Describe a man who has positively impacted your life.
I’ve been a blogger since 2003, but I’d never really called myself a writer. It was something I did in my spare time until Dooce and Jenny Lawson made it big. I am not any less crazy or adorable than they are (were- rest in peace with the former Congressman, my dear Heather.
In case you’ve never read Dooce, she called her dog “Chuck, the Former Congressman” for his whole life and people that were with her from the beginning fell apart when he died). But Heather planted a seed in my mind that this was something I could do. I could talk about my life and people would show up. I was correct, and I have all of you to thank for any popularity I’ve gained over the last 20 years. Until I started reading Dooce, I didn’t have a goal. Then, I did. I wouldn’t have believed it was possible to go from entertaining tens of people to millions in a relatively short amount of time if I hadn’t watched it with my own eyes.
The one thing I will not do is craft the narrative to fit what the audience wants, because that means I’m just writing for attention, not for therapy/clarity. My basic philosophy is that you are free to disagree with me, but you are not free to tell me to stop writing. And now even that is broken, because I would give up my career in writing through blogging if Supergrover asked me. But it’s not because she has some magical voodoo power or anything, it’s that she’s a more private person than I am. I need that relationship to be bigger than it was to succeed again, and I’m guessing that we’re all done because of it. I think that because I said I was writing our story, she thought I was trying to get something out of it. That I was studying her like a journalist. It’s the other way around. She became part of my writing because she became part of my life.
She was the first person to truly validate that what I do is important. That I shed light on the abuse of children because I know what it’s like to be a child and have emotionally abusive things said to you. They’re mind worms that never go away. She lifted me up in every way imaginable, and I’m betting she thinks I’m kidding that if I do get a book deal for this fantastic idea I’ve got and all of the sudden I’m Oprah’s Book Club material, I’d like to pay off her house. It’s dreaming way too big, way too early, but that’s what an INFJ does. They live in the world of utopia and are trying to drag people into the light. They also get frustrated at other people’s refusal to look at themselves.
But before all that, before Supergrover was even a twinkle, there was Bill. I decided in Portland that I’d like to be a cook instead of in IT because when I was off, I was really, really off. In IT, I was tethered with a laptop and phone 24/7, and my writing time is sacred. I go completely off the grid and put my tablet in airplane mode. I got better fast because of it. However, in those days, I wasn’t writing every day. I am on a 53 day streak, and before that the streak was 65.
Sometimes, I write because I want to. Sometimes, I write because I have to. If I skip a day, WordPress puts me lower in their algorithms. I’m not popular enough to be able to sustain a break right now. But it doesn’t take over my whole life. I am astounded at how fast I write. The prompt just came out 37 minutes ago (as of right now, not by the end)….. and I didn’t start until 00:15.
Even taking all that into consideration, I still didn’t think of myself as a writer. I didn’t think of myself as a writer in grade school, either, because writers are a type. I swear to Christ it’s a personality transplant because before you truly start taking a red pen to your own work, you have no idea just how much bullshit you can spout unchecked. When I wrote stories in school, I didn’t think of them as better than my other friends’ stories. All kids wrote them, I didn’t think of myself in a writerly way.
Until that day.
At the pub, there was a poker club upstairs that didn’t allow alcohol, so poker players would come down for a quick drink between hands. That means I saw the same men (there was maybe one woman in the crowd) nearly every night of the week. I don’t remember how Bill and I got to talking, but we developed a very playful love/hate relationship because he and I both acted like Texas “good ol’ boys.” Because I’m genderqueer, I sound more like my dad and The War Daniel than I do anyone else, because I have that Texas old guy patois. This was a lot funnier when I was nine. Now I realize that I am a Texas old guy.
I like my sex, but my gender and I don’t get along all the time. The way I write is often different than what I would say in person, so I come across as more male in writing and more female in person. Because I don’t outwardly look like a woman in my Facebook pictures, people often assume I’m male. I got accused of being a “white knight” for calling out misogyny on Facebook today, so I told him I was a woman. He blocked me and told the rest of the group that I was a sex offender, as if no one in the group would reply to him and let me know that he said it. I was busting him up for calling women gold diggers.
All of these things are color commentary on my conversation with Bill (I’m AuDHD, every thought comes with bonus content):
Bill, clearly sloshed: What do you do? Leslie: I’m a writer (at first, I thought, “I work here?”). Bill: How much have you made as a writer? Leslie: I’ve never made anything.
This man, who is absolutely hammered, puts both his hands into his jeans pockets and pulls out the change. He dumps it into my hands, and says, “THERE. NOW YOU’RE A PRUFESSHIONAL WRITER.”
The total of the change was $1.83, and that’s what’s tattooed on my right wrist……….
And that comes from Dana’s first wife, Carol, who asked me why I got my quill tattoo on my left arm because I’m right-handed. I thought, “well said. Why didn’t I think of that?”
I got an e-mail from someone who works at ExxonMobil the other day, interested because I mentioned being an out lesbian and working there in the same weblog.
So I talked a little about my experiences in Fairfax, both the good and the bad. I started with Kathleen and I walking in Dupont Circle and picking up a copy of The Washington Blade, then nearly dropping our ice cream on the pavement as we read a quote from senior media advisor, Tom Cirigliano. I’ll paraphrase it here: “ExxonMobil does not support domestic partner benefits, but in countries that allow LEGALLY BINDING gay marriage…” We started planning our trip to Vermont that afternoon.
But the real fun began after we came home.When Kathleen presented our certificate to Human Resources, they acted like they had never heard of civil unions, and to be fair, they probably hadn’t. We were assigned a caseworker and given a possible date at which we might be given more information. That date came and went. We finally called back. We were given another date at which we might possibly be given information. We went to church. We prayed. We crossed fingers.
Another month went by, and the date at which they said they’d call us back came and went, and we were assigned another date at which they might possibly give us more information. It was a nightmare of bureacratic red tape. What we didn’t know is that the senior media advior had spoken without any clear definition of what he was talking about. They were literally having to write a proposal for how they were going to include us from the moment we presented them with our certificate. No advance planning had gone into it, presumably because they thought no one would take them up on it.
Another few months went by, and I was hired by ExxonMobil Research & Engineering, which alleviated our concerns about joint health coverage. Now that I had my own, we weren’t concerned about my getting ill- but it was still a justice issue in that each of us wanted to be listed as the other’s spouse in case of a true emergency.
Another two or three months went by, and we finally sent a letter that was very kind but firm- something to the effect of “if the next time we meet we are only given another date at which we might possibly be given more information, we would like to seek legal counsel.” It was worded more diplomatically than that, but our intentions were clear nonetheless. I sent copies of every e-mail and every transcription of every voice mail to the ACLU, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, and sincerely thought about the Washington Post. In retrospect, I would have had a lot of compassion for the people in HR if they had just e-mailed us and said, “we didn’t really think anybody was going to use this, so be patient with us while we write this thing from the ground up.” Wading through months and months with no inkling that any information would ever be forthcoming was the hardest part.
This morning as I sat down to write I didn’t particularly feel like writing about anything. But people who work on the assumption that you only write when you feel like writing don’t get book deals. So with that in mind, I went to Yahoo! and searched for “writing prompts.” The first site that came up was a writing resources page for people who teach junior high. Most of them were pretty inane, but this one just cracked me up: “What does Canada mean to you?”
I’m assuming that this prompt was meant for Canadian teachers wanting to bring out a small bit of patriotism in their students. But in the interest of having a good laugh, I’m going to attempt it anyway. So here it is, for your viewing pleasure:
What Canada Means to Me by Leslie Lanagan
I am pretty sure that if Canada weren’t around, it would have taken the world a lot longer to realize just how ignorant and egocentric Americans can be. For instance, when I was in high school, I dated a girl from Fort St. John. Her accent was so thick you could cut it with a knife, so when we would go out together, people would instantly start in on this conversation in various forms:
Random person: Hey, that’s a great accent. Where are you from?
Girl I Dated: I’m from Canada.
RP: Wow, I don’t think I’ve ever met someone from there. Do you guys have Christmas on the same day?
GID: (flustered) Of course.
RP: Say out and about. Come on, please!
GID: Ok, let’s just get this out of the way: Out, about, house, mouse, boot, shoe, sorry. Is there any other word in the English language that you’d like to hear me pronounce before we move on?
RP: End a sentence with “eh.” Come on, you know you want to.
GID: (turning to me) That guy is a total fucking hoser, eh?
As an American citizen, Canada also means easy access to good Cuban cigars and cheap European imports. Hey, let’s not forget that even though I am sympathetic to the fact that Canadians have little to no identity outside their own country, I am also one of the egocentric bastards they do their best to avoid.
Some days, I talk about how much I love Diet Coke and cartoons. I talk about that to not talk about the ways in which I’ve emotionally abused people because that’s “how I was raised…” Not by my parents, but by someone who became a parent figure because my mother checked out. You cannot convince me that she didn’t let it continue because she didn’t want to raise a lesbian daughter, and you cannot convince me that despite my mother’s warnings, I got hurt anyway. However, it is a truism that the more you tell a story, the more it loses power. Supergrover is coming to mind less and less because I realize there is nothing more I can do except turn my attention. She’s going to be whomever she wants to be, and I can’t help that. If she wanted to make anything better, she would have come to me long before now.
Funny thing about that, though. Once I said something healthy and would return her fire with healthy boundaries, she wasn’t interested in me. She’s not a narcissist, so she wasn’t using me as a dopamine source…. but she only knew how to answer rage with rage, so when I answered it with “I love your anger- let it out,” she was done. It let me know that we were always going to fight like that, because I did the work and she didn’t. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have had the willingness to walk away from someone I truly, deeply love. She doesn’t understand me, because she doesn’t understand her. When she says she wants to understand her, she will- and not before.
She also won’t learn it from me. My breaking her trust was the beginning of something for her, because we had to resolve our conflicts in order to go back to loving each other as rabidly as we do when other people hurt our friends. If she learns like I do, someone else will say something that triggers her back into my letters, and they will make sense to her in a way they didn’t before, because it’ll be the same thing I’ve been saying for 10 years, but it’ll look different coming from someone else because she’s not attaching her preconceived notions about me onto their words.
It’s something she will really love learning. She’s a people pleaser, but not at work. That’s because she can negotiate logical boundaries and gets lost with emotions. If she was in the military, she’d do very well because she’s a perfectionist. If she was a therapist, she’d burn out quick because in addition to being a boss, she’s also a people pleaser because her reality is just as fractured as mine was; I started my own therapy- my blog more than my psychologist. I am almost solely responsible for my recovery and not because I had a shitty doctor or anything. It’s that there is no possible way to recover from PTSD on one hour a week. Just like having diabetes, the doctor doesn’t hold your hand every day. You go in for appointments, but they can’t manage you every moment they’re not there.
I have been startlingly self aware since I was a child, but I didn’t have the confidence that I do now. I didn’t say things like:
That’s mean. Please rephrase.
I am too tired.
It’s not that I don’t love you, it’s that I need space. Please go away and leave me alone for X amount of time. We are all good, I’m overstimulated.
I am not lazy, I am autistic.
I am not flaky, I have ADHD.
AuDHD is a lifetime gig, and we’re going to have to manage it because otherwise, you’re going to get angry and resent me your whole life if you’re my partner.
If you cannot handle any of these things, you cannot be in my life.
I am responsible for my actions, but I’m not responsible for yours.
I am not “throwing things back in your face. You don’t want to admit that you do the same behavior repeatedly.”
The reason I drop people quickly is that I have good boundaries. If I’m not happy, it’s because I tolerated something I didn’t like, some times for years and years. I am using my own examples to bring insight to others on why they do what they do………..
laying out my own flaws and failures from the mundane to the insane…….knowing joy does that, too. If there’s anything I hope people say about me, it’s that it works.
Tell us about your first day at something — school, work, as a parent, etc.
Some of these are just vignettes in my memory.
On my first day of school, Lindsay was an infant and my mom was having a tough time letting me go to school all by myself when I was just as happy with Lindsay all day. She was the extrovert of the two of us- still is. I remember Mrs. Youngblood, and what she looked like down to the green smock she wore every day. My mother remembers that I walked over to a girl that looked sad and a few minutes later, she wasn’t sad because she thought she was going to be alone the whole time.
On my first day of work, I learned about shampoo. My first job was as a receptionist at Supercuts, and they saw me coming. My register never matched up at the end of the night, but at least the first day was a blast. I really enjoyed working there when people weren’t yelling at me about their hair, because I didn’t cut it. I swept, mopped, did laundry, and sampled everything. I was there when Tea Tree from Paul Mitchell hit the shelves. One of the first people to try American Crew (white people pomade). Those two things are my favorites today…… mostly because they don’t smell too girly.
Editor’s Note:
Apparently, this would not be a plus to a rando that just messaged me. He led with, “don’t take this the wrong way, but are you a woman?” I said, “how am I supposed to take it? I’m genderqueer and play around with gender a lot, but I’m genetically female.” He said, “I don’t even understand your answer.” I left it on “read,” because no matter what I respond, it’s going to lead to no good….. for him. Although I have to say that just because I’m not the one he’s looking for, some men love it. Some men have never had a queer girlfriend before and that in and of itself is novel, because they’re buying into something much bigger than themselves- or me. But the first step is always saying, “I bought rainbow boxers because I don’t know if I like them, but I knew you would.” I did. It made me feel incredibly loved and supported. Straight guys are getting there. Just give them another four hundred years.
The day of my first sermon, I was more nervous than I’d ever been in my life. I kept repeating something my dad said. He said it about other people, but here is what I heard. “I have big shoes to fill.” “I BROUGHT MY OWN SHOES.” I’d forgotten my cell phone that morning, subconsciously on purpose so I could focus. I was dating someone in the congregation and wanted to impress her, and I did…… but right as I was the most panicked and about to hyperventilate, someone came over and said the most beautiful words I’d ever heard. “Leslie……. it’s your dad.” He couldn’t get ahold of me on my cell, so he called the church- much to the parishioners’ astonishment. He gave me a pep talk and sent me out there.
The way I got to that time and place is not dictated by a “first day,” but first impressions. Here’s something I wrote about it in 2005 on “Clever Title Goes Here.” It’s what I remember from the day she invited me to visit her at school when HSPVA did a concert at UNT. I was 16 and so nervous I thought I was going to throw up everywhere, and now I still do, but for very different reasons.
Your stationary feels heavy in my hand, and I’m glad there are several pages to flip through. I wish you were next to me while I read your letters, because your handwriting is so unique that even after years of reading it, there are words I can’t figure out. I laugh to myself, glad that one of my strong points is context clues.
I’m glad grad school is going well. It’s fun to think of you as a student again, and kind of cool that one of the requirements of being a student is teaching younger singers. Do you have any good ones this term? Better yet, any REALLY bad ones?
HSPVA is tough shit. I’m on academic probation again because I’m in three performing groups and rarely have time to do homework… and when I do, it’s usually half-ass because I have four subjects all piling it on at once. I wish there were more hours in a day. I’ll probably be able to get back on track with English, Physical Science, and American History, but Algebra I is a wash. I’ll be lucky to get a 50 for the semester, never mind the six weeks. I think I’ll just drop it and take it again next year. My teacher is way over my head- she teaches at Rice for half a day, so I don’t think she has much experience with the mathematically illiterate. Well, maybe illiterate isn’t the right word… mathematically terrified is more like it.
Funny story- I had a HUGE trumpet solo in my last concert, and during the performance I came in a measure early. The ENTIRE band skipped that measure with me so that it wouldn’t look like I messed up. No harm was done, but Katrina looked at me like, “COUNT, YOU ASSHOLE!” Mr. Carter told the low brass that when he realized what was happening, he wanted to take them all out for a beer.
Church is so different without you.
We have a new scholarship singer, Stephanie. I wish the committee hadn’t chosen a soprano, because even though she’s good, her voice is so different from yours that it makes me a little teary-eyed, kind of like, “you’re replacing HER with THAT?” But the good part is that since Stephanie sits next to me, we’ve kind of gotten control of our sectional sound. Much less old lady vibrato. It’s not the same, but I suppose over time it’ll be tolerable.
I told my friend Amy that I’m gay today. I didn’t know she was Southern Baptist, and she dragged me into a practice room and started screaming at me. Then she ran to the bathroom. Her friend Laura told me that she was throwing up. I don’t know if I believe her or not. If I called Laura a bitch, I’m pretty sure it would insult bitches everywhere. How do you deal with all this shit? I’m so confused. I know I was wrong because I only told her that because I like her. I didn’t expect her to come down on my head over it.
The worst part is that after I told Amy, she told everyone else. I was sitting outside with my friends when Amy and her group of airheads walked up to me with their Bibles and started reading me all this crazy shit. I ran to my counselor about it, but she didn’t do a fuckin’ thing. She just asked me what I did to provoke it.
…….
I sat next to Scott on the bus ride up, my palms sweating with nervousness. It had been two years since we’d seen each other, and a person can change a lot in two years.
I didn’t recognize you at first, with your super long permed hair and painted nails. And not that I would ever hold it against someone for losing weight, but you hug different and I’m not sure I like it… as if these things are up to me, right?
Thanks for the compliment on the performance. I was a little nervous about the triple-tonguing section, but I think I got it out ok. At least I didn’t have to play really high and triple-tongue at the same time. It’s murder on my chops. Dude, a LOT of things have been murder on my chops lately… I was put dead last in chair tests this week. I must not be practicing enough, but it’s such a vicious cycle. If I play more, it really hurts- but the only way to get it to stop hurting is to play through the pain. Theresa, my trumpet teacher, says it’s an embouchure problem that will take weeks to correct. What a thing to say to a musician three weeks before a jury! Dan told me the same thing in eighth grade, but I didn’t listen to him then, either… it was three weeks before my ‘PVA audition. If only the world would stop spinning long enough so I could fix this thing.
Oh, and what’s up with calling jazz masturbatory? The only time I really feel lost in the music is when I get to write my own… and that’s all a solo is- taking the music in my mind and putting it out there. Maybe if I was a better player, I’d agree with you… but most of my solos sound like muddy water.
That could be my jazz name. Muddy Water Lanagan. It has a ring to it.
What are your favorite physical activities or exercises?
I have floppy muscles, it’s an inborn trait. Therefore, I have success with physical activity to a varying degree. I think if I had to pick a favorite thing to do outside it’s very simple. It’s walking Oliver, who is a dog. It’s better when Zac is with us because I don’t trust Oliver to behave with me the same way he would if Zac was there, plus hiking in the woods behind his house is intimidating if you don’t know the area well. I could get lost easily and because I’d be in the middle of the woods, my GPS would only say “continue to highlighted route” and I’d be shit out of luck.
Ask me how I know this.
I’m not sure what to call it, but Zac’s townhome development backs up to some sort of nature preserve, so I have hiking accessible to me that’s just as challenging as anything I used to do in the Columbia River Gorge . Zac likes to hike as much as I do, and because he does it more often, he’s more in shape than I am, too. Yes, I weigh less, but I do not work out my muscles in the same way he does. I don’t have to have a physical fitness test to stay employed by the Navy. However, I do stay slim and trim by not owning a car, and I have decided that because ride share exists, that should always be true of me. I don’t actually want to pay money for a car when I could pay money for a car and a driver, taking the risk of driving off me entirely. If we crash, it will never in a million years be my fault. It’s not the hassle, it’s that I know I don’t have 3D vision and driving is working without a net, knowingly putting other people in danger.
Nope.
I didn’t have a choice in Houston, which is why I moved back to DC. If you’re going to take public transportation, it’s a very good place to do so because we’re not huge like New York, yet we have all the same amenities. Maybe it’s because I lived here in my 20s, but New York frightens me in a way that DC doesn’t. I don’t know whether my sensory issues were out of control in Manhattan because it was that big a city or because I’d never been there before. I now know why writers live the way they live in movies when they’re set in New York. As soon as I got there, my nerves felt like they were on fire. As a writer, I was energized by it and also needed to find a way to mute it. Thus, writers in movies being hermits in New York. They’re trying to find a manageable amount of sensory input.
Writing is a sensitive area in terms of perception because you need enough stimulation to have something to say, energy that lets the words flow naturally….. but not so much that it makes your mind lose the train of thought that’s going to hit the New York Times. Fine-tuning that instinct takes time. When I am overwhelmed, I go back to zero. This means wired or Bluetooth headphones blaring white noise like TV snow or a jet engine (because people reading this are so young they might not know what TV snow is…..). Over time, you begin adding things.
I find that I function the best under a sensory deprivation diet, because it helps me to work faster when there’s less going on in the room. I cannot write if people are talking around me, and most of the time I cannot even write with music on. Today, my soundtrack is Zac typing in his office. I’m sitting in his room with my iPad and keyboard, he’s at his government computer because he’s neurodivergent as well. I wanted to cut down sensory issues for both of us.
The funniest thing that happened this morning is that I grabbed a pink coffee mug and Zac said something about it being his partner’s mug and her being picky about it. I said, “oh, no problem. If I’d known it was hers I would have respected the rule. You don’t have to apologize for having other partners or them having preferences.” He said, “I’m just sorry I couldn’t let you have a CIA mug.” I said, “that was a CIA mug? I didn’t know CIA came in girl shit.” I loved his laughter at that one.
Editor’s Note:
Every time I’ve read that line while writing/editing I’ve fallen over with laughter.
It’s not that I wouldn’t like pink CIA stuff, it’s that I’m a purist. I like the seal they already have on a navy background and think it looks classic…… There’s no need to change something that isn’t broken. I don’t need CIA feminized for me, because to me it’s already feminine. Look up all the department heads and count the number of women. It’s staggering.
The truth is that women my age are invisible, and that’s why we run the world. If you believe nothing else I say, believe that. There’s a reason female intelligence officers at CIA and in the military embed themselves in women’s groups all the time. Getting women together is a HUMINT ATM machine. Now I’m wondering what the equivalent of a “stitch and bitch” is in Arabic…………… You can tell a lot about a man’s mood, behavior, and actions by asking the women around him, because dollars to donuts he hasn’t heard what she has to say.
I love that my love of women in intelligence is making others excited as well. It caught on for Lindsay when we went to Zaytinya the other night, because I told her about a fabulous novel I’d read called “The Secrets We Kept,” by Lara Prescott. The premise is brilliant. In Russia, female spies were trained to use their sexuality to get what they wanted, so they were nicknamed “Swallows.” The United States does not do this, so the novel explores what would have happened if there had been an American “Swallows” program. It’s danger and intrigue, but also camaraderie. Spying is the world’s second oldest profession, and it bears a striking resemblance to the first.
My favorite female intelligence stories are “constant fish out of water.” At first, it’s being approached by CIA and getting trained…. hero origin story…. then it’s being fish out of water because CIA doesn’t work inside the US. My favorite part of the journey is from the approach to graduating from The Farm. The Spider-Man where you find out how he became that way is the best. I don’t make the rules.
I feel that though typing is not something one would classically think of as a physical activity, it is my origin story.
Especially since I can write it down.
Now it is time to transition into my day, because it always starts here at the keyboard and branches out. I have coffee to drink, news to read, and a trip across a city in which it snowed this morning. I am eager to get out and take pictures.
Taking pictures for me is a physical activity because I am one of those people. One of those who thinks nothing of holding other people up for a few seconds to be able to lay down in the middle of the sidewalk or whatever to get a shot. This is because I am willing to wait eons to make sure I’m bothering the least people. It’s really the only way I’ve shot the top of the steeple at Notre Dame.
It just occurred to me that creativity often feels like exercise. Creativity often feels like exhaustion once you’ve pulled ideas out of yourself. Both writing and taking pictures show your way of seeing the world, and especially because I don’t have 3D vision, the pictures I take look different than ones taken by people with stereopsis. It’s not a bad thing. It’s what makes me driven to take pictures. I want to see how I see the world by looking back at the way I shot it.
All writers search for themselves. In this blog, you can see it transparently. With novelists, you see it through archetype and allegory. A childhood is a writer’s credit balance, in the words of John le Carré. We start there and we excavate to a degree in which most people are uncomfortable.
And yet the physical activity of writing sustains us whether you’re comfortable or not.
Tonight is a Zac night, and we’re just hanging out. He’s doing some stuff for work in the morning, and I’m writing to you. Later, we’re planning on going out for dinner and watching “The Pigeon Tunnel.” I am so incredibly happy right now, because I can’t think of a better way to spend it than geeking out over my favorite boy, dog, and writer.
Because Zac is Naval intelligence, he was able to pick me up earlier than we usually get together (normally I go by Metro to his house, but Ft. Meade is a stone’s throw from Wire Ave. It’s not that Zac wouldn’t come to me, it’s that I have a lot of housemates and he doesn’t. Zac has a bigger social battery than I do, but we both like what we’re doing now…. I didn’t even know there was a term for it, but it’s “parallel play.” He’s working now, but he’s writing for fun later. We’ll keep doing this until we get hungry. Zac was given a fiction challenge. Genre is comedy, setting is a car wash, and the word he has to work in is “interest.” You cannot imagine the places my mind went when I heard those three things.
Having the setting be in a car wash was a trigger into something great. We started riffing off each other. I said that for me right now, when I hear that word I hear “autism” and “special interest,” so mine would be about a kid whose special interest was car washes and it would be a whole comedic essay on soaps, etc.
Then, I thought of something brilliant. Zac wanted to do something with robots, and I thought, “what if the robots were the car wash?” Like, the brush arm is talking to the sprayer or whatever. So, Zac comes up with this whole dystopian landscape like Fallout 3 where the cars don’t realize all the humans are gone.
I said, “if you’re going to go there, make sure that one of the cars is a hearse. I think it would be hilarious and tragic that he doesn’t know his services are no longer needed. Every day he gets dressed up, anyway.”
So, Zac starts thinking it over and I’m checking out at Safeway- thank God we were held up so long in line because we got a chance to flesh this out, ironically. He says that he thinks he wants it to be like a bartender and some customers. He has decided the hearse will be “Frank,”and I had a small meltdown in which I was all like, “awwww, you used my idea” and I straight up cried as I held up my Apple Watch.
We have to go, and as we’re walking out Zac says something and I have blipped since then, but the end was “….and after all, aren’t we all hearses in the end?” More tears, but good ones. I said something like, “God damn, Zac…. that was a good line.” He became very impressed with himself and he should be. This is why we work so well as a couple. We’d drive each other up the wall if we lived together because two writers in one house just doesn’t work. It’s a whole basket of crazy. So, I feel like I live this great life in my own little world in some ways, and in others I look like anyone else trying to have a good time………..
What positive events have taken place in your life over the past year?
This year I started taking care of me for the first time in my life, ever. People who learn a little bit about boundaries install them with spikes, because they don’t know balancing language yet. So many, many times have I been fed this year on a meager emotional diet, because someone would cross a boundary and alarm I’d never had went off. There has never been anything loud enough in my mind to say that my opinions are valid, because I get intimidated and fold easily………………… in person.
On paper, I am not anticipating someone else’s reactions, so I come across as judgmental when I actually want your input/correction, I’m not dictating to you what our situation might be. My work to do is to learn how to control my autistic brain symptoms, like “I have explained this six times and it hasn’t resulted in any change at all, so that means I only have to explain it ten more ways and we’re golden.” I will absolutely argue with a signpost……… in text. If a waitress served me soup with glass shards, I’d be so mad I’d only leave a 20% tip.
I talk a lot about the first blush of excitement on both ends at Supergrover and I meeting each other, and it’s those memories I focus on when I feel the kind of desperation you absolutely will not admit to anyone, I am fine……… meanwhile, your eyes are rolling out of your head because you’ve thought I was an idiot about it for months why has this taken so long dear Jesus get a life…….. and actually, that’s not true at all. It’s how it feels to write out pain. It doesn’t change all at once. It changes a little every day.
I do not have any interest in telling our story as if it is our facts. No, they are only my facts, and I am a hundred percent certain that our stories are different, but I will never know to what degree. I’ve guessed at the extremes and the middle and been wrong every single time. I just don’t do that anymore. I don’t have it in me. I cannot drag a relationship kicking and screaming into the light when I only own one half…… and if it sounds like I’m holding myself up as some kind of beacon, that’s not it at all.
We fucked each other up nine years ago. Our relationship shouldn’t be so dramatic and toxic all the time. It’s not good for either one of us as we both sound like Dorothy Sbornak and Ouiser Boudreaux in text. We are both first children. We fight until someone is bleeding, because we are not used to losing…….. and I’m laughing about it now, but believe me when I say I have seen Oppenheimer and I didn’t even know it was a movie until recently.
I am just as filled with rage as she is. We’re The Holy and the Moly because one day I’m the bomb and she’s the detonator……….. and then she’s got the big red button. We installed them in each other quickly and use them to great effect. After we fight, I will say “this is what hurt.” She won’t. She says, “I was licking my wounds.” I wish that just once this year she could have seen my face when I read it. If there are moments that make me want to reach through her phone and hug her, it’s lines like that.
Autistic people are not here to be nice, because we do not have all the social masks involved in sensitive situations. I used to be very, very practiced at it, but I’m not in front of parishioners all the time anymore. As I’ve been away from being a preacher’s kid, it has been a slow, painstaking process to unmask. Everyone does the public/private thing to a degree. There is a truly marked difference in “show mode” and “autism.” Most people are trying to hide their emotions a little bit, certainly. No one wants to ugly cry if Oprah’s not handing out Beetles. Autistic people cannot regulate their emotions like neurotypical people, and we can catalogue their behaviors by the hundreds, but what we cannot do is replicate them. This is because the reason we thought you had the reaction was different than why you actually had it.
Impasses are frequent because “I just don’t get it,” and I have empathy for how tiresome that is. I really do. That’s because if your’e exhausted, you’ve experienced a few hours of my symptoms and I live this way. Not said to shame you, just to say “I need empathy here.” There are other areas in which I’m stronger than my friends and we trade off….. no one is ever getting the short end of the stick……
And unfortunately, reminding Supergrover of that didn’t go over so well because I don’t think she was picking up what I was putting down. She told me several times some version of “why do you think it’s everyone else’s job to fix you?” First of all, that’s a huge red flag. If you tell someone up front that you have a disability like bipolar or whatever and that’s what they say, that’s not the healthiest response ever. The reason I ask people for help is that they’re the first person to ask me. In this one case, the tables were turned where I needed help first….. so, of course it felt like I “was the one who always needed help.” But it’s 10 years later and those words just don’t hit the same way anymore. Healthy people do not shut you down every time you want to have a dialogue. What would have been perfectly healthy is just to walk away for both of us, and yet neither of us did it. I don’t think we meant to be in a relationship this crazy for 10 years, but those tickets are non-refundable.
In some ways, I felt like it was really hard work and deservedly so. Most friendships like ours end quickly because of who we are jointly and severally. I am sure this is conjecture, but it seems to be that the key words are “friendships like ours.” What I see as trying for connection, she sees as “telling her every bad thing she’s ever done.” Sometimes when my sensory environment is turned up to hell, I do come across like I’m nitpicking. Because it’s all text, she can’t hear my tone of voice and she doesn’t ask for any clarification. So, whether I intended to provoke ire or not, I will have done it.
I have never wanted that for her, and I had to learn not to want that for me. I stepped all over her boundaries because that’s how it works in my world. If you troll someone, they’ll leave you alone. We just both met our match and wrote checks with our mouths that our asses couldn’t cash. I will never be as strident as she is in person. She will never be as over emotional as me in text……………… but not because she’s not capable of it.
She’s my fairy tale author girl. As in, not the author of my fairy tale but the writer friend I have who is interested in creating fairy tales for actual children. I keep telling her that “50 Shades of Gray” was so terrible I didn’t even read the whole first page, but it did prove to me that either one of us was capable of writing a book on our phones while using public transportation. I have more time in a day to dedicate to it, but I will never write something akin to the main quest of Skyrim, and she could. I don’t know what her future holds, but I do know that if she wrote a book, she’d sell a copy.
What I know is that if I keep talking, one of two things will happen. The first is that repetition gives the story less power. How do I know it has less power? When I can write essays like this and I don’t end up sobbing so hard I can’t see what I’m writing anymore. There’s so much to cry about, really, that doesn’t have anything to do with her. It’s universal. You lose someone significant in your life, and you adjust- but I do not know anyone who is downright happy about it.
It would also be easier to focus on this prompt at the end of the month than it is right this moment. Finnish Independence Day is always craptastic because it’s trying to replace the parts of my heart that are black with the lights and music of Helsinki. Finlandia, yes, but also Finlandia conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen. The black parts of your heart will respond to music if you let them.
That’s it. That’s the thing I’ve learned this year. The black parts of my heart will respond to music when I let them. This means that I can author the destruction of someone I 100% regret having to cut out of my life because I didn’t have any other choice. I could no longer make decisions about the health of the relationship based on what only I thought, because what happened on a large scale a few months ago was happening all the time in conversation.
We hadn’t talked for a few months, so she was reading me without responding….. months of posts in which we weren’t checking the stories we were telling ourselves, and that always feels like “WE WERE ON A BREAK.” That’s what makes our bond cemented for life. She has editorial control and I’ve told her that. She also cannot stop herself from reading because she thinks that I’m out to get her……. or does she? Because she says it frequently and then she’ll take a line I thought about for an hour, just slaved over to capture her perfectly, and send it to me with a “thank you for this.”
The main reason this whole thing is important to me is that I have never been this person before. I wouldn’t be as safe and secure in who I am now if she hadn’t been sure of me first.
What makes her unique in my life is that she managed to get past all the barriers I’d set up. All the social masking that didn’t make me look like an alien, all the catering I do to other people to make sure everyone is focusing on having a good time and not the fact that I am standing here, damaged, in a corner because I don’t want to get my crazy spatter on you. I have never been that person on the outside. Why I don’t always come off as depressed, anxious, ADHD, or autistic. It’s all just a bunch of spaghetti code in there.
One day I’ll reach “eof,” and I know it’ll compile……………….. even when there are so many lines I wish I could have commented out. But that’s the thing, right? The first step to finding things that do serve you is letting go of the things that don’t. I wish I could say a lot of good things happened this year, and I know they did in small measures. But mostly this year was about learning to deal with pain and rage. How much I’d social masked away all of those feelings as a child determined not that my emotions were bottled, but how many six-packs.
In a lot of ways, all my social masks failed at once, and then I didn’t know who I was anymore. I had to build myself back up from 12 on, adjusting to new emotions that weren’t there before and mapping out the dead spots. If you have not done this in yourself, it is backbreaking emotional work and depression/anxiety medication make it easier, not easy.
This year I’ve felt infantilized more and bothered less. That is because I do not have a world-ending autistic meltdown if someone doesn’t like me. I just find out quickly who my people are in those cases and move on, because I’m past the point in my life where I want to justify anything to anyone, because I have enough belief in myself to know that I have limitations and to ask for help when I need it. People rush to parent the people with mental processing differences and psychiatric illness, and I have to anticipate it. I have to deal with it, because there’s nowhere I won’t. That’s a social mask I do have, though, because it feels very much like apologizing for your existence because you’re queer or physically disabled.
The hard part is being a realist without being too negative because I can control my environment, but only to a point. I do not like telling people I’m a Christian anymore because it invariably ends up being an image of me in their heads that just doesn’t compute. Either I’m a bad Christian because my exegesis is bad and God didn’t really mean all that stuff about inclusivity, helpfully written right there in the RED LETTERS……………… or their God is about the letter of the law and not the spirit; homosexuality does not occur in most, if not all animal populations……. it is a demon to which I am solely responsible for its care and feeding. If I just stopped queer behavior, I’d stop being queer.
Gay men are widely accepted as priests in the Catholic Church because especially in the third world, that’s where you go not to get bullied. Most families know when they’ve got a priest on their hands by kindergarten. Please know that this is in no way trying to be shady. Gay men are pushed toward being priests because of their sensitive/more effeminate natures, because then their families don’t even have to meet the boyfriend. They’ve been eating at his table for years.
I’m just trying to let myself evolve, and thinking about systemic issues makes me happier than thinking about my own progress or lack of it, because I have so much that’s up in the air and little that’s solid.
That’s just how it is in a rebuilding year. Next year might be one, too, but this is not to be taken lightly. I cannot be my authentic self until all the pieces are together, or at the very least, scattered on the table in front of me.
Pieces, for me, are thought fragments. The most positive thing in the world that happened to me this year, above all else, was that in January of course I knew I’d found a flawless diamond in my beautiful girl……………… but by December, I realized she had, too.
Kevin, who is a giraffe, used to live at the DC zoo. I do not know when he moved, but I do know that he has. The last time I went to the National Zoo, the keepers told me they’d gotten rid of all their giraffes…. like the entire enclosure is now something else. I was heartbroken, because I went to the zoo that day to get a picture of Kevin for you guys, actually. I believe I brought back pictures of a tiny bear instead.
Here’s a shot I took last night I love- it’s of the kitchen at Zaytinya.
I got to the restaurant a little early, so I grabbed this shot while I was sitting at the edge of the bar and I thought no one was looking. The caption on Facebook is “you have no idea how much I feel this picture in my muscles.”
There were no wild animals except Lindsay and me involved, and we are not actually that wild anymore….. not that we ever really were to begin with. Lindsay was in a couple of rock bands before she went into politics, but that’s about the extent of it. I’ve been 46 since I was nine. We had some drinks and caught up, and didn’t actually talk about why I wanted to talk to her in the first place because we had a thousand topics to cover and there’s always the phone.
In some ways, I wish Lindsay’s dinner hadn’t gotten moved to last night, because it would have been fun to spend Finnish Independence Day with her. It’s only 0730, and I’m trying to make the best of it. Finnish Independence Day is joyous….. for the Finns, and I feel like I’m stealing it for myself through the cunning use of YouTube. It’s a thing I came up with when I didn’t want a date to be a thing anymore, so I don’t acknowledge it out loud.
But I can say to Bryn later, “now that Finnish Independence Day is over, we can start decorating for Christmas” and she will get the most evil smirk on her face. God, I love that woman. Mostly because she’d be the only one in my life to know exactly how far back that paraphrase goes. Because, you see, she does not have to paraphrase. The reason I love Bryn is that I never need to paraphrase anything, because if I’d bother, she would say the thing I was trying to say the whole way through. It’s good to have a friend who’s as no-bullshit as I am, from the same viewpoint. It’s one thing to listen and shut someone down. It’s quite another to open up to someone and having them say “speak more to that.”
Wait a minute. Speak more? No one ever tells me that. 😉
With Bryn it’s always “how dare you make me feel my feelings.” And it feels so much better than keeping everything in. We lost a mutual friend recently (that I knew peripherally, but she and the rest of her family knew very, very well) and I hope that I am being respectful of her space, and also holding space for her. I will check in later, but I don’t hover when people are in grief because I tended to retreat. Not everyone is like that, but I do what I know. What I know is that the most powerful thing I can do is listen. I also know that people need support in grief longer than society usually allows. So, I’ll keep checking back in on her, but I also recognize not to smother mother, either. 😉
Maybe later today, I’ll catch her curled up with Pippi, who is a dog.
Leslie: Could you call me? Lindsay: Do you just want to do dinner tomorrow night? Leslie: This is great. I didn’t even know you were in town, but even for a call, you’re in the right time zone. Lindsay: My dinner got moved to tomorrow night. Zaytinya at 6:00?
Wait, wait, wait…… you mean I don’t even have to wait six hours to see you? This is the best part of ADHD ever. I live for this. Of course I can drop everything. Please. Anything else on my radar is now completely unimportant. As of right now, I’m just sitting here chewing my fingernails and keeping busy until the alarm goes off to get on the bus. Zaytinya is also one of my favorite places to go because it only takes 40 minutes and is located three minutes’ worth of walking from the Gallery Place/Chinatown Metro stop.
My sister works in DC, but she doesn’t live here. Therefore, sometimes if I time it right, I get these text messages full of joy because it’s an outing I didn’t expect, and it’s at “our Spanish Flower.” If I dwell on it, I’ll get misty-eyed. Spanish Flower(s- no one called it Spanish Flowers because Eli, the owner, told us that he named it after Mary, his wife, THE Spanish Flower.) It then spread to eating there three or four times a week. Since Lindsay and I both like finding a thing and exploring it intimately, we go to Zaytinya nearly every time she’s here. We have branched out a few times, like going to Union Stage to see Charlotte Cardin (which lets me know exactly what I should wear tonight…. Lindsay bought me a football jersey with Charlotte’s “number” on it- her album 99 Nights….. I love how she just rolls with my eclectic choice in clothing….. She also got me a hoodie with matching sneakers….. FANCY.). We have also been to that restaurant on the end of the pier where Union Stage is, which Lindsay had been to before and vetted.
It’s what’s nice about Lindsay working here- she has been to nearly every place we try with other lobbyists or Congresspeople. If I had to describe Lindsay’s life in one sentence, it’s taking people out to eat. She sits around, listens to people, and talks about stuff….. so that when she’s older, she can “sit around, smoke cigars, and own stuff.” That is an old, old joke because we used to live in a very tony suburb, and Lindsay went to a friend’s house that happened to have an elevator. My dad asked her what the friend’s parents did to have an elevator, and Lindsay said, “I don’t know. I think they sit around, smoke cigars, and own stuff.” We have repeated that phrase as the ultimate profession since then- probably 25 years.
It’s an unusual day for me, because I spent yesterday panicking about how I was going to get my Lamictal today, because I was completely out. I thought I was going to have to go to urgent care if I couldn’t get a doctor’s appointment today, because at urgent care I could have explained that I can’t get ahold of my doctor and they would have given me a month’s refill. But this morning, I woke up to a text message saying my medication was ready. I do not know how that happened, because on CVS’s web site it said that it was going to have to contact my doctor for a new prescription, and that can take days.
If you are completely out of a medication that affects your brain, you cannot skip a day. The effects are different on each person, but when I go without my medication, my brain starts making sounds akin to the Emergency Broadcast System, a minor second blaring in my head and I just want to stop the pain at any, and I mean any cost. Doesn’t have a thing to do with how I’m feeling. It’s that the pain is that bad. So, I’m vigilant about getting all my meds refilled as fast as possible, and prefer the Amazon pharmacy because they’ll give me three months’ worth of maintenance medication at a time, and I only need to go to the doctor for controlled prescriptions like Klonopin and Adderrall. I need the Klonopin, but I do not need the Adderrall all the time. I take drug holidays from it because even though it works on my mind, my body feels strung out and weak from all that stimulation….. Again, trading physical health for mental. Your body is keyed up and exhausted while your mind is quiet………. and you can’t really tell that your body is keyed up because your mind is quiet.
You quickly get a benefit, and after about two weeks of your body screaming, you want off of it again. I am also starting to feel that because my autism wasn’t caught, I am only treating my ADHD…. and that doesn’t work on autism. So, I’m taking ADHD medication and still feeling like crap because the same symptoms overlap with autism and therefore, don’t go away with ADHD medication. At this point, I am doing well on Sudafed and caffeine, so I might want to keep it that way. If I can get the same effect just by keeping my nose clear and having a cup of coffee or a 100mg energy drink in the morning, then another dose and small energy drink/cup of coffee at noon, it controls my symptoms for the whole day….. and I’m only on the smallest dose of workable stimulants and not beating myself to death with them.
As I have said before, there is a LARGE jump between coffee/Sudafed and Adderrall. I do not suggest using Adderrall long-term. It just affects my muscles, bones, and teeth too much. However, I do not recommend never going on Adderrall at all. You need to know what controlled symptoms feel like so you can replicate it….. but of course, I’m not talking to everyone. I’m talking to everyone who thinks “Driven to Distraction” is really about them….. and them only, because everyone feels that their problems are unique. Like, if you read “Driven to Distraction” and it doesn’t come across as a personal attack, you don’t need Adderrall. 😛
“Driven to Distraction” is the seminal work on ADHD, the Bible for therapists and psychiatrists on ADHD….. every bit as important a work as “One L” for law students and “Intern” by Doctor X is for med students. Speaking of med students, “Intern” is out of print, but you need to get a copy pronto. See also “Five Patients” by Michael Chrichton. Nothing will prepare you better for life in the hospital than reading about someone who went to, I think, Harvard in the 70s….. because nothing about hospital politics has changed in a hundred years……….. see also “Scrubs,” which my stepmother has said is the only accurate show about medicine ever on TV. She noped out of ER during the pilot because there was an X-ray upside down and backwards.
Because I know how the sausage is made in medicine, I do not suffer fools gladly and yet I do because I do not want to exhibit “drug seeking behavior.” It is a balance of knowing my shit and not seeming “demanding.” I swear to Christ, you will not meet anyone as self-aware as me. If I tell you I’m panicking and absolutely need more Klonopin than normal, you can take that check to the bank and cash it. But what you can’t do is get a doctor to stand in your body and feel it. Feel the panic that you do. Feel the nausea that’s going to make you throw up if your brain chemicals don’t “get right with God.” What you cannot do is convince a doctor you have ADHD if your symptoms are under control that day.
Please take it with a grain of salt if you’re in that position. These people see genuine DSB all day long and twice on Sundays. I had a patient back in my MA days who, before they started tracking controlled medications nationally, would go to six different doctors in a day for Valium, and she was one patient of many who had the same idea. So, I don’t push my doctors hard on anything, ever, because that’s the shortest way to cut yourself out of getting narcotics, benzos, and methamphetamines when you’re actually hard up. For instance, knowing what I need ahead of time and being able to explain, “okay…. here’s what I’m dealing with. You make the call, but here’s what I suggest based on what my previous doctors have done and it worked.”
You do not, for instance, ask for a prescription for those drugs and then come in halfway through the month and say you need more, or that you need your dose upped because either you’ve already run through the first prescription, or the doctor doesn’t believe that you actually need your dose upped, you’re just saying that because you’ve run out. There is no chance that a doctor is going to believe that you still have all the pills at home unless you bring them to the appointment.
I had another patient in my MA days that bought a safe for his house, because he noticed that when he didn’t keep his meds locked up, for some unknown reason they went missing. You have to watch for other people in your house exhibiting drug seeking behavior as well as watching it in yourself. I’ll give you a for-instance. If I have Adderrall and I’m going to Zac’s, I keep maybe two pills on me. That way, if my bag gets stolen or the pills do, I have only lost two pills, not my entire prescription. Same with Klonopin. Also, it’s harder to tell that they’re controlled substances when they’re not in a labeled bottle.
You have to know the difference between “I’m doing better” and “I’m fried all day” as well. Because the point of those drugs is to make you feel better, not to numb you out all the time. There are just certain situations that make me more anxious than others. For instance, going with my sister to a familiar restaurant would not cause me as much anxiety as going to a party in which I knew absolutely no one. I’m always afraid that I will find one person and hang onto them like a sloth because I’m intimidated. Luckily, I seem to hang with people who also do this…. because we’re the kind of people who seek out “the introverts’ recharging station” at any large gathering, anyway.
This is generally the kitchen, btw. If you’re looking for the introverts, they’ve either gone to the bathroom or to the room where the least people are gathered so they can hear themselves think. Introverts do not do well in situations where they can’t hear themselves think, because they’re more drawn to their inner monologues than they are anyone else’s. But at the same time, I’m an empath and can feel others’ emotions, and can’t seem to stay out of the heavy conversations because I’m built to hear them.
As I have said before, I do not have the ability to protect my mind, so I carry a lot of pain that’s not mine. I have clinical separation when someone is bleeding, but not when they’re crying. My dad said something to me that’s stuck with me since he said it- which was at least 30 years ago. He said that one of the reasons he left being a pastor is that he was exhausted at only being able to pray for people and not help them concretely. It’s exactly why I would have ended up in medical school if the fates had thrown me the kind of autism that understands STEM completely. Like, that’s a whole thing with me. If I could be mad at a deity for the roll of the dice, it would be having the kind of autism that makes me lost to the rest of the world, inside my head and protective of my environment. If my parents hadn’t both been dedicated to helping me physically and pulling me out of my own thought processes, I would have sat in my room forever, and I know this about myself.
I discovered my ability to take on others’ pain to an enormous degree when I was a toddler, and because I’m an INFJ, I have a deep inner landscape where I can get lost- easier than feeling every emotion in the room and bleeding out until I am full of rage at my sensory environment. When I am in meltdown, it is not pretty……. and you only learn who your real friends are when you stop social masking and start working without a net….. when you are so overwhelmed with your own symptoms that any change in your environment sends you into a place where you cannot take in any more. Rage is about putting up boundaries, a cry for help when it doesn’t sound like it.
Everything about autistic rage is a cry for help because we don’t have the words to express something clearly when social masks fail. We say things wrong and others focus on how we’ve said something vs. what we’ve said. If we could have just gotten the words right, our problems would be valid. We learn over time that there is no tone we can take that will make you see that our problems are valid, because we adjust and the answer is still no, because you’re still rightfully hurt over what we’ve said previously and you’re focusing on it. We are not narcissists or borderline. We are in hell, and we are sorry.
The hard truth is that many people are diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder or Borderline Personality Disorder because they’re female and “hysterical.” Many people aren’t because they’re male and their opinion is expected to sound sort of arrogant all the time. Non-binary people get the worst of it, because sometimes it is missed for either or both reasons. I also think ASD is under-diagnosed and ADHD is over-diagnosed in both sexes because of “bad behavior” in boys and introverted behavior in women…. not that ADHD isn’t valid. It’s that sometimes ADHD medication doesn’t work and that’s because the symptoms overlap just enough for doctors to be allowed to miss it, frankly. I am not angry that my psychiatrist in college missed it, because I have watched hours and hours of video on YouTube where psychologists talk about the neurodivergent brain, and ADHD is always lumped together with Autism Spectrum Disorder because it’s a comorbidity in something like 80% of ASD cases….. also why there is argument in combining ADHD and Autism as one diagnosis, that ADHD is part of the autism spectrum, not outside it.
Where ADHD and Autism differ is that there is not such a pull to get lost inside yourself because you need so much stimulation, and the need changes frequently. ADHD makes you a daredevil, autism makes you need quiet and a lot of it. I vacillate between those two things, but autism wins 99% of the time. That means actively avoiding relationships because I get tired of trying to communicate and it just not working the way I thought it would. I develop selective mutism and agoraphobia because I am trying to create a secure environment again….. and once I find it, it’s hard to pull myself out. I feel like the more I explain that this is part of my disability, the less my people will take it personally. Selective mutism and unwillingness to change my environment doesn’t necessarily come from conflict with people close to me. If I go out to, say, pick up a prescription and the experience is taxing, I will retreat for days to fill my social battery………
Again getting lost in my own world because it’s not as scary there.
Tonight, though, I’m going to a great restaurant with the world’s greatest person.
I can get used to any schedule except being awake all night long. Either I go to bed early and rise with the sun, or I go to bed around 0300-0400 and sleep until noon. That was the schedule that worked best when I was in the kitchen, because I’d get home around 11:00 PM, and could spend my “evening” writing. I think it made me a better cook than in the days when Dana and I would go out after work, because 1) when I wasn’t in the kitchen, I was somewhere far, far away 2) I was never hung over, so I picked up all the shifts due to brown bottle flu and was probably the highest paid employee and not because of salary.
Yes, I had limitations. That doesn’t matter when you just need a body, and the one scheduled is less functional than me. I worked six and seven days a week to keep busy; my disability kept me from perfection and struggled with excellence. At no time did it mean I got less hours, because in a kitchen everyone works long hours and compete with it. If I worked 50 hours, I was lazy ’cause you worked 60. It wasn’t just keeping busy, though. The neurodivergent brain does not know what to do in the absence of structure, and I had no idea what to do with time off. If I got out of the rhythm, it was harder to do it again….. disorienting and exhausting, again trading mental health for physical.
I was a permanently exhausted pigeon, but also very happy. Supergrover was a million miles away (which is what we in MD call “Virginia”), which meant that when I wasn’t at work, I wasn’t the same person. I very much had the feeling of the protagonist in Avatar, because of my physical disability and how all of those barriers were taken away on the world of Pandora. It was amazing learning to speak Na’avi, and if there’s anything I will miss about our communications the most, it would be the ones in which I had to say, “I know you’re busy, so is it “‘wink and nod,’ ’emphatic fist shake,’ or “slow finger wag?'” With Bryn, I could shorten this to “Borum it,” because we all picked it up imitating Matt, Bryn’s older brother. That day, it was “SFW.” Duly noted, beautiful girl. 😉
I also feel that Supergrover and I came to the same impasse I’ve come to with every friend I’ve had, which started with the woman who emotionally abused me- it was her deflection tactic….. “why do you think I don’t tell you anything? You remember it.” I’m a monotropic thinker, human relationships are my special interest, and I basically memorize most of what I’ve read because if it’s not a special interest, you love it a weird amount. I was also completely honest with Supergrover. If you do this, you won’t become “my friend.” I’m an INFJ. That means if we’re going to be close, you’ll be a companion, not just a friend. My personality profile says I only have one or two friends at a time, and I love them deeply. Just unreasonably, and that will always be true of people like Zac and Bryn. If Supergrover wants her spot, it’ll always be open because of the hard out, and as you could see yesterday, I’m not happy about the fact that she is diametrically opposed to this now. That’s because for everything in which I can’t walk away, I understand the assignment and she doesn’t. That when she told me what she did, it would cement our bond for life and we couldn’t be careless with it. So, in short, she’s terrified that I remember everything and call her on it so we can stay healthy.
I know this pattern so well. Your idea of love is so fucked up that you don’t recognize it when people are willing to change their behavior to something healthy, because you don’t recognize it as love. I have so much empathy for her, but it’s time to stop caring if she is no longer willing to engage, because I cannot go without an emotional depth she doesn’t have and not because it’s not inside her. It’s the things she won’t acknowledge to herself, and therefore can’t help me. I know I’ve said this before, probably many times, but watching all these videos about CPTSD and how it rewires you got me to see that Supergrover and I were both extremely damaged people who rushed into a deep relationship before we really got to know each other……….. except did we? I saw the incompatibility within weeks. She is not built to hang with an INFJ, and most people just frankly aren’t. We demand going to a rich emotional place because we’ve discovered it in ourselves and want to drag our friends toward “enlightenment.”
What is stopping me from becoming someone like Martha Beck (interestingly enough, also neurodivergent, queer, and poly) is realizing that’s not really how INFJ works for someone who’s already introverted. I can write about this stuff, but with my processing disorders I am just not as fluid as a public speaker. I can and have to turn on the afterburners when I preach, but I still do not feel that I can process information and speak at the same time.
I thought yesterday about why I was able to transcribe Dr. Wall’s Con Law class when I hadn’t been able to do that before. It was the laptop, entirely. This absolutely is an accommodating for neurodivergetnt kids, and I will take any teacher to the mat over it that I possibly can. Because I’m not Gen Z, I would encourage them to let neurodivergent kids keep their phones. If you don’t have an app to let them respond, then have the kids put their phones in airplane mode so they can use their notepads. Otherwise, if you don’t give the kids laptops, they are in the position of having to buy a second device…… when they are probably already used to the tactile experience of typing on their phones, just like I am the most comfortable at the keyboard.
When I said I was “going to class on my own,” I did not mean that I was going to class while I was in it. I used hyperfocus to drown out everything in the room so that I could hear a voice without listening to it, getting things down without comprehending it….. just like I do with my blog. Stream-of-consciousness is basically “first draft, get it all out.” Therefore, sometimes I’m quicker at crafting beautiful sentences than others. Sometimes, it’s crap you have to wade through to get to the good stuff, because that’s how I work. I start at one point and dive, ending up at another. Overthinking makes me a good writer, because while I’m getting the words out, I am not even looking at the screen. I am staring off into space, touch typing as I think about the next sentence rather than the one I’m currently typing. My brain moves just the right amount faster than my fingers, therefore my typing is not lagging behind because I’m three sentences ahead in my mind rather than just one.
An editor at a Canadian newspaper, Janie, told me that once all this was edited, I’d be surprised what I’d written. That made my confidence shoot up, because I think I’m only writing about what I know- me and how I interact with others, and my reactions to their reactions….. and no hearsay. I don’t say “one of my friends told me that Bryn…..” because I can’t verify that it’s true. Just a for-instance, Supergrover or Bryn could tell me that Dave or Michael did something. I would not write about it unless I could verify that what Michael or Dave said was accurate, because then it’s not something that happened to me. It’s someone else’s story.
For instance, I know it like the back of my hand that even if Supergrover walks away thinking I’m the meanest person on earth, it doesn’t mean I didn’t get the story I wanted and we’re not all good. It means that I will take our memories away and be okay with not creating new ones.
Because I think of Supergrover this way, it is very, very hard to switch to past tense, but I know for sure that will come with time if she doesn’t show back up eventually. It will hurt, it already hurts, but yet it is also not my problem anymore. I have explained it to the best of my ability without so much input from anyone else because I don’t talk about our relationship in person and I don’t talk to her about it, either. It’s not for lack of trying. It’s all due to avoidance on her part; it doesn’t matter why. She’s doing what’s best for her, and I’m doing what’s best for me. I hope that she’s angry AF, because it’s the one thing that will lead her to realize that there is a life beyond walking in anger all the time.
I give her so much latitude because of her job. I know that there are times when she’s not able to respond for very good reason and not because I’ve said something wrong. But when she does reply, it’s to point out everything I’ve said that’s wrong, when it’s not my focus at all. My focus is on a healthy relationship, cleaning up a toxic mess that just doesn’t need to be there. I also have the right to step away when I cannot get any compromise on anything ever. At that point, I just need to stop caring, and I can’t……. also for good reason.
So, I’m in a bad way over it, but writing it out helps. It also helps that this is the only relationship that I have that’s in turmoil, so I don’t have to think about it all the time and I have plenty of love in my life that’s healthy in the extreme. It’s all about using my ADHD to change my focus, but it doesn’t mean that a monotropic thought process drops off the radar…… again, do you have a special interest if you don’t just love it a weird amount?
I would think it was manipulation if it wasn’t a learned behavior from childhood. When I said that I wanted that bubble with an older woman and I got it when I was 12 by trying for it since I was born, it’s not because I was sexualized early or anything like that. It’s because adults treated me like a real person.
As a 16-year-old preacher’s kid who’d had many years of running behavioral heuristics on 200-1500 people at a time, the problems of my friends felt juvenile and pedestrian. I didn’t connect with anything they said, because it wasn’t monster dramatic and that’s what I was used to; people call pastors during the worst moments of their lives, and I actively tried to listen in to everything……….. and those times I even understood the language.
Again, I don’t process voices well, so those conversations would repeat in my head ad nauseam, special interest engaged, because there were two operations at play. The first is hearing something without context so that you can regurgitate it later by rote, even if you don’t understand it. The second operation is picking up what’s neurotypical and what’s not, so a lot of my social masking comes from the PTSD that belonged to other people, because those were the conversations I heard. Therefore, in my mind, it was completely normal to have wild emotional swings all the time and to live in that kind of pressure cooker. It’s what makes me able to work with cooks.
You can do everything by hearing and not taking it in, because you hear something, and then you own it. You don’t need to ask for clarification because there isn’t any, just get it done as quickly as possible. You are also, unless you’re on plating, only responsible for one part of a dish. A good example is a steak salad. Grill does the steak, pantry does the salad. I hand you the finished steak to slice over the salad, I am not in charge of presentation. Even if you have six burgers at once, it’s plenty of time to get all six setups and servings of fries done.
Quick, gotta move fast, gotta perform miracles. Gee willikers, Dre, holy bat syllables! Look at all the bullshit that goes on in Gotham! When I’m gone, time to get rid of these rap criminals……
If SCOTUS can quote Eminem, so can I. Line cooks are absolutely rap criminals. 😉
When you work in a kitchen, it’s the same feel as working in a church. Some of the best conversations I’ve had in a church came from cooking together for a pot luck after the service, or the traditional Easter brunch (which Dana and I did with another line cook one year and the three of us absolutely destroyed it…. that’s good, by the way. Just like comics, we bomb and we kill…… nightly.).
On Easter, you’re feeding three separate crowds. The first is the people who want breakfast after the sunrise service (that’s popular on Easter only). The second wave is the musicians who have come before the 9:00 or the 11:00 service (usually 10:00-10:30 in the Episcopal church). This is going to be a larger crowd of musicians than normal, because you probably already have a choir. You probably do not have a brass quintet, a harpist, an orchestra, or whatever else it is that you do to “boost the ratings.”
Church takes many forms, but for me it is ancient…. the interminable march of Sundays back into the dark ages. The Episcopal church is my favorite because I know that other people I love are saying the same words at the same time I am…..
We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies…..
I didn’t even have to look it up, and the tears have already started. It’s called the “prayer of humble access,” and it is the shortest and fastest path to getting my heart to bleed all over the communion rail. That’s because it’s The Moment. The communion rail is where I wrestle with the bomb that could destroy millions, my own internalized rage. When I knew that everything was over with Kathleen, I went to church and laid my head on the communion rail, I was so wrecked. As the choir sang “lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world” I folded because I had a lot of them.
I didn’t blame Kathleen entirely for her behavior, either, because she didn’t have the skills to deal with me. Just as traumatized as Supergrover, perhaps more so because the effects of her abuse lasted for years in what any adult except another traumatized one would see as wildly inappropriate and must be stopped. No one noticed.
One of the things that I wish Supergrover would take in is that she’s not scarred, not broken, literally perfect. This is because I have enough experience to say that there’s nothing wrong with her, she’s just stubborn. 😉 In these moments, John the Gnostic speaks to me:
This is the verdict: light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed.
We do not run from the light because it’s not there. We run from the light out of fear. Fear of not being loved. Fear that the light is too bright. Fear that our sins are too great and everyone else’s are acceptable. Fear of separation from others, thus the feeling of being separated from God while it’s just not true.
Whether I’m in the kitchen, whether I’m writing, whether I’m queer, whether I’m poly, whether I am anything I have more power when I name it and claim it than I do by keeping it all in and having preconceived notions about what others are going to think. You stop attracting light to you because of shame and not being vulnerable about it…. therefore, you’ll never get to a place of acceptance through the torture of cognitive dissonance.
My life got so much better when my priest said “we are all very members incorporate in the mystical body of thy Son, who are also heirs, through faith…” because it was the first time in my life I’d ever believed someone meant it……. after meeting the wrong priest, first, but still.
For Houstonians, Larry Gipson at St. Martins told me I’d never be a priest because I was gay. My revenge is that he’s Catholic now. Karma took care of him, because the Episcopal church as a whole disagreed with him and left him in the Middle Ages. I will not say any more about that except I can think of several people I’d like to go with him. Like, if you’re going to be a homophobic asshole, put a warning sign out, amiright?
There are many Catholic parishes who have quietly ignored The Pope for many, many years. They also have an organized queer group within the Catholic church. Just like protestants, there is a range. I would feel comfortable walking into any American Episcopal church, but I could not just walk into any Anglican or Catholic church (Anglican being the name of ECUSA churches who left over female ordination and homosexual marriage/ordination.
So, if I go to church at all, it’s St. Alban’s (better known as National Cathedral). I will never be discriminated against ever again, and I need that for me. Other people don’t. The “frozen chosen” have in the past had problems with “the most segregated hour in America,” but that has changed so much across the world, especially with the election of Michael Curry. Plus, there’s a lot of immigration from Africa going on in Houston and DC, so Episcopal churches have naturally gained more black members over the years. And that doesn’t all come from, say, Nigerians being active in the Anglican church overseas. Some of it is that you go to church once because it’s in your neighborhood, decide you’re cool with it, and stay.
My grandparents were Presbyterian, but the church in Lone Star they liked the best was Methodist. Ergo, we were Methodists now. I have to say that Paw Paw made an excellent choice. I got to meet Matt McConaughey before you even knew who he was.
My mother’s favorite joke in life was “I’ve seen Matt in a bathing suit….. of course, he was 12 at the time.” I’ve mentioned this before, but for new readers my dad confirmed Matt into the church when he was a tween, and my mother was his middle school choir director. I was three, so yes, I have met and spent time with him, but I’m going to bet we don’t remember each other and the only reason I keep up with him is because I see him everywhere I look.
Plus, his mom is in Bernie and it was great to see her, too, despite all Matthew’s justified and reported anger at her. I’m not telling tales out of school when I say that Kay wrecked him by giving press interviews about private matters, and it is not lost on me that I do the same thing, essentially, but the difference is that my friends don’t care that I do it. Even Supergrover, who is the maddest of them all, says I’m entitled to my stories and to keep at it, essentially. She doesn’t have to like it, she just has to live it.
That’s because she’s a fucking fan.
The rest of my friends are busy on self-discovery, particularly Bryn and we compare notes. We’re all driven by self-improvement and reparenting ourselves…. not to point out what our parents lacked, but to point out all the times we didn’t say anything and became part of the problem.
I was social masking because maybe if I did, I’d deserve to be loved. That’s the deepest tape I’m trying to get rid of, because that comes with altering and accepting my entire reality as an autistic and physically disabled person. If you compare yourself to someone neurotypical, you will always fall short and berate yourself. Acknowledging I’m simply not capable of some things is necessary because I cannot be held to the same expectations by other people.
I would have no relationships as a result, because they’d all walk off in frustration and still do despite my best efforts. I cannot always be in my body and respond from a place that’s not ensconced in pain. I am human. What becomes a problem is being willing to forgive anyone for anything and not receiving the same courtesy.
This is because I believe neurotypical people are holding me to the standard expectations of a neurotypical person and also get frustrated I can’t “get it together.” When I said that high needs and low trade off, this is what I mean. Sometimes, I am a functional person with a routine. Sometimes, my autism makes me get lost in my own brain and lack of function comes from the inability to change channels.
When I was a child, this presented as being emotional leaps and bounds ahead of my peers and listening to everyone’s problems, then meltdown and burnout after school making me unable to do homework. I couldn’t do eighth grade math when my then lady-love was married to a drug dealer who got drunk at a church party and threw up at one of our best friend’s houses. That stayed with me as a monotropic thought process for years on end, a 14-year-old on a mission to love a 25-year-old through it… another avoidant personality who didn’t know what the hell to do with either my emotions or the situation she was actually in.
As an adult, this presents the same exact way. People are my monotropic thought process and their emotional weight stops me from carrying anything else. So, is the question isolating myself entirely so that I don’t have a jackass magnet on my forehead (the term I use for being on the Metro and someone saying “my dad hit me as a child” or something equally heavy within minutes… the jackass magnet is a reference to the fact that I cannot keep myself from letting it in, not that those people have done anything wrong.
There are two words I could use right now to explain what I mean, and nearly everyone knows them but I’m so mad at JK Rowling right now that every time I say something mean about her, I wish it had been worse.
If you just can’t stand not knowing because you’re not a fan, someone put it in the comments or something. I’m done.
In short, I cannot read minds, and I cannot protect my mind………
People expect me to read minds because the societal response is clear and I am just not on that wavelength. I think big thoughts, and I’m not going to apologize for that. While you’re thinking about how I didn’t do X when you wanted Y, I’m thinking about how the whole company should run and how to change it for the better because my scope is different than yours.
In college, I began to learn how international systems work, the chessboard, and because of my history in the “underworld” of abuse, I was drawn to government espionage (corporate doesn’t do it for me). You’re thinking about the village, I’m thinking about the world. I am not dissimilar from any spy, really, because most of them are truly damaged people who needed refuge in the system…. and that was appealing to me, not a drawback.
The reason spies are generally damaged people is that those are the people who are willing to cut ties. It’s a lot to manage, your real life and your cover identity, so it’s better to be like me and not have many significant relationships so you can keep your necessary lies straight. If you’re an abused kid in any form, whether it’s being young and raped or being 18 and getting shot, you don’t trust anyone.
I listen to everything. I talk a quarter to never. I have selective mutism often. Part of it is that I’d much rather write than talk, part of it is being emotionally abused over many years and having those threads so woven into me that I never know when that woman’s expressions are going to come out of me rather than my own. I sound just like her because that’s who I was social masking as a teen.
Again, from 12-36 years old I was social masking someone who’d been raped as a child, was currently dating a drug dealer, and had a very unstable career because opera is just like that and she was a queer teacher in a conservative school district. My memories of her are crystal clear down to the smell of the air.
As a result, I do not trust anyone or anything at anytime, but I listen to things intensely without processing their voices until after said conversation is over, because I am not both talking and listening anymore. In those cases, talking is limited to sympathetic nods and breaking eye contact when it gets to be too much sensory information…. which it always is. You don’t walk off the Metro with conversations like “my husband beats me” unscathed.
In effect, what’s happening is that I take in information like a doctor, then have my emotional response later. In a neurotypical person’s brain, they’ve “dealt with it and moved on.” I am “lost in the past,” when you’re walking around like a ticking time bomb and I’m trying to stay calm about it.
I am an INFJ, and I’m here to drag you kicking and screaming toward believing in yourselves. I am here to love the shit out of you.
Do you or your family make any special dishes for the holidays?
I don’t cook anything for holidays anymore, because when I got divorced and moved to DC, I moved in with a family who already had Thanksgiving wired, and I wasn’t the only cook in the house. One of my housemates when I first arrived had gone to Johnson & Wales, and was the chef at Jaleo Crystal City (Jose Andres is the executive chef, I mean the guy who actually ran the restaurant on a day-to-day basis). Therefore, I know Jose Andres intimately, even if he doesn’t know me…. and all of his secrets are safe. 😉
We used to laugh together about the things that happened around us that we were helpless to stop. Neither one of us in all of our cosmic culinary power could get people to stop putting knives in the dishwasher or in the bottom of the sink. More than once did we look at each other and say, “I can’t.” We honestly didn’t spend that much time together, it’s that our relationship was like all brothers in arms. We had an emotional shorthand not there for others in the house. If you are not a person with ADHD/Autism when you start a kitchen job, you will gain the ability to see the kitchen that way. Everything in cooking is a sensory issue, and you’re learning to fine-tune it. The tiniest changes will cause absolute anarchy.
For me, a big one is soap. They’re all concentrated differently, and it seems there is a large leap from generic to brand. It also affects the kitchen to change the smell of the dish soap, because you get used to how those fragrances mix with spice. For instance, going from a floral scent to a lemon scent gave me gastrointestinal issues because the lemon mixed with the scent of eggs and ruined Hollandaise sauce for me because every time I think of it one of the flavor notes is surfactant.
Soap is a trigger for a much bigger sensory issue overall. Most autistic people who have sensory issues with smell are because it’s turned up to “pregnant woman.” I throw up more due to bad smells than anything else, and why when I live alone and have a cat, I have disposable litter boxes and change them out often rather than ever force myself to change it. I was lucky in that Dana didn’t mind and had permanent boxes at her house, but I wasn’t counting on her to care for Asher. I had my own system, I just didn’t have to use it. I wasn’t allergic to chores. I traded that one out.
Being married is really the last time I had any holiday traditions, because when I moved to DC, I was folded into an established family here, Lebanese heritage and not Irish. For Thanksgiving and Christmas we have turkey and dolmades. Stuffing and kibbi (Kibbi is actually one of our dog’s names, too- “meatball,” basically, in Arabic). It’s a wonderful life. Hayat and I have talked often about the fact that “I’ve picked up Arabic,” because when I first moved in, Hayat spoke Arabic and Nasim spoke Farsi. I asked both of them if it would bother them for me to listen in on their phone calls, because I didn’t want it to feel creepy and I knew they wouldn’t really, either since I don’t understand either language. I just wanted to take away the feeling that I was trying not to watch them by making it obvious that I was.
Listening to Nasim was hearing the end of “Argo” all day long. Learning the Levantine dialect of Arabic was learning the rolling lilt of the ocean and not the Middle East RP equivalent, Cairo (I checked). Some words in Egypt and Lebanon are different, some words are the same because Lebanon has had a bigger influx of Mediterranean immigrants. In fact, my cover photo on Facebook is a picture Hayat took of the marina in Beirut, now a city on my bucket list if it ever calms down enough for me to go. I would feel comfortable with Daniel or Zac in that situation, but I would not feel comfortable traveling without someone who could defend both of us. That whole idea started the romance with Daniel, because I initially wanted a travel companion and then I realized I wanted him. I don’t know whether Zac and I will ever travel together or not, but what I do know is that he may have not been in the same situations as Daniel, but not because he didn’t train for them.
But Zac and I haven’t started our own traditions yet because we haven’t spent a Christmas together. Since he celebrates Yuletide and not Christmas proper, it doesn’t matter whether I see him on the 25th or not. What I do know is that we as people are a spectrum. Maybe we’ll go for Chinese, maybe we’ll finally watch “The Pigeon Tunnel,” the Apple TV+ documentary based on interviews and John le Carré’s last book. I would have jumped on it the moment I saw it if I wasn’t so insistent about not cheating on him. Infidelity is one thing. This is couple TV. THERE ARE RULES. There are shows I still haven’t finished because I promised Dana I’d wait. It’s getting a bit ridiculous. Still can’t do it.
I have been asked to make a Christmas list and so far the only thing on it is a long-sleeved SAS t-shirt. I’d also like a Senators baseball cap because of the Duke Ellington concert in the spring, because even if I didn’t wear it, oh my God would it ever look good with Jason’s signature on the side. For my international readers, the Senators are the current hockey team in Ottawa, but the baseball team in DC was called the Senators when we first joined the league. Duke Ellington started selling peanuts when he was like, 11?
When Jason told me that he was going to do a Duke Ellington concert in The District, I told him that he was a brave, brave man. He laughed because he knew exactly what I meant. If you come for Ellington in his hometown crowd, you best not miss. Here’s what I know that you don’t. Jason is objectively better at piano than Ellington ever was. He can take Elllington’s ideas to a place that the composer himself couldn’t- another brain seeing different patterns. Ask me how I know that? He’s been doing it since he was 17 (probably younger, but I’ve known him since then), the Mozart of jazz, too many notes that boggle the mind.
I do not say this lightly. It probably sounds like I’m just part of the Houston jazz scene and trying to promote my boy. No. Jason is different. Jason goes to places I don’t like and I don’t know why and then I fall on my ass when I figure out the chord structure. It’s not that I didn’t like Jason, it’s that my mind wasn’t big enough to hold Jason yet. I had to grow into him. He’s an artist that is perfectly capable of giving you a beautiful haircut that you don’t like until you realize you were wrong. You thought it was a mess, and it makes your whole face.
The last time I saw Jason, I left the Kennedy Center and walked around for two hours trying to deconstruct that concert in my mind. Every time I came to a new metro stop, I decided I wasn’t done thinking about jazz yet. If you’ve never been to see Jason, I do not believe you have a grasp of modern jazz and where it’s going. I hope the concert is not too esoteric for Zac, but I don’t think it will be. I just think the difference is that when he looks at Jason, he sees the finished product. I see every iteration. Tall, skinny, quiet, softspoken when he does, can’t get used to the fact that he doesn’t wear a stocking cap every day. Can’t believe he and John Schutza aren’t a thing at lunch anymore.
Zac is going to become a bridge from my old life to my new one, and I think that’s a beautiful thing. I know Jason wouldn’t necessarily look for me at the concert, but what I do know is that he would be disappointed if I came to the concert and didn’t say anything. If I had my life to do over, I would have loved to be as serious a jazz musician as Jason. But, on the other hand, I did not have the ability of Konrad Johnson to “see where they were going and go with them.” I did not have Jason’s ability to see the rules of composition in such a way that he plays as if they aren’t there. No open fourths? Here’s seven in a row. Deal. Not a real example, but on brand.
Jason, like I am, is an unapologetic artist trying to get the audience to come to him, and he’s so good at his craft that he deserves to be a leader.
If there’s anything in my family that starts with me, it’s a love of music- the only special interest I had before intelligence because the first time I ever sang in front of an audience (congregation), I was three. Never in my lifetime did I think I’d get involved with it enough to understand what an open fourth might be, but here we are.
I know that when we talk about dishes, we’re often talking about the things put on the table. To me, sharing music with someone is every bit as important as a Christmas or Thanksgiving table. It’s where my mind goes now that I don’t have to cook for either holiday.
I also talk about music not to talk about what is going to be missing.
Also, here is a meme to express my feelings, one of my love languages:
Sometimes I have thoughts and need to write them down for myself. Then, I realize that they’ll mean something to someone else and I just write here, instead.
It just hit me on the head that Supergrover is beating herself up over what she thinks I think of her, and not what I actually do. Therefore, she doesn’t realize that because I’m creating a portrait of her, she is not just beloved by me. I think that she thinks I want to write about her because of what she does. I knew that wasn’t right, but I did feel this. One day, she’s going to be Jon Armstrong. One day, she’s going to be Victor Lawson. One day, people are going to compare Victor to her instead of the other way around. And I’m sure about that.
I cannot paint a true portrait without a bad side to a person, because that’s not real life. John le Carré taught me that.
“The cat sat on a mat is not a story. The cat sat on the dog’s mat is a story.”
I started reading “The Pigeon Tunnel,” and as I was reading I realized that though people say that my writing sounds like David Sedaris, it feels like I’m him in a different body just by the way he writes. This is for two reasons. The first is that we’re the same “type.” Both interested in news and government for the purposes of writing about it. Both interested in holding up a mirror to the world, because bad experiences are the spoils of war for a writer. As poet Mary Karr has said, “happiness writes white.”
David (Cornwall- real name, sorry- I use them interchangeably) has the same way that I do of talking about terribly serious subjects while adding just enough humor to keep the person reading. He seems like the same kind of serious that I am, because while the things that have happened to me are funny, I think David Sedaris is more camp than I am. David Cornwall is a dry wit, and that fits my personality nicely.
I like “The Pigeon Tunnel” the best of all Cornwell’s books because he’s not masquerading as George Smiley. It’s reading the non-fiction behind the fiction, just like I wanted to do in my own book idea of alternating chapters. I’ve also heard both David Cornwell and David Sedaris in interviews and I feel like they both represent me as a person. David Sedaris often explains the way I think to me, and David Cornwell explains how I write.
Apparently, I am an old English geezer at heart, which I hope makes him laugh wherever he is. He’s entertained me so much over the years. I think that’s because he’s such a marvelous blend of people like Rachel Maddow, David Halberstam, Tom Clancy…….. and also Ian Fleming. Basically, living in a system and writing the criticism of it. You can tell it’s a mixed bag. Even more when he was no longer under cover and people knew who he was. After his father heard that “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” had sold 15 million copies, he swindled him for the rest of his life and complained when Cornwell said, “no. Enough is enough.” Basically, his father wanted him to invest in some kind of farm. David said, “if you want a farm, I will buy you one and give you an allowance for maintenance.” I’m not sure he ever heard from him again.
He reminds me a lot of Jonna and Tony Mendez, which I learned quickly because after I saw “Argo,” I began looking for other stuff like it. I didn’t want to know what being a spy was like based on what I saw in movies because real spies had confirmed for me that the day-to-day job is better in terms of learning how policy is shaped, but most of it’s too boring to be filmed. I think it would be cool to be on one of the committees for intelligence in Congress, because I am definitely a “don’t tell me how you got this” kind of dude. I don’t need the semantics, I just want the protein.
George Smiley is just relatable. An Everyman with a normal job, with moments that would fry your hair. Every intelligence job seems to be akin to being the goalie of a soccer team. It’s red tape bureaucracy AND “oh shit, they’re coming.” What le Carré was trying to do in his books was to erase the public’s perception that all spies are like James Bond. At the time, CIA was all over MI-6 to get their shit together, they had a mole. Just like with Rick Aames, they went after the wrong people first because Kim Philby was good at covering his tracks right up until he wasn’t. People say that Philby was a double agent. I’ll believe it when I see that he also did something good for the British.
I genuinely believed that John changed MI=5/6 for the better by being honest about what was going on. They were a mess. He couldn’t fix it, but he could write it down. Especially when you can’t fix anything, having a voice is important. Even screaming into the void produces results because you don’t have to be heard to feel spent. That relief comes from getting it all out.
John does this so masterfully in “The Pigeon Tunnel,” explaining that his father was a crook, making him live in “show mode,” often doing errands for his dad when his dad couldn’t show his face in public. His father was not scared of the police. It was so much worse. It was the Russian mafia. So, John le Carré and David Cornwell are indeed two different people, but John has been around longer than his pen name. When you live a life like that, you have two personalities. His father constantly lost everything. He was well versed in espionage and needed refuge in the system. It was living the life he’d already been living, while having the stability of a government paycheck and normalcy at home. Living on an extreme edge, but with a safety net he’d never had before.
I don’t know how long into his career it was that he developed a knack for fiction. I don’t believe he thought of it as fiction, necessarily. He was just talking about people at the office. Guess what? They knew it was them. They got mad. They also got over it when he sold 15 million copies……. somehow, when other people loved his characters and the author was a great name to throw down at parties, they didn’t mind so much.
Reading “The Pigeon Tunnel” gave me new insight into who I am….. and how writing is not what I do. It is who I am, too. That’s because my blog is nothing more than a reflection of what I’m thinking. You are getting access to my brain without a filter. Sometimes, it definitely needs it, but generally those entries are popular so I know I can just be who I am and you’ll just roll with it. You know I’m Andy Rooney at the end of 60 Minutes over here. Just a string of words put together in a way that I hope others will find pleasing, but I don’t use it for that. I go back and see what’s changed and what hasn’t. I’m my own biggest fan, because reading my blog is not going to help anyone more than me. It’s a survival manual by now.
I also gain a better opinion of myself by reading myself with a dispassionate third eye, because I stop treating myself the way I normally do when the piece isn’t so close to home. I have empathy for myself in the same way I would in reading someone else’s work. Because I can look back over my life in a way that most people can’t, I think I do have a solid case for the fact that I am the greatest man who ever lived…. I was born… to give and give and give.
After the havoc that I’m gonna wreak, I hope my song also comes with full choir, band, and possibly even Shaker Melody…. but let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. What people forget about blogs is that the story is always in motion. Essentially, that they are living in a book that is still happening. If they don’t like my writing, they don’t have to read it. I don’t require anyone who knows me to read it, but they often tell me when they do. The only thing they can’t do is coerce me into not telling my stories. I am strong enough to say that they can limit their interactions with me, but I’m a writer and this is what I do. I have plenty of people in my life who don’t mind that I do this, because they know that I wouldn’t do it if I could do anything else. Writing isn’t to impress anyone. It’s to tamp down the madness of feeling several things at once. How do you make a decision if you don’t try to see both sides of the story? How are people so certain they’re right so much of the time?
I would rather spend time with people who don’t read blogs at all than have to anticipate what their blowback is going to do to me emotionally all the time. I own my story. I own my perceptions. I am very perceptive and that’s one of the first things that Jonna Mendez noticed when I wrote a piece on going to her book talk and sent it to her. Having a spy tell you that you’re perceptive is pretty great, I want you to know…… because again, Chief of Disguise at CIA isn’t impressive at all.
I don’t know why, but I feel more at home writing about the British system most of the time. Oh, wait. Yes I do. I know exactly why. CIA doesn’t publish how they do operations, so there’s no real way to know what the American equivalent of C or M might be. I couldn’t tell you the difference between one American case officer and the next, but C, M, and Bond are all different levels and different personalities. If I had any job in the Bond universe, I think I would like to be Moneypenny. I don’t know whether I’d have the hots for Bond or not, but what I do know is that I would love hearing everything coming in and going out of M’s office. If we could make Bond regenerate into Hannah Waddingham, I’d be smitten. I also have a clear picture of who should play M in this fictional universe.
Jenna Redgrave has played the head of UNIT so long that she’s the archetype of who should play against Hannah. I don’t know that she’d get the role, but I think she’d be amazing if she took it.
It’s all an exploration of character, and how I accidentally make people in my life fictional characters on purpose. That’s because in trying to describe our lives together, I am only drinking from the well of my own memory. Therefore, anything that’s not fact checked is a fictional universe, and will change as my facts do.
I am trying to be as fair and balanced as I can, because I think like a journalist. There are just some times where there can’t be two sides of the story because this is my web site. I have to take care of me, and my writing is the only thing that does it. But as I learn more, I evolve and so do they.
Supergrover didn’t start out as Jon Armstrong and Victor Lawson. She earned it. In the end, she’ll never be more real to people than she is here unless she writes her own story. No one, even her, knows how valuable that really is. I haven’t said a thing I wouldn’t say to someone who worked at a gas station. I am not impressed by power/influence because my sister has it and I know what that life is like. It’s right for her and I’m happy she can do it, and also know that I can’t. I feel the same way about my beautiful girl…. “you do you and it’s okay, but that doesn’t mean it’s not hard and I’m not entitled to my feelings.”
For as much as I come across like John le Carré, I also sound like Walter Isaacson. Walter’s books are so good because he explores people so in-depth it’s like you’re in the room with them. He made me love Steve Wozniak and continue to think that Steve Jobs was productive yet clearly insane. It wasn’t a puff piece.
But, of course, you’re going to hate it if someone comes to you and says, “I’m a biographer. Can I write a book about you?” There was never a discussion like that with Supergrover because we were idiots. The first is that she told me something I can’t talk about and it’s hard. The second is that her job and my blog are completely at odds with each other, because I’m not “on her social media team.” She isn’t on my radar because I decided to write about her. She decided to be my friend, and is therefore a character because of it.
One that is every bit as strong and comfortable as the blog “characters” we’ve both come to love over the years. She would have let me keep Beyoncé, too.
Before we get started today, I finally found the perfect keyboard for me. When I use it, I feel like Jason Moran (jazz pianist). The touch feels like it’s made to help me go faster. It’s kind of like having a new car, honestly. Like, there is a big difference in the feel of an accelerator on an old Toyota and a new BMW. With the brand new Bimmer, you’re going to touch the accelerator and be a quarter mile down the road. It’s nice to have a keyboard that is not in the way of being able to jump in that fast. The amount of force on the key to make a letter is almost negligible, but it doesn’t feel cheap. It’s that middle of the road touch between mechanical and laptop. If I had to name the biggest sensory issue I have in life, it’s the touch of a keyboard. I think this is because I know how important it is. I would not know that touch was important if I hadn’t lived with a pianist.
Because of my mother, I have words to express what I need out of a keyboard in the first place.
The prompt today is about pet peeves.
My biggest one is that my housemate has a maid and I don’t. I am terrible at keeping things organized, so my room is a mess and I white knuckle through the common areas because since we have a housekeeper, it is manageable. The problem is the six days a week when our housekeeper isn’t here. There are three of us, and only two of us help. Only the entitled one shares a bathroom with me, so I am constantly cleaning up after her. The way she does this is to say that because I have touched something, she cannot touch it. She comes from a culture that does not accept homosexuality and pretends that it is contagious and I am unclean. I have been laughing at her for nine years now, and it’s not funny anymore. I cannot beg her to do it, I cannot get my landlord to make her do it, because my landlord has talked to her about it also for nine years. So, if she washes her hair in the sink, it’s my problem. Has been for nine years….. because I’m gay and that makes sense to her.
Because it’s been so long, I feel trapped between “this is unacceptable” and “this is my weird little family.” There is no way I do not have empathy for someone so twisted in their world outlook that they make me treat me this way. It’s not anger. It’s pity. I look down on her because she does clean up after our guests whether she brought them or not. I say that her culture dictates homosexuality as unclean because it sounds like very Karen behavior, and she’s the furthest thing from it. I cannot see it all the way around as entitled behavior because she’s been taught since she was a little girl that I should be in jail or dead. Therefore, I can understand and be angry all at once.
Another big one is not responding to emotion with emotion. I do not ever want to hear the phrase “you should have known” ever again. I am out of the anticipation business. I cannot be the expert on how I felt and how you felt, too. Because then you’ll berate me when I haven’t anticipated correctly. You have to be strong enough to communicate your needs with me. It is only my job to become emotionally flexible enough to hear them without reacting in autistic meltdown. It is not pretty and I always regret it. Always. However, now I have new ways to learn coping mechanisms. I don’t want people to feel like they have to walk around on eggshells, the way I feel when I’m trying to guess how to make our relationship better.
My answer for this pet peeve is time. I need to hear/read what you think and walk away. Let me have time to process, because I will look at it differently if I change my environment and come back. I do not trust my first reaction. Please always remember that about me and when I say I need time, let me go. I was emotionally abused as a child. I have trauma reflexes. That means my first reaction to everything comes from that place, and I don’t want to operate that way anymore. I react with autistic meltdown because you’ve interrupted my reality so violently that my environment feels different in panic. I often react with panic because I have been corrected so much about every little thing that I feel like a dog surrounded by an electric fence in most relationships. In anxious/avoidant, the avoidant person will move the target to avoid confrontation, so you cannot please them. Meanwhile, the anxious person feels like they can’t do anything right. Every relationship I’ve ever had has been like this to some degree, because I am the common denominator.
If you have trauma reflexes, after the trauma is over you’ll gravitate toward one of those extremes, and they marry each other constantly. That’s because one of you is social masking an abuser and one of you is social masking an enabler. The younger you are when abuse occurs, the more that pattern is ingrained. The person you really are is hidden underneath those trauma reflexes, because you built them to protect the bubble an abuser creates with you. Everything about how I react as an adult is based on how I reacted as a child to hearing secrets that were too big for me. I have learned that my first instinct is to protect myself from violence. If when I express needs, I am met with violence, I will do anything to avoid saying something and I become part of the problem. So much of writing to Supergrover all those years was learning how to walk in the world in a different way.
Because she’s a boss, her thought processes got under my skin quickly. Every time she got angry at me, I made a note of how and why. It wasn’t to throw things back in her face. It was, “I’m a nobody and she’s not. What can I pick up here?” She’s also not a politician, so she could give a fuck if she wins and influences me. 😉 If she goes back and reads my blog, she will see that it’s just a collection of things she’s said in new contexts, and so many of those lines I got when she was adding new definition to furious. The reason I love her so much is that I find lines that flatten me in letters that are meant to convey annoyance, rage, whatever. I thought, “it must be love if you delight in even this.” For instance, when she said “be careful painting your feelings as fact.” I have quoted that in this blog at least 10 times because it was an image I could use and beautifully.
I wish I could get her to see that I stare at her Renoir like she stares at my Jackson Pollack. They are both beautiful in their own way. We are so magnetic when we are both painting our feelings as fact, because what is happening is that she has so much more to work with than I do. Whether she really doesn’t have time, or whether she’s avoiding writing back to feel guilty, the effect is the same. She knows more about me and can think about it than I know about her and can do the same. She has more context about my life, my mental health, my family dynamics, my entire heart and soul on the page, basically….. because when she said I could, I started using a finer brush- that I’d give her details and she’d write back.
Writing back became a pet peeve because she’d find the things she didn’t like and leave out the things she did. I didn’t like living in negative feedback, because then she started to feel like every boss I’d ever had. Assuming malice where none was meant, turning everything back around as if I’d meant to hurt her by being honest about something, and just generally dealing with the fact that she doesn’t deal in emotions and I do. I write so much about this relationship because it became a list of what’s wrong with me and why. But instead of just saying she was wrong, I dug deep into myself and figured out what was going on.
She did not. Therefore, every time we came back together after blowing each other to bits, nothing changed because she’d react in the old way and I’d regress. I got tired of feeling like she was provoking me and telling me I was the one always provoking her. I was not, I was asking her what was going on in her mind regarding where we are and where we’re going because we have shit to deal with if we’re going to create a secure attachment.
The exhaustion came from feeling as loved as I’ve ever felt and a complete dumbass depending on the day; I never knew which woman was going to show up. As a result, neither did she. It was tumultuous and extreme because we were fighting our own battles in ourselves. My way to cope is to use my blog to be Jackson Pollack. Just like an artist, I am throwing my feelings onto canvas so I can look at them from an objective third eye. Her way is to throw herself into work and pretend that our problems will go away. So, I think it’s better to be apart, because I can’t go on having issues with her that are infinitely solvable with any kind of real conversation at all…. and by that, I mean she doesn’t have to come and pick me up or anything. Just send me an e-mail with your Renoir so that I have two pieces of art in my museum. I have only been saying “I feel neglected and this isn’t okay” because I am asking for so very little. I don’t care that she can’t be available all the time, I care that when she’s here she’s present.
I need to be less reactionary, and so does she. I don’t want to end the relationship, but I also don’t want to live in highs and lows, either. It’s too disruptive to an autistic mind, craving stability and having a volatile monotropic thought process. I am not saying I never had security. I’m saying that her coping mechanism was to end the relationship every single time she was mad about something, and then we couldn’t stay away from each other. Just binge/purge for 10 years straight. If my writing had any effect at all on her, it’s that it didn’t make her fall in love with me, but it did make a future in which we were alternately mad as hell AND also craving each other’s words. What do you think it means to her to be a voracious reader and have crafted pages like mine for long haul flights? What do you think it means to me that I’m the author she reads? That bond is unbreakable, which is how I know with a 60-70% chance that she is absolutely hanging on every word here while also not saying a damn thing. Good for her, because if I can’t entertain her one way, I can entertain her another. The delivery method does not matter, and if she isn’t reading, I also don’t care. I just think her morbid curiosity is stronger than her will. 😉
I do not pretend she is dedicated because I’m writing to her. I am explaining my experiences with her, and it would devastate me to publish something just because I thought she wouldn’t hear about it. I have to consider the possibility because it would wreck me if I didn’t, because there could be repercussions for her, not me. I am trying to anticipate what will and will not be offensive to publish, working within limits. So many things here are analogies for something else that will come across to her differently than the point I’m trying to make…. and also having to be aware of that, too. How much am I entitled to my stories and how much am I just actively hurting her? She doesn’t see that it hurts me not to know, and keeps everything close to the vest.
That’s not her fault, either. That’s just the difference between us. I have something she lacks- the ability to spill my guts emotionally. She has something I don’t- the ability to protect myself emotionally by not constantly focusing on others’ needs. We are both lying to the other- she’s as much a people pleaser as I am, she just makes it look good……. and I only know because of how much she tried to please me. I regret every single time that I “made her feel like she wasn’t good enough for me,” because her feelings are valid and yet not a message I ever intended to send. How she got from “you’re the absolute love of my life and I’ll never put anyone above you again” is just beyond my comprehension, but it’s also my reality. I don’t get the right to make that reality untrue…. and she fucking knows it. That’s my anger issue.
That she cuts and runs when it’s hard, and it’s deservedly hard because it’s so fucking worth it. She does not see that’s what I’m saying. She sees it as “you’re a bad person.” I am not asking to change the nature of our relationship and make her act differently, I am saying that “this is a thing we should manage, not avoid.” Absolutely all of this is because of who she is as a person, but it’s not a dealbreaker at all. It’s that I need someone who can deal with the fallout, and she’s insistent on it not being her while also saying I shouldn’t talk to anyone else. It’s devastating to an enormous degree for both of us, because whatever she’s avoiding in me has nothing to do with me at all. I am asking for something she does not have to give. She’s 10 feet tall and bulletproof IRL while also putty in front of me, because she thinks she’s not good enough for me…. and has thought that about many other people. It didn’t start with me, and I know that.
For most people, she’d be a walking red flag. She doesn’t see that she gets to be that with me. That I’m the person who willingly said “the flag is a lie.” My feelings were deep and immediate because of it, and she’s run from it ever since.
The first fissure was treating me like I was suspect and avoiding me because I’d done something wrong….. except the story she was telling herself was fiction. It was a diversion tactic to avoid talking about the fact that she was wigged I’d told her I’d had feelings for her. I tried to be cool. I really did. But I was wigged that both she and Dana were angry at me about it, because I didn’t have a secure environment anywhere. Not at work, not at home, not in the cloud anymore.
It was a time of trial, and instead of blaming everything on others, I got the help I needed. But the problem with Supergrover never went away. Just avoid, avoid, avoid. Checking in once in a while and gifts were enough. It confused me, and she got angry if I said so. I began to walk on eggshells in a way that I don’t for anyone else anymore. I have explained both sides of the story; Dana was going down, but that didn’t not mean that Supergrover led to my decision to break up with her. I couldn’t deal with both their anger at once, and Supergrover was the more stable choice at that point. It wasn’t the whole story….. but it made cutting ties to Dana so much easier when I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that it would benefit me.
She just got freaked that I chose to come back to Washington to do it, because she thought it meant that I was leaving Dana for her. What she did not realize was that a tiny part of it was for her, but not all of it. I could have broken ties with Dana from Houston just as easily. What I could not do is live in a city without a car. What I could not do is find impartial friends who didn’t know me from Adam…. I know my friends. I know that they love Dana every bit as much as they love me. I also knew that Dana needed them more than I did and it was easier not to give them a choice. You can keep up with me online, she needs you to jump in. Go to her.
Just because Dana was a walking red flag didn’t mean I didn’t love both of them equally. Dana just didn’t like sharing me and didn’t have a choice. Every “come to Jesus” meeting was a rehash because she treated me so differently and I never knew which Dana was going to show up, either. We all have trauma reflexes, full stop.
The entire problem was that when Supergrover pulled back, she didn’t have that choice, either. She thoughtlessly put something into my head that will affect me forever and decided she had the right to just let me cope. I don’t have the right to make her do anything, but I do have the right to be angry that she did indeed fail me in some respects, and absolutely delighted me in others. She is a spectrum, a 3D character, you might say. 😉
I loved checking in once in a while. I loved getting gifts in my e-mail. All that stuff was so rock solid. What wasn’t was all my anxiety roiling underneath, the feelings she refused to acknowledge that she had created. The feeling of “not good enough” doesn’t come from the fact that she is failing me. She is failing us. I could love her more deeply and be less reactionary with more information. I do not feel anger at her, I feel angry about my insecure attachment and environment because of it. Her conflict avoidance told me more than anything I could ask her outright, because she thought I was hysterical and overemotional…. because she doesn’t see that my approach to life is so different. She sees it as needing me to get with the program while also not explaining what the program entails. Hard to be successful when you don’t know the rules, but she doesn’t do rules, either.
Therefore, I feel like she steps all over my boundaries by withholding information, and I step all over hers for asking for it. We are at an impasse and always will be, because now it’s up to her to accept my reality. If she doesn’t, a part of me will always be angry with her, but it doesn’t mean that my love gets smaller. It only means that it will remain unresolved, and that causes feelings of injustice. An INFJ does not do well with injustice, local or global.
So, now I’m just working on the anger, and she’s not working on the anger she “doesn’t have.” She says in words that I’m just projecting. In her actions, I feel on target. That’s because she’s never vulnerable about anything. When she’s mad at me, I don’t know it. As you can see, that doesn’t cause problems at all. I didn’t walk away because I was angry. I got tired of feeling like my emotions don’t matter to her while she’s saying that’s untrue in words and deeds.
She did something enormous for me when we met, and I think in some sense I’ve come across as ungrateful because she sees me pointing out problems as throwing emotional bombs. That’s not true at all. I can handle bigger emotions than she can, so I write from that place. She reads it while being buttoned up, so it feels like an attack because she can’t receive what I actually mean. She is moving too fast and accusing me of moving too slowly. Again, the leap between a neurotypical and neurodivergent brain with the exception of both having CPTSD. It’s amazing to me how our traumas are on completely different playing fields, yet our reactions are the same, yet mirror images of each other. I forced us into a bad pattern, and it is better to walk away and lick my wounds than it is to convince her I’m right.
My emotional strength makes me care about myself in a different way than I did before……. but not entirely.
“For all our mutual experiences, our separate conclusions are the same.” -Billy Joel, Summer, Highland Falls
Hers is a gift I’ll never be able to repay, because now I have the confidence to believe that if I speak, powerful people will listen because that’s what I’ve been taught. At the same time, I can’t go on with such an inflexible power structure, because the avoidant one always has it. They don’t do things wrong, you’re a problem.
All I want is reconciliation on my terms, because we’ve been on hers for so long and it’s not helping either of us. If it’s not helping either of us, I have other friends. She thinks of me as someone who points out everything wrong with her…. and in my mind, she is everything amazing about being on this planet.
I seem to have fixed my keyboard issues except for the “a” key. Sometimes it works, sometimes the repeat rate makes me insane because it slows my typing speed to a crawl. Even though I type very fast, I will not sit there and actively look at a typo. So, I did what you do in a tech situation for peripherals. If something breaks, buy a new one. The old one will fix itself immediately. Definitely worked on my Apple Pencil, and it was only $100 for that pro tip…. and you just got it for free.
I accept tips.
If you’re a consistent reader, you just laughed as hard as I did. I hope that when she bought her next Big Gulp with it, she got something good. I love sugar free now, buat as a kid, it was always a suicide…. which is basically a Long Island Iced Tea for a nine-year-old. It’s what we in the US call it when you fill your cup with a little bit of every soda on tap. It’s one of those drinks you remember fondly, and then you go have one out of nostalgia and realize why you stopped.
All of this is background information on why I prefer the mountains to the beach. In the mountains, I can both ski and write. I love to swim, I do not like the beach. I am not afraid of being stung or bitten as I have already been stung by Portuguese men of war. MEN. Apologies to Dana for not getting her out of the way fast enough when she said, “hey. What’s that floating breast implant?”
The funniest part of that incident was a scuba diver telling us to go to a convenience store and buy some chewing tobacco to soak up the stingers. Just mix it with water and make a paste. We needed more soda anyway. Sold. Dana insisted on calling my doctor stepmother. I said, “Dana, if I call her, she’s just going to say that we’re idiots for not believing the subject matter expert in front of us.” So Dana says she’ll call her. I could hear the whole thing and she wasn’t on mute….. The shit eating grin on my face at “ARE YOU CRAZY?” was legendary.
I see into people. I know I do…..
I walked away tremendously satisfied, but it was just another instance of how Dana stepped all over me. I didn’t see it until one of my closest friends pointed it out. That I’d taken on a tremendous amount of responsibility and he was the one that suggested that Dana bring me flowers the night I got home from my first day at work. That she was really thoughtless toward me so much more than I realized. This is not someone who pined for me. This was someone who drove with his girlfriend to help me move- he drove my truck from Portland to Houston with all our stuff, and then I gave it to him as payment.
It was so cool. When I first got it, he gave me a bumper number like the military. He asked me what I wanted, and without blinking I said, “11” (Matt Smith, my favorite Doctor). Then, he spray painted a Dalek on the door- and not even a minimalist symbol, either. It was a whole mood.
In short, this was not a play for me. It was “stop being blind.”
Seven years and I just thought she was loud and boisterous. It didn’t occur to me that especially after she got her DUI, I don’t know if she was drinking more or if she was just angry and felt guilty all the time, but the constant superiority over her memory being infallible and mine being crap didn’t earn her any favors.
I write about memories all the time, and I’m very good at it. I know this because my family says I remember those memories accurately, and you cannot feel good writing about your family until they tell you that. My mother had a very, very good memory and I got it from her. I hate it. I really, really hate it. This is because when I get into an argument with someone close to me- Dana, Supergrover, Meagan, whomever- I am very good about saying “this is a pattern and we need to change it…. and here are the six times it has happened before.” It’s not noticing. It’s not caring. It’s “throwing things back in my face.” Meanwhile, they’re moving the goalpost further away from accomplishing anything. Everything becomes all about my behavior and not attacking the problem together.
Sometimes I just want to be bad at remembering things. It’s not always pleasant. I don’t just remember the good things. It makes my writing better and my feelings disparate. Just like being nonbinary, it’s a spectrum. I have laughed and felt weird the whole time I’m writing…. yet this is not for me later today. This is for me in five years.
You get it today, but I won’t understand it fully until I’ve read it without context. What was happening in the room while I was writing. I don’t remember every entry, but I do remember the hard ones. “Go Tell the Bees” has been the hardest on me in years. Even though it wasn’t all the closure I needed, I did cry all the way through it, which meant several hours of gut-wrenching pain. I dragged it out of me, and I love it so much now that time has passed. In the moment, I published it and walked away. I later recorded it, and had to pause when it became too much.
Even last night when I read the prompt about beach vs. mountains, I thought about what our trip to Coos Bay would have looked like.
I realized after I’d fallen down on the job of trying to be the most perfect friend who ever friended that there was a big difference in my personality and my illness. That I didn’t give two shits about Michael. I’m in a solo-poly relationship, so obviously jealousy is such a problem for me. It was never anything about that. All my social masks failed at once and I was stumbling around, grasping at straws. But we’ve come a long way in 10 years. The last picture she sent me was so incredibly sweet.
I said, “I haven’t had a recent pic of you in a long time. Send me one? Nothing fancy, just want to match a name to a face. Don’t make it weird.” It is a goddamn portrait, the most beautiful picture I’ve ever seen of anyone because in that moment, she just turned the camera around on her front porch, and the way she’s smiling, I know she knows she’s looking at me and no one else. I’ve always loved pictures of her, but I’ve never had one where I just flat out asked and therefore I knew she was thinking of me. She said she must be getting soft in her old age if she was willing to send a pic to anyone, and my heart “grew three sizes that day.” It was a moment I’ll never forget, because she recognized it was a moment, too.
My allergies may or may not be acting up right now….. mostly because even though I love the mountains, I’d never go there ever again for one moonlit walk in our jeans and sweatpants, the uniform of Coos Bay…….. which is in the state where we started and created our own.
When I was in the hospital (psych emergency/med check) nine years ago, some of the people around me started telling others I was borderline personality disorder. Not only was it not true, BPD carries a stigma, like psychiatrists saying they won’t have more than one borderline patient at a time because they’re so difficult. Bluntness and seeming malice are par for the course when none is meant, but one of these things is not like the other. I am not Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde. I social mask until I can’t and the people around me have no idea what the hell to do when I stop. My problem is that social masking has been a part of my life since I learned to walk/talk. How am I supposed to know what’s neurotypical and what’s not? I have been made to believe that I’m a lot crazier than I am.
I was falling apart because my social masks all failed at once and it was a straight up crisis. How anyone could be surprised I ended up in a pych emergency after two therapists saying I was so fucked up it was going to take a very long time to heal is beyond me. You mean none of this is ever going to get any better? This is what my life looks like now? People don’t kill themselves because bipolar makes them sad. They kill themselves because managing bipolar disorder is fucking relentless.
“Borderline” was “over the line, Smokey. Mark it zero.” Here is why I am so fucking furious at the person(s) who said it. I’ve seen my chart. I was never diagnosed with BPD. Ever. I have had meltdowns, burnout, sensory issues, you name it. But I have never had an attachment disorder. I attach too much, if anything. I’ve been in emotionally abusive relationships for forever, because I assumed that people who thought I was a difficult monster were correct. I didn’t have any coping mechanisms for autism, so I just assumed I was the worst person who ever lived. I handle things wrong all the time, but because it’s not the same way a neurotypical person would handle things wrong, it’s a bigger mistake (to them). To them, they are justified in infantilizing me, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s at home or at work.
I got an incorrect label, and I was trapped in other people’s opinions with BPD; autism creates sympathy and treating me like I’m mentally delayed, and BPD means I am so unstable I cannot function. Both choices in how I’m treated blow. There’s no way not to report disabilities because social masking will fail at some point and I have no way to fit into society if I’m dead honest….. or at least, that is my belief right this very moment because I am not done with the process of acceptance. I do not even know how to function anymore because everything I’ve done in the past has been “getting by” and also incorrect for me, because I can’t just white knuckle my way through neurotypical society forever. I will die alone, and I am not kidding. I know myself. I’ll get tired of being misunderstood and just sit in my little autistic nest. It is so much easier not to engage than it is to be sure that you’re a burden on everyone. It’s also never unclear that you are. Social masking leads people to believe that I am an entitled, lazy asshole and that if I just worked harder, I’d be fine.
How long would you last at a job where people treat you like you’re five? Realistically, how long could you put up with being treated that way knowing that your life is a series of performance improvement plans no matter the field and always having meetings about your problematic behavior…… because my tone is always off or I can’t keep up or I need to go to the doctor too much. You name it. Meanwhile, I have never told an employer I was autistic for them to be able to help me because I didn’t know. Considering just how well jobs do with ADHD, I have to assume “not well.” Left to my own devices, I write the length of a novel/novella every month, not year. If I was a fiction writer, Nanowrimo would last two weeks. With a brilliant storyline I can write for six or seven hours at 90wpm. I barely look up. I am the model employee because I can tailor my environment to productivity and there’s no office “HOA.”
I do have a fiction work in progress, but I don’t know how to write fiction yet. I’m going to school for it on YouTube (no lie- plenty of college writing classes available- that kid at Harvard with the cell phone in his lap is my future….. I feel like I should be sending these kids money somehow but it’ll have to be the thought that counts. In order to learn all of this, I had to stop caring about everyone else. Also not for malice. Because they were programmed to all treat me a certain way, with certain perceptions, and none of them were correct.
I basically came to DC so I could meet an impartial set of doctors and friends. The ones in Houston weren’t it. This is because I started researching AuDHD because of several memes in ADHD groups on Facebook that mentioned it and I felt attacked. I don’t put much stock in memes, but I do in MDs/PhDs. I am tired of being thought of as this dark triad motherfucker when I talk all the time about the empathy I feel for my friends, how I bleed out trying to take care of others and come off as rude and demanding, anyway. I can certainly be clearer and better in my conversations, but there will be no conversation after “you’re not autistic.” This is because if you accuse me of not having autism, I won’t say you’re wrong. I will ask you for $3,000, the cheapest estimate I’ve found for an official diagnosis in Maryland. There is also a possibility that I would not be diagnosed as autistic, and yet that doesn’t mean it’s not true, either. For one, I’ve already mentioned that AuDHD is chronically misdiagnosed, and two…. what was two again? AuDHD. 😉 Two is that autism is missed in girls a lot. A lot a lot. I used to be an autistic girl, but I’ve had neurotypical behavior slammed in my face and social masked it for 46 years. Again, we do not have enough data on ASD to know how it presents in adults. What I can tell you is that AuDHD is more common than it’s not, a comorbidity like fibromyalgia and, well, anything.
If I was borderline, I would not notice or care that I was making an attachment worse or better. What does happen is that my brain works differently and some things just fall off my radar, including relationships. I finally decided to fix that by not looking for one overarching relationship, but a boyfriend and several emotional support girlfriends. If I meet another partner down the road, that’s a whole other conversation, but I’m happy as I am and so is Oliver, who is a dog (Zac is happy, too, but let’s remember who’s important here). I can disconnect ad be with other partners when I’m not with him, but I don’t have more than one red string (red strings and yellow strings are romance and emotional support, what a poly relationship “murder board” looks like).
I think of us as mono/poly or solo/poly because I don’t care what Zac does when he’s not with me. If he needs me, he’ll call. If I need him, I’ll call. I don’t want him up in my business with Bryn and Supergrover, he doesn’t want me up in his business with his partners, either. Believe me, it’s not that I wouldn’t respond emotionally if he was hurt. He’d just have to ask me to respond because I’m not constantly anticipating his needs. He does want to meet Lindsay, though, so make a note L Cubed (my grandfather, Alvie, always used to call me L Squared and Lindsay L cubed because her middle name starts with L as well). I asked her if she was going to be in town for Finnish Independence Day and she is, and you cannot even believe what a big fucking deal that is. I use that holiday to replace one I lost long, long ago. I needed to fill my time on that day (6 Dec) so I looked up other holidays I could get behind instead. Finnish Independence Day was absolutely it because it screamed “special interest.” Is it really your special interest if 99% of the world thinks it’s normal? I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that most people will not be lighting blue and white candles with me in the United States, but that doesn’t make any difference. I am using my strenths. I am replacing the dumpster fire of my teenage years with salmiakki, pulli, kahvi, and perhaps a bit of vodka for good measure.
Although I just remembered that the next time I see Zac will be Dec. 10, so I may celebrate it twice just to be sure to hate the Russians a little more. It’s the one war where I know I could have helped, because I’m a good skier. Do you guys know about this? Apparently, the Russians invaded Finland, so they put on their white camo and fuckin’ disappeared. The Russians never knew what hit them…… I know this because I watched several hour-long videos of the war because that’s AuDHD in a nutshell.
So, I went down the auDHD YouTube rabbit hole as well, and have listened to probably 40 hours of lectures by now. It’s all making sense….. like knowing that learning extensively about Finland is weird for an American, but if their independence had been won in June we wouldn’t be having this conversation at all. Luck of the draw. Next horrific date to block out might be independence for the Dutch….. and “if there’s anything I hate, it’s people who are intolerant of other people’s cultures, and the Dutch” (From one of my favorite spy movies, “Goldmember”).
Speaking of “Goldmember,” learning about ADHD and/or autism gave me enough confidence to say, like Foxy Cleopatra, “I’m a whole lotta woman.” That’s because by doing the work, I learned there was nothing wrong with me. I am strong and beautiful because of my struggles, not in spite of them. So many people have told me that my writing is so good that I’m going to be a very big deal. One reason, not the whole story, is that I didn’t believe it myself. I do now, because I resonate with people in other countries, not just my own. I have appealed to an international audience for almost 24 years now….. I just haven’t been driving the bus. I hadn’t really looked at ways to monetize, or ways to attract readers.
Ok, I haave to say up front thaat this keyboard is driving me nuts becaause you caan’t slow down the repeat raate aaand the aa key is out of control. Hold pleaase.
I think I’ve corrected most of it, but this is what it looks like before, so just prepare for this entry to look Dutch by the end if it doesn’t work. I’ll try switching to aanother keyboaard, but no promises. They’re aall problematic. Th other keyboard randomly makes keys stop working, and at 90 wpm, I get overwhelmed with trying to edit very fast. I could just buy another BT keyboard, but I’ve never had one that didn’t develop problems with connection if they didn’t have it already.
But let’s get back to autism and society. One of my biggest problems is that ADHD does not get the validity it deserves. I know this because there’s some argument that ADHD should be part of ASD, and yet just like autism, there are people who believe it’s not real and people who believe they can fix you.
If you ever want to see an autistic meltdown from me, mention ABA. I will not be elaborating further, but if you have plans to wipe “Autism Speaks” off the planet, please let me know where to show up with chocolate and lowers. If you even dip a toe in to videos by autistic people, you will realize that Autism Speaks is for parents, and parents are frustrated and burned out with a kid they feel is impossible. I use high functioning and low functioning for clarity’s sake, but lots and lots and lots of autistic people won’t. I think I’m not offended because I have a use case for that library of images. Trying to prove that I’m autistic in a world where disability porn shows people what I’m “supposed” to look like is cruel. You think autism means mental retardation. Incorrect. In some ways, my brain is 10x faster than yours. In some ways, your brain is 10x faster than mine. In my experience, neurotypicals want to make me solely responsible for minding the gap. It is true that freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences or anything else that would derail being a functioning adult. It does mean that in relationships, neurotypical people see themselves as superior to me because they’ve been socialized to call my actions childish and this will not change in my lifetime- die mad about it.
Should it be okay that autism is naturally occurring, yet you are okay and I am fucked up? This is how every conflict comes across to us when you are irritated with our symptoms, as if we’re THRILLED to have them. Who I projected and who I really was were always at odds until now. When my mother died, I found out my actual diagnosis and that I am indeed physically disabled when she’d gaslit me into believing my father lied to me my whole fucking life while the papers were in her effects and Lindsay found them. I went nuclear for both me and my dad, because that was fucking abhorrent. My parents have always been at odds about me, since I was a kid. I’ve always been difficult, frighteningly intense, high needs (vs. low function) and trying to be invisible, social masking normalcy as not to cause even more problems. I can tell when people don’t like me, and I’ve struggled with it my whole life because I didn’t know what it was about me that was offputting.
Now I know that my emotions are just turned up to hell and other people’s aren’t. They’ve never had to learn to manage emotions this big because they don’t manage their emotions at all. Social masking teaches you to analyze human behavior so you’ll fit in. However, you cannot replicate it because your points of view are wildly different. We dream of worlds where we’ll be understood- obsessed with sci-fi to an enormous degree.
I am not Supergrover’s partner, I just call her that because that’s what yellow strings are called. In reality, she is my Doctor, and a part of me will always be Martha Jones. She does not watch the show, so will you hear my emotions when I say something that means everything to me and nothing to her? I hope she never forgets the time that The Doctor was her.
It led me here, to this place, where I know myself well enough to be able to communicate what is right for me and what’s not. I am not constantly afraid of everything, common among neurodivergents because how they’ll be perceived sits in their stomachs like a rock. I know I’m auDHD, and if I see a benefit to an official diagnosis, I’ll get one. I do not see a benefit in trying to prove that I’m autistic. In my experience, trying to convince someone that you are less crazy than they think but still diagnosed is futile. Just like trying to convince someone that you’re disabled when you “don’t look like it.”
I do not know what to do now, but I do know two things. The first is that I am not lazy. The second is that I am not malicious.
To conclude, here is a meme to express my feelings, one of my love languages.
Stories That Are All True 