I have never needed Jeremy Bearimy more than I do right now. However, I wouldn’t know how to change things if I went back in time. I’d only be able to go with the flow, knowing what I know now. I don’t know if I would or wouldn’t survive Life on Mars. Either I’ll save humanity over and over, or I’ll take in the whole vortex. There is no in between.
I’ll decide in the car. Guess it depends on who’s driving.
If I had to go back in time, I would be Meagan’s friend and let go of the idea that we’d be good together. I was too wrapped up in my damage to pay attention, and it wasn’t fair to her. She just thought I was intense and weird, so she either went on a date with someone else or had a one night stand. She was also supposed to be a mutual friend, so seeing her after Meagan noped out wasn’t the best experience. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t have to. It was written all over my body. It was more grief than I could carry. The relationship wasn’t fair to either of us, because I’m not the alpha dog…. or I wasn’t at 18. She found an alpha dog and married her. I was livid, and not for the reasons you think. I loved her more than me, and to see her commit for a lifetime to someone that would steamroll her every single day made my heart break into a million little pieces. My friend was fucked, and it only took about a decade for her to see it.
This is not blaming her. I just see how it is.
That’s because I love those type women as well. She had it together better than I did, but cut off from her emotions a good bit of the time. I only say that because my dad said I was after I started dating her. That I receded into my shell.
Hm. That has no bearing on “this thing we’ve created and managed.” My eyes are rolling out of my head. That phrase hurt worse than a one night stand. I never got laid, but I am well and truly fucked. It’s too much. And yet, 10 years is not nothing. I have the right to be upset for the time it takes for waves of tears to wash over shallower wells of injury. It doesn’t feel like the end of a romance with my beautiful girl. It feels like wondering where it all went. I know we both participated. I have owned my part. At the same time, the story will not go away.
It’s just that now, I like her character more than I like her. It’s painful, but it’s true. I love her like I love all my friends and family, but I don’t have to like her. She was not being very likable at last interaction, and neither was I because of it. If I start a letter with “I don’t want to fight about this,” the answer is generally not “you’re not getting what you need and I am not going to give you any more than three words. Die mad about it.” I am doing the work so that I don’t. She doesn’t get to steal happiness anymore.
She replaced it with fear that had nothing to do with either one of us. It was our filters for it. We fought because it was easy to read each other wrong and I felt constantly impaled. She would say that she wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t been such an asshole to her, and she’s right. She has also been great about saying I’m forgiven and treated me like dog shit. So, which story do I believe? Do I believe that I am worthy of this treatment, or do I believe that what I did was eight years ago and she’s still a brick wall. It made me so angry that I realized I could not live that way anymore. I had just met Zac and reconnected with Bryn, and I felt settled in a way that I haven’t in a long time. I realized that because her dark begets dark, I couldn’t shine a light bright enough to get through to her. It was her choice to say “you are clearly not getting what you need, and I am hell bent on never giving it to you.” She created a fucking mess, and then blamed me for everything. But because I hurt her, what she did became totally invalid. I couldn’t have pain anymore. I couldn’t have issues anymore. Her right. Her barometer. She would not submit on it and admit that things had not gone as planned on either side.
She thought she was trash, and treated me as an extension.
I do not have to entertain her opinion anymore, but not wanting it is a whole other thing. If she wanted to break me, she did. I think she did want to break me, because when she’s angry she’s quiet as well. Her words reverberate, and she has never grasped how much. So, of course she doesn’t have to apologize. It wasn’t lashing out. If I hadn’t done what I did, she wouldn’t have been forced to treat me like shit until I gave up.
That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.
I needed her to pick up the clue phone, but I was always too much for her. If I am too much for you, now I don’t care how important you are in my life. This aggression will not stand, man. That’s because I’m an easy target to blame for other people’s refusal to look inside themselves. There’s never an actual conflict where we both present stories and try to figure out objective truth. Very few people do what I do, because they hate it. It’s too hard and it hurts too much. And yet, I do it anyway because it helped me to see what I was doing to participate in everything without doing the same thing to her. I didn’t make it all her fault. She saw it as that, but that’s because she was looking for it.
If your self esteem is so low that you cannot open up about anything due to fear of other people, you will hurt them. That’s because you’ll make everything about me. You didn’t do anything, I made you. If I hadn’t x, you wouldn’t have had to do y.
First of all, that’s bullshit. She acted too much like a victim for someone who supposedly forgave me. It was her damage, not mine. If she only needs to be hurt once to lock down forever, I’m out.
Our relationship devolved into as long as I agreed to do everything she said and keep quiet about anything that was bothering me, she was ready for anything. She actually said that I was the only one who ever trashed anything. It was a dick move on her part.
I didn’t respect her boundaries because she didn’t tell me what they were. I would just hit a land mine and she’d explode. I have the ability to make her feel things that other people don’t, because I can say it in a way that actually makes her emote. She just doesn’t do that for me. She gets angry at me and tells someone else.
Meanwhile, I am of the opinion that if the information goes out, it has to go to the right person.
She was my perfect picture of the companion that my INFJ personality profile said I’d get. She traded friendship for shallow communication because apparently it takes a very long time to write e-mails unless she’s telling me to fuck off. Those she takes time with.
Meanwhile, I know why she’s hurt. I know why she’s angry. I know why she cuts off her emotions. I can have sympathy for all that and still think she’s on a path of destruction. She can’t cancel everyone when they make a mistake.
If she goes through life treating everyone like me, that when they hurt her she recedes into her fortress and nopes out, that’s going to lead to a lot of short friendships. But that’s the view from where I sit. Maybe she has managed to meet people that never do anything that ruffles her feathers. For their sake, I hope so.
She’s a lot to lose, and if you piss her off, she’ll hold it over your head for the next 30 years. But she’ll also be nice and not tell you that.
It comes out when her actions and words don’t line up.
She treated me like I was sick when I wasn’t. My perception when she check in on my dad was that my mother died two or three days later, so she felt like she couldn’t tell me that she didn’t really want to be my friend, she just wanted to send me a compliment. At first, it felt like she pitied me, coddled me, anything to make me not get upset at anything. She walked on eggshells no matter what I did, because don’t upset the crazy person. She took away my agency.
She’d beat me emotionally like a southern mama with a hair brush,
I didn’t walk away because she deserved to take a shot at me. But she didn’t deserve eight years of it.
Meanwhile, I also walked on eggshells and tried to please her because I felt like she thought I was a threat. The truth is that I have never even been within 15 minutes of her, and when I truly tried to walk away, she wouldn’t let me go. She could say the same thing about me.
Writing is a comprehensive response to life. That is true no matter what kind, but particularly blogging because the story moves forward every single day, because it’s a choice to post, not a responsibility. I do not feel like I have an audience to whom I owe anything. If I needed to, I’d push the red button and everything would be gone. Nothing threatens you if you don’t need something out of it. I would be giving up a lot, but I wouldn’t stop writing. It’s a huge deal to be a blogger, because people cannot predict what you’ll remember and think they can.
Someone might be totally freaked out and barking up my tree not to write about them, but what they don’t know is that if I can’t make an illustration out of them that works, I won’t. Not everyone makes a good character. Telling them that is worse than blowback, because their ego gets involved. What do you mean, I don’t make a good character?
I feel like I handle this better than most after coming out to straight people without a clue. You’ll never see a more butt hurt child than when they’ve told a gay person they don’t like them “that way” and the person says “you’re not my type.” They are horribly offended in the most hilarious of ways. It is more than physical attraction, and they’ve taken your rejection as if you think it isn’t.
My straight girl crush was because I was struggling in my marriage and it was easier to feel high as hell on new relationship energy than it was to deal at home. She is drop dead gorgeous and it didn’t mean anything to me because I wasn’t looking at her picture while I wrote. She was the equivalent of my “corporeally challenged celebrity girlfriend on the radio.” (I went on a date with a woman from OPB/NPR… maybe two… but this is what Dana and I called her for 15 years.) I could have a crush on a straight girl because it couldn’t go anywhere. I’d get all the good stuff without all the bad except I didn’t. My trauma bond screamed with empathy because she didn’t give me a slap bracelet after the fire.
When I say that someone makes a bad character, I mean that when I write about you, the emotions fall flat on the page. If I can’t make myself feel anything, no one else will feel it, either. If you go back to my older entries, you’ll be able to tell when I’m distressed. I can, but I also have the memory of writing the piece if it’s so overwhelming it made me sob. People think I get really angry when I’m actually crying my eyes out. I am literally pouring myself out onto the page so that I have an accurate idea of how my mental and physical health are treating me. I realize when I’ve been too harsh. I realize when I’ve been too nice.
What makes Supergrover such a great character is because when I write about her I can cry. Not many people evoke emotion in me like that because I just won’t get vulnerable enough. When I write about my beautiful girl, I step into a museum with ten years’ worth of collected art. Some of it was bought and paid for. Some of it we stole in a heist. We’d push and pull and tumble and roll, but for whatever reason, we didn’t cut each other off. That’s because the museum had no easily accessible exits.
I became exhausted because bringing up conflict and it never getting resolved was eating my self-esteem for every meal.
It was very, very confusing because we’d have a fight and she’d say we were done. When I assumed she meant it, I’d try to move on and then she’d drop in. When I assumed that she was just angry af and apologized, it was perceived as me trying to get attention. She would tell me that she told me it was over and I just pushed, but I have two solid memories that stick with me.
The first was a huge fight that really was the end of it for me. Like, I am just not capable. She reads on my blog that my dad is having surgery and checks in. I was pleased, but I felt weird about it because I thought, “surely she sees why this would be problematic.” It felt like “leave me the fuck alone, but I’m going to make sure you know I’m watching.” It has never gotten any more resolved than this, because when she dropped in on me, it was fine. When I dropped in on her, she felt creeped out because she thought it was me saying “I’m always watching.” It happened again when we had another blowout and I thought maybe then I’d get a break long enough to figure out what really happened. Someone said something to her that reminded her of me, and she was back in my DMs.
Neither one of us could break the connection, just “tumbling through a freefall, no one’s going to go unscathed….. but it’s not because you held back, and it’s not how I behaved.” Now I’m humming…. “and I believe that underneath it all, you are my friend. And the way that I fell for you, I’ll never fall that way again. I still believe despite our differences that what we have’s enough” because I believe in her (and I believe in love). You know I have the ability to cry about this if I’m writing and suddenly quote Indigo Girls.
I told my friend Missy that I didn’t even listen to them for the longest because it created a “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” amount of “AS IF I’M NOT WEIRD ENOUGH.” I had a stereo in my room. Their albums didn’t leave when I did for years.
Now, one of my favorite songs is “When We Were Writers.”
Writing is not what Supergrover does for a living, but she does write in her spare time to get away from work. She’s right. It’s a bubble, When I say that I can’t do something or I have to go because I’m writing, it is taken every bit as seriously as when Lindsay says, “I’m going on a run.” Nothing else is more sacred than spending time alone so you can actually hear your thoughts.
With a virtual relationship, you never have to feel alone. That’s because their physical presence has never been needed. The relationship wasn’t created that way. We’d become each other in our work, borrowing style, structure, and tone. It was quite sophisticated in retrospect. It’s amazing how much we were able to do for each other virtually, and now everyone knows it because of the pandemic. We were virtual BEFORE IT WAS COOL.
We’d trade off being The Holy and The Moly.
We both went scorched earth too much when it was infinitely possible to just be out with it and either be done or decide we have something and work toward it. My emotions were larger than hers and always have been. She absolutely knew this. But I do not think that she ever thought that she’d be reopening a wound if she reached out. My part in all this is that because my feelings were large, I ignored everything bad and just kept on believing that one day, I’d find the combination of words that would unlock her. In my mind’s eye, I’m 14. She’s six. I’m older, and I should have known better.
When you know better, you do better. Maya Angelou’s words, but true for me as well. I don’t even know if she likes Coke, but she has a unique name and I knew for damn sure she wasn’t going to find a “Share a Coke with…..” bottle anywhere. So I ordered her one from Atlanta. There were actually six. One with her actual name, one with her character’s name, her husband, her kids, and her dogs. Except the Coke bottle said “Boytoy” on her husband’s because that’s how we referred to him. She never saw them, because I mixed up the address and put my name on the wrong part of the form. So they got a box addressed to me for a reason completely unknown to them and returned it. I was furious because it cost so much to do, but I was only angry at myself for mixing up the web form. It was so unique, and ADHD fucked me. I was absolutely miserable because it was the nicest thing I could think of to do virtually because I’d been a jackass. It was the friend equivalent of having to sleep on the couch and buying chocolates and flowers to beg.
Since she wears suits and crap for work, she also travels sometimes. I sent her a bracelet with a charm for her favorite cause. She told me it was perfect and sent me a picture of her wrist. I feasted on that for weeks because now I could go wherever she was, metaphysically. She just isn’t the sort of person that would tell me where she went, because it’s not important in her daily life and that’s really what I wanted to hear. I don’t care how she’s doing professionally. I care how she’s doing emotionally. I am the red telephone where she is concerned. Even now that we’re done I won’t hear a bad word about her because my friends don’t care about her. They care about me. They don’t recognize how much she gave me because even I’ve never heard her side of the story. I couldn’t make anything better. She was looking for hurt, so she found it.
The bracelet said to me that as long as I kept my behavior consistent, she’d know that my drug protocol was working , and not to worry if I spiraled out, that it had nothing to do with her. It had to do with my mental health, and no one else is in charge of managing it. I know when to go to the ER/psych ward. If that doesn’t end up being the whole story, still not her damage. Blame poor health and bad medicine, not the patient.
It all seems scary to people the way I lay it out because I’m dispassionate. I have a disease. It has to be managed. People need to know they’re off the hook for checking in on me, because when mental health issues pop up, if I don’t do anything that’s my fault.
“Oops. My bad. Should I leave a note?”
Wow. That was dark, even for me. I’m mostly fine, so that’s not an indication that things are about to get worse. It’s just a reality check. Run the numbers, don’t diagnose me.
I am awaiting the cause of Sinead O’Connor’s death. I think I already know what it is…. and no matter what it is, you don’t die at 56 of natural causes.
I don’t want to know, but I ran the numbers.
Here’s the other thing you need to know. You cannot guess what mood I’m in, or whether I’m experiencing depression or hypomania in my work because I write about things that have already happened and I’m searching for the road ahead. I map out what I feel now to plan for what I’ll feel later. It’s not because I know you better than you, it’s that I have to decide how I’m going to react to our next interaction based on past history. I will know whether it’s time to stand up for myself or apologize with fancy Coke.
However, I did not just send a gift and assume that she’d take it as “I’m sorry.” It’s just that her love language is action and mine is words of affirmation. I compromised, she didn’t. She could respond in her own love language, but she couldn’t meet me halfway and talk about her feelings. I never knew which way was up. It’s just not fair to leave someone in that much confusion because my need was being rejected. I needed her to show up, be present in the moment. Instead, her responses were dismissive or angry. Meanwhile, I’m trying to do things that make her less angry and annoyed, but I couldn’t because I was guessing all the time. I got done with guessing way too far past my breaking point. She had enough information to blow up my life, not the other way around. And yet she saw me as a threat without realizing she felt like one to me, too. We were in the same boat, just back to back.
She is the Aunt Voula. I am the Toula. She will be everyone’s favorite and I’m okay with that because she’s my favorite, too. We’re in that weird age gap where I’m not young enough to be her kid, but not an average age between siblings, either.
In the beginning, she treated me like an equal. After fights, she treated me like a pest. It is my fault I treated her badly, and her fault that she never got over it.
The problem isn’t even that she “never got over it.” It’s that she is free to be someone who decides how they feel about you on a daily basis for someone else. It was chaotic and I was tired of the swings.
I have found that being direct has cost me a lot, because especially with women, they think I’m attacking them because I’m not sugar coating anything to protect their feelings. They’re responsible for their feelings. I should not have to do the emotional work of walking around in someone’s mind to determine the reaction I’m going to get before I say something. It makes me people please and my need gets ignored.
That’s because I used to stuff everything down. Anything anyone has ever said to me that mattered is still there. So is everything that has been done to me because I am a victim of childhood emotional abuse and queer, so I’m a big hate double ticket being female as well. Women being chattel is not something we created for ourselves. Queers being construed as mentally ill pedophiles is not something we created for ourselves. Hell, even being female wasn’t part of the plan. It’s just the hand I was dealt.
My mind isn’t all cis, which gives me some confidence now that I’m not four damn years old. I will not take anyone’s shit anymore.
First of all, if we are in a relationship, we have to forgive each other over and over and over and over. I will not accept anything less, because I cannot abide passive-aggressive abandonment. “There’s a problem, so instead of being a grown up, I’m going to avoid you for all eternity.” If you don’t love me enough to struggle, GTFO.
State boundaries clearly and be consistent on letting me know when they change. Again, I will not predict you.
If you’re a homophobe or a misogynist, you cannot come see me until after you’ve already done the work. My friend Erin said that straight people should check with queer people before they decide to say they’re an ally. I told her it meant a lot to me that I could have an opinion on that. That an ally shirt is not something you buy for yourself.
It’s also problematic to buy things that say “ally” on it for some people, because it becomes clear that you’re not willing to take on our burdens. God forbid someone think you were gay. The point of being an ally is realizing it’s relentless. You have a habit of putting on all your rainbow shit until something happens that you don’t like. Maybe it’s that someone hit on you. Maybe it’s that you experienced discrimination. Either way, when you take it off because it’s too hard, fuck you sideways.
Resurrection happens in the middle of the mess, but it will never happen if you believe you’re the main character in every goddamn story. If you’re going to ask me to recommend what you should do as an ally, and then say I’m attacking you because you ended the paragraph by explaining why it’s too hard to look queer, you are not welcome at my table.
Alternatively, I could never get my beautiful girl to open up enough to figure out how we could solve all our shit, and it was a similar issue. By holding everything in, she became the main character in every story because I was constantly begging her to open up because we went through some shit and had way different reactions to it. I NEEDED her, and she half-assed it. The only reason I say this is because she never explained to me that she was any busier, but I knew how I was being treated.
She was an open book once I learned to read, it’s just that now my opinions are not valid. I cannot always be wrong. I am too smart for that. If you insist that your words are never the problem, GTFO.
It’s not that you’ve pissed me off so bad we can’t work it out. It’s that we have a bad pattern and me doing all the work isn’t going to solve jack shit. Go with God. Don’t accept any wooden nickels. May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house. Just don’t come back to me until you know what you want and you can say it out loud. Have the integrity to own that you are responsible for a percentage of what is happening in every situation. Even my emotional abuse isn’t that woman’s problem anymore, because I’m a grown ass woman.
There are absolutes in life you can’t change, though, and with my beautiful girl I found a big one. She did not. We need to be together and yet we are apart. This is not personal. This is that not being able to have a relationship with her causes consequences bigger than me and she’s fucking blind to it. But that’s all her shit. If she doesn’t figure it out, then she can watch as I trip over a land mine.
I will struggle to forgive noping out when I needed her most. I realize that she needed time to recover, but I gave her eight years. It seemed like she didn’t have any other dogs to kick because I was getting massive anger in response to legit nothing.
My beautiful girl, I will always annoy the everliving shit out of you and make you angry because it doesn’t take much. Every accusation was a confession, and we can both be dead honest about that. We were seeing each other through our own filters. I would never escape judgmental dickhead. I would never be her goddess of the moon ever again.
But she saw me being a writer as a threat, so instead of just asking me what I was going to write or helping me craft the narrative or helping me gain understanding about ANYTHING so that I had parameters? She told me that she could no longer allow my words to cause fear in her and to go find new friends. I was livid. I hadn’t written anything about her in a long time because she hated it so much. I could write beautifully about everyone but her, unless I fed her ego and then she’d realize being a character wasn’t so bad. She just couldn’t see herself as true in my eyes. That both sides of the spectrum exist in her just as much as it is in me.
She couldn’t see red to indigo, and beat my ass with blue.
So, now when anyone crosses me, I ask myself what she would do. It works. I’m not a totally different person. I have confidence in what I believe for the first time in forever. I do not think she has the same confidence in her own beliefs when it comes to emotions and relationships. This is because my experience of her is that dealing with conflict is bad and we don’t need to do it at all. Not talking about it is the same.
I’m a verbal processor and I was trying to work through some shit. She could read it. Instead of realizing that I didn’t have to make sense of the way she felt, I only had to make sense of my own emotions, she felt like I was on her ass. Got annoyed when I asked for fucking anything, called me a judgmental dickhead 80% of the time, but if I told her that, she’d say that she thinks I have an extraordinary mind and she’s wildly impressed with me as a person.
Well, start fucking acting like it.
I don’t need friends who don’t respect my opinion on things because they think they’re the whole story. If we can’t collaborate, I am out.
This one relationship is reflective of how I feel about homophobia. It is not my job to struggle with it. It’s yours.
I said something about a Supergrover playlist the other day, that she reminds me of the color green, new life, new earth, etc. But what I needed in the moment was to release pain before I could enjoy everything again without anger or resentment. Here is the list.
She’s So Mean, Matchbox Twenty
Her clothes are on the floor and my records are scratched, but she’s the best thing that ever happened to me.
I Believe in Love, Indigo Girls
When we tried to rework all of this, each to our rendition, painted blindly in a corner, lost for ideas blinding fishing for a compliment or kindness just to bring us into view. You could not interpret me, and I could not interpret you.
Unwell, Matchbox Twenty
I wasn’t crazy, I was unwell. She’s hell on wheels in a black dress, but not by choice.
Hold On, Wilson Phillips
This is a direct result of the movie “Bridesmaids,” and it is completely responsible for making me cry and blow my nose at red lights.
Nobody Knows, The Tony Rich Project
It’s everything you can’t say, because no one wants to hear it.
Pink Triangle, Weezer
It’s the quickest way to make me sob with empathy at Rivers’ plight, because I would know nothing about the reverse….. #eyeroll
Not Your Fault, AWOLNATION
I yelled at her for so much that didn’t have anything to do with her, and that’s where I’d start if I got to meet her on the ground. Just “I’m sorry” all over the place. Alternatively, there were other times when I felt she was doing the same thing to me with no hesitation or apology. It cuts both ways.
Despacito, Louis Fonzi and Daddy Yankee
This is probably the most controversial song on the list because I loved it based on the idea that I was blogging the most innocuous things about her because no one else would think they were important and the narrator talks about writing on her body. This is what happens when you decide a song is about someone and ABSOLUTELYFUCKINGNOT fluent in Spanish. Dude is a creep, and my thought was beautiful because she was writing our story on my shoulderblades as well. I still like it, it’s just not a mutual story anymore. The ink on my skin I got from the amusement park is fading and when it goes, there’s no re-entry. I will not let people tell me one thing and do another. I want to hold your hand while the ride lasts, and if you decide to jump, my emotional support can’t depend on whether I’m happy about it or not. It can’t depend on getting things I want that you don’t, and vice versa, trying to convince the other we’re right. Relationships aren’t supposed to be THAT much work. You aren’t supposed to find dealbreakers once a week.
Superman, Eminem
This is only when I’m really angry, or I skip it. She was the equivalent of “I’m not fazed, I hang around big stars all day, It’s not a big deal to me anyway… you’re just plain old Marshall to me.” I was all “girl, you run that game. First off you don’t know Marshall. At all so don’t grow partial… that’s ammo for my arsenal.” Great at first, a shit show later. I could never recapture her attention even though I wanted to rescue her.
Love Game, Eminem and Kendrick Lamar
The chorus makes me laugh my ass off in this context. “Have a blessed day.” I am the little fuckin’ Ferris wheel and I have no shame.
Business, Eminem
I desperately want to know what it would be like if Dre and Em were us. She would drop me like a sack of potatoes in a rap battle. You can do that when you have ten years of blackmail. Alternatively, I’m cleaning out my closet.
Closer, Nine Inch Nails
It’s not about her. It’s the cry of The Timeless Child. It’s perfect when you see it in the context of abuse.
Dope Nose, Weezer
This has no particular meaning, just a good beat to make me feel good….. even if it is a little “Peter Gunn.”
This Could Be the Start of Something Big, Count Basie
I can’t not hear brass like that without thinking of her. She’s too quick. I should have put this as the intro track.
Church, Lyle Lovett
She should have joined me at National Cathedral if she wanted to see me fly like a lead trumpet. Not getting to see her face while I was riding on a high C makes me sad. She has heard me on a recording and all I have to say is that you didn’t even see the best part yet.
Til the Sun Comes Up, David and Devine
The video says more than the song.
Paper Bag, Fiona Apple
What it feels like to struggle with ***gestures toward everything***
Hit Me Baby One More Time, Bowling for Soup
Chad Michael Murray played me in a movie. It is every bit as embarrassing as it sounds, thank you for noticing.
I realized that I’d told you I have sensory issues, and that I do my best to mute them while they’re not my focus. Here are the things that make me feel the most comfortable:
Professional-grade Crocs, the kind you wear in a kitchen or hospital. They keep my feet on the ground, whereaas Danskos have a heel and it makes my foot rock side to side. That is a disaster for someone with floppy muscles. I don’t care what people think of me when I wear Crocs, but I for damn sure notice what they think of me when I fall. There are very few Good Samaritans in this world and I’ve found that to be true everywhere. I can be walking around with blood on my face and pants and no one says jack shit.
American Giant’s “The Original Hoodie” is the only jacket you’ll ever need in your entire life. The only reason you’ll ever need another one is to change colors, because it gets better the more you wear it. Yes, they’re over a hundred bucks, but they get cheaper than nearly anything else when I look at price per wear. Same with the Crocs. It turns into less than pennies.
Unchallenging food, like white bread, pasta, yogurt, etc. I will get wild with yogurt because I don’t like sweets. I leave it as is and just add fresh fruit. Not many people like it that tart, and my favorite flavor at all yogurt shops is plain. If you mix it with dark chocolate yogurt, it will taste like the best sour cream donut you’ve ever had in your life.
Bombas socks are the tightest elastic that holds over time. My whole thing is about making my body feel secure, so anything I can do to stabilize is critically important. I need to feel balanced, and I am irritated when one foot feels more bound than the other, etc.
Button downs, but only the ones that have buttons on the collar as well. I also like it better when they’re 20 years old and white or blue having been laundered a thousand times and still look classic. I joke that it’s the “Visiting Professor” collection at Macy’s, and I also love sports coats and Nehru jackets that fit like a glove because of it. I also want everything to have a place and look put together. It’s almost impossible to get a collar correct when you iron and have it stay that way. What looks good on the board has fallen flat by the time you put it on.
I like Dockers because they’re just as comfortable as American Giant and Crocs. They just don’t last very long and they’re confusing to buy because every fit is a little bit different. You have to get the name of the make and model, and sure as shit by the time you look it up to order more it’s not there.
Big boys’ dress shirts are always welcome because I prefer men’s clothing because of the way they feel and have a teenage frame…. with the exception that I’m just between a size 16 in boys’ pants and a size 30 in men’s length. It’s mix and match, but nothing too crazy. I’m a visiting professor.
I will do anything to get my hair out of my way, and wear my CIA baseball cap almost everywhere. I cover my head a Muslim amount because it makes me feel safe. I can hide behind it, both because people aren’t staring into my eyes and for some reason CIA is more intimidating than other agencies. I can’t figure that out. The FBI was built on slave catchers, but CIA is the problem. Ok. Whatever blows your dress up. I am genuinely using it like I would use a yarmulke or a hijab. I am hiding in plain sight, because I have trouble believing that people want to notice me. I make people jump too high sometimes, and it’s all my own shit. These sensory inputs being dulled helps me to keep from swinging at every pitch. If I don’t work on my reactions, I’m not keeping up my end of the bargain in relationships and cleaning my own house before I clean someone else’s.
I pay close attention to bar soap because I like to use it to shave. You actually use up body wash and shaving cream much more quickly. The bare minimum is Dove, but I have a housemate who cold presses her own soap and lotion bars that don’t have any scent to them (or are lightly scented). My favorite is charcoal, but I have to have a serious cleanup afterward. All the shower walls are dark gray when I want to turn off the water. It’s nice having the cleanest products available in a quantity that makes me think my housemate likes making soap faster than she can give it away. I’ll have to gift some to Zac if and when I remember it. If I write it here, there’s a solid chance.
I enjoy soap designed for men from high end shops because they always have both cologne and shaving in mind. Basic men’s soap is wax stripper with no conditioners. High end men’s soap is designed to make it harder to cut yourself. Soap and a brush is so much better than anything else I’ve tried, and I’ve had to remember all the best stuff because my skin will freak out at anything less. The best part is that Dove really works on my face and in shaving my legs. It doesn’t have to be expensive. It’s just something I value- continued safety is not nothing, and that’s what grocery store soap offers. It will never change.
Things never changing is why I love futbol jerseys so much. I can ask Lindsay to bring me one from any country in the world and it will feel the same. If I ask her to bring me a scarf, it will feel the same. Right now she’s in Barcelona and I’m wearing a Messi jersey.
I will start a new game of Skyrim like people rewatch The Office. There is comfort in hearing dialogue you’ve already heard, like a famous comedy routine. There is also camaraderie. We used to be adventurers like you, but we took an arrow to the knee (got married).
I go through phases with media. It’s “binge/purge.” I have to see it, then I need to retreat and write my own content. Lather, rinse, repeat. The hardest part is coming back and looking at my own writing, because it’s twofold. Both the WTF? of what I’m saying and the “WTF?” of how I wrote it. How did I miss that twice?
If I was wealthy, I would put a lot of money into peripherals that I don’t now. My Fire tablet is not great on its own. It’s great with a keyboard that makes me feel comfortable. It’s long lasting because Office and Chrome don’t require many system resources and the Fire can handle a browser and a text editor in split screen. Therefore, even with my sub-$200 throwdown laptop, I am just as productive as I would be on a $4,000 laptop. It’s not because I wouldn’t use that expensive a computer if I had it, it’s just that I don’t have a need for it. I will save up for an M1 or a Ryzen when I start seriously thinking about video rendering. If everything can be done using Audacity, Google Photos, and JetPack, I have no need to put together a monster gaming rig.
Because of what my current tablet will do, I think if I bought a new computer it would be a top of the line Samsung or M1 iPad, because there is no need to carry something heavy when you just don’t have to. I don’t even need an M1 iPad to do what I currently do. I have an old iPad Pro first gen that will edit the videos on my phone quite handily. I would get a gaming-rig level processor if I bought a camera that required it or it would take an hour and a half to render everything. I can’t have my computer incapacitated that much of the time. If I was shooting/working in RAW with a Nikon or a professional studio camera, that’s a whole other thing. If I needed that kind of editor, it would be easier to let a professional do it than it would to save up enough money to buy that kind of workstation.
Touch and feel above everything else. So much of the world is uncertain that it helps to have things you can count on. Clothes are one of the easiest ways to make yourself feel safe, because when you feel good, you act completely differently than when you’re threatened. It also helps to look at why you feel threatened so that clothes don’t become a permanent trap to hold in all your feelings.
It works as a relationship analogy as well. If you’re going to wear a suit, remember to occasionally change to sneakers and a zipper cardigan. If you learn nothing else from Mr. Rogers, learn that. No relationship will ever progress until you learn to be as vulnerable as you were the first time you saw his face, and you will not feel any differently after learning that he was also a very flawed human and treat your relationships like that as well. You cannot cancel everyone, and you will not know what’s up until you can look at the situation from a third person perspective. That’s much easier for me than it is for most because I can go back and read myself with a dispassionate eye. I am clothed in the softest material to allow myself to feel words more deeply.
If I can’t distract myself, I won’t. So if I dress weird to you, I don’t care. If I eat weird to you, I don’t care. If people believe I’m in the wrong relationships or saying weird things about people, I don’t care. That’s because all the people I do care about have laid out their boundaries and so have I. Other people are free to look at me from the very, very outside and make their own judgments, because their opinions can’t matter. I have to write what I saw because I have to remember things accurately according to what I was thinking in the moment. Otherwise, this is not even self help to me, much less others going through something similar.
So. Crocs? You have to give me this one. Especially if you later admit you also own them. I will notice. 😉
...but the wood is tired and the wood is old And we'll make it fine if the weather holds But if the weather holds we'll have missed the point. That's where I need to go......
Here’s what you need to know about Zac.
The journey I wouldn’t have taken led me to where I actually needed to go.
If you have to date someone, make sure it’s the kind who reads a blog entry about them trading off holding their dog’s leash and when you get to their house, say, “we should get a picture of you going up the hill because you’re holding Oliver’s leash.” My heart melted on the spot and I will never recover. He’s listening, perhaps a little too well. I’m not used to it, and small kindnesses enter an echo chamber as well. It’s not because I’m distorting them. It’s that the small things *are* the large things. He’s not threatened that I’m a writer and we’ve actually sat down to discuss those boundaries before anything pops up. So you’re free to know that yes, I’m dating a man ten years younger than me because I had no idea how old Zac was when I asked him out and being a cougar is an added bonus. In every lesbian’s life, there is a point at which they stop chasing cougars because they realize they are them. I will let your mind wander as to when I decided that was a real thing.
It was just too wholesome, and the whole weekend was allowing each other room to be us, without diminishing either. Most of our weekend was spent outside. There was this hike, but he also has an Olympic-sized neighborhood pool that looks a lot like the one where I took a picture of Human Oliver. We had access to grills and a griddle, and we took sausages both days. One had a central American vibe, like jack cheese and peppers. The other one was loaded baked potato, and I have never had anything like it. The texture was incredible. I cannot see myself as being so interested in sausage that I actually bought the stuff to make it, but there wouldn’t be another sausage I did make that didn’t have mashed potatoes in the recipe somewhere.
I had my new favorite drink this weekend, a non-alcoholic beer called “Chelada Nada” by Athletic. The black pepper and lime go as hard as alcohol, so you’re not missing the bite. Chelada is basically Bloody Mary Mix and beer, so if you didn’t “grow up” on it, kind of an acquired taste. Very, very popular in northern Mexico/southern Texas.
That was the other funny part. I ate a HUGE meal before I got on the train because last time my downfall was being handed alcohol on an empty stomach. Then, I had several beers and the NA Chelada beat the pants off all of them. It appeals to my little cook heart, because how in the fuck did Athletic do it? Seriously? I am ACTUALLY looking forward to your letters on this one as opposed to using a line Craig Ferguson said on The Late Late Show almost every night during its entire run.
We also spent time on the back deck just talking, sometimes sitting in the hot tub, sometimes sitting at the table with all our vices sat between us.
Life happened while we were doing something else.
Life taught me how to stop with all that lesbian shit, and I don’t mean that nearly as horribly as it sounds. Not everything has to have a conversation or processing about something. Part of it is that our relationship is not heavy. Part of it is that women are generally much more into talking about feelings. With Zac, I’m not all up in my head unless we’re doing our own thing.
It’s funny that we’ve had the same trauma dump you start in the beginning of every relationship because we’re getting to know each other……………… we’re just not handling it the way two women would do. When I am listening to Zac, I am not hearing a monologue of “how does this affect me?” My opinion of myself is not going up and down when he talks. I am not holding back information because I’m not sure of his reaction, or going to the other extreme and saying too much. We both have moments of expounding, and both allow for it.
I don’t want to marry Zac, but he let me know that marrying a man is possible. It’s not that I wasn’t bisexual, it’s just been the wrong situation. It has also been a journey. I’m not the same person I was when I was 25. Bisexuality does not always refer to having two partners, although some people construe it to be that. No, it’s that when you look over your entire life, you are probably bisexual. There is no such thing as an ex-gay. There are only bisexuals with people they trusted. Bisexuality is not my Sam Axe/Chuck Finley. It’s why I will never date another straight man, even if they were a person of color. It’s not the same.
Even if my husband and I were completely monogamous and had heterosexual privilege, the memories of bullying remain. We have the same reflexes. I still look around to see who’s watching before I kiss him. WHY WOULD I DO THAT?
Realizing that little tidbit was a fucking treat. It’s a trauma reflex. Zac understands that when he’s really affectionate in public, it is pushing the needle too far at times. I want to be moved in the right direction, but at my own pace. That’s because he’s had to look around to see who was watching to protect his physical safety as well. A straight man would not empathize to the level a queer one could, possibly treating me as if I were stupid or frigid.
The novelty of me dating a man as an idea has not gone away. It truly makes me laugh because I’m not their type and I don’t even know them. The reverse is also true. They’re not my type right up until they are. It just took a long time to find bisexuality as an identity because thoughts of men were so passing. They didn’t register because they didn’t have to, and I’ve missed a lot of messages in the middle of the mess.
I grew to accept more, and when I did, Zac rose to meet me………
If the weather had held, I would not be here in this moment. I am taking a moment to say a silent prayer to the storm.
I wish I’d thought to write this letter a long time ago, because I have things to say to you that should have come from me years ago. You know everything I didn’t. Just more than I can possibly take in. It was a shitty hand to be dealt for both of us, because here’s the thing…. the woman we love didn’t let us bond, so we couldn’t talk to each other about the ways we could support her. I wonder all the time what it would have been like had I been your wing man long ago, because I would have. I would have cheered you on from the beginning. All the things I never knew cost me, and you should know it. We both know how it feels.
She should have let us feel each other out and then claim our corners to regroup. It would never have come together in one hour. We both would have had to learn to manage the other’s feelings and not get frightened of them, because we both know they’re large.
We should have been allowed to make room for each other, and I was stuck in the bathroom. I hope we’re both sorry we never sat down at your table and just served every dish we’d created over eight 10 years. If you were me, you would have traded those two for a lifetime and you fucking know it.
We should have been allowed to bond because we didn’t have a full house and wouldn’t until all parties saw all the cards. I would have dealt you a hand if you’d been allowed.
What I know for sure is that that we all would have won and rotated hands. What I know to be even more certain is that you and I would remember every loss and celebrate every victory until we were dead.
If you’re the man I know she’d choose, I know you’d move heaven and earth just to stand next to her. If you didn’t turn out to be that man, God have mercy on your soul for this life and every lifetime after. My feelings are just as feral as hers and I will find you.
My only job in this whole equation would have been to allow you to be the best husband you knew how to be, because I wanted to be you and I’m just not capable for many reasons. Neither is she. That doesn’t mean that my protective nature went away when she said it should. She may be her daddy’s little girl, but not the fuck in my presence. I said that about her EA. But her EA was me.
It was my role to be “The Girl Whisperer,” and we never got that chance. So here is an itemized list of things you’ll do if you love her:
If you can’t cry when she does, you’re not paying attention. She doesn’t generally cry, so by the time you get to that point with her, she has no myelin on her nerves and she’s working practically blind.
She loves levity because of it. It preserves her armor for too long until she’s desperately needing help because she hasn’t asked for it. You are going to have to fight her on accepting love every day, and if your game isn’t sharp, her life will pass you by because you’re not really taking it in.
If men do not talk to her first, they will overfocus on her beauty and undermine her smarts. If you have never seen her with someone who has underestimated her and taken in its enormity, you are missing out on the best part of her. When you realize that you are missing out, course correct immediately. Your story is not more important. Her story is only more important right now.
If you give up, you will never see what delayed gratification looks like, and it is immense. You cannot take it in. She will see your sacrifice, I promise. She sees it too much and it weighs on her. I am walking away because I did not want to cause those swings of emotion in her. I didn’t need her to think about me while she was busy. Neither do you, but don’t go too long. One resentful feeling can be put away. Years of them can’t without resolution.
When she doesn’t have time, she doesn’t take time. Do everything you can to lower the volume on television channels in her mind. You can’t turn them all off, but you can make your signal more pure. I hear she likes well-written letters.
If you write something beautiful for her, she will keep it forever. Even if everything ever written between us has been put into the trash, she’ll be able to quote her favorite lines from memory. This is not a humblebrag. This is acknowledging sometimes a piece of notebook paper and a pen end up being more expensive in value than a day at a spa.
She is also a writer. If you can’t reach her through talking, switch mediums.
Dark begets dark. Make sure she knows she’s an absolute diamond every second of every day, and make sure she knows she’s of the purest color, cut, clarity, and brilliance. That’s because she won’t tell herself, and her inner monologue keeps her from seeing how beautiful she really is.
I will never get over this loss, and you won’t either if it happens. Make her your first priority because you can’t not. You will not be able to afford those consequences, and I assure you from the wisdom of my experience.
Everything I write has a thread of her running through it, and if you were me, they’d be mostly about her. It’s not because I’m not capable of doing my own thing. It’s because my story isn’t more important right now. It will be more important later. I had to choose which story was worth telling. Look at me and tell me it’s mine. I dare you.
Because she’s a boss, she’s going to remembered for her professional accomplishments. I hope you’ll come here to read about her emotional accomplishments, and know that they are much more important than anything anyone else will ever read, and only we know it. We’re the ones that love her for who she is. We will remember all the things other people never knew.
She uses ellipses to an enormous degree. It’s your job to find out where the trail goes.
Sometimes, that trail leads to me. Being apart is injuring all three of us.
It is not lost on me that I can move on, but if you ever do it’s going to be a straight up problem. I’m glad she knows you well enough to know that I am not projecting jack shit. You’re a rock and I fucking love you for it. You have no idea. Just none.
Make sure that you’re capable of telling when she’s in hell, especially when it’s your fault. Most of the time it will be. That’s the hand we’ve been dealt.
In moments when it gets difficult, remember that her love will overtake you with a forest fire’s intensity. Remember everything you love about her in order to keep the flame in your mind and not the ash.
She thinks she needs less help than she does. You’re going to be stuck in a fight to let her love you, so sharpen your weapons.
I have never wanted anything but Kings full over Aces for you. I would have reached out. I would have been a better person if she’d let me grow into that role. I would have trusted you to drive, and just slept in the car.
There are so many more bullet points, but I couldn’t go any longer without expressing all the things you never knew, either.
There are so many things we could have shared. I will leave it up to you to decide what I mean because that’s exactly why I need you…………………. on some days more than I need her. It’s just that you have the Google Calendar and I have a yellow string.
That yellow string is now yours if you want it. I just wanted to offer because that’s all I was ever trying to do. If our relationship was going to get healthy, it had to be the three of us, with a relationship that allowed for more as I accepted it from the universe.
You’re the coauthor of her story, I just wrote it down.
Because Dana and I had a brunch gig for years, we made a lot of breakfast at home. It’s the thing we knew how to cook the most quickly and efficiently. We were also auditioning recipes for the restaurant. The most fun I ever had off the clock was picking my own chesterberries, because it made me feel like a real chef. They weren’t even for the restaurant, but they were by the time we got back from our little “pick your own” road trip. I still have a cute picture from that day, but I don’t want to post it without asking and I don’t want to ask. So, know that chesterberries are a cross between a berry and a grape, and in some applications (I know this is Oregon heresy), better than marionberries. I look forward to your letters.
I started out with simple syrup (1:1 sugar to water) and added the berries. I let everything cook for a while so that it became a thick, smooth compote. I must have added at least a pinch of cinnamon, but I don’t remember putting in anything else because even cinnamon is too much for some berries. You literally have to know their personalities as well as you know your coworkers. The point was to make the chesterberries sweet without adding anything that would cover up their natural undertones.
I know I used it for stuffed French Toast. If I had it to do over, I would have made chesterberry Croque Monsieurs. That’s because I already know it’s traditionally served with raspberry jelly and making anything more “Oregonian” is a big hit.
If you cannot see how much I love food, I spent half a day picking berries for myself and donated them to the restaurant at the end. I didn’t even ask to be reimbursed for them, and it’s not even because it would have been a whole other thing. It’s because I was thinking about work when I wasn’t there to an ENORMOUS degree. What I found is that I could cook every dish a thousand times without blinking, which gave me the confidence to have an opinion. There was no executive chef. If I want to make hazelnut pancakes, go for it.
I think the most adventurous I ever got was pineapple thyme stuffed French toast, but not because that’s the most adventurous thing I can do. It’s that in a restaurant, you can try whatever you want. That doesn’t mean someone else is going to agree and pay money for it. The pineapple thyme worked, but I did not have the luxury of making just anything avant garde.
For instance, my chili in Oregon is never as hot as I make it here.
Also, anything can become breakfast if you put eggs on it:
The aforementioned chili
Cheese pizza
veggies and kale/spring mix/spinach/etc. sauted with sesame oil and hit with rice wine vinegar to finish.
Rice, beans, salsa, and cheese
Cheese pizza
Tthere are more, but this one will blow your mind so I have to say it twice. It tastes the best putting them raw on a frozen pizza and letting them bake together. It just mellows the egg out because caramelization is key.)
Therefore, I do not go out of my way to make breakfast, because I don’t really do anything to make it special. I don’t separate out what I will and will not eat into times of day. What makes me a pro to everyone else is coming downstairs in the morning and seeing me flip my eggs like a boss. Everyone can tell the difference between a home cook and a pro by how much fear they have that veggies will go everywhere.
That’s partially because it will go everywhere when you miss and most people are too scared to make a mess. They’re too scared to suck until they don’t. If I miss, it’s a two minute cleanup job because I’ve done it so many times on the line and had my ass beaten for not working clean that I could give a shit who’s watching at home. I can do all the things I used to do in a pro kitchen and actually enjoy it because no one is telling me I’m terrible at it.
By the way, this is no indication of how good I am. Some people think I’m great. Some people think I’m terrible. It’s just that the people who think I’m great know nothing and the people who think I’m terrible were kind enough to make me as much better as I could handle. No one was trying to make me feel bad. It was like private lessons in voice or trumpet. It’s isolating to a sandbox so when you get on stage, everything is perfect.
If you want to get good at flipping eggs, you’ll need way more butter than you think. Flipping eggs is not for people who think butter is the devil. Even margarine doesn’t have the same properties. Hell, even olive oil sucks at this particular application.
If you want to get really good, take out your egg pan and try to flip a piece of bread. Getting really good sometimes requires buying multiple pounds of veggies you won’t use, either. You cannot learn how to cut a carrot in a day. In a pro kitchen, you can’t learn to cut any veggie in a day. It’s not that it’s hard, it’s just that it won’t look natural until you can make an entire pan of something and it all looks the same.
Carrots and apples are my favorite, because as Chef taught me, always find an edge. Turn the vegetable so that the most mass is always touching the cutting board. It makes julienne and batonet so much easier. If you’re wondering, learning to julienne/batonet an apple and carrot were for spicy cole slaw. It was a particularly unsweet Granny Smith. I had to practice that shit for weeks, because of my lack of 3D vision. It affects the way my knife comes down.
Therefore, I’m a speed demon at home because I don’t have to perfect anything. It’s only me. I still treat myself like I’m in the kitchen, just not like I’m constantly going to get fired, because I’m the boss and fuck her, she’s a bitch.
By the way, when I stopped thinking all my opinions were like that, my life got better *FAST.*
I am well and truly fucked in terms of technique, and if I married another chef/pro cook, that’ll be why. Together, we have a complete education and I’ll miss that part of being married to Dana forever.
It’s something I’ll seek out in a partner, because if I don’t have it, I know enough to teach it. I don’t care if someone’s interest is cooking or not. They’ll know how to feed us by themselves if it kills me, because my worst nightmare is feeding someone until I die because “I’m the pro.”
I don’t care if my husband has made his past wives eat shit because they thought they were so important. Remember who I am in the kitchen and submit, or you will not last very long. If being with me is important to you, you will learn to cook. It’s that simple.
You can treat me like a know-nothing asshole or you can treat it as lessons from a truly great chef who taught me every day, and that isn’t limited to one person. Dana is not more important than the Johns, Drew, or Knives. It’s just that Dana was with me for the most meals both served at at home. We started making brunch based on the very idea that because we worked well at home, we’d work well at work. This was absolutely true except when Mommy and Daddy were fighting, and you can take a guess as to who was whom on those days, because it was never a one way street. However, if the conversation was only about the food and didn’t move goalposts, I was wrong. Period. End of story. I didn’t spend time and money at culinary school. She did. She earned those fucking blue stripes and I heard about it to the point that I cannot watch Julie & Julia anymore without sobbing through the scene where Julia is cutting onions.
When we’re talking about “Mommy and Daddy fighting,” we’re talking about less than 4% of the time. And who cares about the other 97%….. 😉
And if Dana had been honest with herself, she would have realized that we needed to pack up and move to DC for all sorts of reasons, because she didn’t think about who I am and what I do, either. She thought working and playing on the Internet was invalid, and I’m a fucking blogger. She was never going to see me as valid, and she was never going to truly see what I’d gotten myself into, or she did and didn’t want to play. Either way, she knows and it’s just as bad as she thought it would play out because the Internet relationship didn’t listen to me and what I do.
I hope she feels relief that I actually said, “Dana wasn’t right, but she wasn’t wrong, either.” I hope for two things. The first is eventually feeling peace that I did the right thing. The second is that my beautiful girl didn’t get screwed over by me (for that particular issue) and I wish I could take away that pain. Not being able to is a massive regret, and now I am either so far down the list that I’m not worth addressing, or I fell off. I won’t know it for years, and I might not know it, ever. She has truly gone into the wind at my own invitation, which was warranted. She cannot come back until she gets herself together, because she couldn’t learn to sous. She’s a boss. She couldn’t generate her own light to compensate for the lack of light from above (God, Ani is brilliant). She couldn’t learn how to bend and sway like all same-sex relationships no matter who they are to each other. She flat out learned to love me, worried for me, protected me, all the things. What she could not do is let me do those things for her and didn’t see that as a problem. It showed me exactly who she thought I was.
I also, if I could have a third thing, I wish she would realize that it’s not just me that gave up someone fantastic. She truly fucked up, because we could have had something. It wasn’t what I thought it could or would be, but it’s so solid you could build a house on it. I watch videos on DIY, and I know what it takes to make a foundation. The concrete is now cured.
Now I’m overexplaining why I don’t have private lessons anymore and why I feel bad about it. DC might have changed both our lives in concrete ways, but we’ll never know that, either.
I didn’t choose the wrong relationship, we chose to move to the wrong ass city.
And that’s why I started doubting all my decisions. I lost True North and I paid for it.
I’ve been thinking about relationships with men a lot lately, because the one I have with Zac is the gold standard now. This is because in terms of men who know how to be emotionally available to women without losing masculinity, watching him a master class. I am picturing him having a very busy day and hoping this makes him smile and relax for a minute.
This is because Zac is everything I want to be, and I’m not sure he even knows it. I am quietly learning to accept that I’m nonbinary and pansexual not because of anything but wanting to make sure the horsepower thrills me before I buy the whole car. Alternatively, I want someone I can grow with, so that the shell stays pristine in my mind because I was there when they started looking at cherry pickers.
I’m not going to change my pronouns, because gender expression means nothing to me. People say all kinds of things to get my attention and it’s always the tone of voice that matters. What I mean is that I see such a difference in gender with the way my mind presents in stream-of-conscious thought. I was raised to be a preacher’s kid, and that is an acting job. What other people do not know is that if you are born into a family with a public facing parent, you have been accepted to a company to which you never applied. People deal with this in different ways. I deal with it by being a wallflower in person and Anthony Bourdain here.
When I say I’m trying to be Anthony Bourdain, I mean it. I have taken on his writing style because it’s useful, and I do that with every writing voice I need. When I write about the kitchen, I need his authority, because we are roughly the same level. I am not treating him as Anthony Bourdain, star of Food Network, Travel Channel, and CNN. I am treating him as my boss who is like every boss I’ve ever had. I know him. We’ve met. Here’s what Anthony would tell you if he was here.
I am so proud of Leslie I can’t breathe because she had the balls to dress down a chef when he put knives in her sink.
That’s because he knows that he is fallible, possibly more than everyone else the way that doctors who acknowledge their humanity will tell you that you actually don’t want a shot from them, they’re terrible at it because they don’t do it all day. You want an ER nurse.
Bourdain was not a great chef, and I don’t know that because I’ve judged him on his food and talent. I know that because he told me that in Kitchen Confidential. He told me that he was a journeyman line cook who rose through the ranks to become chef, and that resonated with me because it said to me that Anthony didn’t have anything I didn’t.
I am awed by his humanity, and that is what makes him divine.
The relationship I have with Anthony in my head is very much like any of my Internet relationships except the possibility of meeting on the ground was cut short by an enormous amount of time. What I do know is that we would instantly bond. It wouldn’t take a drink. That’s because I’m already in Anthony’s tribe….. a tribe that would have both of us.
Relating to guys on that level is just what I do. If we’re in the same tribe, we bond and it’s on like a house on fire. When I bond with men who are in relationships, I become “The Girl Whisperer,” and I don’t do anything but let them talk it out. They know what they want. They just don’t have the clarity to see it.
Alternatively, here’s something hilarious. Lesbians act like men and they fucking hate it. They write it off as us being militant and angry, but never at the fact that we are matching style and structure. Some of thinking that lesbians are angry means they can dish but they can’t take it. They’ll start to feel things they can’t handle because no one has ever taught them to feel anything because of our childhood socializations. When they start to feel things they can’t handle, that’s when the rage starts.
When your protector mode runs up against mine, everyone else is going to see some shit.
Nowhere is this more evident than a lesbian and her father in law. Her father doesn’t think I can take care of shit, and he will tell me that daily in thought, word, and deed even after 25 years. The best I’ve ever gotten from any girlfriend’s parents is mild annoyance at my existence. Whenever I tried to change that pattern, it ranged from “you’re the girl that made my daughter gay” to “you don’t have the right to an opinion here because I’m her father and I don’t understand lesbians so I’m just going to have to assume that I’m responsible for her until she dies.” Fathers don’t even assume daughters can take care of themselves, so why would they think I am capable of doing something his daughter isn’t? The truth is that we do have trouble taking care of ourselves because the system isn’t built for us. Even if laws have changed, attitudes haven’t…… and if we act mean about it, that’s our problem. We should have just laid there and thought of England.
So, as a writer, I never believed that I could take care of anyone until I got some kind of deal going, and I was realistic enough to believe that I needed to support myself if I wanted to be a blogger. It has just taken an enormous amount of time to be able to figure out how I can do that, because eating and writing are equally important as much as I might think they’re not. My ire does not lie with writers who are kidding themselves. Sometimes people do go off on a pipe dream. My problem is that when creatives say they’re willing to work for peanuts so they have time to do something else, that’s not seen as valid because I’m supposed to be accumulating wealth every second of every day.
I have an idea big enough to attract comic book artists, movie directors, and other writers. In the right hands, it’s worth millions and I know what I have. If I take my focus off of it, I need to sell the idea. But then I face having my idea executed badly. I want to be free to be there for the whole process. To write the book and see if readers like it. To accept a movie deal if it is offered. To make my friends last forever as their fictional versions. They don’t think of that when it’s just a blog. But they’ll damn sure know if they were in something like Black Panther.
My job is to believe they could be….. and it affects my relationship with men to an enormous degree. I’m not the dog they need to kick, so I teach them pretty quick not to come up in my yard unless they’re willing to let me hold the leash.
With Zac, I just get to be myself, and we both trade off holding Oliver’s leash when we’re on the same hike.
This is another entry that will just jump around, because a lot bothers me. I just talk about all that here so my friends don’t have to hear it. You’re the place I go when I’ve overfocused and they’re exhausted. 😉
My being bothered encompasses a range. It bothers me that I can’t work on my computer unless I built it from scratch, and it bothers me that Russia is trying to make Ukraine fold.
What bothers me about mental health issues is that I have to be vigilant about taking care of myself, because my brain chemicals will take an issue like the former and make it as big as the latter due to my own echo chamber. So, really it’s me that bothers me, most days. Here is an itemized list:
It bothers me as a writer that if I write about someone’s behavior, they will constantly overfocus on what I said and not how they behaved. If they’re mad I wrote something, they don’t think “Leslie’s hurt” and come running. Ever. They think I’m out to get them, when in reality I am explaining them to me. How do I know how to change gears if I don’t know how I acted? The not focusing on the part where I wrote down my behavior is where it gets tricky, because I stab the knife further into my own chest than I do others.’ They just don’t talk about it because it’s easier to believe that I am a monster. That’s why I’ve gotten rid of a team of people in my life. I realized that if they were going to treat my blog as a threat, they couldn’t have me as a friend anymore. Mostly to protect them, because obviously my writing is too much for them and I don’t have time to cater to everyone. I have tried, and it has failed.
It bothers me as a writer that people think we are lazy freeloading assholes until we’re Brandon Sanderson. You’re not a real writer until money is on the table. You don’t write movie scripts until a studio has paid you for one. You’re not a novelist until you’re on the Bestsellers List. It becomes clear very, very quickly that we are a no-value add if you don’t understand the creative process and devalue us in every conversation. You think you’re being helpful and you’re actually destroying our self esteem.
It bothers me that I don’t always know when my favorite foods are going to be discontinued and like anyone on the ADHD/Autism spectrum I’d like to be able to buy six cases of whatever before it happens. Sensory issues are real, and I try to avoid them in order not to be distracted. When I am not “in the zone,” I’ll eat anything you put in front of me because the food is my focus. In writer mode, I will tell you that it’s been six months and I’ve eaten a vegan ham and cheese sandwich, chips, and a banana for lunch every day. Before that, it was veggie hot dogs with vegan cream cheese and hot sauce designed to wake the dead. If you think this is weird, it’s not. Mark Zuckerberg and I are just the same archetype. He wears the same thing, so I bet he eats the same thing. Source? I also have three hoodies and good luck getting me out.
It bothers me that people should look at me like Mark, but they should also acknowledge that I am hugely emotionally intelligent because I am self aware. If you treat me like a problem child, you’ve missed out on the best part of what I can do. The way I think rubs off. You’ll learn to love yourself, mostly because in my writing I’ll remind you of it all the time. I don’t write about people’s shitty behavior because I’m out to get them. I’m writing it because that is what happened the way I perceived it.
It bothers me in any conflict when people expect me to behave the way a normal person would and hold me to those standards because I have never met a normal person……. and my personality type is only found in 9-15% of the population before the trauma and mental health issues start making me complicated. I have had it confirmed by people in all tones of voice that they have never met anyone like me. I am deep and frightening and intense in every way imaginable. Mostly because other people have so much armor that they’ve forgotten how it feels to emote deeply.
It bothers me that I may never find a partner because of it. I couldn’t even make a close and loving friendship work on that level. So now I think I belong more to the world, as writers often do. If I make my focus all of you, I am not focusing on my lack. I am focusing on an upward direction that will hopefully cast a wider net on making friends.
It bothers me that people don’t understand my Internet relationships. Most of it is that my personality is so rare that I don’t find many people like me to connect with locally and I process better when I’m typing. I get together in person a good majority of the time because other people aren’t writers and I’m good with it. It’s not that I don’t need conversation, I am just unlikely to remember that I need it.
It bothers me that being a writer and getting your work read are two different skills and I really only have the first. I don’t want to have to tell you to engage, and I want to earn enough money to eat. The struggle is real.
It bothers me that the world isn’t built for me. People say, “you weren’t born to fit in, you were born to stand out.” They think it’s a compliment when I feel disconnected and lonely most of the time.
It bothers me that I don’t have emotional fortitude in person because I am frustrated at my lack of being able to craft sentences on the fly, because people say they don’t like my writing and get frustrated with talking to me as well, because then I’m stammering and can’t get words out……. but I seem so self assured…… the medium is the message.
It bothers me that there’s so much noise and so little signal, and fighting through it is immense. What I have found is that the way I fight through it is not seen as valid to many people, because it’s not the way they would do it.
It bothers me that Supergrover and I have a concrete need to be in each other’s lives, that we should have collaborated the whole time because we can’t not….. and then we proceeded to destroy each other. It is devastating that it’s easy to love her from afar, and terrifying to be close because I cannot feel lost and confused that much of the time…. and when I express that, to have it ignored. I get it. She’s a big shot, and I’m not. Alternatively, there hasn’t been a problem smaller than me for eight years, and there never will be. I’m not a priority because I’m not on the list. We created a trauma bond, jacked it up to eleven, and then when I had a genuine need, she treated me as if I was just trying to cause trouble for her. That’s unacceptable. From the outside, it looks like I decided she was the one and moved here to be with her. That is frighteningly incorrect, but I cannot lay out my feelings about that except “other factors at play.” To let go of those reasons would cause hurt, and not even to her. When I said that I did move here because she was here, you don’t know what idea that was based on, either, and that didn’t have anything to do with me at all. I misspoke when I said that I did move here for her and I was tired of covering it up, that’s what I meant. I didn’t show up because I thought she’d change her mind, or I’d sit and wait. No, it was much, much more than that. I’m sure where her ire lies is that for her, my valid reasons felt like a game I was playing, because she invalidated my feelings. It will always bother me that we never took a time out and just called each other.
It bothers me that people are fine with internet communication right up until they aren’t and don’t change mediums. What sounds creepy in an e-mail sounds fine in a phone call because more of what goes into communication comes out. If you start with 7%, you’re going to spiral downward into much less than that.
I was a product of my illness, and she forgot my personality, even after the fight was over. It made me think that she thought my illness was bigger than my personality by saying the opposite and never opening back up.
It bothers me that I understand why people pull back, but if I write about it hurting, that’s an attempt to provoke someone and not a genuine need to communicate with other people because I can’t rely on them. This is an all call issue. I don’t write about you because you’re you. I write about you to understand how I interacted with you. Sometimes, that encompasses our behavior. Only when you haven’t stepped all over my boundaries will I allow for reconciliation. Provoking people is the last thing on my mind, because my ruminations about them aren’t directed. I have a bigger fanbase in India than I do in the United States.
It bothers me that I cannot thank India enough. I did not expect to be more popular overseas, and if I was going to pick one, I don’t think it would have been Asia due to cultural slang. It’s mind blowing. Thank you.
My friendship needs are different than most people. I’m bipolar and have chronic PTSD. I also have ADHD. It means that I get frustrated when things aren’t clear, so when people aren’t, I overfocus and they’re exhausted. I am not trying to hurt them, I am asking for more information. If you do not understand that, then I am going to be a straight up problem for you and I do not want to be fixed. I don’t have some stereotype to fill, because I’ve never been that for anything except maybe Arthur. Most people don’t know that ADHD presents like Asperger’s sometimes. Mine doesn’t come across verbally, but it does when I allow myself to write into and out of a problem. If no one will tell me how to understand, I will find out on my own. Whether it is right or wrong is of no consequence, because no one else is responsible for what I understand. It just helps if they’re willing to do the little bit of extra work it takes to communicate. Exhaustion leaves me in the same state of dread as he is here:
This is the first time I’ve ever gotten my own Arthur meme. It’s not that someone made it just or me, it’s that I’ve never related to anything so much.
Because I process online, I’ve noticed a beautiful symbiosis between David Sedaris and me. My style and structor is borrowed from him, and his style and structure seems borrowed from me in his new book, “Happy Go Lucky.” He takes a hard, hard, look at himself and his family and every word resonated.
He also talked craft in a way that I felt he was in the room with me. He said that when you’re writing these essays, you’re not writing about your friends. They’re the characters. You’re writing about their characters and not them.
He talked about my frustration with blowback, because it happens more than you think. “I don’t want you to write about me at all.” “Ok.” “It seems like you don’t like me because you don’t write about me.” This can go ad nauseam for years. This is especially true of people who also struggle with mental health issues because they don’t like being criticized and love being praised.
It comes across as that you don’t care you’re teaching us how to love ourselves, and in turn, how to love you. It is the mystery of faith, to be able to hold in your mind that you are capable of great decisions even after you’ve cratered your life over and over because of the very conflict I’ve mentioned. People don’t want to do that kind of work, especially bosses. We’re not aware of our interactions with you because we’re focused on other things.
We want to know how the world works, and stifling that is very difficult. No system is built for it. We just have to feel anxious or stop buying in. A lot of people lose their lives because the system for dealing with mental health is so poor in this part of the world, specifically our country (and thank God not my state).
Being ADHD means that through hyperfocus and medication, depending on whether it’s natural or drug induced, you lose your appetite until your body screams.
Nothing gets easier, and yet we pretend it does.
Edited to add that the prompt for all this was someone breaking a boundary. “Michael,” the guy I was chatting with, deactivated his Facebook account and started flirting with me. I said, “what I need you to realize is that when you deactivate your account, I don’t think about you at all.” It’s not because I’m an asshole, it’s that he’s already done it once, then when he came back, he called me “baby girl.” Those are trigger words for me because they do not belong to him. I told him that if he called me baby girl again, I would block him. So, when it happened a second time, I blocked him. If I tell you that’s a sore spot, believe it. I am made of nails right now and I need to be because I am not settling for fine.
If lightning can’t strike again, it doesn’t even matter.
I am touched to the point of tears that Bryn wants to create the audio version of “Stories.” As in, when the tracks are up on the web, it will be her voice and not mine. I said, “of course you can do it.” That’s because even though I was 19 when we met, that was still enough time for her to pick up my style and structure because her family raised me. I was 19. I was an idiot. Well, I suppose it didn’t start at 19, because I didn’t have much time with them until I actually moved. Before then, it was huge summer parties for a couple weeks three summers running. She hears me in her head when she reads, so I trust her when she speaks my truth.
She’s the one I go hard for because I can go to her as well.
We don’t have a hot emotional temperature, which makes me relieved in all the right ways. Yesterday, I told her that she was free to feel as deeply as she wanted about me. That there was nothing she could say that would frighten me away. That it’s already been three lifetimes, let’s go get some more. Now we want to go to Iceland AND Finland, because in Iceland we found a group that lets you ride horses and bills it as business terms. The horses even walk on a giant keyboard, so I guess you could work out logistics, create synergy, table it, and circle back around.
This is totally, completely us.
Bryn had a hand in scaring Sam half to death, because I speak dog and Sam doesn’t. My alpha dog is scary because it has to be… but Bryn goes a step above because she needs it. She worked with deaf dogs for a long time, so she had to train them by touch. When she told me that, I nearly asphyxiated and died. I said, “Bryn is the dog toucher, because when she whispers they can’t hear her.” Even now, tears are running down my face with laughter.
Bryn’s got big dick energy, too, because she’s kind af unless she needs to be a hardass. This is not because she’s trying to be difficult. What I mean is that working with animals makes you a hardass while you’re in the room with them. She’s not forceful with people, but she can piss off a primate without blinking, because they’re going to do what she says whether they like it or not. Bryn doesn’t work at the primate center anymore, which is a relief, tbh. She told me about two inch canines and I realized that I was a friggin’ idiot. She’d been in a lot of danger and I didn’t notice because I don’t know shit about monkeys. Because I’m so geeked out over spies, my reaction yesterday was that she was probably fine, but one op gone wrong…. Same with the military, where I could argue that is a primate center in and of itself. Where’s the lie?
I am also going to be adding Bryn as an author, which means that there will be more posts here, but I don’t mean that she’s taking over for me on some days. I just mean that you’ll have more to love since we collaborate well.
This is exactly what I mean about friends who know where you’re going and want to help. We even had the difficult conversation I needed to have in order to feel safe. “If this blows up, can you love me through that?” She said, and I’m going to cry, “I don’t know, but I want to try.” I’m not being an arrogant asshole. I’ve already been recognized in public at the level I currently occupy, and here’s where I’m going now that I wasn’t before.
I want to take over for Dooce, and I’m not apologizing for it.
I am done apologizing for my existence if I’m going to be the badass Heather said I’d be. I wish I was talking about Dooce, because then I’d have a memory of us meeting. We just have so much in common. I trauma dump here because she did it first, and it helped her right up until it didn’t.
I do not want to be an “influencer.” I want to help the people who are already a train wreck and find comfort in realizing they’re not alone. Bryn and I are both fucked up and we know it. That’s why we’re relentless in self discovery and don’t have much time for people who aren’t. We are so done with people who are emotionally unavailable, and as I told her yesterday, “we don’t feel it in words, we feel it in energy.” We can case a whole room that way in 30 seconds or less. Together, we are unstoppable and we know it.
You get vulnerable, you get stronger. It’s inversely proportional. If I lay out all my thoughts and feelings, I am teaching you how to love me. I am teaching you what I will tolerate and what I won’t, and there will be consequences for trampling over a set boundary. I’ve never had that before, because I’ve been such a people pleaser that I had no inner monologue that said “take care of yourself.”
Now that I do, I’m being called difficult, off meds, crazy, all the things. But it’s not because I am those things. It’s that I’m not letting people walk all over me. I walk softly, and carry a big stick.
Before I really dig deep, I am angry af at Facebook because I’m in FB jail until about 9:00 PM, and even then I can’t use “groups” for a month. This is because a woman was asking for consolation over a breakup and I said “cheer up, pretty girl. If you’re going through hell, keep going. Also, men are trash. :P” The only difference is here I did not say that was a Winston Churchill group, because this is WordPress and we’re smarter than everyone else.
So, for the first time in history, I can blame Winston Churchill for Facebook jail and not me. However, if a man was really petty and reported the comment, that also blows. Either way, again. Facebook is not North Korea, but it might has well be. As I wrote in “The Art of War,” there’s no department of people who determine what you meant. If you say any violent words at all, a text scanner will decide you were trying to incite violence. Ok. I get it. Not so bad. What’s bad is that if you are caught once, you are marked, and things spiral out of control very, very quickly.
I wasn’t able to use Facebook from Thanksgiving to New Years, either, and it sucked being cut off from my friends and family with absolutely no oversight board at all. The reason I know this is that you can appeal a decision and the decision comes back within one minute, then you are invited to appeal from another board where it takes 30 days to even get your case looked at, so the ban will run out before you can even get someone to look.
Since I’ve been off the radar so long, it really surprised me that now I’m on it because I truly think someone reported the comment. This is because there were already hearts and laughter from other people in the group, including the author of the post. The only thing that doesn’t make sense is a man being offended by something so innocuous. It doesn’t matter.
I’m already on the radar.
One of the reasons I got so mad at “your blog makes you sound like a dick” is that this person insinuated that if I wasn’t such an asshole, then Facebook wouldn’t keep restricting me. It was humiliating, because her voice had the tone of someone speaking to a small child with developmental delays. She was using it as a political point when I hadn’t said anything to cause those kinds of blocks except use English a computer didn’t understand. But it served her purpose, so she was absolutely going to use it. Fuck my feelings. I hope she’s happy about how that turned out for her, because I’ll never speak to her again if I can help it.
That’s because I don’t like judgmental dickheads, either…… especially ones who aren’t writers. People who aren’t writers have a MILLION ideas on what constitutes real writing and what doesn’t. If I’d listened to her, this would be a resume and some recipes. I’m sure you would have all been thrilled. Meanwhile, yesterday was the biggest day for likes in the history of my blog and I’ve had 50 million readers validate that I am indeed hot shit next to a policy wonk. If you’re ever my friend on the ground, the fastest and shortest way to get dumped as my friend is to come up in my yard and tell me how to write, then when I say I don’t like it, convince your friends that you’re right and I’m wrong, then invite me to sit and listen to thoughts about my work inspired by someone else’s thoughts about my work because hearsay is exactly what I need to be successful. Why didn’t I think of that before?
How did I not know that I didn’t need to read Shakespeare. Going to a class where people discuss the motivations of the writer off book is enough. I am not Shakespeare, nor will I ever be. But the point stands. If you’re going to have people criticize my work and make me listen to it, it would help if they had actually read what they were talking about.
After that, I realized I’d never change her and she had no business being friends with a blogger. After having so many friends not believe in my writing, I don’t have time. Either you understand where I’m going, or you don’t. It’s that simple. That friend reamed me out because a woman text message broke up with me and I was unhappy about it, so I wrote about it like I’ve been doing every day for 20 years….. but her feelings matter more than 20 years of posting, right? This blog is mine, because I don’t want to write for the manager at Burger King… as if that was my target demographic. My target demographic is people neither one of us would ever think we’d meet. Other creatives.
My blog isn’t fantastic because I’m such a great writer. It’s fantastic because I’m the one that bothered to remember to write things down. On this blog, the woman who hurt me does not get to then share airtime. There is no Fairness Doctrine here.
This is also not Facebook. If you make a comment, I’ll approve it. Go nuts in the comments and tell me what a dick I am and it only drives up my engagement, so even if your opinion hurts, I’ll still let everyone see it. The site isn’t fair and balanced because there’s only me, and I don’t live in anyone else’s head. I can’t. It makes me try to please everyone, coming up with content based on what you want to read.
Not caring is the only thing that allows me to get words out at all. I’ve catered to other people my whole life, and I’m done. Have been for quite a while.
Someone said they thought it was weird that I’d given Supergrover the passcode to my phone and the light went off in their heads when I said, “when you’re bipolar, someone has to know.” There are solid reasons for everything I do. Everything. When you invalidate those reasons and write me off as stupid or crazy, I won’t stay mad, but kiss me goodbye.
I didn’t tell my beautiful girl why, either, so if she’s wondering why she has a passcode for a phone she’s never seen, worry no more. I knew I couldn’t change my story, and she’s the only one I trust in that particular regard. The reason I’m telling you and not her is that i I told her it was “just in cases,” she would have internalized it and told me that I was just trying to piss her off and she didn’t have time for this shit.
No one does, cielo. No one does.
The fact that no one has time for this shit is why bipolar patients kill ourselves in droves.
My friends don’t have time to deal with bipolar bullshit, so I’m passing the savings on to you. Why? No one is requiring you to be here, and no one is telling you to stay. You choose to listen, you choose whether to respond. I don’t even link to things most of the time so that the past can stay passed. It’s fine if others don’t want to deal with me. My ire comes in when you’re stomping all over the place I go when I don’t want to deal with me.
I especially don’t like being “handled” when I’ve been your friend despite the fact that I made the executive decision not to punch your wife in the face on many occasions. I thought she was such an asshole to you. She thought I was a threat and treated me as such, a stand-in for all the people she can’t yell at. She looked at me like The Other Woman for years and years, all because she was mad at you and taking it out on me. How did you react? By catering to her and making me feel like The Other Woman as well.
The two of you turned what was clean, healthy friendship into something sordid by having to have a conversation about it every time you took me out….. and don’t think I couldn’t hear you talking about me because at the time, your house was too small to talk shit in the kitchen while I’m in the living room. So, it was actually very, very easy to tell both of you to go to hell because by the time my “friend” jumped on my ass about writing, I was exhausted. I couldn’t prove to her partner that I didn’t want romance, and you were a pussywhipped little bitch about it.
I was devastated by my own relationship troubles and my mother’s death. I didn’t have time to think about either one of you and now I’m glad I don’t. That’s because if either of you had bothered to look for it, you would have seen that I didn’t have time to love someone that way. I was toast. I need to rest, heal, relax, gather strength.
I chose to listen for years despite wanting to scream “LEAVE HER!” If she was willing to treat both of us like shit, I thought she should be permanently uninvited to your life, because you’re sunny and wonderful and connected. She’s not. My beautiful girl told me to leave you behind years before I actually did, because the triangle was toxic. The more I insisted that we were just friends, the more the partner took out her anger on me.
She’d only have had to talk to me once to know that no one had a chance with me because my significant fulfilling relationship was very, very real and all in my head. It rode the line because pictures and voice memos are not enough. I never even got to shake her hand, and yet there were days when my heart beat only for her and we fought like cats and dogs because of it.
She couldn’t tell me how much she was not in the mood for my foolishness, and I didn’t feel all that great about hers, either. She came back to me, claimed to be my friend, and then did everything she possibly could to disprove that fact, because she was wonderful to me in some ways, but mostly dismissive. I had been discarded, and that was of my own doing. But if you come back and continue to treat me like shit, that’s your fault. That is not on me. That treatment of me is not based on what I did, but because you told me you forgave me and didn’t. Therefore, I was stepping all over boundaries I didn’t even know were there. When she told me she didn’t play games because she didn’t have time, I told her that maybe that was true with her other friends, but not with me. That she had plenty of games, she just didn’t tell anyone the rules and was perfectly comfortable leaving me in the dark every moment of every day.
I didn’t leave her behind because she was a bad person or that her gifts were unwelcome or that I didn’t love her to absolute pieces. I left her behind because people make plans for their priorities and excuses for everything else. It was again a case of going hard for someone I couldn’t go to…. Because since I’d hurt her, anything I did that was genuine felt like a lie. It wasn’t, but that’s not how it felt to her and I take nothing away from it. She couldn’t see me, and lied to herself that she could.
Her heuristics told me that since I’d once been unkind, I would always be that and everything else was a mask. Forgiveness was relative. I was not reacting to the words “I forgive you,” because she said them. I reacted to being treated badly after she said she forgave me, because I’ve never been taught that definition of friendship. I know how to negotiate boundaries. I know how to emote to try and be understood. I am emotionally brave, but I was willing to be as humble to the point of groveling as long as forgiveness was real.
If you read my words looking for anger, you’ll find them. In fact, you might find whole angry entries. But one entry does not a blog make. I am a spectrum. Being me is actually kind of difficult, because my personality and writing creates its own orbit. I am very, very powerful that way, and I have to be aware of it because I’ve seen what it does to people through the woman that groomed me and the other public figures in my life with the same personality. There’s never just one narcissist. If you find one, you’ll be attracted to it forever and then getting better with age becomes Whack a Mole.
I’m winning.
I just realized that the reason my blog entries sound like letters is that I am trying to differentiate between someone and their partner because they’re both the same sex. Ah, well. Content over grammar, I suppose. I am a grammar nazi, but not to the tune of caring about stream of consciousness writing.
Getting better with age is seeing these kinds of patterns and walking away. My truth was not theirs. I was walking around DC with my heart butterflied on my sleeve.
What strategies do you use to increase comfort in your daily life?
One of my now former friends said that to me, and I will never let go of it because it makes me angry and it’s also the truth. It makes me angry because I’m a spectrum. I have every emotion known to God and man coursing through me all the days of my life. To overfocus on my anger and not accept my love is based on what you see, not what you get. I am responsible for what I say. I am not responsible for what you understand. If you go into it looking for the fact that I’m an asshole with a God complex, you’ll fucking find it. This is my web site. It is the only thing I own cold, therefore it’s the one space I have in my life to figure out who I really am. You don’t want to see the actual struggle? I can recommend quite a few web sites that are crappier than mine. Enjoy.
However, if you focus on all the love inside me, you’ll find that, too.
I do not want to be the sort of person that lives to please anyone, especially now.
Remember I was talking about a guy who wanted to date me that completely went off the deep end and I laid down some truth for him? He deactivated his Facebook account. Therefore, I know he overfocused on “I don’t want to waste time on a man I don’t know” and not “if you want to know me, do it.” I meant that he was already so into it that I didn’t have a chance to catch my breath before he was talking marriage. Again, it had been a little over a week.
This is someone that I could see being friends with and possibly more down the road, but I’m not going to commit to anything on no information. I ran headlong into my beautiful girl before I knew what was up, and it was a mistake. I was reading over our conversations last night, and it has been a dumpster fire from the beginning. We bonded, and then spent the next ten years trying to undo it. We fought gloves off, constantly, and it became harder and harder to remain calm because writing letters to each other was just a clarion call to attack, because on the Internet, that’s what people do. They become disconnected from their compassion because of the wall of anonymity.
I think that’s why I don’t meet many people in person. I need to think in longhand, because I want to make things clear. I cannot do it as easily while talking, because I’m generally too flustered to get things out.
In the deep dive, here’s something that struck me as funny. At about 3 years, I started borrowing style and structure from her. Without even realizing it, she was fighting with herself in a different body. She Googled it, and she did not like it. My words in the way she would say them drove her up the fucking wall, and I didn’t even realize it so I couldn’t fix it. If you knew her, that boundaries conversation with “Michael” would have been out of central casting, and I doubt she would deny it.
At ten years, I am so much more comfortable writing because she whipped my ass into shape. It was like exercise. What I didn’t do was develop breathing techniques to kill the burn in my muscles. I’d put out feelings, she’d go nuclear. She said something about her ire only being in response to my shitty words, and that’s not true in the slightest. She took a sword and made patterns on my skin, drops of blood gathering at my brow, because I couldn’t afford to lose her and she was slipping through my fingers. She was right and I was wrong, but that didn’t stop the trauma bond from making me feel like I needed a hit.
Most people would think that’s because I’m a narcissist. That is incorrect. I was groomed by one, so when I was a teen/tween I craved her physically and she craved me mentally, because she was all about getting those dopamine hits. In retrospect, it was the best thing that ever happened for me that she finally decided we were done. I was discarded, and it felt like death.
I was reborn, and she was absolutelyfuckingnot.
So, when my beautiful girl and I trauma dumped, my physical reaction was based (somewhat- ngl, not all of it) on my past history, not what she actually said. I do not mean catching feelings. I mean the physical feeling of craving dopamine that’s now missing and finding things to replace it. The way I know I’m not a narcissist is that I recognize the symptoms for what they are and I am working on the problem. I am not trying to find a new “source…” I am fining that I am having fun being a creative and not worrying about my relationships.
Bryn makes gummy bears for a head shop, and she takes pictures of them for brochures and stuff. She said she needed a theme, and I said, “Teddy Bears’ Picnic.” She ran with it and did a balloon, a blanket, some ants, etc. I said, “I know you weren’t on Worship Team, but this is what it was like. Take a theme and fill in the details.”
It was actually good remembering a Big Yellow House memory that was good…… at first. Then, I got frustrated because I thought, “this is not a real church.” Pastors don’t have debates with people over whether we can drink at meetings….. although in other parishes, it would have helped a lot. No one asked me, but you can’t drink at church. Ever. I absolutely participated because I was new and they weren’t. Plus, it wasn’t like we were getting wasted. It was like having a working lunch with one drink. But if you drink at meetings, you’re excluding people who don’t drink and church isn’t about excluding anyone. People who choose not to drink are in a different situation than people who can’t drink. Alcohol is everywhere they look, and it’s hard to sit through a meeting without losing your mind when you need the dopamine so bad. Pastors aren’t supposed to be that person, the one that steps over complaints as if they are invalid.
The next pastor walked into a shit show and didn’t even blink. It was fascinating watching her “handle” a congregation. I mean, she fucking kicked ass and took names in a “no, we’re not going to do that” kind of way. She also never picked favorites, made them her inner circle, and actively sabotaged congregational growth so she could micromanage it. We got healthy over the next few years, and she is personally responsible. She stepped up in a big way, and I will never forget it.
It’s why I’m frustrated that I had no trust capital with my abuser’s partner, because she never asked me anything. She knew she was GREAT. She didn’t even have to ask me. There were several ordained pastors and preacher’s kids in the congregation. Not gonna lie here, either. I have no idea how those ordained pastors put up with her shit, and I’d definitely want to have THAT conversation.
For all practical intents and purposes, she was the stepdad with anger management issues. She saw me as a threat, and treated me as such. The carnage in her wake was also massive, because she couldn’t find objectivity with a map and a flashlight. It bothered me that she wouldn’t talk to me about complaints, because I saw her as a parent who needed help and she………….. did not. It all made sense to me, though, because she was my abuser’s partner. Eventually the abusive relationship settled into our version of “normal.” This is because since I thought of them as parents, I went to visit and then basically to live with them.
Why would I do that if she told the partner she thought I would go away? When the abuser was single, she was all about me coming to live with her because sh thought I needed to get out of the Bible Belt, and she wasn’t wrong. Portland was good for me, even though she dumped me within a month. She stopped hanging out with me and found a new source, pretending she wasn’t having an affair and everyone talking shit behind her back. By that time, the spell was broken for me. I said nothing, but I realized yesterday that her partner is also a victim in all of this.
For instance, Dana’s and my joke was always that there would come a time when _________ smothered would smother her partner with a pillow, and quietly go live with ______. I don’t care if my abuser likes the mirror, or whether the woman she had an affair with does either. Here’s why. I could fill that position with one of a hundred names. Even if she wasn’t fucking them, she had them by the short and curlies. I couldn’t get away, so they couldn’t either…… they were just smarter and eventually lost their minds like I did. It just didn’t take 23 years.
Things were good because I didn’t see myself as abused, I just didn’t understand the panic attacks and from where they were coming. They were flashbacks to being dicked around. They were flashbacks of all the confusion regarding drugs, sex, relationship issues, you name it. I was 14. I was the lockbox for her secrets and lies because she wanted it and I gave it willingly. I just didn’t know what contract I was signing.
Here’s the reason I started talking.
Her college friends came to visit and one of them told me that yes, she had wanted to sleep with me. When she denied it, her voice was fucking dead. She’s a sociopath, and I knew it then. No one goes into that tone, scary and emotionless, when they’re trying to lay the truth on the table.
Say I’m wrong. Say she was absolutely telling the truth. If you were me, would you have believed her, knowing her capacity for lovebombing and discarding? So, I took her shitty behavior and wanted to sleep with the messenger, because the given me the truth. It wasn’t believing them over her so much as it was a pattern for her to lie, and they had no such history with me. There was no reason to believe they were lying, and I’d been told she was trying to abuse me since I was young, because apparently, people have eyes. Who’da thunk?
No one was ever going to get me away from her without putting me in jail, a psych ward, what the fuck ever. That’s because if anyone said that, I never talked to them again. I snuck around like we were having an affair, because we were. Again, it wasn’t sexual. It was that her emotional energy was going to me and not her partner. Not that one. The other one. It was far easier to trauma dump on me than it was to tell her partner she was a train wreck and to get her shit together because she was going down and didn’t want to go with her. Instead, there were numerous stories about her alcoholic, drug dealing partner and how her job might be affected, like the time her partner brought home a POUND of weed.
If you’ve ever seen a pound of tobacco, you know the partner would have been in jail for at least 20 years. It was Texas in 1992. Please.
So, obviously when you want someone to process those problems with, you choose a middle schooler.
I was living at Neverland Ranch, all right.
My strategy is writing through it stream-of-consciousness style because then I can go back and analyze. My judgment is never off about me. It’s off about other people because I hold no authority. I can’t make them emote. I can’t even make them be truthful.
The strategy is learning to put responsibility on the other person to understand. I am not responsible for their reaction or emotional work, so stop doing it. It is unappreciated and invalid to people who don’t want to feel in the fist place, so shoving emotional work in their faces feels like an attack. It’s wasted energy, especially since in looking back over the last decade, I learned that she’d said originally that she didn’t have emotional bravery and never would. It was too hard and hurt too much. But then she would also thank me for calling her out on avoiding something, and I didn’t have that trust capital very long.
To be honest, I was frustrated that she told me through her words that I was her friend, but her actions didn’t line up. I really, really went out of my way to speak in her love language and not my own. It eventually destroyed me because it didn’t work.
I didn’t trust her no forgiveness plan, and not because boundaries aren’t a good thing. It was because she didn’t set any boundaries at all except putting her hand on my forehead and letting me windmill. To me, if you tell me I am forgiven, you mean it. I am not all of a sudden going to pick up on your shitty passive-aggressive attempts to push me away because I don’t see them. She thought I did, and that I was trying to hurt her. That I saw the manipulation she said I was doing, when she wasn’t even taking the time to get to know me to be able to read me like that. She doesn’t understand mental health issues on a practical level and beat me over the head with that, too.
I am not responsible for what she understands.
My reality has always been different from hers, and she’s treated me like I am lesser than because of it. As if her reactions are the correct ones and mine are just designed to piss her off. Meanwhile, I’m thinking about her all the time. I am trying to figure out how to be a better friend, because clearly I am falling down on the job. I had a complex about ever displeasing her ever again, and she treated me like a stalker because of it. It was terrifying, and she had no empathy for it because she thought she was sooooooo right about me.
I did move to DC to be near her. I did, and now I won’t cover it up. But at the same time, it wasn’t why she thought I did. Being terrified absolutely solved my need to be around her, so when she came barking up my tree after absolutely losing my mind with grief, I was unimpressed. I’d already tried to apologize, and she was a jerk about that, too. She wasn’t trying to get closer. She was trying to control me, because she thought that I’d blow her life to hell on my blog and I couldn’t convince her otherwise. If she didn’t have time to read, she’d sic an attack cat on it, and I know that because referrer stats don’t lie. If you’re dumb enough to come to my page from your work web site because you don’t know how web sites work, that’s not my fault. So yes, I knew she was watching, and I knew who she picked to do it. I’m not impressed with the heavy, either.
I always knew.
That didn’t stop me from absolutely groveling, because my dopamine was so low after complete isolation of my own doing. It also didn’t stop her from throwing me a bone once in a while, and it would make me insane. I won’t say more, but she fucked me over in every way imaginable in a divide and conquer move that cost me dearly. I didn’t hold her accountable because she wasn’t. I am responsible for what I hear, as well. I can tell when the difference between idiocy and malice aforethought.
She never thought in a million years that our trauma dump would cut me off from other people. That’s not all on her, but she does bear some responsibility in retrospect.
As I have said before, getting into a relationship with her hits different, and because she’s already her, she’s not so aware of that fact.
The difference between us was clear when I told her that it was terrible when she decided I was worth something, needed something, or read something on my blog and had to interject. Even when her opinion was beautiful, it sucked ass. I needed her so bad, and all she wanted was to be a fan. She had no awareness of the fact that every time she dropped in a propos of nothing, of course I’d react like a lovesick teenager without all the romantic crap. She knew how I felt. She did not need to hear it again, and it was too embarrassing to lay my guts on the table anymore…. and yet, I did it anyway, because I thought being vulnerable was the best way forward, because I thought she’d have more empathy if she understood where I was coming from. Nope. After a while, she continued to be so angry about everything while still ramping up my dopamine that she cared. We have never been telling the same story to ourselves, and it cost both of us dearly.
It surprised me that she absolutely cratered me every time I had feelings. She invalidated my feelings all the time, and I invalidated hers in return. We weren’t making the effort to get to know each other. After all this time, she knows me. We’d tell each other to fuck off. Sometimes I’d apologize, sometimes I got her attention, but it didn’t mean resolving jack shit.
She never realized that it wasn’t a case of chasing her. It was “if you’re going shopping, I know my place is sitting on the chairs outside the fitting room and holding your bags.” Every lesbian in the world knows that schtick. Its not a play. We just want to be near you, because if we can’t have you, we don’t kick you out of our lives if we’re not struggling with rejection. If we are, we’re fucking miserable because we go hard.
I don’t miss feeling miserable in the slightest, I just acknowledge that they were difficult emotions to dam, and of course she had no concept of how I would feel because she’d never been there. Or, I assume she’s never been there….. but I’m betting I’m not the only woman it’s ever happened to, either. I learned how to be direct from her, actually, and it was better to deal with a hard no than sugar coating, which she did at first because she wasn’t confident in my reaction and dicked me over by treating me as if I’d done something wrong when I absolutely hadn’t. She’s done that twice, actually, but I can’t dive into that one because it would be telling her story.
But I keep in mind that now I’m not invalidating her feelings because I’m not “Angry Anymore.”
Now I’m humming in my head
Growing up it was just me And my mom against the world. My sympathies were with her, When I was a little girl. Now I've seen both my parents play the hands that they were dealt. As each year goes by I know more about how my father must have felt.
The first line of that song just makes me want to get wasted, because it applies to most people I know.
When you see the range of human behavior, if you’re like me, that’s where you start with strategy. I’m trying to heal the world, one child at a time. Some are older than others.
The immediate future is the most exciting. My sister and I are going through a thing (together, not fighting) and I asked her if I could write about it. She said “write whatever you want” and I said “you never have to get me a present for anything ever again.” This is not that entry. We’ve decided to hold off for a little while because OTHER FACTORS AT PLAY. The point is that my next words were “but if you were going to get me a present, it would be cool if you came up for my birthday this year or next year.” I go about my day thinking it’s a pie in the sky hope and in a few hours we have tickets for Charlotte Cardin on October 24th.
I realize that Lindsay is my sister, but she’s such a badass that it kind of rattles me when she wants to spend time together because I am so insecure at times. You’d just have to know how powerful she is to even begin to understand why I feel that way. She eats Republicans for breakfast and doesn’t waste time on ketchup. I have problems with prioritizing two tasks at once. I constantly have to keep a picture of her as a teen in my mind, because Lindsay’s professional persona is intimidating, but the baby isn’t.
I don’t worry about the lobbyist, but I’m the last woman alive that changed her diapers every damn day. The baby’s needs will always wake me up. The baby’s needs will always come before mine. Nothing in my life is more important than making sure her slap bracelet never comes off.
In December of 1990, the parsonage in Naples burned to the ground. My sister heard a fireman say that the fire started in the attic, and it was lucky that no one was sleeping in that bedroom (hers), because the attic rafters would have fallen on the bed and crushed whoever was sleeping. She internalized it, and things might have been different if we’d gotten another house in Naples. But no, we were moved to Houston before the committee even formed to rebuild. The stress of the fire and the culture shock affected us differently. I got sucked into band at school, choir at home, and “my first marriage.” Lindsay developed a phobia around going to school (now does it make a little more sense why that relationship knocked me on my ass? I met her six months after the fire.).
My mother was a stay at home mom. I think Lindsay thought that if she wasn’t home to protect my mother, that something would happen to her while she was gone. A trauma therapist told my dad to have a routine with her, and to get her a slap bracelet (I don’t remember whether she said that specifically, or just something Lindsay could keep on her) so that she had something to keep the routine going in her mind.
Every day, my dad would drive Lindsay to school, and he’d say:
Lucky day…. Gonna get an E today…. Like I say…. Wave to me…..
So, touching that slap bracelet made her remember what my dad said, and we were all with her when she touched her wrist. The therapist got an E that day, because it really was excellence on her part.
So, when I think of Lindsay walking into the Texas Legislature to protect queer kids, it’s me who needs the slap bracelet.
I can’t breathe when I think of how hard her job must be and how much stress she’s under…. And how none of it is her fault. God is not making her life more difficult. People are. People who think The Bible is an authority in the lives of American politicians are trying to make the rest of the country believe it as well. It’s maddening because we supposedly have separation of church and state, but Texas doesn’t believe in it so they just live around it.
As my friend Rev. Chuck Currie has pointed out, “Jesus said ‘let all the little children come unto me.’ He did not say ‘let all the little children come unto me….. except trans kids.’” My sister has to tell the Texas and federal government why trans kids need their medication. Their medication. She’s not fighting them on their wants and desires. She’s fighting conservatives for trans kids’ basic needs.
Meanwhile, Lindsay and I are both the preacher’s kid from “Saved.”
When it comes to Texas Republicans, I want to crash a van into their Jesus, and my Jesus would let me.
Their Jesus is about power over, and is a reflection of white supremacy. The church universal has wasted too much time worshipping whiteness. It’s not just an American problem. Desmond Tutu crashed a van into South African apartheid Jesus long ago.
It makes me laugh talking about my sister crashing her van into Jesus because over the years we’ve both loved Mandy Moore.
Ok, I’m going to take a second. We’ve got to talk about this. Mandy Moore didn’t win nearly enough awards for “This is Us.” Her craft was simply outstanding. OUTSTANDING. Every actor should watch her, because watching Rebecca Pearson is a master class, particularly when time jumps back and forth so that she’s playing different ages in the same episode. It’s a tour de force performance, and she kept it up for YEARS.
I needed to take a break and focus on Mandy Moore for a second, because I started flooding out at “slap bracelet.” There are tears and snot all up in here.
To keep it light for another moment while I collect myself, I think Coca Cola needs to start sending thank you cards to all the Diet Coke drinkers. This is because everyone likes soda, for the most part. Diet Coke drinkers are straight up addicts, and because of the world I inhabit, most of them are musicians. I have never met anyone who drinks Diet Coke that doesn’t drink a hell of a lot of it.
I’m not sure whether it’s the caffeine or the aspartame or whatever, but it does make you crave it with unusual intensity. I used to drink six a day, and I was a rookie. Every soprano I know carries it around like a water bottle. Diet Coke has even made it into a music joke.
How many sopranos does it take to change a light bulb? Two. One to hold the Diet Coke and one to go get her accompanist to do it.
It’s a riff on “how many SMU sorority sisters does it take to change a light bulb?” “Two. One to mix drinks and one to call daddy.” I’m betting that the capitalization of daddy varies by age.
Quitting Diet Coke is relentless, and part of it is the carbonation. It’s hard to give up fizzy water altogether when you’re not used to still. Now add caffeine on top and quitting becomes even more useless.
The only thing that helped me was thinking that even if I was rich, $10 for 12 cans would still seem ridiculous.
Now I’m addicted to drink mix. It doesn’t even have to have caffeine in it because I’ve found that the reason I needed so much of it is that I wasn’t sleeping. Now, I take medication for that because especially during hypomania, I won’t sleep for several nights in a row. That doesn’t happen very often, but my sister is a lobbyist trying to get health care for trans kids and if I was going to stay up thinking about a problem, this is a good one.
My daughter is trans. I hate qualifying it, but I did not birth her. It was better than that. I told her dad in not so many words that he was being an absolute dick to her and to get his shit together. She responded……………. Positively. When we met, she was going to be my stepdaughter. Her dad is out of the picture, but we’re still going strong. So, whether The War Daniel and I get married or not, I have a child adopted through the rainbow flag. I’m here for it, and it’s a lot. But to be clear, Cora is not the problem. Cora is the recipient of the problem.
I still want to marry Daniel, but I have reservations that will never go away, and he hasn’t talked reconciliation. To me, that’s that. But you leave a relationship with an *adult.* Cora is now an adult, but the power dynamic is the same. I don’t talk to her about my feelings for Daniel and she wouldn’t know anything if I wasn’t a writer. I feel that it’s okay for her to read my thoughts, because they aren’t directed at her. In writing, I can make it more clear than I could in person that she’s not the monkey in the middle. Daniel doesn’t think of her that way, either.
To my beautiful girl, I have only found out that the dog is named after a heavy metal star. So, I just have the names Virginia Woof and Sidney Brisdog in my back pocket, as well as a name I picked up for a cat on “Will and Grace.” Jack’s cat was named “Chairman Meow” and I’m still not over it.
That’s because Cora is free to talk about her dad, but I do not have an opinion on him. I can’t. He is making his own choices, and I don’t have to like them. I just have to respect them. Also, whether it’s my own echo chamber telling me this or whether it’s my intuition, I think Daniel got tired of my patois reading as male and started competing with me to see who was the bigger asshole. Unsurprisingly, I “won.”
You can’t win against someone who was raised in NE Texas and has bought in to Republican fodder. He thought I was trying to reprogram him and I was trying to impress the seriousness of what his idiocy has caused because he didn’t bother to get educated when Cora came out.
It’s not inexcusable to be uneducated. It’s inexcusable not to believe your child when they come out. Disbelief is relative. Daniel thought of himself as having to put up with us, and not because he’s a bad person. It’s that he’s a self centered alcoholic, but I repeat myself.
Self-centered alcoholic is almost tautology.
If someone is trying to tell you that you’re hurting them and you react as if it’s all about you, it’s best to walk away. Do whatever it is you need to get yourself together, because the world is not going to think of you as the protagonist in every damn story. If you have been raised male, you think a lot about this.
That’s kind of the debate between cis and trans women…. That trans women tend to step all over cis women’s asses because they were socialized as men when they were young. This is the hashtag “not all trans women,” and yet it is not untrue, either. Their voices are loud because they’ve been told they deserve it. Cis women have been property for hundreds of years. Chaos ensues.
I would also say that cis women generally don’t stand up for themselves and trans women don’t realize there’s a problem. There is a big damn problem, but it is not one that will last forever. The bitch of it is that cis women need trans women because they don’t assume other men deserve shit and act as such. Cis women, not so much.
It’s especially the debate between cis lesbians and trans women, because they have even less political power. Trans women don’t always see cis women’s complaints as real. That they’re being misogynistic and their ire is invalid.
Cis women don’t give a rat’s ass most of the time. We only react to being ignored. I am of the mind that trans women are women. Period. I also don’t think trans women acknowledge how being socialized as a man as a child affects how they walk in the world as adults. That there ARE differences even though with puberty blockers, trans kids are being socialized at a very young age in their true gender.
Cis women also need to deal with their imposter syndrome and learn to kick men’s asses the way trans women do.
My only gripe is with trans women who think it’s all about them. They don’t think that, but I see the dark side. I see the devastation it causes when trans women tell the people who care about them that they’re not doing enough. How fast do you think things are going to change in the South? What is your deal? Instead of bitching all the time, send flowers.
Notice I didn’t say stop bitching all the time. Just recognize that you’re putting a lot of your injury on the same people who are trying to solve the problem. In other words, take out your anger on someone who deserves it and stop biting the hand that’s feeding you.
I’m not sure I’ve earned the right to have an opinion here, but I’m 45 years old and people have been all over my ass since 1990. I couldn’t be my authentic self, either, and in some parts of the country my internalized homophobia still kicks in hardcore. I cannot walk into just any bar, either. I wish trans women, especially young ones, would read up on Matthew Shepard. It wasn’t that long ago. The queer community as a whole is being thrown under the bus, and I realize that trans women’s plights are bad, but I don’t think they’re worse than they were for me 25 years ago. NONE of this is getting better.
I also don’t think there’s too much difference between coming out as a trans child now and coming out as a gay kid then. Back then, gays were the last acceptable minority to hate, and they’ve passed the savings on to you. But don’t think it’s worse for you. You just aren’t looking at the problem from the same perspective, because you’re in hell and no one knows it better than me.
Cora and I have actually had this conversation, and it led to one of the biggest moments in my life. I explained some of the queer history she doesn’t know, and asked her to have empathy. She took the note and made me cry so hard I couldn’t breathe.
When I said that my middle name bothered me she said, “I have a name I’m not using. Would you like to have it?”
And that’s when I knew that there would never be another Cora, and there would never be another Lindsay, either.
I am just glad that I have them in my future. I wish everyone could.
Stories That Are All True 