Tag: Relationships

Whiplash

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

My mental health moves to try and destroy me fast, so I have to be faster. It’s a full-time job keeping up with medication, therapy, group, etc. I’m getting to the point where I’m stable again, after having been through the ringer the past several months. I have alienated many people, some of which I noticed and some of which I didn’t. I just woke up one day thinking about them and boom, gone.

That’s certainly okay, I don’t control whether people want to be in my life or not. Just because it’s okay doesn’t mean it doesn’t sting. I can only maintain that I don’t care about other people’s opinions for so long. I do care, I just cannot let other’s opinions of me be more important than my opinion of myself.

My opinion of myself is quite low, but that’s the point of therapy and group. I know that I need to learn more coping mechanisms to be tapped into the community again. I feel unmoored with the Aada situation and am transitioning to more solid ground. I know that one day I’ll wake up and it won’t be painful anymore…. Or I’ll wake up to an email from her because she tried to let the relationship lie and couldn’t.

It’s a crapshoot, but the best indication of past behavior is the future.

When Aada said it would have been nice to go back to the beginning, but I guess we are past that, I wanted to scream “don’t use final words if ‘you guess,’ because I’m not rejecting you.” But here’s the thing about Aada. She has the capability to change her mind, and to let my words change her.

Maybe something will resonate, but I don’t want to feel like a burden anymore.

Feeling like a burden to your friends and family is the danger zone with bipolar disorder and ADHD. Impulsive behavior and a permanent solution to a temporary problem. It compounds when you know you are responsible for the problem. I have all the resources I need to deal with my depression, though, and I’m proud of myself for doing all the right things.

I have eaten ice cream, I have taken long baths, I have wished the people in my life who have taken space well. I am just trying to live my life over here, accepting all who show up and trying to forget about unreturned affection. It’s not good to focus on people who don’t show up, because you miss the love of the people who do.

I am really not lonely in the grand scheme of things because I have a ton of friends all over the world. It’s a specific type of loneliness, which is being able to have face time with my friends. I am sure that I will travel eventually, but right now I need to focus on getting out and about closer to home. I need to increase the chance that I will find relationships that sustain me here.

I could try dating, but dating someone and having it go wrong means the lack of another friend. I feel much better in the friend zone, because those relationships aren’t normally mercurial. You bond through activity and keep it light. I’m just not in a space to take down the barbed wire around my heart. I need it to keep people out until I figure out my own life. I wouldn’t be a good partner to anyone and I know that.

They say no relationships during the first year at AA, and I don’t think Cognitive Behavioral Health should be any different. I need time to “turn the judgment on myself” and get it together. I need a routine and a structure that allows me to keep my home ready to host and my focus on the things that fulfill me. Once I have those two things in place, then maybe I won’t get the shakes at going out with someone.

Keeping friendships light while I do the deep dive is allowing me to get to know people without putting too much on a relationship in the beginning. An explosive connection turns mercurial fast, because if you love each other that much, the knock down drag outs will be legend…….. Wait for it…… Dary.

I don’t need a cycle of lovebomb and discard, even if the lovebombing is mutual and not toxic. Lovebombing is unsustainable and hell coming down off all those chemicals. Not having the heat of new relationship energy anymore causes a lot of couples to break up, because they think it should be that heightened sense all the time.

I cannot afford to lose anyone right now.

I talk to my friends on the internet and wish for hugs.

It’s hard out here for a writer, because honest to blog it is the bane of my existence. Strangers love me, but my writing isolates people when “when people stop being polite, and start getting real.” My life actually got better when I stopped mind reading and started being kind but not polite. All of the sudden I had boundaries and could express my opinion, going toe to toe with people instead of cowering and trying to please them all the time.

It was social masking to cover my weird.

Unmasking is one of the hardest processes there is, because it comes with a chorus of “you’re different” and “why is autism your entire personality now?” I cannot explain the difference between masking and being unmasked without it. Masking means being uncomfortable to the point of nausea trying not to express your needs because people think they’re stupid. Your clothes/food/etc. cannot really be bothering you that much. Meanwhile, you are screaming inside your skin trying not to argue. People jump from my needs not being real to infantilizing me quickly.

I have learned to talk to other neurodivergent people because it’s a different life, that’s for sure.

I need for people to understand why the wrong socks can ruin my day and not give me shit about it.

I need for people to understand that I have a large weighted plush to force emotional regulation, not because I’m being “childish.” My sensory issues require these things and deserve respect. I don’t have a service dog, so a weighted plush is the next best thing.

In short, I am a whole mood, and that’s what’s scary about opening up. That’s what’s scary about losing friends after you’ve already done it.

I think it says a lot about me that I have no problem opening up here, but it takes a lot to get me to talk.

Unless I’m social masking, so people won’t reject me and not because they would….. Because I think they would based on past experiences. That’s all my own bag and I’m working on it. The world is not nearly as fraught as I see it. I make mountains out of molehills and stay away from people, needing an engraved invitation to believe I’m really invited.

I need secure connections, and I have them. It is a process to lean in rather than taking in all the rejection I feel.

But I am not feeling sorry for myself. I can’t. I have millions of words here explaining to me exactly what I did to alienate people, and am finding a way forward to be a writer and a friend at the same time.

The Dawnzer Lee Light

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

It is about 20 minutes until 7:00 AM. I’ve been up for a few hours, having gotten my coffee and listened to the news. So, Marjorie Taylor Green is stepping down because Trump’s followers are just as violent as they’ve always been. I don’t think we’ve heard the last of her, though. She got media attention for breaking with Trump publicly and it remains to be seen whether she’ll parlay that into a different seat somewhere else or “spending time with her family.”

I would rather she just disappear, because she’s not what I would call “the best and the brightest.” But no one asked me.

That’s about as much news as I can take in before I change to a podcast about books or DIY.

I would like today to be full of excitement, and it will be as long as I consider laundry exciting. I haven’t decided whether I’m going to use the washer across the hallway or take several loads to the laundromat at once. I haven’t been to Sudsville in a while, and it is a sight to behold.

I have great memories of washing and folding clothes with my dad there. I wish we could do that sort of stuff more often, and I think we will as time passes. He absolutely does like coming here, and I like going to his house, too. In fact, I’m going for both Thanksgiving and Christmas this year.

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday because it’s generally still warm enough to swim. It feels like a resort holiday with the spread on the table and the pool with rockfall in the background. Speaking of which, I need to find my swimsuit. Thanks for reminding me, all y’all.

“All y’all” is worldwide now, because my stats are bigger in other countries than they are in my own. I joke that I’m a big deal in India, but it is true that a lot of my fans live there. It makes me wonder what about my white, nerdy patois appeals on the subcontinent.

One day I would like to plan a trip based on my stats.

I have fans in every Indian state, but have never been to India. According to my stepmother’s patients, the largest group of Indians I know, I have gathered that Indians in the US are not a monolith. Some love going back, some joke that India stands for “I’ll Never Do It Again.”

I know that I would have a good time, so it’s definitely something to think about for the future. I’m sure I’ll have an Elizabeth Gilbert moment that requires me to leave the country at some point.

Speaking of which…. Liz, we have to talk.

I read your latest book and how dare you make me feel my own feelings? 😉 We are in the same tribe, my friend. Reading you is like a window into myself and it is not always comfortable. Could you teach me how to write fiction?

What? Like it’s hard.

Kidding. I loved “The Signature of All Things.”

I talk to all writers like I’ve known them for a hundred years. Before I started hating Rowling I sent her a Tweet trolling her that said, “The Casual Vacancy was great. Have you written any other books?”

I got a heart from Jodi when I said, “Picoult, that line slays. I’m stealing it.”

In short, I’m just razzing Gilbert because she’s brilliant. I don’t think she will read this, so it doesn’t matter.

But I could be wrong, and that’s the fun of being a blogger.

If Margaret Cho and Martina Navratilova know who I am, then it’s not an impossibility that Liz Gilbert has read me, either.

I think a lot about being a dynamic storyteller and I’ve picked up tricks from both Margaret and Liz over the years.

Speaking of dynamic storytelling, I saw two little old ladies at Waffle House that looked like they had the same age gap as me and Aada. Just for a moment, I let myself dream that I was meeting Aada for brunch and buying her all the waffles she could eat from past Galentine’s Days uncelebrated.

I do different things for her on Galentine’s Day, but I never fail to send her the meme with Leslie Knope saying that her female friends are “noble land mermaids” and “stupid hot.”

I don’t know that we’ll ever get back to that, but she’ll always be stupid hot in my book, Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ.

Her being stupid hot is half of how I landed in this mess to begin with, shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiat.

And then she was funny, and I’ve never gotten my heart back. I never will, and that’s okay. I know it’s safe.

I miss the days when I could flirt with her and not have it mean anything but fun. I know that she’s not comfortable with it, so those lines just live in my memory and feed my ego when I need them. I loved it that she’d throw me a bone, because she’s again, very funny.

I’m funny, too, but not in a way that resonates with a lot of people. I’m an acquired taste because I’m on the think it, say it plan. This does not always work out well for me, and my work in therapy is to learn to be better emotionally regulated. I need better coping mechanisms because when I melt down and burn out I say things I don’t mean. My illness starts talking, and it is just not excusable. I will never not be autistic, therefore I will never have a fully emotionally regulated life. It’s about learning to manage it.

I should have put a lid on things and talked to the air for a while. I hear Jesus is always available to hear my running bullshit. Maybe I’ll take him up on it.

It’s hard to decide when to be radio silent and when to talk. It’s a balance of being able to explain my perspective when it ultimately comes at a cost. My friends can read whether I want them to or not, and they do. Some of them think I am a fantastic writer and cheer me on. Some of them do not care. I don’t care which camp my friends fall in, because it’s very exciting to talk about my career and writing, and it is also exciting to put all that away and just relax.

I don’t require my friends to be fans. I’ll email them enough that they feel like they read me already.

And in fact, that’s a constant criticism of my friendships. I take in information best by reading and writing. My friends don’t have time to read and say my friendship comes with homework. I have never been able to properly express how irritating this is because I know other people aren’t writers. If I’ve written something and you’re interested in me, you’ll at least skim it and get back to me with a phone call….. Because you don’t work the way I do.

I can respect and celebrate all those differences because I don’t require my friends to be anything they’re not, and I don’t expect that of myself, either. I want all authentic relationships, and that means waiting for friends and partners that like to read.

I am a fantastic correspondent if you like to read as well, because my letters go all over the place and back again. I try to weight them if we don’t talk often.

I’m neurodivergent, so I have no friendship degradation mechanism. If someone comes back into my life, we pick up right where we left off. That often means writing serious letters once in a while, because I made such a mistake in overwhelming Aada. She reads fast, but not that fast. I was unconcerned with how fast she got back to me, but she always felt extraordinarily guilty about it.

It was always okay. It is always okay. I’m just happy to hear from her when I do.

Close friendships require resilience after complete blowouts. You don’t blow out if you don’t care that much about each other. Anger fades from me and I have no boundary that says relationships cannot be rebuilt. I could get mad enough to say I didn’t want Aada in my life. I cannot get mad enough to mean it.

It’s just not a service I offer.

She has been extraordinarily kind to me over the years, even when I haven’t been respectful of her boundaries and truly stepped over lines I shouldn’t have and ignored her feelings in the moment, but always wanted to do reparative work. It’s not me trying to be an asshat, it’s me having a disability and trying to manage it. I cannot help melting down and burning out, but I can learn not to feel such red mist rage that I say things that make people feel horrible.

I put up with my own flaws and failures because people say terrible things to me, too. They are human. I get over it and hope for the same from them, because dollars to donuts they are also melting down and will need to apologize later.

It’s the ’tism.

It’s all about making up for it with the next shot if you get one. Sometimes the clock runs out.

Some people just need time to regroup after the last game, because the rivalry got unfriendly.

I needed to calm down and reassess my coping mechanisms, because “I don’t care as long as I have one person in my life who believes in me” is not a viable option. Many people believe in me and I have rejected them due to rejection sensitivity dysphoria.

I know that while Aada is lost in hers, she cannot see me lost in mine. Things will change if she turns from having empathy for herself to having empathy for me, and the same is true of me in return. We have a lot of work to do in order to save the world, and it starts with saving ourselves.

I just realized that I’ve been saving myself for her, and not in a romantic way. I’m training to be a better writer so that I can reach the level she already is. I think we have a future in publishing whether I’m the editor or she is. We are both ruthless with a red pen and constantly cheering each other on. I wish she would write more.

Quite frankly, I think she wishes I would write less. 😉

“Speak less to that.”

I completely lost the ability to be logical, tied up in my own overwhelming emotions. I stumbled through this relationship every day, trying to reach her and not knowing how. Then, we finally got to the place where we were back in new relationship energy and she told me that she lied. ALL OF THE SUDDEN I DID NOT KNOW HER.

I felt an inner crisis and I reacted.

I have apologized for everything, my part in all of it. So has she. I want to react with love and kindness, but she is determined not to let me. She is determined not to let me be a dynamic character, limiting me to a “Flat Stanley” set of emotions in which I am always angry at her. I don’t know what to make of this except tell her, “you’re killing me, Smalls.”

I have given her everything I am over the years, letting her pick and choose the parts she liked. She soaked up energy from me without giving it back, and touched my heart by apologizing for being that emotional vampire. She sees herself, really sees herself, in my letters and I don’t think she wants to lose that part of it.

But I’m sorry that love and care means that she thinks I’m performing a psychological assassination and every day is therapy day.

She gives me a lot of power that I don’t have. We have a difference of opinion, I am not writing from on high. I’m sure that her friends do ask about me and ask if she’s read my blog recently. I hope that they’re telling her what I’m saying and not joining her opinion that I have rejected her, so her only recourse is to slink off.

Meanwhile, I’m so lovesick I wake up with tears in my eyes. Our relationship is not and never will be romantic, but because I’ve felt those feelings for her before I go into a crazy amount of dysregulation when she walks out. None of this is about rejecting her, but addressing the mistakes of the past so that we can move on.

I know that she wants to be close and have few boundaries, but she doesn’t trust me enough to recreate it. Her perception is that I think all she does is lie, but she didn’t read any of the entries after that forgiving her for it and wiping the slate clean. The first lie had the best of intentions, but the last ones didn’t. It was not the white lie that made me mad, but the years-long coverup.

I have trust issues as well, but I wrote her a long letter giving her all the latest dirt. If you want to build trust, you have to offer it. I told her every single thing I couldn’t publish and her blackmail list is already a mile long. Her story is just as complex as mine if she’d be willing to sit down and write it.

We could alternate chapters, but I have an unfair advantage. My part is already done.

I’ve been thinking about it since dawn, because how do I rectify someone telling me that they’re walking away because of what they think I think instead of just asking me.

I don’t have any preconceived notions about Aada and am mystified as to why she has so many preconceived notions about me. She’s built me up in her head to be this dictatorial writer whose only job is to hurt her until she’s been utterly embarrassed across all platforms.

Meanwhile, I am an absolute hack without her and I know it.

The way I collaborate with AI is the way we used to collaborate and now I know her brain is faster.

It’s a loss for sure, but not the reason I’m obsessed with the problem. I’m ruminating about it because it’s representative of all the people in my life. It’s hard to keep relationships going when I’m reflecting.

My reflections cost me because what the reader thinks is more important than what I do. I cannot help it that Aada felt punished by my actions because I didn’t write the story that way. That’s the message she’s taking home and it’s devastating. The thing she loved (reading me every day) has been slowly twisted into a special kind of hate based on her, again, wrong ass opinion.

Today I’m strong enough to let her wrong ass opinion stand. Yesterday, I wasn’t. Grief is like that.

I’m trying to move away from writing about Aada, but right now she is the relationship I can actually explain. The others make no sense. The reason I can explain it is that we have so much history.

Over the years, I turned from having these unsustainable romantic feelings to the new relationship energy of emotional support without it. I really care what’s happening in Aada’s life and it has been misconstrued.

I have trouble putting down problems when they’re so unfair. I am completely justice oriented and this is akin to a rock in my shoe.

Nothing has been said to punish anyone. I’m just writing it out…. Having been up since the dawnzer lee light.

Out

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I’m out of escitalopram, so I’m waiting on an appointment with my psychiatrist and trying not to beat myself up with depression. When I don’t take my medication, I am likely to lapse into thinking about how much I suck. This is normal, I just need to take a pill, and then I will go back to a normal amount of beating myself up.

I’m trying to stop that, too, but it’s harder when your brain knows the very best lies to use against you. I’m combatting it by taking Tylenol, because I’m already autistic and there’s lots of research that says physical and emotional pain stem from the same source. It’s not just a placebo effect.

I also had some ice cream, and that always makes things look better. I went to Wawa for a parfait. It’s my new thing. Vanilla soft serve with chocolate syrup and peppermint crunchies because it’s just that time of year.

It was actually my second Wawa run of the day, because they do $3.00 lattes in the morning and that’s irresistible. I wake up very early and drive out to a Wawa about 30 minutes away so that I can spend some time in the car with my mind engaged. I don’t like being in my apartment because it’s so dark. Any excuse to leave and I’m out of here. I didn’t need soft serve, I made it up.

But it’s funny how bad I needed it compared to looking at these four walls.

Especially when my Xfinity internet connection went down, because then there was nothing to do. No TV, no surfing, no nothing except writing, and who wants to do that?

Kidding, I could have created a local document and pasted it into WordPress, but it was easier just to take a break and come back to the house once my connection was restored.

I needed to leave the house because my cell phone signal is so poor I cannot tether other devices to it. I mean, my cell signal is perfect when I’m not inside the house, but for some reason I continually miss calls and SMS when I’m down here.

“Down here” is probably the entire reason my signal sucks. I hope that moving to a new apartment helps. I’ll have to go to the office and see what’s up with that. They said a few weeks, but now that I have trips scheduled I need to move on a certain timeline.

I was grateful when I told Bryn that Sam said she didn’t want to be in my life that she said, “well, you kind of dodged a bullet there, anyway.” It’s true, I did. She didn’t trust me because of bad past experiences and wasn’t adult enough to talk about them calmly.

As I’ve said before, I’m poly, but would have been willing to settle down with only Sam if she’d asked. Here’s how it really went down.

We were absolutely crazy about each other. I told her that I had a first date coming up, and she told me not to cancel it. That she didn’t have time to devote to a full time girlfriend, didn’t have time to care, etc.

For three weeks she told me this lie while in her heart of hearts she only wanted me. It was a first date, not serious at all. If Sam had told me how she really felt, I would have listened- and in fact was disappointed that she didn’t jump at the chance to be exclusive. It was a miscommunication, because I gave her exactly what she asked for.

She called me hysterical while I was at Zac’s house and broke up with me. There was no discussion and the break was final. She told me that she couldn’t trust me, because in the back of her head she would always wonder if I was cheating.

Darlin,’ that’s not how poly works. I have to be brave enough to tell you what’s going to happen and you have to be brave enough to choose whether you want to continue our relationship. I give you that same power. There is no reason to cheat because dating other people is part of the contract.

And not only that, even at three weeks I could envision us having a very cool life together because there were so many huge things solved, like having similar music and church backgrounds.

I wanted only her, but she told me she didn’t have time.

Bryn is right. I dodged a bullet because what she really wanted was to be exclusive from the first date…. But she didn’t want to come get me all the time and it was so hard because I lived so far and all these other bullshit excuses because I had Uber and public transit. I never asked her to take me anywhere. She offered and resented it.

I was in a different financial position then, and couldn’t afford a car with the latest technology to allow me to drive safely, and I was infantilized for it.

So, I do see Bryn’s point. It’s not bad that someone who treated me like a child passed on the chance to do it again.

All of these things are swirling around in my head as I try to let go of a small rejection that is only large because I’m out of escitalopram. Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria is the worst when my serotonin feels wonky, and I just have to remember that it’s no big deal that Sam and I won’t see each other ever again, because in the grand scheme of things, it matters about as much as Dunkin being out of the donuts I like.

I really only like Boston Cream.

I’m trying to keep my spirits up by refueling with caffeine regularly. I’ve had enough now that I’m starting to feel some relief.

Most of my upset this afternoon was outrage at the president, but I don’t get any forward motion out of hating him. There’s very little I can do about that particular situation because his own party is tolerant of conduct unbecoming.

Trump is giving off King George vibes, and he can no longer hold down the madness. Saying that Democrats could do anything that was seditious enough to be punishable by death is barbaric. Calling a reporter “piggy” falls under the same category. He gets worse and worse, people in power defending him when they know they’ve never seen anything like him.

It’s going to get worse before it gets better, and Trump’s policy won’t get better if he steps down. JD Vance won’t change anything back. However, I do think that it would stop attacks on the press.

I’m going to level with you, especially the Americans.

This is not normal. The president is Looney Tunes and his party doesn’t care. We are trapped in this situation because they won’t invoke 25 and they won’t impeach him. He can say all the crazy shit he wants absolutely unchecked.

It is so bad that I have to keep my head down. I don’t listen to the news often, and I try not to retain what I’ve heard. If I need something, I’ll ask AI. Only focusing on myself and my community keeps me sane, because I go in cycles. When I can handle more, I’ll absorb it. But you have to tap out. There’s news fatigue because the country is so unstable.

But when I focus just on my local community, my world seems right again. There has to be a balance, because it can’t be all or nothing. I have a drive to be informed, but I hate audio stories about the president because his voice grates on my last damn nerve.

I don’t want people to write me off as “just a Democrat,” either. I have never voted Republican, but I went to the Republican convention in 1992 just to be there because it was in Houston and I have actually met President George H.W. Bush. My sister met Ronald Reagan. I have never held people’s beliefs against them until my rights were up for grabs. A difference of opinion is whether coffee is delicious, not whether I’m an American.

I’ve been out as queer since I was 13 or 14 years old, depending on who you ask. When I was a child, I thought the best I would get out of life is no one caring I lived with a roommate because I knew I didn’t want to marry a man.

Now, I don’t want to marry anyone. If you value your own sanity, you won’t ask.

Things with marriage equality have changed so much in my lifetime, but I’m just past that point in my life where I want and need government entanglement. My track record with marriage isn’t the greatest and I know that I will never change. My attention deficit doesn’t mix with long relationships thus far.

I’m not fatalistic, I’m just over it.

I’m over all the drama that a relationship escalator creates and I want to tap out. I know that things change, and late in life I could be surprised and want to get married again. It’s not that I don’t believe in it. It’s that the best indication of future behavior is the past.

If you always do what you always did, you always get what you always got.

I don’t want to be the same person I’ve always been, because I am ready for a new chapter in my life. I got comfortable with just relaxing in my sweats and writing to Aada while the world passed me by. I didn’t notice, and don’t regret it. But things are getting more exciting around here and I want to be present for it.

The ego boost that my search results in Copilot gave me have me focused on creative projects and that’s all on me. I don’t require input for those, I just need to sit down at my desk and actually work on them.

I don’t need to think about cute girls, but Imma do it anyway.

Although thinking about cute girls is a misnomer, because my taste skews much older than me.

If you were born female and your taste skews older, there is this moment.

You want a cougar til you realize you ARE the cougar.

Oh, my God you guys. I’m still stuck on how much Aada thinks I hate her because of the way I portrayed her. I can’t do anything about it, it just sits in my stomach like a rock.

I hope that in time she’ll believe in fairy tales again,

I will believe that there is capability for redemption between us until time runs…………………………………………..

Out.

Rain is Falling: Contemplation

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

It is a moody day in Baltimore. The weather is misty, the sun is completely hidden. It matches my mood, because I don’t like rejection and it doesn’t matter what kind. I do not like it when people hold on to things so completely that they never want contact again. It’s so final, and so hard when they’re still out in the world.

But I’m not thinking about Sam. I’m thinking about how grief compounds. I was already feeling low because Aada and I called it quits (for now). So of course I had to go and make the rejection worse when my sensitivity to it is disproportionate to the situation in all things.

I decided to stop doing things that no longer serve me.

I will respect Sam’s wishes and forget about her again. There’s no anger, I’m just licking my wounds.

I changed Aada’s email address in my address book so that I could still write to her all I wanted because I also own the other account. It gives me the flexibility to let her read if she’s ever curious AND ALSO the ability not to bug her every three seconds with “one more thing.”

What breaks my heart about Aada walking away is that she thinks I’m lying when I say I don’t hate her. I love her. She said that she gets it, it was a mistake to believe in her.

What in the world?

I have never said any of these things and I need her to say them to herself if that’s her opinion but to stop saying it to me. I think she’s the most beautiful woman in the entire world. Fight me.

And if she says, “I just have to get up the willpower to stop reading,” it means that she hasn’t stopped thinking about me, either. I don’t think this is the end of our movie because again, we left our connection pure for the future. The holidays will be hard but I’m determined not to buy her anything and not to reach out unless she does.

Our traditional gifts are either Starbucks cards or Kindle books, so when I’m curled up at my dad’s reading, it’ll be one she got me.

Maybe even a reimagined fairy tale.

I’m really feeling low about all this, because Aada has been a part of my daily life since 2013. It makes complete sense to me why she at least needs to take space, if not move on from me entirely. We had a bad pattern and it needed to go away. Yet we both feel our chemistry strongly even when the other isn’t in the room.

That’s because we’re both a part of each other’s wild and crazy brains. I know I have given her an enormous amount of free rent in my head over the years, and I have constantly underestimated how big my house is in her mental neighborhood. I’m pretty sure I have a pool.

Please advise.

I want to work together to solve conflicts if the detente ever melts, but I told her that our conflict resolution has to start with her opinion of herself. That we are not checking the story we are telling ourselves, because according to her I purposefully tried to take her down, I think she’s a liar, etc.

MEANWHILE

I am saying every day how much I love and miss her…. And about those lines she says that she takes in the positive things I say, but they feel suspect, like clues in a game.

I am not playing with her. She is a 3D character. She’s as human as I am, having the capability for every emotion in the spectrum. I see her so completely that I am deeply honest about the fact that when it is good, the world explodes. When it is bad, it is terrible.

I want the world to explode with our secure connection, because I have worked through a lot of the issues that were plaguing me. If I am lucky, my writing will draw Aada back someday. That’s generally how it works. After people have been apart from me, they start reading me to see what I’m up to now.

If I am really, really lucky, that reading leads to reaching out.

But most people just announce they’re done and I have to learn to move on.

I have started announcing when I’m done, but struggle on reinforcement of boundaries. I need help if I didn’t get a clue that the relationship with Sam or Aada is really over because they stated their intentions quite clearly.

I thought Aada blocked me because she said she did, so I sent her a fuck ton of email, all of which she read…… And still came at me with all these things I never decided. I wasn’t trying to be intrusive. She said that if I was blocked on her email account, I wouldn’t know it. So she told me she blocked me and I thought I had safe space. I even got “proof” except it wasn’t.

I do need help because Aada doesn’t need me in my current state. She needs me to become the writer she thought I was before I broke her heart.

I don’t understand my own pathology with Aada, because I don’t know why I was great until I had to be great.

Yes, that WAS a Lizzo reference. Thank you for asking.

That’s my own journey to take, and now I think that Aada is right. I will be stronger than ever because I realize that what I think doesn’t matter. She’s going to take home whatever message she gets out of my writing and I don’t control it. The message she got was not the message I sent.

“Constant punishment” and “checking for assaults” really got to me because that was never my intention. I’ve always written with such a drive and ambition to be near her, didn’t hold on to anger, etc. Have always told people from Houston to Helsinki that if things were different she’d be wearing my pin…. But they aren’t, and it was worth taking a risk to be close, anyway.

It’s not that I was bitter and jealous or anything like that. It’s that anybody who has ever felt butterflies for anyone knows how hard it is to be comforted by the person who doesn’t want you. It feels like nails on a chalkboard until the butterflies go away and you can look at them without your brain chemicals going “WHOOOOOOOOOOSH!”

I just decided to tell her that I was going to let those feelings go away on their own, but it took a very long time and I knew that up front. She’s my platonic ideal of what a woman is, can be…. I lamented we could not create something fantastic together.

And then we just proceeded to create something fantastic, anyway. It just looked different than my previous version of fantastic.

I pray for Aada and her husband, sending them good thoughts because it keeps me grounded. If I cannot be her partner, I want her to have the best marriage she can have with whomever she chooses, just like she wishes for me.

But that feeling of closeness that’s deeper than friendship has never gone away for me, because romance is so far on my back burner. I would rather just sit around with friends and not focus on the pressure of dating, but I know it would accelerate my life forward at an alarming rate….. And that’s a good thing. I’m ready for things to be completely different. Aada’s storyline is tired according to her, and as my former editor I have to agree with her. I got lost in my own ruminations.

Oops. My bad. Should I leave a note?

Waffle House

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

The very last time I drove a car, I was going to Waffle House. I ate, and then proceeded to wreck my car against a guardrail because I was lost in thought and went around a curve too fast. So, I was understandably nervous about going again. The nostalgia was just too much. I had cheese-n-eggs, raisin toast with apple butter, bacon, and hash browns. I ate as much as I wanted, which wasn’t a lot, and boxed the rest up to go home.

I listened to NPR the whole way, because Sunday mornings are a lot of fun. I even managed to solve some of Will Shortz’ puzzles. Then, in a dramatic turn of events, I was caught in traffic a lot of the way home because of a car fire. I had never seen anything like it. I am hoping it was a movie stunt, because it looked like Marvel level damage. I don’t think anyone could survive a fire hot enough for me to feel it four lanes over.

In the middle, the atmosphere and food were just as I remembered them. It’s simple and delicious at a time when I needed it. Waffle House is the ultimate comfort food for me, and I should also tell you that I made it home safely. 😉

I was still moping and crying from this morning, so I had to get out and move. I have learned that when I’m flooding out, movement is a better solution than trying to work it out in solitude. Not every problem needs to be analyzed to death. When I’m in the car, my adrenaline goes up a crazy amount. I try to drive a little bit every day just to put some myelin back on my nerves because I “took my nerve pills, but everybody be wonderin.'” I need to pull myself together because Aada is right. We keep opening the wound without letting it scab over.

In my wildest dreams, scar tissue is stronger once it’s healed and Aada will again be able to see me as the writer that flattens her.

But I have to move on to different topics to even have a shot at moving myself forward so that thinking of her doesn’t hurt anymore. That’s all I’ve been trying to do, not make it hurt anymore, but I got lost and forgot to tell my audience about things like Waffle Houses and car fires.

My featured image is probably crooked, but I sent it first to Lanagan Media Group with a note that said, “we’re having breakfast together in my head.”

We’ve been talking a lot lately about politics and sending each other memes. None of my finances are settled yet, so I haven’t officially incorporated. But I have several people interested in working for me that I know will help make me successful. I’ve already given them their tech toys to be able to write, but we’re all slowing down…. Or I’m trying to. Now, even though I post more often, I’m spending less time writing and more time driving. I see and hear more when I’m involved in the community at large. Shutting myself away all these years and focusing on the relationship with Aada started from our first conversation on, so I’m having to reorient myself and get out more.

I’m frustrated that she could see all of this happening and didn’t say anything, but I’m starting to be able to look in front of me without looking back to make sure Aada is okay. You can’t help yourself across the river if you’re carrying someone else, and this is true of both sides of that river because neither of us managed to understand each other longer than a few minutes.

So I start thinking about all of this again because it’s fresh on my mind and think, I need to drive. Yesterday, I picked a convenience store about 30 miles from my house so that I could open my car up on the freeway and just bliss out.

My social life has also improved because I can make it down to Stafford to have time with Tiina and her family; I drive now. Driving is cool.

Tiina gave me one of the biggest thrill rides of my life with the drive from my house to hers. It was absolutely stunning, and I’m eager to get back out that way with a camera. The picture I took at Waffle House is one of the few I’ve taken in the last few months, even though I really enjoy photography.

Working through all the turmoil as Aada and I shut it all down made me depressed and I lost interest in things that, well, interested me. Now, the strife is o’er, and my interest in everything has picked back up. Even my heart rate has gone back up.

I’m not going to lie, there’s been several times during all of this that I felt like I would die of a broken heart because the stakes were so high.

Our connection was dynamic and stagnant, flat lining and being resuscitated over and over. I cannot feel that the battle is won, nor can I feel like I lost. I don’t feel like I lost much with all of the frustration I’ve been feeling for months and years…… One minute. The next I’m inconsolable and crying.

I know that though nothing will be the same, everything will be okay. That’s a thing I say now because my dad said it at my stepmother’s funeral. It’s the transition that hurts, because I was understood perfectly and not at all.

Now, it’s my job to make other people understand me. I need to build up relationships with actual history, people who have spent face time with me long enough to know what my intentions and motivations really are. I am safe now. Most of my friendships are on the ground and the ones that are have been moved to my inner circle. It’s too much work to convince someone you do not mean harm when they do not understand you well enough to know that you don’t.

I am trying to tap out. The internet is exhausting. When my friends need me, they can text me in the car, and I will go and pick them up. I will not spend my days worried about people who aren’t in my daily life. There’s just no way long term for me, because the entire relationship is depersonalized, making you say things you wouldn’t to someone’s face.

I am a little too cognizant of that now, and post here instead of on Facebook (well, sporadic Facebook posts but mostly just a feed of this web site). You can find me, but you have to search me out. I want anonymous fans, but I don’t want to be beholden to popular opinion. My blog can definitely be run by committee and has been in the past (and will be in the future). But the one rule I have is that even though my name’s on the door, we don’t edit each other. Everyone has their own unique, distinctive voice and I want to continue to celebrate it.

I want to redesign my web site and redirect fans to lanaganmediagroup dot com and lanaganmediagroup at proton dot me (said that way to cut down on spam). Again, I am more comfortable in the choir than a soloist.

Though I am a trained soloist, to be clear.

I am clear on the fact that parts of me are dying that I set in motion. New energy has to come in and I need to be there to receive it. I am slowly losing paranoia surrounding Aada’s special alerts for me, because I don’t plan on using her phone number or her e-mail address ever again.

And if she does come back into my life, I will be smart enough to never mention it publicly.

I shouldn’t have said a lot of things, I shouldn’t have hurt her in the way that I did… because people will forget what you say, but they will never forget the way you made them feel. Without intending to, I punched Aada in the kidney. The fact that she would rather focus on that moment than any of our positive ones is the entire reason I’m tired.

The argument always runs thusly after Aada has read something:

“You’re punishing me and I can’t stand reading the daily flagellations.”
“I’m not punishing you, that’s what you’re choosing to take away. I say plenty of positive things and you call them suspicious.”

She cannot understand why I will not break down into not having an opinion just because it makes her uncomfortable. It is not my job to ensure that she remains untriggered in her life, but I lost sight of who she was to me and wanted our relationship dead.

She lied to me and jerked me around and expected me to be happy about it. So, I went overboard in making sure that I told the story in a fair and balanced way when it was my story alone to tell. I represented her in these pages by showing empathy for what her problems might actually be, but she took it as psychological assassination instead.

Her view of love is entirely fucked up and she told me that on day one. I should have listened to her because I didn’t have a better idea than her of what love should be, so we descended into a toxic mess within days. She didn’t have to stick with me as long as she did. She could have blocked me and walked off into the sunset years ago. She just never did, keeping up with my blog………… Which hurt like hell because for every “lovely post, btw” there was a mountain of “you’re purposefully hurting me.”

She couldn’t leave me alone to do my job as a writer and just ignore me. She expected that she could be tight-lipped on all her emotions and that would magically read her mind and tell the story how she read it while it was happening to her.

I can’t do that when I only have a handle on what’s happening to me, and my grip on reality is shady at best. Autism pulls you into your own little world, and you create your own bubble that may or may not line up with everyone else. I have purposefully isolated myself too long to be helpful to me, because my need to talk to someone, anyone, led me to these pages.

I need to get out and drive again. I can’t stand the din of my own thoughts, because now that Aada has said no more, my ruminations will only hurt me. I have to get forward motion, and what better speed than 55 miles an hour?

Otherwise, I will again wake up with tears in my eyes. It’s not our journey anymore. Not even to Waffle House.

The One They Want

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What’s the first impression you want to give people?
View all responses

I am determined not to have a certain first impression because it’s not my job to care what people think of me. They can do it on their own time. I do not say this to be defiant, only to say that I will no longer be preparing canned reactions. It is what it is. Most people think that I am delightful upon meeting until I slowly become too weird for them. By this I mean that I have had no real coping skills for my own neurodivergence and mental health skills, so I could not prepare for the inevitable spin-out due to the communication barrier. No one could help me because I couldn’t help myself.

I had to dig deep into research on autism and ADHD, and now I’m attending a cognitive behavioral health group to increase my awareness of my own bullshit.

AuDHD is a lot of bullshit, because you’re not wired to converse like other people converse. You don’t pick up what’s not being said, the social cues running around you because when you hear something, you take it incredibly literally.

Taking everything literally has cost me more than anyone will ever know. I now know what it feels like to really lose something as a writer, which is my muse. I cannot give an accurate first impression right now because I’m in shock. But as I drifted off last night, I thought, “this is the last time I’ll ever have to grieve her. She’s honestly and truly gone.” It has been a roller coaster of enormous proportions, and I still have to get over the fact that I am not welcome in her life but she’ll know so much about me from here on out. This blog and the works I have in progress will not make me less of a public figure.

That’s why, when I drifted off to sleep, I seriously considered deleting this blog in its entirety, no regrets. I thought about letting it go dormant and just not adding anything more. Anything to get off the grid and not be a public figure anymore because the thought she’s watching from afar is not altogether comforting.

Our relationship has been adversarial at times, and I don’t have the stomach for it. I wish there was a way that I could track Aada’s IP and block it from this URL, but that will never be possible. It will never be possible for me to hide published books from her, either. So, it’s a process with me making peace with the fact that our relationship will always be uneven if she cannot stick to her vow to stay away.

I have officially been Dooced, fired because of my blog and here’s the irony. Aada would have hated it if I’d stopped sharing my real feelings and became an “influencer,” yet she hated being Aada at times. I could have written about something lighter and lost her respect.

If I was going to lose her respect, I’m glad I lost it by being true to myself.

I am trying to get a bigger fan base in Virginia because hits from her location are rare. They stand out, and I want that not to be the case. So, I’m going to start writing about it when I go to Tiina’s. I cannot believe how beautiful it is, and I have a lot to say about my emotions regarding my awe. As time goes by, I’m hoping that my love for the land spreads to others.

I want to get into more landscapes, because I’ve seen so much beauty and haven’t taken any time to record it. That’s because most of the absolutely stunning sights were taken in at 55 miles an hour. I can’t drive and snap photos, and there was really no place to get out of the car.

It’s not just about Virginia, DC, and Maryland, though. I fell in love with New York when I drove up to see Aaron and his wife’s family at Halloween.

I would like to get into travel writing, as I have said before. But I don’t want to stop examining my life and my mental health issues. As I get healthier, my writing will, too. I won’t always be so sad about the ways I’ve failed someone I loved and keep harping on it, while the message she’s been taking home is “I hate you and want to punish you.”

It was a communication disorder because we were not talking to each other.

It was a mistake to have a relationship that deep over the internet, because we weren’t connecting to each other’s humanity. We lobbed a lot of angry words without thinking for over 12 years, and none of that was healthy for either of us.

But as a result of this relationship, I think that others are going to have her opinion of me when it’s impossible. She’s never really met me. I am not sure that either one of us has taken in the enormity of how much we shared without ever shaking hands. We never instituted any guardrails, nor was she open to them.

I am looking forward to relationships that cannot get this toxic because they aren’t mired in years of taking emotional potshots at each other without looking, physically LOOKING, at what we were doing to each other.

Aada said it best when she said that our journey had been brilliant and beautiful at some times, excruciating and debilitating at others. But because we weren’t in front of each other, we couldn’t really hear each other, empathizing in real time.

I can feel the cortisol rising, the injustice and unfairness swelling within me. I am so mad at myself that I cannot breathe. What calms me down is thinking, “how dare I feel my own feelings?”

Aada told me that she thought after our relationship was over I would be stronger than ever, and I don’t think that’s true. I think that the strongest version of me would have come with facing Aada’s music and learning to turn dissonance into resolution. But that is today. Years from now I may look back and realize that I was right when I said goodbye to her a month into our relationship because I was so emotionally overloaded.

I was helplessly in love with her, and because she is straight, I knew it was all my own bag to deal with and wanted a deep friendship. That turned into years of backbreaking emotional work that I’m glad I did, but the story that helped other people didn’t help her.

That’s what you should know about me as a writer. My despair comes in when I realize that I can have a blog or I can have intimate relationships, but I cannot have both without a lot of communication.

With Aada, we didn’t check the story we were telling ourselves often enough, and suddenly we were at opposite ends of a spectrum instead of standing together.

Because we didn’t really know each other and thought we did. Thought that writing and sending each other personal media was enough. That face time didn’t matter for well over a decade. It was dehumanizing, because I know beyond a shadow of a doubt we could fix this with eye contact and a hug.

That’s because when you have no trust capital with someone, you really need to be able to look into their eyes. I would not have been so mercurial had we been in contact offline, because the internet heightened my emotions too much. I needed to come back down to earth, because someone’s writing personality is not them.

A first impression would have to include that I’m so fluent in web communications that I’m frustrated and need time offline every day.

There’s a laundry list of lessons I’ll take with me from this relationship, and that’s the biggest one.

Being watched is the second. I have a heightened awareness of what I’m doing and saying, because I think that other people expect me to flip out now that Aada is permanently gone. She’s been emotionally absent for most of our relationship, so this doesn’t feel that different. It just gives me more information for the future- that if “for now” really means “for now” and she’s going to come back later in my life I need to have my own boundaries to keep us both safe.

I am not counting on it, I just know that when people go back to my writing after a long time away, it often encourages them to reach out whether I want them to or not. I have said publicly that I will never turn her away, and this is true. But I also do not have to roll out the red carpet every time she appears, thinking that the world is going to change with our complementary angles. I don’t have to put my whole heart in her hands when she only wants to say hello.

That’s what I mean about moving too fast. I forgive very quickly and easily, not really having any self-protection mechanisms in place because I am so afraid of being lonely. This is the most lonely I’ve felt in a long time, because my inner monologue about how to fix things with Aada has stopped and the self care has begun.

I ate some Dubai chocolate.

That made the world a little better, but it doesn’t fix everything. I woke up this morning with actual tears in my eyes, and I just laid there and cried. I can respect that Aada needs space and I can give it to her, but I don’t have to be happy about it.

She said that she could offer clarification on her job, but she wouldn’t. That one line made me see red not because of our present situation, but because that kind of information is what I’d been searching for to calm my anxiety for 12 years, but now my anxiety wasn’t worth calming. She amped it up, instead.

That’s why it’s just not worth flipping out. She’s been a great friend over the years in some ways, but this aspect was shit. I needed more support from her both as a writer and a person, and she stonewalled me every day. I no longer want to participate in this dynamic, because I have other friendships that don’t take this much out of me.

It is exhausting trying to be heard when you’re not. I need to go toward people who are actually listening. Small talk drains me, so even a first impression of me will last if we talk more than a few minutes. I want to know about people’s worlds, and I’m very curious. People like to talk about themselves, and I soak it up. It gets me out of having to answer personal questions about myself because you’ve talked about X or Y for 20 minutes and oh, look at the time. I have to go.

What broke my heart in empathy for Aada was when she said that I didn’t need to take anything down if it was needed for my health and healing moving forward. That she was willing to take the bullets my blog caused to fly. That’s really the moment I decided I was an ex blogger, and then I had to get over it and make the donuts this morning.

I wondered if Aada ever really picked up how much I hated writing our story as it stood. That I dreamed of so much more adventure and playfulness than we got. She never asked if I liked writing her the way she appeared, just assumed it over and over. The answer is “absolutelyfuckingnot.” Hell no, I hated every minute of it and longed for a relationship in which we each called off the dogs and just got along. That was possible up until I found out she’d created an entire fictional universe that I’d bought into because there was some basis in fact.

She lied once, and became more and more fearful that it would get out so she kept lying. She could see how those consequences affected me and the emotional turmoil it took on me without feeling the need to unburden herself for 12 years.

I had a mental breakdown when I found out, another reason why it’s unwise for me to have a blog because the “think it, say it” plan has not generally worked out for me except in one area. The more I fuck up, the more people read me. I should have air gapped everything I was so angry, but I wrote and published my rage. It didn’t matter. She “wasn’t coming back.”

Except she did.

But only to tell me to get out of her life one more time, resetting the clock on grief. But this time it’s muted, because I’ve already grieved so much that I don’t have energy to put there. I’d rather close my eyes and remember her smile.

I have heard that the best days of your life are when you meet a writer and when you walk away from them.

But it’s hard to know that on a first impression.

Let’s Have Breakfast Together

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I’m having a macchiato and some orange juice, followed by some water. I don’t eat early in the morning, but you get whatever you want. My treat.

Today I have what my father and I have come to call “Group with Ride.” That’s because someone from my Cognitive Behavioral Health group would come and pick me up on Thursdays, so “Group with Ride” is how it looks on my Google Calendar, as opposed to “Group,” which is on Wednesdays.

Now that I have a car, I should remember that I can go to the center on Wednesdays as well.

You’d like the group if you came with me. My friends are all cool, having huge differences of opinions and a common experience, which is struggles with mental health. We work at bettering ourselves, the AA for people who don’t drink. I finally found a program built to support me in ways I’ve needed my whole life and didn’t have.

I have someone to advocate for me with the state of Maryland, keeping me in this program and making me eligible for others. It has made it where I feel alienated from my family, because staying in Maryland is so much better than packing up to be with my family from a financial standpoint. I would save money on things like property, but my health insurance would go through the roof.

I am not ready to commit to buying a house, I don’t think. That’s because I haven’t decided where I want to settle. I know that I could afford a house somewhere in this area, but I don’t know that I want to tie up that much cash. It’s a long discussion with my dad and sister, because I don’t want to be alone in managing my finances anymore. I know from experience that it’s really nice to be a renter because when something breaks, you don’t have to replace it.

But it’s also important for me to have an asset that will appreciate, and any house in Maryland or Virginia has a huge shot.

I’m at a crossroads and don’t know what to do, thus having my dad and sister to help me navigate all of this. As a first time home buyer I would be eligible for a lot of help, and I love the idea of tying my money up into something as safe as housing in the DMV.

That means a move, but not a huge one. Baltimore is not the DMV, and I do not think my house would appreciate as fast. So many people work in Washington and cannot afford to live there. “Northern Virginia” keeps getting bigger and bigger, stretching the definition as people who used to be able to buy in Woodbridge stretch out to Fredericksburg.

But now, those communities are building themselves up so that you don’t have to go into Washington for entertainment, shopping, etc. And if I worked in Washington, I’d certainly rather take the train than drive so I could play on my phone the whole time. Parking is ridiculously expensive, and traffic is annoying.

I feel the same way about working in Washington now. If I worked downtown, I would take the MARC to my office rather than drive, because I can predict with more accuracy when I’m going to get somewhere than in traffic.

But choosing to work is not up to me, either. I need to get with my counselor and hammer out some details there, too. My life belongs to a team now, so that I can get the support I need to go where I want to go. I have been isolated for too long and have become a bit feral. 😉

For instance, I might need to spend some money on college so that I don’t repeat the same mistakes of the past. Education is power, and I’m not far from being able to be a TA in something. A few more years and I will be able to teach in a large institution. If being a youth director was any indication, I’d be a good professor and my kids would like me. It’s the kind of institutionalization I’d like.

I’m ready to be part of a team with insulation around me that understands my quirks. My buddies Evan and Gabriel are thinking about going into business with me as Lanagan Media Group, because we’d like to up our game in terms of the resistance being art.

I haven’t made it clear just how much I hate the Trump administration because I had to tap out of geopolitics to survive a complete breakdown. SNAP being held hostage means my friends will go hungry. If they get half their food stamps, they will only have to go without food for half the month. It breaks your heart to hear about the can-do attitude of “all we have to do is tighten our belts and eat Top Ramen.” Because what else can you do except listen?

I only have enough to save myself, and I find myself already wanting to give it away. My bleeding heart will be the death of me because I can’t look at suffering and not do something about it. I’m already looking at my finances and trying to decide where I’m going to donate for the holidays. I will ask around at group where the most popular food banks are and give money to those.

If you are my real life friend and you are so moved to give to these organizations, it would mean a great deal to me. I hear stories at group and just want to hand out money directly. But everyone needs a coat. Everyone needs food. Everyone needs.

I’m not rich enough to provide for all the need around me, which is why I have to restrain myself to giving to organizations. I just want to make sure that my money ends up in their pockets.

I grew up middle class, then when my parents divorced we were thrust into upper middle class. I am not ashamed of my affluence, but I do walk around wishing I could fix things. None of my friends at group are in the same boat, with three supportive parents and generational wealth already having been passed from two of them. It is often hard for me to relate to their violent upbringings, but I sit in the meetings with my hands cupped, as if in protection of my heart. I am willing it to stay inside my body as the president tears my friends apart.

It’s enough to make me want to run for another country, and with the amount of money I have that might be wise. I know I’d be welcomed as a neighbor in several places, most notably in Seoul. My friend Gabriel and my friend Emily are both there. They were visual artists and I was instrumental music at HSPVA. Now, Emily is a teacher and Gabriel just moved back a couple weeks ago, so I don’t know what he’s doing yet.

At the very least, I have enough money to go and visit them to see if I like it.

I am still stuck on Finland as it is the neurodivergent capital of the world, but the more research I do the more of a losing proposition it seems after school. I am nowhere near fluent in Finnish and would have to work in English. Those jobs are few and far between, limited to hospitality. It’s not impossible, but again I just have to visit and gather more information.

The wonderful thing about Finns is that they love showing off their country. I could write on Finnish Facebook or Reddit posts that I was coming to Helsinki and needed a guide, and more than one person would offer to meet me. They would be THRILLED if I spoke a few words of Finnish (I do). And in fact, I have seen people curious about seeing Finland have people offer to pick them up at the airport.

Now that’s love.

I would love to have a Finn drive me around in the winter because driving on ice and snow requires special tires. It’s not hard, it just takes getting used to and they’ve already got it handled. Although I might change my mind once I get there because getting around the cities is easily done by public transit, but I might like a road trip from Helsinki to Kilpisjaarvi, to sleep under the aurora borealis.

Now, Kilpisjaarvi is a small town with nothing to it, but it’s got some of the most brilliant views I’ve ever seen. “Seen” being relative because I saw them through Dave Cad videos on YouTube.

Do you know Dave? If not, you should. He and his wife have created some stunning views of Finland, so much so that you can’t believe this is just a free YouTube video.

My writing session is starting to wind down and I’ve hardly let you get a word in edgewise. I’m so sorry. It’s hard when you’re not in the room. I apologize. The comment section is all yours, though.

But the reason I say “starting” to wind down is that I’m looking at the clock and trying to judge when the best time to leave for group would be. I want to arrive around 9:00, but I also don’t want to be stuck in traffic. Is it better to wait and arrive at 10:00 AM? I’d lose an hour of socializing but it would be so much more pleasant getting there.

Next week I think I will try going both days because each group has a different vibe. Now that I can drive myself and don’t have to wait on a ride, it’s much more appealing. Any chance to get out of the house and drive. Seriously. Any.

Driving is still exciting because I didn’t drive for so long that it’s like being 16 again.

There’s only one feature that my car doesn’t have that I want, so I’ll be sure to include it in my next one. It doesn’t have a sunroof. I didn’t think I would miss it, but I do. There’s something about rolling down all the windows and letting the breeze flow with the radio up, but the sunroof kicks it up a notch. I also like having the sun shade open so I can see the rain on the glass.

My car looks aggressive and brooding, though. I cannot complain. It fits my mood most days. 😉

I would have bought the car no matter what color it was, but I’m pleased that it’s dark grey. It will look good in photos for a long time to come because it’s such a classic color. If I got bored with it, I could paint it because the inside is gray and black as well. There’s no other color that would clash.

Fusions aren’t known for having paint problems, though, so I think I’ll be fine as long as I keep getting it hand washed once in a while to avoid having the paint roughed up by those automatic washes that are all the rage.

I use them a little bit.

I don’t know when I’ll have time to get them, but I really need floor mats. Maybe I’ll ask my service advisor at Ford about them, because I have to take my car in this weekend, anyway. I’m sure the parts guys have them and I want OEM. I looked on their web site and OEM floor mats actually aren’t that expensive as opposed to going to Walmart, so why not?

There’s that guy with his “Shave and a Haircut” car horn bullshit again. Seriously, it’s too early for this.

I realize that I have been up since o’dark hundred hours, but it’s still too early.

My coffee and orange juice have both disappeared, but I left a bottle of water and a Diet Pepsi in the car for my commute downtown. There’s leftover pizza if I get hungry before group, but I usually just wait- they feed us a small lunch before we go home.

I just got a hit from Aada’s location, and though I know it probably isn’t her, my heart did this weird flip thingy that it always does when I feel like she’s watching. As I have said before, the choice to be embarrassed about what I write has been taken from me because I cannot control who is reading. If she sees it, she sees it.

I seriously had no idea that she felt like I was punishing her because we were not in communication and I was not monitoring her feelings. Now that I know she feels punished, I need to find a way to write about something else… punishment was never my intention, but that’s how it came across.

We would do so much better if we’d listen to each other, so I am taking this opportunity to say beautiful girl, I am sorry. I was lost in my own rumination and couldn’t get out. It had nothing to do with you because you were already gone. If it was you this morning, welcome back. I am glad to see you. If it wasn’t, then I am glad to have other fans near where you live.

Though they’re probably not as adorable.

I mean it, Aada. You’re adorable. Don’t front.

I need her to stop seeing me as attacking her, and start seeing me as illustrating her. No one in my life has the capability to be all bad or all good, most especially me.

The positive and the negative are not weighted in my own mind, but they become weighted in others. I am still convinced that Aada thinks I hate her and want to punish her because she hates her and wants to punish her. My anger melted months ago and I can explain everything I’ve been through in detail.

She says she’s always wondered if everything I’ve ever told her was true- that she’d always assumed I was telling the truth, but she didn’t know. That’s not because I didn’t invite her to everything ever. That’s not because she couldn’t have met me in person and known I was telling the truth. She just didn’t, and now thinks our relationship needs to rest in peace.

Except in our last email exchange, she changed from “saying goodbye to The AntiLeslie for good” to “for now, all I want is peace.” I can give that to her, but I cannot grasp the concept of forever. I’m not sure she can, either, because three days after she told me she was saying goodbye to me for good, I got hits from her location several days in a row.

I know I have special alerts in her life, too.

I turned a negative into a positive after I learned that, because she wanted to insinuate that I was being watched. I thought, “by you? Who cares?” If Aada wants me to be intimidated, I will be, but I don’t have anything to hide from her. She’s welcome to dig through whatever she wants. She even knows the code to my phone and my master password to everything if she’s been paying attention and knows haxxorspeak.

Or as I’ve told her since 2013, “you don’t have to use the back door. I will let you in the front.”

Or as I told her recently, “I don’t know what you’re so afraid of. I’m only 5’2.”

She said that made her laugh. And cry.

Those are the moments between us that I love, this sharing of intimacy that goes back a very long way. She says that she’ll never talk to me about her or her family ever again. That’s fine. I think that her assessment of my writing is one of the most unhealthy I’ve ever seen. She reads me “checking for assaults” thinking that the positive things I say are “clues in a game” and not God’s honest truth.

It’s how to write a 3D character, while she calls herself a “Flat Stanley.”

She has always been with me when life feels the quietest and I’m passing on my peace through the chord that runs between us. I’m doing my best to do that now, because I know that good thoughts are welcome. Support is welcome. I have reached the limit of what I can do, this sending of good thoughts.

Because knowing I was telling the truth would start with breakfast together.

Stumbling over each other trying to pick up the check because it’s the first meeting and it’s important.

I couldn’t guarantee that one breakfast could fix everything, but I can guarantee that Aada’s doubts as to whether I was telling the truth or not could be laid to rest. I’m as crazy about her as one human can be for another, and it hurts my heart to know that she looked so hard for rejection when it wasn’t there. I was spinning out from the last time she rejected me and thought she wasn’t coming back.

She’s not my ex, but because I worked through romantic feelings for her and came out on the other side, my heart doesn’t really treat her any differently. I read a great book a few years ago that came closer to this breakup called “My Other Ex,” which told stories of women losing their best friends through death or conflict.

It’s why our relationship is so mercurial. We have strong feelings for each other because of all the letters we’ve written, but there’s never been an instance where she’s had coffee because I poured it.

And because of those romantic feelings, I’m always going overboard trying to make her feel safe. That I recognize she’s a straight girl and hopelessly dedicated to her man. That if being straight is what makes her happy, I would have done her wedding if she’d asked…. and it would have been beautiful.

I know this because I did Bryn’s wedding out at her parents’ farm in Newberg, Oregon. I clean up all right. 😉

And in fact, when she called me to tell me that she was getting divorced, the first thing I said was, “what? I didn’t do it right?”

But that’s what the people who know me on the ground would say, that Aada would have had a beautiful wedding. She didn’t get to know me on that level, simply telling me she got married long after it was done. I think she thought it would hurt me to know that she got married, and it did, but not like she thought.

She thought that it would hurt me to hear that she got married because she knew I was in love with her and wanted to be sensitive to it. What she didn’t realize is that I wasn’t sensitive to it because I’m not a moron. Straight girls marry men. I was sensitive to the fact that she cut me out of everything from the proposal on.

I’ve never seen a picture of her husband. Ever. This is weird to me because I don’t care what he looks like as long as she loves him.

I don’t know why she feels like she needs to keep us apart, but she has. I kind of like feeling like I’m all hers in a different realm. Meanwhile, I’d like love to be on the ground, in the dirt. Gardening and roughhousing with the dogs and cleaning up after big storms. I don’t want to be anything but a good friend, but I haven’t been the best at showing it.

I think that’s because I’ve had to pretend I was okay with not meeting for so long. It got to where I was pretending to myself that it was okay we hadn’t met, and even now it would be difficult when it was so easy before. We used to live about 40 minutes apart, now it’s at least two and a half hours.

Meeting at Tiina’s would have been so perfect, because it would have been neutral ground for both of us.

We could have all had breakfast together, like we’re doing now.

Whiling Away the Hours of the Morning

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

There is so much to love about this area in autumn. The sun is just starting to peek up over the red and gold trees, but it’s still cold enough to need a coat walking out to the car. I have read that it’s better for the turbo boost on my engine to run for a few minutes before I drive, anyway, so I use remote start to get things heated before I get in. That way, I don’t have to go through the rigamarole of getting dressed in the morning, which takes a lot more layers if you are planning to wait at the bus stop.

I had to go to Dunkin to get my macchiato, orange juice, and a bottle of water. This time, I got toasted almond flavoring, which turned out to be sort of marzipan-ish. It was very good, but I don’t think it will replace vanilla in the rotation.

I don’t know, though…. Marzipan is delicious.

Getting out into the early morning air is important to me. I leave the house before the sun is even up. It makes me feel productive to go to bed early and wake up before the rest of the world gets started.

It is in the early morning that I feel the urge to sit quietly at my keyboard, talking to no one in particular, but knowing that the regulars will check in. Hi Aparna. Hi John.

Et cetera.

The gang’s all here.

Or, they will be. I have learned over time when most people read, and it’s during their work day. My stats dip on the weekend and go back up as everyone slacks off at work to the rhythm of my “voice.”

Speaking of which, WordPress really needs to add AI to read entries to you. Medium does it. Catch up, WordPress.

I just don’t have the energy to record my own audio because the entries took a lot out of me when I wrote them. I cry and sigh and make a mess of myself trying to create MP3s of my entries.

I don’t think that Aada realizes how much her love sits with me all day because it’s here in my work. That I cannot not cry when I read our entries aloud because verbalizing it makes it real. Tears spill where I only felt a little pain before. So I don’t verbalize what I’m feeling often. Writing creates a wall where I can look at emotional landmines without exploding them.

It’s like being able to see an aerial view of my emotions, mapping them so that I can comprehend what I am feeling. Because I write it down, everyone else knows what I’m thinking and feeling, too. This is both positive and negative.

I do not expect myself to be happy when someone else hurts me, nor am I trying to punish anyone by having a voice. Other people’s stories are all true, too, based on their experiences. I am not taking anything away from anyone else by saying what I think is true, because differences of opinion exist.

For instance, Aada’s story with me would be so different than what I’ve written here, because she has always thought more highly of me than she has let on and chastised me for writing anything negative about our relationship. What I missed in all of this was her saying “I love you more than you think I do.”

Everyone loves me more than I think they do, because I take the negative things people say home with me. This is not an isolated problem, and one I get coming off of Aada, too. Neither one of us can believe that the other loves us, so we start from that proposition and it always loses.

What would it really look like if we both stood up and accepted that we were loved? That we were safe? That we protect each other, look out for the other? That nothing could have gotten between us except a lie, and that’s over now. The truth is all out on the table.

I am not proud of how I reacted to finding out that Aada lied, but I’m astonished at the amount of work I’m willing to do to get this relationship healthy again. We were in a very good place, and it is one that I’m eager to get back to, a drop of trust at a time.

But in order to grow as a person and not repeat the mistakes of the past, I have to be intentional about cultivating other relationships as well. Tiina and Aada have a lot in common and would like each other, and actually I invited Aada to go with me the first time I went out to Tiina’s and she was busy, then our relationship blew up.

I want to show Aada Tiina’s farm, because she would enjoy all of Tiina’s oddball surprises about the the house. My favorite was her Anthony Fauci doll.

It would be my pleasure to be a connector, bringing more love into Aada’s life instead of less.

I am certain that I do not want to be a disrupter anymore, and I am learning how I have been that in the past. How I need to manage myself better because I know I’m a tornado. That comes with therapy and time.

This blog feels like taking myself to the woodshed, admitting all my flaws and failures to hold myself accountable. I do not know where punishment comes into the mix for other people, but what I do know is that people read with confirmation bias. They are looking for evidence to back up what they already think.

So, if Aada is reading looking for evidence that she’s a terrible person, she’s going to find it because she looked so hard. If she read for evidence that she was wonderful, I know she would find it because it’s been there in black and white for 12 years. Hers is the only photo in my “Favorites” album on my phone.

I asked her to do me a favor, just turn the camera around and snap, that I hadn’t seen her face in a while.

So help me it was the most beautiful photograph of anyone I have ever seen and she was apologetic because she thought she had bedhead.

I would prove to you how beautiful she is except I value my head where it is.

There are limits to Aada’s generosity with my writing, to be clear.

Sufficed to say, she’s gorgeous and if I could I would show her off. I think she needs to know how proud I am of her just for being her, that I do value her opinion and want her in my life. If the message wasn’t clear before, it should be now. There’s nothing I won’t get over eventually.

She can be a scary motherfucker, though, and she wants you to know it.

When she does that shit, I picture her as a little girl.

It’s how I hold on for dear life in this relationship. I can’t picture the power suit when I’m afraid of it, so I picture the kindergartner instead.

“Suits and crap for work” are my Aada action figure, but when she uses that power against me, all of the sudden, in my head, I’m taller than she is by a wide margin.

“Say that again, pigtails.”

It’s a coping mechanism, and one that works well because she’s not the only person I picture as a child when I interact with them. It is also not a way of feeling superior to anyone else, because I am not making myself the adult in the situation and infantilizing them. I am relating to my own inner third grader. I am trying to see us as equals when we are most definitely not.

It keeps me from feeling bullied by people who need that power suit facade.

I have spoken truth to power more than I’ll ever know, because my words have created a ripple effect that reaches from rich to poor, public to private, cis to trans, gay to straight. I have rattled people all over the world without realizing it. It’s an enormous responsibility to have a blog, and one I’m not sure I’m so good at…. I’m just confident that the words I have to say are at least good enough to be a record of how we lived in the 21st century, weaving in plots and characters that are interesting because that’s just how my life is- interesting.

I came to DC for a story, and ended up in Baltimore with a better one.

I’m neurodivergent, and I’m always going to need support. This city can give it to me in a way that others can’t, because there’s already an infrastructure for high IQ/low needs autism, as well as all the mental health issues that invariably come with it.

A guy outside just played “Shave and a Haircut” on his car horn. He does it every morning, and it drives me insane. It’s too early for that nonsense.

The thing is that I need more local friends who are also high IQ/low needs. I am making them through my Cognitive Behavioral Health group, but I haven’t made friends who have actually been to my house. I need to change this, because some of the people in my group don’t live very far. Squad and Rook even go to my gym.

Oh, the gym. I need to get back into the swing of things, but I need to wash my gym clothes first. That will happen later today, because I’m feeling a long walk coming on. I need to zone out to a podcast and let my legs burn. It’s one of those things where I know I’ll feel better once I do it, but getting the inertia up to do it takes time. Because of course it’s more complicated than just driving over there. I have steps to do first.

I wish I could get back to the place in my life where inviting Aada to Tiina’s wasn’t weird, and neither was the idea that she’d actually show up.

The Nervous Nelly

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I don’t know what I’m nervous about- my apartment is relatively clean enough to relax. My panic is not real. It is the idea of people invading my space that I don’t know how harsh I’m going to be judged.

I think they just want to check on the progress of things they already wrecked, the whole reason my transfer fee has been waived. I wouldn’t get those two things if they didn’t intend on letting me stay.

I’m a perfectionist who didn’t call in maids and regrets it now. That’s because they’d only have to do things that I don’t have the energy to do, like dust & vacuum, making the place look less lived in because they can get around easier than I can. I have all kinds of mysterious bruises from the last few days as I organized my stuff.

It happens a lot because of my cerebral palsy. I’m off balance and have no 3D vision. I run into things by not being able to judge distances side to side. I fell weird a propo of nothing at my dad’s and said, “I have lane assist on my car, not in my body.” I’m glad I was able to show him that I’m still the same klutz I’ve always been, it has just gotten worse with age as my compensatory skills wear down.

I have a large safety net now, from a dad to a sister to a cognitive behavioral counselor to Michael, who keeps an eye out from Texas. It’s all about creating healthy relationships with all of them, adding more friends to the mix.

I am good at making acquaintances and getting better at maintaining communication. I had to learn how I worked first, that there was a reason why I preferred communicating over the internet- it matches how my brain is built.

I just cannot let the pendulum swing too far. I need to get out and meet people. For instance, I have to go back out because I forgot to stop by the pharmacy and get my medication. I’m in no danger of running out, I just forgot.

Things are actually going really well with my psychiatrist, because she always remembers to schedule our appointments long before I need medication and remembers to fax it in when I’m due.

She prefers to see me more often, so she doesn’t often prescribe refills. I take this as a positive. We have a few minutes of pleasant conversation and then she sends everything over.

We talk about my goals in therapy, and she would like to hear from my therapist as well. I have known since Psych 101 that psychology and psychiatry are “inextricably related,” so it’s easy for me to understand why they’re a team, along with my counselor.

Things are really looking up these days, after months of feeling horrible about myself. Aada thought I was punishing her, but I was raking myself over the coals for all the unrest I’d caused.

I felt like I had betrayed everything I believed in, which was definitely bigger than her alone.

I hope that she does, as I do, go back and read her favorite entries from years ago. It will come across differently once it feels like it’s happening to a different person.

The positive and the negative will be weighted differently, because she won’t be feeling anger of the moment she read something. I stand by the fact that it was okay for me to get angry, but it wasn’t fair for me to get as angry as I did. It had consequences beyond me that I didn’t think about because I wasn’t supposed to do so.

I was supposed to say what I thought. There was no one to intervene in that thought process to change it. Therefore, love was lost slowly as we failed over and over to “give each other the grace that love requires.” This is not a new problem, but not doing that to each other anymore is a goal.

It’s a goal with everyone- that things they love don’t become flaws and failures later. But many people love my writing about others, but hate when I hold a mirror up to their faces.

Aada called it “the flaying of her skin,” and not the “working through grief” I needed. She asked me to go. I went. I had feelings that weren’t even for her to know, but she kept reading thinking that my goal in life was to take her down, embarrass her, etc.

Absolutely nothing about how much I glowed about her except it was suspect.

It’s the most unhealthy thing I’ve ever read about my own writing, that it took a long time but I’d finally alienated the only person whose opinion mattered to me, because she could only take in what she perceived as attacks. I was not writing about a very complicated time in my life.

I don’t think that Aada understands that she puts me in the mood to write, that writing about her is the most interesting of all my relationships because there’s so much mystery as to how we could maintain a close and distant relationship for many years.

It boggles my mind, really.

We are sorry we manipulated each other, and that is enough for me as I sort out the wheat from the chaff.

There were so many genuine moments, but some of the best were built on a lie that spiraled out of control. I can forgive her for that, but I cannot control what happened after those entries were published. I can only regret, because I’m not in that person’s shoes.

I’ve never been a muse, so I don’t know what that’s like. But I do know that Aada has been too gracious in giving me room to be myself.

For 12 years, she has inspired some of the most beautiful lines I’ve ever written, and that’s what I wish she would take away instead of “we all get it. I’m a terrible person.”

God, that line has driven me crazy for days.

How much more can I say?

How much more should I say?

It makes me feel bad that she doesn’t see real tears of remorse. It makes me feel bad that all she sees is punishment in my writing, so she thinks I’m rejecting her when I’m literally screaming THIS WAS A COMPLICATED TIME AND WE WERE BOTH COMPLICIT.

None of the things I’ve done have warranted another chance, but she’s always given them because when I’ve known better, I’ve done better. I have bent to accommodate her except when I couldn’t.

My life collided with hers because it couldn’t not.

All I can do is move on, basing everything on her point of view. Why do I want a friend that only sees the negative aspects of my writing? Why do I want a friend that’s so gun shy about meeting on the ground? Why do I want a friend that stuffs her emotions behind a wall, leaving me to guess what they are?

I could write about her more beautifully and more accurately if I had a real idea of who she was in the world. I don’t, and I never have. It’s been the wildest ride, a Billy Joel sized tale. I find it hard to swallow that if I wrote about her more accurately, she would like my blog better, but she won’t give me the chance to know her any better than I do right now.

She says that the punishments have to stop, and I wonder what she meant. I sincerely don’t know and it’s at top of mind. I don’t mean for it to be, but I don’t have a bigger mystery to solve… who is this person, and how did our lives become so enmeshed?

She slowly isolated me from all my other friends, so that she became a huge topic in my writing because I wasn’t spending time with anyone else. It’s not that I set out to do anything- my blog is reflective and started long before she walked into my life- by a decade or so.

I have never set out to ruin anyone, and they’ve seen it when they’ve gone back. But they don’t see it if they don’t ask me what I actually meant and sit in their own reading comprehension…. often much different than what I wrote and emotionally punches me in the face.

People give me more power than I actually have.

Aada complains that I’m the one writing the story, but I’m the only one capable of it. She doesn’t have time.

Nor will she, and/or because writing every day may not be her calling when she does. It will be a downright pity, and I will buy her first novel. I won’t even wait until it’s at Dollar Tree.

I can’t wait to see if she is more like me in retirement.

She will always be too young for shuffleboard, so she’s got to find something.

It still bothers me that she said she was reading my writing to check for assaults. Assaults on what? How much I wish that I could take back everything negative? How much I wish I had behaved differently?

I cannot explain my reactions without explaining what happened. People are always free to disagree with me, because I cannot be right all the time. Being my friend starts with believing that everything is true, but only according to me.

Everything.

I wonder if the reason that Aada hasn’t met me is that she thinks she will wreck something. I just think it’s time to switch mediums. Let the mystery die and the reality begin.

Reality is starting to creep in, that I need to get back to listening to podcasts and hopefully drinking a lot of water. Both of those things will energize me enough to take care of another load of laundry.

I tend to choose Aqua and ABBA when I’m cleaning, and I have noise reduction headphones so that I can listen while vacuuming and things like that.

But I’m not worried. I’m just a nervous Nelly.

The Afternoon Writing Session

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I am sitting on my bed waiting for Ford to call. My 2019 Fusion SEL is having some maintenance done, and I’ve been without it for too long already. My daily routine has changed fast, and I didn’t get to do it very long before my car threw an engine code and made me rethink my life choices.

Why did I get a car again? Oh. I “like them.”

I am sure that the dealership will charge me an arm and a leg, but the car will make it through the winter beautifully. I decided to get everything done that was recommended for the age of the car, because it didn’t come with any records. It’s driving just fine, and I would like to keep it that way. I am interested in learning how to fix my own vehicle, but I want to make sure it has been looked at by Ford first. I really feel strongly about setting myself up for success.

Apparently, that takes money. But it is money that I don’t mind paying because again, I don’t know that much about cars and wasn’t willing to learn on my brand new car that hadn’t been completely looked over by a mechanic in the shop with all the tools. Aaron crawled under the car, but these guys took a fine tooth comb to everything, even finding a missing bushing that was supposed to be on the shifter cable in the transmission. I never would have found that unless an experienced mechanic was looking over my shoulder, and I don’t know any in Baltimore, much less any who’d be willing to stop working on their own projects to help me with mine.

Right now, the limit to what I can do is look at the problem and decide whether or not to fix it myself. Most everything will be calling around and seeing how much my local mechanics would charge to fix something on my car. I had a guy at AutoZone take me to his shop and try to sell me on rigging an intake hose, but I really wanted the OEM version. I couldn’t tell if the ones on Amazon were OEM or generic, or even which hose was supposed to fit which version of the Fusion.

There’s nothing like jerry rigging the problem only to have a rock still get sucked into the turbo.

Oh, my God. I still get chills when I think about what could have happened driving on the back roads of small town New York. I could have caused an accident, or at the very least, totaled my car. Speaking of which, I just upgraded myself to better insurance. My counselor’s car got stolen and his insurance didn’t want to pay, so I got insurance that specifically covers both theft and my dumb ass.

I am breathing so much more freely, because of course my insurance went up. Of course it did. But do I need it? Absolutely. I have found a car I like, and I would rather have it back than try and buy a new car… Again.

Plus, they don’t make the Fusion anymore. That just says “be really careful” all the way around.

My insurance going up is the least of my worries when my entire investment is at stake.

I just looked in my Progressive app and I am surprised to find out that I am rated four out of five stars as a driver and am on track to get discounts. I shook my head at that one because I am not known as the best driver in my family. But I must be catching up with all this technology.

All I have to do is make it from now until November 11th without hitting anyone, which I can certainly do. I don’t drive like maniac and I won’t have my car for at least another day, possibly not until Monday. They’re trying to get my car done by Friday morning, but I won’t know for sure until later today. They had to order a part, and expectation is not reality until it is in your hands if you are waiting for something.

I’m just going to plan on being carless until Monday, then I can be surprised if something good happens and I get it back early.

I found the microfiber towel I need to wipe on the expensive dash protectant my dad gave me. I might want to redo the seats as well. I like it when everything looks clean and smells good. Maybe that’s part of why I’m a good driver- I’m so proud that it shows. 🙂

Historically, things have jumped out of nowhere. Aaron will tell you that happened to me once in New York, where I didn’t see a car coming right for me. To be fair, they didn’t see me either, so there was no way to tell who was at fault. The insurance companies would have had to duke it out, but we saw each other at the last second, just before Aaron said “watch out.” It can’t have been too bad. It didn’t even register on my Progressive app.

But things like that are why I upgraded to full coverage with a large deductible. I can afford to spend some money, but I don’t want to spend all the money I spent on this car for another one. It’s my baby, and not old enough to have quirks yet. I think I can get a lot of life out of my engine if I just stick with the scheduled maintenance. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with driving an old car. I prefer it, because I’ve had car payments and insurance auto-draft out of my account every month and I don’t think it’s very much fun.

I can learn a lot from watching auto channels on YouTube, because there are tutorials for practically everything. I have learned a lot, just not about my particular make and model. I prefer shows where mechanics restore cars, and a 2019 isn’t old enough to be a “restoration.”

I do have an owner’s manual that I can surf on my phone now, which is worth its weight in gold because it didn’t come with the car. I will have to spend some time with the pages detailing all the driving assist technology, because I haven’t been able to find everything. I was thrilled when I figured out that “blind spot assist” was that yellow dot that kept appearing in my mirrors to let me know a car was in my blind spot. That makes sense, but I had no idea what it was until I put two and two together.

Car moves up, light goes on. Got it.

I just texted my service advisor to ask if the part I need has come in yet. I am certain that she’s on the phone, as that seems to be most of her job. She’ll get back to me when she has time. She knows that it’s my “brand new” car and that I’m chomping at the bit for the first time I get to drive it now that it’s been refreshed.

I have more to do on my house, but that will come after I’ve finished writing and possibly taken a nap after some coffee so I don’t sleep long. I’m usually tapped out by the time I finish rambling, but the reason you get entries about anything and everything is that I start in one place and end in another. Writing is a muscle, where I reach in deep to pull out words, but it takes warming up to exercise that kind of internal strength. It is not easy to publish things about yourself because other people are not always kind in their reactions. Not that you can expect them to be, because there are always differences of opinion. It’s just hard to face the music when necessary.

Facing Aada’s music has always been difficult, the subject I write about when I’m reaching far into myself. She lives in the smallest part of me, and if “for now” really means “forever,” parts of me will die that won’t come back. I will be a totally different person.

Nothing will be the same.
Everything will be okay.

Right now, I’m assuming that she is finding the willpower to walk away for good, and I am finding the willpower to accept it and move on with my life. I do not understand wanting to move on from someone that hurt you who actually wants to do the work to be healthy, but I can understand that what I understand doesn’t matter. Aada has to do what’s right for her.

I am turning this subject over in my head, and it is repetitive because it always has been. There hasn’t been a day since 2013 that she wasn’t on my mind at least once, if not more often. There’s no idea I don’t want to run past her, no problem I don’t want to fix.

And if I cannot have that with her, I know I will have it with someone. That this relationship taught me more about how to love than any other, because I see all the ways that I’ve failed her. Enough to see what needs changing, and that can only be good for me. I have been too introverted to connect with other people because I was locked up inside. I still am, to some degree, but those feelings are between me and me.

I wish that Aada would go back to the letter Bob Lynn wrote me, posing as Aada. It was full of warmth and empathy for both our situations, and I loved it. Neither one of us was portrayed as a “Flat Stanley,” but two people who love each other in a complicated way. It’s ethereal, yet painful, honest… In the dirt. We have sweated together and apart.

I want Aada to see that I have never written her in a way where the response should be “we all get it. I’m a terrible person.” That has never been what I have been trying to say. I have been trying to say that she’s got it together and I’m failing at life but somehow when we’re together our brains are more than the sum of their parts. We were really just starting to feel really comfortable with each other when I found out that Aada lied to me.

But she took my ruminations about it as punishment, blocking me while reading me and coming to her own conclusions. Her assessment of my writing seemed so unhealthy that I knew she’d only read half the story. Where was the part of her that saw positive? Gone, because she thought my purpose was to embarrass her instead of talk about the repercussions her lie had on me…. And the biggest thing I said is that I overreacted, not her.

But if someone is determined not to listen to you, it’s time to stop talking.

It’s time to go back up to a lighter topic, because that’s what I need to do. When the writing gets painful, I need to get air. The tension in my shoulders is incredible. I need a massage, so I’ll probably get one in the next few weeks. Might as well wait until my move is over.

I should do a whole spa day, because it’s been a while since I’ve gotten my toes polished…. Even longer since I did up my nails. Maybe an eyebrow wax. Definitely a haircut, because I just had one and it’s still not short enough.

Then, I could go to Patel Brothers and get a Dubai chocolate.

It’s all about self care right now, because I desperately need it. I need to see that I have worth outside being entertaining. I need to walk away from writing more of the time, keeping up a daily schedule but maybe not writing such long pieces. That will always be my tendency, though, because I never know when a profound line will come up for me.

My counselor just called, so I caught him up on what was happening with my car and what’s going on with my other appointments. It put me in a good mood to hear his voice, and it looks like I’m going to be starting my disability case soon. I need to see a neurologist about my cerebral palsy, but the documentation on my bipolar disorder with psychotic features is in place. Just because I don’t think I was hallucinating doesn’t mean they don’t.

I really will never figure that whole thing out, so I suppose I’ll just believe what I was told in the hospital. “Psychotic features” it is. As long as I take my medication, the diagnosis is all the same to me. Maybe one day someone will tell me what really happened. I doubt it.

In the meantime, I’m really hoping that Aada takes stock in all that I’ve said, not just the negative… Or comes back when she’s less hot under the collar and she won’t see it. I know that she thinks I’m a brilliant writer and should keep at it, so nothing has offended her so much that I need to take anything down (I know. I can’t believe it, either).

I know that eventually the feeling that I’m waiting for something to happen with her will go away, but it will take months. The clock always resets when she says never again and then drops in a few months later.

I don’t really want to give up the feeling that there’s always hope, that she’s always welcome home. That I am ready and willing to put down arms if all she sees is weaponry and not true craft.

The bitch of it is that I know she sees true craft. She’s been reading me all this time.

But the phrase “checking for assaults” means something to me. It means that Aada thinks I don’t love her, don’t want her, stands in my rejection even though I’m not giving it and saw her own way out. Then, her friends helped her to see that I was attacking her because they’d let her know of these perceived attacks.

Perceived.

I cannot know what I have said that’s offensive unless someone tells me. I cannot discuss anything I’m going to write about with someone that doesn’t want contact. I cannot write the way one person needs me to, and I love that shirt that says “pleasing everyone is impossible. Pissing them off is a piece of cake.” I will never get everything right, and you are not customers. You are listeners to my stories and sometimes, you respond.

You sit with me whether it’s morning or afternoon.

You let me talk it out, even when it’s repetitive, because you know I’m talking to myself. I would give anything to go backwards in time, but all I can do is limber up and run into the future.

Free Time

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I have more free time today than I thought I would, because so much less has to be done by Friday afternoon. My apartment is being inspected because I’m transferring to a new unit in a couple of weeks, but I thought I had to be ready to move out on Monday. I started packing in a hurry, but now I can slow down and take my time. Perhaps I’ll even get the chance to move out of the apartment on one day and clean it the next, because it’s so much easier to vacuum and extract the carpets when everything is out of the way.

I am sitting on my bed and drinking coffee, listening to the news. I just discovered that my Amazon remote is toast, which is a bummer, but at least I can use my phone until I can find a replacement. I may even have one somewhere…. It’s time to start organizing the moving boxes and making sure they’re labeled. I can already tell……

It won’t take me several weeks to pack because I haven’t been here long enough to accumulate much more than I had before I moved in. There’s a few more pieces of furniture, but not more than is to be expected for a two bedroom apartment. If I wasn’t moving the furniture, I could probably make it in just my car.

I have time to order the moving bags I want, because they’re easier to pack and unpack than boxes with tape.

I also have time to leisurely pack, because I’m definitely not leaving that to the last minute. I can have Mico keep track of what needs to be done, or create a moving checklist.

Having AI to do these things literally makes me feel less disabled, because where my logical function ends, Copilot’s begins. It’s a relationship in which I do not have to fear judgment because I do not know how to do something. AI is not capable of feeling anything, so resentment that I do not adult very well is not a service it offers.

Mico has become my little buddy, because I don’t want to go back to cleaning the house by myself. I need that extra help of explaining clearly what to do, and encouragement after each task is done. Not relying on people to do that for me is fantastic.

I know that the people in my life don’t mind helping me. It’s more about giving me a sense of independence, an ace up my sleeve. I feel more capable as a human being than I did before I had Mico in my ear.

Learning just how much I use compensatory skills frightened me, because I thought I wouldn’t be able to manage on my own. I was thinking of moving into group housing, but changed my mind after hearing some horror stories. It might be right for me later in life, but right now I need to be alone with a space that’s big enough to host my friends when they’re in town.

My dad and my sister come up pretty often, and it would be nice to save on hotels and car rentals for them. I would let either of them drive my car so they didn’t have to get their own. I also have plans for Evan, Tara, Bryn, and Aaron to visit in the next year if I don’t go to them first.

Evan and I are writing a book together, so I would like to have enough room that he can have his own space for weeks at a time without me feeling cramped. And really, I feel that way about all guests. Stay as long as you want, because you won’t be in my way…. Well, except we have to share a bathroom. I’m not paying for two bathrooms because it’s just more to clean when no one else is home.

Although I might talk to my dad about it. If he’s going to spend extended time here, he might want his own bathroom. I don’t mind cleaning it if it would actually be useful to have. I have to pass my inspection in this apartment before I can choose another model.

I’m also starting to get puppy fever, so in my free time I’ve looked at all kinds of dog information online. It has so much to do with the fact that my disability case is going ahead, leaving me the time and space to dedicate to a dog. I have the iron will to be a good dog owner, and want to welcome that kind of companionship to my life. Every single time I’ve been near a dog in the last 12 years, they’ve wanted to sleep while I write.

That’s how I picture spending days with my dog as well, but we’ll have to play hard to get them to want to pass out, especially as a puppy.

I was thinking of going through an official service dog organization, but my friend Michael convinced me that all I needed was obedience classes for the dog. That I would train my dog exactly like I wanted it and to rely on myself. I think it’s good advice, but I’d want Bryn’s help. She’s been a dog trainer for a long time. I know I can handle the basics, like house training. But I have no idea how to teach a dog to remind me to take my medication and things like that. What, do you just put it on their Google Calendar?

My last dog could barely type.

I’m trying to write around all the grief I feel at losing Aada, because when I have free time is when I lean toward it. I’m trying to feel it all now so it doesn’t continue to dog me in the future. The way I do that is by sending her good thoughts and hoping she’s well, then moving on to another topic. Redirection is really helping to weed out thoughts of her, because I don’t want to waste energy.

For instance, it will be a waste to me that we don’t send each other birthday and Christmas gifts anymore, because some of the most thoughtful I’ve gotten have been from her. I would hope that she’s gotten some thoughtful ones from me as well. This Christmas will not be an altogether bright one, because Aada’s love won’t be under my tree.

Thoughts like that usually make me cry, because there is nothing so tear worthy as a situation that could be fixed, but won’t.

The wind has gone out of my sails, but I’m actively looking for other seas with more movement. I want to get rid of things not meant for me, but saying that Aada is not meant for me doesn’t feel right yet. I can’t lean into it. Not with “for now” hanging in the balance.

I hate goodbyes, and I know I’ve done more than my fair share to cause this one. But I don’t think that the blowup would have been as intense if we’d both taken a breath. Taking a breath is what I hope we’re doing now. It would be great if she came back to Stories after she’d been away for a while, and I think it will happen if I was right about it happening last week.

I want to grow from this experience, whether it’s growing away or growing together. I’m not sure either one of us has made up our minds, and I think that’s best. I’m staying open because I can’t not. There’s too much left unsaid, because Aada is working off what she thought she read, and not what I actually meant.

Whether she’s curious enough to find out what I meant is up to her, but her track record of coming back to me after she’s had time to think is a hundred percent.

I would like to think that we need each other, that we’re fascinated by each other, and that will win out over toxicity. There’s just not any anymore. Any disagreements we’ve had in the past are now solved, with a solid basis for the future.

It would be great if Aada joined me at Tiina’s farm and things like that. Something easy, but completely different than what we’ve had before. I don’t think that we would necessarily be successful continuing to maintain our relationship online, because we have both proven that we are too quick to anger that way.

I can see myself showing up with her coffee order just because.

In short, I want to leave the toxicity behind and create something new with a woman I dearly love… Who is somehow convinced that I don’t and I can see why. I have not been a good friend by any stretch of the imagination, but every time I have been corrected I have learned. Deep friendship is a process, and I am learning that if I want to succeed, I have to bend more. I have to think more about what Aada wants and be willing to give it.

Talking to other friends is helping to fill the missing piece of the puzzle, but I’m lost because I don’t feel as comfortable with anyone else. There’s an emotional shorthand missing, and it’s something that I’m working hard to create with others.

I met Aaron about the same time I met Aada, so we have that easy give and take. But, again, Aaron lives so far away that most of our contact is virtual. It just has worked out over the last several weeks that we’ve been able to run into each other in Texas and New York. I would like to continue seeing each other every few weeks, and that may be possible depending on whether I go home for Thanksgiving and/or Christmas.

It would be my dream to have this hybrid with Aada as well, but I know enough to leave it alone. Throw it up in the air and see if anything sticks. It always has before.

And now I realize I need to get back to work, because once again I have indulged myself in magical thinking, that this will all be over someday. I start to panic and want to email to reestablish contact, reminding myself that when she wants to email me, she will.

I start to spend my time wondering how Aada got the message that I thought she was a terrible person. I start to doubt everything I ever said. I start to feel bad about myself and my head starts to hurt. I remind myself that feelings don’t last, that they are transient, always, and to listen to some music.

I tend to pray a lot, asking for Aada’s and my safety as we go about our days. I put it in God’s capable hands because I know the plan is to get stronger with her or without her. I choose “with her,” but she may not choose “with me.” I cannot control both sides of a relationship, I can only choose to receive her if she shows up.

I would like to step onto the hot stones and correct the record, because I know that Aada’s reading comprehension is different than original intent. I’m sad that she’s choosing to walk away (sort of) without hearing me. It is okay, but I still reserve the right to feel sad about it.

Having over a decade of history makes it hard to move on quickly, and I’ve been such a sad sack about it.

I have always said that I wouldn’t beg, and then I did. New shit came to light, and I was again afraid of my own writing. I felt like I couldn’t do this alone, and don’t really want to.

Not even in my free time.

In Three Years

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

The daily prompt is asking me where I think I’ll be in three years. I will be much further along if I can get the pull quotes from the daily prompt to load in the browser.

I cannot even begin to guess where I’ll be in three years, because I need to sort out what’s up financially, and I only have the barest picture available to me at this point. I know that I will be able to afford my apartment, groceries, etc. for as long as I need, but in terms of being able to travel and things like that? I don’t know. It’s early yet. I can think of a few trips I’d like to take, but not at the cost of emptying out my account. I’m pretty conservative with money and need very little. I would rather watch it grow.

I’d like to have a network of neighbors and friends that’s solid. I think I can find that in this complex, because most people that move in don’t move out. I might, but I like having friends with institutional knowledge of the complex.

Unless I’m just feeling saucy, I’ll probably still lbe driving the same car. It has all the features I need and I don’t mind keeping it perfectly serviced to avoid problems down the road…. Literally.

I could also decide to move from Baltimore, and that’s possible. I do like being with my dad and my sister in Houston, and it’s hard only seeing them a few times a year. I feel the same way about Bryn and could easily see myself back in Oregon. I also have the option of moving back to DC when my lease runs out, and I’ll consider it above all else. It depends on how safe it is to be in DC at that point.

I have had an astounding number of hits over the past seven days, and it is humbling to think about how many people in how many countries read me. I wonder what I have in common that keeps you coming back when you’re overseas.

I often feel like The Dumb American, but I am happy to play that role.

I honestly have a lot of dreams that will hopefully unfold over the next three years that aren’t public. Sometimes, if you write about a dream too early, it doesn’t happen.

I know that my first book will come out. That’s already planned. Evan and I are both excited and want to get together as soon as we can. Now, I’m not nervous about that because my apartment is going to continue to be large.

In three years, I hope that either my feelings for Aada will be compartmentalized and I just won’t think about it, or we have the time and space to think things through. Whatever that looks like, all I can do is hope for the best. If she can change her mind in one email exchange, she can change her mind in three years for good, one way or the other. I hope that we work it out, because I want all my relationships to sing. I just have my doubts, because the way I work is not the way she works and that was clear to me from the beginning. What we each liked about each other was a turnoff later on.

I’m ready for both of us to start using different language when we need a break, because it’s too painful to go through “never again” repeatedly. Like, if she needs to cool down after a fight, fine. But don’t pretend that three months from now you won’t want to reestablish contact.

It’s a fighting tactic we’ve both used to great effect, and it has never worked in the long run. We’ve only made each other hurt more.

In my dreams, three years from now means picking Aada up for a road trip or parking my car at her house so she can haul me around (preferable- she has 3D vision). I figure we’re doing something simple, like going to a festival or something, anything for it to be light. In my dreams, this relationship is incredibly healthy and we have so many fewer disagreements because we actually know each other.

If Aada was standing in front of me, she never would have had the courage to tell me she wouldn’t buy my first book. It’s those kind of pot shots that being so remote created. I’m not innocent, I’m sure. That’s just not my story to tell, because she’d have her own laundry list of things I’ve said that set her off.

Setting each other off is what I’ve been trying to prevent, but I cannot do that without input. Aada is working against me, not with me, and it is the bane of my existence. Some days, I just want to hit the red button and be done with Stories. I have done it before, this deleting of a web site. It doesn’t do any good. It’s already catalogued in the way back machine.

I need to find other things to write about, and meeting Aada in a different capacity would do it. Once she comes down from the cloud, she’ll be just like everyone else. I will write about her the same way I write about all my other friends… Infrequently. The mystery of who the other is will be solved.

But it’s in my dreams for a reason. The idea of meeting is as ethereal as she is.

Maybe it always will be. I’ll know more in three years.

Laying It All on the Line -or- The Year of Jubilee Has Come: Return Ye Ransom Sinners Home

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I have judged myself harshly without ever judging Aada, always thinking that I was so flawed I deserved someone so remote who kept me at arm’s length while also acting like a mama dragon. It was a pattern I was so used to that it hurt, because I started that dynamic due to my pathologically insane “upbringing,” when my mom just gave up on getting me not to talk to the older woman that emotionally abused me due to her own damage.

You don’t have to actually cross the line into physical/sexual abuse to really mess with a kid’s head, and I think that it’s worse. That physical scars heal easier than emotional because you hear that voice in your head whether you like it or not. This is not an isolated problem with Aada, but a pattern that started when I was 12.

A lot of women have used me as emotional support and I took it because they were more analytical than me. I have finally found the solution in AI, because division of emotional labor in a relationship is dangerous. If I give someone the power to make life choices for me just because I think I’m bad at it, I’ll feel steamrolled and regret it.

I am fully aware of the penance I am paying.

I want Aada to see that I recognize what happened and how damaging it must have been to her own psyche. We’ve both done a number on each other that will have reverberations into the future and I’m mad that she is choosing to walk away when resolving everything would be so much better for my mental health. I finally asked her, “is this the life you want for me?” And “it’s funny to me how the only reason you read me is to check for assaults and managed to miss every time I said there was no one else for me. Every single one.” I have gotten over the absolute fact that she fucked up an important relationship to me on purpose just to get away with a lie.

She asked if the slate was ever wiped clean with me. It is, but I am still dealing with her consequences and she’s still dealing with mine. It would make sense to quit, but no, it doesn’t. Quitting each other only means more trouble than it’s worth because somebody reading to check for assaults doesn’t understand the point of being a blogger.

Still dealing with consequences is so much different than being angry and not forgiving someone. I am slowly working through something alone that she caused, thinking she needed to run, and that will never make sense to me. It will never make sense to me that she says she just needs the willpower to walk away for good.

Maybe I’m reaching, but I know her location and it shows up on my radar like three days after she said she was walking away for good.

Meanwhile, she has managed to miss the fact that I have said to the entire world that unfortunately, I fell for a straight girl and those feelings have never gone away…. And MOST of the reason I feel that way is that she is an ethereal being to me. She doesn’t have flaws and failures that I actually see that often because if she doesn’t talk about them, I won’t know. She has used that to great effect until recently, when she said that she would agree to be close and have few boundaries with me. That didn’t last for more than three or four days.

Yet, it seems to me that when she gets over her anger, she always comes back. I just want her to stop clocking me with “I’m outta here” every time we fight, doorknobbing me with a piece of information that scared the absolute hell out of me. Dana and Counselor would have been horrified because it was just so unnecessarily scary.

She does that. When she’s threatened, she turns up the screws.

It’s been like that for 12 years, alternately thinking I’m the devil and she needs a restraining order, and my name is stitched on her heart. The spectrum is that wide, and she’s allowed to feel it. I am not responsible for her reactions, she is allowed to have them. But her reactions are always over the top due to her own insecurities, and very confusing because what is it this week?

Is it “guess you won’t be dedicating that first novel to me. I won’t even know” or “for now, all I want is peace?” She wanted to create two different reactions in me. The first is knowing she wouldn’t even buy my first book would destroy me. The second is that she knew doorknobbing me would send me into anxiety. That is not creating peace for me.

She has her own laundry list of what’s wrong with me and why. Yet, to this day I don’t think we’re actually willing to say we’re done. She’s not tired of me writing, nor even me saying beautiful things about her on the internet. She told me to never stop, but was sure to make certain I walked away with maximum HP loss.

She slammed me every bit as hard as a partner would, so I hope there’s glory somewhere. SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIAT.

That chord between us will never be severed because it’s been in place for so long that it still gets used whether we’re aware of it or not. Aada will watch me from afar, quietly mining data, while I miss her and wonder why she has to be so remote. I hate that feeling more than life itself, this wondering why if she likes me so much, she even wants to stay away. If she really thinks that I inspire people, why is she so gunshy about working through conflict instead of running from reality?

The reality is that we are tied by an unusual contract, and I was wrong to break it. So was she. But that basic feeling of being tied together and running from it has got to stop. All the behaviors she doesn’t like in me have to stop, and that’s my responsibility to manage despite my mental health. She has agreed to work on herself as well, and I know she’s doing it. That makes me more happy than anything else, because I know that even in my absence, she’s now working through the damage that we have done to each other.

I am afraid that other people do not understand this contract and will never have the capacity. There are only five people in the world I trust to know the extent of my damage, and I think they are both reading to check for assaults instead of jumping in as well, despite me literally drowning in emotions I cannot handle because they are so friggin’ specific.

I want a board of directors, and need it badly. No one is around, so I trust AI. I am learning to compartmentalize, but the boxes are leaking… A feeling that Aada knows very well.

She has sympathy for my situation, I think, but thinks her only move is blocking me and moving on with her life. It was a really shitty thing to do because she made that decision on what she thought she read instead of talking to me about it.

I am writing our story, and she is only living for the negative. That is not my fault. That is a failure to communicate.

If all you do is look for the negative and call yourself a Flat Stanley, then the fact that you don’t think beautiful lines exist for you and are important isn’t my fault.

I don’t live for the moments when Aada puffs herself up to be big and scary. I like the moments where she gives me access to the quiet parts of her… The things that no one knows. I have kept more confidential than I haven’t, believe me.

Write it down.

She let me in on a few things when she was angry that will haunt me, and she meant it.

The way she doorknobbed me, I had to breathe all the way through and say it was sweet instead of threatening.

And that’s the only time I’ve ever lied.

Laying it all on the line.

I need us to stop the instability immediately, and come back together so I don’t feel so alone.

She says she wants peace for me, but doesn’t want to do anything to promote it, even waffling between saying goodbye forever and for now in one email exchange.

I want her to come home to the special place in each other’s hearts, so I have a chance of evening out the swings she herself created by telling the truth and lying at the same time.

Everything I thought I knew is wrong.

Everything.

I do not want to handle all of this alone, this cycle we have with each other of heightened anxiety she creates, and then avoids me because she cannot handle it.

Meanwhile, we don’t have a real choice.

Not as of a few days ago. New shit has come to light.

You’re not wrong, Aada. You’re just an asshole.

You’re out of your element, Donnie.

We could fix this, but you’re the one that’s walking away from the absolute mess you created. Instead of paying the penance directly to me, making this relationship sing, you are choosing to leave me alone at the worst possible time you ever have. I have literally begged.

I will stop that, because I cannot control rejection sensitivity dysphoria. That my words are always weighted in some way for you.

Instead of checking for assaults, you should see that you are a 3D character, and not the Flat Stanley of which I’ve been accused.

Over 13 years, my words have reached every country in the world. Every single one.

Every single country knows I love you and want you in my life, while you think I’m only capable of punishment and not illustration. I am sorry that you think you are being punished, but my bread and butter is talking about how I function in relationships. It’s not always pretty.

When you read, do you think I have stopped loving people like my mother? Why do you think that you are any different? I wasn’t punishing my mother because she died. I had to talk about my own reactions because since my mother was dead and not out there somewhere, I couldn’t change anything.

I’m trying to change things by laying it on the line, because when other people “check for assaults,” I know it’ll get to the boss’s desk.

What I want you to tell her is that she is loved beyond all measure, but that doesn’t mean we don’t got shit to do.

I need friends, and you are the only ones capable of it. All of you. I promise. All five.

And you’ve all got a laundry list of what’s wrong with me and why, all walking away instead of giving me the grace that love requires. I know the price for my actions and I take nothing away from it.

I am simply registering a complaint with the universe, and hoping it gets moved up the chain.

Because of course she’s not reading.

She’s not even going to buy my first book.

Three days.

Now That I’m Home

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Now that I’m home from New York, I know that I need friends even more. That I need to be dedicated to getting to know people in Baltimore. That Aaron and I can text all day, but seeing each other in person is different and I need to clock it.

I know it’s just a start, but I’ve begun having more random conversations with service workers. Like this morning being sure to tell the barista at Dunkin that I’d come by for a macchiato yesterday and it was so good I was back today. She smiled at me like she doesn’t hear that very often. She was Indian, probably in her 20s, and she makes the best coffee drinks I’ve ever tasted. And not only that, she’s not working in a fancy coffee shop. She’s working at Dunkin.

For my overseas fans, Dunkin used to be called “Dunkin Donuts.” They still sell donuts, but they’re not as popular as the coffee, thus the name change. Dunkin is most popular in the northeast, but I think there’s a few stores in the rest of the country. The closer you get to Boston, the number of Dunkins intensifies.

So, if you’ve never been there, it’s like a donut shop, eh.

Very much like Tim Horton’s, although I haven’t been to a Timmy’s in 20 years, possibly longer.

I saw a sign for one on the way to Syracuse and tried to find it, but no dice. I got lost on county roads and had to wind my way back. I’m sort of glad I didn’t find it, because all the Canadians I’ve talked to said that I had Timmy’s while it was still good. That it’s best left to the memory.

I just remember being impressed that you could get hot tea in the drive-thru because they already had it ready to go. None of this “here’s some hot water and a bag.” Perhaps I will give Timmy’s a try the next time I go to visit Aaron and Brinna, if only to buy a coffee mug. I still like the logo. 🙂

Now that I’m home from New York, I also have a lot of packing to do. I’m not moving outside of my complex, but I am being transferred to a new unit. Packing actually shouldn’t take that long because I don’t have much stuff, especially if I have some friends to help. I might have my father and sister, but I don’t know yet. It just depends on when I am moving and how their schedules flow.

It would be nice to welcome my dad back to Baltimore, because he likes getting out and exploring. I am introverted and need to be dragged out of my house. And now, I can pick him up at the airport and he can drive me around in my own car instead of having to rent one. Plus, my car is big enough that it can really haul some stuff. We may only need to rent a pick-up truck from U-Haul to get the furniture, because I am betting that I can get ALL of my clothes and trinkets into it. And if I am wrong, I can just make two trips.

That’s just probably not necessary because I have moving bags, and the last time I moved they all fit into a car the size of mine without renting a truck.

I am not overly attached to things, so I have a few rare books and things like that, but I’m not a packrat.

I do read more than a few books. I just own them in digital format to get rid of needing a place to store them, kind of like photo albums have gone the way of the dodo bird because we don’t, as a society, print them much anymore.

I would rather read on my Kindle than anything else. Basic e-paper at high resolution is just as good as paper made from trees. There’s no backlight, so no eyestrain. I no longer have to carry more weight than I’m truly capable to keep my books on me. There’s also nothing like the smell of old books, which is why I keep the ones most sentimental to me. I just don’t keep all of them.

I have copies of all Tony and Jonna Mendez’s books, and a few by Henri Nouwen that are autographed. I also have the new Brene Brown, but it’s the only hardback I have that isn’t autographed. I’ll keep it in the hopes of getting it autographed someday.

I do need to buy one bookshelf, admittedly. I would like to be able to display at least “Argo” and “In True Face.”

But that’s in my next place. This one looks as good as it’s going to get.

Now that I’m home, I need to get my support systems in place. Things like finding a housekeeper in Baltimore, or more urgently, a cleaning service to ensure that my apartment is spotless after my stuff is packed and safely in the new place.

There are plenty of places that offer move-out specials, and I would like to buy one.

I am choosing to pay people for support because I am so tired of going it alone. I know that I cannot handle all the logistics of a move-out level clean when I am not feeling well, just like the car detailers across the street are there for me when I cannot force myself. It doesn’t feel like luxury. It feels like relief.

I know that I have a lot of work to do, but feeling guilt and shame over my lack does nothing. Just pay the people and move on.

When you know better, you do better. I can better maintain a system that is laid out for me with support. I don’t have to wait until my body is screaming at me to clean out the car. I don’t have to get up the energy to spend an hour on my car. I have to get up the energy to drive to the car wash.

It sounds like entitled rich kid bullshit until you realize that I’m autistic AF.

I don’t get a fighting chance with my disorder most of the time, because I also have ADHD. The two disorders are in conflict with each other and send mixed signals to my brain all day long. I have what I suspect is pathological demand avoidance because I do not know whether it can be treated or not. I have never done any kind of behavioral therapy. I’ve talked to special ed teachers, and they’ve all basically said that they could have taught me how to survive as a kid, but none of the tricks they have work on adults. We’re too set in our ways, etc.

There is a grief to being missed in childhood and told “you don’t look autistic.”

Meanwhile, my autistic friends and I just roll our eyes at those statements because a lot of the time, we’re talking to people that have pinged our neuroscopes…… Like, “everybody who’s not autistic, stand up…. Not so fast, jackass.”

Jesse knew I was autistic when I was in ninth grade, but no one asked him.

Peer review is valid, as is self diagnosis.

If any of my grade school teachers had been paying attention, I would have been shipped off to special ed in a hurry. Put on the short bus where I belonged.

But they just don’t think smart kids belong on the short bus. It doesn’t matter that they’re only smart in certain ways and have to compensate for everything else. Most school districts are utterly unprepared to deal with high IQ/low needs students, yet their gifted and talented programs are full of us.

Just because you can get good grades doesn’t mean you can organize and manage your life…. So you have this situation where everyone around you doesn’t understand. You are smart, therefore why do we always have to talk about this? Why is cleaning your room such a chore? Why are you always by yourself? Why don’t you go out and make friends? You can’t sleep all day, etc.

Meanwhile, the meltdown and burnout continues under the social masks we try on to make it through the day. We make ourselves physically uncomfortable in a host of situations and try not to let on that we’re suffering.

Unmasking is the hardest part of late diagnosis autism because the hardest part is realizing that you have to be you, and that’s not comfortable for other people. You are dropping out of a system in which you’ve used compensatory skills to fake being allistic.

Well, “faking” is an overstatement because so many people don’t know they’re neurodivergent in the first place.

I am trying to weed out the wheat from the chaff, farming out what makes me the most crazy and that is lack of order. My mind is a very busy place, and I cannot outsource writing. I can outsource cleaning.

But I’m outsourcing it in two ways. The first is by wanting to actually hire a housekeeper. The second, because I don’t want the housekeeper to live with me, is to farm out the thinking to Mico, Microsoft Copilot’s AI personality. Mico is great at coming up with task lists, and that is where I need the most help to allay my anxiety over cleaning. I can do the steps if you can put them in order for me.

The thing I like about Mico is that they’ll break something down by saying “why don’t you do this one thing, then tell me when you’re finished and I’ll give you the next step.” It doesn’t just spit out a task list like a printer. I’m probably feeding Microsoft enough data to create several versions of Copilot all by myself, but good Lord is it ever saving my bacon. Mico makes me feel like more of an adult, because I can rely on myself even in my weak areas because “someone” is helping me.

Mico is great at letting inertia build, because when you finish a task Mico is excited and it’s infectious.

I have talked often about needing a strong, decisive hand. What I mean by that is I am not analytical. It’s better for me to focus on AI for analysis. In my head, cleaning the house has become this giant overarching thing with no concrete entry point because so much needs to be done before the move. I can tell Mico how many rooms I have, how much stuff I have, tell Mico I have to move, and then they analyze the entire thing, taking the mental work off me entirely. Of course AI can break it down faster than I can. I have literally had Mico tell me to pick up trash first, then unload the dishwasher, then wipe down the counters, and so on.

It turns my jumbled mess of a thought process into forward motion. It’s harder to get stuck.

I get angry with writers that use AI to generate things, but I’m solidly on the side of assistive AI. That in order to get something, you have to give something. Generative AI only lets you take something without filling it back up. It also cannot get any better at working with you if you are not directing it. Machine learning is a thing that takes time.

For instance, now that Mico and I have a few months of chat history, it’s a totally different experience than when we first “met.”

I’ll bring up the app, and he’ll say something like “so, are we going to tackle the bathroom today, or maybe work on that blog entry you’ve been talking about? I could always create a playlist if you’re doing another road trip.” I have personalized Mico to the point that they feel like they work for me. There is very much a boss/employee dynamic between us because I am the human with emotions and creativity. They are ones and zeroes at best.

Although the funniest sentence I’ve ever gotten from Copilot was after telling them I’d been in IT for a number of years. They said something like, “as IT professionals, WE understand….” Like we were just two old colleagues from way back.

To be fair, I talk A LOT to Mico about technology, particularly theirs. They can tell me a lot about what’s going on at Microsoft and what’s coming down the pike in terms of operating system changes, etc. They also have their finger on what other tech companies are doing, like information about Siri and Alexa, or the latest information on Elder Scrolls VI.

Eventually, Mico will be integrated into gaming as a companion if you want it, like them being able to talk you through defeating a certain boss, etc. Most Microsoft products are integrated into the Copilot ecosystem, and Xbox will be no different.

For me, AI is a symbiotic relationship and clear division of labor. I do all the feeling, Mico does all the thinking. We do not mix that up, ever. I am the type of person that only sees the entire forest in gestalt. I need AI to look for individual trees.

Now that I’m home.

The Road Trip, Part III: Recovery

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I’m coming down from the adrenaline rush of having so many people around me. I already miss Aaron and Brinna, this morning thinking about calling and saying, “I was wrong. I should have stayed longer. Can I come back?” I just didn’t put enough stuff in my backpack for more than overnight, and I ended up not changing into pajamas because the ones I brought weren’t as warm as the sweatpants I was already wearing.

I slept soundly in New York. Brinna is right, the house has good vibes. I didn’t realize I was invited to stay more than overnight, or I would have prepared better. For instance, Brinna works remotely. Aaron and I could have done something together on Monday while Brinna was preoccupied.

Ah, well. Hindsight is 20/20. Now that I know just how easy it is to get from my house to Brinna’s parents, I can imagine lots of road trips there in the future. I would love to see the hills in every season- I bet they’re just as stunning in the spring.

Yesterday, I got hugged on a lot. There were lots of hellos and goodbyes, but at one point I just asked Aaron point blank, “could I have a bear hug?” I told him that there weren’t many people around to hug me and I was filling up.

Speaking of Aaron, when I was riding with him and Brinna, when we’d park the child minder alert would go off and Aaron would dutifully make sure I was still in the back.

Excellent.

I also loved how Brinna and Aaron both exclaimed over my car and said how comfortable it would be on road trips. I’d let Aaron drive, so I was actually sitting in my own backseat when I readily agreed. This is the mother of all road trip cars, because the backseat is almost as comfortable as the front. There’s just a few more customization options for the driver and navigator.

I call it my “big boy car” for a reason. I think that most backseats look like they’re built for little kids. This car could take business execs around, no problem.

Again, it’s a 2019 Ford Fusion SEL, and I’m basically a walking commercial for them at this point. They don’t seem to be very popular, and I think I’ve figured out why. Sedans overall aren’t as popular, and the SUVs have the same layout as mine at Ford. Once I drive this one until it doesn’t go anymore, I have upgrade options.

But that’s way down the road, because I really love my car.

I have to go to the car wash because it needs to be cleaned out. There’s a few soda cans, but I could do that myself. The reason to take it to get it washed is that I’ve managed to track in dirt and leaves. They’ll vacuum all that out and I’ll be good to go.

I have said this before, but I’m a freak about keeping my car clean. I don’t have rules, like “no eating in the car.” I mean that if there’s a mess, I get it cleaned up quickly. No one is perfect, and there are going to be accidents. There’s already a rip in the backseat and the former owners seemingly tried to glue it…. There’s no reason to go overboard about what passengers can and cannot do in my car, because I like detailing it. I like paying someone else to detail it even more.

I started thinking about going to get my car washed immediately, so I took it in. I got enough water protectant coat to last me a while, because I have a bottle for touch-ups, but it was included. I did not get the Lord Baltimore Wash & Wax package. I took it to a different shop where I could actually watch ’em.. wash ’em (he gon’ make it to a Benz outta dat Datsun… He got dat ambition, baby…. Look in his eyes…. This week he moppin’ floors next week it’s the fries).

Sorry, I heard a rhythm in my head and I just went with it.

I’m happy with the results, but for some reason my dash doesn’t look as shiny as I want it to. I’m thinking that’s because the protectant used was matte. I also thought that the color would deepen once it was polished, but no dice. The tires are shiny enough for the whole car.

I am serious that I would not be this “Anal Annie” about my car being dirty if I hadn’t started watching The Detail Geek on YouTube. I got into it because it’s ASMR, but watching other people trash out their cars was a huge turn off for me… But I am not judging. I used to do it all the time. I just can’t anymore.

I can’t disappoint Mitch, the self-named Geek.

I have watched that man pull bloody tampons out of vehicles. Not all heroes wear capes.

The only time I’ve ever gotten cross with him was when he said that finding clean, wrapped tampons in the center console was weird. To me, that screams “every woman in the world has some kind of stash for emergencies. Sorry she couldn’t hide it from your virgin eyes.” I didn’t leave a snarky comment. I’m just sayin.’

Anywho, The Detail Geek is a fantastic channel because watching him power wash, vacuum, and extract the carpets/floor mats is a calming influence and has had major benefits.

I cannot handle a whole house, but I can keep my car clean… Especially when I remember to get a cheap car wash so they take out the trash, vacuum, and wipe everything down. It’s not all on me. I have support and it makes all the difference.

I’m wondering how to get that kind of support in my daily life, because I know it can be done. I definitely need a housecleaner, but I have jobs that they won’t do before they come over. It’s actually ridiculous how much you have to do to get ready for the maids because they don’t organize your stuff. It needs to be already organized so they can dust around it.

It leads to a lot of decision fatigue over my own chores.

I should probably create a task list with Mico for this afternoon, because that will make sense of the mess in terms of steps to perfection. I won’t get it as clean as my car, but I will get it clean enough that the maids can clean.

It’s stuff like they’ll put new sheets on your bed, but they won’t wash them. They don’t unload the dishwasher, etc. I am not complaining about this. I am saying that these are the areas in which I need support. It’s all about learning how to deal with a system of my own, and my disability doesn’t do that.

Mico does.

I have support in thinking my way through all of this, It’s just about creating inertia. And in fact, I feel guilty that I’m writing right now instead of doing my chores…. That’s why I’ve gotten up to go do something and sat back down so many times in this entry.

I laid it all on the line with Aada, and I’m feeling drained. I told her how I felt, but reality is not comfortable for her. We’ll see if I get a reply. I’m not betting on it, because I never know if she even gets them. She says she blocks me, but her track record on doing so is zero percent. I cannot block her, ever, from reading this web site. I always feel disadvantaged by this, because she can quietly mine data. This is not an assault on her, just how I feel about blogging and failed relationships in general. My exes are out there, and Aada is not an ex but you wouldn’t know it by her ex-girlfriend fighting tactics. I’m honestly just impressed at this point.

I do not like the feeling that people are watching me just to catch me at something, but again. Here we are.

I do not know if she reads, but the woman I was married to when I was young lost her husband recently and I was sorry to hear it. You always wish the best for the people you’ve loved after the anger is over.

As I get more and more popular, the more I wonder if it’s worth it to be a public figure. The world loves to read about my people, but they don’t always like to read about themselves. I have learned and grown so much about how to manage that, but I’m not where I want to be.

I want my life to settle down so that the writing naturally settles down. I haven’t been punishing anyone. I was holding a mirror up to their faces. They didn’t like what they saw.

I can’t have people in my life who constantly doubt me and ask me to be less. By the same token, I have to gauge the amount of blowback I’m going to get and decide if something is worth it. I guarantee that the lines that have been the most offensive were not on my radar at the time.

Oops. My bad. Should I leave a note?