Tag: Relationships

I’ve Been Laughing About Today’s Prompt for a Year

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Because I answered it last year, I can’t answer the daily prompt again…. but that didn’t stop me from laughing about it. The prompt is “have you ever been camping?”Leslie Goes Camping is one of my favorite stories in life, and it is years and years old.

The setup is that Dana (ex-wife, but we were best friends for years before we got married), her then-partner, and I went on a camping trip for our church. It was great, because we were able to have worship on top of Mt. St. Helen’s, and a few other things we could do when “Jesus has left the building.” Dana and I had met the Easter before, when I’d been brutally dumped (not really, but it felt that way at the time) and needed to make a whole new friend set…… arguably worse than being dumped, but neither made me feel so hot.

It was the start of The Separation, and Dana and I didn’t even know it. However, she would have been relieved, and I know this. She watched me struggle every fucking day for years. I wasn’t a very good wife on most days, but I had my moments. I just have to hope that Dana remembers them, too, and I don’t have to continue to feel bad that I completely wrecked her life as well.

I do not think this is because we were bad for each other (at that time). I think I didn’t know I was autistic, so I got called a judgmental dickhead a lot. In fact, I can’t remember a better day in Dana’s life than when my beautiful girl called me a judgmental dickhead to my face. At that particular date and time, I did indeed deserve it. She was not always wrong, she was just not always right, either.

To me, there is a huge difference between saying “your actions have hurt me” and “you are a bad person.” Both women saw me as saying the latter, and they’re both invaluable, both bright diamonds. I just don’t think that either one of them could follow me very well, and that’s not due to anything they did or didn’t do. It’s the way I communicate now that I’m aware of my shortcomings, and the way people interact with me based on the label because they’re already aware that, girl. I got issues.

But I was thinking of exactly none of that when it was time to go to bed. On the mountain. In the dark. Where the temperature drops precipitously. My friend Kari lent me a fabulous sleeping bag that was rated for -20F weather. However, I could not generate enough body heat to keep the bag warm. About 0430, I opened my suitcase and put on every piece of clothing I brought at once, then went back to sleep.

By the time I came home, I knew that I loved camping, just not in that cold a temperature….. so maybe not on top of a mountain next time, eh? I also knew that I loved Dana in a best friend sort of way. We were inseparable after that, and not because we were actively trying to have an affair. Dana’s partner was a construction worker, so we gravitated toward each other when her partner was on the road for six weeks at a time. Neither one of us needed a girlfriend- Dana was already ridiculously happy and since I’d just been dumped, I was not in any shape to feel romantic towards anyone.

What I didn’t realize is that I wasn’t dating other people because showing up for each other made it where I didn’t need or want to hang out with anyone else. I was satisfied with the love of a good friend. That’s why we were best friends for three and a half years before anything happened. I would rather have emotional and intellectual stimulation, so if the choice was going to a restaurant to meet someone new that felt like a job interview, or playing “Drunken Trivial Pursuit” with my best friend, guess what’s going to win every single fucking time?

Dana and I did not gravitate towards each other because of anything shady. We just came to rely on each other more than anyone else, and it pulled the romance trigger in both of us. It was completely organic, but I do know it started on that trip. That’s because I honestly didn’t have any other friends at all. They’d dumped me because they didn’t see the bullshit through the notes, just inhaling all the music as is- leaving little brown spots on their noses……………

When your emotional abuser is a wonderful musician and locally a big deal, you can count on exactly zero people thinking that you’re telling the truth unless they sit down with your friends when you were 14 and she was 25. That’s the thing that would have blown their performance fleece back, but they didn’t have time to look critically at anything.

So I moved halfway across the country TWICE to try and get rid of that feeling. I wasn’t running FROM Portland so much as TO The District. I already had friends here in addition to Supergrover, so my moving here was never dependent on her. Because our relationship was virtual and planes exist, I have a feeling we would have been equally happy in different cities all these years because physical proximity has never mattered.

It hurts that I’m not laying on her couch right now instead of mine, because if I think about what could have happened, I delve into what actually did. It’s not pretty, even now. I just wish it was.

But if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. I know it’s my fault, and I don’t blame her. I just wish I could convince her that’s what I really think. I want peace for her just as much as I want peace for me. That just because I’m talking all this out doesn’t mean that I want to be shitty to anyone.

As I have learned through a Facebook meme, it is time to stop dividing myself into smaller, more manageable bites; in order to reach my full potential, I’m going to have to let some of you choke. The people who are left are my people. I am tired of making myself smaller.

Even though I felt as small as I ever have next to the beauty of Mt. St. Helen’s. It is not lost on me that I didn’t stay warm because of lack of blankets. I didn’t stay warm because I wasn’t generating my own heat.

If the last 15-20 years have taught me nothing, it’s that I should be.

This Needs Attention

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

There needs to be an overhaul of #dailyprompt on WordPress, because not being able to use it cuts you off from the WordPress community. I got more exposure from #dailyprompt and #dailyprompt-x than I have from tagging anything else. That’s because you’re more likely to appear in people’s feeds because they have it- people have to go looking for things like “friendships,” “relationships,” and “CIA.” And now I’m really laughing hard because to a new reader, this must look horribly confusing and I think it’s better to just leave it.

If you only have dailyprompt-x for so many days, and then you just start reusing them, eventually, you can’t answer them anymore. It doesn’t matter to me that it’s an old prompt. I am never starting from the same place on a different day, especially with 365 days in between. It also reinforces using the Jetpack app, which I have noticed they like reminding you to use it a lot…… So make it easier, Matt (Mullenweg, owner of Automattic). It creates a habit, and literally the only habit I have. Now, I’m feeling a bit weird at committing to write every day and I somehow have to think of it myself? Like I’m a creative writer? This is bullshit.

I hope I’m kidding…………..

I have gotten so used to rolling over, picking up my tablet, and seeing what the prompt is- then taking a few minutes to think about it while I get myself together- and writing everything in one shot.

One of the funniest things I’ve ever gotten is that the prompt came out at midnight and by 12:30 AM I had a fully functioning essay ripping Evangelicals a new one; a reader said, “whoa. You are good at this.” How did he know I was good at it? Daily prompt tag.

I write a lot faster when I feel passionately about something, and a writing prompt doesn’t have to be followed strictly. You receive the idea, and whatever comes up, comes up. If the prompt is about a time in my life when I felt embarrassed and it was on a fishing trip so my ADHD brain jumps to everything I know about fish, it’s still valid because I was still prompted.

Today’s is “topics I’d like to discuss.”

And I’m all like, “this web site is always about me. What about them?”

I will talk to anyone about anything, but I like listening to subject matter experts. That’s why living in Washington is so important to me. One of the best nights I’ve ever had socializing in Silver Spring was stopping into a restaurant on a whim (All Set for some Sriracha Cheddar biscuits. If Red Lobster closes, Silver Spring is going to be okay). I started talking to the man next to me and he was president of the National Black Journalism Association. So, I got to hear about what he does and how he does it. Those are the conversations I treasure because I am all about self-improvement and learning from people who are better than me at what they do. I think that people think I’m obsessed with fame, but they don’t see Tim Ferris that way.

There’s a difference between wanting fame and wanting success.

Not only that, I’m not impressed by anyone, ever. I find that if I get impressed, I won’t speak at all. The inverse is also true. The more that you treat people like you’re impressed, the less they want to get to know you because you’re somehow weirdly obsessed with them. I got my own taste of that when I realized that I did not want to date a fan. Since I have mentioned that Supergrover started as a fan, I feel like I have to specifically say I’m not referring to her.

I went on a date with a woman who’d read me and she grilled me over the coals. It felt like one would feel when they show up to a party and get served because of the bait and switch. I will give you a for-instance. If I said on my blog that I was married three years ago, then why am I not married now? Fair. But it just kept getting deeper and deeper, like she was trying to catch me in a lie and there was some kind of “gotcha” somewhere. She didn’t do anything specifically wrong, per se. I’ll just never forget the feeling of being on the witness stand and not being able to give any right answers. If they didn’t match up exactly to what I’d written months ago, then I was a liar……. When time had gone by and I was in a different mindset and god knows what I was thinking while I was writing that day…….. You get my drift.

Blog entries are just a snapshot of my day, and you can see it in my feelings between entries, because some entries are diametrically opposed. To me it is a way of saying to the world “yes, she can be taught.” I don’t feel like I am now lying, I feel like someone is holding me to the past. My blog is helpful to me because I can see where I need to grow and adjust. It is not useful to have people around me that do not see it as a living document. Everything is being amended to reflect progress.

It’s also about accountability. I can’t go back and cover up my past, but I can read it to change my future. It’s scary to go back and look at what you’ve said in light of what it did and didn’t do for you, and that’s what happens when I go back and read an entry from even last year or the year before. It doesn’t take five years for things to change. It doesn’t even take one. The blog changes every single day not because I’m making things up, but because I make it my business to think about how I can improve my relationships and get clarity on my life.

However, I made a decision to paint myself as an unreliable narrator because I am. I have given you everything you need to know about why I am an unreliable narrator, and that mostly has to do with the fact that narration is unreliable in and of itself. It’s harder to take seriously when that person is documented as having mental health issues.

I am not trying to be anything I’m not. Interesting, yes. But an expert? No. I’m also still laughing about “who peer reviews you?” Because if there was a peer review for bloggers back in the day, it was all of us commenting on each other’s posts. People don’t comment now. They acknowledge. It’s the difference between Facebook and Reddit. Both have ways of one-tap recognition, but redittors are not known for being terse. Reading people’s writing on Reddit is sometimes better than reading a novel…… As long as you don’t mind looking through a lot of spam and porn to find actual intelligence. Reddit is the best of us because it’s the worst of us….. Just like we loved “The Real World” when it stopped being polite, and started getting real.

For instance, I posted on r/washingtondc about the beauty of Washington and how you should stop and take a look because it’s worth it, etc. Basically using lines I’ve used with you guys about DC before. All of the sudden, I had almost 300 upvotes along with a cacophony of where’s hiking? Where’s biking? What are you talking about?” People came out of the woodwork saying “here’s where to rent a boat,” here’s where to hike/bike, here’s the good lakes, etc.

And when you’re in r/washingtondc, you do not dare mention Virginia or Maryland. There are places to do all of these things inside the city if you are not expecting the Columbia River Gorge dumped into a major metropolitan area, which is what most of the people from Seattle seemed to be so fucking mad about. Like “Rock Creek Park is not hiking…. When I was a hiker…. :::dramatic flare:::

Sit your jack ass down.

I realize that this is not The Gorge, but Rock Creek Park does have good hiking, and I think that Great Falls is just as beautiful as anything I’ve seen on the West Coast. Just because it’s a little different doesn’t make it less divine. Sailing on the Chesapeake is just as spiritually satisfying as driving out The Gorge.

I’m blessed that I’ve gotten to live on all three coasts in the US, because I’ve lived in Houston/Galveston as well. I also know that I am an Oregonian, not a Californian. I am not that kind of “West Coast.” Portland is full of old white lesbians that nine times out of ten look something like Paul McCartney. I fit right in.

Oregonians and Californians have a tense relationship, because basically when California started becoming expensive, Portland became the new hot place to live. Oregonians are gatekeepers, most of whom think should have closed when they came in. I am guilty of a little bit of that because it made rent skyrocket dramatically. I lived in Portland when it was the right time for someone my age to do that, but I’m glad I left. It’s not just that I’m a different person, it’s that Portland is a different city. If I moved back, Portland would remind me of DC and not the other way around in terms of the way the city is more focused on business and industry, less on being the place where “young people go to retire.”

Maryland’s suburbs do not remind me of Oregon, but Virginia’s do. There are lots of pockets that look like Lake Oswego, Beaverton, etc. On the Maryland side, the population is too dense to spread out like that. Zac’s neighborhood is a perfect example of what we don’t do here in MD, because it’s a townhome community backed up to a nature preserve. It looks very much like many of the houses I visited in Oregon. It’s not a beauty contest to me. Both cities have a lot to offer, I just think Washington has more because of the transit infrastructure (I would be broke trying to get around Portland or Houston). I don’t wake up every day and think, “God, The District is gorgeous, but it’s not Oregon.”

I’m not always on Reddit.

Here’s my favorite quote so far:

That morning was when I began to invent my own personal version of shorthand, which I would continue to use throughout my career. It was so secure and so covert that even I couldn’t make out its meaning sometimes.

I gravitated toward her style in some ways because it’s reminiscent of mine. Or mine is reminiscent of hers, but I started writing before I started reading her books. So, chicken and egg debate on who sounds like whom. I know I sound like her when I write about intelligence because she’s my touchstone on how to do that. But as a general rule, both she and Tony write like me because their books and my blog are both memoirs. Mine is just written paragraphs at a time.

Memoirs are one-sided, always. People get very angry about them. Will Smith, Jada Pinkett Smith, and Harry Wales are the three recent memoirs that have caused the most scandal, but all memoirs are written with one person’s story in mind- the writer’s. I keep memoirists in my head all day long because I only have a few people giving me blowback at any given time, not a nation or a kingdom.

I don’t think I could cause an international incident with my blog, but give it time……. Eyeroll.

If I could pick a writer that I would like to spend a day with, learning their secrets, it would be Vladimir Zelenskyy. I’ve thought he was brilliant since I saw “Servant of the People” on Netflix, so I know that we are kindred spirits. This is because he’s also interested in writing, comedy, political affairs, satire, etc. I believe I would need a translator, but if I were to meet Zelenskyy at all, I would FIND a translator. There’s got to be a Yellow Pages in this house somewhere, damn.

The other thing I learned this week that I’m going to have to tease Jonna about the next time I see her is that I’ve already found a typo. She called it “Silver Springs.” I kidded her that one day I’d write something as good as hers and she said, “it’s good you’re still workin’ on that.” Every time I hear her say it in my head, I fall over laughing. It was the right way to tease a writer…. Because I like talking to subject matter experts. It means a lot to me that we can joke about craft, and more importantly, I know that Jonna has lived in my little town.

The funniest gag in the first episode of “SOTP” for me was the newly elected president saying he needed to stop by the mall for a CD for his niece on the way to work because it’s her birthday. His staff offers to do it for him so he can get to work. He agrees and the scene ends.

Later, the secret service show up with the band, because as they explained, they could not find the CD.

And on that note, it’s time to go and make coffee…….. Because I just heard the pipes.

Gratitude Journaling

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I just caught a dog rifling through my trash can, so I am not feeling particularly good about myself right now. I didn’t know that the dog was smart enough to open the trash can himself. I shouldn’t have doubted it, and I can’t get him to clean up the trash, either. So, I cleaned it up…. by myself…. again.

I’m not bagging on David, my housemate. I am bagging on Jack, who is a useless housekeeper. My coworker needs a visit with HR for a performance improvement plan. I don’t know how to keep a dog out of the trash except getting a different trash can or keeping the door closed all the time. I’d rather just train the dog, but again, Jack is very smart. You have to get right up in his face before he will even begin to think you have half a brain. So, we’ve been working on “sit,” “heel,” and “bring Mama a Diet Coke.” That last one was a joke that Heather Armstrong (Dooce) wrote about her dog, Chuck, the former Congressman.

I’m trying to keep Heather’s name alive because she’s a part of the zeitgeist, but no one has influenced the direction of this web site, because Supergrover and I both loved her once upon a time. It was the same for me- I fell out with reading her when she got on the influencer bandwagon, because like my beautiful girl I thought it lost something when Dooce stopped getting so real. There was no more Dooce (a typo she used to make while typing Dude), no more Asian Database Administrator (probably good she took that one out), no more dry humping and Sprite.

Sometimes I feel like Dooce is gone and I got the best of the best and you just got me. I keep trying, though. I’ve just realized that what I thought was Texas old guy is actually Utah blogger, apparently, and I know her writing well enough that she would be pleased by this. Unfortunately, I never got to meet her. We just ran in the same circles. If I had an hour with her, I’d ask her about blowback.

I’ll ask her about the friends she lost, and the friends who came to take their places. It’s something for which I’ll always be grateful, and I’m glad she came up in my mind while I was trying to say “I’m not in a very good mood, so I need to find things for which to be thankful.” I count blessings, every single one. It keeps me from thinking that I am failing all the time, because I recognize when I have a win.

I continue to be thankful for my house, and even Jack. He continues to be “my dog,” and he’s as lovable as every dog ever. If he’s ever missing, I know he’s in my bed as far under the covers as he can go. He’s shaved almost to the skin right now; when the wind is blowing in from the windows he shivers. It’s how I like it, because it’ll be 55F outside, but I’ve got a sheet, a blanket, and two comforters on top. I think I’ll be okay.

At the same time, when I take sleeping pills my body temperature goes way up, and having the windows open keeps me from sweating because of them. There have been a few days, though, where I woke up and thought I lost three pounds because I’d shake the blankets off, it would be too cold, then I’d pull them all back…. All night. It was glorious, let me tell you.

I’m grateful for a comfortable place to sleep, and a room with so many new possibilities. Neither my lamp nor my shelf with a light came with light bulbs, so I ordered some retro LEDs. They look like they’re from the early 1900s. I have a floor lamp without a shade, which is why I thought it would be nice with the bulb exposed to go decorative. I am hoping that I will have enough light, because each bulb is 60w. I wanted higher than that, but I couldn’t find any yellow bulbs that came in 75w or 100. I do not like the bulbs where they take all the yellow out and it leaves a slightly blue glow on everything. I do use 100w white bulbs in my bathroom because I want to get dressed in the most unflattering light possible. That way, when I get myself fixed up, I will look better when I leave the house. It’s good to have goals, anyway. 😉

I’m grateful I have a bathtub again. Hayat replaced our bathtub with a stand up shower long ago, so it’s nice to be able to sit and relax when I want. I liked the stand-up shower, too. I’m not knocking it. I just had trouble shaving because I am terrible at balance. It’s not that one was bad, it’s just that with a bathtub I can also sit in lavender and eucalyptus salts.

I’m grateful to still have a garden. David is the gardener, I’m just the enjoyer. I’m going to have to put some lavender out for me, because I’ve talked many times about talking to the bees. It’s real. I don’t mean that they can hear me, necessarily, but that it does make you feel better to talk to them.

I’m grateful for DC. There are limitless possibilities for beauty here. There’s kayaking, biking, hiking, sailing- basically everything I could do in Portland is also right here. The two cities mirror each other in lots of ways when it comes to layout. That’s because people in DC do not think of Arlington as the same city, but if you look at it from the sky, it looks the same as Portland being divided by the river north to south and Burnside east to west. We are a bridge city, and I can’t wait for Bryn to see it from the air. The only real difference is that when you land at National, there’s not a long airstrip parallel to the river. If the pilots at National can’t stop in time, they’ll fall into the Potomac.

Seem to remember something about that in the news when I was a child.

Zac says he has never met a person that loves this area as much as I do. Zac has never left and come back for any real length of time. I wonder how it would look different to him if he’d lived here in his early 20’s and then traveled all over. I missed the Potomac because the Willamette is always cold. Always. I cannot remember a 4th of July in which I was not absolutely freezing my ass off. I once drove with a housemate up to Mt. Hood for lunch (we weren’t skiing that day) and it started as we were driving home. It was June 27th. DC is the beauty of a city with a river running through it that is also not 54F and raining 280 days a year. I love Portland a whole lot, and I would move back if I had to do so. It’s just not my first choice for a number of reasons, and the weather is at the top.

The only pro here would be getting to live in the same city as my best friend, because the position has been filled- end of story. That being said, occasional video calls and visits are fine. I do not have a need for Bryn to move here or me to move there. If so, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. I just can’t think of a good reason all our time needs to be in person.

There are moments, of course. You don’t move to your partner’s or your best friend’s city because something is happening. You move there to be available if it does. That’s because even now when something is going on with Bryn, I can’t help but want to jump on a plane. Therefore, I’m not sure I’ve ever been more surprised than when she said she was jumping on a plane to get to me. It’s getting so exciting thinking about her visit, and it’s already the 25th. So, not many more sleeps. I’m grateful.

I’m grateful that both Bryn and Dave want to see SPY so it doesn’t feel like I’m strong-arming them into going there on my account. I live here. I can go any time I want (and do). We haven’t decided what we’re going to do all days, and I know they’ll probably also want time to themselves. We just need to talk about dates so that I can send Zac an invitation. I live and die by Google Calendar.

Zac’s acceptance is not mandatory, I just want him to know he’s included in the fun and he’s said that he does want to meet Bryn. So, now Zac will have met one friend I met in high school and one I met my freshman year of college. I’m glad I can bridge those gaps in time, and it makes me happy that Zac is going to learn just so many “Borum-isms.”

I am grateful for “Borum-isms.” It’s a specific cadence, and I will pick it up instantly because it’s not based on accent but rhythm. Bryn’s dad said something so incredibly profound that I’ve remembered it for over 20 years…. “the hardest part of teaching is remembering what it was like not to know.”

Bryn also reminds me of Arya Stark, and I don’t have to squint. But by that I mean she is take charge alpha dog all the time, which means that she is strong and firm, but also the most loving person in the room because the alpha’s job is to manage the whole pack by seeing their needs and helping them……. serving, not owning……. as opposed to whatever the fucktard morons think it is this week.

In some ways, I’m grateful for guys like that because it reminds me of Roy Wood, Jr. who said that he appreciated businesses with the confederate flag outside because then at least you had a tip it wasn’t going to go well for you. If someone is advertising on the internet that they want a “tradwife,” they probably mean that they want someone who will take all their bullying all the time and call it Biblical. Therefore, there’s no confederate flag, but there’s a big waving red one.

I’m grateful for the ability to see red flags and work on them. I see them in myself by rereading my work. Throwing words on a page and seeing what they look like once they’re outside you gives you enough separation to say “ok, that’s good…. but that’s bad.” Not the writing, the way I behaved.

I am working to find peace within myself, so don’t think I don’t notice when I’m angry and figure out a way to resolve it in myself. I think I have. My tone is completely different than it was a year ago. A lot of it has to do with Supergrover finally telling me what she really wanted. She wants peace and rest, I assume for both of us. Maybe one day our paths will cross again, but I doubt it. I require something she does not have, which created the initial attraction to each other in terms of energy. This is because she has something I don’t, which is pragmatism and logic. In some ways, our personalities are exactly alike. In others, they are diametrically opposed.

But leaning in through all of that made me who I am today, and I’m more confident in myself as a result, and grateful I ever got to meet her at all. I am so angry that what she chooses to highlight in our relationship is all the negativity and not our incredible potential for joy. Maybe she already has these things with everyone else but me, and it’s because I’m a shitty friend that I don’t have these things with her and I’m whistling Dixie because no one else ever has a problem……. I would tell her the same thing I told her when she said she was giving up Diet Coke. “Yeah. Uh huh. Keep talkin,’ sweetheart.” No, wait. It wasn’t about Diet Coke. That was another day. And now I’m laughing my ass off, but that joke is above your pay grade.

I think the thing that makes her spit nails is that I’m right. What I realized through my mistakes is that I didn’t have to sit in them just because I’d made a long time making them. That my history with her meant a lot, but not at the expense of my own health and happiness. It’s not because I wouldn’t have done it. It’s because I expected her to pull her weight. I would have done anything for her, but I realized that she didn’t feel that way about me, and it was stupid to think that, in retrospect. I did not feel that way every single day. I recognized her hurt and talked about what happened often, but she never took the bait and opened up to me so that I could better understand her. I thought, “I am going to end up giving her absolutely everything I have and she’s not going to notice in the slightest.” I’d listened to the whispers and the screams long enough.

I’ve said this before, but I did not get angry that she was also angry. I was furious because she refused to tell me anything that gave me any headway. All I could do was talk about myself when it was the last thing I wanted to talk about. I also didn’t always want to talk about her, as if I was mining her for information. I wanted an easy give and take, the strength and comfort of someone I’d known for a very long time.

There was every reason to stay except having a feeling of safety and security when we talked, because it was missing for a very long time. Any attempt to lighten the load was wrong, so I didn’t get tired of her. I got tired of how I felt about myself. She says I’m “a lot.” She has never really grasped that she’s a lot. That for everything she’d like to change about me, there’s something I’d like to change about her. What I cannot get her to see is “this is me. Take it or leave it.” And that’s what we’ve both been trying to say to each other for years, mostly at the top of our metaphorical lungs. I have found that it is much more fun to fly with a dragon than to be touched by its fire.

I’ve thought for many years that if I did ever see her face to face, that I would go mute. That she’s the only person I know where that would happen. It’s not that I am not interested in talking, it’s that I would be completely overwhelmed before the conversation began. But I know us. We both know how to make each other laugh. After a few minutes, it wouldn’t be weird. One of us would say something to break the tension, and the spell would be broken. This person that we’ve each built up in our heads will be gone, and it will seem like we’ve never met.

Here is something I also know. I will never know how much of my e-mails she’s taken in until I hear her talking around other people, because I know what I’ve written. I would know when she was quoting me and when she wasn’t, and I would never say a thing. It wouldn’t mean as much to her as it would to me.

I do know that if we were at the same party, one of two things would happen. The first is that I’d be telling a story and get a detail wrong, and from across the room I’d hear, “THAT IS NOT WHAT HAPPENED. This is how it happened…..” The second would be her seeing someone else mistreating me because despite how she feels about me at any given moment I know she’d eat off their legs.

What I mean about getting a detail wrong is that all of the sudden she becomes very, very familiar with absolutely everything I’ve ever said when she is irritated. When she’s irritated, she quotes me back to me. How much she’s irked is inversely proportional to my joy at watching her quote me, because the more angry she is, the more likely she is to do it. I don’t do anything to irk her on purpose, I’m just saying that after a fight, when I feel calmer I go back and reread everything. I notice style, structure, all of it. Even when I’m devastated, I still find beauty in hearing from her at all because I rip her off mercilessly. Without my e-mail history, I am so much dumber, I promise you. I hope that in some ways she feels the same, because my dexterity helped her when her own words failed her. It’s something I hope she knows, really- that wherever she is in the world, my heart is with her. That’s because everywhere I go, her heart is with me.

So, even if she was trying to avoid me at a party, she’d never make it. We don’t have any mutual friends so far, and I’m not interested in making them…. mostly to protect the innocent.

I also know that no matter what, as long as I don’t start going with the crowd, she’ll still be in my audience. I know that when she told me that Dooce sucked now and she wasn’t going to read anymore and I told her it was her job to tell me when I should retire because she could just re-send that e-mail.

Come to think of it, that’s what would happen at a party. She’d hear me use a joke or two I’ve told in front of her and then we’d be picking up the end of each other’s sentences because we’ve both heard them before.

We could also have a lot of inside jokes that other people wouldn’t get, but we’d be falling out. For instance, me being the president of Overthinker’s Anonymous not because I am smarter, but because president is a public-facing office.

I think part of me hoped she would join Lanagan Media Group, because she would be great at both writing and podcasting if she had the bandwidth. She told me that she was always looking for what to do in her next career, and I think part of me hoped she would say “writer,” but I didn’t push. I got her stuff to help her in her own direction. She’s talked about writing before, but in a faraway sort of way. The bits of her story I’ve gotten to write because our lives overlapped are unique and beautiful. I know she thought it was unique. One out of two ain’t bad.

I feel like the way autism logic works, people think you’re much more negative than you mean to be because neurotypical brains are used to hearing things in a certain way. There are patterns to neurotypical speech that contain social cues. Autistic people can imitate them, but they cannot understand them. However, not being able to pick up social cues is only one of the criteria for autism. You do not have to have every single one to “prove” you’re autistic. For me, it’s a mixed bag. I do not recognize social cues in a person based on what they are thinking, but from the millions of faces I’ve seen before that looked exactly like that when X…… or when my parents described people’s emotions to me without meaning to…… I started understanding speech very, very early. Therefore, I have overheard things and ruminated on them for years before I understood them. But it’s because I’ve ruminated that I have accurate heuristics for the most part.

It’s easier to social mask when you’re hearing phone calls regarding pastoral care, because if you’re the pastor’s kid, you’re learning how to talk to people while they’re upset…… and mostly at each other. For instance, people who need marriage counseling, etc. But of course there’s a lot of people angry with you, too. Mostly over the things you’ve said.

Being a creative is being a creative. Preaching and writing are two separate skills, but they are two ways of expressing the same ideas. With me, it’s readers who don’t come back. For pastors, it’s church members who inexplicably disappear. Therefore, I am used to an ebb and flow in size and don’t get wigged about stats. I check them, but I don’t focus on them. The only stat I really like is how many flags I got that day. I like how far my site goes. This week, the leaderboard has been Africa- hello to South Africa and Ghana.

OH! South Africa!

Speaking of which, I started watching this YouTube channel called “Flipping Johannesburg,” and it’s incredible. It’s tempting to move to South Africa in some ways because land and resources are so cheap. I could build my own house or purchase one in disrepair so that I could have more land for cheap and more room to overhaul. The last house I watched on “FJ” was 800,00R, which is about $40,000. It was a U-shape with everything from a garage to staff quarters to a huge pool in the middle. I am certain that it took a lot of work to get it where it is today, and also a lot more Rand. Because of this, I am grateful that when I cannot go to South Africa, Flipping Johannesburg brings it to me.

And finally, I am grateful for Zac. He and Oliver, who is a dog, have made me feel more at home. It’s so much fun to have two hiking buddies. It’s nice to have someone to hold onto when I walk. It’s exciting to see him when his car (Antimony) comes over the hill to the Kiss and Ride. Yes, that’s really what they call the place where you pick up and drop off.

If he gets there first, he’ll park. If I get there first, he barely has to slow down and I’m on his way home, anyway. It makes me feel good that he’s relatively close to the Metro so it’s not a big imposition to drive me around. He also knows that all he has to do is say “I’m busy” and I’ll Uber. He does it just to be sweet to me and I appreciate little things. Like, how it is problem to worry how I’ll get around? It was Sam’s whole deal, too, except that Zac (for some disastrous reason) thinks that I am a fully functioning adult and doesn’t have an issue with saying “God, I’m slammed. Meet me at my house.” Therefore, Sam never got to see that I’m a perfectly capable adult. She drove me around and sulked about it because she offered and then regretted it. So, of course the easy thing to do would be to stop offering to drive me around so that I don’t have the choice to say yes or no. Because I can feel energy very well and if you resent that you have to come get me, I’ll know it. I feel it like a scar on my skin.

I would only need a car if I moved from the DMV metro area and out into Virginia or to the eastern shore. With a combination of bus, train, and/or Uber I can get anywhere. I just need a little bit more notice. This is great because if you call me and say you want to do something short notice, I probably won’t want to do it, anyway. I am bad at transitions and like to have my calendar planned out in advance.

Therefore, I am limited to staying in the city because I don’t want to lose excellent transit without a car payment and insurance. A car is just another place for me to let stuff accumulate. I’m not sure I used my car for much more than a high speed crap wagon.

“High Speed Crap Wagon” is my new band name.

I’m grateful.

Write Til it Hurts, Then Write Til You Feel Better

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

My jumping off point today is this phrase, because it’s a play on something I heard at a lot at church- “give til it hurts, then give til you feel better.” It was our way of making fun of Evangelicals, yet let’s be clear. This is a church that I went to as an adult. Not that my dad and I didn’t joke about things we’d heard and seen….

For instance, one of my favorite stories about my parents when they were young is that my mom was having dental work done and she was all laid out with the bib. My dad walked in and said, “my. Don’t she look natural?” That’s what people say when they see the body at the funeral home. My dad is often funnier than I am, and I am often funnier than he is. It’s a give and take. Although I like it better when he calls me “Chief” than “you go, girl.” I am not in charge of anything, so it may not seem all that flattering. But I’m young (all things being relative), so perhaps I am just “not living up to my full potential,” which is not something he said but is said by every teacher ever who doesn’t know that kid is neurodivergent. That’s why gifted & talented classes are mostly filled with depressed, anxious teenagers.

We are so goddamn smart that it doesn’t make sense we’re so dumb. That’s because we’re not dumb. We:

  • Have demand avoidance, even down to taking a shower. Urging yourself to do things and not being able to accomplish them leads to guilt.
  • Guilt over having demand avoidance.
  • Shame over demand avoidance
  • Getting overwhelmed to the point of nausea
  • Hitting the limit to which we can be stimulated, leading to anger at ourselves and lashing out at others, or alternatively becoming non-verbal
  • Guilt over meltdown
  • Shame over meltdown
  • Go into burnout, which generally means sensory deprivation to reset, and the length of time varies for all autistic people
  • Lather, rinse, repeat all day long with every demand or decision all day long

When you are as smart as I am, along with all the other people with low needs/high IQ, you can see every side to every story. You are not limited to black and white, but all the colors in the spectrum. When everything becomes grey area with no solid base, you drift. You get overwhelmed, and go into a world of your own.

For me, that’s intelligence. I wouldn’t have a million dollars worth of trains in my basement, but I’d have a first edition Le Carre signed “David Cornwell.”

Speaking of which, yesterday autocorrect made me misspell both Jodi Picoult and change “Jennifer Finney Boylan” to “Jennifer Finney Boyle.” I guess I’ll need to go through my Android tablet and turn off spelling and grammar. I do that a lot, because I don’t misspell much and autocorrect doesn’t know everything- like poetic license, plays on words, acronyms, people’s last names, and thinking it knows better than me that it’s “utopian ideal” and not “utopia ideal.” Little things like that drive me up the wall, and it’s worse in voice dictation because Apple thinks it fucking knows where punctuation goes and it drives me up the wall and back down again. I want to throw my phone against a rock for making sentences look like this:

Rebecca, when are, we, going, to Starbucks?

Going back to correct all that is a nightmare, but I use voice dictation when I don’t have a keyboard because typing on my phone is hard as shit for me. It’s not that I can’t, it’s that I hate it so much. All phone companies lost me when they got rid of thumb boards and slide out keyboards.

It’s why I use my phone a quarter of never. I don’t like to call people, and I don’t like to type on my phone. Therefore, I use my iPad or my Android tablet for nearly everything. That’s because I like the bigger real estate for calls, anyway. If I’m calling, it might as well be a video call because I know I’m not going to see you very often, etc.

Therefore, I really only use my phone for voice calls. If I decide to walk somewhere, I leave my phone at home and connect my headphones to my watch. The middle man carries very little value except that I have to have it on to unlock all the features on my watch. However, it’s a fully functioning “dumb phone.” If I had money, I’d upgrade my watch before I ever bothered with my phone, or replace my older iPad with a newer one because it can do everything except control my watch (emphatic fist shake). However, for what I do, I do not need to upgrade any of my technology. I do three or four things and none of them are mobile gaming. Therefore, it doesn’t matter what chip and graphics card the motherboard on the tablet has, it just has to be adequate.

I have Microsoft Office, AndrOffice (Android port of LibreOffice- a full desktop application for you other writers in the crowd. I find it easier to use a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard for it.), a web browser, a basic photo editor, and JetPack. So far, I’ve been able to upgrade to every version, so my hardware can’t be that old.

I also watch movies, but that needs a better network connection than anything else. I’m not picky about the picture, but some people are. Those are the people that should buy high end tablets, because you’ll end up sitting in bed with it vs. watching TV, especially with headphones while your partner is sleeping (I have never needed to do this with Zac, but it’s possible, just like connecting Bluetooth headphones to your Kindle to listen to audiobooks.

I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again as writer’s advice.

We all make notes in our books. Having a Bluetooth keyboard connected to my Kindle makes it where I can use my notes later and sync them with Goodreads. You can choose whether your highlights are available to the public, so lock it down and it’s a private, free repository of your highlights and the notes you put with them. That way, if something happens to your Kindle, you still have everything and you don’t lose months of work. I also used my Kindle quite extensively when I reviewed books professionally (putting that out there because people often offer me books for free with a gift certificate so I have a verified sale to review.

I have liked most of them.

However, I’m not a harsh reviewer because I am so precise with language that I can make a bad review sound like a good one. That is because I want to say what I liked and didn’t about their books without hurting their feelings.

Of everything I read, I liked “Pancake Money” and “Dead Lemons” by Finn Bell the most.

Some of the others were downright drudgery.

“What would you say to universities about stifling writers?”

“In my opinion they don’t stifle enough.” (Flannery O’Connor)

This being said, you don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth, either. They gave you their baby for free. It is something that they’ve birthed over a tremendous amount of time. A lot of care went into it just to get to the finish line. I was crushed when Supergrover thought I was dismissive of her writing when the only piece of advice I gave her was “come on, SG! I know you have more than that in you.” She doesn’t dive as deep as she can. However, she can turn a phrase when she’s in her element, and she’s not often in her element. I’m not sure there’s really a place she calls home in her soul, and I don’t mean anything derogatory by it. I mean that she doesn’t dig as far as she can go, but if she did dig as deep as me it would be the best book you’ve ever read in your life.

I know because I’ve read it. I know the parts of her that she’ll share, but she’s not often in a place to take those things and dig deep on them. She’s pressed for time all the time, and introspection is really hard work. REALLY hard work. However, I have never said she was a bad writer. If it were true, I wouldn’t have basically memorized everything she’s ever said to me- both the good and the bad. I have been furious by some letters and angered by others. We are not so different, we just choose to act like it. It’s devastating to an enormous degree, because if she read my entries from the standpoint of counting up how many phrases that are hers hidden here. And now my keyboard has decided that the “Enter” key is the only one that doesn’t work. I have no idea what is causing this, because it just drops and reconnecting doesn’t help. Maybe you’ll get more later, because I’m not really feeling the whole “writing session is over” thing. I am feeling disappointed and frustrated that I can’t keep writing right now. I should save that feeling for writer’s block. “What if I wasn’t permitted to write?” It goes a very long way. I could make it all one paragraph, but Chason told me that short paragraphs are easier to read on the web. I try to be mindful, because he does web design for a living. This is not one of those days, apparently. So, anyway, I quote her all the time from her e-mails and her other writing. She said I dismissed her when I, unlike President Clinton, inhaled.

Just Me and the Boys

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rule #1

Assume nothing.

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

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

:::stares in Grey’s Anatomy:::

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We can’t all be Elizabeth McCord.

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

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

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

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

And also you. 😂😂😂

Kidding, kidding.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Social masking.

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

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

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

I need a breath after that paragraph.

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

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

I Have Absolutely No Idea What to Say Today

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Despite my best intentions, today may be a “show about nothing.” That’s basically all I know about Seinfeld because I wasn’t a fan back in the day. I don’t remember a lot of what I watched in high school except “Animaniacs” and “Jeopardy!” At that age, I was usually sitting on the floor of my bedroom with my headphones on trying to be Miles Davis. I assure you that I always thought I sounded better when I was alone, because I wasn’t focusing on pleasing the crowd and making a show go well.

I do remember the highlights. I was more happy that I impressed Doc than impressing a crowd, because I did a solo in “Come Rain or Come Shine” and Doc’s response was “Leslie Lanagan! 9th Grade, ladies and gentlemen. NINTH GRADE.” I was also the soloist on a local Houston TV show called “Black Voices” (yes. Really. But it wasn’t because Summer Jazz Workshop was all white. It’s because I beat out everyone else. I got that solo from Konrad Johnson, director of one of the most famous jazz bands in  the nation- Kashmere High School. I’ve mentioned this before, but Kashmere got a chart on the soundtrack to “Baby Driver,” and Konrad, who has now passed, is memorialized in a bigger way than just locally in Houston.

When a black jazz director picks the white boy for a solo on a television show called “Black Voices,” it means the fucking world. I have rarely felt more “I’m on top of the world” than that. It’s also really funny in retrospect.

If I had to describe my sound, it’s very much like Wynton Marsalis. This is because he’s who I studied the most closely to learn both jazz and classical. Let me tell you about the time I met Wynton. I walked right up to him and said, “Wynton, I’ve waited my whole life to meet you.” It’s funny because I was 15 and also true. I’ve been listening to Wynton since I was in the womb because my dad is also a trumpet player. You can see him most weeks on the Second Baptist broadcast in Houston, or streaming over the Internet.

My dad’s claim to fame is that when he was in high school, he went to the 50 yard line and played “The Star Strangled Banana” all by himself instead of having a singer and accompaniment. I have no doubt that it was absolutely gorgeous, because I inherited his “elements of style.”

Speaking of which, a bookstore worker was talking on Reddit about how this person came in and said she needed a book for her daughter, who was a writer. It was by “shrunken white,” and EVERYONE was confused. But what writer wouldn’t have known it from “shrunken white?”

(It’s “Elements of Style,” by Strunk & White.)

If I have any advice to give writers (because I’ve done it so many years, not because I think I’m “all that and a bag of chips”), it’s write where you feel the most comfortable. Sometimes, it’s at my desk. Sometimes, it’s under the covers.

Write where you feel the absolute least threatened, because your emotions will flow through you a lot easier that way. You’re still writing about your own head when you’re in fiction mode. It’s just expressed as your characters.

That’s because we’re making it up as we go along, hoping you’ll track with us. Even if you’re an architect to plans in advance, that’s no guarantee that people will track with you. It’s your system, not theirs. I am not an architect. I’m a gardener. I start at one place and dig down. Otherwise, it’s not my diary.

It’s trying to impress the crowd, and this time, I don’t want to do that. I want to move and challenge people so that they’ll come along with me and not the other way around. The right people will gravitate, and whether that’s a hundred or 10 million is of no consequence to me because I’m obviously going to write whether people think it’s worthy of money or not. I don’t have to be validated by anyone else. I have received enough praise and been compared to enough people better than me that I feel solid. I don’t have to worry that I’m so far not successful because of lack of talent. If Margaret Cho and Jonna Mendez both think I can write my ass off, then I fucking can.

So, I don’t have to believe the people who say I’m a hack anymore.

In terms of writers to whom I’ve been compared, I get David Sedaris the most frequently. I can be as funny as he is, but I’m not. We don’t often share the same goal, which is to make people laugh outright. Mostly, I can’t because I don’t feel like it. When I’m not feeling funny, I’m not.

And that’s why people come here- to see both the good and the bad- not because mine is better than anyone else’s, but that mine exists over people who aren’t writers. There are lots of people with web sites that don’t actually say anything. I don’t want mine to be one of them.

I would be a powerful speaker in public if I liked my voice, because I have been told I already am a powerful speaker in public. I know this solidly because I have preached sermons multiple times that have been well received. You don’t graduate from being a preacher’s kid without having picked up some tricks over the years. Just because I’m not a minister doesn’t mean I don’t have that patois when I’m writing or in front of a crowd.

I don’t have to believe the people who say I’m not a good preacher.

My grandfather always said “write it tight” because he was a publicity man for Lone Star Steel. He actually learned the same type photography as Jonna Mendez, basically hanging out of an airplane to take overhead photos. It’s interesting to me that she was a spy and he was publicity and yet they learned the same tricks.

In terms of writing it tight, I do in certain sentences because it fits a mood. That mood is the one I’m in at the moment. I am INFJ, neurodivergent, nonbinary, queer, poly, etc. Therefore, I have never made a decision on what kind of person I am in my life.

“The Counselor” personality is a thousand years old when it is born. We are born with a desperate need to search inside ourselves for answers, because we have an absolute neediness when it comes to wanting to improve the world. We need to feel wanted and valued, but the way we do that is by trying to lead people by laying out our vulnerabilities first. It is not a narcissistic game, but a realistic understanding of what it will take to create connection and resolution vs. power over.

My personality is enormous in the smallest of ways. I don’t approach this blog like I’m a god, but that I am whispering into the night and hoping it resonates with other people. This is true among people who do not know me, but is not true among people who know me.

Therefore, I feel like I know Jesus on a deep and spiritual level, and anything written to amplify his life into being divine is not the message and never should have been in the first place.

Sticky, sticky blood theology bothers the everliving shit out of me. That’s because it’s focusing on what I believe was a marketing campaign to spread his story. That I don’t have to have mystery and magic to think that the historical Jesus is valuable and actually taught people things to which they should pay attention. Our entire religion backfired during The Crusades because supposedly religious superiority launched war off a nomadic preacher who taught people to love each other.

Again, it’s the strangest transformation in history.

The first mistake was turning Jesus from a brown person into a white person, and blaming Jews for the crucifixion and not the Romans. He was a destitute homeless person, basically. But he did it by choice.

I do not understand people who trade his supposed glory for what he was actually trying to say– to you and to all the other people in history who have colonized others. My favorite line in The Gospels is “render unto Caesar what it Caesar’s, and render unto God what is God’s.” This is because it’s like he’s telling power to its face “you do you, but okay.”

It’s the messages they’ve missed in the middle of the mess. And I am so tired. Evangelicals are exhausting because they treat Jesus like this professional Christian superhero when he was basically thrown away like white people have thrown away black people for hundreds of years.

There is no reason for this foolishness…. And yet, they persist.

Focusing on the resurrection is not about any of that. It’s being willing to believe that if you will be forgiven for your mistakes, it means you’re allowed to make them. It does not mean you don’t have to say you’re sorry….. And that’s the kind of Christianity that’s woven into the Republican Party.

You do you, but okay.

Pricks on My Skin

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I just thought of something and it occurred to me that I wanted to remember this feeling. I don’t write about anyone in a negative way to write about them. I write about them so I remember why reaching out is a bad idea. I have to remind myself every day that Supergrover and I aren’t talking this week…… Sigh. We’re both tired. Tired of so many things.

I don’t come absolutely unglued in these entries because I feel a need to shame people. I write to explain why I can’t go back in time. The fact that I broke my beautiful girl’s heart is a fixed point in time is so painful that I’ve been to some really dark places over the years. It doesn’t matter as much to me what she’s done as what I have, because it takes so much longer to forgive yourself than to forgive someone else.

I regret that I never got to know her in person, because she said she’s more fun and funny in person and I’ve never doubted it for a minute. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve been in deep grief that wouldn’t go away simply because we wouldn’t stop picking on each other and get it together. We were never fighting about the thing we were supposed to be fighting about.

She couldn’t get vulnerable enough to fight about the real issue, and I don’t think she ever will. In her last letter, she talked around it. She got very close. I realized it when she said “you’re not the only one who has triggers.” I’m the problem. It’s me.

She can’t admit that she’s scared of me. I’ve told her I’m scared of her. We both took each other to the mat. We both fucking lost, because we each had a little red button regarding my writing and her career. Something we could hold over each other’s heads for 10 years and fight about something else.

So, that’s why we fluctuate on how close we want to be. It’s not a one-sided problem. It is, as she says, “a wheel with many spokes…” Which I had to retype because at first I typed “a spoke with many wheels.” I think we are on the same page, I just call it a tapestry. I think we say the same things in different words without realizing it a lot of the time. The most interesting thing to me about her last letter was how close I was in terms of seeing what was going on. I was right. She said that my words felt like pricks on her skin, and any strength I had left went out the window. I thought, “I am not communicating effectively, because this is not what I want in the slightest.”

So, of course I would just keep explaining.

Just like according to Jim Gaffigan, “if there was a Catholic service started somewhere, it’s still going on,” I felt similarly about starting a letter to Supergrover. Because again, I call her that because she’s cute, cuddly, and works blue. She also said once that she didn’t mind being monstrous, and that was the picture that popped into my head. That’s because she’s Alduin when she wants to be, and has always been my Pet Monster on a Fraying Leash, Inc. I sent her a meme of a little girl braiding a dragon’s hair.

Why a dragon had hair that long is another matter.

But the thing is, I’ve grown into my own type of dragon over the years, but I’m always afraid I can only sneeze sparks. I believe that in English, it would be called “imposter syndrome.” I’m not sure anyone really gets over it. I know lots of people older than me that still get intimidated by things. We’re always learning that the world is bigger than we think it is, which is why the greatest acknowledgement as you age is how relatively little you know. I’ve studied political science and international affairs since college. I can assure you there’s a lot I don’t know. But I do research the news thoroughly because I don’t normally write about stories immediately, but it’s the easiest way to get illustrations for my blog. Although I’m noticing that my posts on history have gotten attention, too, like “The Personal Computer.”

I study the news to stay relevant, because I want it to be a mix of me being able to exercise my demons when I need it, but also be able to weave current events and history throughout my writing no matter what. I have gone into sensory deprivation lately, though. I have never known less about the world because right now I’m in burnout over it. It’s too much, too fast. I’ll get back to it. I just need a breather to reset.

I feel like the blogging prompts were all meant for memoirs, except on rare occasions. This is because most of the prompts were talking about recreating a scene in your mind. Depending on who you ask, I am either brilliant or terrible at it. By the time the camp was large enough to be firmly divided, the less I cared because both sides had a hot take that wasn’t necessarily true. I am neither as brilliant nor absolutely fucking evil as everyone says. I talk a lot of shit for someone who can’t reach the top shelf.

But it’s because I’m talking it out and you’re seeing my emotions go up and down that eventually “shit works out, my dear.” You see my struggle as I come to peace within myself, because in order to let people go, this is how I grieve them. Fortunately, since this is the Internet, they’ll be able to come back later and re-read my words without so many emotions attached. I have often found it surprising how much I’ve learned in five years. 😉

That’s because they’re not seeing the 3D character. They’re reading every day, when entries are actually just micro chapters of a book. In order for you to see yourself as a 3D character, you’d have to read it bound. My dragon would look so much different to herself if she went back to 2013 and read forwards. The plot moves forward, and shit works out.

I have written about emotions that cover the entire spectrum. There are some feelings I can’t describe even now. But it’s not about making her feel bad. It’s to remind me that I shouldn’t reach out, when it’s not what I want. I’m not whining about it, just trying to retrain my brain. For 10 years, my absolute first impulse has been to tell her everything. I’m autistic and this is a monotropic thought process (the hitting “compose” part). Therefore, I experience a lot of anger- also not to anger her, but to remind myself that my emotions are valid, and her opinion of me doesn’t determine my worth.

I didn’t say “right” or “wrong.” I said “valid.”

We both invalidated the other’s feelings all the time because we were so eager to run out the door. It’s been a disaster every time I’ve tried to retrain my brain before, because I’ll just crash and burn and it makes her furious whether she says anything or not. When she does, she doesn’t say it without spikes, which gets my hackles up because I’m not itching for a fight. And yet if someone tries to make it hurt first rattle out of the box, it induces red mist rage and I go blind. Unfortunately, I can type with my eyes closed and hilarity does not ensue.

Unfortunately, this is also startlingly common among autistic people because we cannot regulate our emotions.

“Even when I feel nothing, I feel it completely.” -Sylvia Plath

With neurodivergence, there’s a switch that flips between “obsessed” and “completely disinterested.” There is no middle ground absolutely ever. ADHD people are great at multitasking in some cases because even though they’re monotropic thinkers, they can switch channels so fast that no one notices. Or, at least, that’s what I’ve noticed in the kitchen. You’re multitasking and in hyperfocus at the same time. It’s where you’re “in the zone,” and finding the right ratio is hard as FUCK.

God forbid I have an unexpressed thought, but I gave myself a space to do that without bothering anyone else, but they came here expecting that if I portrayed them as a deity once, it would always be that way… Even those who have been reading my writing for years. They’re never allowed to change and grow over the years because they fired themselves. I describe times where my emotional needs are being met and everything is wonderful, and I describe when my emotional needs are being ignored and how it’s my problem to deal with, but that doesn’t make it easy. When someone is committed to not hearing you, then you don’t try to change them. You walk away.

But I wouldn’t let Supergrover go and not because I didn’t want to; I felt like we were trapped in a vicious cycle because of our trauma bond. Believe me when I tell you that she is one of the most beautiful, most capable, most successful people I know. Believe me when I tell you that the medium is the message. Emotions hit harder in writing. Both of us have huge emotions and a terrific amount of empathy, and we both throw it away to pick on each other. Over time, it became less and less worth it because she was Breadcrumbing me and wouldn’t admit it until she did.

I don’t write to punish her. I write so that I remember I have a reason to move on, because otherwise I never would have had the strength to let go. In the beginning, I thought she was single and I never wanted to let her go ever. But then I decided her boyfriend would take issue with that once I really took in the enormity of the situation and had a better handle on it.

But it’s not just her husband that would object to not being able to spend time with her, and I’m ok with that. There’s her parents. And her kids. And her siblings. And her friends. And her dogs. I’m just the late night crowd, literally the piano man. She’s even put bread in my jar.

But that’s because my writing didn’t make her mad because she was reading as a fan. She read it with totally different eyes once she was in it, and I couldn’t leave her out. I just can’t say everything I’d ever want to about the situation, and she doesn’t want to help me manage it. So I wing it……………………………… Poorly.

There are some life events that are too important not to record, because I don’t really have any day to day memories of Kathleen EXCEPT for what I’ve written on my blog. We were together when I was a junior in college the first time around. Therefore, the reason I write so obsessively is so that my memories don’t fade. My grandmother died of Alzheimer’s. I want this fucking blog.

So, you can call it silly or stupid or whatever you want, but I bet The Bloggess is crying into her bank account over it. Maybe I’ll get there one day. Maybe I’m just a hack. However, that’s not up to me. Apparently since Jenny got a big metal chicken before I thought of it, she’s more successful than me (kidding, she’s one of my favorite writers of all time). If only I’d bought Beyonce first. Emphatic fist shake!

It doesn’t bother me when people come and go, because if it’s not worth reading, I don’t encourage people to stay. I want to be worth your time, but not because I have to bend over backwards trying to explain my life in a way you’re not angry because I botched the characterization…. And come back later and apologize, because after you’ve thought about it, I had a valid point. You were angry. Or, alternatively, I explain my thought process more fully and you understand it, when you thought I thought one thing and it was exactly the opposite, because you don’t actually know what I’m alluding to- you think you do. How well we communicate is what allows me to capture people in real life.

So, first of all, I don’t want friends who don’t believe in me as a writer, because there’s never going to be a time in which I write the way you like it consistently. It’s an impossible task. It’s setting me up to fail.

I’m not going to let anyone set me up to fail. I owe it to my beautiful girl, because it was her love and adoration that made me feel this way. That I had a right to take up space in the world.

She gave me back to myself, and I sleep deeper most nights because of it. She appears in my dreams frequently, all the conversations I would have liked to have had playing out as scripts in my head. God, I’m such an INFJ. How dare I use my dreams to go to therapy? It seems like a lot of work. That’s because it is.

It’s essentially praying, dividing my brain in half so that I’m thinking about what I’m saying and creating the responses as well. It helps me get clarity and calm down. My clarity is not someone else’s truth, and if I wasn’t a writer, you wouldn’t know any of this. I am not out to psychoanalyze anyone but me, and the way I do it is by looking at the situation with an omnipotent third eye. I am very judgmental when it comes to situations, not people. I look at problems through the lens of medicine, psychiatry, and ministry.

“Grace never leaves you where you were found.”

-Anne Lamott

I Just Didn’t Have It In Me

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday, for the first time in a long time, I got demand avoidance over writing. I take a lot of heat for my opinions, but I am of the same mind as Ben Franklin…. “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.” So, first of all, my blog is why I stand up- to have a voice at all. Sometimes it shakes, and I speak my truth, anyway. That doesn’t mean that my truth means someone else is lying. They are not having the same experience as me. So, if we have mutual friends and they have a different story than me, please believe both. It’s not a matter of truth vs. lying, but what both people picked up in the room- and by necessity, those won’t match because we didn’t know what the other was thinking. There is room for more than one truth, and mine isn’t the only one. That’s because there’s truth, the subjective, and Truth, the objective. I do not traffic in Truth so much as truth. I cannot be omnipotent, I can only be a diarist. The problem comes in when my readers want me to be omnipotent, representing their mindsets.

I am not here to take away validity from anyone else’s story. I am here to name it and claim it, whatever it is. It really hurt me when Supergrover said that I’d painted some things as fact that I didn’t have the right. I had no idea what the hell that meant, because it’s not like she talked to me about what I was writing, or offered suggestions as to how I could make it better and more accurate. I was floundering because I had no information and my responses were feeding themselves without any input at all. So, if you leave me to my own devices and never address anything, I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing because you don’t have a problem with it. If you tell me there’s a problem, I can regroup.

I cannot be held to the standard of apologizing for everything I don’t know. Everything I don’t know is fucking enormous, in this situation and in others. What I can do is apologize for what I do know. I’m shattered that I hurt my beautiful girl at all, ever, but I am so incredibly human and fallible. I made mistakes. Full stop.

I just got tired of paying for them over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over……… You get my drift. As I told her, “I don’t get to decide how long you hurt, but I do get to decide where the line is between justifiably angry and holding a grudge.” I didn’t get tired of her being hurt and angry. I got tired of her not wanting to resolve any of it so we didn’t have to live in hurt and anger.

As I have said before, I would have cut off any one of my limbs to read her blog entries about me (she’s not a blogger, I’m just sayin’). I would have liked to have been angered and moved by her words, too…. And I was, but only when she was mad enough to say “I’ll answer this one, but after that, fuck right off.”

I know she doesn’t want drama. I know I don’t, either. But we’re both cutting off our noses to spite our faces. It’s an unbreakable connection on both sides, because after a few months goes by, the urge to tell each other things returns in full force. Then, we get close and after a few months, we’ll blow a gasket and tell each other to fuck off again. It’s seriously like an addiction I can’t kick, because neither one of us are very good at no contact. This is because it makes me cry every single time she says “I’ve been good. I’ve followed the rules. You said you wouldn’t reach out again, and yet, you did.” The fact that she thinks she’s being good by not talking to me wrecks me every single time. We are not cut out for this.

We are both tenderheart bears, yet not without our claws.

It’s just time to put them away, and for her, that answer is distance. For me, that answer is connection and resolution. I will never be happy with a relationship in which someone intentionally keeps things from me, because it makes me afraid and untrusting. I don’t need that anxiety, and I’ve confronted her about it many times before writing about it here. It’s frustrating, because she’s mad I let the world into ours, I’m mad that she doesn’t listen to me and you do.

In the end, I basically had to choose between being a writer and being her friend, and I chose me. It was time if she was going to keep stonewalling me, and I have no doubt that she would have done it until she died or I did.

But that’s my baby girl…. And I don’t mean that in a romantic way at all. I mean literally, in my mind, she’s a child. One I was supposed to love, protect, honor, all that. I did and I didn’t. Very mixed results. I do not blame her for any of that. I was a straight up mental mess. However, once I got it together, there were no more conversations in which we could make headway because we were still so cautious and resentful in the first place.

It is seriously one of the most fucked up things I’ve ever been a part of, and yet also something I never want to live without. I can’t, because even when she’s not here, she’s here. When I write, I can feel her presence, and she’s usually teasing me.

Something to the effect of “come on, Lanagan. I know you have more in you than that.” I basically just replace the person I know now with the person I knew 10 years ago because those memories are happier. I do not like all of the unpleasantness, and I am finished with it. I am receiving the closure I need the longer I go on having sent her very healthy messages in return, because it says to me that she was only in it for a dog to kick.

Being called a “judgmental dickhead” for 10 years will do that to you.

Meanwhile, I have so many terms of endearment for her that I couldn’t even write you a list at this point. She can also act like a huge jackass, but I don’t think of that as her personality.

When I think of her personality, I go a little starry-eyed. Still. After 10 years.

It’s not a game, and I resent that statement more than anything else. I promised her I’d be there for her for her whole life. I didn’t know what it would entail, I just said yes. At that point, we didn’t even really know each other, and yet I knew I was forging an unbreakable connection.

It started to feel like only her pain mattered, only her thoughts mattered, only her everything mattered. That’s because I made time for it. She did not make time for my feelings in terms of responding to them unless they were about other people. I have never managed to convince her that we need to work on our own communication. No one’s relationship with anyone is off the table except for apparently the one between us.

I haven’t been saying that this is all her fault, or using my blog to be shitty to her. That’s because I was not having the same experience as her, so I doubt she’s been tracking with me this whole time. I am positive that has led her to believe things about me that are not true, because she doesn’t respond. She takes things in and “reads between many lines.” But no actual communication regarding any of it except for “I’m furious beyond belief at some of your entries, and moved by others.” Well, what the fuck are you mad about and what moved you?

I feel like both of those things are important for me to know.

Because if I knew what moved her, I’d always write like that. I always want everything to be happy and sunny in my world, but the world doesn’t work that way. It’s complicated and sometimes it’s dark. Sometimes, it’s really dark.

But, for every storm, there’s a rainbow.

In Which I Just Wander Around, As Per My Normal

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I got a new haircut today. I’ll probably end up posting a photo because I’m not actually sure that many of you know what I look like. I was growing my hair out, and it looked great. However, it was a sensory nightmare on my ears and neck. I’ll probably not grow it out again, because I have learned absolutely the hard way that getting it shaped once in a while is not the answer. Like, not military short. You’ll see. Right now I’m writing on a coding notepad, so you’ll have to wait until I post this in the JetPack app and hope I’ve remembered. I’m not so good at the remembering, but I will certainly try.

I also ordered a few things for my room, like two prong to three prong adapters (the house is old), and some lamps because the space has great windows and lots of shade. Therefore, when I want it bright in here, I have to provide my own lights. One of them is a shelf where I can store “The Doggy Lama,” a small statue I’ve got of a dog in Buddha robes. I’ve also got a few other things I’d like to display, but I don’t know the measurements on the shelf. If it’s really small, I can display one of my autographed Henri Nouwen books. If it’s a little larger, I can display something by Team Mendez and “The Unexpected Spy” by Traci Walder. I have a ton more intelligence books on my Kindle, and I only keep hardbacks that are autographed. Everybody wants thirty bookshelves until moving day. Choose wisely. Normalize making the number of books in your Kindle library your status symbol instead of breaking your back trying to move a library. Trust me on this one. I do not have many paper books at all, and that’s by design.

I’ve been through two house fires so far, so it’s really important to me to be able to buy another electronic device and just re-download my books. I bought a copy of “Argo” on Amazon for the same reason. I also bought a copy of the miniseries “Hillary” off PBS……. right before they started offering it for free. I should also mention that this miniseries is not about Hillary Clinton. It’s about Edmund Hillary. It is very, very cool and if PBS got my money, no worries. I like them.

The last thing I bought was some drinks, because I’m trying to get out of the habit of drinking soda (and have been for years). I did get some mixins with caffeine, but also a ton without so that I don’t drink caffeine all day long. I’m kind of that way with caffeine, anyway. If I get enough sleep, I only need what my friend John calls a “maintenance dose.” For me, this is a cup of coffee or two cups of black tea with milk. Two cups of Stash English Breakfast is pushing it, but I don’t care. We all have our vices. 😉

So far, it’s really working out in my new house. Colin is endearing and so is Jack. He sleeps with me, even during the day. Like Oliver (who is a dog), he just likes to be near me when I’m writing. I’m also his official carer because I’m getting such a deep discount on rent. I figure walking a dog every day is worth $400/month. It’s very, very nice only sharing a house with one other person, because Colin is also an introvert. Therefore, I don’t hear him talking, listening to loud music, etc. It’s perfect, because neither do I. If I want to watch something, I have great headphones. Sensory deprivation has been wonderful for my mindset, because nothing was wrong with the other house, it was just louder than it is here.

I did get a fan, though. It’s not expensive, it’s just necessary because there’s no ceiling fan in this room and Zac said that if we tried to install one, it might open a hornet’s nest in terms of the ancient wiring. So, I improvised and got what is essentially a swamp cooler. It functions normally, but you can put water in it.

Zac’s housewarming gift was the beginning of a bar. There’s some Amaro, Wild Turkey, cocktail cherries, two kinds of bitters (because he knows I like them in soda water), and I think also some vermouth…. but that might just be something he left here. I can’t think of a reason to buy more alcohol than I already have, because I drink so rarely that it’s not like having the same cocktail over and over will be boring. The cocktail cherries are especially good.

In fact, I might just save it for drill weekends, because I’d like to have something on hand for Zac and I’m more interested in soda/water anyway. Oh, and Bryn and Dave will be here in May. Considering the size of the bottles Zac bought, I’ll definitely be able to give them some of whatever they want. 😉 Except the cocktail cherries. I’m betting those will go fast.

My dad’s housewarming gift was a sherpa blanket and a box of snacks which I am happily sharing with Colin. There’s all kinds of things, from Airheads and Laffy Taffy to Pirate’s Booty and Cheez-Its. That will be gone almost as quickly as the cherries.

Eventually, I’d like to get a small television to put above the layette closet. It just can’t be too big, because the wall curves up toward the ceiling. I just need a stud finder, and if I don’t say I’ve already found him, I have failed at the most standard dad joke of all time.

For those just joining us, he’s my boyfriend Zac. Zac is owner of Oliver, who is a dog. What’s really funny is that because I always say “Oliver, who is a dog” on my web site, it’s entered Zac’s lexicon as well…. whether he’s writing an e-mail or speaking.

It’s an antidote to the darker grey sides of life to be able to laugh together as hard as we do:

Leslie: I need to talk to a queer man about lighting.
Zac: I’m not that kind of queer man.
Leslie: I didn’t think you were, I just thought you might have access to one.
Zac: Well, I probably do. Besides, you’re the worst lesbian ever. You didn’t even get a U-haul.

Now do you see why it’s different when bisexual people date bisexual people instead of straight? Same cultural references. I have never been interested in a man who was also a “Friend of Dorothy,” and he’s probably even old enough to know what that means. 😉

He’s just become so dear to me in the smallest of ways, because he’s the type of person that likes to sit in his backyard with his dog and so am I. He says he’ll take me to do anything I want to do, he’s just not very good at planning. So, find a thing and we’ll go. Guess what I don’t do? Ever find a thing that’s worth leaving Oliver.

I was also very touched when Zac showed me a picture of the Easter eggs that one of his other partners had made. There were the names of all the partners on the eggs, and I was so touched she thought of me that I cried.

I’ve also cried a lot for Zac. He really opens up to me, and given what he’s been through, we don’t exactly have the lightest of conversations. It affects me, but in no universe do I want him to stop thinking of me as his safe space. I just don’t want him to think that his stories don’t matter, that I am not holding them in my heart and wishing the best for him. It’s not about trying to own him. I’ll never do that (or have the ability, as it should be). When I think of Zac, I don’t think of him like my fountain pen or any possession. I possess him the way I would say “my neighborhood” or “my coffee house.” I do not require or desire his complete and total attention. I do not need to be smother-mothered. I do not need to have a violently jealous partner. Too many people do.

I just tend to explain because there’s so much wreckage around the way society talks about polyamory…. as if it’s different than people who are in affairs having multiple partners and their partner doesn’t know it. It is different, because it’s totally open and honest.

But let’s be clear:

A lot of the people who condemn polyamory in public are devastating their husbands and wives with their affairs, possibly multiple. It doesn’t show that they care about their partner’s emotional well-being or sexual health. You will absolutely bring about devastation and think you’re better than me (or any other poly person). You’re not superior. You’re just an asshole who hopefully is only temporarily not being caught, because you are wasting your partner’s time if they’re mono.

I would never have suggested to a partner that we have an open relationship. It was easy to start an open relationship because I wasn’t seeing anyone. I never would have explored dating more than one person at a time if it meant saying to someone that I wasn’t happy with monogamy and we should change our relationship to reflect that. The relationship hardly ever survives, because the partner who didn’t say they wanted poly either feels pressure to say yes or devastated that they have to say no, because once a person decides that they’re poly, it’s not likely that they’ll ever agree to monogamy again. So, announcing that you’re poly generally destroys everything. So many people use it as a stop gap measure to try and stay together before completely giving up. In my experience, that has never worked.

And besides, I don’t have more than one partner, and I’m not looking. I just think that I’m wired for poly not because I have to date more than one person to be happy, but because it doesn’t bother me to let my partner be whomever he wants to be because why do I get to control what he does? He was up front and honest with me about what I could expect from hom, and it was completely acceptable to me….. because not only do I not care, I don’t have time to start. My life does not need to be taken over by worrying where Zac is every moment of every day.

There’s a joke in the poly community that I’ve been laughing about for like a year. It’s “polyamory is just three introverts passing around their extrovert so they can read their books in peace.” The other truism in marriages is that men ask for open relationships and the marriage falls apart when they see that they are not marketable……. but their wives are. All of the sudden things don’t look so hot when you’re the one that wanted new experiences, and so far that experience has been watching your wife come home from something fabulous while you’re always left on read.

That’s rough, buddy.

Honestly, it’s reclaiming the matriarchy, and it’s fucking beautiful. Then, you watch them try to crawl back on their knees to shut the relationship back down because they didn’t know Cindy Crawford didn’t want their dumb ass.

Then, the joke’s on them, because all of the sudden these women are having fun and they don’t want to go back to feeling unappreciated and undervalued. After all, it was their husbands who said they weren’t enough, right?

Or, the husband begs the wife to shut things down. She does. He doesn’t. It is always a double standard, like men saying their wives can only date other women because that’s not threatening. It happens so often it’s called the “one dick policy.” If your male partner does this to you, that’s not what poly even is. You love who you love…. within reason. One partner can veto another before they start dating, but for this to be healthy, it’s not saying a person is off limits, but a group like mutual friends or the other’s work colleagues, etc. Just common sense not to make your partners’ lives more difficult than it already is.

The one reason I say I’m poly even though I don’t have any other romantic partners is that Zac is friends with me on Facebook. Therefore, my friends see pictures of him with other people and it looks like he’s clearly on a date. That’s because he is, and I do not want anyone’s guff about what a shitty boyfriend Zac is because he’s running around on me. You know, if he was running around on me and we were also friends on Facebook, you’d think I would have broken up with him by now. 😉

I would be more upset if Zac watched an episode of “Slow Horses” without me. That is clearly “sleep on the couch” behavior. We’ve both been good, though. I joked with him that it was easier to wait than it was to pretend I hadn’t watched it. 😉 If you have Apple TV+, don’t sleep on it.

Speaking of Apple TV+, I also really love “For All Mankind” and “Acapulco.”

Anyway, the point is quality over quantity. When we’re together, we block out the rest of the world. We just don’t spend all day, every day together and I think that’s healthy. It’s basically the only way I haven’t gotten myself into a relationship that got too serious, too fast. It’s nice to stay in the dating stage permanently, because I’m finding out that I have less time to spend with partners than I want, anyway. This is not to say that Zac’s opinion doesn’t matter. If he wants more tme with me, it’s not like we can’t discuss it. I’m just saying that I am not on a relationship escalator and I like it. I don’t have to say things like “what are we?” Well, I do, but only in terms of prioritizing time together, not whether or not we’re solid. Not my words, but important…. a relationship elevator, not an escalator.

However, if I do meet someone else, I also want them to be wired for poly because Zac and I have been together long enough that I don’t want another person to try and control my time, either. This is because I do not want one person to be completely dependent on me for all their emotional needs and vice versa. Even if you are monogamous, you will never get everything you need from your partner only.

But don’t worry. If you don’t make time for your friends, they’ll go away. Cocooning destroys relationships, because when they end, you look up and you don’t actually have any friends you’ve talked to recently. Your entire world walks out the door and you have to rebuild your emotional support system from scratch.

It’s not that I’m against monogamy. Obviously. I’m monogamous right now. It’s that I like the fact that Zac can’t and won’t ever tell me who to date, what to do, what to think, what to wear, etc. If he doesn’t like any of these things, he doesn’t have to. If I have multiple relationships, my job to be a good hinge and recognize everyone’s discomfort, because in those instances, it’s 100% because I wasn’t a good communicator.

When you start learning about polyamory, you start learning about communication. Being partners with multiple people isn’t for sissies. In order to open up to multiple people, you have to be stronger at communication than you do when you’re monogamous. You have to be proactive so that problems don’t come up in the future. Because you’re learning about communication, you improve all your relationships overall. Your friends & family reap the benefits of you learning how to be open, because if you don’t, you’re going to wreck more relationships than just the one.

I would also never interrupt a date with one partner to go and rescue another unless it was an emergency, and even then we both would rush in, because I’m not dropping you at home if it’s an emergency. None of Zac’s partners would have a problem with this, and I need it to be the same way with mine. I do not need perfect harmony. I need basic respect and kindness. Even now, it’s not perfect. We all have our limits and Zac manages them well. However, because everyone knows when Zac is available to them, it’s not like there’s any bad blood. We’re just not mutual friends. We do get together for all call parties at Zac’s house, but laughitng together at a party a few times a year does not a mutual friend make.

You also don’t stop feeling jealous. It’s just that now, it’s your responsibility to find out why you’re jealous and be able to pinpoint what would fix it. If you can’t articulate those things, boundaries are unclear and everything falls like a house of cards. We have so many checks and balances, though, because Zac’s house is neutral ground. None of his partners live with him, which solves a lot in and of itself.

There’s a lot of checking the story you’re telling yourself and making sure it lines up with what your partner’s story is as well. Silence is every bit as detrimental as fighting, because if you don’t know what someone is thinking, you’re probably thinking the worst. And, the longer the silence goes on, the more the stories you’re telling yourselves differ.

I love that Zac is part of my story now, and that he’s the type of partner that doesn’t ask for the whole book.

Here’s another bright spot. I remembered the picture.

The Importance of Being Earnest

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday, I started an entry about the whole move. I didn’t finish it before midnight, so I was going to finish today. Then, I decided I just wanted to start fresh this morning. I got an amazing night’s sleep, something I desperately needed. I will also be taking a bath in eucalyptus at some point. I’m not miserable, I’m just not young enough not to hurt after a move.

Although technically, I did all the packing. Zac moved. By the time he got to my house, I was completely toast because I’d stayed up all night trying to get everything ready. By the time Zac arrived, all we had to do was throw the totes in the back of the car. However, they were a bit too heavy for me while I was exhausted. So, Zac wins the award for being such a thoughtful person and taking over so I didn’t have to bust ass again.

What happened is that I was trying to fold my futon into a couch, and the mattress was upside down and backwards to be able to do that. There’s a special hinging system in the mattress so that one part of it has to be on the seat panel. When I flipped it over to the mattress side, I wrestled it all by myself and didn’t see the “this side down” tag to avoid this problem. So, on Friday night I turned my legs and arms black and blue trying to make more space in the room for sweeping, etc.

The futon and I fought. It’s not easy to admit when you lose to an inanimate object. However, in the end, I did get it done. It was a victory after all the sweat and bruises. So, again, I was glad that Zac could see I was wrecked from lack of sleep and exertion. I honestly believe that the pain is not all due to age. I really fucked myself up, but what other choice to you have in those moments? Where the only answer is “figure it out,” and the problem brings you to tears. So you cry and do it, anyway.

When we were finished with moving, we decided to watch Slow Horses and order pizza. Then, after we’d eaten, Zac pulled out a small box of cannoli, a delightful surprise. He’s been my rock through all of this, and I know for certain that if he’d had the bandwidth, I wouldn’t have been packing alone, either. That’s because it’s a huge give and take. We both get demand avoidance, meltdown, and need to call each other because neurodivergence, what the fuck?

It is a misnomer that autistic people know exponentially more about our disorders than neurotypical people, because we have the lived experience. This ain’t necessarily so, because data is not lived experience. We are as confused and mystified by our behavior as anyone else around us. That’s because I’m self aware enough to know when I’ve hit a wall, leaving my my mind divided in half, doing odd things and trying to figure out why.

Is it that I’m an INFJ and naturally introverted? Is it meltdown, burnout, demand avoidance, anxiety, depression, hypomania, CPTSD, etc.? Those are a lot of heuristics to consider, so managing myself in terms of patient care doesn’t always go so well.

As I was telling Bryn the other day, “when you treat yourself as if you’re the best doctor you’ve got, you probably need a second opinion.”

I need more psychological support than I’m getting, because I need an autism specialist- both for working out problems and the process of creating values and visions.

I am always about “values and visioning,” because that’s language from the church in terms of creating a mission statement. It works personally as well as it does in groups. Therapists aren’t just there to help you overcome your problems. They also help you when you’re stuck career-wise and don’t know where to go from here. Mostly, that involves talking to yourself until you figure out that you have always had your own answers, you just need to be guided to them.

If it helps, I think of my monologue here as therapy, so maybe you can think of your therapist as your raw blog entries. You’re just saying them out loud to the one person who actually knows what to do to help you emotionally suit up for a healthier future.

“Half this game is 90% mental.” -Yogi Berra

In terms of finding that for myself, what I have learned is that being on my own for so long has made it where the bare minimum effort on Zac’s part looks enormous to me. Just the fact that he does things like pick up income due to our income disparity is huge. This is because it says “I want to do this thing with you and I enjoy your company so much that I would rather pay for you to be there with me than worry you’re not going to be able to swing it on your own.” It doesn’t feel like chivalry, but…. not going to lie…… yes, it does. He just only sometimes feels that way. Most of the time, it’s just that he recognizes his own white male privilege. It’s one of the best conversations I’ve ever had in my life, because it was so comforting to see that he wants his only goal in life to make his world better. This doesn’t just extend to me. It extends globally.

Zac’s small kindnesses are so endearing, because it’s not about all the chivalry. It’s remembering things I say and respecting my words as equal to his own. I have not known many men like this, because most of the men I’ve known who date women think their opinion is superior because they’re the provider (generally). When women become the provider, men often get jealous enough to derail their careers. I remember one instance on reddit in which a woman was making bank in her field because it was so incredibly niche and had a lot of sensitive information. He interviewed for a job at one of her competitors and she had to divorce him immediately because he forced her hand. It looked too bad in her niche field to even date a competitor, and this woman had been married a long time. She told him all of this before the interview, and he did it anyway.

I know intimately that I will never have any of those issues.

I have also learned, and I think I’ve written about this before at some point, that it surprised me how little difference there is between dating a man and a woman when both parties are queer. Dating a straight person generally leads to keeping them insecure and anxious that you’re going to leave them for the same sex. There’s still such a cultural stigma on homosexuality that two things are running concurrently. Jealousy and homophobia are best friends when you want the worst possible outcome. On the flip side, gay people think of you dating the opposite sex as betrayal. Frankly, I understand and respect this outlook, because it seems like we’re watching you embrace the thing that oppresses us. There is also no world in which gay people don’t treat bi people like they’re “not queer enough.”

I will give you an example. I surf dating apps just to see who’s out there, and I am astounded by the number of lesbians who have on their profiles “no men, no bisexuals.” This basically comes across to me as “Irish need not apply.” No one ever thinks of bisexual couples who are in the system have the best ability to change it. Since we’re more accepted, we have a bigger platform. I think it’s shitty to use heterosexuality as a shield, but I don’t think it’s wrong for me to date men, or treat other women like trash because they have. It’s really hard for me, because that attitude is friendly fire. I need gay people to hear that in 7.1 Surround Sound, and the bisexual community is over it a “fuck you” amount. Straight people who have this constant insecurity that we’re going to leave them for gay people, gay people have this constant insecurity that we’re going to leave them for the enemy.

🎶🎶 One of these things is not like the other.……… 🎶🎶

I get it. I really do. I don’t have to agree with you, because that’s not my problem to solve for you. Bisexuality has nothing to do with cheating. Cheating is cheating. Bisexuality has nothing to do with polyamory. You’re either wired for multiple partners or you aren’t. They are two separate mindsets/skills. Therefore, that does not have anything to do with sexual orientation, like we’ll die if we don’t have both.

All bisexual people are saying is that their partner’s equipment is a non-issue, it’s not a barrier to a romantic relationship. They are NOT saying “I’m incapable of marriage.” Whether they are or they aren’t is a separate conclusion from attraction.

However, with Zac I don’t feel invisible, and that’s what happens to bisexual people in heterosexual relationships. We both look queer as a three dollar bill, so we don’t exactly exude heterosexual privilege when we’re out and about. I realized that dating a bisexual man was not losing my connection to the queer community with my partner. That it’s important to share whether you’re in a heterosexual relationship or not, because we’re on equal footing when it comes to being oppressed by the system. It’s amazing how often queer cancels out white in a racist theocracy, theocracy being the key word here.

I am tired of the Bible being confused with the Constitution. It’s gone on long enough. I’m tired of atheist hate of Christians because we deserve their hate so much….. In America, Christ’s actual messages have been mangled into a religion he could not support.

If you dare to judge me, you are a Roman, not a Jew. Period.

That’s because Jesus was on the side of the oppressed. American Christianity would make him vomit. It’s tinged with racism because slave masters would use Bible verses to keep their slaves in line and justify their monstrous behavior………..

Not counting on the fact that the slaves would empathize more with the minority who was beaten and killed just like them. That it was religion that gave them enough courage to stand up and fight for freedom. If you are straight, white, male, and cisgender, you don’t see with striking clarity the horror of the situation……….

That Jesus was under the exact same constraints that Americans are now. It’s just that the conservatives weren’t Republicans and Democrats, but Pharisees and Sadducees. Same software, different case. Therefore, white supremacists do not see the irony in being the people who oppress others in his name, repeating the cycle for 2,000 years. Conservative evangelical faith does not see the liberation in the story….. sometimes through thoughtlessness, sometimes through malice. The thoughtlessness is because people who aren’t oppressed don’t need liberation theology. They don’t need to feel inspiration from the fact that a minority was murdered by the state.

Not only that, he wasn’t murdered for actions, he was murdered for ideas. He was murdered by a government who didn’t want the people to think.

“It’s people like you what cause unrest.”

So, when you think about it that way, if you are a Christian policeman with racist beliefs, you’re not actually being a Christian. You’re being a Roman.

You’re not the people for whom your sins were forgiven lightly. That’s because I’m betting it’s easier to forgive the whole world as an abstract concept than it is to forgive the people who are actively in the process of murdering you when you did it.

You are as worthy of redemption as everyone else, because grace and mercy are free of charge. But the more you exclude people, the more you separate yourself from the Jew you claim to adore while mangling his words into everything he didn’t say.

Where in the Bible do you find that Jesus would have accepted the behavior of people like Donald Trump? That is the real mystery of your faith, because your blinders keep you from seeing it. Your words and Jesus’s actions don’t line up, so how dare you think writing your own headcanon and retconning everything to support the crazy idea that Jesus would support war and greed, things like that is everything wrong with white church.

You don’t see the hypocrisy. You don’t see the discomfort you create, even in your regular followers because your services are so fear-based. Why do people have to say they’re a “recovering Christian” at all? Do you think that Jesus would ever want people to go through recovering from trauma given to them in his name?

It is the weirdest transformation in history.

However, a lie can get around the world six times before truth can put on pants.

I am trying to find the truth in it all….. wading through the bullshit of exclusionary Christianity that harms people all over the world and trying to decide what’s worth keeping. My biggest gripe is that the squeaky wheel gets the grease, so when most Americans think of Christians, they think of Evangelicals. My reputation proceeds me in the absolute worst of ways.

This is problematic because atheists think that all Christians go to some sort of fucked up Bible college and are fed all these bullshit ideas. They don’t think of Harvard, Yale, or Oxford Divinity School first. To them, The Archbishop of Canterbury and Joel Osteen have the same amount of education.

I know most of you know this, but for the record, I’m going to bet the Archbishop has more.

Most people don’t know this, but the former Archbishop, Rowan Williams, was really good friends with Christopher Hitchens. They have some marvelous debates on YouTube if you’re interested.

I think this is a good point because people like Williams are being left out of the conversation. That Christians are intelligent, but there is a war between people who interpret the Bible and people who take it literally. Unfortunately, the people who take it literally, as if the pen was actually in God’s hand, have entwined themselves with the Republican Party and are the loudest idiots in the room.

When people think of Christians, their brains don’t jump to Martin Luther King Jr. and Raphael Warnock. They don’t think of William Barber and Bernice King.

They don’t see liberation theology because they don’t need it.

Zac is an atheist, and he’s the kindest Christian I ever met in terms of showing actual Christlike behavior.

If an Atheist is a better Christian than you, that’s the point at which you need to decide which God you actually serve. Are you tapping into the universe, or trying to control it?

Are you a believer, or are you Pilate, washing your hands of the whole thing because hey.

He’s just a Jew.

And that is the importance of being earnest with ourselves about the Republican Party. We need to decide when we’re going to stop following the Sanhedrin and state that murdered him, or admit it’s been a good run..

The choice is yours.

One More Sleep

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

It’s my last night in this room, as Zac is coming over tomorrow after drill to help me move my stuff, and if we don’t have time to do it all, we’ll finish it up Sunday after 5:00. I don’t think it will take very long, but that depends on our energy levels and the stairs at both places. I’m lucky in that Zac is very handy, so he has tools already that would be helpful and yet, I wouldn’t have thought of them on my own, like a drill and a hand truck, etc.

So, as I close out this chapter in my life, I have a million thoughts in my head, pictures going by too fast to get one to stick. The people who’ve lived here with me, the things that have happened, etc. It’s a lot. But my entire DC story minus the 18 months I lived here in my early 20s has been created in this one house, mostly this one room.

I hope I’m as comfortable at the new house as I have been here, and I’m grateful that we’ve been able to cohabit so long without incident. It is one of the longest stretches at an address I’ve ever had.

Everything is, big picture, going to be the same. When you get into the details, my route around town changes. I “have a dog now,” because the house I live in now has five dogs, but none of them live on my side of the house. I don’t see them for months at a time, but I’ll hear them.

Jack will have free run of the house, and may sleep with me some nights. I can walk him whenever I wish. I think it will be good for me, because I always notice I’m calmer when I’m writing and Oliver, who is a dog, is in the room. His presence is everything, so I hope Jack and I will have the same vibe.

I need to get to work, but I thought it was too important a date to go without writing just because I was busy with other things. I am very, very busy with other things and absolutely could not afford to tell you all this, but I thought, “will it matter in five years if you didn’t blog today?” That’s the moment I stopped. This is a milestone.

Nine years is a long time.

When I landed at DCA, it was midday. I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to go right home or to Kramerbooks, but ultimately tiredness won out; I took the Metro to Silver Spring, where Hayat picked me up.

Hayat drove me to BWI when Lindsay called and said that my mother had died and I needed to come home.

Hayat gave me a Lebanese jewelry box that is one of my favorite things, because I designed my room around the color scheme of the tiling. The curtains are teal, and are thick enough to use as blackout. I never have to worry about working a graveyard shift ever again, because she said I could take them as well. 😉 And on that note, I have to go- for some reason my Android has decided it does not like the “Enter” key today, so I cannot make new paragraphs. I’m not sure my brain is capable of new paragraphs, either.

The Next Logical Conclusion

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The first was to be seen and heard.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Global and national are the same as local.

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

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

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

Please Allow Me a Bit of Procrastination

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

My little AuDHD brain is overwhelmed and I need to shut down, refocus. So, I’m sitting on my bed and writing an entry… soothing myself back from burnout/demand avoidance because I have so much to do. Or, I think I have so much to do because my brain is consistently arranged like “The Persistence of Memory.” Everything is clear and logical, with solid lines….. except for the dripping clock. I have no ability to estimate how long a job will take, and my room isn’t honestly that big. I do not have the ability, however, to say “I have X number of days…. how much do I need to devote to packing so that I’m absolutely ready by the time Zac gets here? I have already packed a few boxes, and I have plenty left because they’re so large. It’s helpful that they’re canvas, because they’re just as heavy as cardboard, but they have nicer handles. So far, I like the orange ones best.

It’s kind of interesting that my moving boxes are a stunning array of colors.

I’ve been moving hard, but I cannot sustain concentration and effort on packing right now. My muscles need a break and I’m desperate for some water. But even when I sit down, I’m still searching for something. My mind gets busy when my body is weak.

On the autism subreddit there are tests to get you started in terms of gauging whether you have autism or not. It’s confusing, especially when you have ADHD….. although the most insightful test for me was called “the Aspie test,” and I’m sure they mean “Asperger’s,” but apparently that is a dirty word because Asperger was a Nazi. Anyway, there are different ways of asking the questions, and it clarified something that I could not explain, but I know is true.

It asked me when I read books if I could imagine/picture the characters. The Aspie test was the only one that allowed me to choose “imagination and visualization are two different things.” I am moved by prose, I am not seeing a movie in my head. I know a picture is worth a thousand words, but I generally write quite a bit more than that. What a focus on in a novel is empathy with the characters; I like reading how they think and feel. However, when I read descriptions of people’s physical attributes, it means nothing.

I will tell you that when I got to see an actual picture of the real Supergrover recently, I thought, “I will never in my lifetime do her justice, and there’s absolutely no one they could cast that would look anything like her.” It made me sad, because I realized if I didn’t read that way, I wouldn’t write that way, either…. it’s not my wheelhouse.

I swear to God, if I publish a book and you have no idea what any of the characters look like, it’s only because I have no idea, either.

So far, I’ve taken all of the quizzes. I 100% have traits of autism according to one because they took more information from me than anyone else. It was rad. They asked my gender at birth and gender now, my age, and whether I was self-diagnosed or professionally diagnosed. Then, they asked if I was professionally or self diagnosed with ADHD. The answer is that I am self diagnosed/suspected ASD and professionally diagnosed ADHD. THEN I started the questionnaire. That means it’s a weighted score, because the test already knows that if you’re diagnosed with one, there’s an 80% chance you have the other.

The thing that really freaked me out was that they asked if I had a specific gait, if I’d been accused of staring at anyone, if I had depth perception issues…… I mean WHAT IN THE ACTUAL FUCK?

No one had to call me out like this.

At the same time, now that I’ve taken all of these quizzes that back up my gut feeling (I’ve taken the monotropism questionnaire and got a very high score, but nothing like the ones above), I don’t have imposter syndrome anymore. I finally have answers to miscommunications lasting back decades.

The worst was “I often say things that other people think come across as mean, and I don’t understand why.”

However, it is to Supergrover’s credit that I started down this road, because of course ADHD Facebook groups often have Autistic memes as well because we’re both neurodivergent. I saw a few too many autism posts that skewered me, and I started doing the research. The reason the credit goes to her is that she may never have thought of me as a narcissist, but her words made me feel like one when I was trying to reach out to her. I had to find what was missing in me. How could I improve my communication skills so I didn’t come off that way anymore? When I figure it all out, I’ll let you know. But at the same time, I have made progress. It’s just hard to make progress when there are several differences in the way I communicate with most of the world:

  • I am a big picture person. Always. My mind is not built to handle detail. This leads to professional and personal problems, because detail at work is required and detail at home depends on your partner. Are you always forgetting details that are important to them, having the most insensitive reaction possible, having them tell you that “you knew what you were doing?” There are a million cues built into the system that lead people to the most obvious answer. So, if I was neurotypical, I have no doubt that those people would be right. I’m not. I’m autistic. Therefore, my brain processes information differently and because it’s so out of sync with the rest of the world, it is aggressively annoying. I will do everything I can to help you navigate being in a relationship with me except read your mind. I will not pick up on the fact that you’re mad about something just because we haven’t spoken.
  • I see patterns in everything, all the time, when it comes to human behavior. I am not a STEM genius that can do magic with data strings. When I was a kid, I was the one that knew everyone’s phone number off the top of my head. Now, without my iPhone, I could 100% call my dad. Everyone else I might get wrong. One out of hundreds of contacts is not that great.
    • I know this because I do know my sister’s phone number, but when I had to dial it recently I put in the wrong area code and had to start over. So, I suppose I know two numbers.
    • I remember e-mail addresses easier than I remember phone numbers because I’m driven by letters. I still have a friend on AOL. It’s adorable. I have thought many times “what if I had the money to send her a GIANT BOX of AOL disks and a copy of Windows 95?”
  • I get lost in tasks to the exclusion of all else, and this shows most adamantly in working on computers. If something is wrong with my computer, I will take it down to the studs, because I prefer doing everything the same way every time. I am also not a detail person. I am a “keep everything on a cloud drive so that I don’t have to deal with details” kind of person.
  • It doesn’t take me very long to get frustrated with a task, and my fuse is more short with Windows, because I can use Google or ChatGPT to find the snippets of code I need to fix my Linux system. I should look on a DOS subreddit, but I won’t. The only DOS command I need is wsl –install (Install Windows Subsystem for Linux and the default distribution, Ubuntu). I will not put up with any system foolishness. If a hard drive disagrees with me, they seem to STFU when I drop the partition table. Troubleshooting a problem in either operating system can take hours. When things start getting difficult, I would rather start over. Metaphor for neurodivergent life, probably because we’re all relentless perfectionists so that we don’t get labeled lazy.
  • I do not like being interrupted, and while I am not grumpy about it, I am frustrated that nothing ever goes back to the way it was. It takes me a long time to transition in and out of “the zone,” no matter the task. But I’m not the type to say “you interrupted me,” because it’s not my job to enforce strict rules on who can talk to me when. I do, however, miss the many ideas that have floated off into thin air, and thankful I’m fast enough to have another idea to replace it.
  • I don’t process things verbally very well, because I think a lot faster than I speak. I’m literally having buffer overflow issues, and trying not to stutter when I’m in conversation. That’s because I generally have one thought building on another and I have to take all those strands and braid them before I speak. And even then, I often realize that I might have said something truthful, but I had no idea of the impact, because I have no idea how my words are going to be received.

Not knowing how my words were being received was instrumental in making me wonder why Supergrover called me a judgmental dickhead all the time, when I was sending her so much love and attention…… but I didn’t change for her. I noticed that I was struggling with relationships in every area of my life and couldn’t explain why in those cases, either. It was a long journey, because I didn’t want to be flippant. I wanted to be Maude Lebowski “thorough” before I said anything, because there’s a lot of hate in the autism community for people who don’t do the homework and just decide on two Tik-Toks that this is totally them.

Therefore, not only did I seek out autistic YouTubers, I also sought out lectures by M.D.s and Ph.Ds describing the symptoms of the disorders on the spectrum overall. That lots of people are creative and not visual. Because the autism test asked if I had depth perception issues, I assume that there are lots of people who can’t see movies in their heads because they don’t have the ability to put things correctly into their environment. Someone with 2D vision cannot have immersive experiences, for the most part. For instance, trees aren’t blobs because I don’t have glasses. They’re blobs because they’re all 2D. I can’t place individual branches on their x, y, and z axes…… particularly zed. I call it the zed axis because even though I’m an American, “Zed” sounds like more of a villain name……..

Zed Axis…….. so we meet again……..

So, because I cannot place things in their environment, can’t process thoughts and emotions the same way as a neurotypical person, and look like I’m from the Ministry of Silly Walks, I am a long way from normal before I ever really start talking about “my issues.” But they all combine to give me a hilarious sense of humor if you are also neurodivergent, because one of the things that the tests point out is that neurodivergent and neurotypical humor is different, too. We generally have no sense of propriety, and are always on the “think it, say it” plan regardless of the consequences, because it’s a disability, not a personal failing (I do not mean that one can or should blame their behavior on a disability. It’s the disabled person’s job to fix it because someone’s poor impulse control, demand avoidance, etc. isn’t a partner/coworker/boss’s responsibility except to give us everything we are entitled to through our places of work….. or, in the case of a partner, taking our needs seriously. A good example is that I basically like three brands of clothes because of the way they feel on my skin. Say my partner finds socks two dollars cheaper at Costco?

They might say “what’s the difference?” And I will be absolutely devastated, both because I don’t want to disappoint the person that brought the wrong thing, so I’ll use them until they wear out, annoyed they aren’t what I want. Socks last a long time and there’s no real need to replace them except for my autism making it where I can’t concentrate on anything else because the tag is three centimeters off from where it normally is. I feel all of these things. I hear sounds other people don’t notice. I pick up on behaviors other people don’t notice.

One of the questions and answers was interesting, because it told me a lot without saying a word:

The question was “can you easily pick up social cues?” One of the choices is “I think I can remember how to act like someone else I know.”

Christ on a cracker.

There’s also the matter of your abilities as a conversationalist………… Because you take everything literally, there’s probably no White Elephant in the room. If there’s something that needs to be said, if you’re autistic you probably just blurted it out like it was nothing, because to you it wasn’t, and you don’t understand the emotion coming at you. It gets overwhelming fast if you’re with more than one person, which is why I try to be with only one person at a time. I cannot process two people talking while also thinking of something to say. I end up missing the jumping in point, because they’re supercomputers and I’m a raspberry pi. I am much quicker than other people in text, but it’s a different kind of comprehension. I’m the supercomputer when they’re at a disadvantage.

Because I don’t process voices well, I do like talking on the phone, but only to the people who are very, very close to me. That’s because I don’t want it to be too long in between hearing each other’s voices. With literally anyone else, I tend to talk with my hands. I talk with my hands in person, too, but that’s just because I’m a Texan.

A Texan who has just realized that procrastination time is up. Have fun with the quizzes if you decide to take them. And by “fun,” I mean “I didn’t actually know you could feel this devastated and elated simultaneously.”

Exercise

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Today’s prompt, which I answered last year, was about what kind of exercise I liked….. or something like that. Well, I can assure you that it is not carting laundry up and down from the basement and packing boxes. It’s all a necessary evil, though, because for as much as I love my house, I’m getting really excited about moving into a new space. I can’t say that it’s bigger, because I haven’t really spent a whole lot of time there. But it’s at least as big, and it’s still a whole house over a tiny white box apartment. In my area, I would pay twice or three times as much for the privilege of living alone in a tiny white box. I realize you have to take a chance on housemates, but I truly prefer it to living alone.

I am a solitary person. If I didn’t have housemates, I wouldn’t talk to people at all. I go days without conversation now. Therefore, having someone around is not the worst thing in the world, and having it be someone I genuinely get along with is exciting. I’m bummed that Magda pulled out, but I see why. She just has too much stuff to fit in the space. I don’t know if she’s found another place or not. I’m just glad that my moving in was not dependent on me bringing someone else with me. He absolutely had the right to say no, that he only wanted one roommate and he was going to look for someone who could pay him more. And yet, he didn’t. It was very gracious of him, and I’m glad neither of us has to interview more people. We’re both neurodivergent and the thought of living with someone else is frightening. You find someone you get on with, you don’t lose them.

I mean, at the end of the day Colin only needs someone who cleans up after themselves, and is a normal human being. One out of two ain’t bad. And as I’ve kidded him, I have no problem moving in with a stranger because I’ve never met anyone stranger than me. This is undeniably true on many levels, and people tend to find this out over time, not immediately. But at least we’re the same sort of weird. Neurodivergent people feel like aliens, so it’s like two aliens decided to share a house instead of interacting with so many humans.

Yes, it really does feel that isolating sometimes, but it’s hard to notice when I’m actually lonely, if that makes sense. For instance, sometimes I mistake boredom for loneliness, or a hundred other emotions that are actually feeling lonely but written off as other things so they just fly right past me. I am not consciously saying to myself “stay lonely,” but “the world out there is scary.” “Out there,” I have to manage my AuDHD, and it’s sometimes an impossible task. Often a disability does not mean you cannot do something- it means that you have difficulty. Autism criteria tells me that I will suffer with problems in my interpersonal relationships my whole life. Apparently, my reaction to that is not to have that many of them.

But this isn’t unusual, either. Most people hang out with their partners and kids, and they don’t have a ton of friends, either. I believe that why this bothers me is that for them, cocooning with their people is perfectly normal. Not being a social butterfly because I’m not very good at it is problematic. Thankfully, I’m starting to feel this type of judgment less and less as family configurations come forward in all types of ways, and by my age those family configurations are completely convoluted, because by now we’ve all had multiple relationships….. and sometimes the people in your family are the ones that decided to stand by you when those relationships ended, so the family you thought you had is not where you ended up.

It’s the beauty of life, that we don’t know where we’re going to end up. But what I do know is that at this point in my life there’s no replacements. There’s no getting rid of Zac or Bryn to make room for someone else, because there is plenty of room already…… and yet, it doesn’t feel like it. It feels like my life is bursting with good things. I am not waiting for something to happen; it is happening while we speak.

I have changed so much. I just wanted to go out and have a good time with Zac, kidding him that I liked to be “wined and dined.” It’s funny because we love Trader Joe’s and so far we have shared one bottle of wine in the year that we’ve been dating- or at least, I know it’s over a year, but I don’t know how much. I haven’t counted it up, and I need to. Zac says I need to pick an anniversary and that was immediately overwhelming. I wouldn’t know where to start, and that line of thinking immediately made me fall over with laughter….. the part where I think about what might constitute an anniversary. In any case, I wouldn’t have said that I’d rather find someone else who can fit into that rather than someone who would make me give that up, which is how most of society works. I have found that neurodivergence is basically a Chinese Wall. When Zac isn’t with me, my time is completely dedicated to something else. Therefore, I know I have the capacity to manage multiple partners because I’m not spending time with one thinking about the other, ever.

You live and learn. I had a hierarchy with Supergrover and Dana, but I never want that again, and I don’t have to unless I seek it out. The important part of learning is knowing where and when to stop looking. The hierarchy was in Supergrover’s favor, and she can feel guilty and hurt about that all she wants, but it doesn’t make my story any less valid, because there were things in her life I couldn’t see that I needed to see; and things in my life she needed to see and ran away from for years. I know she’s hurt, angry, tired, etc. Still can’t undo it or help it. She could have helped me with clarity, but she attacked me when I asked for it. There are so many really good conversations we needed to have that would have been hard, but enriching. It wasn’t easy to be dressed down by someone I love that much, but I survived.

Now that she’s out of my life, the power structure is still there, but it’s not so extremely loud and incredibly close. Having a power structure like ours made me feel comfort, because her love is a weighted blanket. But sometimes in the middle of the night, I got too hot and couldn’t take the blankets off. I saw visions and took off in that direction, and it was the right one. I just also made a shit ton of mistakes in the process. There’s nothing to regret or blame, just put to sleep.

What I have realized is that when it comes to Supergrover, echolagia is how I stim. Having her around me feels comforting, therefore I write about her when I’m trying to calm myself. It has worked for 10 years now. After all, her name is a waltz that plays for me and me alone.

I hope she knows that; I want her to know that thinking about her is the easiest way for me to calm myself, because I think she thinks I want to come after her with heat….. and in reality, I’ve just read her for so many years that it feels like I somehow have this other personality inside me. I don’t mean I impersonate her in any way, I mean that when I’m about to do something, a relevant line from one of her e-mails will come back to me and then I decide if I’m still going to do the thing.

When I’m talking to other people, relevant lines come up from her e-mails, too, and I don’t bother to quote her. I just make myself sound smarter by ripping her off blind. I’m not sure that she’s offended by this, as I am sure a lot of her friends know “her” opinions as well. 😉 Not that I’m as clever or funny, it’s just that I know if I have a good line and it stuck with her, it probably came up somewhere. I have fun thinking about where those things might have come up.

But once trust was broken, we stopped acting like we like each other and turned on each other instead. It melted into an easy peace, and I’m good with it and not. I have the character I’ve created in my mind, but I wish I had the real thing.

She is not a Hydrox. She is an Oreo.

However, over time I have learned to like Hydrox better and better. It’s a sweet treat, after all this mental exercise.

A High School Reunion I Liked

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Recently it was my friend Norman and his wife’s anniversary, and I know she’s a lucky, lucky woman. That’s because when I said on Facebook that I couldn’t find Dr Pepper Zero, and two days later there were like 40 on my porch. It was then that I realized I’d made a horrible mistake. Ryan never bought me any Dr Pepper Zero. 😛 😛 😛 Kidding, of course, it was just a sweet gesture that I’ve always remembered it because it made me smile at a time I really needed it. So, when I heard it was his anniversary, I commented and told them both what a beautiful picture it was of them, happy anniversary, all that good stuff.

Later that night, Norman messaged me and we spent a long time catching up. Norman’s memory is all fucked up, because he thinks I wasn’t that bad compared to him. He’s actually one of the few people I knew in symphony that I thought actually would go pro. But he, like my dad, didn’t want to do the gig economy and ended up in tech (my dad went into ministry, but same deal- salary vs. contract).

My freshman year, Norman and I were the only trumpet players in the symphony. The next year, two others joined us, one every bit as talented as Norman, the other person I’m surprised didn’t end up in a symphony somewhere. Symphony playing is extremely refined, and they both had a sound like Maurice Andre, Wynton Marsalis when he’s playing baroque, and exactly none of the other trumpet players I’ve ever studied in my life except Wynton, because he’s a crossover between jazz and classical. Norman and I were from different backgrounds, but we had one thing in common. He liked to win at chess, and I liked to play. I don’t mean that he was ever mean about it, I mean that I’ve never won against him, and I don’t want to even try to beat him. What I have learned is that life is stressful and you should keep your chess engine on level one.

We reminisced about things we’d played:

  • Sleigh Ride (Norman was the horse)
  • Beethoven 7
  • Danse Macabre (Saint-Saenz)
  • Dvorak Cello Concerto (with Anthony Wheeler)
  • Blue Danube
  • Empire Waltz
  • Rodeo and Fanfare for the Common Man, Copland
  • Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet

There were a ton more that I don’t remember, because we sight read every Friday. Norman made me bust out laughing because he said I remember one day when we were transposing a minor third while in a fast tempo and we both just blew it and fell over with laughter.

Our biggest night was my sophomore year, Danny and Norman’s junior, and Laura’s freshman. We were GLADIATORS. The Dvorak Cello Concerto opens with a sectional fanfare in the fourth movement, and it was perfect. The trumpets had entered the motherfucking chat.

I would not be a very good trumpet player if I didn’t say it like that. I am a soprano, line cook, and trumpet player. I joke that with all that ego, I must be completely insufferable….. I mean, I joke about it, but it’s true.

It was just good to again, stretch out. Remember who Norman and I were then, at 15 and 14. Since he was a year older, we didn’t really hang out together, and I’d never thought he’d want to-

Until last night, when music made it seem as if no time had ever passed at all. When I hear his voice in my head, they still have the childhood lilt of his parents’ country. I’m not telling you where he’s from, but I thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen that he had a Mercedes-Benz in high school (pronouncing it correctly), because in his country that is a perfectly normal, serviceable car for a brand new driver because I’m not sure that in their country they have other brands. 😉

Former Texans buy Blue Bell and Whataburger when they can get it. Former Marylanders always have Old Bay in the cabinet. When you immigrate from overseas, I doubt there are many parents trusting of American cars for them or their kids, even if they are better (how would I know? I don’t drive. 😉 ).

I thought I was so clever and sophisticated for figuring that out as a freshman. I also liked it because it was fire engine red, and then his younger brother started driving it as well…… his younger brother being an equally talented musician and someone I worked with in Jazz II.

Speaking of Jazz II, I told you that Robert Glasper and Jon Durbin (The Suffers) were in my class, but I forgot to mention Eric Harland, who is one of the most talented drummers I’ve ever met in my life. He is every bit the drummer that Jason Moran is a pianist, and I know this because they’ve been playing together since HSPVA.

This is what I mean about Doc Morgan birthing so much talent….. and also birthing me. 😉 Because I was in Jazz II with these guys, for me it’s enough to know that if I’d continued in college or if I’d been able to get into the Airmen of Note, I would have done all right. I would have had time to fix all my embouchure issues and be able to practice as long as I wanted without pain. I could go six hours at a clip no sweat in terms of hyperfocus on the music, but my lips gave out constantly. Just overworked to the point of tears because I had that high C out of nowhere five seconds ago, and now I’m fucking toast.

Sometimes what saved my ass was adrenaline. When I was frightened, my muscle memory kicked into place and I didn’t feel the pain as bad. It’s just good that marching contests and concerts weren’t even five minutes longer.

We did Rodeo with The Houston Symphony, and Norman told me that he still tells his kids he played with the Houston Symphony. I told him I use it as a non-sequitur all the time at parties. No one here knows me as a musician. So, if there’s a lull in the conversation, I’ll say, “I played with the Houston Symphony, you know.” Then I explain to them that my whole high school orchestra got to play with them for a concert and I wasn’t a soloist or anything. It is done with comedic effect, because I can claim being good at a lot of things. Trumpet playing is not one of them (at least not now). I will not say that I wasn’t good for my age back then, though. I think that’s because there’s nothing that can take getting into a school like HSPVA from me. I wouldn’t have gotten in if I wasn’t at least good enough to nail the audition, and the audition is the hardest part. It was also 14 minutes long. Not enough to fail to impress anyone. I waited until after the wedding to reveal my deficiencies, although it does make me feel quite a bit better about the fact that Norman and I both acknowledged my limitations and he really made me a lot better just by sitting next to me. It was one of the reasons I was ready to spit nails when I found out we were getting two more trumpet players in the orchestra. I mean, it ended up being fun, but I seriously needed that hour with Norman to myself.

As he got better, I did, and it’s because he was available to pay that much attention to me. Since I was the only person that could really talk to him, we spent long rehearsals playing chess in between invaluable trumpet lessons.

But, with Danny being just as good as Norman, I now had two people of elite caliber to teach me to be better. I think that’s because we all had a little bit of an ego that wasn’t easily hurt, it was just fun to lightly tease each other. The rest of the time, the ego was put away. We had shit to do. We were a section, and that only comes from talking to each other.

Just like I got to do last night with Norman…… the first high school reunion I’ve been to in a long time that I actually thought, “we should do this again.” We don’t get many high school friends like that, do we? Seriously, what a gift…….. grateful.