Tag: Relationships

Let’s Think About Breakfast

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What foods would you like to make?

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 just never got change.

We’re Trapped and We Should Lean on Each Other

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

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 Feels Like Getting Right with the Lord

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What bothers you and why?

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.

Talking About Boundaries

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

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.

Getting Help

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

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.

I have big stick energy.

Too Much to Contain

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 5 Comments

What do you think gets better with age?

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.

Your Blog Makes You Sound Like a Dick, Part II

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

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.

Stability

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What are you most excited about for the future?

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.

The Melody

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What could you let go of, for the sake of harmony?

I am a soprano, but I like being an alto or a tenor. Diva is not my personality, although I was an accessory. That’s kind of my jam. I’m not the star, I’m the ghost writer. The reason I say that I am a soprano is that I don’t pick parts in choir, and the conductor never picks me for anything other than high As if they can help it. If there is a hell, my sentence will be the soprano part to Handel’s Messiah. Just hold it til you turn purple.

I actually don’t struggle that much with high notes, because I had a voice teacher that unlocked them for me. In fact, check out THIS SHIT. He increased my range from a high A to a high E flat. I am not a diva, but I do have tiny, tiny moments of it. The worst time I’ve ever been butt hurt by another soprano (aforementioned opera singer, so you know it damn near killed me) was when she said, “I think she’s an alto.” That’s because I knew she was trying to get me moved away from her because people were starting to talk.

Speaking of having an affair under everyone’s noses, we were. It was just asexual. It was confusing wondering whether we’d ever sleep together, but like I have said before, I didn’t need to be romantic with her to struggle with what real love is. I didn’t have lust. I was like every woman in America. If you need me platonically, if we’re interested in you we’ll give you everything.

Here’s where that stops.

I have never in my lifetime been this strong in the beginning of a relationship because it sets the tone for the rest of it. If I don’t state my boundaries, he’ll step all over them. He told me he wanted to marry me. We’ve been talking for a week and a half at most.

Now, he’s butt hurt because the story he’s been telling himself is that it was love at first sight for both of us. How interested could I possibly be? Zac and Bryn are all I need. I don’t have time for much more than that if you are not here in front of my face. As I told him, “that doesn’t mean pack up and move. It means that the Internet doesn’t get all of my time.”

Shut it. Snitches get stitches.

That’s all I’ve got for today. I just wanted to say for the record that boss ass bitches cure you of almost everything. Mine did.

Trauma Bonds -or- Go to Hell, Michael Jackson

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Dear Bryn,

I have to start this entry as a letter to you, or I will lose my courage and not post this at all. Clearing it up with the Fanagans that you have said “write whatever you want. I don’t care.” So, fair warning. I will.

I also know that you are not frightened by the title, because you know where I’m going with this because we just talked about it this afternoon. All of this is to avoid blowback. I know that “don’t go bitch to Bryn. You only think I’ll fuck you up. Bryn will hide your body” is sound advice.

No one would ever know. In order to be truly frightening, you have a big backyard…… of which I am stunningly aware in case I’m ever an asshole. 😛

I have loved you for three lifetimes, and I will love you for as many as we have left. I have no idea what our future holds, but I know that whether we’re together in the same city or apart is of no consequence. Facebook video calls travel, and we don’t waste time on small talk. My pain is yours, and your pain is mine.

My heart sighs in palpable relief that our lovebombing has been genuine for over a quarter of a century. As I told you on the phone, I should have known the first time we disappeared at a party that it was for life…. the way it would have been with more people in our circle if they hadn’t been such dipshits, and I only use that word specifically because our mutual friend’s partner didn’t understand trauma bonds and said friend was absolutely handfasted to me whether she asked me to marry her or not.

If that partner had wanted to undo it, she should have shown up ten fucking years earlier. Michael Jackson is more famous, but he has too many fucking faces. Some of them are round cheeked and have a great smile.

If our “friend” had been truly honest, she would have said as much. She would have said to her partner that she had roped me in and there was nothing she could do about it, so fucking deal. She should have said that it would injure us both. What she told her partner was that she “thought I would go away when I was 18.”

The partner before her was a fucking mess, so she dicked me around. She needed someone, but it shouldn’t have been me for two reasons. The first is that I was in middle school. Take that in, bitches. The second is that as an INFJ, I could feel her emotions coursing through me better than I could feel my own. I WAS IN MIDDLE SCHOOL.

I know you know the story, but you weren’t there for the beginning. You weren’t there when I lost my life and started living hers. You weren’t there when I was 14 at school and 25 at home. I’m so sorry if sitting in this shit is painful. Don’t read it all at once.

You notice that no one asked about the other little girls.

But I fucking noticed.

I talked, and most of our friend group shot me to shit because they couldn’t see me as a hurt child. They fucking wrote me off as a bipolar adult and people were STILL BEING HURT. Oh my fuck I am never going to stop being angry about this, even though she’s forgiven honestly and completely. I cannot carry that much pain, and I refuse. It’s just the lingering anger that irritates my trauma bond. Hearing Cynthia Erivo sing the Rutter Pie Jesu on Fresh Air almost sent me to the hospital because I thought I was going to die and it was just a panic attack. Do you know how traumatized you have to be to feel like there’s no difference between a panic attack and a myocardial infarction? (LMGTFY)

Yes, you know what that is (say that in a Dalek voice- obligatory Doctor Who joke).

All the love that doesn’t belong to Oliver (since you are aware that you are in second place with both puppies),

Leslie

Once I started talking about being abused, I couldn’t stop. I would drop another Google tattoo, except every time I see her name I want to fucking throw up. That’s because she fucked me up, and never apologized for it except one e-mail in 23 years….. she said, and I quote, “I can see how some of those conversations would be confusing and upsetting to you.” AYFKM? That’s it? That’s 23 years’ worth of apologies?

Then she had the audacity to make an “It Gets Better” video for young people. I won’t link to it, because it makes me vomit. She became the director of the Portland YOUTH Philharmonic, and no one knew SHIT. I protected that path for all it was worth, and I am so done. SO. DONE.

There’s going to be a lot of cursing in this one because I’m so fucking angry right now. One trauma bond snapping reminded me of that one, in which the relationship was over twice as long a time period and every bit the same outcome. It’s just that in this case, she was the one that fucked me over, and I did not stop the cycle. I took it out on someone who absolutely did not deserve it, and I cannot blame anyone for that except sitting it at that woman’s table and making sure she doesn’t return the fucking casserole dish. I had no culpability. None.

That’s because I realized that my beautiful girl lovebombed the fuck out of me, and I did it to her right back. Here’s the thing, though. People who have been lovebombed by narcissists don’t recognize when it’s genuine. They don’t recognize love that goes that deep, that crazy, that a relationship can keep up that intensity, because they’re constantly wondering when the other shoe is going to drop. There is a moment in every relationship with a narcissist where you do something wrong, the sun turns, and you’ll never see it again. You will be trapped in a trauma bond with the wrong ass person. You will grovel like a worm to get that dopamine back, because childhood PTSD doesn’t allow for much else. Narcissists fucking bank on it.

I didn’t trust Supergrover’s love as far as I could throw it, and acted as such. For her, I’m betting that’s relatable in The Later Years. I know this because changing her tune from lovebombing to no affection in her tone at all and completely shutting down emotionally let me know she was in protection mode, strengthening the fortress so that I couldn’t get in.

That’s because if you think trading dick for a live in chef is offensive, you should have seen what she let me get away with in The Early Years. It fucked me up, because I knew I had no chance at any real relationship with her again. She fucking told me she had to lose weight and I told her I’d take it off in a week. Joking was fine before, but not fine after, and it would have been a beautiful thing to know that before I stepped into it up to my ass. I even joked about having an affair under everyone’s radar, and the way I phrased it made even her laugh. So, to have that be a trigger instead of a source of amusement also ate my lunch, because it made everything seem so much worse. I would hope that she has found in retrospect that my sapiosexuality had been groomed. That I did not escape perpetuating carnage, but when I realized it, there wasn’t a hole in the ground big enough.

THANKS FOR THAT. I won’t go into namecalling, but you can imagine what’s in my head right now. It’s not great. I want to tear her limb from limb the way I wanted to take her partner apart WHEN I WAS IN MIDDLE SCHOOL. I had all the rights and responsibilities of a loving partner without any of the fun stuff, because she has had and will have emotional affairs with anyone dumb enough to fall for it. People don’t change without significant work, there’s no statute of limitations on guilt, and there’s a lot of “don’t want to” in “can’t.” If you become her best friend, which she will tell you often that she is, but really you are her pet person because she knows she’s better than you. She doesn’t pick people smarter. No predator does. I also doubt that age matters. She can take a fully functioning adult and make them a shell of a person and it doesn’t take even a week. I can name names, and I would if I could ask them first. I blocked the minors on Facebook because I didn’t have enough strength to reach out. I also didn’t have enough strength to look at their faces in my feed. If she read this, she’d be furious, because she doesn’t see what I saw. She lovebombed the fuck out of every woman around her, no matter whether they were little girls or grown ass adults. In order to find people to control, you have to put out feelers.

The relationship with my beautiful girl was a reflection of what had happened 10 years earlier, and it’s eating my fucking lunch, so may I repeat myself…… THANKS FOR THAT. She should have had to destroy herself over it. Get right with God. What the fuck ever. But let me let you in on a little secret. Her actions fucked me up so bad that a therapist told me she was too close to retirement to take me on… that healing me would take five to ten years….. and because I couldn’t see the feelers, I couldn’t take in real love, either. It was suspect. Unsafe. My heart beat to it….. “unsafe. Unsafe. Unsafe. Unsafe.” I became the Master when I took in the whole vortex at once. Here’s where I surprised Zac by going dark. All abused children are “The Timeless Child.” Even The Master and The Doctor are the same person. If I think about that long enough, it gets chewier.

It leads my mind to Dexter violence. Thank God I’m not violent, I’m just a kid with a keyboard, which is absolutely more than she’ll ever have and very effective. I won’t physically hurt you, but in a letter I’m Hattori Hanzo. I will leave you in ribbons. You’ll never get me out of my head, which is far superior to a good ass kicking. That’s because my therapy is right here where I can go back to it. If I falter in strength, I have a place to go that says fuck you and the horse you rode in on.

What killed me was pointing my sword in the wrong direction, and dear God I didn’t mean a double entendre but I see it and I can’t decide whether to leave it or save my ass. Eh, I’ll leave it. It’s a brilliant self own, if nothing else.

But what I’m really saying is that I lost my mind and she fucking stole the TARDIS and said, “drinks on the moon?” It has never occurred to me before now, but I’m not Rory the Roman. I haven’t been. For 10 years, I have been The Master and her Impossible Girl. She has no idea how much I mean this, and because she doesn’t watch Doctor Who, she won’t take in its enormity. For every bit that I felt a connection with The War Daniel, I felt the same pull toward her in a different way. I wanted both of them not just for this regeneration, but for all of them. The child, the teenager, the decades with different stories and faces. I would have loved her with this much intensity until she died if she would have only let me. Our bond makes it almost impossible for anything else to seem important, again, so personal to the two of us that I just don’t want to let go of it. I never will, even if people don’t understand and I have no choice but to look like a nutter. It makes me anxious that people will again write me off as a bipolar adult when they couldn’t find a clue with both hands.

Also. I love how The Doctor says they’re “not that kind of Doctor,” yet The Master and The Doctor are the same person and their initials are MD. To all the Whovians who will gatekeep and say I’m wrong, they just share DNA, Southerners never let facts get in the way of a good story. See title of blog.

I have to be angry here, because if I don’t, the MIDDLE SCHOOL trauma bond will reactivate. Who else would she tell her secrets besides someone she could control? It was too risky to be vulnerable with someone she couldn’t. My beautiful girl tried to control me in the same way, for entirely pure reasons. There is nothing in the world I feel more than her right to feel however she wants. It’s just that she seemed to be wrapped too tight, I was wrapped too loose, and we never rapped.

“You like Eminem? Explain exactly how I’m not going to fall in love with you. USE BIG WORDS.” (When did you say that? Day one. She appealed to my ego, and no writer in the world would react differently, especially an unknown quantity like me.) DO YOU SEE WHAT THAT WOMAN MADE ME LOSE? I perpetuated the cycle, and I lost a friend who would have moved mountains for me. I know that because she did it. In every way possible, I wanted to save her because she saved me first. I wrote that line about Dana, but only half of it did I really mean for her. It didn’t make my feelings for Dana less intense, only shared.

I spent 2003 obsessed with The Eminem Show. I am not sure she didn’t. Now, I listen to “Love Game” all the time and nearly fall apart with laughter.

“Have a blessed day.”

She’s told me what she drives, and I know damn well that if we were screaming down 66 we’d have all the windows down and the music blasting loud enough for the entire city to enjoy. I don’t think of this song as being about her. I imagine us both enjoying thinking about subject matter.

Now, when I have a genuine need from my beautiful girl, she only tells me that she is frankly tired of being guilted over it. To take an example from the song, neither one of us forgot the other’s birthday……… at first. That’s actually the thing that drew me to her the most when we started talking reconciliation. She forgot several years running and then couldn’t always e-mail me on my actual day, but started remembering again. She even sent me a fairy tale book last year, and I ate it up (it wasn’t Stephen King. It was a reimagining of Peter Pan). It wasn’t that it was never enough for me. It’s that remembering my birthday is a huge damn deal. I don’t care about the presents, I care that she’s so busy she can’t even breathe. She barely knows the date and time. And yet for a moment the clock stopped on Sept. 11th, with a note saying she’s sorry she forgot. I was completely fucking undone, because that showed me so much love and respect that I could not even. It wasn’t that she couldn’t commit to small things. It’s that she thought I was too much for her on the big things. Even the big things could have been solved with Jack Daniels on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

Eight years since the original break (seven and a half at most) and she thinks all I’m doing is trying to rattle her. Does this even make any sense if my letters are the same as my blog? That I see everything as a spectrum and not only will I let her know what is going wrong, but what is going right? I have been every bit as rabid with love as I have been with you. How she could look at that and say I see nothing but negative says I’m not the only one with rejection sensitivity dysphoria.

And yet, I am careful about painting my feelings as fact, because even though I write like that, I am relentless in saying “this is only my opinion.” Take it or leave it, seriously. I don’t care how you respond. I care whether I’m stuffing down emotions because all INFJs get ill from negative feelings. We feel everything, which is one of the reasons I think my bond with both women was so incredibly hard on me.

So.

Fuck Michael Jackson.

If you think the two stories aren’t inextricably interrelated, you’ve never seen my abuser work a room. Fuck me. She’s so powerful she can suck up everything. The carnage in her wake…..

She was a fucking opera singer. In what world would a lesbian who looked like that, had that much talent, and made it unclear whether she was romantically interested or not would I not lose my fucking mind? I was 14. My hormones had kicked in very, very recently. I had no idea what love was.

Here’s the reason I’m a ninja blade. It is now 33 years later, and I am only now able to really staunch the bleeding. To say she didn’t know what she was doing is criminal, even though she didn’t break any laws. Let’s say she didn’t. Let’s say all the other women were totally above board, even though anyone with eyes could see something was wrong. She was 25 years old.

23 years of the monster in my head and the ghost out to get me.

Now, I’m living my life by telling everyone who doesn’t believe me to go to hell, because you were there and you did nothing. You didn’t save any of the others, and you didn’t believe me. You should check in with them and make sure they’re okay, because when I saw them, they were FUBAR and you were silent, because you thought you were better than them, too…….. because she was still lovebombing you. You didn’t walk into the game, because you were stronger than her. We were weak and couldn’t hack it. Seems legit.

It’s interesting that she met me when I was 12, but I didn’t feel sexual energy in my direction until I was 14. Two things are completely fucked up about that. The first is that it shows grooming with intent. The second is that no healthy adult tells a child things that are way too big for them. It created my most devastating secret; I learned the power of what childhood emotional abuse could do. We don’t understand it, but we crave our abusers. We walk toward it because the control is complete. We feel ourselves wanting to have sex years before we’re ready, because whether you’re a monster or totally clueless, you’ve already fucked us no beers.

So, to my beautiful girl, thank you for everything. Thank you for listening all those years. Thank you for loving me to the best of your ability. Thank you for publicly declaring your love for me, because it showed me how much I mattered to you. Thank you for letting me walk away with my head held high, because you were there to catch.

To everyone else, CHECKMATE.

Wordless

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What is your favorite genre of music?

I am the one that provides the words.

I need music to flow like water around me. I love the word “soundscape.” I love how composers and writers make love to each other, birthing individual creativity that feeds the other.

Probably one of the reasons the partners I’ve had haven’t been creative (except Dana). I thought it was a good thing that we were so different, because we were feeding each other. Now, I realize that nearly every relationship I’ve ever had with a woman became based over time on division of labor. They’ll do all the thinking if I’ll do all the feeling.

I was comfortable with my beautiful girl’s availability because it was no different than any relationship I’d ever been in with a woman except the relationship I was currently in. That does not mean I choose wrong, or that I’m a bad person for not getting rid of the Internet relationship. There’s several reasons I couldn’t do that, and even when I realized it was necessary, it was too late.

I can’t remember which entry I was reading where it became clear, but I know for sure that I am trauma bonded to this woman and perhaps it just didn’t present for her in the same way. That’s fine, and I don’t expect anyone to have my experience. I was just reading over what I’d written when it hit me….. “that’s a trauma bond.” You need her so bad it physically hurts? That’s a symptom.

If she doesn’t have an itch on her skin when she thinks about disconnecting from me, then of course we are not the same. I wish I’d thought about that years ago. I should state for the record that I am not saying she caused trauma. It’s the opposite. She came into my life while I was experiencing acute trauma, and sat next to me while I took my own medication. No one who sat with me at that time isn’t bonded to me in that way, it’s just not as extremely loud and incredibly close.

I think the itch on my skin is thinking that I am too incomplete within myself to do life without her, but that’s my trauma talking, not my personality. Even she would be surprised to see how vulnerable I really am, because I don’t write from that place often. It never left my mind that she’s older and wiser, so be on your A game. Seeing her as younger comes from getting to know her inner voice. I care for that child as much as I care for that adult.

I betrayed everything I believed in because my disease started managing me. I don’t think I came back to myself until I moved to DC and had been here long enough to feel stable. I had to get away from Dana, and I had to get away from Houston. Our relationship looked so much different without those two things, and I was grateful. This is because I moved to Houston with Dana because she wanted to teach, but then when we got there, she didn’t do anything until she had to.

So I was managing my career and all kinds of PTSD triggers everywhere I went. It was unsustainable, especially the day when I learned that my new therapist’s office was a couple streets over from…. That house.

Getting out of Houston so that I could be myself again might also have been the answer to saving my relationship with Dana, but I don’t think anything could have done that. We got into a pattern where she’d check out on her phone, I’d decide she wasn’t interested in interacting, and e-mail my Supergrover. It wasn’t a big series of fights, just more that when we each looked up, the other was busy, so we assumed we could just keep on doing what we were doing. We woke up months later and didn’t have much of a connection anymore. The reason that a straight girl did not and could not have had any culpability in this is that if Dana and I had made more time to be emotionally available to each other, we would have been okay. We just stopped communicating.

Just because Dana was jealous didn’t mean anything my beautiful girl did to contribute had purpose. Dana chose to get angry at the wrong woman.

Actually, she forgot to get mad at two women. She should have destroyed me, and also herself…. Because I am betting that she does not think of herself as checking out and not caring, and how that might affect my relationship with her.

Because if I tried to engage her and it took more than a few minutes to get her to engage, I gave up. Maybe it was too fast, but I don’t have patience for saying “just five more minutes” when it comes to a video game and I am offering to take off your clothes.

Gay or straight, Supergrover whooped Dana’s ass, and here’s how she did it. Dana didn’t start acting like I had serious value until Supergrover noticed I was brilliant.

So, everyone can think I’m the bad guy until I’m dead. I don’t care. But the relationship started to fail before I shot it out of its misery.

In a perfect world, I would have seen another woman looking at my brilliance and thought, “oh, that’s sweet.” It’s not a perfect world, and she’s hot as shit…. Therefore I lost mine.

I was the one that tumbled out of reality, because at that time in my life, reality bit (if you’re my age, you wore out that disc. It’s probably scratched to shit yet still in your parents’ basement somewhere).

I just wish that I’d used music to help me more than I did. I wish I could have drowned out both women so that I could hear me more clearly. Perhaps my need would have been filled by something healthier, cleaner.

Music definitely would have helped me move on for good, but even that was confusing because I did have a relationship with my beautiful girl. Tenuous, but there. It was a note that grew up to be a symphony, because I love dissonance in the right chords.

Too much had happened for either one of us to feel the same way about each other without work, and we decided for whatever reason that this was a conflict that could be solved by writing. In retrospect, it made things more complicated because neither one of us can read when it comes to the subject matter. How would our conversations be different had she ever put her arm around me? How would kissing each other’s cheeks and hugging tight have mixed up the equation? I go back and forth.

It’s not something I think about a lot, because it’s pointless except in determining that I don’t know as much as I thought I did. It’s just not possible for each of us to feel as much fear in person, because there’s more to grab onto in terms of context.

Because of what has happened, I am wary of online dating, because I know what a shit show it has become. I’m getting a taste of my own medicine in terms of not being able to deal with others’ emotions, because a guy who randomly reached out to me now thinks we are in a much heavier relationship than I do. I just tell him everything she’s told me and surprise, it works. So obviously I know that we were not on the same page and she was trying to fix it as well. Our approaches were just so different that they prevented us from seeing what the other was doing or even understanding it.

But it’s not the same situation. I did just meet this guy out of nowhere, and he started acting enamored after a couple of conversations that had legit nothing to them. Nothing was said that could have created a trauma bond, because I don’t talk to anyone about that unless I’m writing on my web site. I feel like people get enough of my problems if they’re fans, so I won’t talk about my issues unless people ask….. or with Zac, I’ll just ramble around until he finds a point. 😉

I am finding out that being bisexual has nothing to do with sex at all, ever. I have learned that I have dated few men not because I’m not wired that way, but because men legitimately have no clue about what women go through societally and are so damn condescending about it that some dude will say two things wrong and I’m like “block.”

To be fair, I haven’t specifically started seeking out men or women. I just connect with people. However, I notice how I’m being treated and overall, men treat me like I’m little and cute. Boy, I will fuck you up. Respect me as such.

It’s because men aren’t looking at me like I’m half a husband, and it is their downfall. I will never be “the little woman.” I don’t understand most social constructs and step all over them, so expecting that I already understand everything about male/female relationships is a mistake on both our parts.

When a trauma bond snaps, it feels like quitting caffeine cold turkey and then having to deal with the headaches. So, that’s a lot of fun as I negotiate being a new person. It’s why I feel like I’m not good at dating. I go out and I’m not focusing on them, but about how long it’s been since I had at least a goddamn Diet Coke. My body doesn’t feel right, and the one friend that’s always been there for me has taken a back seat…. When music could have handled the detox on its own. Music and I have been together since I was born.

My mother was a classically trained pianist with a degree in piano performance and pedagogy. My father played both classical and jazz trumpet, getting 26 full rides for college. Curtis, Juilliard, Oberlin, you name it.

I am what happens with “the Mozart effect,” but I’m not sure whether that’s a ringing endorsement.

Music has a way of focusing me that other things don’t, and I’m going to have to make a Supergrover playlist as well, because the music I needed to get rid of romantic feelings isn’t the music I need to feel calm. I’ll start with the color green. She reminds me of new life, new growth, new everything and the music should reflect it. I’ll have to go through my music apps, but it should start with something like “Sheep May Safely Graze” yet not exactly that because I’d be whistling it 24/7.

I just need things that are mathematically complicated in a major key.

Actually, that would be a good tagline for her, if there was one. Never have I met anyone with such a range of emotions that centered on light, often shining it into my darkness while I cleaned up. It was easier because I could see.

I listen to classical music a lot while I’m doing other things, because it relaxes my ADHD mind to have at least one plug filled. One less way for another stream of thought to interrupt.

That’s how I think meeting in person would have helped. Talking would have avoided all the traps of going down the wrong road too far before having to figure out an exit strategy, which as you can see is going really well. Obviously I’m not bothered by the situation because I never write about it. Eyeroll.

The writing prompt today reminded me just how much I cannot separate the music of my life from life itself. I am put together with blood and bones and skin, and yet that doesn’t mean music’s contribution isn’t there. Music is the invisible fourth wall providing structure…. So thick you don’t even have to have a stud finder. Just decorate it up, it’ll hold. Like concrete, music drips like water into all your softest places and hardens. Music that moves you will call you to you forever, and not everyone is attuned to your beat.

To turn that back on me, my rhythm changed and I didn’t realize how different it had become. I was a basic 4/4, with a new composer who only knew how to write time signatures by subbing in random numbers. Today, it’s a waltz. Tomorrow, it’s a march. Tuesday is experimental jazz odyssey.

I am living my life with the map on the table, knowing there’s no way to fit it back into the package.

Which ultimately leads me to my favorite song in life, and a story about my ex wife. I thought it was hilarious that the Indigo Girls were on tour, and Kathleen was late to the concert…….for the “GET OUT THE MAP” tour…….. 😛 😛 😛

The thing that stays with me from the first time I heard it until now is “I’m going to love you good and strong while our love is good and young.” The hope for that love is eternal, knowing a piece of it is in me. I can stop the itch on my skin, I can go back to my life, I can move on. But there’s never going to be a moment in my life that is bigger than “you think I’m smart? You? Really? Are you sure?”

Things Are Going Well

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I have come to a turning point in my healing. It’s going to sound harsh, but I mean it in the best way. I’ve had enough clinical separation that now both my beautiful girl and her man are the characters they’ve been in my head all along. They are very real, and yet very not. I cannot have them, but I can have the memories attached to them. I have every emotion I have seen come through my Supergrover for ten years. She is an uploaded consciousness, and now there is Silence in the Library.

Hey. Who turned out the lights?

God, it would be good if I were the sort of person that could end on a line like that. Just MIC DROP. I can’t say it any better……. AND YET I’M NOT DONE TALKING. 😛

The only part that’s sad is she chose this for herself, and I let her. It was time if we weren’t moving forward, and I am sure that she doesn’t see my point and she doesn’t see that I do see hers, and I’m willing to accommodate it and I always have. She’s been holding out on me and saying there’s nothing wrong. I don’t have to live with that, and I won’t. There is a very good reason I’m all in with her, it’s just too personal to tell the whole world, because it only belongs to the two of us. Even if it’s something we’ve told ourselves or others, our reactions to it are our own and should have come with beer.

Oh, wait. It did, one night. We celebrated my divorce virtually with beer. By that time, there was no conflict. I was just glad the marriage was over and she was glad for me. There was really no turning back, and we both knew it. She just didn’t pick up the extent of it because all she saw was me spiraling out in teenage blushing madness and not the very real possibility that we’d actually need each other.

My mother is dead, and so are all three of my grandmothers. It’s just one of the reasons I needed her- that loss of female energy all around me. I hope I gave her more than she told me I did, but even if she never does, I have my guesses…. And have to try to stuff down the automatic reaction that it’s probably bullshit according to her. I lost my sense of up and down, the feeling in all relationships as to whether open and closed door personalities matter.

It would have been ridiculous to dump someone that close to me if her marrying a man was my issue. It’s not, and it won’t ever be. It’s that it changed her identity in such a fundamental way that I realized just how much had been going on in her life that she just neglected to mention. She wasn’t purposefully hiding anything, she was protective of herself and unwilling to let go on the off chance that there would be more devastation emotionally. I understand all of that. Our differences come in where I was absolutely lionhearted in my belief that I could just invite her to do something and the spell would be broken for both of us. We’d become real people, and not even the people we used to be to each other.

It has not escaped my attention that I got shut down when I asked her for any attention at all. Those two things together told me that she might love me, but she was never going to actually commit to talking, she was never going to actually commit to anything because if she was, she would have by now. She would have seen my dreams and said “that sounds cool. I will totally come visit you.” She danced around everything, his Ginger Rogers and my Fred Astaire (I couldn’t lead at gunpoint, so if she can’t, either, we’re fucked up now. I would find it devastatingly hard to believe she does not know how to lead.

I pictured coffee with both of them at different times, letting my characters play. With him, I joked to her that he’d be all “wake up, loser.” But what I meant was being that person that I could look at with one glance and tell how Supergrover was maintaining. She’s a handful, and he’s capable. I would never put him before her- that’s not what women friendship does. But don’t think I can’t tell how Lindsay’s doing just by looking at Matt.

I’m betting they have about the same Starbucks tab as well, which I’m sure is extraordinarily healthy for both of them.

Again, letting them be characters is like the show at the end of “Dawson’s Creek.” OMFG. I’m going to cry. I’ve been Dawson at the end for ten years. Happy for Pacey and Joey, glad to be along for the ride, and eventually did his own thing just to get some distance….. where Pacey and Joey were the stars of the show. My God.

They became his characters, we just work in different mediums. If my characters are playing right now, they’re watching Dawson’s Creek and telling me I got something right, but they’ll never admit it.

It’s healing to be able to walk away while treating myself. I can’t treat myself with drugs, but I can certainly spend more than an hour a week on self-improvement. Pro Tip: Therapy doesn’t work without homework.

Here’s the writing prompt that got me started on the whole healing journey in 2003.

My mother never……………

I don’t remember the whole thing, and it’s gone now (I think). It’s from Clever Title. I wrote:

My mother never found herself. She stood behind a black robe, one after the other. (Her partner once my parents divorced was a judge, and my dad was a minister, which worked very well in this piece.) I talked about how she changed things bit by bit, like adding spices to a soup, but not enough to alter the flavor significantly. This is because I thought she cared wayyyyyy too damn much what other people thought, and I didn’t for the life of me want to be her. My mother was a gracious, loving woman crippled by so much fear of not being the perfect family that we all struggled to be that for her.

It was the start of realizing I could have an opinion, because no one else ever held back on us. Then, she died, without ever realizing how big the world could get when you actualize….. when you step into yourself.

She cooked her husband dinner every night and deferred to all his opinions, which weren’t bad but definitely more conservative than mine. I was actually close to one of his daughters, because she was chair of Mexican Studies at UTSA before she died and we were both geeked out over Tony Mendez….. and she was geeked out over me, and who doesn’t like people who think they’re amazing?

If it seems like that is extraordinarily harsh, it is a direct line to my personality. The one that hurts for everyone else. The one that wants everything to give to everyone else. My mother was like that to her core, built for it, and so am I. But when the person who is helping doesn’t have somewhere to go with their feelings, they resent all the people they care for who aren’t stepping up. That’s because I have been so reticent to express any needs at all that if you wanted to help me, you couldn’t.

So, for the first time in my life, I reached out to someone for help. It was the most embarrassing thing I’d ever done, because I reached out to someone who said “why do you expect everyone to fix you?” What I should have said is that I spend most nights thinking about your issues, where’s your five minutes for mine if I don’t make you pay attention for 300 seconds in a row?”

What I actually said was…….. nothing.

It was the right move and it helped me, but it didn’t help me get rid of all the bitterness and resentment because she could justify her emotional unavailability. What ruined my relationship with her was ultimately my relationship with Jesus, because my faith teaches me that we have to own the forgiveness of sins. Remission is right out.

This is because the remission of sin is their erasure. It’s sweeping it under the rug and pretending it didn’t happen. Forgiveness is saying you’re wrong, saying your’re sorry, and letting scar tissue heal over.

We had a remission/forgiveness debate and she lost, because remission wasn’t acceptable. She wasn’t growing with me, she was fighting me. I was regressing. Like I said, mutually assured destruction because she’d pop off with the same tired crap and I’d fall for it every time, escalation mode engaged. The one time I did come out of a fight like that clear headed, I was dumb enough to go back for more. It’s not because she’s a bad person. I just should have realized that if there was going to be a pattern change, it was on her, because I’d already spent eight years doing our work for me. Relationships grow and change and tumble and climb. What got to me was being able to say emotions and not hear them. She would probably say that my ears were clogged, but in the last eight years if I’d been deep diving into something, she wouldn’t say I had a point there, either.

That’s because if I bring up the past, she’ll say there’s nothing she can do about it. She’ll say she’s not a perfect person, but she won’t say “I’m sorry.” There’s no acknowledgement that talking is a good thing.

If she really wanted to put the fear of God in me, she would have texted “we need to talk.”

Although the last really funny exchange we had was that she told me it was interesting the kinds of people I talked to on the Internet, and I said, “many women before you have taught me to be wary when they say “it’s just interesting.” 😛 When I made her laugh all my feelings spilled out. She just does that to me. If she gets tickled, I’m not far behind and vice versa.

Speaking of which, she actually still owes me some work product. A 12 page report with graphs and color glossy pictures, if I recall correctly. I mean, she did send me the bullet points, so I think I’ve got it, but concentration is key.

If you know that reference, you are REALLY an OG. All I have to say to that is “well, I guess I owe her a report, too. My graph will just ride on more metrics.“

One of the things that we talked about that’s really stuck with me is the idea of the complicated construct. We are both forceful when we need to be, Southern when we don’t. Neither of us see gender in us as much as we see gender on us, because again, she’s been a boss for a long time. Her patois reads male, her voice…… music…. and I don’t think she’d phrase it that way, but I’m the reader. If I were to challenge her as a writer, I’d ask her to write a love letter to a person, place, or thing. I don’t think people ask her to do that very often, and it’s counter to her nature.

If turnabout was fair play, it would be a task list with two things on it.

WHY GOD, WHY?

I’m just feeling good that I can laugh and be out with it. All the feelings. All the love. All the anger. All the tears.

Things are going well, because I am healing through getting to know my own version of my characters, because even though they’re based on real people, they’re not exact because they can’t be.

“You want me to write accurately about your vibe? Show it to me. Put up or shut up. Not looking for an invitation, but not looking to be punished over what I don’t know, either.”

If there’s any anger that will stay, it’s that the line above didn’t do a damn thing to change our dynamic, so I knew it ultimately wouldn’t.

I suppose I’m rattling on because it’s twofold. She’s not listening, so I need to hear me. Also, these entries won’t mean anything in a few months. Then, it’ll be another ten years and I’ll be sobbing in reminiscence.

Because things are going well.

Me, Myself, and I

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

On what subject(s) are you an authority?

The only subject I am comfortable projecting authority is me, and you would find it amazing the sheer number of people who want to revoke my degree. It is my work not to take their opinions seriously, because they simply have not spent as much time with the subject as I have. Totally nuts, completely self aware, trying to put herself back together. That’s the elevator pitch, I guess. The “completely nuts” will never go away. It just has to be managed, and admittedly it’s not such a great time right now, but it is getting better.

I feel like I lost my shit yesterday, I was so blindsided by a wave of grief I didn’t see coming. Everything I’d ever done to offend anyone was beating down on me, so of course not only did I ruin my beautiful girl’s life, but because I didn’t know she had a boyfriend/husband, I couldn’t freak out about those implications, but I did yesterday because I was berating myself for a hundred percent of everything. Yes, she was a total jerk to me, but I felt that way after not being heard on the same issue for years and then being told that it was tiresome to hear about said issue. It would have been good to know that subject was tired because I thought she hadn’t read it. So much information was lost between keyboard and chair.

And that’s what I’m thinking about. All the thoughts between us that didn’t get expressed and now need to find a box for safekeeping. In allowing myself to get that angry, that upset, I realized what a mess I had created by assuming everything was fine, writing everything exactly the way I always did.

It wasn’t fine. I didn’t start talking to her any differently, same cadence, same tone, same temperature, some everything except the reaction my words would create. I tried too hard, and it came across as trying to get attention, when in reality I was just grieving a loss and hoping I was wrong… that I’d be found.

I’m not upset that she cannot forgive me in the way that I would like to be forgiven. That is not my call. I am frustrated that it took so very long to reach the same conclusion we would have had, anyway.

Or maybe I’m just being hard on myself, because looking at her words, I still cannot find a clear path. I am just going to have to chalk it up to the nature of the Internet.

When I am not looking at her words, I recognize others’ footfalls and get in line. The path that I’m creating is walking away from her indecision, because not knowing whether I was welcome or not made me walk on eggshells a hundred percent of the time while apologizing for my existence.

I could talk about anything with her except her…. which made me in the unenviable position of having to ask myself what to say, which was invariably wrong.

She’s right. It was a hundred percent clear I wasn’t getting what I wanted, because she didn’t want to answer anything, ever, at all. It didn’t make any sense, because she liked talking about my dating life, my mental health, my cooking, my career, etc. She felt free to tell me anything she wanted to about anyone in my life, but got pissed off if I said anything about anyone in hers. When I hurt her, I set up the double standard that she could be as close to me as she wanted, and also to be angry that I wanted to know things.

She could pick apart my dates, and I didn’t even know she was with anyone officially, because she told me she was seeing someone and then never mentioned him again. I am glad that I just assumed it all worked out, because it did.

Now I’m getting tired of the story in my head and wish it would leave me alone. I’m getting the distance I need to be free, and it feels like I’m tripping into the light. It wouldn’t be me if I didn’t.

The story in my head is bigger than me and has to stop adding layers. Enough is enough. I just think I’m done and then another wave hits me.

That’s because during the original break, I never really gave myself enough time to pick out the shrapnel before I started apologizing. This time, it’s been months because something happened this time that didn’t happen before. My faith in her is broken. Hers in me had broken long beforehand, it’s just that she was polite and I was blind.

We just don’t fit anymore, and it was a mistake to think that with time, everything would look better.

Trust me. I’m the authority.

Needs Work, tbh

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

How do you express your gratitude?

I feel gratitude flowing through me like water that my mental health issues dam. If I am trying to relieve emotional pain and trying to find its source, the path often leaves out how thankful I am because I am not working on that core. Particularly with writing, it gets out of control because I am not taking time to choose my words carefully. My rage ignites and it’s not pretty when it goes off. I am constantly learning to manage it, because I didn’t know where it was coming from for a number of years. It is hard work developing self-soothing mechanisms trying to recover from PTSD. I have said unforgivable things to the most important people in my life. It’s not their job to stay when it gets bad, so I am not trying to avoid culpability. I am having compassion for myself in the wake of my own consequences. I am entitled that without infringing on anyone else’s belief system.

It’s hard going back to the life I had before I had a goddess that talked back, very much a real description because since our relationship was virtual, the voice I made for her in my head echoed in my chest. “I’m averting my eyes!” “Well, stop it.” I’ve worked for years trying to shut down “The Committee,” the tapes in my head that provide my inner monologue. It hits different when you’re trying to shut down your external monologue that is also, in fact, your internal monologue.

The best part of a virtual relationship is that it’s all still here. We don’t have to create new memories. I’ve saved them all up. When I need her, I’ve got her just as much as I ever did. That’s enough, and she makes me smile and feel strong. So whether she ever thinks working it out is a good idea or not, I think she’s fantastic. No author has ever met such a beautiful character. I hope I can do her justice, because nothing will mean more to me over time than having a real picture of her in my mind that is not all good or bad but true. That it’s possible to drive me up the wall without dulling my curiosity or want to be near you.

I’ve always thought of myself as a Merlin-type character. I’m not so much into fantasy, but my favorite character when I was a kid was Merlin from “Sword in the Stone,” because even as a child I was a grumpy old man.

If I have the heart of a grumpy old wizard, she has the heart of a knight. Brave, crazy, stupid, wild, glorious, swings at every pitch and hopes for the best while I am the world’s biggest baseball fan when she’s at bat.

I’m fairly certain that if you could call it a sport, she could letter in it.

I’m absolutely certain that if you could call it a sport, I couldn’t.

I think one of he biggest things that was helpful in our relationship is that she had to wear suits and crap for work. I didn’t. Our perspectives are completely different. She’s been a boss for a long time. It’s fun busting her balls because I can tell she’s wrapped a little too tight. I am constantly rubbing up against her ire with kitchen humor, because as she got used to me being an asshole, she could flip shit back at me like the best chef I ever had. Nobody has ever made me laugh harder or be prouder with two letters, and you have to be an OG to know that one.

Guess you had to be there.

Nothing made me more grateful than laughing together, and nothing destroyed me more than realizing she’d always see my attempts at humor as negative, because I’d hurt her. I have never avoided accountability. She has avoided talking about how we could make things better so that I don’t constantly annoy her. I feel stupid that I thought I mattered more than I did- that I could have just walked away at any time without discussing anything and she wouldn’t have noticed.

It didn’t start out that way. How it started is not how it’s going, and that meme is solid. Because I hurt her, I was not a grumpy old wizard anymore, and I would have walked away happily if I’d known then what I know now. I thought she was reaching out to get closer, and now I don’t know what she meant by writing to me at all. My guess is that she has never believed any of this is real. That people develop real feelings even when the relationship is virtual. That surely my love for her can’t be as real and solid as it is. What I love about that is she doesn’t know how stable we are, but I do. I don’t have to dwell in negativity. I can just be grateful we met at all, because in some ways she was a character I needed to meet. In others, my writing has created a character for her. I hope that character loves as deeply as my beautiful girl, because I know what her real life sunshine is like. She turned the sun away from me, but I set it in motion. I’ll regret it for the rest of my life, because it betrayed who I really am.

I’m a sweet, quiet geek who fell in love with the smallest place inside her, the one that had been missing. She was a catalyst for that change, so I fell in love with her, too. That’s because the love didn’t center around who she was entirely, but the two of us because I liked who she helped me to be. I’m stronger than I was. I’d have to be to walk away. I just got tired of trying to be less, so I asked her to be more.

And that was that.

Meeting “The One”

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What are you most worried about for the future?

One off the reasons that my beautiful girl destroyed me is that we affected each other with our secrets to an absolutely enormous degree, so over time she’d forgotten how deep our rabbit hole went. We went deep enough that in order for me to move on, we needed to start managing practical consequences and she told me she wasn’t interested. What didn’t mean anything to her might have ruined me for anyone else in terms of priority, and she didn’t think of that, I guarantee it. I’d met “The One” in a very roundabout way, because it wasn’t an affair I had to manage. It was off the wall feelings on both sides. She had to protect what I knew and vice versa. It was mutually assured destruction because she asked me to forget an impossible amount of shit.

I thought it was better to love each other through it, she thought it was better to tell me that I thought she was a bad person. That was never an issue, ever. At issue was “if you’re going to tell me something like this, love me the way I love you. I won’t accept less.” It wasn’t that I was goading and provoking. I had a genuine issue in talking about an issue because she had a genuine talent in avoidance.

I shouldn’t have settled, and I didn’t. But we’re still managing each other’s secrets and lies without our refuge in the cloud. It would never be worth that kind of devotion without that kind of love. I do have to forget, and not because I wanted to. Because she thought I couldn’t handle it. I could, as long as she could take it as easily as she could dish.

That’s what ruined our relationship. If I said something negative, she’d rip me a new one. If I said something positive, I’d never hear from her. My emotions frightened her, always, and they should have. She helped make them that intense without recognizing me, ever, so whether she appreciated my willingness to be hers or not, it was a stone cold fact.

If I say I would have done anything for her, I mean it. I got brownie points for an e-mail about busting my ass at her house after a storm, because we live close enough that it wouldn’t be a weird offer at all. It would have been a weird offer from Houston or Portland, but the move was a coincidence because I didn’t want to just pick up and start over in a new city, and I lived here 20 years ago from the time I made the decision to move back. If Minneapolis had been my hometown, I would have moved there. The first is that because our relationship was virtual, we could be anywhere. The second is that planes exist. I would have eaten it up if she’d come to Portland or Houston. I would have shown her on a platonic date in either city, and I only say that because that’s what it would look like now. In the beginning, we could have been a threesome if Dana hadn’t decided to be jealous. Polyamory is a thing, not that I’m necessarily that in practice, but if I hadn’t been so wrapped up in new relationship energy, I think she would have easily forgiven me and I would have gotten over it and the negative aspects of our relationship would have smoothed over in time.

New relationship energy ate my lunch because it was so different for me and so normal for her. Getting into a relationship with her hits different and because she’s already her, she’s not so aware of it.

Which scares me about the future.