I should have known that this is exactly how things were going to turn out with Daniel, but I felt like it was important to keep the promise to myself- to see whether rehab had indeed cleared his mind and whether we could make the plans we made fit a future now. I did not want to be the person that abandoned their partner while they were in the worst part of their lives. I couldn’t be that person to my partner, and I wasn’t. I can be proud of that.
But in retrospect, there was a red flag on day one that I couldn’t ignore, and I ran from it, because I knew that I had made a horrible, horrible mistake unless Daniel was telling the absolute truth, and there was no way of knowing whether he was telling the absolute truth from this many miles away. He said that he was still drinking, but it was night and day now. It’s not the thing you want to hear from someone that’s been to inpatient if you know even a couple of things about alcohol and the brain. It’s not that they’re not telling the truth. It’s “are you willing to gamble?” Because maybe they are. Maybe one or two beers every once in a while is their new normal. But I’m not willing to gamble.
I was for a few days. Seriously. I wanted to know how Daniel thought, whether any of his thought processes had changed over the year we were apart, how he treated me now vs. how he treated me then, etc. Absolutely nothing has changed. At no time did he consider my feelings before he went right back to saying that we were starting over while also treating me like a fiancée, so which is it? Do you want to pretend that we don’t know each other or do you want the intimacy that comes with being a partner? I don’t share all my thoughts and feelings with just anyone, and I found out that he cannot handle them.
Even after having a talk about the way I process emotions and the difference in the autistic brain, it was still all about how I’m just so mean to him and “putting all this stuff on him.” Meanwhile, he does not have any answers for my questions and no indication as to what “putting all this stuff on him” even means.
I told him that no person worthy of me would ever spend a minute trying to make me think that my feelings don’t matter, and then I blocked him and walked away, while also telling him that I wouldn’t be back. I already have two people in my life that are willing to open up to me and share with me. I don’t need to fight through to be heard, and I have discovered I won’t.
I wanted a partner to build a life with, because Bryn and Zac already have life partners, and that’s unlikely to change. And by that, I do mean that Bryn is also my life partner, but with best friends, it’s a little different. I mean that she’s my off site document repository, because she knows my files better than I do.
Also, I know this sounds crazy, but the idea of marrying your best friend is starting to seem so much more sane than marrying your romantic partner. Like, why would you place something as important as marriage on a relationship that’s dependent on sexual attraction? It doesn’t make sense to me, but that’s how it’s done….. for most people.
Daniel told me that he wanted to be my favorite person, and I told him that he was…. because I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the position had been filled in 1997 and 2013, when my heart expanded to give huge palaces in my head to three women, not shoving Bryn and Dana away in favor of anyone else. When my definition of love got bigger, I did.
There are so many follow up questions that Daniel never asked, just treated me like the classic sitcom nagging wife. I have never been in a relationship with gender roles before, so I made no attempt to understand any of that. If he wants to marry a nonbinary mind, he’s got to understand that I am his equal. He can’t just dismiss my concerns; I will walk and I did, because I will not learn gender roles for anyone.
It was easy for the world to revolve around him, because only I had to respect his time. We had one conversation where we were actually focused on each other, and that was on the phone. The rest of the time, I sat and waited because he said he had time to talk and then everything that could possibly get in the way made it where our responses were 10 minutes apart. I couldn’t focus on anything because I was caught between thinking that we were having a conversation and not knowing whether I should wait for a reply or not. When I said this was irritating, he jumped all over me about that, too, when what I wanted was “sure- I’ll tell you when I’m doing something else because I also value your time.” If I have someone’s divided attention, I’d rather you finish what you were doing and come focus on me. Because it means that you won’t really focus on me. My words won’t resonate because you’re too lost in something else, like having a conversation with someone who is listening to a podcast with the TV on in the background.
I told him that I was excited about the future, but that didn’t mean that there weren’t things to talk about. That throwing problems out on the table and seeing what they look like in the light wasn’t a bad thing. He said, “you’re right, of course.” Then he proceeded to berate me for acknowledging our problems.
In the past, this would have made me start trying to learn all the ways I can move in a relationship that won’t piss someone off, giving up the parts of myself that make me unique to please someone else. I’ve been there so many times, and it doesn’t help anyone. I’d rather keep finding other people who have also gone through that transformation. It says “I am not threatened by another person having feelings.”
One of the things that really got me was the incredible double standard. Daniel told me that he gets so busy with his writing that he disappears for days, so I thought nothing of it when I was in shutdown/burnout mode; I didn’t contact anyone. I can’t think of a single person who has ever chastised me for that except Daniel, as if I should have somehow divined that he was not okay with going a day without contact from me. Although I probably would have said something to the effect of “what I hear you saying is that it’s ok for you to dissociate, but when I do it I’m a bad partner.” What’s good for the gander has to be good for the goose, because again, I am not into being the classic definition of a wife.
He said something about “trying our best,” and I thought, “that’s not what I’m going to remember about you. So far, you’ve taken every problem we need to work out in order to be together and shut down like a steel trap when I wanted to talk about it. You see me as blaming you…. so until you see me as a partner that wants to work with you instead of someone who’s ‘laying all of this on you,’ I can’t help you.” I cannot live with someone who’s in Fantasyland right now, and it seems like he’s changed his mind about moving to Maryland, because originally, we were all going to find a place somewhere between DC and Baltimore, because Daniel is overqualified to work at Johns Hopkins. It’s fine that he doesn’t want to move anymore, but he could have said that instead of just invalidating my feelings. I was talking about Avery moving in with us or something like that…. I can’t remember what. But I said something about DC and Baltimore and he said, “or Dallas or Austin.” I never want to have that conversation again, because it was like he was doorknobbing me. I would never seriously think about moving back to Texas unless the circumstances were dire.
Plus, I don’t like Austin. I just don’t. It looks like Portland, because they wanted to be all weird and stole all their slogans, then just like Portland, big industry moved in and it wasn’t the same place to live anymore. But in the end, to me it just feels like a city full of bumper stickers that say Keep Portland Austin Weird, and The People’s Republic of Portland Austin.
They were also the first Texas city to get a Voodoo Donut, but you will never in your life know how weird it really was. The FDA shut them down for making doughnuts with NyQuil and Pepto Bismol in them, as well as caffeine. You aren’t OG Voodoo Donut unless you’ve been drunk at 3AM on Burnside….. before the second location, before the hype, before the notoriety.
That’s how I feel about Portland and Austin. The donuts will never taste the same, but Austin can imitate the feeling of those donuts………. poorly.
There are better donuts out there that have taken the place of Voodoo in PDX, but for a while Voodoo was this enigma.
I also don’t like moving at all. It was great when Daniel was headed up here already, that we’d talked about him moving here about this time last year. I realized that his PhD put us in the way of that, but I wasn’t daunted. However, I did think that it was very unfair of him to change plans without me and not let me know up front that in order for us to be together, he’d also like me to “come home.” I could have saved him a lot of trouble. That’s not a doorknob conversation. That’s a conversation you have to be up front about, and that’s my whole problem with Daniel and the many other emotionally unavailable people in my life. They call me demanding when I lay my feelings on the table and expect them to do the same so that I know what problems I need to work on in our relationship, too. But, if you think that the problem is always me, it’s not a relationship anymore.
I have always been the unseen child. I do not have to be the unseen adult, unless I just want that. I thought I did. Turns out, I had to let go of a lot of things to make me realize who I was. My destiny is not to belong to one person, but to belong to many so that I never have to put all my eggs in one basket ever again. I don’t want my husband or any of my partners to feel less important than the others, because they’re all a part of my family.
It is cooking, where we all make each other’s lives more interesting. For instance, I love hearing about Bryn’s journey through all her relationships. I love opening up to Zac and knowing that he’s capable of going toe to toe with me. I didn’t reach out to Daniel in a time of need, but abundance.
Daniel had been in a poly relationship before, so it wasn’t like I was springing anything new on him. But he didn’t want to talk about his own boundaries, only that he never wanted me to pit him against anyone else. There’s no way I would or could do that. It would be comparing bananas and oranges and giving up one rather than realizing that they’re both great in different recipes.
I didn’t want a relationship where Daniel lived in Fantasyland, thinking I’d wait around for him all the time while he did whatever he wanted while also wanting to be married while also not wanting to compromise on anything while also saving things up and exploding.
You have been reading about that relationship with someone else on this web site, which made me especially gunshy when I saw that shit coming towards me again. Blame the person for bringing up a problem, find a way to turn it back around on them, and be extremely stubborn about being vulnerable so now I always feel bad about bringing up this problem because I know this is how you’ll react every single time.
So many women learn the land mines because they feel they need a partner worse than they need to stand on their own two feet. I’m not that person, and I never will be.
I know you have your shit. I know I have mine. The difference between us is that I’m willing to tell people the truth as I see it. As in, “this is how your words are making me feel.” Then, they choose how they respond. When it is immediately defensive, I know they’re not ready to compromise on shit. They can’t even be open and honest with themselves, so why would they be with you?
When you know yourself really well, you don’t feel the need to get defensive all the time, because you know that you’re just as fallible as the other person. It’s always a matter of working out compromises with other people if you want a relationship with them. But if your reaction to another person telling you what they need from you is “there’s absolutely nothing wrong with me; how dare you,” then you’re in for a world of hurt. That kind of defensiveness takes years to work through in therapy, and you’re not a hospital for broken people. It’s too much to take on, because you’re either walking on eggshells or “starting fights,” with absolutely no in between.
Again, it took two hours for Daniel to go from “I’m having a bad day” to “you know what? This isn’t worth it.” It took him two hours to blame everything on me in my sleep because I just wasn’t attentive enough. I wasn’t attentive because neither was he. He showed me how to act. I wasn’t going to give him anything he wasn’t willing to give me.
Also, Zac and Bryn and I don’t talk every day, so it wouldn’t occur to me to treat Daniel differently unless he asked me to, and even then, I’d feel like a fuckup when I didn’t want to engage because my autism was struggling that day.
For all Daniel’s talk about understanding autism, it didn’t translate to actually improving communication, because I told him how I don’t social mask and he continued to treat me exactly the same…….. while also saying he got it.
In short, it was too much of a roller coaster, and it was easier to cut him loose and move on, knowing that I am the person I said I would be, and I will never have to play these childish games again.
It’s starting to stress me out that you can’t answer a blog prompt against, because I don’t really have a topic to start from each morning. Today wouldn’t have been a good one, anyway, because I don’t have any more morning/night rituals now than I did the first time around. The point still stands, though, that it was night to have a jumping off point and a tag everyone starts with every day, #dailyprompt and #dailyprompt-x, the number advancing every day. Well, since I have both tags for all of the prompts from last year, that’s why they already look like they’ve been answered this year. I’m sorry I’m on about this, it was just the main thing that kept me from being lazy and not posting something that day.
But yesterday wasn’t about laziness. I skipped yesterday because I was in burnout mode. I was more overstimulated than I’d been in a long time, because my schedule was all messed up. I needed time to recover and I took it. I slept, mostly. I am not as young as I continue to think I am.
If I have learned nothing from going to psychiatrists and psychologists over the years, it’s that medicine and therapy absolutely work and are valuable……… but so are sleep and sobriety. I don’t practice total abstinence from alcohol, because it’s okay to enjoy it once in a while. It’s just that if I am taking an antidepressant and drinking a depressant, I have not made any forward motion.
When I was in the restaurant business, I drank a lot more because that’s what we did after work. But, then after Dana got her DUI, we went to all these classes on medicine and alcohol (legally required for her, I just drove). It sent MY brain on fire. When I realized what was actually going on in my brain when I drank, I had a light bulb moment. It just didn’t feel like an every day sort of thing anymore.
Therefore, when I worked in a pub here in Silver Spring, I rarely drank. Occasionally I took them up on a beer, but they also had Maine Root Mexican Cola. That won nearly every night. It was a pub. None of the drinks we served had ice except for soda. With the choice of a room temperature beer or a cold soda with ice after a 12 hour shift on grill, it was a quick and easy decision. Give me the cold one.
I have shifted my focus into accommodating who I actually am instead of who everyone told me I was. Whoever I thought Leslie Lanagan was, I cannot say from before. I can only say that I saw the expectations in front of me and found all of them easy for a short period of time, and all of them untenable long term. I learned who my real friends were when I stopped social masking, and Doc was the first person who recognized it before I said it. “Do you think the authoritative part of yourself comes from you feeling more confident in confiding in me?” Yes, 100%. The more you allow me to be me without social masking, the more I want to talk to you. The more I want to open up to you.
I can only speak to the fact that the more I get to know myself, the more I learn how wrong I’ve been. Treating myself as perfectly mentally stable and perfectly physically able, just lazy and a drain on society has nearly killed me several times. I know that because I can only treat myself that way so long without realizing it’s not producing results.
Once I started being kind to myself, I could be softer, as well. That’s because I was living under everyone else’s expectations of what I should be able to do. I was not raised to be neurodivergent, and in some respects, not raised to even be fallible, either, because that is opening the kimono. The parish doesn’t get to live in the pastor’s house.
I didn’t “choose to air all of this out on my web site” re: Supergrover. I decided she wasn’t worthy of listening to my story anymore, because she’d told me she was tired of it. That did not mean there was no more story to tell. She just asked to stop listening to it. There’s so much context she’s missing, and what bothers me is that she told me that I’d aired some things she wanted to keep private, and in no way did I know any of that. When I started explaining, I went by the timeline of her e-mails, especially the ones where they said that her stories weren’t mine to carry anymore, that everyone already knew. She didn’t tell me any of it- no anger, no disappointment, no hurt, no anything. She just let it fester and wandered further from me. The thing I needed most was intimacy, but she didn’t want to give it to me. Not my call. It’s perfectly valid. But so is my hurt if that is her response. I am not saying that she did anything wrong. I am only saying that it is not her responsibility to have my reactions for me. If she wants distance, it’s just a different way of ending the game than I would have done it, but I get the same result and cannot be angry about that.
She says it’s a lot, that every letter is so dense. And at the same time, I don’t think she’d be as obsessed with reading my letters if they weren’t so deep and chewy. What brought us together has driven us apart.
Therefore, I went to my only other safe space in writing….. the part where it’s just me in my room, thinking to myself. I am writing these as letters to me in the future, which is why I cultivate this web site as what my friend Kristie called “my pensieve.” I am a really rare breed, I think….. someone who’s willing to let another person read their autistic mind in real time. I think it’s important, because generally, autistic people aren’t raised to be autistic. They know how their neurotypical adults handle the world, but they have no clue how an autistic person does it. And then add to that the large number of older women who are getting diagnosed now because it was entirely missed in their childhood due to having social masking beaten into them early. That social masking, those expectations, are what make an autistic person feel like an alien.
That’s because I am an aggressive taskmaster with myself, authoritative and stern without love because in addition to not giving myself empathy, I am a relentless perfectionist who doesn’t give a fuck about my feelings. I haven’t cared how bad I’ve made myself feel for not being perfect since I was born, because that’s how the outside world has treated me for years as well.
If you could have something named after you, what would it be?
Generally, things are named after you posthumously, and I don’t want to be given an award for the most original way to die, like accidentally rocking a Coke machine onto myself….. that’s a classic. In DC, I basically have the option of a museum, a statue, or a gravestone. However, the plots around Gore Vidal are already taken at Congressional cemetery, and I don’t live in The District proper. I’m not sure there are any other requirements to live there. But it wouldn’t matter. I’d rather be cremated because I don’t see anyone needing my body after the doctors with it (I am an organ, skin, and donor). I also don’t have a special attachment to one place, but a lot of them.
I’d like to become one with the Columbia River Gorge, because no one is going to rename that after me, but it’s where I’d like to spend eternity. And if you put me on the Washington side, I WILL KNOW. I don’t know how I will know that, but I do know that I’d take a lot of chances with ghosts, but I’m not one of them. I could outsmart me easily, because I create the logic. I don’t have to follow it. I am sure it is something that seems like a joke to me and yet is the source of all my real problems. I don’t have to follow what I say because I know what I think. I forget about the translation layer between neurodivergent and neurotypical people that makes me automatically sound immature and a little bit crazy because I haven’t thought it out. I’m like “The Doctor” in that way. People spend time with me and wonder how I get so far on half plans. It’s because I’m not threatened when they don’t work out or change. I just assimilate the new information into whatever the plan was before.
I realized I was struggling without Daniel because there wasn’t someone to social mask in the mornings. There was nothing to build anything with if we didn’t take the raw materials with which we started and put in the work. I don’t want to throw raw ingredients into a stock pot and hope for the best.
He told me that some of the things I said made him not want to engage. I said, “that’s fine and we can table it, but these are the important conversations to have and we can’t ignore them. Problems keep revisiting you.” He agreed with me and we moved on. I am not trying to make anyone feel bad, I’m saying, “this is the problem. What do you want to do about it?” Most people do not think of it as a problem unless it affects them. They rarely care when their actions affect you. What’s good enough for them is good enough for you in all cases, regardless of how their first family communicated.
I’m guilty of the same thing, but I’m trying to learn from my mistakes. I do not need everything to be doom and gloom all the time, but I do need for people to be emotionally mature and tell me how they feel instead of attacking me for bringing something up. It’s an easy and cheap shot that I will never let anyone get away with ever again. It’s the equivalent of “it’s not that bad. You’re imagining it. You’re dwelling on the past.” No, I’m telling you the feelings that are coming up for me now because of what happened in the past, and we can either deal with it now, or we can deal with it forever, because if this is always a one-sided conversation and it is important to me, it becomes a dealbreaker.
Yesterday, Daniel asked me how he could show me the most amount of love. My answer to that was twofold. The first is that if he really loves me, he’ll want a housekeeper before I move in…. one of those jokes that’s not meant to come off as a joke because I’m autistic/ADHD and I don’t remember anything going anywhere and I don’t create messes, I maintain them. They are piles, but it is my emotional support detritus.
Here’s why “emotional support detritus” is a thing. The first is that few houses come with built-ins where you can see anything inside. Every cabinet has a door. The neurodivergent brain has to have everything out in front of them all the time, because they do not create memories of where they place things. It’s a need for iron structure and an inability to create it with ADHD. I am a Virgo. Back to school has excited me since the 80s. I have bought every planning system known to God and man. The thing that has worked best is my original Palm Pilot with Graffiti 1. I never got the hang of Graffiti 2, and I am still butt hurt about it.
I might look on E-bay to see if I can find a Palm Pilot and a dock, because the form factor is so much smaller than my iPad and “Scribble” is harder to get used to than I thought it would be.
Interestingly enough, Graffiti 1 works really well on the Apple Watch, but it would be better if the Apple Watch supported the Apple Pencil because it’s so much easier to hand write with a stylus than it is with your finger, especially one as touch sensitive as the Apple Pencil.
I write like it’s Graffiti 1 anyway, because it’s easier than having to get all my letters perfect. It knows what I mean…… except for voice dictation. I have better luck when I’m on Bluetooth headphones, and I cannot be very far from my phone, because I think the voice files are actually processed on your phone rather than your watch.
I want an Apple Watch version named after me, because I have some good ideas. What if CIA gave us those batteries that lasted months without a recharge, and a chip that would fit inside a watch and be so powerful that you don’t need your phone for anything. I have a feeling that would involve creating a larger memory ROM, but surely if they have enough room for as much as they do now, they can put more RAM on the board. The biggest problem would be overheating, but if they can make tiles for a space shuttle to guard against heat, they can probably design something like that to absorb heat in an Apple Watch.
The battery is the main thing, because Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and a 5g connection all take a lot of battery at once, and that’s before it starts processing apps. The one I use the most is “Find My iPhone,” because I can make it make noise from my watch….. unless my phone is dead…. then I’m on my own and that’s not a pretty sight. Although because of the Apple ecosystem, as long as I have a wi-fi connection, I’ll still get iMessage on my iPad. I will still get iMessage on my phone, as well as SMS.
Although I think if I ever get a new Android tablet, I’ll want it to have a slot for a SIM card because I won’t use anything for texting on an Android but Signal, Wix Secure Messenger, and WhatsApp. I use Facebook Messenger because it’s easy, but it’s not encrypted, either. If you want to chat with me on either of those platforms and already have my phone number, please do.
On my author page at Facebook, you can leave all kinds of comments, and the more engagement I have, the closer I am to being paid. It also makes it where anyone can message me, you don’t have to be a follower (although it would be cool, no lie). Sometimes I wonder if I should do an FAQ on Facebook as an introduction, but I don’t know what people would ask. I’ll answer anything, you just have to respect that “no” and “that’s too private” are valid answers.
Anyone is welcome to contribute, from my biggest fans to my biggest detractors. I do not think I am the expert on anything but myself, and your stories are your stories. I often get so many likes on a post that I don’t know what triggered the reception. Is it the time of day, is it my content, is it my characters, etc.?
The biggest surprise is being more popular in other countries than I am here. I have a huge following in India and the UK. Plus, I have flags all over the world where I know who they are. If you don’t want me to know who you are based on geography, I would suggest a VPN. 🙂 I have so many people addicted to this web site that know me in real life, because they’re in the position where they don’t want to be written about, but they inhale everything I’ve written as truth because it is interesting and presented in a way that hopefully everyone can understand it. That I try as often as I can to use universal examples so that I’m not attacking anyone. I am laying down the facts as I see them.
Very few people are willing to stand by and let themselves be written as a villain, because that’s how they see themselves in my writing- not that I intentionally portray them that way. I have made it a point to record every up and down in every relationship, so that you don’t see me as paining anyone as perfect, not even Jesus.
Speaking of which, I am watching a docudrama on Netflix called “Testament,” and it’s all about Moses, starting with the story from when he was a child. The documentary part is interviewing all kinds of scholars from the Abrahmic tradition because he’s the only “character” that appears in all three holy books. There is a lot more information about him that way, and the Jews in the conversation have been very enlightening, because Jesus was a Jew. It’s fun learning about the traditions he would have been taught as a child, before he started branching out……. because in order to understand the future, you have to understand the past.
I can absolutely believe that as a historically known INFJ that his divinity started the moment he started arguing with the rabbis in the temple when he was 12 years old. That his divinity does not come from resurrection, but about being able to go toe to toe with the best theological minds in the world when he wasn’t even a man yet. His bar mitzvah was still a year away.
To me, I believe as Pete Rollins has said, that “a/theism is the greatest love story ever told, and the truth is in the slash.” To me, theology is not the end goal, whether there is a heaven and a hell, whether there is an afterlife at all. It is the ritual and the argument.
I got sidetracked when I was talking about Gordon Atkinson, who used to blog as “The Real Live Preacher,” as if he was a carnival act. I have never related more to anything in my life. He really opened up to me in those essays, and I understood myself so much better after reading him. I didn’t grow up to be a pastor, but I grew up with a pastor dad. It was hard not to feel like “The Real Life Preacher’s Kid,” because when you are a public figure’s family, you’re all in the fish bowl together……. and sometimes, two things happen…… severally or jointly. The first is that people think preacher’s kids are somehow better than everyone else. I mean, I am, but let’s not talk about Lindsay. (KIDDING)
I only say that because I really bought in. Lindsay was a walking wild hair, and I envied her for half my life because of it. Still do on days when she has to be “on” and I’m in burnout mode. I do my best work by standing behind her and just listening.
I did not have the strength (and sometimes still don’t) to have equal relationships with people by calling them on their bullshit. She learned it at three. I learned it at 45. There is a slight difference between those two ages, and I have to say that it probably comes from birth order. I was almost six when she was born, because her birthday is in June and mine is in September.
Therefore, I don’t have a lot of memories of what it was like to be an only child, but I do have quite a bit more than someone whose younger sibling was born when they were a toddler. I was blessed to have a sibling, because I was that kid. I talked about different stuff than most kids. I had the vocabulary of some adults by the time I was two or three because no one ever talked down to me. I was expected to keep up, and I did. Before Lindsay was born, I didn’t have that mostly neurotypical kid to intervene on my behalf. My main interest and what served me all through school was finding an outcast and sitting next to them, because I only wanted to talk to one person at a time.
Everyone thought it was because I was a preacher’s kid, and I’m sure that’s definitely part of it, but it’s not the whole story. I hate small talk, and if I was only sitting with one person, it wasn’t a good bet that we’d be doing small talk for very long.
That’s how Daniel became my boyfriend in 2nd/3rd grade. We were both “that kid.” We had more to talk about than basic 2nd grade shit, because we were both way beyond our peers with reading and music.
I will say something again that is meaningful to me about choosing Daniel. Not only did he know my mother, she taught him music for at least a year. So, that meant that Daniel was in some of my school plays with me, and my mother trained his voice. I can’t wait until we have our own house that will fit a piano, because I want to hear Daniel play my mother’s piano, as well. I am sure that it will become four-handed duets in no time, because I can’t keep the left and right rhythms going at the same time. If he doesn’t already play piano, I can at least teach him “All Blues” by Miles Davis.
Yes, Jason Moran. I know you’re terribly impressed right now. It is almost like I’m the savant you missed in taking on students. A pity, really (it’s got an easy bass line and like two or three chords). Although I’m pretty sure I’ve heard him play keyboards in his music, so I might get an accompanist out of this deal. 😉
I might get an accompanist, anyway, if Colin wants me to lay down some tracks for his band. I think we’d have a great time together since he plays guitar and I sing, plus he has professional recording equipment in his attic. I can’t wait to show Lindsay that room, because I think it would be her heaven. Maybe for once we could be in the same band. 🙂
Lindsay was in a band in college that I really liked called “The Cosmonauts,” and my favorite t-shirt at that time was “I’m with the band.” It went over really well with my in-laws…….. because I was wearing a nice sweater and when I took it off, it sort of amused and horrified them. I explained that it was my sister in the rock band, and I can’t tell whether that impressed or horrified them, either.
I have never been in a family that was really accepting of me, because I always felt like I had no right to take up room. When I felt like I had enough clout with Dana’s family to have my say, Dana was horrified because I was changing her family dynamics. Well, of course I was. You are introducing a whole new person.
With Kathleen, I think she really bought into the fact that she only wanted to have babies with men. And, to be honest, I think she was afraid of me becoming even more psychiatrically unstable because the research on taking antidepressants while pregnant suggested it would be dicey. But I didn’t care if Kathleen was the biological mom. I would have been happy either way. We just didn’t have enough money to swing it, or blamed it on that, anyway.
I think eventually I realized that I didn’t want to have kids with her, because even if I wasn’t the extra kid, she’d always treat me like that because that’s how she treated me currently.
My biological clock went CRAZY when I got together with Dana, because she was the right person to have kids with, even in retrospect. I would have preferred her to carry the baby, but she wasn’t buying it. She said she’d do it as a last resort. But by the time wee got to the OB/GYN, the phrase “geriatric pregnancy” did not sound appealing and we just kind of put the idea away.
I don’t think either one of us were actually capable of integrating an infant into our schedules without major changes, most notably getting out of cooking because Dana would never make enough money to support housing for both of us if we were depending on me to make all the money. My job history isn’t that stable with all the medical conditions I have, and it’s hard to integrate just how many doctors’ appointments I have without a cooking job, because my days off weren’t generally Saturday and Sunday. I could schedule my appointments in the morning and still be on time for work.
However, I have IT to fall back on, and as far as I know, Dana doesn’t. I didn’t pressure her to go into it at all, Aaron just noticed she was a great coder. She wanted to be a teacher, but didn’t make that a reality, either. We moved to Houston so that she could teach, because you didn’t need a Master’s there. She was rejected by one program and didn’t try to get into any others. It’s a shame. She would have been a marvelous teacher. I just don’t think she was in any shape to be a teacher by the time we arrived in Houston.
I don’t blame her in any way, shape, or form. The only appropriate reaction to an abnormal situation is an abnormal reaction. She was very depressed and I understood intimately. The problem was that I was also very depressed, and I couldn’t handle Dana’s depression at the same time.
Then, I got an influx of “new relationship energy” that was supposed to be clean, light, and fun. Well, since I was a jackass and told her my feelings were starting to change, she started not telling me things, as if that would make the situation better. I was guessing too much of the time as to what would make her happy, all the while making her ridiculously angry and not knowing why.
Enter Daniel.
“Oh, wait. You’re autistic. That changes EVERYTHING. If you’ve told me this before, I don’t mean to make you rehash, but tell me again how your autism affects you.”
It was the end of all the feeling like he was being bombarded by questions, because he’s a Doc. He saw which way that train was going and hopped on.
As we were talking, he said, “do you think the authoritative part of your personality is that way because you feel safer to express what you feel to me?” That was a lightbulb moment for me, because it’s exactly the thing I’ve been trying to explain to everyone for all time. If I don’t think you can handle my feelings, I won’t tell you what they are. If you don’t like my tone, you can tell me to rephrase something. But the more I don’t feel like I have to social mask around you, the more I let my guard down and I start writing like I’m blogging- to an international audience and not an audience of one. So, even if it’s not a personal attack, it comes across like one because I am not running what I say through every filter ever. I want those closest to me, especially someone I want to build a life with, to be able to take me at full strength. Daniel has agreed that he’s just as intense as I am, but the thing that was the most valuable about this conversation was feeling seen. And not just seen by Daniel as my partner, but seen by Daniel the doctor as well.
Otherwise, he wouldn’t have said, “oh, shit. This changes everything.”
It does, and I’m looking forward to every fucking minute.
I’m getting tired of the daily blog prompts saying I’ve already answered them, because I often have new ideas the second time the prompt comes around. Today, though, I’m glad I got nothin,’ because there’s been a change, and I really can’t tell you why. Magda decided that she didn’t want to move with me, and told Colin she wasn’t coming. I don’t know why. So, I was very scared that all of the sudden, I didn’t have a place to go, either, because I couldn’t afford to pay for both rooms all by myself. Colin said not to worry, that I could still move in, and my body relaxed. I think he hopes Magda will change her mind, but I have never seen it happen. I feel bad, that maybe we’ve done something to alienate her? But that’s impossible because neither one of us have had conversations since the last one we had together.
So, I have to stop worrying about all of that and just be glad that when my boyfriend arrives to be the muscle in the operation, I still have an address to point him.
That struck me as funny all of the sudden…… that if you never really thought you’d ever have a boyfriend, God laughs and you wind up with two. 😉 Two that know about each other, and aren’t threatened by each other………. very much like I wasn’t threatened by the idea of Michael for Supergrover even at the height of feeling absolutely waylaid by an arrow to my Achilles’ heel. We had two completely separate roles in her life, and I was incredibly far away. He was on the ground. It’s the same now. Daniel is incredibly far away. Zac is on the ground. Neither of us should expect the other to be monks for years on end, and that’s not what poly is, anyway. It’s not being able to divide love up between more people, but to love multiple people 100%. That gets tricky in terms of time, but not feelings.
I have never told Bryn that I loved her INSTEAD OF Supergrover (nor told Dana I loved her INSTEAD of Supergrover, or vice versa), so I wouldn’t do it to anyone else. Bryn doesn’t tell me she loves me INSTEAD OF Dave, and I’m glad because again, two completely separate roles in Bryn’s life. W
e’ve been through so much together, more than I’ve been through with either guy, she’s been through more than she’s been through with Dave. I just don’t care whether it’s a yellow string or a red one, if you’re connected to me, you’re important. My time is just as sacred for my close friends, and always will be.
It helps that The War Daniel is in the Navy, because since his classes are online that does open us up to him being able to visit on standby. As long as I have a way for him to watch wrestling on Wednesday nights (God help us all).
Colin has cable, but he’s interested in cutting the cord. I wish I still had my old computer. I’d have a media center set up for him within the week, because I already know how to cut the cord effectively. You can have everything, including a DVR, for the cost of a cheap computer. Well, I suppose the DVR also depends on how good the signal is from your antenna, but the point stands. I can also install Kodi (media center software) on my FireStick with a little bit of hackage.
And yet, all of that is a story for another day because for right now, it’s about how to fit all of my stuff into my new moving boxes. I want to pack everything except for the sheets/blankets and some clothes. Boxes stacked in here will be easier to keep clean and neat should we have visitors. The visitors are by appointment only, but I’d like to mitigate my ability to be me as much as possible.
No one was here to rescue me on this one. I had to do it all by myself. I had to reach out to people and tell them I was interested in looking. I had to be brave and make phone calls, which seems ridiculous and yet Gen Z just went, “oh my GOD, are you okay?” I ended up in a wonderful situation with more space than I thought I would get (at first, I’m sure someone will move in). The other thing is that I get to stay in my neighborhood, and it turns out that’s pretty important to me, too. I’m a Marylander now.
That may not always be the case, as I love Virginia, too. I just feel that it’s easier for me to own my space up here. I will never run into anyone I don’t want to see, and that covers a hell of a lot of ground. You cannot imagine how relieved I was to learn that there’s a Waffle House on my side of the river, as poorly as that trip turned out.
It is definitely time for a change, but not one so big that I meltdown and burnout in a cycle until I relearn my surroundings. I wanted to avoid all of it, and I think I’ve managed successfully…….. because did I mention that Colin lives two major stoplights from my current house?
Apparently, when you answer one of WordPress’s prompts, it remembers. So, even though I answered the prompt when it first came around, I’m not eligible to answer it again. The prompt was “what’s something that most people don’t understand?” If I remember correctly, I wrote an entire essay on how most people don’t understand themselves. How blogging is kind of a superpower that way, especially when you write every day. I understand myself because I go back and look at the entries from the last few days before I write the current one. That way, I can see if what I said then is still true. My mind works very fast, and is a busy place. I’m also not afraid to admit I’m wrong, so a good bit of knowing myself is saying, “Ok. I felt this…. but I don’t feel that anymore…. this is still good…. that can go in the back of the closet, etc.” It is a quilting of my life, because not everything is bad and not everything is good. But in order for me to see perspective with clarity, I have to be brave enough to read my own writing.
That’s the hardest part of blogging, the reading your own writing. Even when what you’ve said is embarrassing, you have to stand next to it because it was all how you felt in that moment, even if you don’t feel that way anymore. Also, processing my feelings about other people makes me feel closer and further away from them, too. When I think about what has happened to me over my life, none of it compares to my reaction at what I’ve allowed. No one affects me more than me, and I have not done things I needed to do to protect myself, and have also done too much. Apparently, I don’t know a whole lot about balance, but I don’t know many neurodivergent people who do.
For instance, yesterday I told The War Daniel that enough time had passed between us and we should start talking again. We agreed that we were assholes to each other. That I hoped he realized that I was never going to abandon him in rehab, and he told me he didn’t feel that way. We’re healing, a day at a time, and I get pictures of “my kids and grandkids,” who are apparently cats, a service dog, and a snake (between The War Daniel and his daughter, Cora). The War Daniel is getting his PhD in English literature, and it’s fun to hear about that project, too.
I realized that if The War Daniel wasn’t brave enough to come to me and say he was an idiot, then it was on me. Because it wasn’t a matter of losing or winning a fight. It was a matter of losing or winning Daniel.
I told him that I’d lived on something Cora said for a year….. “I don’t think your faith in my father is misplaced.” He said it was such a relief. I am not rushing for any specific outcome, I’m just glad to have the big rift healed. We’ll either end up moving in together or we won’t, but that’s not my main goal. My main goal is getting us stable enough to be able to communicate every day without leaving pricks on the other’s skin that won’t heal anymore. I don’t have time for things to fester, because I don’t want to live with that level of insecurity in my life.
So, at the very least, I have solved the most important rift in my life, and that is enough. Two important rifts, if you count the peace I feel after getting Supergrover’s letter and letting her go back to what she’s used to with her own family. I feel like that rift is fixed, because she’s welcome to show up with real feelings just like she did previously, she’s just not welcome to kick the can down the road and make me think we’re fine when we’re not.
I am stronger than that. I can take it. Whatever our real problems are, that’s what I’m built to solve, not to figure out the neurotypical games that come with talking around being anxious/upset/angry.
I’d rather just get back on the same page with someone, even if the writing we’ve previously done is good and we have to scrap some. Daniel and I have a new timeline and a new vision, but I decided that if I was quiet, I was part of the problem.
Now, there is hope where there wasn’t before.
Hope that I didn’t know was there, but had to ask and see.
I promised both you and The War Daniel that I would not give up until he’d been out of rehab a year and his brain wasn’t fuzzy anymore. I kept my word, and I was right. That was the surprise, that I was right. That we’d both been assholes under extreme pressure but it didn’t mean we didn’t love each other.
Other than that, though, nothing changes. He’s in grad school in NE Texas and will be for the foreseeable future, though his classes are online because his tuition assistance also comes through Texas, but once he’s done with school, he’d definitely think about moving here, because he wanted to last year as well. Cora has also said that if Daniel moves here, she wants to come with him because trans laws in Texas are terrible. So, all of these are things that need to be discussed a little bit at a time, while our timeline is long enough not to miss anything.
I have found that Daniel and I are both driven to write, and we need to cut that shit out. For instance, I think we should start video calling at least once a week to FORCE ourselves to stop being writers. This seems like it should be a joke. It’s not. Writer personalities are real and deep.
Supergrover and I have rarely ever gotten out of it, and if the same were to happen with Daniel, I think our relationship would go the same way- not feeling it as secure and real because it’s just text.
I learned the difference with Zac, who sends me pictures of him and Oliver, who leaves voice notes, etc. It helped me get out of my writer personality with him because there were more than just paragraphs to our relationship.
Supergrover doesn’t have time to send me pictures of herself and her dogs on a schedule, nor does she have a committed time for voice notes. The ones I’ve got, though, are priceless. They indeed made me feel close to her in a different way, an added layer. Getting to know the way she talks felt intimate- the mask in front of all her words after I’d internalized them.
Therefore, in online relationships I’m different now. This is not an online relationship because I’ve known The War Daniel since we were seven…. but it’s online now because that’s how we can communicate across states easily. I want voice notes. I want video calls. I want everything to feel as grounded as humanly possible.
Describe a phase in life that was difficult to say goodbye to.
First of all, :::checks notes::: WordPress, it’s “describe a phase in life in which it was difficult to say goodbye.” Just like it’s not “where’s the library at?” It’s “where’s the library at, asshole?” Never end a sentence with a preposition.
I do it a little bit.
Humor before I start diving deep this morning, because there have been many, many times in which it was Boyz II Men hard to say goodbye.
The first time it was a really hard transition was moving from Galveston to Naples the summer after first grade. I loved the beach (my sister did not- she used to run away from the waves saying “don’t. Don’t! Don’t!). I mean, she got over it…… she did get married in Galveston. The cultural difference between living on the island and living in small town Texas wasn’t hard because I didn’t like it. It was just a transition. I was especially close to my friends Asbury and Beulah Lennox, who kind of took over being my grandparents when my own grandparents were so far away. The bonus was moving about 12-15 miles from my biological grandparents, a complete change as well.
I do not do well with change, and I’m glad we moved in the summer so I could ease into it. Incidentally, since The War Daniel was not a member of our church, I didn’t meet him until September. I can’t remember when it was second or third grade when we made it official. 😉 I will say that it wasn’t until I met The War Daniel that I felt truly comfortable, the INFJ/INTJ people we have always been. We were the book nerds, the music nerds, and the ones who didn’t give a fuck if people thought we were weird. We both have this historical Jesus personality, we just come at it from different directions. He’s a thinker. I’m a feeler.
Editor’s Note:
Two things. The first is that “The War Daniel” is a play on words, because of John Hurt in Doctor Who- “The War Doctor.” Daniel was a Doc in the Navy, embedded with a team of Marines.
The second is that if I say that I or anyone else has a “Jesus” personality, or that “it’s as hard to be me as it was to be Jesus,” I’m talking about his day to day life, not that I or anyone else has a Savior complex. Jesus cannot be much different than any current pastor (especially those in clerical collars willing to be arrested at protests), because he was a rabbi, though they didn’t have that term back then.
Incidentally, there is also no evidence one way or the other that Jesus wasn’t married, and it’s been a debate for centuries; think Catholic vs. Protestant- Catholic priests are told they have to bear the burden of ministry alone, because they can’t love everyone if they love only one person that deeply…. takes away objectivity or something. The Protestants, like The Avatar, discovered that pastors could not do it without a support system. His partner could have been anyone from John, the Disciple marked as “whom Jesus loved,” and I have not looked at the original Greek or Hebrew to see if there’s more context, like philia or agape. But right now, I’m willing to say that there is no evidence Jesus was gay one way or the other, either, because there is also a debate on Mary Magdalene.
Supergrover actually sent me several novels about this, and it’s basically that Jesus and Mary were married and were writing their own Gospel, the Book of Love. It does make sense. After Jesus died, the story is that Joseph of Arimathia (rich merchant) helped Mary and the children escape to France. It is, of course, fiction….. but based on the little evidence we do know. It’s just been too long, there’s too many questions that will always be unanswered. So, Jesus is who you need him to be, not the other way around…… as long as you realize that Jesus did not come here only to comfort the distressed. He came here to also distress you out of your comfort. No power over. Power with. It’s why he was peaceful about it, but probably hated the Sanhedrin because they were the most vociferous Jews regarding law and very little around compassion, which has no bearing on the church today.………….
I think what The War Daniel misread as anger was actually fear. We should have video called more before he went to rehab, but we’re *both* writers, and lapsed into that personality way too easily…. which took away too much of our compassion. I also know that being in a relationship your first year out of rehab is absolutely not advisable, so when we got engaged, I kept dating Zac because it really didn’t bother him. Because Zac is poly, Daniel knew he was no threat. That if Zac and I are building a life together, it consists of exactly what is happening now. I have so much love for him because he’s a solid dude as a friend and as a boyfriend. How our relationship is supposed to go is unknown. I just know that we probably won’t get closer than we are now. Neither of us has the time.
It wasn’t that we were rushing into anything, we were just each other’s end game. Daniel didn’t offer to marry me because of anything but I needed it for the health care and benefits as a military dependent. And it was his idea not because I wanted it, but because he saw I needed it.
So, the hardest transitions I have to talk about today are the summer before I met Daniel, and the months after he left.
The reason I chose to write about this instead of the transition after my mother died is that I just can’t go there today. So, I will tell you what I was feeling in the moment, instead. It is so raw and real that if you are also in grief, it might help you as well.
The ones who have helped me through all these transitions just being kind enough to sit with me and listen.
Now that I’ve had so many days posting in a row, I’ve missed a couple. One was due to two things. The first is that I was exhausted. The second is that it was Galentine’s Day, and I chose to spend my time focusing on my sister (that was 13 Feb). The second was yesterday, because the prompt was “what is your favorite drink?” Now, I could have written about Dr Pepper Zero YET AGAIN, but I include it in so many entries that I didn’t think it needed its own.
Except to say that if you go to Waco, Texas, you will find both the Dr Pepper Museum and The Fort House. My paternal grandmother is a Fort, and it’s the story of her family. I believe those two things are related, because I never saw my grandmother drink anything but Dr Pepper and occasionally, sweet tea. She was sure that it had medicinal properties, and who am I to disagree with my grandmother?
In terms of what bores me the rest of the time, it’s things like RTFM (reading the fucking manual) with software, because I’d rather just play around until I break something. I don’t like reading EULAs (end user license agreements) because I know for damn sure that Facebook, Windows, et al are going to do exactly what they said they wouldn’t do, they’ll just hide it in the background.
In terms of apps that are watching you for possible malice, I’d pick Tik Tok. It’s bad enough when my own government wants my information, much less China. I’m so terrified of the Chinese government that I don’t even want to go there. I know it’s beautiful, I know the people are nice, and I know I’d be thrown in jail with one blog entry or YouTube video, because I would use all my American freedoms to say whatever I liked, forgetting that I am not, in fact, in America.
I am sure that there are all sorts of tips and tricks for surviving a trip to China as an American, but I’m not interested. I’d rather go to a country where I’m already allowed to say what I want to say. So, basically, China bores me because I wouldn’t be able to tell you anything real about my trip until I was safely back home.
I’d rather go somewhere my writing is not threatening, which leaves out Russia, but I’d love to go to Ukraine when the war is over. I got a taste of it through watching “Servant of the People,” and so if it was possible, I’l like to meet President Zelenskyy as well. He’s such a great writer. I wouldn’t want to talk to him about politics, but about how he created his mom, dad, sister, and niece for the show, plus his cabinet. It’s such a funny sendup of all politicians, and you should watch it if you have Netflix. At least the first season is up (in Ukrainian with subtitles).
Foreign movies and TV used to bore me, but not now. I am one of those people that will sit there and scroll on my phone, losing the immersive experience of watching television- but you can’t do that with foreign movies and TV because you have to read the subtitles.
Speaking of foreign shows, I also love Mr. Brain from S. Korea and Osmosis from France. Mr. Brain is on Apple TV+, and Osmosis is also on Netflix.
Mr. Brain is a doctor that learns to transplant one person’s brain into another, but he starts with himself… building up….. so of course he eventually has human memories from other people. However, one of the funniest was when he crossed himself with a cat. I think that was because the cat saw something about a murder and he needed to see the cat’s view. There were….. side effects.
Osmosis is one of those classic sci-fi shows where someone has invented a scientific way for you to find your permanent love match. It just feels a little different from the French perspective- not so formulaic…… and boring. To be fair, I’ve watched all of Dr. Brain and all of Servant of the people, and I’m only on episode two of Osmosis. So, caveat emptor.
Finance bores me because I do not understand the first thing about money except “don’t spend it.” I could live on that principle for the rest of my life, because I say “bore,” but the reality is more complicated. Even reading a textbook or a web article on finance leads to autistic meltdown and burnout. So, I approach finance with the best of intentions and then slowly feel like my body is breaking down. The boring part is just looking up the articles that I need. Once I find what I’m looking for, the panic attack starts.
I do not think I could answer a question about a single thing regarding bank and finance because I get lost at simple terms like “amortization.” I have found that it is not a case of fear, necessarily. It is a case of my autism saying, “nope. We don’t do that.” Demand avoidance is real when your nerves feel like they’re catching on fire and you cannot function.
The fact that I ever thought I could be a good partner to anyone is frightening because I now realize that I had to lean on them far too much. I also don’t know what to do about that, except trying my best to get into a program for autistic people that helps me deal with meltdown and burnout appropriately. I am nowhere near the only person that shuts down when talking about complicated things. It’s just that for me, the complicated things are logical and the easy things are emotional.
I think that’s why I’m solidly on the polyamory train, because I do not want to be in the position of leaning on one person all the time. I am a lot. I know it. My partners/friends become bored/frustrated with me easily and need a break. The only person who doesn’t get a break from me is me, and I wish that was the case as much as they do.
It’s interesting being the only INFJ in my group of friends, because I come off as intense even when I don’t mean to be. To me, they are poignant questions that need to be asked….. but not necessarily questions to which I need answers. They do. I have started saying something important to Zac, because I do not want him to feel like I am prying into his life at all. I just want him to know that he’s loved and supported. So, I say things like, “rhetorical question that I don’t need you to answer, just chew on it.” I hope it’s working well, because I don’t want to ever put him on the spot, and if these were questions about me, then I would expect an answer. But they’re not. They’re things I’ve listened to that have happened at work, social functions, etc. Therefore, it’s okay to ask the question. It’s not okay to expect an answer when it’s not my bag.
I just want Zac to the best person he can be, and I know that in some ways I am helping. He was the one that told me that I inspired him to start writing every day. The cover picture on my author page is the chalkboard painted wall in his entry way, and his handwriting that says, “You Should Be Writing.”
He took it down, so I wrote “You Should Be Writing” the last time I was there. I would like to believe it stayed more than a day. 😛 TFW someone is calling you out…….. and that worked both ways, otherwise his handwriting wouldn’t be my cover photo.
I did experience a moment of success with demand avoidance. My dad told me he needed a file I’d created for him and when I checked my hard drive, it wasn’t there. So, I recreated it for him within the hour. This is all while I was battling a stomach bug, and it was no small thing to be able to transition from upchucking to sitting at my desktop with a trash can next to me. But I did it. A small victory.
When I think back on how bad I wanted to be Supergrover’s partner, it’s now embarrassing because I thought I was on top of the world in terms of being able to do the thing. As in, of course I could manage a partner, kids, a job, and the fast and furious pace of a suburban mom. To be fair, I would have gotten a lot more support from her kids than I would from her or Dana (in the past) and not because her kids are around. She may or may not be. But I would have supported her like Dana, and it wouldn’t have been enough. That’s because both of us were bad at ignoring things and not making lists. It’s not laziness, it’s a genuine disability if you’ve read any neurodivergent book ever.
I also think that I would have been stuck in the same repetitive pattern, because people who are cut off from their emotions aren’t generally cut off in one way. I can tell you the exact moment I realized it, seeing something posted on her social media. But I can’t be specific. I can only say that I’m so glad she’s straight…. JFC. I would have been in over my head from day one.
I think the difference is that she has worked with neurodivergent people in many different settings, so perhaps she would have caught my autism faster than I would have in person. And then it would have been off to the best doctors available because not only did I need help, so did she. When I want to be with a partner, I make the promise to keep myself strong for them. It is not their responsibility to “fix me.” She might have told me the doctors I needed, but after that, I’m on my own. I need to show whether I can fly under my own power.
The only reason she didn’t catch it in me first is that it’s hard to tell over e-mail. Basically, we couldn’t get to a place either of us liked because of the gap in communication.
I’m determined not to do that with Zac or anyone else in my future, because it has gotten me nothing in the past. It touches me to my core that he’s just as honest with me. He asked me if I would come and help clean his house because he was going through a thing I also go through. I got there and he was very apologetic, and I said, “Zac, if it was my house, would you be there?” Of course he would. I’ve just never asked.
So, not much bores me it seems. Humans are interesting, and an endless subject because there are so many of us.
And I hope that in laying out how I work, you see yourself here, too.
When my bipolar was flipping me out, I decided to check myself into the psych ward at Methodist Hospital because something just wasn’t right. My mood and behavior were all over the place. The first time I felt better was twofold. The first is that I discovered they had the good ice in the cafeteria, the kind you get at Sonic or Dairy Queen. There was no hour of any day that I didn’t have a 32 oz cup filled with that ice and whatever they were serving that day. Sometimes it was orange juice. If I was lucky, I could find a Diet Coke. Mostly, it was just water because the drink didn’t matter. The second is that once I had a drink in my hand, it was time to go find the best friend I had that week. He was a Viet Nam vet.
Our story starts when I walked up to him and said, “what are you in for?” He said, “murder.” I never left his side after that. 😛 I actually got mad at a nurse over his situation, because he said that the beds were too high for him to get into them (he was in a wheelchair). I talked to a nurse about it, and she said, “that’s not your problem to worry about. That’s ours.” I said, “well then, it looks like you need to do your job.” I give no fucks when it comes to nurses, because they do stupid shit all the time. I was a persona non grata after that, but I could give a shit. They were making my friend’s life harder…. and they are not gods. In fact, I got in really big trouble when he got let out a day before me and I hugged him goodbye. They screamed at me that there was no hugging.
What they didn’t know is that I’d been taking a shower with my roommate all week because she told me she was afraid she was going to cut herself in the shower. She and another person on my ward put everything in perspective for me because my roommate was trying to kill herself in the hospital and wanted support to not; one of the women in my cohort had a big red, angry X on each of her wrists. I did what I always did in that situation- started taking care of everyone else but me, because I was also halfway to “Spongebob Headstone,” but what pulled me out of it was realizing that I was trying to get better and they had a longer road than I did. It made me irrationally angry at the nurses and all they didn’t see. They’re not the sharpest knives in the drawer at times.
For instance, once my stepmother left her umbrella at the nurses’ station and said, “put my name on it so no one else takes it.” In what world does that not mean “put a note on it?” They wrote her name on her umbrella in Sharpie. I could go on, but I won’t. That example is enough to cover A LOT of ground.
The reason I felt so comfortable with the Viet Nam vet is that one of my best friends in Portland worked for the motor pool in the Army. He taught me everything I know about cars, and though I can do some things on my own, my favorite thing is for a mechanic to stand over me and tell me if I’m doing it right. For instance, much easier to bleed brakes with a buddy. When we got to Houston, we put power steering on Dana’s car because it came with rack and pinion. Our next door neighbor was a mechanic, and he said that he was really impressed that we managed to do it all in the driveway instead of in a shop.
My dad bought Dana’s car, and then her parents gave her some money, so he told her that she could be in charge of buying my car to pay him back. She never did, and I don’t remember why. I just remember that my friend and I did probably $2,000 worth of work on her car for free, and even that wasn’t enough to make her realize I needed a car as well.
It worked out okay because Dana didn’t have a job and could take me where I needed to go. But it wasn’t the same. My brother in law ended up giving me his old car instead. It was a Toyota Corolla, and I had more fun with it than the law should have allowed (but I never wrecked it, a miracle with my eye situation).
Now, by Dana buying me a car, my dad was not talking about a brand new one. He knew that I could work on cars, and our mechanic was still here. So, I could buy a beater and add everything I wanted aftermarket. I just don’t want you to think that she got the old car and I was supposed to get “the new one.” I wanted an old Saturn just like hers.
I believe that hearing this story was why my friend laid it out and said, “you need to get away from her, because she steps all over you and you don’t even notice.”
He was right. I let her get away with far too much because she’s a very strong personality and I am an introvert. At first, it was perfect because she could be the person that dragged me out of my house. Over time, her extroversion led her to easily be able to steamroll me because I wasn’t interested in arguing about something. Whatever she wanted to do was fine. I didn’t realize how much of myself I was losing in the process.
When I moved to DC, both in 2001 and in 2015, my number of military friends doubled just because of the neighborhood. For instance, on our street alone we have retired military, retired intelligence, and retired Secret Service.
To be retired from these things does not mean you are old. Zac is going to retire from the military next year. I think that will make him 36 or 37. I say this to prove that our neighborhood is not all old fogies like me. 😛
One of the first dates I had when I got here was with a spy who was on loan to us from MI-6, working on a human trafficking project. Now, I do not have any idea in the slightest why she told me she was MI-6, but I don’t think I was being catfished or anything. Maybe in England it’s not illegal to say you’re part of (at the time), her majesty’s secret service.
It was Thanksgiving night, and I was busy with my family. I was very late, and she rightfully left quickly. I was very happy about that, because I realized that I was about to get on the wrong train. For instance, if I dated her, it would have been harder to date Zac. He does not need me to have anyone on my contact list that works for a foreign intelligence agency….. and I can’t get away from his contact list because I’m one of his partners.
It kind of makes me worried that CIA or any of its derivatives would see my interest in intelligence as threatening, because I don’t want to know anything that’s classified. I’ve sought out retired spies because I want to know history before I start writing fiction. The operations don’t even matter. What does it take to do the job? What kind of personalities are in the room? Who are the people who Get Shit Done, and who are the people who would write your name on your umbrella with a Sharpie?
Though John le Carre has actually taught me more about this than my retired spy friends, because his whole schtick was showing MI-6 as it really is. There are lazy government wonks and amazingly good spies and they all inhabit the same building. I have no doubt that there is a real place like Slough House.
Speaking of which, I just realized why the show is called “Slow Horses.” It’s a play on words for “Slough Housers.” In the US, Langley is sort of “Slough House,” because if you make a mistake at CIA, you have to stay at the head shed and work a desk job. Or maybe you get sent to a country no one really wants as an assignment, and it’s not Chief of Station. It’s akin to starting off as a chaiwala (for my Indian friends).
It reminds me of my friend Stephen Johnson (now deceased) who thought he was going to be assigned to Viet Nam because it was that era (not a spy, a diplomat for State as far as I know). He said he ended up in the wilds of Montreal.
Dana always said that one of her great aunts was a spy. She was right. I went through a thousand interviews with case officers/diplomats, and I found her. I was looking for Stephen, and she also popped up. Very much a part of the whole Viet Nam clusterfuck Stephen wanted to avoid. She was there for some of the most horrific things each country did. I seem to remember that she was there when Dien Ben Phu fell. She was long dead by the time I married Dana, but she would have been one of the people that I would have wanted to hear everything.
One of the things that I hope The Agency gets if they ever come after my blog is that I’m trying to get enough facts to write a book, not to take down the agency itself. I find myself learning more through conversation/e-mail than I do reading books, though I do a lot of that, too. I just use both modes of learning because books are for plot, retired spies are for characters.
It also makes a difference if you’re talking to someone in a public facing job or a private one. Those are two different stories, always…. and both relevant.
But even if CIA was so interested in my writing that I got put in jail over it, at least I’d know what to say when they asked me what I was in for….. “murder.”
How do significant life events or the passage of time influence your perspective on life?
As a blogger, I have a perspective on life that is more accurate than most, because I cannot tell myself in the moment how something happened 10 years ago unchecked. I will go back and look. I do not have any moral superiority, because I can only go back to what I was thinking at the time, not another person’s thoughts. Therefore, it’s not “I’m right on the principle.” It’s “I’m right in that this is what I told you, and this is what you said at the time.” People confuse the two, because it’s “throwing things back in their faces.” To me, it is Brené Brown 101. I am checking the story you are telling yourself, because my blog made me check the one I was telling me.”
People think that I am pointing out that they’re lying. No, it’s “now you’ve told me two different stories and I need you to explain why your thinking has evolved.” I don’t care why there are two stories. I’m autistic and I want to know how everything works in your mind. I do not need judgment and I haven’t given any. I am asking for information, and people do not like that (as a general rule).
I complain about bosses who say “explain to me how this happened,” and then when I proceed to explain an autistic amount (which is, granted, neurotypically exhausting), they’ll reply, “I don’t need your fucking excuses.” I complain because I do not understand asking for information and refusing it. In short, I do need your fucking excuses. I just don’t call it that because I’m not going to judge you on your answers. I just want the whole story when you think I should pick it up on my own. That’s because there are social expectations everywhere that I cannot pick up, and you are setting me up for failure by “knowing” what I’m going to do next because of them.
My perspective also changes because I take in information through reading and writing, so I retain a lot of what I write, and what I go back and read here later…. which I often do because nothing spurs something I’m going to say like taking an old thing I said and turning it upside down and backwards because new shit has come to light.
If I didn’t, I would sit in anger and bitterness all the time. In short, this blog is my “Let It Go.” I’m not going to do it in a moment, but you’ll see the process as I make my peace. There’s very little that’s truly important in life, and you’ll begin to see what I think is and isn’t. And mostly that I am vulnerable enough to admit when I’m wrong, both when I see it in myself and when I yield to another person.
But I will never appreciate the phrase “throwing it back in my face,” because that’s an autistic trait, to see pattern recognition in everything, including behavior. When I am pointing out pattern recognition in relationships, I am actually trying to make us stronger by saying, “this problem has come up six times now- why does it always come up in the same way? It always hurts me. How can we make it stop?” The other person always makes it about them, because me noticing pattern recognition is more offensive to them than fixing the problem. The “how dare you” aspect is strong in a lot of my friends.
I notice my own patterns of behavior accurately and I love it when other people can do it for me. You also have to be strong enough to deal with criticism because I know what I will tolerate and what I won’t; it’s not because I’m trying to hurt you. I know me. What will make me feel better and what won’t. If you cannot hear me on those things, I do not want a relationship with you.
This is the standard by which we should all run our relationships. “How do I feel when I am with you?” If I constantly feel invalidated, I am not going to stay. You cannot hear me, and when my problems fall on deaf ears and yours never do, then I’m out. For instance, if you are vulnerable with me and tell me about a problem going on in your life, I will listen until you are ready to stop talking. Just vent for hours if you need it. I expect the same of my friends, because I do not want to be someone’s emotional dumping ground when they’re upset and too busy to take my calls.
I get that I’m a lot. What I don’t get is how many people refuse to acknowledge that they’re the same. All people are a lot. To love someone is huge, because you have to accept a whole lot of good and bad behavior without blinking. That’s why I do not believe in love at first sight. Infatuation and sexual attraction? Surely.
I don’t think you can say you love someone until you’ve wanted to smother them in their sleep with a pillow AND ALSO would give them an organ AND ALSO take care of them if they were sick, travel with them, and smile through family functions even if you didn’t want to go because even if they don’t, you feel like half of them hate your guts. You don’t love someone until you’re willing to clean up their vomit….. because you partied too hard OR you’re going through chemo.
If you don’t know how I learned that, you don’t know my writing. I cannot be in love with Supergrover because she is not capable of loving me that way. I cannot love Supergrover because she won’t let me. And by that I mean that she will listen to my problems about other people all day long, she’ll read my adoration and love with that intensity, but she will not address problems in our relationship.
It makes me feel like she’s here for the dopamine and not for the long haul. That can’t be me anymore. I want reciprocity, and I was tired of not getting it in the slightest. It doesn’t matter how I feel about her, that I would do all of these things as a yellow string and not a red, that who she is as a person was never dependent on her ability to switch hit. That I could have been a support person for both her and her husband, because I’m interested in keeping them together, not being a wedge.
I am not a jealous ex. If you’ve read “Outlander,” I’m Lord John Grey. John could learn not to want Jamie sexually, but he could not learn how to let go and not love him anymore.
We have a lot in common, me and Grey.
It took me six or seven tries to get into “Outlander,” because I wanted to read it. I always read my favorite people’s books, the ones that shaped them. However, I couldn’t get past the rape scene in the first few chapters. I had to read it, get distance, and try again. Once I made it over that hump, I inhaled the whole series up to that point in like, 11 or 12 days. I held all my calls and “Buy Next” is dangerous if you’ve ever been to the Kindle Store.
That’s because representation matters. If you want to read my two recommendations in stories for understanding who I am, they are, it’s “The Giver” by Lois Lowry, first of all. Great series, but you only need to read the first one for representation of me. There is no more important character to me in the world than that because I think both The Giver and The Receiver are INFJ. The way that The Giver explains information is very much the way an INFJ would, and the way The Receiver takes in information is very much an INFJ on the flip side. I use their titles and not their names because I think that tradition has continued in the world of Same for a hundred or two hundred years. They are The Keepers of the Memories.
The only ones in their community who are allowed to feel.
The only ones in their community whose brains work differently than everyone else’s because of it.
Not understanding anyone else when they can’t feel, can’t explain how they feel.
When they do feel, their emotions run as deep as the scene where The Giver gives The Receiver the concept of war.
You cannot imagine what happened in my heart and brain when The War Daniel had his hands on my back. Honesty about war is too much for everyone who hasn’t been there and is hearing what it is like for the first time. Daniel had a particularly rough emotional time of it because he had an experience where he won a piece of fruit salad that most people win posthumously, coming through unscathed, but a near miss by a fraction of a second. Daniel was in the Navy, a medic embedded in a team of Marines. The Marines’ mission, and therefore Daniel’s as well, was to make sure there was no violence at an event where they were giving out vaccinations. About a hundred people were gathered that day (in my memory- it might have been a little more or less).
A terrorist had rigged up a five year old child with explosives and had a remote detonator so he could throw the child in the middle of the crowd and blow it up. Daniel caught it out of the corner of his eye and shot the terrorist before the child exploded, saving the entire crowd. If the child was already wired and no one had caught it already, it was a near miss by seconds. Daniel also, presumably, was not the one in charge of watching for terrorists, just had his eye out because he did have responsibility. Yet he was a medic, one of the people who was giving vaccinations at the time. I think that makes his actions even more amazing, because there’s two things at work. Being able to notice both the people he was vaccinating and his complete environment, and being able to react before anyone else in both directions.
It was a memory that cost me a lot of spoons, but with perspective it helped me grow more than anything in the last, I don’t know, decade? It deepened my love for all people who have been to war, down to a Starbucks clerk I noticed was a Navy Corpsman. It’s the reason Daniel was embedded with the Marines in the first place. They don’t do medicine or travel. It’s amazing how much crossover there is, and rivalry because of it. People think the Marines are the toughest, and they do absolutely nothing to dispel this.
I had to bring in a little humor to the situation, because I realized that as I was getting deep into the combat aspect of my story (not being in it but feeling my partner’s emotions about it so viscerally), that when I tell The War Daniel’s story it doesn’t lose power. It feels like he’s touching my back every time I hear it in my head. The War Daniel was (is?) one of the loves of my life. The timing was just off. That being said, I have no idea how he feels about me now having broken off our engagement, but he hasn’t cut off contact. We’ve e-mailed each other once, but unfortunately I didn’t get it until a month after he’d sent it. I think it led him to believe I was uninterested in him. But, if he hasn’t been reading, he wouldn’t know that. I prefer it that way, to be honest. That if he doesn’t want to know how I feel, then I have my answer because in order to know me, you have to know my writing as well. I am a range of people depending on our experience.
Being online friends and in real life friends is totally different, because I understand things differently in person than I do in writing , and therefore present myself differently because of it. I am just not going to waste time on a man who doesn’t care how I feel……… because I’m not shut down. And neither was he, in the beginning, when it was all the rush of having known each other as children and him saying “I’ve been in love with you for 36 years.” I do believe that he meant it. I really do.
That’s because in the beginning, he could lay it out for me. That’s because he was on medication to control his alcoholism and drinking one beer to avoid the shakes so he could come down naturally and at home before he admitted himself to rehab. Therefore, his emotions were stable. When he started rehab, he was a different person and we started nitpicking each other. Because he was in rehab, there was no way to have an in person relationship for a while, and our engagement fell apart.
But here’s what I know. If he was serious that he’s been in love with me for 36 years, then it’s always been me and he’ll get off his ass or he won’t. But it’s not a matter of love, it’s a matter of pride.
Does he think he deserves the love of his life or not?
What he could lay out for me is that he knew he was fucked up, and therefore encouraged me to keep seeing where my relationship with Zac went, because he couldn’t be there for me in person and he needed someone “on the ground.” It helped that he found Zac charming and wouldn’t have been threatened if we wanted to stay together when he got home. That he did want the life we envisioned, which was living overseas if we were able and having our daughter, Cora, join us if she wanted. We even wanted to live in a country with protections for trans women, like Thailand, because she currently lives in northeast Texas and doesn’t know what a life without that persecution is like.
Our job was to be there for Cora, and when our relationship fell apart, we lost that ability to tag team as co-parents, which we absolutely were. Cora and I still have a relationship on our own, but I don’t tell her how I feel about Daniel because she’s not the monkey in the middle. I am happy to talk to her about cats, her fictional worlds that would be famous if she puts them out there, us both being queer and having that experience, etc. It is enough, that she can always reach out to me because I’m her “queer mom.” We are emotionally available to each other even when The War Daniel and I are not. Again, our relationship reminds me so much of The Giver, because The War Daniel was the first person to touch me with the memory of war the way Lois Lowry set up imparting all memories by The Giver putting their hands on the backs of The Receiver. However, I know that I was the right Receiver for him because I’d had the experience of listening to so many other people with complex problems that I was ready for it. And before he touched my back with war, he touched it with love.
It’s the perspective that made me believe I’d done a lot of things right in my life. The War Daniel was the first person that made me turn my attention from Supergrover, because he showed me everything I wasn’t getting from her that I needed to function in our relationship. She went too long between touching my back with good memories instead of bad. I deserved a lot of criticism and anger in the moment, but being forgiven made me think there was a future that wasn’t really there.
In my world, forgiveness meant something opposite from what it meant in hers. That loving someone meant forgiving them honestly and completely so that we can talk about our issues again, because we can both be vulnerable without fear of the other’s emotions. I feel that Supergrover was scared of my emotions because she wasn’t used to dealing with them on her own. Therefore, she could not give me what she didn’t have, and could not admit it. It was an unbreakable power imbalance, because we could not move past anything by actually resolving it. We just kicked the can down the road. There were two reasons I had to love her as a whole person, and love her husband that way as well. We all needed each other, and we all turned on each other as well (I mean, I assume that they’re a team on this one- that he probably wouldn’t want to go for beers).
It would have been a better situation all the way around if we’d sat around a table in a relaxed manner and actually talked about what was happening. That I couldn’t undo what had happened, she was it for me on multiple levels, and her husband would know why better than anyone else. That I didn’t liken it to polyamory because I thought I could weasel my way into some sort of weird unicorn hunting them. I likened it to polyamory because in the poly community, close emotional relationships matter just as much as romantic ones because we’re all talking about priority and time, not whether we’re banging during said established date. It’s not the kind of love, but the kind of attention.
I have not given her that place in my life, my first priority, because I am who I am. I have given it to her because I’m a writer and she’s a muse- in her world, problematic. I am not calling her out on being a bad person, just bad at not having realized this before. She’s not a bad person, it’s a bad situation. Therefore, what I have always been trying to get across is not “I am scolding you.” It is “this is a real problem for me and we need to talk about it. Here’s what I think.” If you don’t reply with what you think, not my problem. I’m not going to encourage relationships with people that go on the defensive every time I try to express an emotion. But because Supergrover is my muse, the one who puts me in the mood to write, not encouraging a relationship with her was never going to happen. If we didn’t submit to each other, we were fucked. I began to pontificate on how she felt, but she wouldn’t pontificate on how she felt in response. She’d blame me for telling my story when it was off from hers, but didn’t correct any of my assumptions. Our relationship became perfunctory, the way I learned in “The Giver.” My feelings were evident and hers were not. She said “you’re not the only arbiter of our relationship” and once called me a dictator. She didn’t realize that I’d be telling a different story if I knew what hers was. I wasn’t the arbiter of our relationship, I was waiting on her input………… that never came.
In Lois Lowry’s world of Same, their communities not being able to feel, down to being given shots to repress their sexualities, is mandated by the government and everyone is used to it.
In the real world, people have a choice to be locked down or not, and most people do because it’s so much goddamn easier.
And less worth it, which I think the book makes an excellent example in showing it.
I don’t think you notice those messages until you go back and read YA in adulthood. I think that’s why books like The Giver and all other science fiction stories that have Christ figures are such hits. Everyone wants to know how being able to feel changes the world, and they see that bravery in media, but not in them. They’re drawn to the media that does it because they cannot find it in themselves, yet are inspired by it. It is admirable, just not for them.
For instance, if Supergrover already had all the people in her life that she wanted to do those things for her, that was fine. I would be in her life to whatever level she would accept. Even if she never wanted to meet me in person, that was also acceptable because I can say just as much in writing as I can through other senses, if not more. But, as I told her 10 years ago, “a hug would be a nice goddamn thing.” It was great when she agreed with me, and I promise you there was a time, even if there’s not now.
It is the most important I’ve ever felt in my life.
The fact that she gave me that gift, even once, is more than I can take in. I just had to give myself The Tiffany Talk before I could be vulnerable with her again, because I needed space to get over my crush and get on board. Because I was so in love with her, I got resentful and bitter that I needed to separate myself from her for two reasons. The first is that I was married and feeling like total ass about myself because I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror. The second is that there’s a reason I was so in love with her. No one had ever put my mind in hyperdrive like that- made me care about the world and not just my little piece of it.
I just realized something, and now I’m making me cry. When we began, she was my Jamie Frasier, and Dana was my Frank. Thankfully, it was a totally different situation, but those are the only literary characters I can think of that accurately represent what it was like to be married to two people at the same time. The difference is that Dana and I loved each other deeply and fiercely. I didn’t find out that I needed Supergrover because Dana was capable of being toxic until much, much later. I learned that I was poly by going back and reading what I’d written about both women 10 years ago, how it was possible to love two people with such rabid attention and not have boundaries on either. We did have boundaries that helped me be safe, I just ignored them all because I was under every kind of stress you can possibly imagine and I became more mentally ill than I’ve ever been in my life.
Now, I realize that I have been The Receiver the whole time……….. with perspective.
All of it spiraled into me checking myself into Methodist Hospital, because I believed that neither my psychological nor psychiatric reactions were correct, and that my behavior was driven by both not having the emotional tools to deal with that amount of enormous emotion at once as well as not the right protocol.
Dana, Supergrover, and I all have massive life stories. It wasn’t the romance of it all that put me in the hospital. By then, I was already in it for the long haul with both of them. Hearing both of their stories bonded me to them in a way I’ve never felt about anyone else, and why I’ve made the decision not to enter a monogamous relationship ever again. It’s not that I cannot be monogamous, it’s that if it happened once, it could happen again. I am not going to bet against the house and end up wrecking my life at 46 the way I did at 36.
I lost a stable life with both of them because I spiraled out, but because of the already established long haul relationship, I never stopped hoping that Supergrover and I could, in a sense, start over once I got better. She’s not vulnerable enough for that, because it would require talking about a lot of uncomfortable things. If we’d ended up as partners, those uncomfortable conversations would have been different, but no less important. In a lot of ways, I am glad that I did not end up married to her, because what I learned from spiraling out is that if it hadn’t been my crush on her, it would have been something else.
Those intimate conversations wouldn’t have happened no matter how our situation turned out. I learned this by going back and reading my own work, because her emotional reaction to everything is to lightly move past it if it’s not all that serious and full on attack when she feels threatened.
It’s why “She’s So Mean,” “Your Love is My Drug,” and “I Believe in Love” (Matchbox Twenty, Ke-Dollar Sign-Ha, and Indigo Girls, respectively) have been my favorite songs since their release. “Your Love is My Drug” is particularly sentimental for me in two ways. The first is my connection to Supergrover, because our adrenaline was that hyped on many levels, and the second is that Dana and I danced to it at Lindsay’s wedding.
Accidental polyamory, but ok……………
Incidentally, my favorite meme from that Facebook group is when a guy texts another guy who is dating his girlfriend and he gets pissed about it. He says, “relax, bro. She is dating both of us. You are my boyfriend-in-law.”
Relatable. It’s how I think of Zac’s partners. That I’d hope they’d never react poorly if I reached out to them, because I don’t think of them as threats in the slightest. I get irritated with Zac about our relationship, which is different. The conversation we had about his newest partner was about me being jealous because he treated her completely differently than he did me, and it was particularly egregious for a number of factors.
My jealousy had absolutely nothing to do with his partner. It had everything to do with how Zac behaved, which, in the poly community, is called “being a bad hinge.” I was calling him out in love, because I want the best for him. I was also standing up for myself, because I am an older partner who can absolutely lay in his lap….. I also refuse to be a doormat on the other end of the equation. Zac prevented me from doing that from the beginning, because this is the first time he’s ever been a bad hinge and I had to call him on it. He established that the partner who never called him on anything was the worst because he couldn’t respond to their needs if he didn’t know them, he was bad at communication/getting back to people, etc. Therefore, the person who never called him on anything never got their needs met because they weren’t taking up room.
His honesty floored me because he’s the first partner who’s ever laid that out for me before we ever got intimate. Generally, that’s something I figure out after being with them long enough to pick up those things on my own. How much I care is dependent on how much I love you. If I don’t love you, I won’t call you on anything. That’s because I don’t want to do anything to make the relationship worse.
I have abandonment issues, and it’s something I’ve known since I was 14, because I knew even then that it was a core memory.
My emotional abuser was always as honest with me as I am with everyone else (about most things). I appreciated it at the time because as I found out through a Facebook meme, “you don’t like powerful women because they’re powerful. You like powerful women because you’re autistic and they’re direct about what they want.” It’s a terrible match, because they’re direct about everything except their emotions.
I have a feeling there are a lot of ASD/ADHD people trapped in that cycle, because we’re programmed to throw truth bombs whether you like it or not, and emotionally avoidant people HATE THAT. They would rather follow social convention and get mad when you ignore it. Social convention is nice, but it’s not kind.
What is kinder? Zac laying out everything for me beforehand, or surprising me later? What if he’d led me on for months before telling me that he had other partners? He could have, because telling someone that you’re dating other people is not required when you haven’t had the talk about whether you’re exclusive in the first place. I don’t feel like it’s a conversation you have on the first date, necessarily, because you haven’t even found out if you like the person well enough that you want to sleep with them.
Although if you do know on the first date, then that definitely is a first date conversation. You will wreck both parties, otherwise. One is disappointed because they found a great connection, the other is furious that they thought they might get a love story and they were actually one of many…… because most women are programmed to believe that when someone shows interest in you, that means that means We Are Really Starting Something™ from the moment we start texting.
The reason I say women are programmed to think that is that I was programmed to think that from a very young age, so I can relate. I also have found that if you express that you’re not interested in being exclusive from the first day forward, they’ll stop talking to you because they want that fairy tale so bad.
I was single for seven years, happily so, because I was more interested in Supergrover’s emotional support than I was interested in finding a red string. That’s because Dana’s trump card was punching me in the face, and I needed those seven years to recover. There was no way in hell that I would trust anyone that much, because I didn’t trust myself. I participated in us spiraling out to that degree, and by writing it all down I got perspective on the way I behaved and why.
That’s because I could go back and read it later without having the emotional attachment to my words because I was still struggling with the same problem. Looking at your own behavior with an omnipotent third eye is invaluable, whether you’re writing it for publication or secretly at night.
I choose to publish how I feel because I find that as I’m learning myself, other people learn themselves in turn. It’s what my personality is designed to do.
I’m an INFJ.
Like The Giver.
I love whole people, not just superficial attraction.
Like Lord John Grey.
Perspective on my life comes from other writers. Maybe yours will come from what you read here.
Here are my two favorite quotes about writing.
The first is a teacher asking a little girl who her favorite writer is, and she says, “me.” After writing since grade school and being 46 now, I cannot say that I am a great writer. I can say I’m my favorite author. It is one thing to love your characters when you see them in fiction. It is quite another to love your friends in real life so much more when you can see how you’ve both changed each other over the years. The second is “one day you’ll be someone’s favorite author.”
I hope that my friends realize that as I pass down memories like The Giver, they’re the reason I can do it, my reason for living because my experiences make my writing so much richer and deeper. I have been compared to Dooce, The Bloggess, David Sedaris, and a lot of other comedic writers. I can express things comically because perspective means I can laugh later, while having felt like Sylvia Plath in the heat of the moment.
I just realized that I told you that I had to give myself “The Tiffany Talk,” and I didn’t explain what that was. I then realized I couldn’t describe it better than I did the first time, so here’s a link to a sermon I preached at Bridgeport that I believe is the best I’ve ever done- and not because I’m that great.
Before we get started, I just wanted to tell you that I am willingly using my iPad today because oh my God. I refuse to code in anything but a monotype font. It has been 15 years since I’ve used anything but “Droid Sans Mono.” On my Android, I still do. That being said, when I dug into the app iOS app “Koder,” one of the recommended fonts was……. wait for it……… Helvetica. I’ll take a screenshot of the app so that you can see its ultimate superiority over Arial, the font that was so good Microsoft made a knock-off of their own…….. instead of buying the font from the actual artist. Seriously, fuck them. They did what people do to artists all the time. Although perhaps Steve Jobs had a non-compete with the artist so that Microsoft had to rip off Arial. I will be finding a documentary on YouTube shortly.
I absolutely loved the doc “Helvetica,” because it shows the artist, and just how many street signs are made with it in how many countries (it’s a lot). But, even still I had to justify switching from monospace. I had to sit there and justify it for a little bit. In the end, it was “you’re a writer…. you don’t code that much, anyway….. bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. I just love fonts an autistic amount. And now I’m sitting here looking at the way I’ve loved Macs since I was 18. I had a Mac SE in my room in high school, and it was my favorite computer ever because it’s the last one I had that didn’t connect to the Internet. I want a computer from 1990, Zac just bought a word processor and called it a day.
Word processors don’t have Helvetica. But maybe e-Bay has a Mac that old. On second thought, I’d rather have one of those old as shit Mac laptops, because even though they’re much heavier than a normal laptop, I’d rather write with the computer in my lap as opposed to my desk. My desk chair is crap and I don’t want to change it because nothing modern would match. In the end, I might give in because I really do like sitting at my desktop, I’ve just gotten used to lying in bed with my tablet and keyboard in my lap, because I’m 10 times more productive that way and both my tablets have everything I need to work and play.
One of my readers said that she felt anxious I responded to her in a blog entry. I did it so she wouldn’t be intimidated by the length of the reply, because it wasn’t personal at all. She said something that stuck with me, that she’d been married for decades and we had completely different outlooks on relationships. I thought that was so universal that it was a blog entry all on its own. That yes, people do have different outlooks on relationships because there are so many permutations of human behavior that nothing in this life is a binary.
She’s not wrong, and neither am I. And I’m pointing it out because of the stigma that comes with ethical non-monogamy. I like what Jada Pinkett said on the matter. “Will is his own man. He has to make choices that make it ok for him to look himself in the mirror.” She made the point that she doesn’t control his time, and that’s how I feel about Zac. I do not get to dictate what he does while he’s not with me. I’m just here to receive him, because he offers me so much solace even when we can’t be together all that often. He’s cooked for me, and of course it’s always fabulous. That’s my boyfriend cooking for me. I’ve talked to him many times about cooking for/with him, but he says that he’s just always had this outlook that you could for guests. I am so thankful he’s not impressed I’ve cooked professionally.
“Food is hospitality. When you reject someone’s food, you reject them.” -Anthony Bourdain
Which is why my favorite meal to cook is never about the food. The food doesn’t taste gorgeous because of something I did as a professional cook. It tastes better depending on who’s at the table. I don’t celebrate the people who aren’t here, I value the ones that show up. It’s taken a lifetime to learn, this not yearning for someone who isn’t here, because again, that goes back to 14 years old. I made people priorities when I was only an option, and could even see it and not give up.
I have deep and abiding abandonment issues from my emotional abuser, probably why I lived in Portland for so many years. I had to prove to myself that she wouldn’t abandon me, and found out when I got there that was not the case.
With Supergrover, I don’t know what would have happened if I’d kept my big mouth shut a lot of the time, but I do know that her hotheaded anger fed mine. My dopamine and adrenaline went through the roof when she snapped at me. I don’t react well to that, and neither does she. But I can count on one hand the number of times she’s apologized for her own words, because it’s so much more convenient to believe that I am the sole cause of everything. I have no doubt that she’s telling people that I’m the most toxic person she’s ever met, because she couldn’t take accountability for shit when it was emotional. I know she’d send a fully armed battalion to remind people of her love if she thought someone was hurting me. What she cannot do is take in that I feel the same way about her. We just don’t have the same love language, and I became fluent in hers- acts of service. Over time, she became less and less interested in mine, words of affirmation. I would tell her that I felt bad she called me a dickhead all the time, and then all of a sudden I was enormously impressive.
So, in a lot of ways, I feel that we could have fixed a lot with one night where she was my sous chef. She’s a very good chef. Horrible line cook….. which means that what I wanted was being able to tumble and roll in those roles.
This wouldn’t be appropriate for us because we’re not a couple, but it illustrates a point.
One of the things that therapists do in age gap relationships, because they often become a big damn problem, is to ask the older partner if they ever lay in the younger one’s lap. If the couple says no, then generally they’ll make them do it in the office. Over time, the older one views themselves as wiser because of course they are, but not about everything. The problem becomes the older half parenting the younger, making their relationship a strict power dynamic rather than one that’s fluid.
She couldn’t lay in my lap. That’s all on me, but that’s what we lost that made me push her away. I didn’t like feeling that my letters were making her feel guilty and not knowing it for weeks on end. I hated that she always relied on her own instincts to figure out what I was saying, and she was often wrong. I have no doubt that telling me she’s “read through many lines” means that she’s read through the wrong ones because she had no context and didn’t ask for clarity so that I could reassure her that I wasn’t attacking her. She assumed I was attacking her, so we never got back what we lost.
Here’s why it’s such a shame. I told her that I was French-trained, but that I’d had friends who were Japanese-trained and either works well. She said she didn’t know the difference, so I sent her two pictures of me holding a knife over a cutting board and wrote “French” and “Japanese” on them. She said she kind of uses a mix of the two, and one of the things I would have told her if we’d cooked together is “there is no such thing. You’re holding your knife wrong. Here, let me show you. “Spider on a mirror, Supergrover. Spider ona mirror.”
One of my readers, Susan, really got to me in one of my latest entries. In saying this, I mean that it made me think, not that it wounded me in any way. I turned it over and over in my head, because in order to understand why I’m okay with Zac having multiple relationships and me being unsure about whether I will in turn is not because I am scared of managing multiple relationships in person.
I am AuDHD. When I am with someone, I am truly present and in the moment. What I am not good at is getting back to people and being responsible about the feeding and upkeep of a relationship. But Zac being poly takes the pressure off me because he has a lot of the same thought processes as me. He hasn’t defined “neurodivergent,” but in my case……
As Zac’s roommate would say, “the ’tism is real.”
I do not know that when I am not with that person, I would remember to keep them in the loop. This is something that Zac and I have in common, because we understand each other on a truly deep level. We say “how dare you attack me like this?” a lot.
But the point is that neither Zac nor I feel possessive of each other in a way that would impede on our other relationships, because we’re both the kind of people with no executive function.
But in order to understand how I got here, you’d have to understand a journey that started when I was very, very young.
In my childhood, I was told that someday a man would come and he’d be everything I’d ever want. As it turns out, this was true. Even though we broke up, I wouldn’t trade my relationship with Ryan for anything in the world. We took a break for a while to give each other space, but that lasted all of a few years. Now, the chord that runs between us is major in terms of music and close in terms of geometry.
Our schedules haven’t lined up to see each other, but that hasn’t stopped us from chatting online or on the phone when he’s on his way to work. It’s been a while, but it doesn’t matter. We pick up right where we left off, because we both have such tender feelings about each other when we tap into our memories.
I do think that we were both really going through something and needed the experiences of being with the other people in our lives, especially because now Ryan is a father, his son in on the jokes in which I share. What I do not think for a moment is that I didn’t get that fantasy while it lasted.
At the same time I was dating Ryan, I was dealing with all the problems that my emotional abuser put in my head, because I’m autistic and turning those problems into solutions becomes a full-time job. I drifted from Ryan because even if she didn’t mean to do it, she still opened the door to my sexuality by giving me her college journal. It doesn’t matter whether she just didn’t proof it or whether it was on purpose because the effect was the same.
She became a monotropic thought process because I realized that for as many red flags as this woman had, I was on board.
This is not what I think now, but at the time I realized that I was good at active listening, good at pattern recognition on things she didn’t see, and genuinely made her feel better about herself. Nothing about her opening up to me physically was threatening because my excuse was that for a lot of history, our age difference wouldn’t have mattered a damn.
I did not realize it was emotional abuse until I was 36 years old.
Therefore, one of the reasons my relationship with Ryan was so incredibly perfect is that because we met at summer camp, I was away from this woman long enough to connect with someone else in a major way.
Therefore, I spent a lot of time with Ryan before the emotionally abusive relationship overshadowed everything else. If I use the same murder board as Zac’s friends, where my yellow strings are just as important as my red, I’ve been poly since I was 14 years old.
I never had a relationship after Ryan where I could make someone else my first priority, because even though I wasn’t with this person all the time, the monotropic thought processes didn’t go away in her absence. I have a feeling I’m giving a lot of clarity to a lot of people right now……….
So, when I dated my first girlfriend, she was there in the shadows. I’ve never had a relationship where someone isn’t lurking in the shadows, affecting my thought processes to the point where I’m taking my eye off the ball.
I lost being married to it, because when the emotional abuser went away, what I missed most about her were the years we were separated and writing letters to each other. It did a lot to heal the fact that she wasn’t in love with me, but definitely did want me as a yellow string (when it was convenient).
That’s because when we were only writing letters to each other, I had a secret world, an inner landscape to whom I’ve given very few people access. I don’t judge people by how well we get along in bed, but by how well we get along out of it. That’s why my platonic relationships are so important to me. I do not need the safety and security of a full-time boyfriend because I’m trying to be my own person. However, I do know that there is someone in my corner that I could call in any kind of jam. He might not be able to do anything about it, but he would to the best of his ability; I know that because of how I’ve seen him treat his friends over the last year.
Editor’s Note:
To Zac-
I see you. I take in a lot. They’re confused. We are not.…….. xoxo
Here’s where I also stopped believing in monogamy. So many women advertised it on their dating profiles that when I was looking for a partner, I didn’t know what any of the hell all that meant….. then, as I was doing the reading on polyamory, I started learning about AuDHD. Through the combination of all those subreddits, I could listen to other people’s experiences without replying.
I have found so many people that have been on my same pipeline, which runs thusly:
INFJ
ADHD
Coming out as queer
Autism (as a comorbidity)
Nonbinary
Polyamorous
There is a huge crossover between being queer (either through sexual orientation or gender) and neurodivergent. It’s not a circle, but the Venn Diagram is solid.
There is a huge crossover between being autistic and being INFJ, the personality that’s already a thousand years old when they’re born.
There’s a huge crossover between the number of autistic and queer people who have decided gender is not a thing.
And we all recognize that getting our neurodivergent brain is never going to happen, so we adjust our expectations on what can be expected of us in a relationship.
It hasn’t been my outlook on relationships for my whole life. I was single for five years when I met Zac, single for seven before I actually asked him out, and after a year am finally comfortable with how polyamory works and I’m a fan.
However, I would never have thought about it if I was hurting another relationship to do so. For instance, I wouldn’t have asked Dana to open our relationship because it would have hurt both of us…… we both would have felt like we were losing something with each other, not gaining…….. and when we were with other partners, they didn’t like us at all because we really only talked to each other, like we were the main characters instead of our girlfriends.
Part of this is true, part of it is that for a lot of our relationship, we weren’t in the same city; it was a big deal when she called, which added to our partners’ ire. I don’t blame them. But Dana and I would have been better off as friends from the beginning, because we were great at that. Once we dragged our whole family into it, things began to get messy.
I would have given anything at one point for that relationship to last the rest of my life. Just so many things went wrong so fast that staying monogamous was the least of my worries. I had to get out for my safety, and even if we’d had counseling, when you get hit by someone, you don’t take the chance it happens twice.
I’m never going to be one of those people who likes putting all their eggs in one basket anymore, because what I’ve learned is that it’s better for you to have more than one person to fall on. Your entire world doesn’t walk out the door at once. I still feel this way about Supergrover, because the way I wrote to her was so regimented that it feels like a bit of a loss….. not so much because of her, but because I’m having to reroute a lot of impulses. In some ways, I’ll never give those up,because I see things that remind me of her all the time.
Polyamory is a system adjusted to me, rather than me having to fit into yet another system in which I have to social mask my way through it. It’s easier not to social mask in front of Zac because since we’re both neurodivergent, he’ll always have empathy even if he can’t have sympathy.
He said something to me that meant a lot, which is that our relationship is not “cutesy.” I don’t want that type of relationship because it leads to “acting as if.” I’d rather have emotional bravery and he’s shown me he has it.
So, in short, it’s not that I never wanted a marriage that lasted decades. I could have pictured it with Ryan, Meagan, and Dana. It just didn’t work out that way. I think it ultimately turned out better than I could have imagined. In no world would I have gotten the space to write what I needed to write out of someone jealous, because they simply would have tried to sabotage my writing time because spending time together is obviously the most important thing in my life, and any time away from each other means that I need room to cheat.
That leads to the millions upon millions of partners justifying why it was right to go through someone’s phone. I feel like if you can’t trust your partner to the point where you feel you need to go through their phone, your intuition has already given you an answer…… and doesn’t make you judge, jury, and executioner when you have no moral leg to stand on invading someone’s privacy.
You don’t have to confirm how someone else feels. You have to confirm how you feel in therapy, because you’re not going to change someone else.
I have done too much trying to change people in the past by writing about them, and not because changing people works. People have to want to change from the inside out, and sometimes hearing how I really feel about something puts new light on what their behavior is doing to me, and it creates an understanding that wasn’t there before.
In a relationship, I find it’s more helpful to lead from the back. That if I lay out my insecurities first, you’re more likely to open up to me in return because I’ve made it look not so scary.
Here’s where things get tricky, though. The first is that I make it look easy. In order to lay out my vulnerabilities first, I had to learn how to do that over years. It is not something I learned on the fly, it is something I’ve learned over my whole life.
I’ve always been an observer to human behavior, and I remind myself of Dominick Dunne when he used to write columns for Vanity Fair, covering the trials of the “rich, and the very, very rich.” In some ways, I feel like I’m trying to be Rachel Maddow, weaving my experiences in and out so that my emotional connections and how they come together are as researched as my intelligence special interest turned up an autistic amount.
This is because it’s one thing to get a soundbite from someone, and rare to get an essay, particularly one that goes through an entire range of emotions about one person. Understanding that range of emotion in a person is very important to communication with them, because it gives them more context on me than I will ever have on them.
However, just like with my readers, I have a bubble with them, too. Just like I invite my readers to be vulnerable in the comments, I invite my friends to be vulnerable by opening up to them in person (as well as I can without stumbling over my words because it’s verbal). People tell me things and both love and hate it. I do not stop writing about someone when I’ve said something that they haven’t liked. I’ve stopped writing about them altogether because they’ve proven that they aren’t supportive of me as a writer, because doing that doesn’t look like only being adored. You’ll get your moments, I promise you. But you won’t get all of them, because no one can.
We are divine in our messiness, not in our ability to keep things under control.
All of my thought processes combine to make me “messy,” and honestly one of the things I started wondering when I started exploring poly was whether it was actually fair to be this intense all the time around one person. No one can be my everything because they’ve all burned out under that plan.
But again, I believed the fairy tale. In some ways, I got it.
But there came a point when the dream just changed.
I’ve written about this before, but one of my best dates with Zac was when he’d just gotten a fiction prompt on robots, and we bounced ideas off each other as we were going through the grocery store. I was very emotional when he came up with a great line, because it was then that I knew I wanted to be with him for as long as he’d have me, because my love for him is limitless. There’s nothing he could do that would scare me away, and the fact that he’s poly doesn’t scare me, either, because all of our relationships with him are completely unique and separate.
I’m also not trying to scare him by saying that my love for him is limitless, because my platonic relationships run just as deep. I wouldn’t feel less love for him if he decided we were better friends than partners, or I did. You have partners that you’re romantic with, and partners that you’re not. One of Zac’s friends has a literal murder board because their red and yellow (romantic and platonic) strings are just as important to them. Emotional intimacy is important, and sometimes more important than sex. Think of all the straight women with kids who move in together so that their kids still have two parents to handle them.
To me, that is polyamory because you’re not showing your boyfriend any less attention than the co-parent (I’m assuming these women still date). Once you get to a relationship where you’re living together and taking care of a household and raising kids, wouldn’t it be harder to break up all that to move in with someone else the kids don’t know? Does it make it any less of a serious relationship when you’re not having sex?
What I have learned over the last year is that Zac is my orange string. I want him in my life to whatever level he’ll accept, and right now, everything is working out perfectly for us because I am obsessed with writing to the point where I go off the grid. Zac is so busy that he doesn’t get freaked out when I don’t reply right away, wouldn’t wander around worrying that I’m dating someone else (if I was dating anyone else, he’d be thrilled and not threatened). He’s bisexual. He doesn’t want anything but the tea.
That being said, I love our orange string and I don’t know how much I want my own time to be divided. It is not that I feel this Protestant urge to be monogamous and I’m hoping from Zac that this will turn into something more….. a something more that cannot be there. All of his relationships are secure, so that would be pointless and something a traditional woman would do. I am anything but that.
A traditional woman would be trying to weed out all the other partners so that they got more time than everyone else, hoping to eventually change Zac into something he’s not. They’d be jumping up and down to show why they “deserve the rose.” I see it all the time.
What I also see is men who have attractions to other women and instead of cheating, will ask their wives to open the relationship. The wife agrees, and one of two things happens.
The first is regret. Sometimes on both sides, sometimes on the wife because she agreed to it under duress (the first red flag it’s not going to go well).
Here’s the second. Men get controlling and jealous, wanting to shut the relationship down into monogamy when they realize how much easier it is for women to get multiple dates than men. They stop being confident that they can meet someone else, so instead of working on themselves, they start working on either forcing their wives to break up with their other partners, or trying to sabotage their other relationships so that the partner will realize “they’re the only one left.”
Here’s the third. There are heterosexual couples who are called “unicorn hunters.” The reason they are is that this type relationship blows up the most frequently, and works so incredibly rarely that it’s practically fictional.
Generally, both women are bi, so they want a female partner because it works out for both of them….. but they don’t treat their “unicorn” as a real person. They’re just there for the pleasure of a couple, because their hierarchy is so entrenched. If the couple has children, the “unicorn” quickly feels like the maid and the nanny……… because in reality, that serves the couple perfectly. Use the unicorn and emotionally abuse them. Treat them like an employee, but don’t pay them.
But that’s not the only dynamic. If the unicorn is dating both of them, the couple divides because they start fighting about time and it gets nasty quickly…… that’s because the unicorn is either not dating or “not allowed to date.” Why would they be allowed to take time off and be their own person when they need them to be chief cook and bottle washer?
The other thing that happens frequently is that couples try to find younger women and the husband abuses both women. That’s because the wife sees the power imbalance early and the younger woman doesn’t, because she doesn’t have enough life experience for that. So, one woman is too afraid to rock the boat and the young woman is too naive to leave. Eventually, they band together. But that takes time.
In absolutely all of the reading I’ve done on polyamory, there are two things that make a difference in how successful your relationships are in the future.
The first is not being in a relationship at all when you start thinking about polyamory, and not getting into a relationship hierarchy at all. You have the ability to see that all of your relationships have this dynamic and no one is mourning something they’ve lost while also trying to integrate new partners into their lives.
Failing that, you have to find a poly-friendly therapist and work out all your issues before you just decide to casually say “I think we should open our relationship,” especially when you find out that the reason one partner wants poly is covering their ass because they’ve been cheating for months. It happens more often than you think, and it’s devastating. Better to break up immediately because you will not get over lying and cheating. That’s not poly, that’s lying and cheating.
The best way I’ve ever heard polyamory phrased is that I own Zac like he’s my neighborhood, my favorite place and not my favorite possession.
The reason I’m pouring my heart into him is not so we can be more to each other in terms of time, but more to each other in terms of quality…… because here’s what I see, and I told him this. “You’re about to go on a journey, and I want to be there for all of it.” Plus, I’m getting closer with his other partners, and that feels good, too. It feels like being a part of our weird little family rather than Zac and me cocooning to the rest of the world- what has happened in every one of my monogamous relationships. They’ve been so intense that I didn’t have the time I needed to be present with all of you.
He hasn’t counted up the months as to what I mean by this, so he underestimated by a large margin what I actually meant. I am not directing him in the slightest, I am excited to see what’s going to happen for him.
What I mean by “weird little family” is that like all families, there are issues and jealousies that pop up (over time, not feelings….. all our relationships are separate except for the few times a year we’re all in the same room). I do not know why, but I believe it is because two of us live in Virginia, but people believe his latest partner is the one before me.
Even I thought that until I counted it up.
So, I laid out all my feelings about all of this to Zac, and it was the most healthy conversation I’ve ever had with anyone….. because he’s used to having these conversations all the time. Negotiating boundaries is hard, and we do it well.
He said something that I really needed to hear, to the point that I almost cried. I said something about how our relationship is easy because when we have something to work out, it’s a few minute conversation and not making things bigger than they really are by holding everything in.
My beautiful boy looked at me and said, “I think you should take a lot of credit for that, because I don’t think I’m that way all the time. I think you bring it out in me.”
It was the first time in a long time that someone had told me that I was also good at negotiating boundaries, and again, something I really needed to hear.
Then, he cuddled me and I felt safe…. because I’d brought up a problem, and we talked about it until it was quickly over. What made me feel safe is that he never once invalidated my feelings, just called me on my logic and reassured me when my perceptions were off. That he’s in it for the long haul, too.
But again, this is not about a competition. This is about making what we have solid in and of itself. If I’m bringing out something in Zac that he actually likes, then I hope he knows how often he does it for me.
I am afraid that getting lost in this relationship would cost me something else, and I’m not doing that ever again with writing time.
I don’t just have this project going, I’m doing the hard work to learn fiction as well. What I’ve learned from Jonna & Tony Mendez is that there is a world of difference becoming a respected author and being picked for Oprah’s Book Club.
I know I want the first, and I think I want the second, but the stimulation of all that scares me to death. But ultimately, it’s not on me to decide whether I’m well-respected or Oprah’s Book Club-level famous. It’s up to you, my readers.
Because I’m already good at non-fiction, perhaps I should release one of those, first. I feel that when I write about history/intelligence operations, I do it the way Rachel Maddow does…. by combing through the research and putting together the story so that it’s compelling, when you really can’t make research do that.
For instance, count them up. How many hours of research do you think that Brené Brown did on shame and vulnerability before she published her first book? Did her first TED Talk? I met her in either 1999 or 2000, and she was working on it even then. Again….. count them up.
Editor’s Note:
Even though I met Brene a very long time ago, I don’t want you to think we’re best friends or anything. We spent some time together when she was in the Master’s program at the Graduate School of Social Work, so she was a student/TA who I lovingly call “one of my kids,” what I called all the students/TAs in the GSSW because I was the supervisor of their computer lab for a year before I started web development. Meeting her was a million to one, and I didn’t even recognize her name when her books started coming out. I thought, “that looks like one of my kids” when I saw her first TED Talk. So, I contacted her team to make sure our dates lined up, and it was indeed the same person. That being said, she wouldn’t know me from Adam….. but she might….. one day. 😉
Now that I think about it, I probably have enough material for a book on shame and vulnerability right now. You could write it with this year’s entries alone, but it would be better with edited versions of the last 10 years, because this is the decade in which I’ve grown the most.
I really had to look at what I was doing in all of my relationships, and when I hit 45 and realized there were only 20 years left until I was older than my mom, all of my qualms about standing up for myself went out the window. I started vomiting up emotions at an alarming rate, because a lot of it was old information in new context and new information with no context.
I feel that everyone has seen this shift, and thinks that I’m only angry. No, I think I’m experiencing the rage older women get when they realize just how much bullshit is in the world and just how much of it will not be solved while they’re still living.
You realize just how little things matter on a grand scale, that of course you should work for social justice, but you can’t burn yourself out on it at the expense of time with your family and friends. I feel this way about any community event.
I see this all the time in church members because I grew up as a United Methodist preacher’s kid. They come to a Sunday worship, and have a meaningful experience that they’ve never had before. Then, they start coming regularly and pretty quickly get involved with committees up to their eyeballs because this church is the coolest thing they’ve ever seen. But it’s not sustainable, and people burn out after six months to a year.
I keep tabs on my religious friends because of it, because they’re the ones that will tell me it’s been three Sundays and they’re already in charge of something…. most people don’t join committees as fast as they realize that churches are hosting a special event. They get put in charge of that one event and it’s not that hard, so they sign up for a few more.
Then they join a committee without dropping all the special events, and they realize, “oh my God. We’re at church all the time.” People really don’t like to talk about their feelings, so I can only think of a few times in my life when I knew why someone left…. in those cases, it was pretty obvious. Most people just ghost because they wanted something so bad that they started excluding other things that were important to them- and that’s okay.
Churches love Marthas, and they tend to take advantage of them. Don’t forget to be Mary some of the time….. or as I phrased it in a sermon, “Don’t Just Do Something…. Sit There.”
And that’s how I feel about Zac. We have the moments where we don’t just do something, we sit there. We have quiet moments where when a problem comes up, we aren’t reactive. We hold space for each other without getting defensive. We are honest about the important things- vulnerability, honesty, negative feelings on both sides, and really being able to take all that in because either we’re walking and talking (being mobile makes me thoughtful), or we’re lying on a bed/couch where we’re already comfortable.
I don’t choose moments to talk to him based on how important my need is, but when I can sense that we’re both in a relaxed mood. I don’t tiptoe around him because I think he’ll get mad, I actively look for the moments in which he has the bandwidth to hear me. It’s one thing to have a conversation in which you are totally focused on each other, and another when you’re both slammed and overstimulated up to your eyeballs. We’re both neurodivergent, so I know how to look for those things.
I don’t want to trigger a meltdown or a burnout, or to irritate his anxiety that I’m pulling away…. because I’m finally convinced he doesn’t want me to do so. Because his other partners live so much further than me, I think he feels like it’s an imposition on me to make the trip, because he’d think of it as a drag and I think of it as free, unencumbered writing time on the train both ways.
And, just like with Sam, I’ll never have another partner who hates it that I don’t drive. If I need to get somewhere fast or need groceries, I have an Uber account and I know how to use it. If I have the time, I want to be on the train because it is just enough stimulation through movement (I wear Bluetooth cans to keep out the rest) to provide a lot more creativity than normal.
My creativity is knowing that Zac is not a red string or a yellow. He’s both, and as I’ve kidded him before, “I prefer burnt orange.
Our relationship feeds my writing not in being able to write about it, I just understand it better because I write about it. The real reason is bigger than that. We have the same commitment to each other- to be brutally honest all the time (because we’re neurodivergent, so we’re likely to do that, anyway).
I want him in my life because he makes me a better me than I could be on my own, because our friendship is so strong. I have never wanted a relationship that transcends his others, or even impacts them.
But I also know that I deserve the right to take up space, and I learned that Zac appreciates that I can do it without making it hurt…. or at least, trying not to make it hurt. Some truth bombs are just hard, and you can’t go around them, because if you did it would be detrimental to both of you.
I’m also finding out the differences between being with a man and being with a woman, because this is the first serious relationship with a man I’ve ever had- in that it has lasted so long, not that I wasn’t Zac-serious about the other, Matt.
There’s only been the three, and Ryan was 7th-8th grade, so every bit as emotionally intense without the drive of our hormones kicking in- mostly (Hi, our parents!). All of our friendships have been as strong as mine with Zac, it’s only that Zac and I have been together much longer than Matt and I were, and approaching being together longer than Ryan and me.
We were unusual for kids. I was with him for a year and two months, and I will never feel that way about anyone in my life. That’s because our relationship never complicated itself with sex. It was always a good time, and still is. We still want the tea on who each other’s dating, how work is going, all that. Plus, I trust him more than I do anyone else, because we met when I was 13. We both made relationship-ending mistakes, but his was so easy to forgive because at the time, I no longer believed I could love him the way he deserved to be loved (bullshit, bullshit, bullshit- thanks a lot, lesbians. But I’m not bitter. #eyeroll).
What I have learned from my experience with Ryan is that a red string can certainly become yellow, and I knew that was typically true of lesbians. I didn’t know it was true of men as well, but it so is, especially since we’ve both dated women. I think men trust women that have dated women more, in some cases, than straight men and women because of the outside perspective angle. I can take gender roles out of something and explain the dynamic that’s going on in their relationship…. and then whether they realize that’s what I’m doing is on them.
What I find is that men will absolutely take on female roles if they understand what they’re doing to their wives when they don’t. But, they won’t hear it from their wives, and they won’t hear it from their male friends, because they’re all stuck in the same heteronormative bullshit institution.
The best comment I ever got on my marriage article was “I didn’t know the writer was gay until the end.”
That’s kind of because I write, like another reader said, “a 15 year old boy……… and his mother.”
And on that note, I think my love for Zac is clear and why. He shows love every day to his “twinkie bitch boyfriend by sending me pictures of himself dressed for work every day, and at least a few times a week, a picture of Oliver, who is a dog, as well.
I think that’s my favorite nickname now, Twinkie Bitch Boyfriend. Zac is the first person I ever told I thought I was nonbinary, because I knew he would know what I meant, that I never wanted to change anything, I could just see both sides of my brain working at once. It’s not a slam to say I look like a tweaker at a club, he’s honoring what I told him……. that I’m so female, and so not.
I just need a better twinkie bitch boyfriend haircut, which I usually achieve by going to a stylist with either a picture of Matt Smith and asking them if they can make me into The Doctor, or taking a picture of Robert Pattinson and saying, “can you make me a sparkly vampire?”
I love both actors, but Robert’s haircut in Twilight suits me. Speaking of which, I love the Twilight movies because the people who wrote the script were a fuck ton more talented than Stephanie Meyer and also the movies have terrible moments which make them even better popcorn films.
Which I’ll have to watch, since I promised Zac “Slow Horses…” because he’s my orange string.
Before we get started today, I have to give a shoutout to Susan. When I went back over her comment on yesterday’s entry, I realized what she was actually saying and I laughed til I cried. She said, “I’m surprised at what’s coming up for people in response to this ‘innocent’ question.” I was confused because I thought I’d asked a question in the writing and I was slow on the uptake as to which question she meant……. and then I realized that THE WRITING PROMPT was a question. Face palm. Yes, the writing prompt was completely innocent, and it didn’t take me all the places I could have gone because I have so many food memories.
I stopped taking road trips when I stopped driving, but I do love them. Zac was kidding me about being a bad driver, which is valid. But when I didn’t have a choice, I drove. I got better with age, but my last wreck came from my last road trip. When I tell you the circumstances, you probably won’t be surprised. Just yet another time autism ate my lunch.
I think deeply about things, to the point of the exlusion of everything going on around me. As a driver, this is not ideal. I think everyone is like this to some extent; they get lost in their own little world and then all of the sudden, there’s a car there….. I’d just talked to my first girlfriend after years and years, and I can’t remember what it was about the conversation that had me tripped up- mostly that it had been so long and I had absolutely no idea why she ghosted me in the first place.
She came out of hiding to say she was sorry my mother died, and then nothing ever again. Because basically what I realized is that she had the ability to control my emotions because mine went up and down as hers did. If you’ve read any of my writing in the last 20 years, you know this is not an unusual thing for me. I’m an INFJ. I take on every emotion in the room, good and bad.
I did what I always did back then when I was upset. I went to Waffle House. Or I tried. The one I used to go to when I lived here before was out in bum fuck Virginia, but there was one on my side of the river in Frederick. So, off I go for salvation- which in this case was going to be a triple order of hash browns with chili, cheese, and onions. It’s my emotional support junk food.
Frederick isn’t really that far; I’m not sure that a Marylander would think of Silver Spring to Frederick as a road trip, but it was memorable. I ended up in the hospital when I took a curve too fast and slammed into a guardrail. I hadn’t been drinking (as opposed to what normally happens when you go to a Waffle House), I was just lost in thought and missed a sign for a 25mph speed limit while coming around…… or at least, I thought I did. The cop who came to ticket me (deservedly, I was really nice about the whole thing and so was he), he said that it wasn’t marked on this side. It was marked on the other side of the freeway. I remained cool and calm, but on the inside, I was livid. How is a sign a half mile away going to help me in this situation?
So, yes, I was driving distractedly, but I surely cannot be at fault for everything that happened that day if a curve was that dangerous at 30mph and unmarked. Seriously, five miles over at the entrance to a freeway and I went up on two wheels. I took my lumps, and I’ve never driven again…. unless I was in Texas and Lindsay and I were going to our grandparents’ houses or something (they used to live in the same town- our step-grandparents lived about six miles away). And even then, that’s only happened once.
Lindsay likes to control the driving and the music. You have no choice in this matter. 😉 I just don’t mind because she listens to things I’ve never heard before. For instance, Charlotte Cardin…. she’s a Canadian who had her premiere American concert at Union Stage, and we got to be there. Just a core memory all the way around.
Oh, wait. I did drive on one of our road trips, and it brings me to a really funny story even though :::waves hand::: this is not the road trip you are looking for.
When I was about 23, my mother went with her church choir to perform at Carnegie Hall. Lindsay, Kathleen, and I couldn’t get tickets for the performance, but my mom invited us to meet her in New York and just bum around. I think we spent the night? Not sure, but I put in a text to Lindsay to see if she remembers. If she gets back to me “before publication,” I might be able to shed some more light. I want to say we stayed at The Time hotel, but I’ve spent a couple nights in New York and I may be mixing up trips………
But anyway, when we were kids, my dad left an entire pound of sliced turkey in the trunk of his car. We didn’t find it for weeks. When we finally found it, my dad called it “Lanagan Lunchmeat Syndrome.” So, at one point, I think Philly, we stopped at a gas station to get sandwiches because Washington to New York is really not that far. We just needed a snack. So, that was a good move right up until I didn’t notice that Lindsay left half a sandwich in the back seat of my car for like, six weeks, so I know that Lanagan Lunchmeat Syndrome is genetic. I’m sure I’ve celebrated it more than once since then… Oh, wait. I definitely have because I can’t remember whether it was Dana or me, but she definitely knows about “Lanagan Lunch Meat Syndrome.”
The reason I can’t remember is that Dana didn’t change her name legally, but we were both Mrs. Lanagan to our friends. That’s because at the time we were thinking about having kids. We didn’t, of course, but at the time it made sense for us all to have the same last name and she had cousins with her last name and I didn’t. So, we both answered to “Lanagan” in the kitchen and I don’t believe I have ever been more touched when they called her and she answered to it. Plus, it was fun calling her “Naganalanad.” Oh, and we had two other nicknames. Dana introduced me to one of her customers that always called her “Trouble.” So, when he said, “hey, Trouble,” she introduced me as her wife and he nodded to me and said, “Mrs. Trouble.” I don’t remember what I said, but it was some version of “you have no idea.”
But in the original road trip instance of me showing signs of “Lanagan Lunch Meat Syndrome,”, we didn’t spend much time together. The part I really remember is driving down West Side Highway and the water being so incredibly beautiful. This why I wanted to go to New York, Zachary. He only gets the full name when I’m play upset.
No, I was telling everyone in another entry that I’d like to spend some actual time in New York people watching, because that’s the one thing I’d never done. Just gotten a table at an outside café, probably with a newspaper so I’m not incredibly obvious as to all the staring I want to do. How do New Yorkers live? How do they survive? I think my answer would be to slowly become Fran Lebowitz….. and honestly, I’m not even sure I’m not her already. I am 46…….
I have not had many days lately where I’m not absolutely as cranky as she is, but she’s brilliant so a lot of funny comes with her outlook/attitude. I suppose Fran is a better archetype for me because Harper Lee was much more agoraphobic than I am (though I do get that way sometimes). Fran does speaking engagements that are basically just interviews with one person and I think, “I could handle that. It’s just one person.” She also loves being at home with her books and writing, she doesn’t feel trapped there.
I saw a meme that spoke to me yesterday (the reason why I have trouble in conflicts with neurotypical people), literally to my core because it says so much about my emotional abuser, then Meagan, Kathleen, Katharin, Angela, Supergrover, and to a certain extent, Meagan and Dana (that’s because they were the only two personalities I’ve dated/been partners with that deviated from the pattern and got into it once I was just, so………….. meeee.
The meme said, “you don’t like dominant women because you’re submissive, you like domaninant women because you’re autistic and they’re direct about what they want.” I can 100 and crazy percent agree that this is why I thought Meagan was right, that we would have been good partners for each other as adults if we’d tried, because she was an athlete and is now a massage therapist. That means she is driven to succeed and also didn’t completely steamroll me every chance she got.
She was in touch with her fallibility, when a lot of women aren’t. When emotionally unavailable people shut down, whatever it is that they’re upset about becomes inflexible and there’s not a lot of compromise. I have come to realize over the years that this is not personal in any way and just to distance myself from those people. It’s not because I don’t love them to the moon and back (even Kathleen, because I’m determined not to be bitter).
The feeling I had with Meagan where there were some things I felt strongly about and some things I did was why my relationship with Sam tripped me up for a bit. I did not feel that I was absolutely steamrolled until I put all the puzzle pieces together. Just wire monkey all the way around when I desperately needed cloth after a bad relationship beforehand….. and there were seven years between Dana and Sam, so it was a very big deal for me to let my guard down even that much. So, the first red flag is that she felt responsible for my transportation because she had a car and I didn’t. Not once in three weeks did she say, “I’m going to be at X. Meet me there.”
In fact, I don’t think she ever would have, because she’s a mom and wants to take care of everyone, overextending herself in the process by putting something on herself that just didn’t need to be there………. and the biggest red flag as to why I originally said no to our first date. She picked on me for not having a car.
I told her that if we worked out, I would think about buying a car because it wouldn’t just be about me. I’d need to be able to get there faster if she was stuck for child care or whatever (I never wanted to be the stepmom unless she asked me, just mom’s girlfriend who lets us get away with murder- relative, because they’re pretty much the perfect kids.
I didn’t have the money to buy a car currently and if I did come into enough money to buy a car, I wasn’t sure it was the safest option for me unless I bought a Tesla, the only way I’d let the kids ride with me because of the technology. I also said that I was waiting for other car companies to get their adaptive driving tools in their own cars because Elon Musk is a tool. So, from the very beginning, me not having a car was a straight up problem……………. FOR HER.
It was a road trip to see her, but not any longer than I would have taken to see Zac, just in the other direction. She lived near BWI, and the train ticket on the MARC was $18 round trip. If Sam wasn’t available to pick me up, or just didn’t want to, it was close enough to Uber without spending an arm and a leg. And not just to her house- it was a small town. I could have met her anywhere, without, I might had, having to pay for or find parking.
The other thing is that Sam told me from the very beginning that she was just starting a successful clinic and she really didn’t have time to date. That she didn’t even know if she could see me after our first date. This did not sit well with me. I said, “it looks like you’re only looking for a girlfriend for a weekend, and I’m not into that at all. She promised that no, it had nothing to do with that, it was only timing both with her business and with the kids’ dad (we weren’t even close to being introduced- that would have been straight up insane). The one thing the kids did know is that their mom was dating someone, and if it worked out they might meet me, but she wanted the kids to know she was dating in case I accidentally left something at their house, etc.
So, I know that Sam wasn’t as shallow about all this as she seemed. She was trapped between two worlds; the one where she wanted a successful business, and also wanted to throw her whole heart into a relationship because she didn’t know how not to do that. Frankly, until I’d been dating Zac for a year, I didn’t know how not to do that, either. It took time and patience to learn, because negotiating emotional boundaries doesn’t wig me out the way it used to.
I was actually talking to Zac about this, that because of the way I was raised, I was taught to see men as an authority figure, as all women are and fight against it our whole lives…. and that me being 10 years older made me realize I wasn’t scared of him. That I actually was coming from a place of wisdom, but not always because Zac is every bit as intelligent and creative as I am. I feel like I have met my match, and because I feel polysaturated at one person, I don’t feel the need to date more because now I’m the one that doesn’t have time for a full-on relationship because I am pouring my energy into all of you.
And we negotiate boundaries all the time, except that most of those are on my end. You get to see what you get to see, but I do have a third dimension…………. kind of. 😛
So, I am of two minds about the breakup. I was trapped in the same world she was- content to focus on my writing and not her exclusively so she wasn’t overwhelmed at work and at home. This led to two issues. The first is that I don’t know how long it had been since her last relationship, but she basically went into it feet first and rushed everything until it flamed out. She was scared she was going to do that with me, and I know it.
You don’t have jokes like me calling her “Wilhousky” if you don’t get each other on a deep spiritual level. I am lyric soprano, and she’s an alto with mezzo tendencies….. so basically, the same kind of soprano as me. Not full of herself, first of all, because most lyric sopranos are. It’s supposed to be my job to be the egotistical nut bag, but I’m not because I’ve watched those absolute bitches for years and I will have no part of it. I already know that with pieces that really fit my voice, I am unstoppable all on my own. I don’t need to compare myself to anyone else at any time…… and Sam felt the same way.
Plus, her house was big enough that if she wanted a grand piano, I could have brought her one. 😉 But that would have taken years to build, and she was so ready and yet not. She felt it was too soon to jump in feet first, yet didn’t have any experience not doing so. Frankly, neither did I. But what I was comfortable with is loving her to whatever level she would accept, because I thought she would make a great friend if we weren’t together……… right up until she text messaged me to break up and when I asked her if we could talk about this, she said she didn’t think it would do any good. To me, that’s not an adult. That’s hiding. But there’s more to lesbian relationships moving fast than you might think. We are terrified of scarcity. We will lock down bad relationships and stay in them for years because it’s so hard to meet lesbians as a general rule.
In terms of queer women, we are very much known for this. My friend Beck and I are both surprised U-Haul has not built an entire ad campaign around it……… It’s not a secret, it’s history. As I said in a queer group on Facebook, “we don’t want to treat women like men. We don’t want other women to treat us the way men treat women. So we do what women have done for thousands of years….. use inference until someone gives or until both people die.” I don’t want to be this way with anyone anymore, because it’s never gotten me anywhere.
Most, if not all lesbians need to be told directly that you like them, because I promise you that most women have self-esteem issues and will not believe it just by watching across the room for interest. So, I feel very sorry for it, but that’s what gave me too much hubris with my beautiful girl. Because first of all, if she felt anything from my letters, I knew she wouldn’t tell me. The second thing is that I didn’t want to go my whole life without knowing the answer.
I was brave, crazy, and a total idiot. I think she didn’t tell me she was in a serious relationship because she knew it would hurt; it actually made things 10 times worse because she waited so long to lower the boom. In my opinion, she didn’t tell me things like that because she was afraid of my reaction…. because I would imagine that she has had to deal with male interest every single fucking day of her life.
With me, she got shy and absolutely didn’t know what to say. In some ways, and please forgive me, beautiful girl, just something I know to be true from other women that have been older than me- their internalized homophobia is stronger because of the era in which they grew up. Just because there are gay people around someone doesn’t mean they know how to react when someone is interested in them. My job was to make sure that it didn’t feel threatening, and at first, it didn’t. She was flattered and appreciated my thoughts.
But I was married, and basically, so was she. But there was a power dynamic between us that made our relationship stronger and different than the one with my wife. But those are all the parts I can’t explain, which is why I was such a dick in trying to shut the relationship down. I really thought she’d block me on everything and that would be the end of that.
She didn’t understand any of it because she wasn’t in love with me. She didn’t freak at seeing my picture in her feed all day. It wasn’t hard for her to see my status updates because she wasn’t reading into them the way I was into hers, because it hurt to be close and not. Nothing about our situation said that we were having the same experience, but that didn’t mean that either was wrong.
She said something to me that I’ve always remembered, because it gave me room in the relationship to be me. She said, “we both have different ways of being in this relationship, and that’s not wrong. I don’t know what else to say.” She didn’t have to- that one line was everything and I’ve remembered it for a decade. Most of the things that I’ve remembered, I’ve remembered for a decade.
That’s because those are the days in which we really opened up to each other without putting emotional guns on the table and seeing if they’d go off. What I have learned from this, many, many times, is that she must love me to some extent because no one in their right mind would have stayed and fought it out with me if they didn’t.
Even on our worst days, we still communicated. It might have been angry that day, but the connection was still there. What we didn’t have was my ability to call her out on her bullshit, when that wasn’t a problem before. There was an even more strict power dynamic because she thought I was always trying to rile her up and make her angry.
I always thought that’s because she doesn’t deal in deep emotions and I do a hundred percent of the time. So, what I thought of as opening up and trying to get closer, she thought I was “throwing emotional bombs and waiting for the shit storm to begin.” So, when she’d say that, I’d go into fight or flight and it never ended well.
But those angry conversations are the last thing that happened, not my intention for our friendship. She wasn’t always the one who escalated, but it was easy for her to blame stuff like that on me because I’d already hurt her once and she was protecting herself from it not happening again. I respect that part of it. I do not respect holding me to that wrong forever, because if I didn’t really mean that there was no friend zone, that whatever she offered me was great, I would have given up eight or nine years ago.
I feel like I’ve been acting the way women want men to react, to see that there’s more to life than sex with women and really take in that if women won’t give you that part of themselves, that doesn’t degrade their worth as a person and they still have so much to give you. So, if you take your shot and lose, walking off with your tail between your legs, you have probably lost a relationship that could grow into something strong and comfortable if you weren’t such a jackass about it.
My jackass days are over, because I cannot stress enough how my emotions happened completely organically so that even I was suprised by them, both that they existed at all and that they were intense. One year she was going on vacation and I offered to Skype her. She said, “sure,” and we didn’t make it happen. Our relationship devolved into more and more writing, less and less planning to get together as our two stories diverged in a wood, because it was deeper and more emotionally charged due to the wall between us.
But the thing is, if you’re used to really fucked up love, you’ll find it and stick with it because you don’t know anything else. I’m only calling her out on this part because she thought I was jumping up and down for attention by sending her emotional bombs. In reality, I knew that we’d be apart for a long time, so the letters were weighted so she’d actually have something to chew on before we got together again, even virtually.
But because she thought I was throwing emotional bombs, she’d reply immediately and ream me out. From my perspective, none of the messages she was supposed to get actually came across.
I wasn’t jumping up and down for attention by sending her “emotional bombs.” I was trying to clean up our toxic mess by asking her emotionally intelliegent questions, and doing things for her like occasionally picking up her afternoon coffee and sending her presents for Christmas, her birthday, and Galentine’s Day…… because I’m Leslie….. get it?
We need to remember what’s important in life: friends, waffles, work. Or waffles, friends, work. Doesn’t matter, but work is third.
The first time I sent Supergrover a Galentine’s Day present, she had never seen Parks & Rec, so it was a cute way to suprise her. She said that Feb. 13th would carry a new connotation henceforth, and it was so incredibly sweet. I knew then that she was my “poetic, noble, land mermaid.” It always makes me happy for her to feel happy at something I’ve done, and I feel all of that got overshadowed over time.
It was all my fault, In the Beginning.™
But again, I cannot abide people who forgive you on the surface and pretend everything is fine. My crush on her was not our only problem. Her problems were also on the table, and if I’m really honest, fed each other and also canceled each other out. I think we would have been a different “chosen family” altogether if we could have stopped the petty fighting and started the real one. There was no way to get closer by arguing over the equivalent of our preferred brand of toothpaste while ignoring the fact that we were both struggling underneath.
Editor’s Note:
I’m beginning to realize how long this is. Please excuse me. I took my Adderrall at 0630 and apparently it has kicked in….. JFC.
Now you know why Supergrover was overwhelmed. This entry is basically what one of my weighted letters looked like- I should have sent less of them, but she was my “first text of the day.” And in all honesty, that was all I needed from her. Just to be that person I could say good morning and good night to before I launched into a relationship that meant having to keep up with all that stuff. I knew she wouldn’t get jealous and wonder why I didn’t do it if I forgot or whatever, and I’m not even sure if she liked it or not.
And that became the root of my problem with her, and my problem with Sam. Because both women were emotionally unavailable, neither Supergrover nor Sam would have gone deep with me and said, “here are the things that are going right. Here are the things that are going wrong. Here’s things we can fix. Here’s things that are basic incompatibilities and we should move on….. because we’re wonderful, just not for each other.” I feel like I should have known this with both women a lot earlier than I did, and with Supergrover and Sam both situations resolved in much the same way.
Sam held in all her feelings about wanting to get close right away and also not having enough time for me and didn’t want me to be lonely all the time. What she didn’t know then that I know now is that we would have been as happy as Zac and I are because since he has multiple partners, he’s not dependent on me or vice versa. With Sam, if she’d wanted to be monogamous, it would have worked the same way. I would have been too involved in my own life to pay attention to the fact that she wasn’t always around.
And in fact, now I have an inside joke with one of his other partners, and I’m not sure she even knows it. I’ll use a fake name, but this is still really funny.
Leslie: No need for you to reply, just dropping a note here so I don’t forget. You are out of Diet Dr. Pepper. Karen and I would like a word. 😛 😛 😛
Zac: I’m just now headed for home after I have to stop for……. something.
And here’s the thing. He’s going to have to go to the store again if Karen won’t switch hit like I will. Zac knows that Karen likes Diet Dr Pepper and I like Dr Pepper Zero. It made me feel even more special when he walked in wiht my favorite (just like he would do for her), because Zac is the kind of man that remembers these things.
One date night turned into two because he bought us tickets for a cheese and beer tasting event.
So, the first night we hung out and watched “Sideways,” only the sexiest film in existence because Stephanie is a bad, bad girl. Then, the next night we went to the event at Fair Winds (it’s great, you should try it. It’s in Lorton.). Good lord I had flavors I never thought I’d find outside of Oregon. But I was good to myself. Too much alcohol is bad for my psych meds, so I tasted everything (a couple times), and then had a short Fruit Punch sour that absolutely blew my mind.
Then, it was still relatively early in the evening when we got home, so we watched “The Holdovers,” because we both love Paul Giamatii. Zac had heard a review (or maybe an interview with Paul) where the plot is basically “what if the guy from ‘Sideways’ was Edward James Olmos in ‘Stand and Deliver?.’ Now, I haven’t seen the movie to the end (I fell asleep because we were watching it on a tablet in bed), so I don’t know if he actually wins the entitled private school assholes over, but what I do know is that by writing that description of the movie, it’s making me laugh so hard I’m crying……. because here’s what I know.
Poor kids experience more physical pain. Rich kids experience more emotional pain because they’re surrounded by “safety.” Safety like a mom promising to take her son to St. Kitt’s for Christmas break, then calling him up while his suitcase is in his hand and saying he can’t go because it’s her honeymoon and she doesn’t want him to come. I think I only noticed one kid (not an American) who actually had a good home life. These kids are in boarding school because their parents have kids as status symbols and heirs, not the cuddlebugs they actually are. And, I’m actually not even sure that poor kids experience more physical violence, because I was talking about their neighborhoods. I am sure there are people across the income spectrum who think nothing of beating their children. Those kids learn to do everything to please their parents, so when their parents dump them, they realize that they’ll never please their parents and to find someone else…….. a large part of “Spare,” by the way. He calls out the African man who actually raised him and says it just like that. I think it would have been a dagger to the heart of any father that had feelings.
That’s why boarding school teachers and nurses are so important. They become the parents, especially for small kids. Very, very few parents send their kids to boarding school because they’re impressed with the education and truly want to give their kids a better life.
Boarding is not required at many schools. Imagine being such an absent parent that you can’t handle your kids sleeping in their own beds at night.
But I’m sure that school is also a refuge for those with alcoholic parents…… and that happens across the board, too, except kids who aren’t in boarding school don’t get a break.
I take all this in from thousands of interactions I’ve had with people over the years, often standing on my dad’s platform as a community leader (his last church was about 1600 members, so not a small sample size). I also read a ton of books on self-help, emotional intimacy, and conflict resolution. I realize that autistic rage and burnout cannot go unmanaged if I’m ever going to live with someone else, even a roommate. That’s because in my next house, I’d like to be closer and actually run a household together rather than every man for himself.
I think Zac and I would be great at this, but there are two reasons why that can’t happen. The first is that he just got a roommate about a month or two ago, and the second is that he has a hard and fast rule that romantic partners cannot live with him. I love this, and I also know that he’s said it’s not a hard and fast rule if I’m only looking for a short-term (maybe two weeks) place to crash if I’m waiting on an apartment or room in another group house (my first choice).
I also wouldn’t want to put Zac out in any way, so it would be perfect if I could crash while he was somewhere else so it didn’t feel like we were living together. The only reason I even consider him being a roommate is that I’d love him whether we were dating or not, and I have that outlook on our relationship. That I don’t know what the future holds, but my platonic relationships run just as deep and I can’t imagine a life in which we’re not coming up with book ideas and flipping each other shit while we do it. So, what I really mean is that no matter how much time we spend together, it is always quality because we’re a lot of fun.
The only thing I’m really trying to convince him of is just how beautiful a human being he is. It is not a “falling in love” sort of feeling, but recognizing a kindred spirit. We’re neurodivergent, so we have the same sense of humor- e.g. “are you suggesting object permanence is a problem?” I said, “Peek-a-Boo, bitch.” I’m laughing now even as I type this, but I still can’t believe he let me get away with that one. I’m lucky in that he’s military, because there’s very little I could say in which he wouldn’t just roll with it. And the best thing is that if something I said crossed a line and actually hurt, he’d be emotionally strong enough to tell me that. And, of course, now since he knows my sense of humor better, his digs at me are getting better and better….. to the point where I can’t wait to see what happens as we get to know each other even better. I think he is as divine as everyone else, and I want him to believe it. I believe in him, both as military, intelligence, and fiction….. plus blogs. It was a kick to be written about, and an honor…….. and then there’s things like this.
He sent me a leftist cartoon where Jesus is at the southern border with all the Mexicans trying to cross, and I said someting theologically literate and flaming liberal. He said, “commie,” and water came out of my nose.
I think it’s great that he’s an Atheist and also not offended by the teachings of Christ in the way that I use them (his criticisms of conservative, white supremacy apologist theology is valid and appreciated. Leftists need to do better at beating this down.). Sometimes, when I use a theological device in my writing, he’ll ask me what the story is behind it because he knows that I like religious discourse as an academic subject and not in any way trying to change him. We both have different ways of being in this relationship, and that’s not wrong. 😉
And now we’ve arrived at our last road trip. I need to go out into Virginia and see what’s available. I don’t need to be closer to Zac, that would just be an added bonus. No, it’s more serious than that, and something I can’t let go publicly. I just need to get all my ducks in a row regarding health care because I would be losing a hell of a lot if I couldn’t get reciprocity.
So, if you are a praying sort of person, black magic or white, ponder how this trip might turn out and wish me good luck.
Being autistic makes me naturally come across as demanding, when I am not demanding anything but the truth all the time; it is how I take in the world. If you bullshit me, it takes me a long time to regain trust. Therefore, I spend a lot of time being in anxiety about the situation, and it’s something I just don’t want to do anymore.
My biggest weakness in life is Supergrover, and it sounds romantic and yet it’s not. When she refused me as a partner, it didn’t mean that she refused me or cared about me any less. The feeling is mutual, most definitely. I don’t know how to turn it off after 10 years, and the only reason I bothered chasing her down (virtually), is because I wanted whatever our relationship grew into, not what it was in the moment.
In the moment, we were always hotheaded and angry, without exception, because that’s what an anxious/avoidant attachment does. It is not personal, ever. If someone is being avoidant and you need information to function in the relationship (and you do, always), then the relationship cannot proceed because it can’t. The tautology is real. True intimacy is by sharing information, not by hiding it. Saying we were fine was okay with me, but not after years and years. Something about it didn’t feel authentic, and I couldn’t fix it. But there were genuine moments, clearly, or she would be off my radar.
I’ll always keep the promises I made to the best of my ability, which is why it’s so hard for us both to make room for each other. My blog is a threat, objectively, and I understand that. But in order to describe what is happening with me, some information is necessary. I can use little things to talk about big things….. because the little things are the things that mean the most, not what is impressive.
In the future, for the readers I haven’t met yet, if you can’t understand that I’m a writer and try constantly to take it away from me because you think it’s a threat, then I don’t have time for you- not that you aren’t valuable and special, but it takes a lot out of me to write and this is what I do. If you don’t like this, you don’t like me on a very fundamental level. And I don’t need those friends.
I’m not going to stand for anyone having a problem with my writing, because I’m going to do it whether you’re in my life or not. It’s what I have when I feel the most unwanted- I can entertain myself by putting myself out there to strangers when you don’t want to talk. If you won’t listen, someone else will. And that’s all I’m asking. That this blog is my way of coping with life, and I learn more about myself than when I am in conversation, and it drove me to write six books’ worth of my journey as it was happening, not reviewing everything when it’s long in the past. Here’s the thing that’s most important about being a writer: you learn intimately that patterns repeat and there are no real surprises in life if you take that attitude.
If people are avoidant about bad things, they’ll be avoidant about good things, too. The person that won’t open up at work probably has trouble opening up to people they like as well. It’s never personal, it’s how they operate. A person like that in a relationship where the other person spills their guts is going to irritate the fuck out them, no matter whether it’s me or anyone else……
because patterns repeat and if you don’t change the dynamic, you’ll get stuck. It’s how the most people connect instantly and come off the rails over time. If you have trouble believing this is true, think about how many women leave their husbands because they work all the time, never share anything, and shut down when there’s a problem. It’s not anything personal to them, it’s how they operate. If they’ve caused damage to other people in their lives, they are 100% going to cause damage to you. I don’t look at it like “everyone is out to get you.” I look at it like “everyone has their own issues and how they respond is none of my business.”
For all people, the way they respond to my writing is important. What I have found over time is that everyone loves my writing as long as it’s about people they don’t know. For 99.9% of the world, this is true. But if you stop liking the mirror I hold up once I’m writing about you, then it was never about supporting me. It was always about adoring me and then discarding because they just can’t handle it. I didn’t leave those people behind, I grew past them.
I don’t go around picking people to write about because I don’t have to. All my friends are interesting enough to be characters in fiction. I don’t even make them a real person unless they’re close enough to me to warrant writing about them in the first place.
If you love the good and praise it often, and don’t like the bad and kick me in the nuts over it, then it shows that you’re not in it for the long haul. It’s really that simple. I will never kick anyone, because I am doing two things that they’re ignoring.
I have never found all the bad in someone without finding the good, but it may not be in the same entry. I am only talking about a snapshot of my day, and I change my mind frequently. Therefore, it might be a hit piece one day because I think your actions are fucking me up, and it might be that you are the best person in the world for me because we’ve just had a breakthrough and I want to celebrate it. I do not go after people, I reflect them as they are in my perception. As my perception changes, so do the characters they represent. I am laying out my thoughts this way so that they’ll change, not because I am trying to direct ire at them. I have the right to say I went through something bad and it hurt, without bugging you to read about it. If you want to know what I think, you’ll read. If you don’t, you won’t. But at no time should you take it personally. I write about everyone in the same way.
If I didn’t, then you would see that I’m only mining my friends for the gossip and not what is really happening in real time. It wouldn’t change me, because I’d just be a vicious, vindictive person and not trying to do therapy on my own. You are reading my most intimate thoughts regarding the people surrounding me, not the happenings around town like I’m the local Gladys Kravitz.
I try to be non-specific about people that matter. But if I start out with your real name, I won’t change it unless there’s a solid reason, and I have them. If you’re not named, you’re not that important, and I want the people around me to know that. I also know that it’s better to write about people than it is to not, because when I stop writing about them because they hate the negative things, they rail that I’m not only writing the positive. No, if you insist that you like an international audience thinking the sun shines out of your ass, then you don’t make a good character. Flat out.
It’s why I’m having so much trouble believing that any of my friends don’t see themselves as a 3D character, because I’ve even been nice to exes that have slashed my heart in two- less so with Kathleen, mostly because I don’t remember our day to day life together, but I definitely remember how she left. But again, emotionally unavailable so she wouldn’t talk about underlying issues, but would beat the hell out of me emotionally if I didn’t clean something to her standards, recognizing that not everyone grew up the same way. I fold the towels the way my mother did, and so does everyone else. It’s not worth relationship crisis, but she did it often enough that I knew she’d never open up. But I couldn’t leave, and I don’t think she could either- which is why she pulled such an egregious trump card.
And the thing is, if our relationship had been set up with poly in the first place, that she couldn’t commit to monogamy, so we’d make other things our touchstones, I don’t think I would have handled it as well then as I would now, but it would have been better than ambushing me with so many lies, and waiting until I was out of town to cheat.
Due to that experience, and having my own new relationship experience while I was still married, I can’t commit to it, either. It’s not because I’m incapable, it’s because I never want to be accused of cheating ever again. It’s not cheating if you’re not breaking an agreement…. so I just won’t make it.
I’m not going to trade new relationship energy (no matter what kind- platonic relationships are just as fulfilling) for my entire life falling apart. I cannot put all my eggs in one basket anymore, and part of it is that my heart is already gone. I don’t have a choice about that, and yet, I do. I want a scenario where when I have to make Supergrover a big deal in my own life that it doesn’t affect any of the others, and if Supergrover is in any way picking up what I’m putting down, she knows to the very depth of her being that I made the right decision by putting her first, even in my marriage.
I will never apologize, ever, for that stone cold fact, because I cannot do anything about it. She should have realized that when we don’t interact, it almost affects me more than when she is. We have a hard out, not subjective like with my other friends, and she has taken no responsibility for that fact. What she has taken responsibility for is changing my life and she wishes she’d never told me anything at all, when it’s the best gift I’ve ever been given. But gifts don’t come without potential problems when the wrapping is fallible- and I mean human, not that anyone has to be perfect; they can’t.
So, when I talk about biggest challenges, they’re always emotional because that’s the wavelength I’m riding and not many people are. Most people don’t know themselves as well as I do, so I seem threatening when I’m just certain. I can also listen to someone else without agreeing with them; then, they become threatened that it’s going to take different words to convince me they’re right, because I’m not trying to find a situation I can “win,” but a situation in which we both get what we want. It takes time and effort to do that, but it’s not impossible. People just cut out long before the discussion is over, and if you’re supposedly in it for the long haul, then you’ll meet me halfway.
Podcasts are so sophisticated that they’ve turned my attention away from music. I enjoy conversation, so interview shows are essential.
My friend Wade introduced me to my current favorite, a CBC show called “Writers and Company.” The host is retiring, so I don’t know if she’s going to be replaced or a new show is going to be made instead. Through that show, I’ve met so many people like me. I’m not the same level of writer that they are, particularly for people like le Carré, but I identify with the creative process. I like hearing how people work.
In the unedited version of “On Being,” Krista Tippett always starts with asking the guest what they had for breakfast, and I’m like, “Krista…. thank you for asking the real questions here.
Pete Holmes (You Made It Weird) and Marc Maron (WTF) compete for my attention week to week based on guest, and if I have time, I’ll get involved with the show more regularly because keeping up with every show is how you keep up with Marc and Pete. They both have what I call the “Craig Ferguson effect.” They can both talk for an hour and it will be fabulous. Craig could have hosted The Late, Late Show until he died, no guests, and I would have been glued. I was devastated when he didn’t want the job anymore, but genuinely hope for his happiness and success because he’s another person I feel is a kindred spirit. He’s an alcoholic and I’m bipolar. Both rabid Doctor Who fans. Same software, different case.
I don’t think Craig has a podcast, but I have genuinely enjoyed listening to him when he’s been a guest on others. Sometimes I just need to hear “it’s a great day for America, everybody.” And when I need to, I can hear him say it on YouTube.
I love “SpyCast” and have been on it a couple of times, because I’ve been in the audience and thus the recorded Q&A. I haven’t always asked questions, but when I laugh, you always know it’s me. I got into it because of the interviews with Tony and Jonna Mendez in the archives, but stayed because I really liked Vince Houghton’s interview style (and later Andrew Hammond’s).
It’s cool to hear people like John Brennan when they’ve got five minutes on Conan or whatever, but they’re amazing when they’ve got 45 or 60. Spies are personable, yet not trained for television, either. It takes more than five minutes to find the rhythm in which they’re comfortable opening up, and that’s true of everyone who doesn’t work in television. Hell, even people who do work in television. I love long-form interviews with actors as well.
It’s not technically a podcast, but The Hollywood Reporter funds roundtables where actors, directors, and writers interview each other. There is a moderator, but for the most part the actors talk amongst themselves. You learn more about the craft than you ever would by watching TV.
In terms of writing roundtables, my other favorite podcast is “The Writer’s Panel.” You’ll see a list of guests and not recognize a single name, turns out they were on a team that wrote five of your favorite shows this year. And it’s always a random assortment, like “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective” and “Schindler’s List.” Not a real example, but on brand. Work is work. I particularly want to hear from black writers, because their voices are more authentic to mine than whites given my sexual orientation. The Writer’s Panel is the first place where I’ve met a lot of black TV and movie writers at once, and even more importantly, all talking to each other. That’s the kind of “creatives talking about business” I need because they have the same limitations I do in working for a system that’s not built for them. Hearing multiple people come at the problem from different angles gives me solid information on which to reflect.
I have loved news since I was a child, so now I listen to it in Rachel Maddow’s voice whenever I can and Alex Wagner’s failing that. I listen to everything Rachel does, and I’m particularly wrapped up in her podcast series (multiple). I like how she weaves history into the present and I think that’s what makes me sound like her some days. I used to have a picture of Rachel sitting in her office as the background on my laptop, and my housemate asked me who had taken that picture of me. We look alike, we think alike, we have the same interests. I believe that I remind people more of her after we speak than before, and I’m her archetype everywhere in the world with my genderqueer schtick.
Before Maddow, people pegged me as kd lang. They probably connected me more easily to her because not only do I sing, she’s the lesbian who resembles me and other people know who she is. If I looked like Melissa Etheridge, people would have told me I looked like her on multiple levels….. and I know this because “you look like kd lang” has all sorts of connotations depending on tone of voice. Rachel and I probably both got called “kd lang” as a kid, because I can’t remember who’s older, but it’s not enough to be memorable if there’s an age difference. Therefore, I feel very tender toward her even though we’ve never met. Another person with whom I could set a date, step off a plane, give her a hug, and go for beers. On the surface, we are the same person, and not because we actually are. We are holding the same banner at the same parade. Rachel is one of those people that I think “I’d be happy with her.” It guides me as to who I actually want to date because not only do Rachel and I not live in the same city, she already has a partner and they’re so happy it’s impossible not to be happy for them. It is cool that she works here sometimes, though, because if we ran into each other I think we’d have fun. She could certainly introduce me to women I’d have never met otherwise, the reason I came to Washington in the first place. I didn’t want to be a Texas writer. I came here to play.
And with Rachel, it wouldn’t be about meeting women in terms of dating. It would be walking down the hallway and Hillary Clinton stopping us for a second. I wouldn’t have any business with Hillary and I wouldn’t care what their conversation contained. I would just be honored to hear something like that. It wouldn’t just be Hillary Clinton, either. Rachel knows everyone. She’s so powerful she probably knows we’re talking about her right now.
I am sometimes one of those women who likes murder podcasts, and always someone who likes “dark history.” Bailey Sarian covers both my bases with two shows available on YouTube and as a podcast. “Mystery, Makeup, and Murder” is a long form lecture on a murder while Bailey is applying her makeup. I love it because it’s so informal, and very much like reading one of my own blog posts because she just lays it all out there like we’re sitting there having a drink. She is also an outstanding makeup artist, and reminds me of Kevyn Aucoin with her style. I flip back and forth between MM&M on YouTube and audio because even though I am not into makeup as a general rule, she is so gorgeous that sometimes I just want to watch her in a not-creepy way for when I do decide to get “all nellied out.” The new foundations that are coming out are like magic. You can basically PhotoShop your whole face in 15 minutes flat. For the uninitiated, “all nellied out” is queer for someone looking extraordinarily femme and comes from Nellie Olson in “Little House on the Prairie.” I don’t do it much anymore, but that doesn’t mean I’m not good at it. But really, when it comes to Bailey, I’m more attracted to the murder. She is just the wrapping that comes with the murder. It’s an excellent package.
When MM&M became insanely popular, a company asked her to do a second podcast called “Dark History.” These are long-form lectures that translate just as well on audio because she’s not doing something else. There are obviously dark episodes, like Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, but also things that most people don’t think about, like the war over pineapples and sugar. The child labor in chocolate and coffee. It’s just fascinating and I recommend it both because it is interesting and so is Bailey.
Indirectly, Bailey changed the direction of my media-watching habits because for the last, I don’t know, year or so? I haven’t really watched TV. I’ve watched YouTube. Finding MM&M and Dark History led me to watching other long form lectures, which in effect, sent me back to college. I haven’t seen all the latest shows because I’ve been thinking about the Roman empire. 😉 No, seriously. I watch lectures by college professors on history- military and CIA particularly because that’s what I’m researching. Right now, it doesn’t matter what era of military history it is, as long as we’re talking about WWII forward.
That’s because before then, we didn’t have an official intelligence service (and my novel focuses on both defense and intel equally). We had “Wild Bill Donovan,” America’s one-man traveling Langley. He had few friends in this town. Any mystery and cool factor over CIA that exists today isn’t based on them, I assure you. Military hated intelligence at first because they weren’t helpful, they were a threat to their authority. Americans love CIA because Ian Fleming charmed them into it. George Tenet knows this better than anyone else. He knew that CIA needed a win, so he was the one that declassified the operation so that the story of the Canadian houseguests could be told.
That’s because he knew Britain was in love with James Bond, and so was America. What if it was provable that CIA has a spy who is just as lovable? It has to be a good movie if my heart goes a little squishy every time I see Ben Affleck and it’s not because of “Chasing Amy” (I do not know a single bisexual girl who didn’t become absolutely 100% obsessed with that movie….. maybe I’m less bi than I thought or something.)…. and honestly, it’s exciting thinking about who I’d like to play Jonna if “The Moscow Rules” is also optioned (and she’s told me that there’s interest, but nothing has come of it- no ink). Kristen Stewart might be a good choice because she and Jonna both have the same vibe- feminine and rough and tumble. Same for someone like Megan Fox, Mila Kunis, etc. It would have to be an actor about Friends-cast age because if I was Jonna, I’d want Ben to play Tony in TMR, too (I’m just thinking out loud. Jonna, you can stop me at any time…. kidding, I don’t know if she reads me, but it’s not impossible). I can’t think of anyone I would choose based on direct comparison in looks, because I don’t think that the best actors do imitations. For instance, I don’t think Peter Dinklage actually looks like Cyrano De Bergerac, but I do know he chewed the scenery. It wasn’t an imitation. Dinklage became him.
I would choose Taylor Schilling to play Jonna if she hadn’t already played Tony’s first wife in Argo. I don’t remember how many years it was post-Iran, but she died of cancer before Tony and Jonna started working together.
Here’s the most important scene in “The Moscow Rules” to me, and I will be seriously pissed if they leave it out of the movie. Tony and Jonna worked in disguises, right? So they were in charge of giving people their disguises and training them to detect when they were about to get made. They did this by taking the “kids” to Georgetown and letting them loose, a spy game. They all have different skills, like one’s a linguist, one’s got the map in their head, etc. However, all the spies have to be functional in everything. It’s all about leaning on each other’s strengths and being capable when you’re alone. I think it’s the part about spying that’s ignored the most- how fun the training is. God forbid you get a job where you actually enjoy yourself.
I am sure that in a lot of ways, The Farm is like boot camp. You get out and the real world bears no resemblance to anything you just learned. The courage to be a spy isn’t being fearless all the time. It’s letting go of the fear that you’re going to suck and acknowledging that it’s okay to suck until you know what you’re doing. However, if you’re going to be a spy, know that it’s not a movie. Err on the side of caution because other people’s lives are in your hands. You could get people killed by leaving a newspaper in a coffee shop. It was an accident, and assets still got made.
If I sound like a I know what I’m talking about, it’s exclusively because of podcasts. After seeing “Argo,” I began to look for other writers that did things like it- and then Tony and Jonna released the book in reaction to the movie. But by looking around for writers, that included listening to podcasts about intelligence. Everything I’ve said is something I’ve heard directly, or is my opinion based on something someone else said.
I notice things that people don’t say in audio, more clearly on video. For instance, when I first started dating Zac, Jonna Mendez scared the life out of me on YouTube. We’re friends in real life, it wasn’t directed at me in any way, and yet my stomach clenched. She said something about “when you work for an intelligence agency, it’s not your family that’s the problem. It’s your friends.” And yet, for her, it was the other way around because she did tell someone in her family that made it a huge deal all the time, causing her not to tell her best friend for 35 years… interesting.
In fact, I’m not sure that said best friend still doesn’t know, because I don’t know if the friend was still living when she said that to the audience. Betraying a boyfriend with infidelity is child’s play, and both Zac and I are clear on it. I don’t have a problem with saying I’m dating Zac Wood here because I say it on Facebook, his profile is public, and it would come to someone’s attention faster than it ever would here in terms of search results. That being said, I don’t say things like the specific name of his agency, either. When I say he went to Langley or whatever, it’s because they’re his clients, not the other way around. You could probably Google all that, but my friends/fans on Facebook could do the same thing because he follows me personally and professionally. In short, I don’t want his Facebook profile and his character here to be different, because I want his professional persona to only be what he projects, and for my reactions to him to be genuine without touching on anything too personal in a business sense.
For instance, he can’t discuss troop movements in Ukraine, but we can both geek out over “Folksoda,” “Burn After Reading,” and “Slow Horses.” Neither of us have seen that last one. It would be a cold day in hell before either of us had time to schedule a marathon, but if we did it, “Slow Horses” would be a good one. It’s not that we don’t like being lazy and sitting on the couch. It’s that our lives are too packed to make too much of it. As a result, we make plans to watch things with no recognition of the fact that it’s been a month or so since we’ve seen each other and end up talking for six hours in a row instead.
I want to be with someone like Zac, and I only say “someone like Zac,” because I can have him, but I can’t have all of him. That doesn’t bother me. I just need to find my own partner if I want to settle down. I made the commitment not to start looking until January, because I do not want to be the type of person that turns my back on “The War Daniel” at a time when he needs love the most. He was lost in a pit of despair, anger, and addiction that will only start to lift in January (at the earliest) because it will have been a year since his last drink and his brain will be in a totally different place. No one knows this more than a doctor, and that’s why I call him “The War Daniel.” John Hurt plays “The War Doctor” in the 50th anniversary special of Doctor Who, and Daniel (before he retired) was a medical Navy Corpsman embedded with a team in Afghanistan during Operation Enduring Freedom. If he’d done the same job as a civilian, he could be certified as both a medical and surgical nurse practitioner, and in some cases is, I believe, superior to an MD trauma surgeon on his best day. Most people who have been to medical school didn’t have to put a brain back together under cover fire.
That is why I am comfortable living with him like royalty or paupers, because he deserves to earn his fortune and he also deserves to kick back and just be poor, living off his retirement so that he doesn’t have to ever do anything he doesn’t want to do ever again.
Dana’s dad (my former father-in-law, high comedy) was a Marine, but he was in the JAG and went into private practice later. I think Daniel could do something like that if he wanted, because he has the mind that would make law incredibly easy for him. But that’s only if he wanted to change careers. If he went to school to become a nurse practitioner or a doctor for real, that’d be a good move, too. It’s just that I wouldn’t want to do something if it caused triggers in me, but Daniel is in the unique position of never being able to walk away at any time. He has a patient population that will never in a million years trust anyone else. They may not have physically seen each other for ten years, but he’ll still get calls in the middle of the night. Sometimes, it’s easy, like “I can’t tell anyone I have a rash there.” Sometimes, it’s talking someone down who literally has a gun to their heads because he’s the only psychiatrist they’ve got.
Daniel could become president of the United States and he’d still be a doctor. He’d still be The Doctor. And here’s the thing. Daniel is George W. Bush if George W. Bush was smart. That’s because he’s the W. version of Bill Clinton without the rabid infidelity….. and he’s a war hero, having won an award that most win posthumously. Daniel could become president of the United States, and I know it like the back of my hand. But I do not want him for that. I would hate every minute of it. I have more in common with Michelle Obama than I don’t. All I’m saying is that if he decided he wanted to be president, people would show up in droves.
That’s because he’s got a George W. demeanor and my political/historical/writer mind. If he did want to become president, I could help him do it. That’s because I’d be great at writing his speeches in the background.
“When did you write that last part?” “In the car.”
If he is Jed Bartlett, I would have to grow into the role of Abby….. but he already has his Sam, Toby, Josh, and Donna…… on multiple levels.
“Oh. This is bad on so many levels.”
Accidentally sleeping with a law student that also happens to be a prostitute is exactly the kind of trouble I’d be in all the time, too. This is because a prostitute, lawyer, and preacher’s kid (and spy, feeding my special interest) have one thing in common. They’re all the type of people that connect to other people immediately and have interesting stories because of it. With someone like Laurie, she would have set my brain on fire talking about SCOTUS cases before I ever realized she was a professional…… another thing I wouldn’t give a fuck about because I would care so much more that she set my brain on fire, which is I think how Sam Seaborn would have reacted if he wasn’t deputy chief of staff……… who also thought at first that his boss’s daughter was like, nine to disastrous effect. He has an archetype, and it is me….. incidentally, I am also the archetype for Toby Ziegler because I believe he is coded as autistic. I see it clearly now because of The West Wing Weekly, which has made me look at the series again after many years. Scenes play in my head.
Ziegler acts like us, even stimming when he throws a ball against the wall to think more clearly. Everyone I know in real life just went “ohhhhhhhh.” Light bulb.
I’ve realized I stim by walking everywhere and dictating my notes. Attaching a sensory memory like walking makes an idea move faster and retain longer….. for instance, not only do I retain a lot of what I read, I retain a lot of what I write because typing is stimming in and of itself…… and honestly, prevents a lot of burnout because I am emotionally distanced from people while I write so I’m not anticipating someone else’s needs. I am fluent in my own and asking for your input so I can change my mind if I think you’re right….. at the very least, explaining my dealbreakers in detail so that someone understands why I can compromise so easily with some things and am so rigid about others. It all revolves around my disability because that’s something I can’t change, and is just as valid as diabetes or COPD. A panic attack in your mind is just as valid as an attack in your heart, and it makes me angry when people admit themselves to the emergency room with a real psychiatric issue. That’s because most of the time, it’s treated like a “false alarm,” thereby ignoring the underlying problem and ensuring that if it happened today, it will also happen next week because Xanax isn’t important and surgeons have prepared for battle. You can smell disappointment in the air.
If you’ve ever watched Scrubs, it’s the most accurate medical show in the history of the world because Todd is for real. Surgical really does have a bigger complex than medical, even though medical is generally smarter because they don’t just pull it out and see it like a plumber. They’re detectives. In my opinion, House is superior to your basic cardiologist, if you are unclear on what I’m saying. It is absolutely the difference between medical science and medical art.
I say this because J.D. is another good archetype for me. In fact, I would say that I’m more like J.D. than I am most characters on television and not because I have experience in medicine myself. It’s that my ability to learn the jargon has been heightened an enormous amount by living with e medical detective.
Because we also lived in Houston and I went to a math and science magnet in middle school, I was fascinated by her being a doctor because I thought she should apply for the space program. She said, “but Leslie…. I already am a space doctor. I’m a “room atologist.” Here’s the serious part underneath the conversation. Going to space is all about improvisation because you don’t have any tools or materials you didn’t pack.
My stepmother’s second favorite stethoscope was from the medical bag of a Playskool set, and I’m passing this information to all my friends who are still field docs…. but check them out and if they’re not good anymore, try to find one on e-bay from the 90s if you can plan in advance. Retro toys are all the rage- it’s not impossible. It’s something that bar being in the space program, if you don’t have it you can find it at most big box stores on the fly….. provided Playskool hasn’t fixed something that wasn’t broken. It makes me laugh that a Playskool medical bag is as essential as a burner phone in some cases…….. and a tampon can save your life in two ways. It’s ironic that two male soldiers told me why I needed to carry tampons on me at all times even if I didn’t use them.
To pivot to that story, the first way is if you get injured. They’re a great addition to a Band-Aid if you’re bleeding profusely (and you can put it directly into a wound if it’s deep enough). The second way it’s absolutely crucial requires two more ingredients. In order to start an all-weather fire (not foolproof), you need a tampon, a way to start a fire, and some petroleum jelly, which is most useful to keep in your car if the temperature drops and you’re stranded. The reason that the tampon needs the petroleum jelly is that it makes the flame last longer, essentially turning the tampon into a candle. It’s not enough to last more than 5-10 minutes, but it is a better shot at catching kindling than using matches, sticks, and paper.
Another thing I’ve learned in terms of the whole field doc schtick is that multitools and “spy pens” are no joke. They’re not practical for everyday with things like mini-glassbreakers, so it’s kind of like having a truck. Alternately and absolutely the most useful and wasteful thing you’ve ever bought depending on the task at hand.
For instance, a parachute cord bracelet that unwinds is another thing it’s useful to keep on you for emergencies, but the reason it’s not useful is that it doesn’t go with every outfit; who knows if you’ll have it if said time where it’s necessary is absolute and wearing it is optional?
If you are a photographer, my attitude is extremely similar. The most important camera you’ll ever own is on your phone, not your Nikon “Turn it Up to Stupid o’Clock.” That’s because you don’t want to lug around all the equipment, and your smart phone that records in HD for video and takes 12 MP photographs (perfect for printing) is in your pocket. If you have a smart watch, you also have a remote. Anything you can do on the best Nikon can be done with an iPhone or an iPad, a Samsung tablet or phone. When you can carry something so heavy and aren’t required, you won’t.
That’s because most people don’t specialize in photography and filmmaking, therefore do not need the file size that most professional cameras have on photos and video. Even then, for pros it becomes about convenience and they’ll deal with lesser quality because of it.
Seriously, get a tablet and it will change your life because it’s so light you’re more likely to have it on you. The two tablets that accomplished this the best for me were the Nexus 7 and the iPad mini. There was enough real estate to be able to edit accurately, yet they were small enough that it felt like the same diameters in terms of height and width in portrait mode as a novel. Great for things like writing documents and would fit in the front pocket of a hoodie or my smallest bag. My problem with them has never been the form factor, but that they haven’t been able to fit better hardware than is currently available into that form factor. That’s because CPU power for 7-inch tablets is “budget” because they’re going off of price and not use case scenario.
For instance, I could build a marvelous tablet out of a Raspberry Pi Zero because it would fit into a tablet form factor. However, it does not have the power of a Raspberry Pi, which won’t unless you’re just talking about a laptop with a touchscreen on the front. There’s no way to get it small and cool. Pick a lane. It’s not that they can’t stay cool, it’s that laptop cases that don’t come with fans are more likely to overheat, and there’s currently no Raspberry Pi laptop case that’s immune to it. The best I could do with a Raspberry Pi Zero is a file server or a smart mirror, because a graphical interface would run like a three-legged dog. Clicking a menu, then being filled with rage because you’ve come back and it’s still not done, etc. Because of this, it would take a ton of work and the best performance I could get would come with an interface that looked like NASA in the 60s, with Bluetooth for a keyboard and wifi to access other devices on the network. That would indeed be useful, but not on the go. You’d be limited to a tablet where you had to carry the keyboard everywhere, the interface wouldn’t support a touch screen (it would, but you’d get tired of it quickly), bail to the command line, and be limited to the applications you can run using only text. Games like Pong. A text editor. A web browser that doesn’t really work anymore, lynx. An e-mail client so ancient that all college students my age have used it, pine- so old that when I use it, I feel nostalgic and put up with its limitations often. But we didn’t use it the whole time. We transitioned to Eudora at University of Houston. One of the funniest support calls I ever got was from a lady who asked me how to configure her “Endora” account. She asked me why I was laughing and I told her that Eudora was a mail client. Endora was the grandmother on “Bewitched……” Really, I wasn’t laughing at her. She reminded me of my mother’s mother, who made malapropisms standard operating procedure. She once told me she was going to lay down on the couch with an African (afghan). I doubted it, because losing certain words was so hard for her.
I’m not ashamed of being a Texan, but there’s always been a lot wrong with it.
After all, I did agree to marry George W….. if W. was smart. I’m not holding onto him forever, but I am holding onto him until I am sure that we’ve both had enough time to decide whether we made the right decision in the moment or not. I believe, like Meag and me, that it wasn’t that we aren’t good together. It’s that it was the wrong time and the wrong place, because with his addiction and both our mental illnesses/processing disorders, we were trying to find a secure environment in a hurry. But read “Blink” and then question whether I was wrong after you’ve had time to really take it in.
I blew Supergrover’s mind with two blinks in a row, but because of my autism, I could express my entire thought process in a way that came across clearly in text. She was excited for Daniel and me once I explained the ins and outs. That it wasn’t a snap decision like a wedding in Vegas. It was taking a leap toward a better life with a friend I’d known since I was seven and has a daughter I’m completely in love with as if I’d had her myself. It blows my mind that I’m old enough to be the stepmom of a 25-year-old. It was also good for me to have a partner, that polyamory meant he didn’t care if I fell in love with him or not because being friends trumped everything else, that having his back was more important than a wife. That whether I ended up being Leo or Abby it wasn’t a dealbreaker. I said the same thing to him. That even if I can’t be Abby, I’ll always be CJ.
This is better than, for instance, being with Meag and secretly pining for……. someone else. Being with anyone and pining for someone else, now a recurring theme I can’t ignore because it lends itself to cheating when you have ADHD and autism. Your brain makes you ruminate about someone who is not your partner and if they have ADHD, you won’t have to guess because they won’t keep their mouths shut for love for money.
Ask 50 neurodivergent people. We all agree.
That is why research suggests that poly behavior among neurodivergent people is sky high. They throw truth bombs whether you like it or not, which actually makes it easier to communicate because boundaries are secure. It’s especially common among couples where both halves are neurodivergent, because they understand the idea that obsession and complete disinterest are symptoms and there are times when both of us are going to tap out and come back together. It’s extreme because of the processing disorder, not because we’re mad at each other. There is also a complete and total difference between the love you have for a partner and the love you have in NRE (new relationship energy). The former is deeper, like drinking fine wine or looking at a Renoir. The latter is Jackson Pollack deep fried on a stick.
You can enjoy both environments depending on mood, but to be clear your partner is never going to be Jackson Pollack ever again…….. and not because they’re less valuable. It’s the nature of the dopamine when you first meet. Once it’s gone and lust isn’t the “forward note,” it is only really then that you find out where the rubber meets the road. I am neurodivergent and find it quickly. That is either because I am pastoral in nature and people spill things to me up front, or they are annoyed by my ADHD and Autism. There is no in between and my relationships tend to burn bright and flame out because of it, including at work.
I am not alone. I think something like 80% of autistic people are unemployed at any given time, because think of how hard work must be if you were bullied in school and teachers of “real” subjects looked down on special ed? Do you think that bosses and coworkers are in any way different when we graduate from high school? Teachers decided that you didn’t need it if you were smart, limiting anything we would have learned to help us later on. It makes for a hostile work environment because without special ed, we might have suffered in school and still made it through, but we didn’t learn any thought processes except social masking. Nothing even close to what’s available on autistic YouTube right now…… and lots of podcasts are just YouTube videos with the visuals cut, so the videos are the podcasts I listen to whether it’s on YouTube or not.
Everything I have said in this essay can be found in one podcast or another. I am so grateful that talk radio has expanded in this way…… but podcasts can only do so much when I want to see Rachel Maddow instead of just listening to her voice.
Stories That Are All True 