Tag: Relationships

Mr. Goodbar

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 4 Comments

What snack would you eat right now?

It’s so simple. Just peanuts and chocolate. Delicious and doesn’t taste cheap like a Krackle or however it’s spelled. I need the protein, because I haven’t had breakfast yet. It’s about 0930, so this is not unusual for me. I’ll get home around 10:30 or 11:00 and I have stuff in the fridge begging for my attention. If I’m hungry enough, there’s leftover pizza. We’ll just see. After getting all my medication back on track, I’m sick as a dog with nausea. There has to be a better protocol for me than this, but going through the rigamarole of trying something new can introduce more problems as you find out that something doesn’t work for you.

I’ve tried Prozac, Zoloft, Wellbutrin, Effexor, and anything else you can throw at depression. Lamictal is the only thing that has worked in 20-odd years. So, I’d like something new that didn’t make me quite so ill, but it might take a year or two I don’t have or want to take. When you’re trying out different meds, it sometimes leads to mood and behavior that seems like you’re off them completely. For instance, Effexor can make you suicidal.

That’s actually a sore point between Dana’s old therapist and me. I thought she was a complete hoe bag. I can safely say they don’t interact anymore, so this story goes all the way back to like, 2015, maybe earlier.

When you are in a psychiatric emergency like your medication wanting you to kill yourself, you are stuck in the shit. You can’t see past your own pain, and someone has to step in because you literally cannot make that phone call by yourself. So, with Dana’s permission, I called her therapist and said that she couldn’t come to the phone herself (currently with her own head between her knees), and explained the problem. She’d just started Effexor and it made her nosedive.

She called Dana back, didn’t tell her to go to the emergency room, and told Dana that if she couldn’t come to the phone herself, then I was controlling and she was codependent. We can explore all that once Dana is out of immediate danger, but first of all, you’re Dana’s therapist and you don’t know me from shit or Shinola.™ I have experience with psychiatric emergencies both from watching myself with an omnipotent third eye, and being the one to take care of my friends when they cannot do things for themselves.

When you are in burnout, can you make a phone call?

I can, sometimes, but it requires a Mr. Goodbar. That I don’t have. I’m on the train back from Zac’s, so I could stop and get one. But I won’t. It’s better in my memory, when my mom and I used to split them.

I particularly need chocolate today because I’m sad. Through no fault of his own (TDY), Zac is going to miss the book signing for “In True Face.” Maybe I’ll just bring a cardboard cutout. 😛 I am sure he would love that. #eyeroll

If I’m lucky, maybe Lindsay will be free that night, because I doubt she could go to the thingme with me, but might be able to meet for dinner before or after. Preferably before, because I’d just be reading in the restaurant.

If I’m alone, dinner will be a Mr. Goodbar It’s my way of taking my mother as my companion instead of Zac. I don’t know how much she knew about spies (you never knew- she read a bazillion autobiographies), but I know she did know quite a lot about chocolate…… and peanuts….. and the fact that you can’t by the King Size because the ratio is off.

I might have come up with that last one myself, but I doubt it. Institutional knowledge seems to come out of nowhere when I take the first bite.

I Had to Choose to Accept It

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What is your mission?

Today has been a complete shit show from beginning to end, but now it’s over…. not the day, just the negative aspects. I should be getting dramatically better as my brain chemicals rebalance.

Yesterday, I realized that I was out of Lamictal, so I contacted CVS for a refill. They came back to me and said I needed to go to the doctor for a new set of prescriptions.

No problem.

The problem came in when the doctor’s office said they didnt’t have any appointments for the rest of the day, and I had to spend all night cradling my head between my knees…. until I finally realized I could take a metric fuck tonne of sleeping medication and the whole nightmare might be over……. or so I thought. I took three melatonin and some Zyrtec, which had me out like a light prety quickly. However, the migraine-like pain of having your brain chemicals whacked let me know that today was not going to be any better than yesterday, and I had to white knuckle my way through getting my own medication. By the time I got to the doctor’s office, I was in a right state and they knew it. There were lots of whispers that maybe they should have worked me in yesterday…….

I’m just not a complainer. Just like my mother when she was having me, she heard all the other women around her screaming bloody murder and she was not going to be that patient. So, she was basically biting her pillow until the OB/GYN nurses bothered to check whether she was in pain or not…… and it took a while, because my mother wouldn’t say anything.

What I know from this experience is that they weren’t paying any attention to her because she didn’t bring any attention to herself. I struggle with this often, as I do not want to be seen as a complainer, either. This doesn’t work in my favor, necessarily, but it does. If I had gotten any sicker, I would have gone to Urgent Care. I just thought I would be okay, and I was absolutely 100% wrong.

I wasn’t having trouble with my thought processes today. Psych meds aren’t known for giving up after only 24 hours…. except for benzos and methamphetamines. Those wear off as quickly as they kick in. But for maintenance medication, it takes about six weeks to build up in your system.

The antianxiolitic I take, Klonopin, kicked in immediately, so I’m not in as much pain as I was previously…. it still doesn’t take away the sting of the clusterfuck that happened after my appointment…. and the pain won’t truly be gone until my brain chemicals are right, which may take a few days. So, absolutely none of this is what I needed today, and could have been avoided if CVS hadn’t waited unti the last moment to tell me that I needed to see a doctor. Again, today has been a goat-roping clusterfuck. I’m glad that it can’t get any worse. Tomorrow is date night with Zac, and I can’t wait to give him a hug. It seems like a long time, but we’re both slammed, so it’s no issue. It’s a huge relief that we’re both doing our own thing. That being said, it’s going to be nice to have a place to decompress after :::gestures broadly at everything:::

First of all, we are going through a huge storm system- I know it’s huge because my dad and Lindsay are stuck in the same one (they’re in Houston). Therefore, taking the bus was not really an option because it’s not just normal rain. It’s supposed to flood. The bus would have been fine. Standing in water that’s over my ankles isn’t.

So, I ask the doctor’s office where they sent my prescriptions. They said, “CVS on East-West Hwy.” So, I head there and the doctor has actually sent my prescriptions to their in-house pharmacy. I know this because the doctor’s office did resend my medication, but then it was saying that they were too early to be refilled….. because they’d already been filled at the other place. So, I go back to the other place, the in-house pharmacy that only carries three of my medications, so I have to go to CVS, anyway. I’ll have to pick up the Adderrall tomorrow at some point, because it’s not the priorotity here. I have the three things I really need.

So, I get to my pharmacy and in the time it has taken to get from CVS back to the doctor’s office, that pharmacy has canceled my order so I can pick it up at CVS. My only saving grace is that the pharmacist called upstairs and got the three medications I needed rather than make me hoof it back to CVS, saving me a lot of money in that process…. again, Uber. I also managed to get some home COVID tests, the COVID vaccine, and a flu shot. I have a feeling none of that is making me feel any better, either, but here we are.

In the meantime, here is my protocol because I feel it’s important for my people to know how I handle all this. Bipolar is hard on all of us, and sharing information means more to talk to your doctor about, because I’m not it. This is, in the words of Paul Gilmartin, “a waiting room that doesn’t suck.”

If you’re thinking about doing psych meds, here’s what works for me, but there’s a caveat. Unipolar depression medication sometimes works with a mood stabilizer, somtimes it makes bipolar worse. So tread carefully. Again, this is only what works for me….. and since I’m a doctor’s kid, you’ll get it in pharmacy notation…… 😉

  • Lamictal 200mg i qD
  • Lexapro 20mg 1qD
  • Klonopin .5mg BID
  • Adderall XR 20mg 1qD

I don’t know what I’ll do with the Adderrall because I don’t know that I need it all the time. But I’m getting it anyway just in case, because I never know when my ADHD is going to eat my lunch…. because I won’t.

These drugs do not play around, and I’m in the shit with side effects. I was so upset that I had to fill my prescriptions at the pharmacy in the doctor’s office after I opened them, because there are two different Lamictal generics. Same ingredient, lamotrigine, but whatever is in the diamond-shaped one makes me so nauseous I will absolutely throw up anywhere and everywhere. I look like such a drunk sometimes, because I’m trying to find a trash can and that’s people’s first instinct. But, you can only control what you can control, so what people think of me does not matter.

As I have said before, I have to choose between physically ill or mental, and I choose physical because my interactions with other people are more important to me than nausea and vomiting. It’s never fun, but it beats the hell out of not regulating my emotions.

The weird thing is that I’ve had ringing in my ears since I haven’t had my medication, and now I’m just waiting to see when it will go away. I basically flooded myself with brain chemicals, so it’s happened before. They just need to get into balance, and if I’ve said this twice, I apologize. I am not a well woman. But I did have a “not a well woman” exam today. They ran all my bloods and I should get the results back. I wouldn’t be surprised if anything is wrong, but I would be surprised if it was anything more than “you need to do more of this at home.” I’ve thought I was getting an autoimmune disease for the last few years, and I’ve been tested for rheumatoid arthritis, but not gotten the results. So, I’m having my clinic run the test again because what happened last time was that I was on my cycle and they couldn’t do the test….. another thing that could have been brought to my attention because we could have rescheduled…. No one has ever told me they didn’t want a urine sample when I’m menustruating before, so it didn’t occur to me to tell them.

But the bloods aren’t just for that. They have to make sure that my liver is still functioning well because mood stabilizers have a tendency to beat up on them. With some mood stabilizers, you have to have a liver function test every month, not every six months or a year. It’s serious business, and all of it started with lithium as we learned more and more about it.

All of these drugs are murder on your body after a while, except Klonopin, and with it there’s the pull of addiction. I have not fallen into that trap with either Klonopin or Adderrall, because again, I’m choosing sick over crazy. There’s nothing that makes me want to take more medication because the side effects are toxic…. mostly in that they render me in a constant bad mood like I’m Ouiser Boudreaux on a mission from God.

I’ve been 46 since I was six, so I actually have been in a very bad mood for 40 years.

But right now I’m thinking about the fact that Zac hasn’t read my fiction blog entry yet, and the only reason I want him to is that he will absolutely pick it apart. “That would never happen…. or that…. or that…. or that…. or that….” I’m joking, and yet I’m not. Zac and I are in it to win it. We may not ever get paid for writing, but that doesn’t mean we don’t want it to be excellent.

I also know that I’d wait years to hear his impression, and I’m saying that out loud so that he doesn’t think, “oh shit! I have something to read right now!” It’s not a homework assignment, dear heart. It’s just fun working with him because even though he’s not a spy, he’s worked in military intelligence (not as much of an oxymoron as you might think) since he was 18. I think he signed up willing to do any job, but his test scores on the AFAB or whatever were so good they realized they could get anyone to weld ships or whatever.

So, entrusting Zac to be ruthless, kind, and accurate is a good thing. I know for sure that none of his criticism will be mean, because I’m not mean to him….. or if I am, he hasn’t mentioned it. 😉

Coming up with ideas for Zac’s fiction challenge was one of our best dates because we were both excited and happy about creativity- and he’s definitely more creative than I am on the fiction side of things. I can turn a phrase and make it funny, but he can build whole worlds. It’s the mountain I have to climb, and as I’ve said, I’m at the bottom. Yet, none of it bothers me because I know I’m becoming a stronger writer every day.

I am seeking out strong writers like Jonna Mendez, Tracy Walder, Vince Houghton, and John le Carré. I know that le Carré is dead, but “The Pigeon Tunnel” is a masterpiece and I’ve been learning from him through podcasts. His interviews on both Fresh Air and Writers & Company are among my favorite episodes of the entire show.

I don’t want to write exclusively about intelligence, which is why I’ll always be a blogger. It engages a different part of my brain. Intelligence is just what excites me about fiction, because I have read so many non-fiction books that I feel like I’ve taken a college class. Fiction is easier to write when you’ve done the research first. You’ll always have to research along the way, but knowing the broad strokes of a subject is key.

I can write about the kitchen because I know it.

I don’t know shit about spies, but it’s the same concept. I sought out Bourdain in order to develop that voice. I sought out Jonna and Tony for the same reason, because I loved the “Argo” script and wanted to do something like it eventually. I figured starting with their books was wise, but in reality the book about The Canadian Caper was written after the movie came out, because there were so many people who wanted the real story.

Reel is not real, and thank goodness the book came along. Argo is punched up for drama, but the story itself is no less great when you take away movie magic.

If they don’t make movies about “The Moscow Rules” and “In True Face,” it would be such a shame. I mean that sincerely. People need to know what happened during “The Cold War,” because it wasn’t any less devastating than our other conflicts. And honestly, they wouldn’t have to punch up “The Moscow Rules” much. It opens with a case officer having the shit beat out of him by FSB in front of the American embassy. I would like to believe we won The Cold War definitively, but the moment Trump took office, it ramped up again (in my educated guesses). That’s because the FSB beat up someone trying to get to American soil in…. wait for it…… 2016.

It startles me how the rest of the world does not see that Trump is an enemy both foreign and domestic. The Russians are in it to win it, and they have had/will have an asset planted at the top depending on whether Americans get it or not. The Founding Brothers are rolling over in their graves, because the last time high crimes and misdeameanors were on the table, both Republicans and Democrats believed it. This time, Putin has won. He has divided and conquered a nation by helping elect a president that was completely out of touch with reality and took notes from all the “benevolent dictators” out there. I’ll believe benevolence when I see it.

Most Americans are completely ignorant of the chessboard because they think we’re the best. All the time. Every day. In a way, I’m on a mission to dispel this notion, because it is simply not true. Other countries do things much better than we do, like having standardized drug prices across the country, whereas Medicare and Medicate pay different prices depending on where you are. Every drug costs a bit different depending on the pharmacy, not just the geographic location…. and that’s just one example. We could have better railroad infrastructure, both subways and cross-country. Lots of cities would benefit from it, because especially in the South, you get a car and won’t take the bus, anyway.

However, this leaves the least of us stranded because gas is expensive and people moving- not so much. I hope that more people than just me have a passion for taking care of poor people, because I feel that the United States is the country with the least viable support system because we have social services, but universal heatlh care takes so many problems off the the table. The US needs nationalized care badly, with doctors making real salaries, because since poor people can’t afford insurace, they end up in the emergency room never having had preventative care…. they can’t afford it. They also can’t afford hospital bills, and when you don’t pay, that’s keeping money out of the hospital system for salaries.

There won’t be any difference to you in terms of health care if we do it right, because the only thing that will change is who is writing the checks.

But drug companies and our current insurance policies don’t want that. They want to be able to charge whatever they want and get medicare to pay for it. It’s unsustainable. By not having universal health care, you are crippling people at jobs who don’t pay for benefits, or shackling someone to a job so that you have insurance in the first place. Nothing like the golden handcuffs.

But at the very least, I want everyone to be able to show up healthy to work because they didn’t wait to go to the ER until they were having a heart attack, or kidney failure, or any number of things. Stuff that could have been caught and wasn’t. So, instead of a $10 co-pay, the bill is $120,000 dollars….. but it’s $200,000 at a different hospital and a different part of the country. Prices vary everywhere. There is no standardization among even generic drugs.

Government-run pharmacies and clinics would allow us to buy all generics in bulk, same with medical equipment so that a cast in Oregon is the same price as a cast in Vermont. And we can get closer to home (for me). The highest Medicare costs in the nation right now are in El Paso, Texas. How does it have the ability to go up and down? Other countries don’t have this problem, and it’s a shame that we can’t have nice things when 99% of the world has figured it out.

We had a lot of hubris in the Revolutionary War, but it went overboard. We are so independent that we think saving money on health care is a bad idea. Meanwhile, if we’d lost, we’d have our own version of NHS because we’d be a Commonwealth country. So, in terms of progress, winning and losing that war are both a mixed bag.

I’m not on a mission to prove to you that we should have lost. I ultimately think it was better to win….. that doesn’t mean that we should stop taking lessons from other countries. They take lessons from us. I think we’d be a lot happier in the world without American imperialism….. or at least, so much of it.

If I have a mission on this blog, it’s saying random factoids that will stick in your brain along with all the crazy. 😉

I don’t know that it’s a Mission from God.™ But I do like jazz and blues, so it’s a start.

Human Long or Vampire Long?

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What are your thoughts on the concept of living a very long life?

Twice or three times I didn’t think I’d make it this far. Bipolar disorder is a bitch. But thankfully, all the med checks I’ve had over the years have gone very well. I’m more relaxed in my body…… I can also feel time starting to drain away. I am lost, confused, and afraid. But everything will work out in the end because it always does.

Up and to a point.

I cannot imagine my daily grind until I’m 92, the age at which my grandfather died. However, I have so much in my life that’s feeding me, I tend to tap into my own resources, which is a polite way of saying I’m my own best company. I want friendships/relationships/whatever, but I am not dependent on them to provide anything I lack.

I didn’t get here until I’d lived alone for quite a while. Yes, I have housemates, but I do not interact with them much. For the most part, I am locked up in my room, and there are lots of reasons why, absolutely none of them having to do with me.

Here’s the bottom line:

Guy goes to the doctor and the results are really bad. Doc says, “you have six months to live.” Patient says, “six months? What am I going to do?” Doc says, “buy a pig farm. Move to Oklahoma. Marry the meanest woman you can find. You won’t live longer, but it’ll be the longest six months of your life.”

If you’re not picking up what I’m putting down, it’s that a year can seem like 10 minutes, and one moment can last 10 years. Time is relative. I do not need to live a long time to live a lot. I keep this in mind every day because though my grandfather died at 92, my mother died at 65. I’m only 20 years younger than that, and I think I have more than 20 years left in me…. but I can’t be sure. Not only due to the nature of my mental and physical health, but also because if you learn anything from the sudden death of a parent (embolism- it blew, she was dead 30 minutes later from a broken foot), it’s that a long life isn’t guaranteed.

So, whether I get to finish out my life like my grandfather, or whether it’s going to be cut short by some unknown force, I will be ecstatic either way, because I’m not saving up writing my passions until I don’t have anything else to do. It’s what I do instead of going out, because I feel more driven to get all of this down than I do to interact.

That’s because when you’re not interacting with people, there’s less chance to make a mistake. That’s one of the reasons I don’t want to live a long time. I have communication issues and it is relentless. Because I’m neurodivergent, I process information differently than a good bit of the world. Therefore, I am the problem child, not of my parents, but of my employers. Neurotypical people cannot hear neurodivergent people without training, and vice versa. Even the way things are written, when they’re written, are sketchy because we don’t all have our neurotypical decoder rings on us.

A hundred percent of the time, it’s not that I’m not listening. It’s that I don’t understand…… but you do. “Everyone does.” I am not stupid or slow because I read the directions differently than you did. It’s because of the way the instructions were written, and again, no neurotypical in my pocket to check…… because you can go to a boss occasionally to manage priorities, but if they feel like they’re doing your work, then you’re out. And it takes surprisingly little to get you out if they’re convinced you don’t listen and can’t learn.

80% of autistic people are unemployed, and none of us have job security. I am trying not only to manage money well, but also to create something that will last long after I do. These are not just empty pages. This is not for me after I’m finished using it. People, again (from another entry, I can’t remember which), are going to want to know about the way we lived. I’m going to be a part of that, and so will my friends.

So, even though I wasn’t nice to Sam, I think I’ll still come out all right in the end……. because after I processed all the feelings from said breakup, I let go of the anger and was indeed nice to her.

I can quote the first line from memory….. “Wilhousky, you had me at hello.” The Wilhousky arrangement of the Battle Hymn of the Republic is one of the most glorious things I’ve ever done with a brass quintet. I’ve sung it a hundred times, too, but there’s big brass energy when you’re the lead trumpet player for the clarion calls. So, when Sam told me that she was a soprano in the Army choir, the first question I ever asked her was “how many times have you sung the Wilhousky arrangement?” A nanosecond later…. “a million, conservatively.”

Now, the first trumpet part is actually not that difficult, it’s just very, very exposed. You are hanging out on a ledge with barely any accompaniment, so any flaw is going to show. Any impurity in the sound. So, when I pulled it off, I was right proud of myself.

But I suppose if you’ve performed it a million times and not just a hundred, you might not feel so great about it. I hate “Amazing Grace” for the same reason Sam and Peter Wilhousky are never ever ever getting back together. Well, two reasons. The first is that I’ve sung it into the ground. It just feels like an old war horse to me. The second is that organists tend to drag……….. I don’t know what it is, but a good chunk of piano/organ accompanists slow down “Amazing Grace” and “Happy Birthday” to “funeral procession.” I’m not just picking on those two things. I already know that if I end up in hell, my penance will be singing the soprano part to the hallelujah Chorus on repeat. Hold it till you turn purple. In that instance, I would wish for a short life, but it’s hell. I could end up singing The Hallelujah Chorus, anyway, without Lucifer Morningstar on baritone. You know he knows it.

If I was going to live a long life, like, vampire long, I would have time to go back and get the training I need to actually do something with voice. It’s not that I’m so great, it’s that I love being in a group. I will do a solo if someone asks me to, but I will not offer.

I am not a stereotypical soprano. I only compete with myself over my last performance, not with everyone else in the room. Believe it or not, I’ve listened to myself enough that I knew it was a bad note before you called attention to it, but it was so sweet of you to point it out just in case I’m a little slow on the uptake. Voice is an instrument, just like brass. Not every note is going to be perfect because it depends on so much more than your throat.

Singing is a full-body workout, and after a choir rehearsal, my core feels like I’ve been tied as tightly as an old sea salt twists his rope. It’s always my diaphragm. The only good part about knowing how to work your diaphragm is that you can stop your own hiccups…….. most of the time. But, training takes money.

Once I got vampire money, I’d pick a university and just park it. I could stay there a hundred years and still not learn everything. I’d start by finishing the coursework I’ve already started, then branch out. Maybe a second bachelor’s in music, but I doubt it. That part of my life is so long over that I really would be starting at zero again in terms of a professional career.

I’d probably read law, eventually. Lindsay and I were talking about that the other day, that sometimes I still feel the fire in the belly….. but what I’ve figured out is that I thought I was a bubbly personality and I am……… but not long enough to last an entire day in court. Repeatedly.

No, if I read law I’d still be in academia. There’s a lot you can do with a JD that doesn’t require taking the bar….. and I’d need a vampire’s lifetime to figure out where I’d want to live/work. Because after 200 years, DC might not be home. Who knows? What I do know is that I have no plans to relocate, not even out of this house, for now. I just mean that eventually, I’d like to see more of the world and write about it.

Doctor Who focuses on chance meetings with interesting people from the past. My thought is, “why not go meet them now, before all you have left is their work?” I can tell you the exact day I realized it- January 19th, 2019. On the 18th, Tony Mendez found out from the Publications Review Board at CIA that “The Moscow Rules” was approved and would be on shelves. He died the next day, before I got to meet him and believe me that is not the important part in the grand scheme of things- it just makes me sad.

I did try, but by the time I got here, he had stopped doing public appearances due to the Parkinson’s Disease. But meeting would have been good for both of us, according to Jonna, his widow. We’re not really friends, but we’ve talked to each other at The International Spy Museum a couple times and she’s read at least one entry here with her name in it and I cried when I got the note back- that she loved it, and that I was very perceptive about everything that was going on in the room.

Tony didn’t live as long as anyone would have wanted, so I wrote about being sad. It was a celebration of his last book, the last one I’d ever get. And, of course, that’s what makes Jonna’s next book so exciting. Only in Spy Dust did they really alternate chapters so that you could distinguish Jonna and Tony separately. “In True Face” is probably going to be my favorite book of them all because I love women that write about intelligence. Not that I don’t think Tony didn’t hang the moon.

I just want to know the woman he sat with while he was up there. She’s just as funny as he was, but different, I believe. She, in an interview, said that “she was a real hard-ass,” which means two things. The first is that CIA is a boys’ club, or it used to be when Jonna started….. and I want the tea if there’s any to sip. The second is that CIA is overwhelmingly geared toward women now, and the next cup would be how they got there. They’ve embraced female leadership at C/DIA in a way the that FBI just can’t handle. Thoughts and prayers.

So, their library is going to be read and reread by me long into the future, because I need female heroes. I need to see women succeeding because if I can’t reach that level of discourse myself, I would at least like to read about it.

I don’t know what Jonna’s famous line is, but John Le Carré’s was “I’m the only friend you’ve got.” That seems like tradecraft 101, but just like in music, spies have no accompaniment, and are completely exposed. Any flaw will show, because they’re hanging out on a ledge….. generally during a time where if you lose your footing, you aren’t exactly sure whether the person who helped you up is friend or foe.

In thinking about Rebecca, which I often do because the character is actually from a novel I started a long time ago, actually called -frog.- Gregory and Leila are also from that story, but not “Robert.” Robert is the new man in my life, for all practical intents and purposes, because once a character gets in, it’s hard to get them back out. Rebecca and Robert have been talking in my head all day long, and they need to go to bed.

Just not together.

Robert is a mixed bag. He talks tough. He’s a little boy. He knows Rebecca could end him, and that’s why he likes her. But Rebecca and Gregory are a solid item, and Robert is actually ace….. you just don’t see it because of his tough guy exterior. What man would admit that to a beautiful woman on first meeting? It’s all about representation. I picked up ace representation from TJ Klune, who is one of my favorite novelists and lives out in Fredericksburg, VA. So, it’s possible that he’ll do a book signing in DC eventually. I’d love to get an autograph on “Under the Whispering Door,” because I liked “House in the Cerulean Sea,” but I thought it couldn’t be topped.

I was wrong.

Under the Whispering Door is about death. Long lives, short lives, somewhere in between? It explores the great mystery……..

Surrounded by tea.

Words Are Hard, Part I

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 1 Comment

Zac got me a box of writing prompts from Freewrite for Christmas, so I thought I’d leaf through them. At first I thought you weren’t supposed to do that, but on the first card, “How It Works,” it says that you don’t have to do them in any order; it’s not a pop quiz. Just find one that speaks to you. The prompt is actually a quote, and I’ll highlight it when I get there. I told you I was at the bottom of a ladder, but thanks to this box of cards, I have a solid few rungs in front of me. Like I said earlier, if I have enough fiction to start a separate blog for it, I probably will as not to mix up my entries. Right now, I’m just seeing if I like posting my exercises at all.

Rebecca Alexis Radnowski checked her watch.

12:20.

They were late.

She had already kissed Kermit for the last time, her angel baby…. her little -frog.- She could not, would not do it again- torture on both of them. There was nothing to do but wait for the taxi.

As she got into the back seat, she did not see the little boy in the window, creating his first memory. For years, the only thing Kermit knew about his mother was that she owned a long red coat and high black heels. However, Rebecca wouldn’t have known that. Couldn’t have known. There were more pressing matters at hand.

Gregory, Kermit’s father, and Leila, Gregory’s sister, had to step up to be parents in Rebecca’s stead, because someone had to know the plan. It was too intricate not to have someone know how to get in touch with her, because she wasn’t sure how long the assignment would last. Was it going to be three weeks or three months?

This was a trip in which she had to get her ducks in a row beforehand, because she might not come home from this one. Overthrowing a government can lead to……… issues, and thinking about what was about to happen took away the sting of everything she was leaving (as she lied to herself). She was at least making it look like she was running logistics in her head; anyone with eyes could see the little death happening.

The file tree detailing her current life was dropping away, and the new information became synonymous with her initials…. Compressed and password protected, at that. People had always joked she was a RAR file because she’d always been buttoned up…… and failed to see the humor in it. People with emotions were unpredictable, and there were few things she could abide in life less than surprises. So, it was no issue that when she laid it out for Gregory, said she’d been “approached” and wanted to go, all he could do was kiss her and say “good luck.” Gregory knew that while he and Kermit were important, this was fulfilling Rebecca’s life ambition. Besides, Kermit wasn’t even out of diapers. Rebecca wouldn’t miss much and Leila was great with him.

Later on, Beck would regret this choice from the depths of her being, because she gave up a relationship with her son. It was not three weeks or three months. She doesn’t know that right now, though.

Right now, she is annoyed.

The taxi has dropped her in front of Dulles at curb check-in, which should have made everything a hell of a lot easier….. or it would have been, had Karen not been in front of her in line. Having traveled for so many years, Beck had packed her stuff in one large suitcase (she wasn’t going to check anything, but realized she wanted her weighted blanket) and a duffel bag. Since the duffel was a little oversized, she thought she’d check that as well. She had a small messenger bag with her tablet, keyboard, and some Sudoku…. plus a couple pairs of underwear in case her luggage ended up in France. It had happened before.

The name of the game, Rebecca believed, was traveling with the least amount of stuff possible. Ask around about local brands, etc. because you can always pick up stuff in your AOA and not count it as part of your weight limit. She was a firm believer in buying shampoo, soap, and hair products in whatever country she was “visiting” and giving everything away on her last day there. That’s the one part of her life that she will never change- being addicted to products she cannot find in the US.

Because of Rebecca’s clear superiority in packing, Karen did not impress her. Karen’s bags were full of all the shit Rebecca has learned to leave at home, because she didn’t want her stuff to end up all over the ground like Karen’s is now….. taking stuff out one at a time so that she doesn’t have to pay overage fees (but also her husband is very powerful and DO YOU KNOW WHO HE IS?).

Rebecca wears a tight smile and thinks, “I could have you killed.”

She doesn’t mean it, of course. Just a little black humor to let off steam. Or, it would have been if she’d not just realized she’d actually said it out loud. As predicted- once her idiocy was confirmed- Karen turns to her and says something to the effect of “who the fuck do you think you are?” Rebecca thought it best not to answer that.

Rebecca is, in the popular vernacular, “the one who knocks.”

She redirects to try and de-escalate the situation. “I’m so sorry. I was just annoyed. Take your time.” Also as predicted, it does not work. Karen is in show mode….. “THE AUDACITY OF THIS BITCH….” Rebecca steps back and thinks to herself, “I had a meeting at the White House yesterday. Aren’t I important?” This time, she made sure she only said it to herself, knowing that Karen would never know she was making fun of herself. She had one job. Get through the airport.

It was going so well.

After that kerfuffle, Rebecca realized that she hadn’t even had time to drink a cup of coffee and checked her watch again. 1:00 PM, and the flight didn’t leave for an hour. Her bags were already dealt with (surprisingly without any real bloodshed). Time to find a coffee shop.

She saw a couple of places, but picked Starbucks because she knew it would be the last time she’d really get a boost of that magnitude. She walked in and gave them her standard order….. “just fuck me up.”

A quad shot red eye later, she was smelling numbers….. just like God intended. She set a timer on her watch for 30 minutes, and sunk into her favorite novel, “The Story of Edgar Sawtelle.” She often thought that she’d like to write fiction, and saw promise in David Wrobleski because it took him 10 years to write his first novel, which turned out to be a masterpiece. “In my next life…..” she thought. “I”m going to have to choose something else eventually. This job is for young people.”

Rebecca Alexis Radnowski is all of 28 years old.

She is not a complainer. She would rather die than complain about anything. But the hard truth is that intelligence is hard work. It’s less physically demanding than police or FBI, but that doesn’t mean that her knees aren’t 80. She tries to keep in shape by hitting the gym several times a week, but there’s only so much she can do to stop the passage of time. She was supposed to have rested three surgeries ago.

…..which is why when her alarm goes off, it takes her a second to get moving again. Transitions are so hard, and being autistic just makes it worse. Rebecca is not the kind of person that can walk into any room at any time without extensive preparation. For instance, if she has a meeting with a high value target to pump them for information on even higher value targets, she will stand in front of the doorway to the interrogation room for a few minutes and will herself to walk in.

It’s not that she’s not good at her job. She’s not good at transitions. She’s always gotten glowing reviews from her superiors, and God help the person behind the door. That doesn’t mean her life isn’t made hard by autism. It’s that she had to develop coping mechanisms….. both for when to emote……… and when to……. not.

This particular transition is actually getting on the plane. It is something she has prepared to do for weeks. Her husband and sister-in-law are cheering her on from home, excited for all she will be able to do for the people she’s trying to rescue……. deep in the wilds of Guatemala.

Editor’s Note:

CIA did try to overthrow the Guatemalan government in the 50s under Truman, so there is historical precedent. However, this piece takes place too late for that and is just a fictional example of something that could conceivably happen.

Because the environment of the airport and the environment of the plane are so different, Rebecca knew that she would need extra time to adjust. She didn’t need to go through security, and got on the plane as soon as they called for pre-board. The agent gave her a little guff, so she did something she never does. Ever.

She pulled rank.

No further explanation was necessary, as she knew would be the case. She loved that with the way she moved in the world, it was open to her. She also knew that it was not a skeleton key. That the rules still applied to her, but at the same time, needing extra time to board for autism was as valid as everything else. She always weighed options and tried to decide carefully if she was putting other people out with her power, or whether she was using it for good. After eight years, she still wasn’t sure. She just tried to be as humble as she could be given that she didn’t open doors, they opened for her. She didn’t just board early. The gate attendant gave her an upgrade.

Somehow, when your badge has three particular letters on it, people don’t see anything else. Rebecca is used to it by now, but it gets a bit tiresome. All of the fuss really only happens in airports, because no one at the airport knows where she works, but they do know someone must be powerful if they don’t have to go through security, and are allowed to keep their weapons.

Even with the special treatment, she can’t get to her seat fast enough. She needs quiet like air…… but an air hostess greets her and tells her that she loves her hair. It sets her off at first, and then she breathes deeply. Finally, something normal. Rebecca tells her that she just got it cut at this great little place in Burke, then offers to Air Drop her the contact info. When the air hostess replies to the message, she saves the number in her phone. It wouldn’t be bad to have an air hostess’s number in her back pocket given her LOW.

Shortly afterwards, the air hostess shows back up with a glass of champagne and a cup of orange juice. She says, “I know this is already free because you’re in first class, but I just wanted to do something nice for you.”

Her seat mate grumbled.

“Jesus. Who do I have to fuck to get service like that?”

The air hostess, looking embarrassed, says everything without opening her mouth. Rebecca has nothing to lose. “Are you going to treat all the air hostesses like that or do I have to cut off your nuts?” The knife in her boot started itching, craving a workout.

Her seatmate looked amused, but said nothing except “I could have you killed.” And then, it might have been an accident, but she thought he winked. Winked!

She looked down at her tray and wondered what all this was about. They hadn’t even taken off yet, and she’d managed to make two enemies already….. but he didn’t seem that scary. It looked like he knew she wanted to be scary, but was actually just three little girls in a trench coat. It was unnerving, but she couldn’t say that she didn’t like it. No one looked at her as innocent. Not anymore.

Her seatmate said, “I’m sorry. We should start over. I’m Robert McCall.” “I’m Susan Plummer,” Rebecca replied, catching the theme. Robert didn’t miss a trick.

“Good catch, Rebecca.”

All the color drained out of her face. Her real name wasn’t even on her Guatemalan passport. Tony had crafted it especially for her, and it was a gift. So perfect there weren’t reproductions like it anywhere in the world. Who WAS this man?

They were now climbing through the air, 50-100 miles from the ground, and Rebecca had never felt so unsafe. There was no going back, there was only through. Someone had gotten the jump on her, and she wasn’t even sure of that. Maybe “Robert” was part of her ground crew. She didn’t know every company employee ever.

Rebecca went back to the Sawtelle farm, unsure of what to say next. A few hours passed, and she looked up. Robert was asleep, and the rest of the plane was quiet…….. right up until it wasn’t.

Robert and Rebecca noticed it first. They had flown a left hand triangle twice with 2 minute legs, so they knew it was coming. There would be an announcement that there was total engine/comms failure, a signal to the tower that the plane’s behavior might be erratic.

When the announcement was made, the tin tube of misery became as quiet as a crypt. There was no yelling. It was not like a movie. Terror is quiet. In those moments, even the hair raising on your arm feels too loud. Rebecca wasn’t religious, but she was raised in the church, so she said the only words she remembered….. “Jesus loves the little children…. all the children of the world….” Tears started to fall as she thought of her sweet baby boy, her tiny -frog.- Robert’s tenor soothed her…. “red and yellow, black and white….. we are precious in his sight….” He did not finish. His own daughter, Kiambre, was three. He broke when he thought of that particular aisle he’d never walk.

As the plane went down, they both made a note. If we get out of this alive, we’re going to need supplies. There’s a lot of jungle near the airport, so I am sure we’ll have resources…. but what kind and how much will vary, as will the speed of our ex-fil if we do not die on impact.

For both Rebecca and Robert, this kind of “casing” is their normal….. and now they each know the other is fluent in this particular language. Or do they? Rebecca really doesn’t know. She thought she knew everyone in the office, and her team wouldn’t send her help unless she asked for it. Robert, for his part, does not mention how he knows what he knows…….. nor that he’s not CIA.

They sit there in silence, fingers touching just for human comfort, until the plane comes to rest between several trees. The air is dense, a hot and wet blanket as they exit the emergency hatch.

Because Rebecca is who she is, she thinks that not being at the scene is a good idea. Nothing like being caught in a camera sweep during film at 11 to ruin a perfectly good day. She’s about a half mile away from the plane when all her adrenaline runs out. She looks down.

She really should have rested three surgeries ago.

A softball-sized hematoma is growing on her knee. There is nothing left to do but sit down. She thought she had power in this situation, but the universe decided otherwise. She didn’t need to stay in the jungle all day, but she decided that a few minutes of rest wouldn’t hurt anything.

Robert’s curiosity got the best of him. He knew Rebecca was CIA. He knew that in her agency she was more powerful than he was. He knew he was sent to find her because his government needed her more than hers did. He decided to push his luck.

“Well, I’m not actually a doctor. I attended med school for a few semesters… I’m not so great at finishing things…. Looks like I’m your best bet in the middle of the jungle, though,” he said between enormous bites of banana.

You May Be Entitled to Compensation…. Probably

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

If you had a freeway billboard, what would it say?

Let’s be clear. I don’t have baggage or drama to heap on someone else because I deal with all that stuff here. I don’t have to rely on my friends to help me know how I feel about a situation and how I’m going to react. So, the reason I say that my billboard should be “you may be entitled to compensation” is that I am so independent that it’s hard to pin me down….. get your mind out of the gutter (I know you won’t, you’re Fanagans. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t swear like a sailor or wish you could).

OMG. OMG. I am so wrong. Why didn’t I think of this before?

My Blog Makes Me Sound Like a Dick…. theantileslie.com

I will never not keep repeating that phrase, because when my friend popped off and said it she had no idea what she was unleashing. I had already been mad at her for years because she was poly and I wasn’t the person(s) she was dating in addition to being married. However, we met on OK Cupid, when I saw her profile and just said, “I’m not sure that I even want a date, but I’m new to the area and would like more friends. Would you like to get together? Bring your wife if you want. It’s just easy.”

So, we did meet up and her wife did come. It was there that I made the mistake of a lifetime, because it made her wife not like me for the rest of our relationship. I hugged her. She’s really hardcore about consent and being a Texan, I walked right into that trap. Betcha Brené, Matt, Renee, and Beyoncé have done the same ass thing. We all grew up in the same state, the same areas, so I’m betting that piece of history/future is solid. It’s a mistake you don’t stop making, because Southern politeness sticks in your bones. Someone who doesn’t hug people politely is going to be creeped out, and in effect, that’s what happened.

I became a stand-in for all the other women she didn’t like, because my friend was dating and her wife wasn’t (not a thing, her own choice). That being said, even I raised my eyebrows at how much my friend was going out because I was like WTF? You just had twins? So, in any case, I was actually on her wife’s side the whole time, but she wouldn’t have taken the time to get to know me.

I told her that I was from Portland, she said it smelled like pee. So does every major city in America, fuck off. It was just a dig at me, and I knew it. But basically, my friend was getting around and leaving her wife on baby duty all the fucking time, so of course her wife resented her and everything that came with her. I saw it in 15 minutes, and I stayed, anyway, because the friend was actually cool……. right up until she told me that my blog made me sound like a dick and I should have been nicer to the woman that ripped my heart out and served it to me. Again, fuck off.

I never want to see her again if I can help it, because she became a train wreck in her own life and dared criticize me. This was not constructive. She has the right to think what she thinks and say what she says. She does not have the right to control my reaction, which was to say that she had no business being friends with a blogger and I was tired of her shit all the way around, anyway.

It was too much when I only wanted to be friends with both women and their twins. I noped out pretty fast when I saw I had an out. We could be done with each other, and I needed it.

If you want to criticize me, please do. I love criticism. However, if it is mean-spirited, I’ll shut down. There’s a way to say “I think you’re wrong about this” without emotionally destroying each other….. but make no mistake. I promise that you will never meet a writer who doesn’t love verbal combat, so take that warning seriously. I won’t start a fight, but I’ll end it. I know this about myself, and that I say things that can’t be taken back. So I would rather focus on not making myself angry. I did that by stopping caring about a lot of shit, like other people’s feelings about my writing that get frustrated and say something that I’ve remembered for YEARS.

It’s funny now…. but, “your blog makes you sound like a dick” when my girlfriend had just broken up with me a few days before was egregious. OF COURSE I WAS FUCKING FURIOUS. WHO DO YOU THINK I AM? I am not made of stone. I was lucky in that I had another beautiful woman to catch me, and I leaned into that, instead. So, for all practical intents and purposes, I broke up with my friend and my girlfriend simultaneously. The friend hurt worse because Sam and I had only been together for three weeks.

I deserved the right to have my own feelings about that relationship ending, and for someone to say that there should have been rhyme and reason to what I think about a breakup after what seemed like 15 minutes is insane. She wanted me to post more recipes and shit, as if that’s going to attract anyone.

If I started putting recipes at the bottom of my blog entries, that might be interesting. You wouldn’t have to read any less, it just wouldn’t be about Kayden, Kory, Kerry, and Kayleigh.

But the bottom line is that I had to make hard decisions in my life about what I will tolerate, because I am not a person that can click long-term with just anyone. I can talk to anyone in the world about anything for a few minutes, but it takes a miracle to spend time with me day in and day out without wanting to stab yourself with a fork. I know this because I drive me crazy all the time and I don’t want to be with me every single day, either, but here we are.

The piece de resistance was when I decided that Supergrover could either give up her “this is threatening” shit and work with me on what I could say and what I couldn’t, or she could get out of my way. I wasn’t going to tank my career for her, but I would have. What I did not know were ironclad boundaries to stick to before I started writing in the first place. I know a few things that would identify her to the public, but not enough.

I told her I would never give her editorial control, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t need to get our story straight. It’s not fun for me to think that she thinks I’m making things up as I go along. If there were plot points or character exploration that needed to be done, that’s on both of us, not just me. I am not blogging her story. If I did, she’d probably begrudgingly read it. It’s not that I want to write a story about her. I’m writing a story about me, and she happens to be involved through a strange set of circumstances, but not because she’s a hotshot. That part is the least impressive thing about her because it’s code for “I’m exhausted every minute of every fucking day.”

No, with Supergrover, who is my beautiful girl, there was only empathy for her struggles and an ache that I couldn’t fix it for her. We don’t do the same job, we aren’t even really in the same city anymore. That doesn’t mean my heart doesn’t go out to her.

I hope that when she’s screaming down 66 at some point, there will be a sign telling her all is well.

Because it would be a better sign to say “my blog makes me sound like a dick, and you may be entitled to compensation.”

SG, I love you out loud. I hope that covers punitive damages.

The Straight Truth About Queer Dating: The Leslie Edition -or- Too Weird to Be True

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Straight and queer people both suck when you’re bi. That’s because it’s all homophobic and for queers it’s internal because we’ve been taught to hate ourselves so much. It is offensive to cheat whether you’re male or female. The person you had an affair with shouldn’t matter, but it does. As if the fact that we’re bisexual means we’re purposefully going to screw you over later by dating men…….. because they are the enemy. No lesbian thinks you actually enjoy being with men. It’s all an elaborate intelligence operation where we’re trying to hit your most vulnerable spot when in reality we are just moving on with our lives.

No lesbian believes that a bi person can be monogamous, because they think that we can’t live without dick in both directions because no straight woman would believe that of a man, either. Cheating comes in all sizes and shapes, and is not personal. That’s your internalized homophobia, and you don’t get to control us if we break up. Not going to happen. To make it a requirement of your partner is ridiculous and you look really hateful…… and kinda stupid.

For instance, to me, Supergrover being wigged out that I was female and not male said homophobia to me, so I retreated and then couldn’t get her off my mind, so I lashed out to get her to go away. But she took it as that’s all I would ever do to her, all I would ever be, and we both missed out on something incredible……..

And then realized we were stuck in an impasse and I didn’t have a choice but to fold and prepare for a lifelong connection. I cannot ever cheat on her or leave her because she’s already found her life partner, so my gender shouldn’t have mattered. I should have known she was dating a man, but I didn’t. I should have assumed it from the beginning, but I didn’t. I’d never had a deep internet relationship that didn’t take away sexual orientation and gender out of the equation because after a while you don’t see it. I wanted to wait it out and hope because I knew I could appeal to her in writing better than I could in person. That we’d get over our issues faster and easier if I wrote them down- the neurodivergent urge to explain more and better, more and better.

So, bisexuals might cheat, but it’s not going to be about gender. We don’t cheat any more or less than you do. You know how I know this? I’m bisexual and I’ve dated both bi and lesbian women. Except for Dana, I’ve been cheated on by every single woman I’ve ever loved- because they wouldn’t want to, anyway, regardless of the gender of their partners. I do not want anything less than enthusiastic consent, and it would have been incredible to eventually be wanted in that way, but because it didn’t happen didn’t change me. It didn’t change how wonderful I thought she was, and sometimes it seemed like she thought that of me.

On my end, it would not have been any less offensive to Dana if Supergrover had been male (not sure I would have noticed, tbh, because she’s got the patois)….. but to some women it would have been more. That’s where the self hate comes in, and it doesn’t have anything to do with the bisexual partner. It’s your bag, not ours. I bring up Supergrover because it just shows that especially an emotional affair sees past gender, especially for bisexual women because women are naturally programmed to open up to people that open up to them. We’re raised to be fixer/pleasers, so when we don’t have to be, we connect on that level regardless of the other’s private parts.

It’s more important to be heard after the new wears off. Good sex can be found anywhere. Good communication is rare, beautiful, and precious. Choose that. It’s why I love Supergrover- because she’s absolutely who she is alt all times and I love all of her. But if you hurt her, she’ll never open up ever again. I’m wondering how that’s working out for her all around, because I get the feeling that I’m the only one she’s really honest with, either, so it crushed her when I couldn’t stop myself from being a dick to get rid of her by wigging her out a little more. It wasn’t a good plan, but first of all, it worked and second of all, it was 10 years ago and we eventually made our peace when my body and mind relaxed about our situation. What I knew for sure is that she had changed me emotionally in a way I couldn’t open up to someone else, so it felt natural to want that from her even if she didn’t want that from me. That’s fair. What hasn’t been fair is needing to talk it out and get closer while it’s also the most unpleasant option. I think she thought I was bullshitting her about this connection and just trying to get into her pants, but it was a symptom, not a diagnosis. I needed time to get over it, and I did, but I don’t think she believes it.

Because in the immediate moment, she deserved to be furious. I took my lumps. I didn’t deserve them for eight years until she finally said that I needed to look for friends that didn’t cause issues in me and she had no worries about what I was going to say…….

And then when I started telling the truth about my perceptions, she would change her mind and it would send me into a spiral. So, I have never been as obsessive as she might think. I have been trying to protect her while also processing our experiences and she picks and chooses when to be mad about it, scaring the hell out of me. I found what I was looking for about the baseball game. She’ll know. It’s unlikely all right. That’s her way of being an absolute dick to me now, and it would make so much more sense to you if I could explain the whole thing, but again, the most important pieces are the ones I can’t talk about, and she’s being paranoid and oblivious at the same time…… and when I say things like “I didn’t get laid, but I am certainly and surely fucked,” even those words don’t describe the pile of shit I walked into, but they’re the best I’ve got. I don’t give myself to someone else because I don’t want to do it.

We took each other to the mat and that’s why I think we’d have been all over each other for about two weeks and then emotionally destroyed each other. But that would have had to be predicated on her being single and queer, of which she was neither. So, being close enough for the relationship to flame out was a bad thing, and I couldn’t think of a faster way to get us there than sex. It messes up more than it solves…… and it did mess up everything because I opened my big mouth. And she had a right to know that I was going to write about it, so hiding it wasn’t going to happen.

So, I have a drive to be near her and available that I won’t ever give up, because I can take care of her emotionally in ways that other people can’t. Objectively, not subjectively. She just doesn’t believe it, and that’s okay. It’s a love that will last because it has to, and not in a way that I feel put upon. I’m just in touch with reality and what her news from home does to me. There’s no hard feelings, but I concede that the love is there if she wants it, she just really has to want it and I don’t think she ever will. I think that she thinks I’m out to get her, which is why my next partner doesn’t have to worry about her anymore. She thinks she’s doing the right thing by disappearing, and I hope she’s right. So far, I don’t think she is. I will never forget what I know, and she’ll always be threatened.

Would it make a difference to you whether you were having sex with the person or not once the relationship got to this point? That’s why I don’t think my gender matters. That’s why I don’t think hers does, either (though not getting to be the person that touches her ass is tragic). That’s why I don’t like lesbians who inherently think me being with men is offensive to them, on purpose like a “fuck you” because we have more power than you do. It’s never that we feel guilty and empathetic about that, but we can’t do anything about the system, either. All we can do is wear our queer flags with the rest of you, supporting you while you’re “so offended.”

I like Zac’s personality. I like Oliver, who is a dog. I like how I feel when we’re together, and it doesn’t bother me that he has other partners because I feel polysaturated at one person. I’m a writer. I don’t have the time or need to have someone around me 100% of the time like a caretaker in addition to a boyfriend, or needing to make sure he’s happy every minute of every day…. which is what a lot of lesbians see our relationship as being. That I’m willing to sell out. I am definitely not. I have had fulfilling relationships with both sexes. I think about what Ryan and and I could have been had I not been so influenced by the women around me. That it was a transition and I’d never feel the same way about men again. I don’t feel the same way about women that I did before I slept with them, either…….. #protip

So, will it hurt my next partner that they can’t have all of me? Of course it will. But they can’t have the rest of me if they can’t handle it. Poly means more jealousy, not less. You just have to breathe through it, and I’m good at that because writing is my lover. I’ve made promises to S-dog o’ Bling Bling due to what I do, and it’s important. But would it hurt more if I was a package deal with a man? To most of my dating pool, this is true.

The reason I’m so furious about this is because women advertise that they’re not interested in bi women, rejecting us all because of course we’re a monolith. I have an interesting case of poly love because I can’t let anyone else into my little bubble, my softest spot- which is why it hurts that I can’t talk to her about it anymore because she doesn’t have time or wants to avoid me. I do not know which, but I’m hurt either way so it doesn’t really matter. However, if sexual fidelity is the fucking only thing that matters to the self-righteous bigot brigade, all I have to say is that my next partner is none of your business. So, the fact that you’re walking around butt hurt because it’s a him (even if we’ve broken up, there’s still an expectation I date the same sex partner?). You don’t have the right to judge me on my next partner, because when our contract ends, you don’t get a say in my next relationship.

It’s all about making us feel like shit as much of the time as possible because they think we’re exploiting heterosexual privilege when we do it. But my boyfriend is bisexual as well, so does that mean heterosexual privilege, too? Perception is not reality. All it would take for Zac to get queer bashed is to be with one of his male partners in the wrong place at the wrong time, but we’re bad people because we’re privileged. I promise you that by the end I’m not standing in any. Straight women are freaked out by my being gay because they don’t really understand being queer. Lesbians are freaked out by my being bi because they don’t understand that men can be human as well. To be fair, they haven’t done a bang up job of proving it, but my boyfriend is bi so I don’t have the standard model, either.

That being said, just because Zac is perfectly perfect in every way, that doesn’t mean I’m going to get struck on the head by lightning the way I was with Supergrover. It’s a whole different thing, because I’ll never meet anyone like her ever again. But, behind every beautiful and powerful woman, there’s someone who has to deal with their shit. I just think it’s worth it provided she’s on her game as well. She cannot be supportive and frightened, because that doesn’t give me room in the relationship to be me. Right now I am waiting for all the stories I know to have been told so that she can rest easy in my memory, because she’s told me that’s what she wants so many times and reneged when she’s felt threatened…. basically, reaming me out until I adore her enough in print that we’re good again. I feel I’m only good for the adoring entries in which I extol her virtues. I could do that a Shakespeare amount, okkkkkkk…. but it wouldn’t be interesting because it wouldn’t be real. All people have problems with their family and friends, but we don’t talk about it. I do, because my honest voice is a good one. I am not putting myself out there and pretending to be anything I’m not. I am bisexual, but that doesn’t mean I’m not capable of being faithful. It just may not look like the kind of faithful your parents told you that you should want.

I’ve said it over and over so that you get when you see Zac and I out and about, you will most likely be confused rather than enlightened. We look like a heterosexual couple that really doesn’t fit in because we look like we don’t know we’re queer. Lesbians and gay men all think that they’re enlightening us by telling us that bi us just a phase, and we’re confused. No, you’re confused. We’re bisexual. It seems too weird to be true that gay people have a hierarchy just like black people. I don’t know what the word for it would be , but it feels very much like colorism, where I am judged on my sexual purity by how many men I’ve slept with. Even one in college is a black mark, on both sides of the equation because we’re all homophobic to varying degrees. Heteronormative bullshit is the default script, but we’re finding out the default script doesn’t work.

And that is all I have to say about that.

The Devil is in the Details

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What are your biggest challenges?
View all responses

Being autistic makes me naturally come across as demanding, when I am not demanding anything but the truth all the time; it is how I take in the world. If you bullshit me, it takes me a long time to regain trust. Therefore, I spend a lot of time being in anxiety about the situation, and it’s something I just don’t want to do anymore.

My biggest weakness in life is Supergrover, and it sounds romantic and yet it’s not. When she refused me as a partner, it didn’t mean that she refused me or cared about me any less. The feeling is mutual, most definitely. I don’t know how to turn it off after 10 years, and the only reason I bothered chasing her down (virtually), is because I wanted whatever our relationship grew into, not what it was in the moment.

In the moment, we were always hotheaded and angry, without exception, because that’s what an anxious/avoidant attachment does. It is not personal, ever. If someone is being avoidant and you need information to function in the relationship (and you do, always), then the relationship cannot proceed because it can’t. The tautology is real. True intimacy is by sharing information, not by hiding it. Saying we were fine was okay with me, but not after years and years. Something about it didn’t feel authentic, and I couldn’t fix it. But there were genuine moments, clearly, or she would be off my radar.

I’ll always keep the promises I made to the best of my ability, which is why it’s so hard for us both to make room for each other. My blog is a threat, objectively, and I understand that. But in order to describe what is happening with me, some information is necessary. I can use little things to talk about big things….. because the little things are the things that mean the most, not what is impressive.

In the future, for the readers I haven’t met yet, if you can’t understand that I’m a writer and try constantly to take it away from me because you think it’s a threat, then I don’t have time for you- not that you aren’t valuable and special, but it takes a lot out of me to write and this is what I do. If you don’t like this, you don’t like me on a very fundamental level. And I don’t need those friends.

I’m not going to stand for anyone having a problem with my writing, because I’m going to do it whether you’re in my life or not. It’s what I have when I feel the most unwanted- I can entertain myself by putting myself out there to strangers when you don’t want to talk. If you won’t listen, someone else will. And that’s all I’m asking. That this blog is my way of coping with life, and I learn more about myself than when I am in conversation, and it drove me to write six books’ worth of my journey as it was happening, not reviewing everything when it’s long in the past. Here’s the thing that’s most important about being a writer: you learn intimately that patterns repeat and there are no real surprises in life if you take that attitude.

If people are avoidant about bad things, they’ll be avoidant about good things, too. The person that won’t open up at work probably has trouble opening up to people they like as well. It’s never personal, it’s how they operate. A person like that in a relationship where the other person spills their guts is going to irritate the fuck out them, no matter whether it’s me or anyone else……

because patterns repeat and if you don’t change the dynamic, you’ll get stuck. It’s how the most people connect instantly and come off the rails over time. If you have trouble believing this is true, think about how many women leave their husbands because they work all the time, never share anything, and shut down when there’s a problem. It’s not anything personal to them, it’s how they operate. If they’ve caused damage to other people in their lives, they are 100% going to cause damage to you. I don’t look at it like “everyone is out to get you.” I look at it like “everyone has their own issues and how they respond is none of my business.”

For all people, the way they respond to my writing is important. What I have found over time is that everyone loves my writing as long as it’s about people they don’t know. For 99.9% of the world, this is true. But if you stop liking the mirror I hold up once I’m writing about you, then it was never about supporting me. It was always about adoring me and then discarding because they just can’t handle it. I didn’t leave those people behind, I grew past them.

I don’t go around picking people to write about because I don’t have to. All my friends are interesting enough to be characters in fiction. I don’t even make them a real person unless they’re close enough to me to warrant writing about them in the first place.

If you love the good and praise it often, and don’t like the bad and kick me in the nuts over it, then it shows that you’re not in it for the long haul. It’s really that simple. I will never kick anyone, because I am doing two things that they’re ignoring.

I have never found all the bad in someone without finding the good, but it may not be in the same entry. I am only talking about a snapshot of my day, and I change my mind frequently. Therefore, it might be a hit piece one day because I think your actions are fucking me up, and it might be that you are the best person in the world for me because we’ve just had a breakthrough and I want to celebrate it. I do not go after people, I reflect them as they are in my perception. As my perception changes, so do the characters they represent. I am laying out my thoughts this way so that they’ll change, not because I am trying to direct ire at them. I have the right to say I went through something bad and it hurt, without bugging you to read about it. If you want to know what I think, you’ll read. If you don’t, you won’t. But at no time should you take it personally. I write about everyone in the same way.

If I didn’t, then you would see that I’m only mining my friends for the gossip and not what is really happening in real time. It wouldn’t change me, because I’d just be a vicious, vindictive person and not trying to do therapy on my own. You are reading my most intimate thoughts regarding the people surrounding me, not the happenings around town like I’m the local Gladys Kravitz.

I try to be non-specific about people that matter. But if I start out with your real name, I won’t change it unless there’s a solid reason, and I have them. If you’re not named, you’re not that important, and I want the people around me to know that. I also know that it’s better to write about people than it is to not, because when I stop writing about them because they hate the negative things, they rail that I’m not only writing the positive. No, if you insist that you like an international audience thinking the sun shines out of your ass, then you don’t make a good character. Flat out.

It’s why I’m having so much trouble believing that any of my friends don’t see themselves as a 3D character, because I’ve even been nice to exes that have slashed my heart in two- less so with Kathleen, mostly because I don’t remember our day to day life together, but I definitely remember how she left. But again, emotionally unavailable so she wouldn’t talk about underlying issues, but would beat the hell out of me emotionally if I didn’t clean something to her standards, recognizing that not everyone grew up the same way. I fold the towels the way my mother did, and so does everyone else. It’s not worth relationship crisis, but she did it often enough that I knew she’d never open up. But I couldn’t leave, and I don’t think she could either- which is why she pulled such an egregious trump card.

And the thing is, if our relationship had been set up with poly in the first place, that she couldn’t commit to monogamy, so we’d make other things our touchstones, I don’t think I would have handled it as well then as I would now, but it would have been better than ambushing me with so many lies, and waiting until I was out of town to cheat.

Due to that experience, and having my own new relationship experience while I was still married, I can’t commit to it, either. It’s not because I’m incapable, it’s because I never want to be accused of cheating ever again. It’s not cheating if you’re not breaking an agreement…. so I just won’t make it.

I’m not going to trade new relationship energy (no matter what kind- platonic relationships are just as fulfilling) for my entire life falling apart. I cannot put all my eggs in one basket anymore, and part of it is that my heart is already gone. I don’t have a choice about that, and yet, I do. I want a scenario where when I have to make Supergrover a big deal in my own life that it doesn’t affect any of the others, and if Supergrover is in any way picking up what I’m putting down, she knows to the very depth of her being that I made the right decision by putting her first, even in my marriage.

I will never apologize, ever, for that stone cold fact, because I cannot do anything about it. She should have realized that when we don’t interact, it almost affects me more than when she is. We have a hard out, not subjective like with my other friends, and she has taken no responsibility for that fact. What she has taken responsibility for is changing my life and she wishes she’d never told me anything at all, when it’s the best gift I’ve ever been given. But gifts don’t come without potential problems when the wrapping is fallible- and I mean human, not that anyone has to be perfect; they can’t.

So, when I talk about biggest challenges, they’re always emotional because that’s the wavelength I’m riding and not many people are. Most people don’t know themselves as well as I do, so I seem threatening when I’m just certain. I can also listen to someone else without agreeing with them; then, they become threatened that it’s going to take different words to convince me they’re right, because I’m not trying to find a situation I can “win,” but a situation in which we both get what we want. It takes time and effort to do that, but it’s not impossible. People just cut out long before the discussion is over, and if you’re supposedly in it for the long haul, then you’ll meet me halfway.

Because I see their biggest challenges, too.

Ringing It In

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I know it’s popular to go out on New Year’s Eve, but tonight I am actually sitting in the dark, with the noise turned down to zero except for the fireworks (oy with the fireworks already). It’s a combination of a lot of factors. The first is that Zac is off on a mini-vacation, I have a headache that might have prevented me from going out, anyway, and I’d like to close out the year with something good.

My last post of 2023 lets me say two things. The first is that long ago, I said that I was writing my love story with Supergrover, not that it was mutual, but that it was mine. Over 10 years, we grew to accept each other; I couldn’t imagine my life without her and I didn’t right up until I wasn’t given a choice. I couldn’t let her get away with letting me feel so bad all the time. I wasn’t guessing right, and I was getting punished all the time for not being able to read her mind. It began to outweigh her mama wolverine claws coming out when other people hurt me, because she was closer and more important to me than absolutely any of the others.

I would have been much happier if for once, she turned the wolverine claws on herself. I could acknowledge when I was the problem. She couldn’t. She’d tell me she was licking her wounds, but not what they were. So, I listened to all of her pain without her being specific enough for me to change anything. She lumped it all together, as if she wasn’t my Evelyn, my everything everywhere all at once. She overfocused on the negative and ignored the positive, because I don’t think she believed my feelings could run that deep. But it’s okay. It’s what I meant by “she’ll never know what she lost,” because she got under my skin. I mean, absolutely set me on fire. I used it to become a better writer, and if I do sell books in the future, absolutely every dollar has been inspired by her in one way or another.

I don’t have to write about her at all to write about her, because she’d come across even better in fiction than she would in real life. She’s one of the few personalities I’ve met that could walk onto a procedural and act like she owned the place. If you’re one of her closest friends, they’ll never find the body.

Sometimes I worry about the things she keeps in her safe, the place in her heart where I reside; it’s not just me, though. I genuinely care about Michael and the rest of her whole famn damily. They’ve got someone out there loving them that they can receive whether they return it or not.

I said in “All the Things You Never Knew” that it was our love story and how it grew to accommodate both of us….. and I desperately hope that will continue, but in a very faraway, dreamlike state. I think I’m still in shock that when I laid out everything I was dealing with, she told me to go find new friends. After 10 years, if you can’t lay it down, we don’t have a future until you get yourself together. I do not have time for her if she does not have time for me.

The problem is not that I didn’t want the friendship she had to offer. It’s that our problems are too wide and deep to continue that dynamic without resolving the monster conflict that lies underneath. So, if I wrote 614,000 words this year and multiply that by 10, I have written at least 60 books that all have a thread of her running through it. And that’s not including the long e-mails that I’ve crafted especially for her. It’s a lot, and I’m sure it’s overwhelming.

But she’s a lot.

I would never have been changed to this degree by someone who couldn’t think faster than me. I don’t think my thoughts are better or worse, but AuDHD moves fast and furious with someone who’s a special interest. I wanted to resolve this conflict, and I got overwhelmed with talking to a brick wall. That didn’t mean I didn’t want her care, connection…… it meant I wanted more of it and was jumping up and down for attention by not doing it, then popping off with rage the longer I resented it.

But our anger feeds the other’s to an enormous degree, so we’re magnetic and repel as often as we attract. I feel sad because I only wanted to be on the fridge. Whether she chooses to be my yellow string or not, she only has to grab onto it, because I will deal with anyone’s red flags as long as they have a commitment to dealing with them on their own. If I have to learn conflict resolution, why don’t you (plural, true in every conflict everywhere and not a slam).

Here’s healthy for you.

I was really missing Zac, so I asked him if he had any time in the next couple of weeks. I just need to decompress and I love being at his house just as much as I love being with him. What I really love is when he works from home, but whether he’s there or not it’s very quiet. When he works from home, it’s still quiet. His office is kitty corner to his bedroom, so all I hear is him typing, and occasionally taking a call- but that’s rare because most things in intelligence are done in writing. But to be clear, I don’t know what’s classified and what’s not, so I tune everything out or close the door. I love that we’ve reached the stage where it doesn’t matter whether he’s home or not, I’m welcome and I know it, constantly.

So, he proposed a couple of dates, and I said “either work for me.” He said, “we’ll see.” I responded by saying “I don’t understand.” He didn’t get back to me and I was still thinking about it, so I said, “this unsettles me. You gave me a couple of dates, so I thought you already had them cleared, and you haven’t expressed lack of interest before, so it confused me.” I’m paraphrasing, because I told him that it came off as lack of interest, not that he actually meant it.

He responded by saying that no, it had nothing to do with lack of interest, just that now he didn’t know which days were good for him. Matter solved immediately, no bullshit. I didn’t give into my anxiety and start tiptoeing around him because I thought he was put off by me. It clears up a lot when instead of sitting in your bad dreams, you just ask if you’re right first.

It also helps when you believe everyone the first time, because after that it’s your anxiety to manage. Their actions will tell you whether they’re hiding something, and so will your intuition. But you can’t go on that until you just plain confront the situation, because perception is not reality.

What I’ve written a book about is how not confronting a situation made it a whole lot worse. I wonder all the time what would have happened if we’d just been big people and met up to really resolve everything. But if she was uncomfortable about that, all I asked is that she be more like Zac- you don’t have to manage my anxiety, but could you at least lay down the law all the time so that I’m not shooting in the dark as to how to love you so that you feel it?

60 books.

And whether it comes back around to writing another book or not depends on the coauthor, because contrary to popular opinion, I am not a dictator. I don’t wish for good communication because I live in this faraway land. It’s necessary for every relationship on earth. I am not special, and neither is anyone else in this regard.

So, in all of these volumes, it brings me to the second thing that the last post of 2023 allows me to say. Another author noticed me, a very good one, and recommended that everyone get involved with reading me. She also said that there was a tremendous depth to my work, and it made every tear worth it.

I can assure you, there’s been at least 614,000.

What She Did

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What makes you feel nostalgic?
View all responses

The thing that makes me feel the most nostalgic is when I open my inbox and see all the e-mail I’ve received over the years. I never delete anything (in case that is a thing you’d like to know). I also don’t archive anything. I take the good with the bad, the chateaubriand with the Spam (“I’ll have your Spam. I love it.”).

WordPress tells me that I wrote 614,000 words this year, and I feel like every single one of them was dragged out of me to varying degrees. I wrote when I was elated or devastated. I wrote whether I felt physically well or that day was a disaster. I don’t know that I turned pain to beauty in all cases, but I do know that I wrote it down. It doesn’t matter whether it’s recognized or not; it matters in how much all my writing changes me.

Over the last 10 years, I have become more introverted and keep to myself. I think it’s always been that way, but at the same time, I needed to learn self-reliance as well. The last decade can only be described as “hard as shit,” but I’m looking forward to that getting better. It has to, because I swear to Christ it can’t get worse. When I think of everything that has made me who I am, the last 10 years have contained everything I needed to know to be successful by breaking me into a million pieces first. I hope that you never learn what it feels like to be hit by a partner. I wish for you even less that when it happens, people assume you did something to deserve it.

Some people think that about everyone no matter what, but I feel that when it’s just two girls fighting, who cares? Neither Dana nor I were in a good place, and we chose to handle it with avoidance and rage. At times, it was unbearable because I could feel her being nice to me because she knew I was ill, while taking no responsibility for being a factor in my downward spiral. If she’s not an alcoholic, I can at least say with certainty that at the time, she had a problem with drinking. She was not drinking the night she hit me, but she got a DUI and spiraled out afterwards. I did not handle it well, and I’ll never forget the people who stepped in for me when I couldn’t step in for myself.

Nostalgia arrives in the most powerful of ways from reading Supergrover’s old e-mails. It’s not because I need to live in the past, it’s that in a lot of ways, she helped me create a new future. But now it’s my work to do, and I’m on my own. I will never give up hope that the matter is not closed, but I feel it should be- at least for the foreseeable future. I am thinking that she has left the building, but I have no proof of that. All I know is that she’s hiding something, and she won’t tell me what it is. I would rather live the rest of my life without her than continue to tiptoe around her trying not to upset her…… and failing miserably.

There were two gut punches that I’ll never forget, and in order to erase them, it would take a lot.

  • She has said that she’s exhausted by everything and she wants to throw all my e-mails away.
  • She has said that I do not write her as a 3D character, that she’s always the same.

That first thing is easier to forgive than the second, believe me. I do not believe the latter is true, because I have talked about all the times she’s been avoidant and all the times in which I was absolutely ecstatic to even be on her radar.

I have written this before, but it is apt here….. “She walks in beauty, and I do because of it.”

I would not be the person that I am today had we not met, because she thinks so much differently than I do that it opened up new neural pathways in my brain. The logical jumps she was making were not the messages I would have gotten, and she doesn’t miss a trick (even with nachos). So, over time, I began to pick up her patois and my writing voice is totally different than it was in 2013. I’m more strident, and I take a lot less crap. But sometimes I go overboard, even with her, and that’s definitely what happened in this case. She made me strong enough to stand there and fight with her, but didn’t like her tone being parroted back to her, either. I’m guessing that’s because she’s a terse writer, anyway, and if you irk her, she’ll make sure you know it. But, then you push back, and she will fucking destroy the land where you live.

She also gives in to the other extreme, loving with wild abandon when she feels safe. I broke her trust, and we could not get back to “safe.” I don’t blame her- it’s a sad situation, not “Supergrover is a bad friend.” But as I’ve said before, I created the original break, and I felt that absolutely never opening up again was not the answer. We had to resolve our conflict, because otherwise, we’d keep being pissed off under the surface and people please until the end of time.

We are both guilty of this; neither one of us wanted to rock the boat.

So, in a lot of ways, when I’m writing here, I am only talking about the character, not the person. She has made it so unpleasant to talk about conflict and resolve it that I just don’t want to try until I have some buy-in. Actually, a lot of buy-in. None of this is fair- not the mistake I made, not the pattern we set up to deal with it yet not, not our treatment of each other when people-pleasing failed. I am sure I have been a frequent topic of conversation because everyone knows what I think, every day….. and not because I am trying to speak to anyone. The people involved read my writing, so they think I’m speaking to them. The reality is, though, that I am just as happy with using them as an illustration for people who don’t know me at all. There are patterns in everyone’s behavior, and I can see my own in stark relief.

Whether I’m bathed in light or shadow depends on where you’re standing.

So, in terms of nostalgia, the last 10 years are going to be monumental in my memory, because some of it is universal and some of it is alarmingly specific. In all cases, I loved hard….. but not often well. Sometimes it’s because I’m mired in my own crap, sometimes it’s because you can’t have a great relationship all the time and conflict is going to arise. If someone else is avoidant, there’s nothing I can do about that. I don’t have authority over anyone, but by the same token, they don’t have authority over me, either.

Adults don’t have authority over other adults except for asking them about things you’re making up right now, because they’ve probably made it up before. It doesn’t matter what the advice is about, we’re all making up everything as we go along. Life takes on a heightened definition when you realize everything begins and ends with you. It’s not how others behaved, it’s what you allowed. Trust your intuition, because no one else has your best interests at heart, even if they say they do- this is not always for malice. Sometimes it’s just that someone else’s idea of what’s good for you is, in fact, really shitty advice.

So, when she says “who cares what I think,” the deepest parts of my heart only have two words:

I do.

The One About Which I’m Thinking

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What relationships have a positive impact on you?

No one has ever had a completely negative impact on me, because I see the good in everything and everyone. That doesn’t mean good people don’t do bad things. It means that I see both ends of the spectrum of human behavior and I don’t meet anyone that hasn’t proved it all to be true. Every human on earth is a glorious mess. We’re all a bunch of red flags, and we don’t work nearly hard enough to stay together. Not as couples, not as friends, and certainly not as states and nations. You just have to remember to live for the highs.

I won’t let anyone into my life without understanding it may not be forever- people come and go, so let them. I have had many people in my life for which I would go through hell and back before I’d admit it was a bad relationship. It’s hard when people screw you over. It’s worse when you’re at fault. People can and do resolve monster conflicts, but both parties have to buy in. You will never get anywhere if one person wants to resolve conflict and the other doesn’t.

However, “doesn’t” is relative. Sometimes, it looks like ghosting. Sometimes it looks like saying everything is fine, but it doesn’t feel right. If it doesn’t feel right, it isn’t. When you have no idea what’s wrong, do not guess. You’re wrong. Or, more accurately, the less you know about how someone feels, the more apt you are to make things worse.

I am a craftsman.

I am not good at talking about relationships because mine all go so well. I am good at talking about relationships because I’ve been through the ringer. I have made every mistake a person can make in a relationship, a lot of them way more expensive than I could afford.

I can describe the mistakes I’ve made, and also write what I wish I’d done in retrospect. I cannot breathe life into a dead relationship, but I can talk about it while it lived.

Right this very moment, the relationship that I have with myself is having a positive impact on me. I have a lot of things to think about, deeply, because I need to direct my energy and resources where it will do the most good. I don’t know what that means for me, but I do know that my life looks different than it did a few years ago, and I’m adrift…. but not in a bad way. In a way that I need to be self-sufficient for now (while also dearly wishing I wasn’t… I’m not the “adultier adult” type).

I have made so many mistakes, but somehow they have a positive impact. I think it’s because I’m driven to lead from the back. I have found over and over that people will not be vulnerable with me if I am not willing to lay all my cards on the table first. What is true of blogging is true of conversation; I just do not opine like this in person. It seems rude, because it is. If you wanted to read this, you typed in the URL or clicked the link. In short, when I’m in a crowd, I generally think “no one asked you.” I keep to myself, because I like hearing other people talk to each other. I like being around conversation more than I like being in one.

There are also many things I’ve said out loud that probably sounded better in my head…….. and stretching the definition of “several” things I’ve said that shouldn’t even have made it past my brain. The vetting process is getting better, but it’s not absolute. However, I think of those times and there’s not a one I don’t regret….. but you don’t get to be 46 without regrets.

However, I think I’ve spent long enough talking about regrets and am really starting to embrace the writer’s life…. ecstatic to be alone and also together with Zac (and Oliver, who is a dog). As a writer, I need more alone time than most. I also love dating an extrovert because he’ll drag me out of the house….. and even if we just end up watching a movie, I still got out of MY house. 😛

I’m looking forward to two dates in the future, because I’ll get to introduce him to Jason Moran (jazz pianist) and Jonna Mendez (former Chief of Disguise at CIA and my favorite living writer). We’ve got plans sooner than that, but those are important because both Jason and Jonna are important to me, and so is Zac in a completely different orbit.

Jonna, I believe, will find him completely charming because I’m going to bet she didn’t have “meet Leslie’s BOYfriend” on her bingo card.

Don’t ruin this for me. Shhhhh.

I Have No Heart or Brain

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 3 Comments

How have your political views changed over time?

They say that if you are a conservative when you are young, you have no heart. They say that if you are liberal when you’re old, you have no brain. They do not suggest the unexplored third option, the permanently exhausted political science student who really doesn’t like any of you. 😉 Actually, I think it’s also due to age. Gen X (technically, I’m a Xennial) is now the adult in the room, because people older than us don’t understand technology, people younger don’t know how to function without it. We are the hybrids that remember what it was like to function on paper, the glue holding pre- and post- internet together.

If there’s anything I credit with my political views changing, it’s being in college before the Internet was really a thing. I was still fascinated by T1 connections at that point- you mean it’s always on? I don’t have to dial into anything? Plus, when I got to university, I was studying poli sci in school and my boss in IT was also a lawyer.

A lawyer who had a t-shirt that said, “Charter Member of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy.” Today, this would be ominous. It was 2000, so I still laughed. I’m not sure anyone knew back then how this whole thing would turn out, but I didn’t have Donald Trump on my Bingo card, I’ll tell you that much.

I will say that I think younger people than me are coming up with the best ideas on the liberal end of the spectrum, and I think what being conservative in your elder years means to me is deciding which of these ideas are too wild to fund and which ones are worth pursuing. At its heart, universal basic income is a good idea. Other countries have implemented it and it works. But how do we scale up something like that without breaking the funds available for such a thing?

When it comes to money, I want everyone at the table in terms of ideology. I want James Baldwin and William F. Buckley on every single issue, not what passes for dialogue now. It’s not a good idea if you can’t explain a liberal idea to a conservative or vice versa. That’s because 99% of the time people don’t get what they want because they don”t actually know the question.

The liberals don’t have worse ideas, they just can’t sell them. I think it was Aaron Sorkin who wrote that originally, but it has stuck with me. The Republicans demand complete buy-in and loyalty, the Democrats don’t because we like free thinkers. While not a bad thing, this has cost Democrats DEARLY and they have no idea how to fix it.

I’m including me in that statement, because I’d like to see the party embrace bigger and better ideas, but also to have a concrete idea of how to fund them. There is no sense of polity in the Democratic Party, because both Bill Clinton and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez are Democrats, but their platforms were/are worlds apart. Hillary Clinton’s is closer, but that’s only because she stayed in presidential politics longer.

I am definitely a Clinton Democrat, because it’s the lens through which I take in information. I voted for Bill in 1996, my first election….. although I also went to the Republican convention in 1992 and was thrilled about it, because back then it was just a chance to go to a major convention, because first of all I was a child and couldn’t vote. Second of all, George H.W. Bush grew to love both Clintons, so I think he’d forgive me for voting for them.

In terms of the way I was raised, I didn’t really know anything about my parents or grandparents’ political leanings until I was older, because they didn’t wear hats like they were pitching for either party. The only thing I remember from being a young kid is that my grandfather did not like LBJ, because of the Viet Nam war.

Fair.

But if you do a little digging, you find that it’s not the whole story. The thing that people are most known for isn’t necessarily what is going to do the most good or the most damage from a historical perspective. I agree with my grandfather that LBJ made some terrible calls during Viet Nam, but we also wouldn’t have gotten Great Society passed without him.

It is controversial to the general public, but not in political science circles to say that Lyndon Johnson was objectively a better president than John Kennedy. That when you take away the mythology of Camelot, Kennedy was wonderful for the American image and Johnson was more effective legislatively because he knew how to whip. I do think that John Kennedy deserved to be president, and that he was good at it- most political science students agree that it would be easier and more fair to compare both of them at full term, but we’ll never get that chance.

What I do not think is that we’ve managed to capture the fever behind one idea like “Great Society” that will get us elected….. and The New Deal before it. We need people on the extreme fringe of the party to come up with the new and better ideas, so that the more conservative members of the party can red team them. It’s not “shooting everything down,” but it seems that way because a red team’s job is to take you to the mat before you’re in front of the Republicans.

When I think about red teaming now, I think about Molly Ivins, who was not afraid to call out hypocrisy or bullshit on either side of the aisle, and was in fact more mystified by Texas politics than anything else. She thought it was wilder and weirder, and proved it every day in her columns.

I am not standing outside looking in, I am definitely a Democrat. But at the same time, I do not discount conservative ideas. I discount bigotry, and that has become 99% of the Republican platform. How we got here is not really a mystery. If you’ve studied the rise of Hitler, you know that what is happening now is what happened in Germany- the people were starving for a leader, and they chose the most racist asshole they could find because he parroted all their shitty beliefs.

Trump is not Hitler in his later years, but we’re ignoring the signs of fascism nonetheless. Here are two things that you really need to take in about this, and they’re important:

  • Trump discredited CIA on day one. He went into their house and told them point blank that he trusted the Russians more than them. So, the message from day one was “don’t believe the intelligence experts that have historically been the best in the world, and only pay attention to me.”
  • Trump discredited the journalists. So, not only should you not believe the raw data coming out of CIA (filtered for publication through State and the committees on intelligence in Congress), you should not believe any stories written about it.

Trump has the same outlook on domestic policy. Don’t read any stories about me, only look at me. Meanwhile, he’s not really running the country because he doesn’t know fuck all. Getting his whole family security clearances was downright offensive to the spies I’ve met, because that is not a community you join easily or lightly. You have to be trusted beyond a reasonable doubt to carry that kind of information, and I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Jared Kushner is not one of those people, and neither is Donald Trump.

The president of the United States WAS NOT QUALIFIED to see the documents he saw, and managed to show other world leaders things that he should have had in his possession because he’s the president and should have had enough sense he was actively harming American interests.

But that doesn’t matter, because he’s a Russian UI.

Putin’s revenge for Khrushchev’s treatment by Kennedy was to make us implode, and I believe it worked. There are people who still believe with a passion that the election was stolen due to Russian interference that Trump welcomed. Trump didn’t want to be president. He wanted to have been president. I believe that he sincerely thought he was going to lose, and 2016 was a bid to get more people into his DC hotel, not a legitimate presidential campaign. Hillary and Donald have known each other too damn long for either one of them not to see through the other’s bullshit, and I don’t think that Trump really thought he had a chance, which is why he was such a total asshole the entire campaign. I honestly think he was wondering “what do I have to do to lose?” By the end.

But we elected him anyway, and the rank and file judges and State employee jobs stayed open for months because there was no one to direct presidential appointments.

People, the damn president of the United States didn’t know he was president of Puerto Rico, and that’s just okay because people in the US don’t know that, either. Do you think that the president is less the president to our territories?

The president also commands lots of people overseas being Commander in Chief and American representative in global affairs. Honestly, the fact that Trump got to be that for us is alarming, and other heads of state noticed. Do you really think that Justin Trudeau, Angela Merkel, Jacinda Barrett, and especially Sauli Niinistö (president of Finland- rake the forests? Get out of here with that bullshit.) and Kim Kielsen (premier of Greenland- I’m sorry. You want to buy WHAT now?) were in any way impressed with us at all? The only reason we didn’t lose the plot with the UK is that they’re experiencing the same wave of conservatism that we are.

If there’s any way in which my political views have changed, it’s by leaving the Democratic and Republican parties alone and just doing my own thing by studying world systems. I’m looking at the forest, not the trees. I love dating someone who works in intelligence, because I am with someone who also has the ability to look at global systems and not get stuck in the minutiae of daily life. The world looks different when you’re talking about countries at war and humanitarian aid and everything that comes with it, vs. the fact that Chuy’s is too far away for my liking and Whole Foods continues to be out of the veggie dogs I like.

Perspective.

Years ago, I was on IM with Supergrover and I was telling her that I was having a really crappy day….. and that one of my cases to call back didn’t have a name at the top, so I dialed the number and the woman answered “Doctors Without Borders.” I died for a second because absolutely anything I was thinking about that day melted away with perspective. There’s never going to be a day in my life more stressful than being a doctor in a war torn country.

It’s like working for NASA and actually being an astronaut. Not the person on the ground that has every resource available to them at a moment’s notice. No, the guy who’s stuck in a tin can having only what they brought with them. IF MSF doesn’t bring a medication with them, it may be unlikely to get a local supply. We’re not talking total health here- we’re talking HIV vaccinations and TB tests.

So, again, if we’re talking about politics, then I’m probably not the person to ask how to fix the party.

But I think the first step is leaving your heart and mind out of it, and committing not to elect someone who tells you that what you’re seeing and hearing is the truth, when he’s just the mouthpiece.

In this case, you should absolutely pay attention to the people behind the curtain. They’ll be the ones trying to save us from ourselves.

We Have Covered This

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

Who are the biggest influences in your life?

I laughed to myself when I wrote that title, because everyone I write about is a big influence. I can’t think of anyone that has affected me more in both good ways and bad than going back over my years and seeing what happened.

Zac is my biggest influence right now, because for Christmas he got me a box of cards with fiction challenges on them. I may start a different blog for that, at his suggestion for his own site, because it would look disjointed to have fiction and non together. I will wait and see whether I’m actually prone to publishing the results first.

Speaking of Mr. Wood, I had no idea that a comment and a blog entry about me was written by him, because I absolutely didn’t see the play on words with “Mr. Would.” I was reading too fast and I saw “Mr. World.” But even if I had read it correctly, it wouldn’t have helped me, because Zac didn’t mention that he was a blogger. I am looking forward to another blogger in the house, because I need to know how it feels to be written about, and I can’t think of a person that sees more of my range of emotion.

That doesn’t make it not funny that I didn’t know that Mr. Would was actually my boyfriend. This is because I thought I was going to meet someone new in the area, and was surprised to see t hat we’d already met. We’ve been dating for a YEAR and I didn’t know he had a blog. A YEAR. YEAR, people. A YEAR.

Now I’m really laughing.

He was probably gathering intelligence to see how good an idea it was to tell me he was a blogger, and that just makes me laugh harder because of course I’m kidding. I have the same philosophy as Bryn. “Write what you want, we’ll work it out.” He actually took me to the mat over traveling, and that’s what made me think I had a superfan on my hands. He said that I didn’t include places I’d said I’d wanted to go before, and was surprised I didn’t mention them again. So, I have this entire ass blog entry written about me by MY BOYFRIEND, and all I got was a pingback.

No, it is AS IF he listens to me, and I could cry when I think about that intensity. I know I am valued because when I say something, he remembers it. I have never been in a relationship with someone so much like me, with the possible exception of Dana. The thing is, though, she would adore Zac as well because he’s like both of us. Neurodivergent and also in the military. Neither Dana nor I have served, but her dad was a Marine and she speaks acronym. I definitely have a type, and it doesn’t have to do with looks. It has to do with the way someone thinks.

So I’m sitting there reading like, “does he memorize my shit?!”

The only reason I didn’t think of Zac at all is that this has happened before. I know I’ve mentioned it, but for new readers there was Stephanie (at least, I think that was her name, it was years ago). Stephanie invited me for coffee through a dating site (the miracle is that I said yes). I sent her my URL because I separate the children from the adults fast. If you can’t handle that I’m a writer, we’re not going to have much in coommon.

Stephanie proceeded to read back four years’ worth of entries, and then pretended like my blog was law and I couldn’t change. It was an hour’s worth of “now you’re saying this, but four years ago, you said….”

I’d gotten divorced, moved to DC, and my mother died in relatively quick procession. But of course no one changes because of anything as simple as that.

But right now, I can’t dwell on anything in my real life, because tonight is not about me. Jesus is one of the biggest influences in my life, and it’s almost time. Mary can sense it. Her water is about to break. Right now? This very moment? I’m just waiting for the baby.

Tonight Luke will come out in his scrubs, and announce that he’s here. The baby that will one day change the world. Tonight is the night that the membrane between heaven and earth stretches so thin, we can touch the face of God.

The miracle is not that Jesus was a virgin birth, but that he survived at all. Can you really imagine being a baby and lying that close to cow shit? Can you imagine delivering your son in a barn? It was so long ago that they didn’t know about germs, so it probably wasn’t as scary for Mary because she didn’t know what could happen, but we do.

If your baby got that close to death, don’t you think they’re divine?

On this Christmas Eve, know that it doesn’t take a miracle to make someone a child of God. We were all born innocent, and we make the decision to resurrect ourselves all the time. It’s the message we’re missing in the middle of the mess.

Whether or not tonight means that The Messiah is being born is irrelevant to me, because this is not a story about magic. This is a story about mystery.

Jesus survived, and the odds were stacked against him. So, in remembrance, I’m mentally gathering the layette. I’m buying everyone blue bubble gum cigars. I’m writing the announcement for the newspaper. It’s all I can do, this waiting.

My area is by the Pepsi machine.

Yes… No… Maybe?

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 4 Comments

Are you a good judge of character?

I am an excellent judge of character in other people, but what I don’t know is how much of my behavior is inspired by me. I tend to pick out emotionally unavailable people, anyway, so I wouldn’t know if I was doing something annoying or not because they would not volunteer that information. Therefore, I could not change.

It’s why I had so much empathy for Jon Armstrong during his divorce from Heather (Dooce). He went through absolute hell with her, and I know this because my caretakers are often overwhelmed when I get mentally ill. I go into autistic meltdown and burnout, which is code for “doesn’t play well with others.” So, when Jon said “she told me everything that was wrong and just left so I couldn’t change it” (not a direct quote, I’m paraphrasing), my mirror neurons went off and my heart went out to him. Mentally ill people can be so ungrateful, but it’s not because they are actively trying to be emotionally abusive or narcissistic. It means that they’re in so much pain they can’t see past it.

I don’t blame Heather for leaving, either. Her feelings are absolutely valid. I just know from experience that perception is not reality. Whether what Heather saw was accurate or not is missing the point. There is no wrong feeling, there are consequences for acting on them. Depression, particularly bipolar, blows everything out of proportion because sometimes you’re depressed and sometimes you’re manic. You are not seeing what things are really like, you’re seeing them in a fun house mirror.

Whether I’m a good judge of character depends on when you meet me. My perception is different depending on my mood, and that’s not a good thing, but it’s real. It’s my work to do, because mental illness is not the whole answer. It’s developing coping mechanisms and safety nets. Depressed and anxious people do not actually believe that we are loved and we are not a burden on our families or society at large.

The hardest part of a mental processing disorder and/or mental illness is that you’re either slow or crazy, take your pick. I’ve never been called “slow” mentally, but I pick up facial expressions and microaggressions easily. I know what emotions look like on people’s faces and even when my perception is wrong, my judgment on other’s motivations/moods are generally correct. This is because in order to understand a conflict, you have to understand both people’s interests and what motivates people to get closer to you vs. further away.

Most of this is through looking approachable, not being nice. Nice is not kind. Those are two completely separate things. “Nice” says “no, we’re all good” while you continue to distance yourself from me. I noticed discrepancies between words and actions quicker than others do when the words are actually coming out of their mouths, because since my intuition on what I’m going to do is rock solid. I don’t make bad leaps by judging character, but by noticing the hypocrisy and seeing what happens if you call people on it. If they’re angry you noticed a problem and want to talk about it, that’s the biggest red flag you’re ignoring if you’re a people pleaser who lives not to rock the boat.

Most abused people exhibit this, particularly those who have been emotionally abused young by people who are supposed to take care of them. For instance (this didn’t happen to me, just an example), children raised by alcoholic parents are programmed to invert the dynamic. Boys are just as susceptible to becoming a parental figure as girls, though with girls it generally comes faster because women are designed societally to be people pleasers, anyway. But I know this to be true from the number of “mama’s boys” I’ve met, both straight and gay, who weren’t babysitting their mothers because they just wanted to do so; they realized their mother or father couldn’t take care of themselves and didn’t want to watch them struggle, because watching them struggle means that they’re angry and absolutely will take it out on them.

My stepfather is a perfect example. His mother was a horrible alcoholic and actually died from it in a roundabout way. She didn’t live long enough to die of cirrhosis. She was on a drunk and passed out in the snow. She didn’t wake up….. and obviously, he married my mother. The classic image of a “mama’s boy” is not him. That being said, he had to grow up fast. Running a household was nothing to him because he’d been doing it since he was five.

Again, he ran the household as a child until she died in the snow and someone (I don’t remember if it was his family or a neighbor) just found her. I cannot imagine that kind of trauma, and I don’t want to try.

Everyone is fighting something, which is why I believe there are no red flags. I have never met anyone, particularly a woman, that wasn’t fighting massive trauma. Absolutely all of my girlfriends have been sexually assaulted, more than not raped in childhood. That’s not an anomaly where I just went out and picked women who were abused. I have experience with abuse because again, ALL women. All of ’em. Every woman you know has at least a creepy story about a man, and in this culture it’s surprising when you get off that easy if one in four women is raped at least once in their lifetime.

In fact, for most of history it wasn’t rape if you were married to them.

Some mothers are even vicious enough to tell their children that they’re a product of marital rape and make their kids walk around with that knowledge until they’re adults and start unpacking it. It gets worse before it gets better. I cannot stress this enough. You will recover, but at times it feels like you should give up.

But here’s the thing….. during the Renaissance, beautiful statues were often finished in wax to cover mistakes. This is a double-edged sword as an illustration when it comes to PTSD. The first is that the statues weren’t any less beautiful. The second is that when finished with wax, it didn’t mean that the flaw wasn’t still underneath. What you get out of healing is what you put into it. Are you using the wax to cover your wounds, or are you examining the dead spots in your emotions? Are you using the wax as filler not because you are ignoring pain signals, but because you’re rerouting them?

A statue without wax is called “sin cera.” “Without wax.” A statue sin cera was incredibly rare….. another truism because you can make a statue sin cera, but no person ever could be. It is the nature of being animate, fully human and fully divine.

The sculpture you start carving after abuse looks completely different than the one you were carving before, because you don’t have the same thought processes anymore……. however, you do not get a new piece of marble. Maybe you’ve chipped more away. Maybe you’ve taken the “clippings” and rearranged them into something new.

People who have been abused and then are driven to success sometimes drive me insane because they’re so insistent they’re fine. Meanwhile, it’s not that they’re so perfect, it’s that everyone has learned to tiptoe around them. They’re not fine in terms of their emotions, but they don’t notice because why would they? Everyone around them is FINE.

Meanwhile, families who have someone with PTSD become the planets revolving around the sun…. in effect, nurturing it and asking it to warm them when they’re not capable of it. If they’re scared of their emotions, they’re scared of yours.

A lot of the women in my life are or have been a big deal. The two most successful women I know are complete wire monkeys, both raped in childhood and driven to control their entire universes so it never happens again……. not realizing that by trying to control everything, that includes controlling the people around them.

The planets orbit the sun, completely dependent on its behavior and not daring to deviate from the pattern that’s currently working….. but it won’t forever and instead of calling bullshit, the people around “the sun” adopt new ways of trying to please to avoid emotional injury.

Are you people-pleasing because you’re naturally programmed to give all of yourself away, or are you giving all of yourself away to try and mitigate damage?

I don’t know. Sometimes I’m a good judge of character. Sometimes I’m not. It’s especially wishy-washy in trying to determine my own. I am selfless and giving to an enormous degree, but not so much that I’d be willing to do anything to get love. But that’s a relatively new development. In the past, I was so afraid to lose a connection that I just wouldn’t do it. I would cower in fear instead of saying “this is bullshit. You don’t get to control my feelings in addition to yours.”

Whether or not the person listens is the best judge of character there is, because whether you’re wrong or not, your feelings still deserve to be heard. I am the worst person in the world at giving up in relationships, because I believe that certainly there must be a combination of words that will unlock you and make you open up, but it has never worked with a woman who has been raped.

Ever.

But that’s a perception with empathy, not a judgment call. The most upsetting thing is that statistics don’t lie and culture doesn’t change.

But you can.

When I’m Pharrell Without the Hat

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

When are you most happy?

I am most happy when all my relationships are in balance. I do not expect perfection in anything, but I do expect excellence. I’ve gotten to a point in my life where I can pick out patterns that I do not like and ask to change them. If it doesn’t happen, I don’t keep hammering the point anymore, because people’s actions tell you their intentions. I have a larger tolerance for it the longer our relationship, but I do not feel guilty for setting boundaries. I am allowed to take up space in the world.

My opinion matters, even when it’s wrong, because I am not explaining something to be right. I am explaining something to be heard. The one way to truly piss me off= the quickest and shortest path to rage, is this conversation.

Neurotypical: Explain to me exactly how this happened.
Leslie: (starts explaining an AuDHD amount)
Neurotypical: I don’t need your fucking excuses.

What I have not done is actually call people on it. I could have said so many times, “you asked me to explain, and I did, so I am not getting why you’re annoyed/angry.” This conversation happens quite frequently with neurotypical bosses…. or in the kitchen, because there’s no time for an AuDHD-length explanation. I am at a loss because I do not know what neurotypical people do in the same situation, because I am not picking up what you’re putting down if you ask me for an explanations and then write me off as making excuses. I don’t do excuses.

For instance, with this blog I feel like I’ve made it clear that I’ve done a lot wrong. At no time have I excused my own behavior away, and I’m not using my entries as justification, either. These entries are all context, because behavior doesn’t come out of a vacuum….. and for me, context is important. I am not trying to merely understand a situation, but to grok it.

It is honestly how I am able to be so forgiving and loving in my relationships, because if I start with the axiom that I’m not perfect, it allows me to see others’ humanity as well….. particularly if I write about them. Writing allows me to see the ways I’ve been treated in both negative and positive ways, and that is the nature of relationships. No one is wrong or right all the time. You are often presented with situations in which both halves of the relationship are right to different degrees…. and instead of focusing on the 80% on which we’re agreed, we’ll fight tooth and nail over 20% of a problem. Or worse, we won’t tell each other our feelings at all, content to resent.

If someone says nothing is wrong, and it clearly is, the energy surrounding them pushes you away. It’s your body’s intuition saying something is wrong, and you have to believe your intuition over what people are saying. This is very much affected by depression, because someone else’s words will come across to you differently than they would if you didn’t have it.

The way I handle this is to acknowledge that my attachment style is anxious; all I ask is that people not irritate it. I choose to do this by communicating early and often, and to take people’s words to the bank and see if they cash. If they say nothing’s wrong, but there’s no concrete reason for them to be snappish and nitpicking, then they’re probably not telling the truth. So, you ask what’s wrong and if nothing changes, you don’t have the right to say “you’re the one that needs to change, because I’ve tried everything.” I can only control my actions, not theirs. I also won’t do other people’s emotional work for them. I have consistently found people with avoidant attachment styles and made them out in my head to be more emotionally capable than they are. It leads me to believe that people will rise to an occasion that just never will.

That’s because I don’t believe there are red flags, and I’ve never been wrong to hold onto a relationship with a deeply flawed person, because I am also deeply flawed. I don’t get the kind of love I need from unbroken people, because if you’ve never been through trauma, you will come to resent me. Here’s something really scary. I have never in my lifetime had to look for a girlfriend with trauma. It’s not because I chose the most toxic woman in the room, it’s because I was dating women.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

People who haven’t been through trauma treat PTSD like autism in that even if you don’t know someone is autistic, you know their reactions are different from yours and you somehow judge your own reactions less harshly than mine. But honestly, it’s not blame I can put on anything but the fact that neurotypical people have always believed they were more capable than neurodivergent people because workplaces reward all the things that come easily to allistic people and feel threatened by neurodivergence because we’re not “following the script.”

I believe that I could work out a two state solution for Israel and Palestine easier than I could make myself follow a morning and evening routine for any length of time. I have empathy for demand avoidance, because I’ve felt it down to taking a shower. I have empathy for executive dysfunction, because I panic when I have more than two things on my plate. The absolute worst feeling in the world to me is presenting my task list to my boss and asking which is the most important and them saying it doesn’t matter. What I have learned is that it means “it doesn’t matter if you’re neurotypical, because what you accomplish is not what I would have accomplished, nor any other neurotypical.” It is not that one is morally superior, it’s that an autistic person has different pattern recognition than an allistic one. Therefore, all autistic thought processes are going to seem ludicrous to a neurotypical boss.

To be fair, if I’m not doing something that 90% of people would do, it’s not all the boss’s fault. It’s lack of education. No one knows what to do with autistic people after they graduate high school. I have been lucky in that I have had some neurotypical bosses who have also been parents of neurodivergent kids. Therefore, they had experience in “being the boss of” someone neurodivergent and how to get them to perform what you need because the way of asking looks different. I also think that I get along better with female bosses than male, because that’s another communication style difference when it comes to empathy. Most female bosses- most, not all- understand the neurodivergent way of thinking even if they’re neurotypical because dollars to donuts if their kids aren’t ADHD, they’ve still been around ADHD kids their whole lives. Because which parent is usually the one who knows their kid’s friends?

Plus, there’s little discernable difference in being neurodivergent and being female, because violence occurs to all women to varying degrees. Not one of us escapes it, and one in four women have been raped. PTSD, particularly when it’s chronic (e.g. raped in childhood), will give you the same symptoms as ADHD and autism; the trauma rewires your thought processes and reactions. Most people make the mistake of thinking that going on medication and doing therapy will fix everything and it will all go back to normal. This is untrue.

If you had an idea of what your life would have looked like before trauma and you’re trying to get back there, it’s never going to happen. Give up. Slash those old dreams, because they’re the ones you won’t fulfill and think it’s “your fault.” You have to make a new dream starting from where you are, not where you used to be. That map marker fell off the day you were traumatized. We all tend to undercut the abuser on how much we were abused, and take more responsibility than we need. For me, it was always that I deserved to feel the way I did because I asked for it, and that’s not unique at all. Most abused children think this. I was never physically abused, and it didn’t matter. Emotional abuse hurts worse to someone who already has bipolar depression.

In my case, it’s not really bipolar depression. My downs are so incredibly profound that hypomania looks like a regular person amount of energy…. one on caffeine, I’ll grant you, but a regular person nonetheless. My biggest symptom of hypomania is insomnia. I have roughly the same thought processes in an up that I do in a down, I just don’t get enough rest unless I take sleeping medication, and even then sometimes it fails. It depends on how married to the idea of being awake my brain is that day.

Not sleeping well makes me focus on what’s wrong instead of what’s right. I self-sabotage a lot, because I attribute negative things that aren’t there….. and in a relationship with an avoidant attachment style, you won’t know whether your negative feelings are wrong or right….. because they’re avoidant.

Which brings us up to now.

Zac and Bryn are partner-level close to me because if I say I feel anxious, they’ll tell me whether I am right or wrong in terms of their emotions. They will not let the story I’m telling myself be that they’re avoiding something and don’t want to be close. I won’t let them tell themselves that story, either.

If you’re not emotionally avoidant, you have to ask yourself how long you’ll tolerate someone who is. That’s because good relationships don’t function with that kind of blame cycle. “If I don’t tell you how I feel, then I don’t have to express myself AND I can also blame you for not considering something you didn’t know.” I can assure you that your needs will never get met by me if you do not tell me what they are. To think that I should be able to root around in your head and find your feelings is crazymaking….. particularly when it comes to things like my relationship with Sam. She couldn’t say “I want you all to myself and I also don’t have time for you,” so she couldn’t let me deal with it and decide what I was going to do. So, when I told her that I had a date with Zac, it was during one of our very first conversations because I wanted my words and actions to line up. I knew Zac wouldn’t care what I decided, I just needed to give him more information, too. I would have been fine with it if Sam had said she wanted me to herself. I’m a writer. I don’t need to see people in person much to connect with them. It wouldn’t have been a big deal, but it was because she didn’t ask for it and lashed out.

By lashing out, I mean that my first date with Zac was on a Wednesday, and we had plans for dinner the next Monday. She couldn’t wait that long. Breaking up with me had to be done while I was with him, apparently. She admits that things were going great and she just flipped out, so I’m not telling tales out of school. She thought she could handle it, and she couldn’t. But what she didn’t get didn’t come from something I couldn’t provide. It came from something for which she never asked.

I will not put up with any kind of loyalty test based on “if you really liked me, you would…” This is because you don’t say those things out loud, they’re societal conventions anyway, so it’s not like I’m not thinking the same thing…… No, I can guarantee that our thought processes are nowhere near similar. I have the rarest personality type in the world, literally a Christ figure because the historical Jesus is thought of as “INFJ,” then made even more rare with AuDHD. In fact, there is such a large crossover between autism and INFJ that I’m wondering if Jesus was autistic as well. His robes were all made of the same material, as well as his shoes, and he only ate like five things. I’m laughing, but really. The Sermon on the Mount seems like it was written by an autistic person. Who would wish more for the meek to inherit the earth?

That thought makes me the most happy, the Advent devotional that’s something missing from the diaspora. Maybe I’ll take it on, because if there’s female theology, queer theology, etc. there should definitely be neurodivergent theology. People who are mentally and physically disabled are very much part of the Disinherited (“Jesus and The Disinherited” is a relatively small book, always found in an inside pocket of Martin Luther King, Jr’s suit coat.). Liberation theology means more to those who need it. Not that all people aren’t worthy of having their wrongs forgiven. Not all people look at the resurrection in the light of Jesus having to struggle…. losing the battle, but not the war. His ideas got him killed, and it takes a strong man to say that these ideas will last forever even if I don’t.

It’s why I write digitally instead of in a paper journal. I know from The Wayback Machine that things on the internet don’t disappear. There’s the lesson. If you’re famous enough that dirt on you is a good thing, it doesn’t matter if you take it down or not. Whether you’re immortalized in the Wayback Machine before you take it down is directly linked to how fast you remove it. The longer you wait, the more likely it is that the Internet Archive has taken a snapshot of the server. For instance, Matt Rife will never be able to live down sending people to a web site for disabled kids’ helmets as an “apology” for his domestic violence jokes….. this is not problematic to me, that he will go away at some point; I never thought he was that great a comedian in the first place. Like, some clever lines, to be sure, but I took him about as seriously as I took Dane Cook. I’d rather see Matteo Lane than Dane Cook, because he isn’t a commercial for toxic masculinity and does the same kind of crowd work.

Crowd work makes me happy, whether it’s a brilliant comedian or rapper, because clever written lines are my jam. I feel like rappers tend to be more like Stephen Fry than anyone else, because in order to drop a verse, you have to know a little bit about everything. For instance, readers are better rappers than non-readers, just like novelists are better writers when they read, fiction or not.

Stephen Fry, rappers, and writers are all deconstructing words as we use them, and rappers do it faster than the rest of us. You don’t have to be smart to enter the arena (and bring a knife), but you have to be smart to win at freestyle verse. That’s because I believe it was easier for Billy Joel to write “We Didn’t Start the Fire” than it was to do the research for it. Imagine what you’d have to do to be able to think of something that clever on the fly….. and yet rappers do it all the time.

Listening to rap and hip hop is when I’m the most happy…. because the only people who come close are bloggers like me.

Thinking and Its Implications

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I think out loud by writing, and I don’t consider others’ feelings when I’m writing if the relationship is so long gone and irreparable that it doesn’t matter what my feelings are anymore. It’s why I dive into memories vs. writing about my current life. It is easier to write about people once they’re gone, because what I have noticed is that according to the people around me, I am only a good writer when I say nice things.

It is a truism that when you’re a blogger, people love when you say glowing things about them and hate you when you call it like you see it from both ends of the spectrum. If I am going to describe life as it is from my own perspective, you’re looking at my painting. But for the people in my life, it’s a mirror. Bryn likes it when I write about her because she likes the mirror I hold up. She gets that not everything is going to be sunshine and roses all the time, but it will be both ends of the spectrum for the rest of our lives. She’s so much a part of my journey now because her philosophy is “say what you want. We’ll work it out.” Zac has basically said the same thing, I just can’t get specific about where he works or anything like that. I say that because he said that to me, not because I actually want to write about Zac at work.

The only notable things about Zac working in an intelligence agency are that he has access to the best gift shops and he has seen the seal on the floor at Langley and I haven’t because God is unfair. After that, it’s more fun to talk about “our home life.” Tomorrow I’m going to his house for date night, and then the next night is his Solstice Party. I think I’m going to help him get ready (he took the day off work), and see how it goes. I might feel like going to a party, I might leave before it really gets going. I have a love/hate relationship with parties, because it’s way too much sensory overload and yet necessary to meet people. You forget how important socialization is when you go too long without it.

I need to move forward and have more life on which to reflect, because I’ve mined what I need to mine about this chapter. It feels over, because I’ll always accept Supergrover back into my life, but I will not seek her out. It needs to stop mattering to me, and it can, because I don’t have to carry my feelings around with me. They’re already here.

She could have gone radio silent for any number of reasons, but I have a wait and see attitude about all of it. It has never been true that she’s stopped reading, and it’s never been true that she doesn’t have feelings for me. She does, they’re just very different. I am lost because I don’t know what they are, and I’m tired of being treated like a judgmental dickhead when I am expressing emotions like an adult. If someone shuts you down every single time, it’s a toxic pattern. It also means I don’t have the right to tell her to change, I have the right to need it and the right to walk away when she can’t provide it.

The easiest way to get out of a conflict is to tell someone that they’re wrong or crazy because there is no problem.

And at the same time, I thought about the implications of saying that she was more important to me than Dana, because I absolutely meant it in a way that Dana would concretely understand. It was not a value judgment, but phrase with many different meanings, none of them meaning my love for one or the other was greater, but the priority list.

Supergrover doesn’t think she has a problem with being avoidant, she things I have a problem because I think in order to have good communication, she needs to stop running from it. The reason there’s so much rage is that we both have unresolved conflicts (emotional and professional) and all our reactions about more shallow things come from that black hole.

So, if I’ve said something that made her run from me, it’s 100% something we could work out, but I won’t go back to a relationship in which I am always wrong, and then if I complain about it, all of a sudden I’m extremely impressive……… but the change in tone goes back to “you’re a dickhead” almost immediately. I was not crazy to notice this, and it’s not a bad thing to want to correct it. It’s a bad thing if nothing changes and I put up with feeling horrible not to rock the boat.

I feel like most of our problem is that I’ve written her beautifully crafted pages over the years, but I haven’t met her in person. It takes away my barriers to communication in some ways, and not in others. Her tone is so brusque it feels like she’s angry all the time. It became her tone with me because I hurt her, and it never went back to how she talked to me in the beginning. I could understand in the immediate aftermath. I can’t understand 10 years later. If this was some kind of joke, it wouldn’t have lasted 10 years.

I think about the word associations I have with her all the time, because lines she wrote run through my head and they’re funnier coming out of my mouth. I owe her a lot of royalties on a few of them.

The problem is how to extricate myself from the relationship, because it’s one that’s not inherently easy to stop myself. There are so many things that are unresolved and I am getting closure on my own. It’s not that I don’t want input, none has been provided.

My story would have been completely different if she’d been open and vulnerable, because then I wouldn’t have had to explain my reactions to you based on what I thought at the time, not what she did. She is not vulnerable, she is running the entire relationship in her own head and not telling me about it. What boundaries are in her head that she hasn’t expressed?

All of them.

This is also not a relationship where I could put toothpaste back in a tube. I didn’t shy away from telling her that, either. That I can’t be a Christmas and Easter friend, because I either have to feed our bond or ignore it and there’s no middle ground. She doesn’t feel as deeply about me as I feel about her, so it wouldn’t make sense to her why I would say something like that.

Lesbians, how easy is it to be in a relationship with the straight woman you absolutely knew was going to wreck you inside and you just decided to enjoy the trip?

It’s so stereotypical I could vomit, and it’s true. If’s every bit as hard as maintaining a relationship with an actual ex, because even though those feelings didn’t exist for them, they are very, very real for you. I put away all that crack smoking foolishness years ago, but it’s still like being in touch with an ex because it’s hard to deal with the loss in priority when our “honeymoon phase” was so explosive. I don’t think I’ve ever had bigger NRE, because her energy is bigger than most people’s. Remembering that kind of dopamine and trying to to maintain a relationship that’s a shadow of its former self is something I’m no longer willing to entertain.

It still feels like a breakup because even though she was never my romantic partner, the loss of response is palpable. She’s unique, and I pride myself that no one will ever love her like I do because the situation was so weird and wonderful that it couldn’t be duplicated in a million years. No one will ever love me like she does, either. It’s just irreconcilable differences, because there was no mediation.

I had to work for a long time to forgive myself for walking into that entire wall of bullshit. The entire course of my life would have changed and I self-sabotaged. I want to get back to my Mama Wolverine, but I want her to hear me when my claws come out, too. I’m younger, smaller, and slower, but I would not hesitate to bite the ankles of her enemies. 😉

Not that she is not capable of being a badass on her own, it’s just my protective nature kicking in just like hers does when I’m butt hurt over something. I suppose now it’s just time to take those feelings away, and feel like “somewhere out there,” that love is being returned. I choose to believe that it is, both because I don’t want to live in enmity and because I know that not telling me her story is not personal. It’s controlling in a relationship not to tell someone your feelings, because then you can blame them for not doing what you wanted. It’s scary to show up to a conversation and say, “I don’t know, either, and this is difficult. I’m willing to work on it. I don’t have the answers, but I showed up.”

It’s the kind of thinking that causes the correct implications.