment of my dream for me… that I will one day be as strong and vulnerable as he is, so that when my Sassenach arrives, I’ll know what to do. I canna see her, but I imagine.

Maybe she’s a doctor, too.

I am fascinated by medicine, and thought about becoming a nurse myself. I was talked out of it by those closest to me, because they dinna believe I would realize that dream. I’d struggled with math all my life; it made no sense to them that I was capable of righting that deficiency.

I knew what they didn’t, that I’d made bad grades because I couldn’t see my learning disability for what it was. ADHD took my concentration and mangled it like a drunken head-on collision. I had never learned coping mechanisms, and I’d never taken medication. I knew that school this time around would be different, but I let my loved ones’ opinions rule over my own, because I wasna secure in my own beliefs… until…

I met the archetype for my Sassenach. She was the wrong woman, at the wrong time, the wrong place, the wrong sexual orientation. I struggled anyway, married to Laoghaire and Frank in one body. I became Lord John Grey in his smallest little boy place, loving my Sassenach at arm’s length, trying not to want too much because I wasna hurting her with my want, only torturing myself.

Slowly, over time, I came to an important realization. I’d only seen pictures, I’d only met her virtually. It was her words that got under my skin and nothing else. In essence, I hadn’t fallen in love with my Sassenach as much as I’d fallen in love with one of my own characters. The more I wrote about her, she was a 3D character that danced in my mind… but that 3D character wasn’t really her. It was part of her, with my own words filled in.

That epiphany was the one that allowed me to let her float back into the ether from whence she came, because when she realized the depth of emotion I had, her first reaction was to run away. Why wouldn’t it? She didn’t realize that, to a writer, her words were always going to be more important than her physical body. I stared at her pictures the way Jamie stared at Brianna in hers…. Love overflowing because I could match words to a face, and finally make her some semblance of real.

You talk often of your love for Doctor Who. In my own mind, the journey was trying to turn her from Rose into Amy… the face I loved without a hint of romance to it. Deep, companionate love that would last a lifetime. When I couldn’t make that leap anymore, I pushed her away with such fire that I have doubts she’ll ever return.

My cardinal mistake, the one I’ll always regret, is this one line in our letters:

I will stop talking about those in-love feelings if you’ll just allow me to flirt with you in a non-threatening way.

I flirted in one line, she flirted back.

It seemed right and good. I was laughing so hard my desk chair sagged. Things were going to be okay.

So I flirted back, and so did she.

I flirted back, and so did she.

It was in the last two lines of dialogue that I realized I could never quiet the storm raging inside me. I undid myself by opening the door to something I couldn’t handle, thinking all the while it was harmless.

I dinna ken.

Her wordplay was sharper than mine, and she stepped over my comfort zone without even knowing it… at the time, neither did I. It’s never the earthquake that gets you. It’s the aftershocks. Imagine a full orchestra on a final note, the way the reverb in a live room keeps it ringing.

It was mostly downhill from that point, because I did everything in my power to make her angry enough to stomp off, because I knew it would work. If I couldn’t have my Sassenach because she wouldn’t have me as her Jamie (or vice versa- take your pick), I had to learn to live without her. Trying to turn her into my Jenny or my Murtagh failed over and over (and over and over).

The thing that brought us together, my lifeblood, my writing, tore us apart as she saw herself in my mirror, because she dinna ken, either… that I was creating a character based on her- but could never be her because how much can you really know about a person in only black and white? Ink and paper without pictures can only reveal so much.

…or at least, that’s what I have to make myself believe, because even “Frank” knew I’d seen her soul and how I wrestled with that reality. As a writer, can’t you see how much I am lying through my teeth? That ink and paper are everything?

Jamie lived in Claire’s memory for 20 years before Frank got mad enough to stomp off. In my case, it only took two. As did Claire, I loved my “Frank.” But our love became distracted, disjointed enough to break us apart with bitter words at the end.

I did not find Outlander for myself until after “Frank,” “Claire,” and “Jamie” left. I say all three names because I canna decide who was the Sassenach and who was the Highlander in this analogy. The story has healed me in so many ways, because even though my Sassenach was never really mine, I have taken Jamie’s pain into myself.

I see his struggle. I see how he cannot even mention her name without feeling pain. I am in that same small place, not even ready to distract myself because there is no room.

Not yet, anyway.

I love easily. My love is gigantic, and I am waiting without distraction for the capability to forgive myself for letting this situation happen. In Outlander, when Claire realizes that she will betray one love for the other, my soul wrenched and nearly broke in half. In a metaphysical way, I still wear both rings. Now, I want to be free. I want to choose myself… again, so that when my real Sassenach arrives, I will know it.

I want to be able to run into the arms of the one that is capable of the same kind of soul-ensconcing passion that Jamie and Claire embody. I want to take her, own her as much as she owns me… in ink, in paper, in body and flesh entwined. The whole package I never knew I needed…

Until there was you.

Thank you for your words, because they forced me to want more. To forgive myself for all that is past to make room for the future.

…because your words are with me. All day. Every day.

Leslie

A Little Lean-to

June 2, 2015June 2, 2015 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

When Jamie and Claire reunite after Black Jack Randall’s excoriation of Jamie’s spirit, he tells Claire that the small space in his soul isn’t restored, but he’s at least managed to build a little lean-to. I’m paraphrasing because I don’t remember the exact line, but the concept is the same. Putting together my application for Howard and committing to my church that I wanted to work with them as I grow gave me a renewed sense of purpose and, well, light.

To that end, I sent Argo a message that said, “please unsubscribe from my blog. Cut the ties.” Nothing has come of it yet, but I don’t want to see her name in my followers list anymore because when I do, I get sick to my stomach and I canna breathe. I don’t care if she reads my blog. First of all, there’s nothing I can do about that. But get a damn RSS reader or something, amiright? That way, she can read and I don’t have to see her name every time I log in. It’s just too much. I recoil at the sight, and I don’t want to feel that pain, but I canna remove her myself. If that were the case, I would have removed her long ago, not because I hate her, but because I would hope that she wouldn’t want to create reactions in me anymore. She’s made it perfectly clear that’s not the case on the ground. Why in the cloud?

I have told her all the things I dinna ken, all the ways she could have been my Jenny instead of my Jamie and I blew it all to hell. She doesn’t want any part of any of that now, so I have to move on. You’d think that something as simple as an e-mail address wouldn’t jar me, and yet, it does.

Because when I see it, I only see pain. I only see darkness. I only see the past instead of the possibility of a clean, white future because she has said she doesn’t want it. There is no hope for resurrection, so it is like walking in Good Friday. I think I have done enough in that respect. If she wants no further contact, then don’t make it so easy to e-mail her every single day…. if that makes any sense at all.

There are ways of reading me where I canna figure out who ye are. I’d rather have it that way, because it just keeps me in the space of “there must be something I can say that will fix this.” I will ruminate on it until I’m blue in the face and the only one that it hurts is me.

I Am So, So Sorry

May 19, 2015May 21, 2015 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 1 Comment

Dear Outlander Fans,

I was wrong. There. I said it. Once I fought past the idea of Claire disappearing into the 18th century and falling into a near miss with rape from her husband’s relative, the book settled into a great fairy tale of magic and mystery. Some of the writing still drives me crazy (ending sentences with prepositions in formal writing, overuse of commas and under-use of sentence structure, etc.), but I cannot ignore substance over style.

It’s still violent and rape-y. I tense up during those paragraphs, because I have never been raped, but I *have* had emotion thrown at me before I was ready for it- sexual information that changed me as a human being for better or for worse. Therefore, anything that smacks of abuse or rape sends me over the edge emotionally and I fight to keep it together.

In some ways, it is cathartic, because Claire struggles with the same issues I have over the past few years. Argo never participated in the feelings I had for her, and kept it all above board on her end to make it clear that she could never reciprocate. At the same time, for me, all three of the main characters smack as elements of Dana, Argo, and me… so much so that tears fall in every scene where Claire and Jamie fight for each other, to the death if necessary, because that’s how important they are to each other. One line keeps repeating in my head as I read (DAMN YOU, GABALDON)- that secrecy deserves respect, but always honesty.

There are things I could have just let unfold. I rushed the story, and it came to denouement quickly because of it. The steadfast, loving aspects of Jamie have always been Dana. The adventurous spirit has always been Argo. I twisted and turned in the definitions of love and fidelity just as Claire struggles with hers. She loves Frank- married in every respect, but at the same time, Jamie excites her and she becomes more than she ever could have been without him. It is so familiar, and so foreign. So extremely loud and incredibly close it could be a movie (wait).

So far, the story has explained me to me in a way that I couldn’t have before. I had a revelation that created a positive tempest in a teacup of activity, because it set my brain on fire. As I am sure you well know, Argo is a nickname. Argo is a character. The real person is probably nothing like her based on the amount *I* have written, not who she actually is. In some sense, for the last two years, I have not been in love with Argo. I have been in love with the idea of her. That idea is the persona I created for her based on her words, the ones that quickly got under my skin in a way that no one else’s ever will. The revelation was that the character is based on MY words. I have, in some sense, been in love with a part of me.

A dimension was added to me that I never knew I needed when I began writing to Argo, and it is one I will keep whether we reunite on the ground. The chord that runs between us is not broken. It is strong and beautiful, all the things it once was- but if she doesn’t pick up her end, it becomes a loopback, feeding me. The love that was directed at her is coming back to me full force, because I realized that the words I wrote to her strengthened me, too.

There were ugly, bitter fights- especially when she took the initiative in believing that moving centered around her. She’s on my mind, certainly, but no more or no less than she’s been before……….. as is Dana, my steadfast love. When I think of them both, the love that flows from me is everpresentlovingkindness, the peace that comes from loving them whether they love me or not. I don’t have to receive to send. As I have said about God as well, I don’t love them because it changes them. I love them because it changes me.

They both made me realize that I was swimming in a dark hole, one that would never lead to light unless I changed on my own. It gave me the will and the drive to create the greatness I know I have, rather than believing that darkness is the only thing I deserve.

In some sense, I believe that Jamie and Claire do that for each other….. but they are not above using darkness for a greater purpose. They find light in each other in the middle of a garbage dump of a situation, and it strengthens them for the journey ahead.

It is strength that extends to me. Argo cannot and will not be my Jamie or my Claire, but I realized that I was worthy of a relationship like it. That I needed to reach for something more, something worth fighting for until the death. I believe that I can have that with Dana if she will reach up and grab it, but I am satisfied that she does not want it to happen.

However, that does not mean that I do not look at both of their backs and want to kiss their scars.

Again, I am sorry. I was wrong. It’s a great story that’s unfolding…………..

and it’s a good book, too.