Tag: Relationships

Unfair

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

In reading over my past entries, I’ve realized that I’ve been truly unfair to Aada and she deserves an apology. Recently, things did change drastically and I skipped over that part to rage about the past. It was a few months ago that she said she was willing to be open and not have a lot of boundaries, but that was only a couple of weeks before she told me that she lied because she wanted to impress me. Therefore, we did not get a lot of time together in this new phase of hers before my bipolar disorder decided to flip out.

I do not know why I chose to get that angry, that fast. It was a white lie that snowballed, as they all do. I think that the reason I got so angry was because she told me she never lied, and put such a brass ring on the truth that it held me to unbelievably high standards. Meanwhile, this lie was pathological and it had been running underneath our relationship for 12 years. Why was it so entrenched? She never thought that I’d find out.

The rule was that she could lie to other people, but she couldn’t lie to me. I never lied to her, but it seemed like it. That’s because I told her that I’d deleted all of my e-mail from and to her, then later found something I’d written that I really liked in another forgotten inbox. It wasn’t a lie, it was the passage of time. I am utterly destroyed that I was stupid enough to delete everything, but at the time I was hallucinating that she could restore everything if I needed it. Therefore, everything that made me love her more than life itself is gone. It’s probably better that way, because I would often go back and reread everything, making me lost in the past instead of creating a future.

I mentioned that I needed space to recover from this bout, and she has said that she has no interest in being friends with someone who’d treat her like I did. So it remains to be seen whether she will always think of me the same way she does right now. She has every right to be angry. I have every right to be angry, too. However, I think that friends often say they don’t want a relationship and change their minds years down the road. I don’t hope for much, but I do hope for that.

I don’t think it’s better that she’s gone. I think it’s better that she’s gone right now.

My family is going through changes so fast that I cannot predict where I’ll be in the coming months. It’s enough that I’ve been asked not to talk about it, but I will say that these changes make me unsettled and longing to take care of everyone. It’s very difficult being far away from both my sisters and my dad, and impossible for them to come and visit me. We talk on the phone and text a lot, but it is not the same.

Therefore, while it would be nice to have Aada’s “mama wolverine claws” dug into my heart, it’s okay that we’re not talking. I need to go through these changes alone, and perhaps tell her about them once time has passed. That remains to be seen. I wish I knew if I was hallucinating or if she’s still mad enough for it to last a lifetime, but I have decided that it doesn’t matter. I can only throw my wishes up into the air and hope they come back to earth.

I can give plenty of examples in the past when we were both mad enough to never talk again and it lasted a few months. So, again, it remains to be seen whether this relationship is really over, or if it is “over.” In some ways, I think it has run its course due to something I said:

Here’s how I can help you. Walk into your therapist’s office and show them everything I’ve written.

That got her therapist to tell her I had a habit of manipulating her, that this was all my fault. Fine, if that’s the way I’m being seen, I don’t need this relationship. She says that I am damaging to her, and that’s the last thing I want. It makes more sense in my mind just to let her go than to ever hurt her again. But I do not think that I am the only manipulator. I think that she reads my blog and decides it’s ok to drop in after a while, not taking in how much my heart bleeds when she walks away. The reason I think she doesn’t take it in is that it’s all here. I have never written about her in a way that’s light reading.

Where I fail is in letting go. I have loved her so intensely for so long that I just don’t know what to do with myself.

:::cue White Stripes:::

The thing is, she loves me intensely, too. It’s just not the same for her because she has never felt those teenage, blushing butterflies for anyone with a female body, much less me. That does not mean she doesn’t have feelings that are deep, where we both run like a river under the other’s skin. We’ve managed to create an unusual kinship, and I have no doubt that she’s hurting, too. She must be. She lost a friend in this deal, too. One that hurt her beyond all measure, and feels the guilt weighing on my chest like a rock.

I have always had trouble believing that she liked me, because most of her e-mail is so strident. But then she’ll surprise me by saying that I’m very impressive as a writer and those letters are the ones I miss the most. I have never thought of myself as impressive, and she was the first person to really believe in me. She thought I was more well-known than I actually am when we met. My one claim to fame is that I was recognized on the street once in Portland, but that was 20 years ago.

I lost myself in hurting her, because that was not the end goal. The end goal was getting well for me. It was bringing my life back into the light, because the secrecy surrounding this relationship was not good. We’d blocked each other on everything so that our relationship only lived in one bubble, away from the rest of my friends and marked them as unsafe. I wanted her to be able to communicate with my other friends so that our relationship was more normalized. She didn’t want to get together with other people.

In all fairness, that’s probably okay. She would have liked Bryn better than me. 😉

But there was a point. I wanted her to have other people in her life who knew me. I wanted us to have context outside of just talking to each other. We tended to get lost in our own little world, not knowing how to fix it when it became toxic. We’d just separate, and then come back together when the heat died down.

It was a cycle I’m not eager to repeat, and why I’m trying to write my way out of this mess. I don’t want to long for a friendship that isn’t there. I don’t want to cry over someone who isn’t crying over me…. and I’m not even sure that’s true. It’s easy to pretend that she doesn’t care, but I think she cares more than she’d ever let on. I just have never seen her express those kinds of emotions unless she was so angry that she popped off.

But toxicity is not something I want in this relationship, if there is to be a future after this round of heat dies down. I want to love her with my whole heart, and that means getting myself healthy first. I need therapy to understand why my own popping off caused such pain for her, and why I felt it was necessary to bring her into the light when she wanted to stay hidden. I am by no means a perfect person, and I have shown it. I have been incredibly unfair to someone I claimed to love. So how do I keep it from happening in the future?

I needed to listen more than I talked, something I’ll always regret because time cannot move backwards. All I can do is say that I’m going through something huge in letting go, but I realize that it’s time. Wishes may come true down the line, but I cannot count on them. It’s why I vacillate between being glad that Aada is gone and wishing desperately that she was here. I cannot make up my mind because what I want is the idealistic version of what our relationship could be, and not the toxicity we’ve given each other over the last 12 years.

I need to stop writing about her, but nothing else puts me in the mood to write quite like she does, because she inspires me to be better than I am. That’s been her job for a long time, molding me into a writer that connects with an audience through examples from my own life. I wish that I’d made her my editor a long time ago, because I have a feeling we would have created something spectacular together rather than fighting each other over what I’ve written.

And in the end, I just miss her. I wish that I could have done everything right. Because she’s been my yellow string, my emotional support, since 2013. It leaves me empty to know that I hurt her, and the crying won’t stop any time soon. That’s because my apologies are no good, and something feels final. All I can do is hope, but that’s not nothing.

Hope is a thing with feathers, but it takes a hell of a lot to get it off the ground.

All of Them, with AuDHD

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
Which activities make you lose track of time?
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I could while away the hours just writing, and often do. But there are other activities that make time irrelevant:

  • “Playing” with My Computer
    • Most people would not consider installing an operating system “playing.” However, I like to try out different versions of Linux and can spend hours perfecting my desktop. Right now, I just have the vanilla version of Ubuntu installed, but lately I’ve tried Cinnamon, Mate (like the tea), KDE, and in a fit of insanity, switched over to Red Hat. The installer crashed, which is why I’m back to Ubuntu. I don’t know why I bothered with Red Hat. I haven’t used it since college. I think I was just feeling a bit sentimental, not realizing that the commands are different and I would have to learn a different way of “speaking” to my desktop. To be clear, I did not cause the installer crash. I just realized I didn’t want to have to learn a whole new system, making me grateful for the same old crap I already had.
  • Gaming
    • Gaming should be in quotes because I really only like “Skyrim.” I’m not sure you can call yourself a proper gamer if you only like one game. I was introduced to “Skyrim” by my brother-in-law, because I was watching him play on his Xbox and thought, “that looks fun.” A few days later I was fighting dragons on my PC. And in fact, I had to buy it twice because of the modding community. The first time, I bought it through GOG and the scripting engine was broken by an update. I have it through Steam now, which allows me to install it on both my Windows and Linux PCs. I am sure that you could get the GOG version working on Linux if you were a programmer, but Steam support is so much better that it’s not worth the hassle.
      • If you are interested, my character is a Wood Elf/Bosmer named Quinn. I’m deadly with a bow and arrow, so I generally conjure companions for melee (Dremora Lords are particularly good) and find a spot to pick people off, hidden behind a rock.
  • Cleaning
    • When I clean and organize, it takes hours because I will find things I haven’t used in forever. It stops the process as I sort through pictures, books, knickknacks, you name it. But there’s a rhythm to cleaning that is soothing, and I enjoy it when I am able. I have trouble taking care of myself due to my autism, but when I’m on top of it, I am absolutely “Anal Annie.” And in fact, I should probably take a nap to get ready for a marathon cleaning session today. I’d like to be able to host a friend this weekend and my apartment isn’t ready for that kind of commitment. If you make promises to yourself like that and often beat yourself up with guilt, I have a book for that called “How to Keep House While Drowning.” It has been revolutionary in helping me do what I can do with my compromised state. Executive dysfunction is real.
  • Reading
    • I inhale books. I’m a member of Kindle Unlimited because I’ve made a lot of author friends and want to read them all for the cost of one book a month. It’s also nice to be able to get most books that are recommended to me through KU as well. I’ve had to buy very little recently, but I’ve certainly gotten my money’s worth. For the $12 I paid this month, I read five books that were $8.00 apiece, and another that was $20.
  • Walking
    • I’m a member of Planet Fitness, and one of my favorite activities is to set a program on the treadmill for incline and zone out to the TV, YouTube, or a podcast. If I’m listening to music, it’s usually “Podrunner,” a running podcast sorted by beats per minute and the DJ is fantastic. But most of the time I’m listening to whatever is on TV at the club. I tend to show up during all the talk shows, reminiscent of when my mother and I used to walk every day during The Oprah Winfrey Show.
  • Watching TV
    • I love to write so much that I’m always looking for smart television to up my game in terms of story construction. However, I also enjoy actual construction and “This Old House” is my comfort show. I have learned so much that I would seriously think about buying a house if I was married… because I don’t want to do all that work by myself. 😉

Oooh, even thinking about me being married again gives me the shivers. I do not want to get lost in thought on that. So I think we’ll call it for today and pick back up later. I have a house to clean……… ALL BY MYSELF, THANKS.

Wisdom

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What do you think gets better with age?
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I think that the only thing that gets better with age is wisdom. You have enough life experiences to react with more ease and grace than you did in your younger years because so much has happened to you that you know what deserves your time and what doesn’t. You have enough regrets to know not to commit the same mistakes, as well as enough victories to know what works.

You become better at regulating your own emotions, and controlling your own behavior. You realize that every problem begins and ends with you. You have no need to count on others to provide the answers, because you realize that they are only speaking from their experiences when they provide advice, which cannot line up to your own. It isn’t that you stop taking advice (necessarily), it just looks different because you have a better sense of what will fit you and what won’t.

I have recognized that these are the things I need to work on in my own life, this continuing to learn emotional regulation and impulse control. I lost the great love of my life over it, because I was so angry that she lied I could not function. As a result, it made me so depressed I needed counseling and still struggle with those demons. The thing that makes me feel better about the whole situation is that I am not the great love of hers, so we will drift apart naturally over time as I forgive myself and move on.

The thing is, though, I am being dragged kicking and screaming toward my own redemption. Getting better with age feels so far away because this relationship did not express any wisdom in controlling impulses or emotional regulation. I popped off. Full stop. That comes with my brand of neurodivergence, but it doesn’t mean that I am not accountable for my actions. I am filled with sentences like, “if I could go back, these are the things I would change.” But they are useless and would fall on deaf ears.

I sit like an old wizard twisting his beard, alone in my castle.

What I can do is provide comfort to myself- that I haven’t met all the people I’m going to love in my life, nor have I met all the people who are going to love me. I can only work on myself and try to become the idealist my personality profile says I am. I am tripped up by my own mental illness, and that comes with its own set of problems. They require addressing, because I am tired of not being included in the safety net of a local friend group and it’s my health that stops me from getting out and making one.

I have become too introverted with age, refusing to leave my house in favor of communicating through writing. Though there is nothing wrong with that in moderation, the pendulum has swung too far. Letters are not enough, but it’s amazing how much they’ve provided over the years. I have more friends in other places than I do in Baltimore and DC, and keep in touch with them daily thanks to the Internet. But something is missing without contact comfort, and I’m tired of pretending that I don’t need handshakes, hugs, and face time.

I suppose that also had to come with age, because I had to go on this journey to figure it out.

I have spent the last 12 years touch-starved and lonely because I was more interested in learning about my pen pal than reaching out to people in my area. I gave her too much power, another morsel of wisdom that has only come with age. I am not sorry that I fell in love with her writing, because she’s damn good at it. But I’m sorry that it isolated me to the point where I didn’t want relationships with other people. I just hung on two words:

Someday, perhaps…..

I still hang on those words occasionally because none of this feels real. Nothing feels final because it never has. We will always have a reader/writer connection because even when she’s not in touch with me, she’s still reading here. I can only hope that I will write something that will resonate with her, because she sees that I am learning and growing in wisdom. That may be a pipe dream, but I’m allowed to have them.

Wisdom is telling me to have a wait and see attitude, because every time I think that my connection to her is shallow, she surprises me with depth. She has always surprised me with depth, because I will get two or three words from her for months on end, feeling rejected and small until the Mama Wolverine claws come out of nowhere and slash my problems from me. If nothing else, I will miss that about her in the future.

Getting better with age is allowing myself to be my own Mama Wolverine, slashing problems away on my own. I think that has been the point all these years, learning to stand up for myself. I didn’t so much fall in love with a pen pal as I fell in love with the person I was when I was writing to her. Even she says that meeting her in person couldn’t live up to my imagination, which made me blush because she knows my imagination better than I do and I think was trying to poke a little fun.

Eventually, what I hope gets better with age is letting go of her as the voice in my head to which I compare my own.

The Aada-See

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What could you let go of, for the sake of harmony?
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The Homerian epic that has been my relationship with Aada needs to go for my own peace of mind. We have hurt each other over and over, trying to change… neither one of us has done well in that area. So now, it’s a blessing and releasing. I have asked God before to go with her where I can’t, and I repeat that prayer today. If I cannot be the friend that she needs, then I don’t want to be her friend at all.

It’s not that I don’t have hope of a redemption story, it’s that you can only have a redemption story if both parties are interested. She says that I have a need to manipulate both her and our relationship, without taking into account all the ways she’s manipulated me over the years. That’s for her and her therapist to work out, because her therapist will never meet me. She will never take in the drastic changes in my own personality as Aada’s edicts came down from on high.

The biggest is that I’d never had to keep a secret from my wife before, and that caused way more problems than it was worth. I suppose that I’m grateful I got to see Dana become violent so I knew she was capable of it before I spent any more time with her, but it all started with Aada saying “don’t talk to anyone.” The problem is that she made it where I couldn’t talk to her, either. I sat alone in my room with the weight of the world bearing on my stomach.

However, that was not our only problem.

She doesn’t realize just how much her lie cost me, and she never will. That’s because she didn’t come with me to a book talk with my favorite author. I couldn’t glance back at her and see her eyes when the question was asked, “so are you looking for a job now?” She couldn’t see the torrent of emotions running underneath my skin, but she could have if she’d been able to see my face. I was too nervous to say yes without her approval.

Through it all, I’ve charted our friendship on this web site, and I think it has helped me to see some perspective. I do not like it when Aada gets main character syndrome and fails to take in what I am actually saying. She skips over my pain and concentrates on her own. That has to stop, for both our sake. I am writing in hopes that she’ll listen to me. She is reading to look for attacks that aren’t there. She reams me out and I cry…. lather, rinse, repeat. It has been going on for 12 years now, and for the life of me I don’t know why I’ve hung in.

I guess you would just have to know how beautiful she is in spite of all her flaws and failures to know why she has been my Achilles heel.

But for the sake of harmony, I cannot hang in anymore.

She will continue to read everything I write, calling it toxic. The only way to stop that is to write about other things… I have to find a new muse, something that fills me with the passion to write. It shouldn’t be a person, because it puts too much on one relationship. I need to find nature, or God, or something.

The only thing left is to thank her for being the inspiration behind my writing thus far, and forgive her for all her missteps.

It’s so much easier than forgiving myself for mine.

Dreaming

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I know that because I betrayed Aada, she will never trust me again. That’s because she will not give me a chance to rebuild. The thought is devastating, and runs on repeat in my head. All of my thoughts of her are now intrusive, because there’s nothing I can or should do. I just need to leave well enough alone.

Unfortunately, that is not my personality.

I want to fix everything. Surely, there’s something I can do, something I can say that will make things right. I don’t do well with relationships ending, because I don’t think they ever do. As long as we’re both breathing, there’s still a connection. It is manhole cover in size, and I cannot manage to shut it down.

My energy goes through that chord even when we’re not talking, because I know that she can use all the prayers she can get, even though she wouldn’t call it that. She doesn’t “do” prayers. She used to call me her “pinch hitter,” and I hope that at the very least, she’ll think of me that way now. I know I have done wrong, but I do not want that to be my only narrative.

I don’t want to provoke her, as she says my blog entries are designed to do. I want to tell my other readers that this relationship has left me in a million little pieces. I have felt every feeling for her that a human can express, from deep love to deep anger. My anger got the best of me quite a few times over the years… and so has hers. Through it, we’ve managed to forgive over and over.

Therefore, even though Aada says that her decision is final, it does not feel real. It won’t for a very long time, because I will need to turn away from writing to her. I will need to turn away from writing about her. I will need to stop making her my first thought in the morning and my last thought at night. I will need to find other people to make those touchstones, and it is frightening.

I do not like moving on from someone I’ve loved this much over the years, one who agreed to be my yellow string on the murder board of polyamory (red strings are romantic, yellow strings are emotional support- making that very clear). Cutting a string is tantamount to cutting off a limb for me, because I feel emotions down to my neurons. Pain tears through me when I think that the other end of the string is an empty slot.

The truth is that she made friends with a blogger, not knowing what that meant. I made friends with someone in government, not knowing what that meant, either. We should have worked closely together, or she should have told me I couldn’t have a blog. Either would have been acceptable, as her career came first.

I don’t know how I lost sight of that fact, but I did. I didn’t say to myself, “self, you’re running in a different league now. Cut the shit.” Because all my writing is shit to me. I throw it out there and let other people tell me whether it’s good or not. It’s not my decision as to what has value.

Aada found tremendous value in my words at first, and then as our relationship became more enmeshed, the more she hated being a featured player. I am sure that I have done my part in embarrassing the hell out of her, but I hope I explained my writing to her behind the scenes well enough that she won’t hate it all in the future.

That’s dreaming, I’m sure.

I wish that I could stop crying, that the grief would lift long enough for me to get out and start making other friends. But so far, I’ve just stayed in my own little bubble. I need time and space to emote. Because I’m autistic, my emotions are large and need room to breathe. I need time alone for red mist rage at myself, because I did not get the future that I wanted.

I sabotaged it, and I will never know why. Perhaps I was tired of keeping secrets all the time, that it made my life too small. Perhaps I was tired of all the isolation, because Aada would not let me get closer to her. She kept me at arm’s length and let me sit in my discomfort at not knowing who she really was. I mean, I do know her writing voice and could pick it out of a lineup. I have memorized her face, but only in one photo.

I have dreamed many times of making her laugh, have sent her videos and pictures of myself so she could get to know me “in person.” I wanted to make the transition from online to offline as easy as possible. But I think that wanting to meet in person was just too intimidating. I cannot help but believe that when I asked her about it, she got nervous and started fighting with me just to end our relationship before it could happen.

I can see how meeting me would be intimidating given all that I’ve written, but I am strikingly different in conversation. I am disconnected from my writing and do not retain blog entries. Our relationship would have been without context. All of the love that I poured into my writing may or may not have been there after a coffee together, because who knows if we would have gotten along as well without the anonymous wall that the Internet presents?

I think about that all the time… that normalization of our friendship would have cut her out of my blog almost immediately. Why would I need to write about her? I just saw her yesterday! Etc.

I dream about what I would do if Aada came back to me and said that what I did was horrible and I have a ladder to climb if I really want to make things better. My answer is “anything. I’d do anything.” It is not up to me to decide how hurt she is, nor how many steps I’d have to climb. And right now, it’s just a dream.

I am preparing for the worst, that I’ll never see her again, and my heart is bleeding out. Hope slowly drains from me as I fumble around on this web site, trying to explain how a virtual relationship got me so twisted up that I cannot breathe. I am lucky that I have other people in my life who have gone through the same thing, that 10 years later it still hurts to think of an Internet friend who is no longer.

I remember saying that I thought she was scared, that frankly, she didn’t know what would happen if we were alone in a room together. Would our easy give and take transfer to conversation, or would we tear each other apart? She did not answer.

She did not answer a lot of my questions, preferring to hold her emotions close to the vest. I am attracted to that, because my emotions spill all over everywhere and I constantly tell myself that I need to learn compartmentalization. In all my friends and romantic partners, there’s been that disconnect in which I constantly crave their emotions when they are unable to show them.

I think that Aada was attracted to me energy-wise for the opposite reason. She saw her inability to emote and wanted to be more like me. That I was a breath of fresh air when she was stuck in the doldrums. But over time, that led to too many fights because I required her to do emotional labor.

I extol my love for Aada all over the place, but I wasn’t always happy with her. No relationship can claim that it’s always happy if it’s in any way dynamic.

Our dynamic was to have a very close moment and then separate, because Aada could not sustain it. Our dance of intimacy required separation after difficult conversations. I did not like it, because I couldn’t understand why closeness couldn’t stay in place. Now that I know more about her, I know that it wasn’t personal. It’s what she requires, and I fell down on the job.

I want to give her what she requires, and right now that is separation. It is not good for me, but her needs must come first. I am the one that hurt her this time, and it doesn’t matter what I think anymore.

I look in the mirror, and I am shattered.

Into a million little pieces that will eventually rearrange into a different order, with or without her.

A Letter That May Never Be Read

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Dear Aada,

In trying to talk about my own feelings, I exposed the world to my perceptions of what yours might be. It was wrong, and I’m sorry. I wish I could tell you why I did it, but there is no answer to that, just like there is no answer to the reason why you lied to me. What I do know for sure is that I did not set out to hurt you, that you were collateral damage in trying to explain my journey to everyone else.

I am sorry, like you said, “a million times over.”

I have no excuse for my behavior because there isn’t one. I fucked up. I also accept that you have no interest in working toward a future, and that’s what scares me the most. I don’t know who I am without you. I think, though, that I am going to find out.

This phase of my life has been rewarding, but also tremendously lonely and isolating. Your insistence that I tell no one anything at any time was also manipulative, because it marked all my other friends as unsafe. I sat with unbelievable anxiety in the pit of my stomach while I waited for letters from you, not reaching out to anyone else because I couldn’t. If anyone asked me what was wrong, I would not be able to tell them. I got to where I wouldn’t leave the house. My mental illness spiraled out of control. I didn’t get any relief until you said I could write about what I wanted.

I took your words seriously, that there’s nothing I could say that would hurt you now that your life is different. Then, come to find out, that wasn’t true at all. We could have avoided a lot of missteps in my publishing life if you had been clearer. I thought that for the first time, our lives were equally boring.

But they’re not.

If I had known then what I know now, I wouldn’t have published anything about our relationship at all, and yet it is the richest tapestry on this web site. I hope that one day your anger will lift, and you will go back a few years. I think you will be surprised at how much I’ve learned. That seems to be the way, anyway. My friends read about themselves and are incensed in the moment, and then when time has passed, my words just hit different.

I was never trying to manipulate you. I was trying to illustrate you- to paint you with words. I have often ripped you off blind, using things you’ve said so that you know I’m paying attention.

One of the most profound things you’ve ever said to me is that I “paint my feelings as fact.” I am still not sure what that means, but it’s such a beautiful line that I repeat it. I guess I just have never met a writer who didn’t paint their feelings as fact, because it’s their story.

It’s a line that I wish had led to an in-person conversation, because I would have liked to look into your eyes as you explained what you meant. I would have liked to look into your eyes as you explained lots of things. But knowing me, I would have worn a baseball cap to hide mine. I was social masked into eye contact at a young age. I could not hold your gaze long, but I would have tried.

I would have tried harder to be the friend that you needed me to be with more support from you, because guessing what was okay to publish and what wasn’t landed me in this mess. I do not blame you. I can only blame myself. But what I do know is that if we’d had any kind of production meeting, you’d be happier with the result.

I needed my editor.

I would burn this whole blog down to get her back, because that’s how much I believe in our ability to write together. You write fiction, I write nonfiction. I’ve had so many ideas over the years as to how we could harness this and make it profitable. Maybe I’d be a better editor for you because I wouldn’t catch plot holes, but I’d definitely catch spelling/grammar mistakes.

It’s just another dream that died, because we’re not on the same page.

I wish I could stop being so sad. My life feels over. I keep thinking about the conversations we had before I was admitted to Sinai and wondering how it all went to hell. I do know that when I was in the hospital, you were with me in spirit. You sat at the foot of my bed while I slept, watching to make sure I got healthy. There were too many signs of you to ignore.

How did you get that green shirt to me? How did it get back to you?

You are always the best.

We could start writing there… it’s a story that needs to be told in fiction for both of us, doesn’t it?

You are always the best.

You told me 12 years ago that you’d have lots of juicy bits for my first novel, and I still don’t know how to write fiction. I don’t visualize anything. My brain doesn’t come with that feature. You can see the whole map at once. I have a feeling that’s a large part of our story without saying anything. That you saw the whole map while I fumbled in the dark.

I’m still trying to find my way without a lantern.

That’s because I want to stay in my lane, writing what I know while you build the fictional worlds. I’d be a good research assistant and Dagger’s not hiring….

I wish I’d known how much you thought of me, wanted to impress me, wanted to be my friend as much as I wanted to be yours. I know all of that can’t possibly still be true, but I’m flattered nonetheless.

I wasn’t the one that said you were a nobody. To me, you’re the greatest thing since sliced bread. I was trying to send you a message, and you thought I was being literal, launching an assault with words.

I thought you would know by now how I feel about you after years and years of telling you EVERY DAY how much I feel for you. I’m not sure a day has gone by in 12 years that I haven’t written to you, my blog coming in second because if I was responding to you, my other readers just didn’t matter.

I believe that part of you is proud to be Aada, because when I write about other subjects my emotions don’t run as deep or as real. Part of you, I’m sure, would like me to push the big red button and move on to something else. But how are you going to feel when I do?

You said that you learn more about yourself when you’re reading me, and that comment sticks in my mind as well. It’s what I wish every reader took away. That they read me to learn more about them.

Stay away for as long as you need, because the thing about letters is that they keep. The thing about blog entries is that they keep. You have a treasure trove here that you may not want to lose. I have not always behaved badly. Neither have you. We have grown and learned much just by being so incredibly different.

You are logic. I am emotion. We are built to be complementary angles, but we flounder by dividing up all the labor. Sometimes, I must be more logical. Sometimes, you must be more emotional. But that’s only if there’s a relationship to fix. I don’t think there is right now, I’m just going off past history. Eventually, you’ll want to know what I’m up to and you’ll drop a note out of nowhere, and I will be prepared. I know you well enough to know that you’re thinking, “that’s impossible.” But life is long, and we haven’t managed to stay away from each other yet.

I really would sit down with you and your therapist if the opportunity presented itself, because I do not want to be a manipulative force in your life. I have told you for years that I came to DC to do great things, and in no world do I want you to be excluded from them.

I would also sit down with your husband and answer any question he threw at me, and in my imagination, the first is, “what in the absolute hell is wrong with you?” I would probably cry and say that many doctors have tried to figure that out, but they’re still scratching their heads. Join the club.

If this is really the end, I hope he’s the one for you. I hope your family, friends, and colleagues are there to fill the hole that I left in your heart. I’m only now realizing that I made one, because our relationship was so turbulent that I didn’t take in your feelings, not a quarter of them.

I have cried so many nights, wanting to please you and not knowing that I already did. That I am enough, all by myself. I’m sorry for every moment that you did not feel like enough, all by yourself… and that is what was so surprising about your lie. That you didn’t believe I was sufficiently impressed with you, as you are.

My God, Aada… if you only knew.

When my mother died, the only person I wanted was you. I couldn’t emote in front of people, but I could write letters into the night. I would not have recovered without it. So know that even if we never speak again, I will always remember your contributions to making me feel like there is life after the death of a loved one.

My life won’t be as interesting without you, but I have to be prepared for the fact that your anger will stay in place. That what I have done is too big to forget or forgive.

All I can say is that the emotions you said I had weren’t accurate in the slightest. You read me wrong, just like I read you wrong.

My point for the last year has been that we need to stop reading each other, because there are so many ways we could communicate our feelings. I have heard you talk in a voice note, but you have never picked up the phone. I have never seen your body language, micro aggressions, facial expressions, anything to indicate what is going on with you except words in the heat of the moment.

Surely there is a part of you that wishes you knew those things about me… that we hadn’t put it off so long. I hate that I know your coffee order and have never actually gotten to bring you one. I hate that we have never taken a walk. I hate that I only know you in black and white, because I know that there’s a well of information I’m missing and so are you.

We could fix this if we tried, but I cannot hope for that. I can only hope that I can recover on my own. But know that it is a setback of enormous proportions. I will have to work hard to forgive myself for everything I have done and left undone.

Because you are always the best.

Love,

Leslie

Structure of My Own Making

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

When I wrote about this prompt last year, I remember saying that I didn’t have any daily habits. That was 100% true at the time, but now I’m charged with creating a structure with which I can live. My care team at Cognitive Behavioral Health does not think I am ready for a job yet, so I am muddling through what that actually means. Am I disabled for good and should start pursuing government assistance, or am I capable of slowly creating my own recovery into the workforce? My writing does provide a little bit of income, and as I get more popular here and on Medium, I see results. I’ve been a blogger for a very long time, but so far I’ve only had one fan who was so impressed she thought I should be world famous. I would like a few more of those. 😉 But nothing good will happen if I do not take care of myself.

This starts with setting medication reminders in my phone. My day flags if I do not have the correct doses at the right time. I have always been good about taking my medication because I had a doctor tell me that most bipolar patients stop taking their medication when they feel better, not realizing that it’s the medication that’s making them feel that way. However, I was not so on top of it that I remembered to take it at the same time. I’m also on a lot more medication than I used to be……………

I’ll talk about my psychiatric drugs because I think that people need to learn about them. I am not a doctor, just a waiting room that doesn’t suck (thanks, Paul Gilmartin. I stole that line from you). Crazy meds need to be talked about because it’s such a major undertaking to be put on them:

  • Lamictal (lamotrigine)
    • The first time I was put on this mood stabilizer was the first time I knew what it was like to live without depression. It took about six weeks for the fog to lift, but I’d never been more grateful in my life. The only side effect I’ve experienced so far is nausea, and it was very hard to deal with for a long time. Now, I’ve just decided to stay on it regardless of the side effects because other mood stabilizers make my weight balloon. It’s also an old drug now, so it’s relatively cheap if you don’t have insurance.
  • Lexapro (escitalopram)
    • This is the gold standard of SSRIs, and most bipolar people don’t take them. That’s why I think my diagnosis may be wrong, that I actually have autism and not bipolar disorder. In a bipolar patient, SSRIs tend to make them flip out with suicidal ideation, negative/intrusive thoughts, etc. My SSRI keeps me at an even keel when I am really paying attention to my body. As for side effects, I haven’t noticed any of them.
  • Buspar (buspirone)
    • This is what replaced my benzos for anxiety, because it is not related to them and yet performs the same function. It’s better for me because there’s no risk of addiction long term. I do not have an addictive personality, but better safe than sorry. I have been on Klonopin for over 10 years, but my new clinic doesn’t prescribe benzos to anyone. The entire hospital system has put their feet down over it, so I have to adjust. Now that I’ve been on it for several weeks, I am unsure whether it works or not. I will keep you posted. The one thing I do know is that it’s the most important drug for me to take at the same time every day, because it will flat stop working if I miss even one dose.

My crazy meds aren’t the only ones I take, they’re just the most important for keeping my structure stable. It feels like everything is hitting all at once as I age, because I didn’t have to worry about hormone replacement therapy even a year ago.

As an aside, it’s a big joke with my sister that because I’m enby, I thought that if I was going to do hormone replacement therapy, it would be in the other direction…. after that particular doctor’s appointment, I went home and consoled myself by buying both the book and audiobook of “Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe.” I needed some Stress Tabs #10 and some candy bars (but maybe not 11). As it turns out, the book and audio were not enough. I also watched the movie on Prime just to see Kathy Bates… “how do you accidentally run into someone…. how do you accidentally run into someone six times?” I get it now. I’m older and I have more insurance.

My medication is working, and for that I am grateful. Now, my schedule runs from sun up to sun down, skipping the night owl routine altogether. And in fact, when I took my sleeping medication yesterday, the sun wasn’t even fully down yet. I prefer to work in the quiet of the morning, especially on the weekends before the kids in my apartment complex wake. The ones who live above me are particularly loud, which is why I’m glad I have good headphones. I hunker down in my office after a night of wild dreams and try to remember what they are. It provides a writing exercise that’s all my own, propelling me into really thinking about my life and what I want to accomplish. I accomplish nothing without coffee, through which all things are possible.

Coffee is also part of remembering to take my medication, because I have found that a lot of caffeine is just enough to control my ADHD, but Ritalin or Adderrall is too big a jump. I have a coffee machine that makes a cup at a time, and my preferred coffee is Cafe Bustelo. It’s in honor of my old chef, John Kinkaid, because we used to walk to a Cuban restaurant between prep and service for their Cafe Bustelo lattes.

I mentioned in “Why It All Still Hurts” that I was working on a nonprofit, and I am… but that dream has been deferred. Kinkaid was killed in a car accident. I am still reeling from the grief, but I got Kindle Unlimited and added five books on starting a nonprofit to my library. Again, the idea is dinner with dignity, offering the unhoused food they could never afford on their own, and opening my kitchen up to take homeless people on as apprentices if they’d like to learn the trade. I am still sold on this idea, it’s just going to take a lot longer to accomplish than I thought.

That’s because the longer I think about it, the more ideas I have. What if instead of this one nonprofit, we were able to build a library like Oodi in Baltimore? There, I could have my cooking classes and a place to serve food, plus books and maker tools for everyone. My structure these days is centered on how to spend the government’s money for the good of the people. Learning about Oodi and all the services they provide gave me a bigger goal than just “dinner with dignity.” It would give the unhoused a place to go. Maybe my purpose is not to go to Finland, but to bring Finnish ideas to a city that needs them. I want to redirect Maryland’s money from the DC metro area and Annapolis to Baltimore, because it is so underserved. A lot of the city is completely trashed out with no way to fix anything…. or so it seems from an outsider’s perspective that just moved here in December.

I need more time to watch and wait, gathering stakeholders and formatting a business plan. Perhaps my structure will always be internal, because that’s how autists work best. I do not want to go down in history as merely a blogger. I want to create something beautiful that will last and bring hope to people that might not be feeling it that day.

I find that working on giving hope to other people is the easiest way to claim hope for myself. I am slowly building a structure into which I can grow, taking others’ ideas and implementing them like a plant takes root in the soil.

But it all starts with remembering to take my medication.

I Feel So Weird

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I feel like the poster child for the digital age, having had an entire relationship from beginning to end over the Internet, pen pals for 12 years with only a few pictures and one voice note to show for it. That’s because I’ve deleted the millions and millions of words between us on one e-mail account, and am in the process of cleaning out the others. I cannot bring myself to delete the last one, though, because it’s so full of anger that it lets me know two things. The first is that I didn’t get the e-mail I wanted, but I did get the e-mail I deserved. The second is that Aada does indeed love me, because people who don’t care don’t get that angry.

My journey to take is why I was so doubtful that her love was real. That I needed it to be more grounded when she thought it was already in the dirt. Why was I so insistent that meeting in person would fix everything? Because my writer personality is not the sum total of me. I’m introverted and quiet unless I’m involved in a conversation with people who are giving me energy. In person, I am much less likely to engage, preferring to watch my surroundings. I wanted her to know that side of me, because she’s the person I wanted to sit next to as I stared out into the beyond.

If I think back to when my mother died, that’s when I needed her the most. She’s got big mom energy, and I needed to soak in it. She didn’t have to say anything in my grief, I just wanted her presence.

I still do, and I hope that over time she forgets how angry she is right now. I wish that I had been a less turbulent force in her life, because I own my part. There was no way we couldn’t be turbulent without the normalcy of conversation… e-mail allowed us to go down the wrong path much faster than we would looking into each other’s eyes.

I wish she’d seen my crooked-yet-endearing smile. I wish she’d seen my disabilities. I wish she’d seen my autism up close and personal, as well as the ADHD that plagues me. All of these things would have given her more insight into this person that she thought was so impressive at first… because I do not think that I am.

I wish I’d taken in that she wanted to impress me, because I was always trying to impress her.

What would it have looked like if she’d told me long ago that she was intimidated by me, that she’d lied about knowing an author to impress me before it became pathological? I would have laughed. But by the time she’d told me about her lie, it was so deep and involved that I could not help but react in anger.

What would it be like if I could take all that back? What would it be like if I could go back to day one?

I might have gotten our picnic if I’d just been cool. I could not be cool because I fell all over myself in hero worship, not knowing that she was equally jazzed… I mean, why would anyone be impressed with me? I’m a third rate hack who emotionally vomits all over the Internet.

I’m not Jenny Lawson, for Chrissakes.

Am I embarrassed that I fell in love with her? No, but I’m embarrassed by all the ways I’ve shown it. I’m sure her husband would have some choice words for me, but I’m not even sure he knows I exist. However, if he does, I hope he’s taken it in stride and would roast me rather than be angry, because of all people he should know that his wife is utterly incapable of returning feelings for an enby with a female body. And besides, I don’t know her in 3D. Behind every beautiful straight woman is a man who is often sick of her shit. I don’t have to put up with any of it, so how could I really know what it’s like?

The butterflies in my stomach would have gone away much easier watching her actually be said straight woman. Over the internet, her patois is as gruff as any man’s. Meanwhile, in real life apparently she is cute and cuddly because I’m the one that got the cactus. I don’t feel bad for wanting to meet the cute and cuddly side of her, but I don’t know why it couldn’t be arranged. I am sure that I scared her with the intensity of my love- but to be fair, she scared me with the intensity of hers. She cannot return my feelings when it comes to romance, but God help anyone who tried to cross me. Many of my former friends and exes, we joke, are buried under her pool. I hope she will do me a solid and keep them there.

She has told me that I am part of her wild and crazy brain, so I can only hope that when the heat dies down, she’ll come back to me. I don’t hope for much, but I do hope for that. Life is long, and grief is weird. She will never truly leave me, because she only tries to stay away from my web site. There is no telling what I will say that will make her think, “Leslie needs me.”

Let me clear that right up. There’s no situation in which I don’t need her. I pop off and get angry, saying that I don’t want this relationship but I cannot bring myself to actually mean it. She got under my skin in two seconds flat, and I haven’t stopped thinking about her for 12 years. I have often put my own needs below hers, and I thought that since she told me there was nothing I could say that would hurt her professionally that I could write about what I wanted. There was a gap between what was said and what was meant. I cannot take back anything I’ve written

Nothing here is meant to provoke her, but it does. This is a problem because when she says I’m trying to make her mad, she will not listen to me when I say that my writing is not for her. It’s for everyone, because I’m not trying to do anything but show my audience what it’s like to live in my own head, to think with me through enormous relationship problems that they may be going through themselves. I think that my digital love is a new take on relationships because it’s something that has happened many times to people my age and younger, the architects of the current social media landscape when it first began because we were the people lost in Internet Relay Chat first.

Aada is not my first digital love, but she’s the longest, outlasting my marriage by four years.

No one in my life takes in that part of it. She is now the longest love of my life, and I do not know what to do with that information except file it away, knowing it’s true and yet trying to forget. I need to connect with other people and I’m at a loss as to how. I want to secret away into our little bubble again, and I’ve had a hard time adjusting (really hard). I cannot believe I was willing to give up so much for e-mail… because she was going to meet me in person one day. Surely it will be next year. Maybe now that it’s been five years. Maybe now that it’s been eight. At the 11 year mark, we talked seriously about baby steps. I am certain that she thought she needed to unburden herself of this lie before she actually met me in person, and ran when I got angry… not knowing that I would indeed get over it.

I keep composing an e-mail in my head…

Dear Aada,

Don’t do this. Don’t cut me off. We are each a part of each other’s wild and crazy brains. Losing you is like losing my right hand…………….

And that’s where it ends because I know that she doesn’t feel that way about me.

Or does she?

That is where I have always been unclear, because I am so vocal about my love for her and she’s got all her emotions tied behind her back… but the wall comes down occasionally and the Mama Wolverine claws come out with the clear message that I am hers. Those are the moments I’ve lived for, because they’re few and far between… yet just so precious.

I am mystified that Aada’s therapist thinks that I have a need to manipulate her and our relationship because I am a blogger who writes about their relationships and experiences. I have always been that. It’s why Aada sought me out in the first place- she was impressed by the way I lived my life out loud. And then everything she loved about my writing became something to castigate once she was my actual friend.

I have not changed. Aada’s view of me has changed.

The difference between her and me is that I would actually sit down with her and her therapist and try to create healthy coping mechanisms to bring our relationship into the future. I know that my writing is a basket of crazy and I do not want to stop Aada from getting healthy if I’m the problem… nor do I really want a future without her.

I think that being digital friends allowed patterns to become entrenched that do not happen in verbal conversation, and that we could find a way forwards with some frank discussions with eye contact. I don’t believe that I’m not the problem. I don’t believe I’m the solution, either. I just want to be. It is not in my nature to hurt someone and not have empathy swallow me up. I have done wrong and I know it.

I have also admitted my flaws and failures every step of the way.

The bitch of it is that I know we love each other. I know it like I know the earth is round. But sometimes, love isn’t enough. The way I hurt her may be too big to fix, because I broke her confidence due to my own mental illness. I was so depressed and anxious that her love couldn’t reach me.

So what would I do in the future that’s different? I would listen closer, because I don’t think I really took in her feelings. They are muted in a way that I cannot always see/hear/feel them. I miss social cues, particularly over the Internet, so I’ve glossed over what she’s written and published my own takes on what I thought she said instead of what she actually did.

I would insist on meeting in person, as intimidating as that is to both of us, because it would lessen my need to write about her if I wasn’t lost in imagining who she is… because that’s all an Internet friend can do, imagine the context in which a person operates. I imagined her as a hero, and she hasn’t entirely fallen off that pedestal for me to see her as a normal person.

It blinded me to a lot, but there’s nothing I wouldn’t take for my journey now.

That doesn’t make it less weird.

Boundaries

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I wish that I could have stuck to the boundaries that Aada set for me about not talking to anyone. I really do. It would have made my life a whole lot easier in terms of not upsetting the apple cart. She didn’t recognize that her secrets were big enough to constantly make me sick to my stomach with anxiety… and not because I didn’t tell her. She was too busy to pay attention to all the warning signs that I was going down. I cannot imagine how much a face to face conversation would have helped, but I cannot hope for that anymore. I can only hope that as I move forwards in time, my mind will quiet on its own.

I have been told that my actions were disgusting, that I had a need to prove something by talking about our relationship. I had nothing to prove because all I wanted was relief. I was isolated beyond belief with one friend who wouldn’t really let me have any others, because I couldn’t share what was troubling me to any of them. I chose Michael because I thought… no, I didn’t really think. I was desperate. I couldn’t hold on anymore. He quieted all the anxiety in my mind, but he also caught Aada in a lie. When he did that, one string pulled all the others.

She said I was like a child in a toy store with “you’ll sure as shit get her side, Dagger.” No, that wasn’t delight. That was anger. That was truth pain. That was “if she lies to everyone else, she’ll lie to you, too.” But at least Dagger “isn’t Michelle Obama, for Chrissakes.” My reaction to that line is unprintable, because she knew it would hurt… and it did. That’s because Dagger is precious to me. No one disrespects Dagger in my presence, one so large they identify as the definite article. Michael told me to e-mail them both at the same time, because if they knew each other, it wouldn’t be a big deal. They didn’t, and it was…. especially because the lie snowballed over 12 years to the point that she made me block her on Facebook, ending a relationship I wanted professionally.

I’m just sick over all of it… some days so angry I cannot function that Aada picked up her toys and went home… at others willing to beg and plead like a five year old. I cannot be angry at anyone but me, because apparently if I’d done everything she said the way she said to do it, I’d be sipping coffee on her back porch right now. But is it all really my fault when I told Aada for years that I was anxious and upset? Yes, it really is. The stakes were too high, and I ignored them. I also cannot take anything back.

It is not true that I am the only one at fault for our demise, however. We both did a number on each other when all we really wanted was love… again, not like that. She’s been my muse for 12 years because the only thing more beautiful than her face is her mind… and I met her mind first.

Oh, wait.

That’s not true. The first time I saw her picture I was instantly charmed because she looked like a comic book character. Her hair spoke to me. 😛

I hate small talk, so little jokes became heart to heart conversations in which I disconnected from everyone else just to spend more time with her. And because I couldn’t tell anyone about our conversations, when I was with other people I was there but not present. I retreated into myself so fully that even my family had trouble connecting with me, and that was fine with Aada as well. As long as her secrets were safe, who cared what happened to me?

I waited until I got the all clear from her- that there was nothing I could say that would hurt her- before I started talking about the last few years. Then, a few days ago, she told me that wasn’t true. That people in her professional life had told her they were reading my blog and that was dangerous. So, Aada’s work people, welcome aboard, I guess. I wouldn’t have invited you, but now that you’re here, I suppose you can stay… as if I have any control over who reads me at all, or would even know.

Don’t give her any shit, she’s already been through it having to deal with my sorry ass… though that’s what I hear you’ve already been doing- making sure she’s okay. Keep doing it. If she won’t let me love her, then congratulations. It’s your job now. I’m alternately the easiest and hardest act to follow you’ll find.

That’s because I drive her insane, but I’ve had my moments.

And this is where I start to cry and shake, because those moments are precious to me. I will never love like this again because there will be no circumstances in my life like the ones in which we met. You’ll have to go back and read all 12 years because I’m too tired to talk about them today.

I am not too tired to talk about how my brain chemicals are rearranged with grief, because I deleted everything in my Gmail account both from and to her. That means that our most precious moments from when our relationship began are no more. They at least live in my memory, but I cannot take them out and read them as they happened. In some ways, this is for the best as I tended to reread often and dwell on them, not moving forward in time. I just wasn’t smart enough to see all the consequences involved between what is said and what is meant.

“There’s nothing you could say that would hurt me” has been the biggest lie of all, because of course when you lot showed up (Aada’s work colleagues), I wanted to crawl in a hole and die. The very least you could do is send me some swag through the mail.

Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ.

After all the shit we’ve been through, I’m still finishing up this entry in tears because despite everything, I’m losing my favorite person. But I think that “my favorite person” has been an idea for a long time, and she’s not real. I’ve never gotten to sit down with her and hammer out details on what is acceptable to say and what isn’t, so no wonder my blog is an absolute shit show when she reads. The one thing that makes me sad is that when she reads, she does not take in my thoughts and feelings. She does not see me as a separate person. If she doesn’t agree with something I thought and felt, it is not that we’re different, it’s that I lied.

For instance, I said, “I do not want you to feel like you’re cheating on your husband when you’re talking to me.” That doesn’t mean that Aada has ever actually felt this way. It meant it was something I worried about. I didn’t lie about jack shit, because if Aada had said, “I’ve never felt that,” I would have been relieved and that would have been the end of the conversation.

She says that she is also not the person I portray here, and that I agree with wholeheartedly. I only know her in 2D, while the rest of her friends and family get to experience her laughter. I have never heard her laugh….

And I’m sure not laughing now. I broke a ton of boundaries after I thought it was safe, because there was nothing I could say that would hurt her.

When the best thing for me would probably have been not to talk at all.

How Do I Keep from Screaming?

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I have done it this time. I have successfully killed a relationship that I really wanted to last long after we did, because we’re both writers. I just want to scream into the void, hoping it swallows me up.

The one thing that keeps me going is Jesus, and I wish I was being funny. The resurrection is a wonderful metaphor for forgiving each other later in life and moving on… or what I will do to resurrect myself after this little death. Who knows which way it will go given our long history of death and resurrection already? I’m trying to stay away from her, she’s trying to stay away from me. It’s not going that well on either side because she still reads me. Maybe all we need is time to get over what has happened, and maybe it’s best if we move on. I think that depends on a lot of factors, but I know what I want. It’s her- it’s always been her. I just don’t think she’ll choose me, because I’ve let her down. I’ve hurt her and I know it, but I don’t know how to make it up to her. I can’t just write my way out of this one, but I can try…. resurrection happens in the middle of the mess.

If there is a second thing helping the resurrection along, it’s my blog, because at the very least the last 12 years will outlive me, a biography for those who lie and love their audience.

I am so sad that I want to get down on my knees and beg, and I’m not sure why. Our relationship has been turbulent from the beginning and I don’t know why I should want that. Mostly, it’s what I know and cannot turn away quickly… but that is dismissive of who Aada is as a person I want to work with to create something beautiful. Our relationship has been that at times, and we’ve both wanted to get back to it. I cannot know what our future holds, together or separately. I can just throw wishes up into the air and see if any of them stick.

I want our attachment to be secure and non-volatile. She seems to think that I manipulate her so it will never turn into that. She loves me enough to say goodbye over and over, but not enough to make sure it doesn’t happen in advance. I do not like the roller coaster. I like my dreams in which we’re just us, laughing over whatever… even if it’s at my expense. I think I would make her laugh. I accidentally do my own stunts. The fact that she’s now married doesn’t bother me in the slightest, because she’s so secure in that relationship and I’m so secure in the fact that she loves me the best way she knows how (when we’re getting along).

I was jealous of her then-boyfriend for about three minutes. Three minutes is all it took to realize two things. The first was that I loved her so much that I needed for her to be happy, no matter what that looked like. The second was that I needed her emotional support way more than I needed romance, and she was up for it. I didn’t want to be bitter and angry I didn’t get a diamond ring, I wanted to be overjoyed that this woman would have me in her life at all… and that’s been my theme over the years. Just be happy she loves you on her terms, because you cannot believe how deep that water runs.

I wanted her to be with me for all of my huge life events, and so far I cannot even get her to meet for lunch. We make great pen pals, but she will not show herself. It makes no sense to me because she literally lied about knowing my favorite author just to impress me, so if she was so impressed, why has she stayed away? If I think about that part of it too long, I actually do start screaming. She wanted to meet me because she was impressed with me, and then stayed away for over a decade.

WHY? WHY, GOD? WHY? I’M SERIOUS!

God doesn’t know, either.

I used to dream of taking her on a picnic so that we could drink wine in the sunshine, forgetting about all our problems. And yes, I am aware that she already has friends and family with whom to do such a thing. I never wanted any part in separating her from any of them… most particularly her now-husband.

Because I cannot hide behind anything I’ve ever written, I was hoping that he’d roast the everliving shit out of me on a daily basis (I am laughing very hard). I’ve never met Mr. Aada, but the reason I’d want to is to make sure he loves her the way she needs to be loved. How would I do that? By watching them together. I have no need to intrude because if Aada is happy, then so am I. I’ve had 12 years to get used to the idea that she’s not queer and not available. I have also had 12 years to intimately understand that my heart flipped the fuck out and it doesn’t matter. My feelings just stay steady, my heart walking out of my chest when I think of her………. I just let her set boundaries and abide by them.

When I read the Outlander series, I knew I wanted to be the Lord John Grey to her Jamie for the rest of my life.

She has not so quietly loved me like a house on fire in return, because she absolutely is my James Alexander Malcolm McKenzie Fraser. I can speak to her in ways that other people can’t because she’s glued to my writing. I draw her like a moth to a flame. She’s intimidated by me because she thinks that her writing isn’t as good as mine, when in reality I think that my writing pales in comparison to hers. She doesn’t often have time to write long letters, but when she does I memorize them. I wish everyone could read her long letters, or that she was also a blogger. I think you’d find that I’m the hack.

If you meet her, you’ll never forget.

If you love her, it will be a runaway train.

If you lose her, you’ll rue the day.

Which is why I’m just here, screaming into the void. I know on some level that this post is delusional, because I’ve done enough to push her away for the rest of our lives. But maybe it’s not. Maybe something will push us back together that neither one of us can see right now, because I have no idea what she’ll read and think, “that motherfucker…. let me get my purse.”

That is a direct quote from her regarding the last man that tried to hurt me. Now, I’m sure that I’m the one with the big purse headed towards me. I just wish there was something I could do to change the arc.

In short, this sucks.

I hate our situation and am desperate to improve it, but there’s nothing I can do. My heart hurts and the only solution for that is Ben & Jerry’s.

And time spent screaming into the void.

Learning to Manage

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I wrote last night that I was learning to manage without Aada in my life, but this morning I have a different take. When she’s not in contact with me, I try to do everything I can to distract myself from the fact that she’s not coming back. That all the dreams I had for working together are dead. I’d sent her an e-mail last week, imploring her not to be embarrassed about lying, because my friend Michael had posited that she was, and that was the reason she was staying away. I wanted her to know I didn’t care. I just wanted my friend back. I then went back to avoiding thinking about her at all, and forgot I’d sent anything.

So yesterday, when I actually did get correspondence from Aada, my adrenaline, dopamine, and cortisol went sky high. As I mentioned, it was not pleasant, and “ripped me a new asshole.”

Technically, she ripped me a brand new two bedroom, two bathroom double wide asshole, as from the movie “Bernie.”

I was up most of the night after two sleeping pills because I just could not quiet my mind. I kept rereading her anger and wanting to quiet it, knowing nothing will do that but time. I have learned over the years that it’s better not to fight fire with fire, so my response was as meek as I get. I also don’t think she’ll get it, because the last line of her e-mail was that she was going to block me… but she’ll read it here:

You may have blocked me already, but I only have two things to say. The first is that I didn’t lie to you. I deleted everything in my Gmail account and then found the one from January in my Hotmail account months later. Not the same thing. The second is that you missed the point about [my friend] Michael. He told me he thought you were avoiding me because you were embarrassed, and I was trying to tell you not to be.

That is all. I wish you all the love and peace in the world, and I wish I could be part of it. But I know I’m sick, and I’m trying to get well. I wanted you to be a part of the wellness, but I’m not sure you’d ever be open to it. 

I’ll still be writing for myself about my own thoughts and feelings whether you’re there to read them or not. That’s how it’s always been, that’s how it’ll always be. You’ve been the center of my world for the past 12 years and I’m supposed to get over it and forget it in a few months?

No.

I am sorry for all the hurt that I’ve caused, and I am trying to work forwards without you. It’s not going so well, to be honest. Even seeing that I got an e-mail from you nine hours ago made my heart beat too fast because I thought, “she’ll never get this one. I’ll be too late.”

I don’t know how to talk to you anymore, but I won’t stop blogging. I don’t have another life to write about instead. This is the only one I’ve got.

If you thought I lied about anything in January, you could have told me that then. I would have listened.

I don’t set out to irritate you, I just do.

I don’t know what else to say.

I stared at the ceiling until sleep finally overtook me around 3:00 AM.

She called me out on saying that I deleted all my e-mails from her. She called me out on betraying her confidence. She called me out on everything I’ve ever done, and I deserved it. That doesn’t mean I don’t get the right to feel. She isolated me from every one of my other friends with her schtick and wouldn’t accept me into her life with full faith and credit. So, I couldn’t get close to her, and I couldn’t get close to anyone else. I thought I was doing the right thing by confiding in someone else who was also IC, because I needed an objective ear. He just happened to put together more than I actually said because he already knew the building blocks.

I don’t think Aada ever took in how damaging her isolation was to me, and still doesn’t. She said she had no interest in being friends with me because I talked to Michael about her, and that’s fine. Michael and I actually have a healthy relationship in which he doesn’t require me to be secretive, isolating to the point where I have no other friends. It was this kind of shit fit that led to my divorce as well. “Don’t talk to me, and don’t talk to anyone else, either.”

She feels that she’s not responsible for my divorce in any way, that it was all my decision. But what choice did I have, really? I couldn’t compartmentalize, therefore I couldn’t keep secrets from my wife. I also couldn’t separate from Aada because the damage had already been done. I was trauma bonded to her on multiple levels, one that I felt go off last night, sending my brain chemicals into such overdrive that enough sleeping medication to down a baby elephant didn’t help.

I am tired of the narrative that I manipulate our relationship when she is guilty of doing the same. I cannot attach to other people in the same way I used to because according to her, I shouldn’t talk about our relationship at all. So while she’s off in her own little world, I have to cope with it. Talking with my wife always helped, because we’d pray about it together… until Aada hit the roof that I’d even said anything. In the church, my life has always been about care, connection, and community. I did not know how to section off a rope so my Members Only jacket was secure.

The Members Only jacket was a straight trip to a straitjacket instead.

I have spun out many times over the years, wanting her love and affection because I wasn’t getting it anywhere else. Recently, she told me I could say whatever I wanted…. and that turned out to be a false flag. Last night she berated me for my blog entries as if she’d never said that.

I cannot predict other people’s reactions to my writing, I can only go off what they say in advance. And to be fair, no one likes being written about all the time. I am free to say whatever I want as long as I glow about her, but saying anything negative is off limits. It’s not fair to me as a writer, because everyone in my life is 3D. There are going to be times when I’m happy and not, because I have the full range of emotions as a human being.

Learning to manage without Aada is trying to find the truth in all the years we wrote to each other while making room for new people. I don’t have enough life experience to move on yet, because talking about my last 12 years invariably involves all the time I spent writing to this one person. I’m trying to curate new experiences, like bumming around Baltimore with my sister, but not enough time has passed for me to change my writing altogether. It’s a conundrum, and one I won’t know how to solve with anything but time.

My cognitive behavioral health group helps, because I’m slowly making friends there. I even found two guys who go to my gym (though I haven’t run into them there). Walking seems to help, because the longer my endorphins stay high, the easier it is to feel like I’m walking away from my old life and into something new. Aada’s e-mail was just the high of seeing her name in my inbox and the aftermath of realizing she was not going to be kind.

She deserved her pound of flesh and I won’t take it away from her, but no one ever wants to be read the riot act. It was just more shaming into isolation. It feels as if I should have been happy only having one pen pal the rest of my life, a relationship so massive that it prevented me from seeing other people… yet not. Because I’m free to have a relationship with anyone I choose if I gain the ability to cut off a limb, or so it seems to me.

It’s not realistic, and I know that she does not give me the same courtesy. She can’t, because I’m a public figure… in moderation, of course. I choose to live my life out loud here, the thing she loved so much about me when we met. She took a butterfly and slowly cut off its wings.

I am not the only manipulative person in our relationship. But again, if that’s what her therapist thinks, then more power to them. They don’t know me, have never interviewed me, so what could they really know from one side of the story that may or may not be accurate? My guess is that it isn’t, because I cannot tell you how many times I’ve written Aada e-mail in which she completely missed the point I was trying to make and skewed it into something else. If she’s only taking what she reads into our relationship to her therapist, then of course the therapist doesn’t know shit from Shinola.â„¢

Again, there are three sides to every story…. yours, mine, and the truth.

It’s Aada’s therapist’s job to be on her side, and I support that. But to use that as “evidence” that one person is entirely wrong in a relationship when they’ve never met them is ludicrous.

I do know that I’ve done wrong, but I don’t think I’m the only one that has done wrong. Having someone lump all that on my head is just cruel. It makes it where I can’t sleep at night.

I’m learning to manage, but I cannot say it’s going well.

Why Does It All Still Hurt?

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Here’s a letter to Aada from January that I think is relevant now. I am still in this much pain, all the time. Nothing has changed, except that she lied about knowing Jonna and Tony Mendez and her profession. She was never a member of the intelligence community, she was a fraud who wanted to wind me up over the internet. It worked, to the point that I’m afraid to go to the spy museum anymore. I want to run into Jonna even less than I want to run into Aada.

It’s been a month, no recurrence of any dreams. I was just upset to the point of nausea and I always will be. No response is ever necessary, because I have created my own closure and moved on. But what I want you to know is that it was all real. All the love, all the tears, all the emotional dysregulation in which I gave in to emotions at either end of the spectrum.

I never want you to feel like you’re cheating on Michael when you’re talking to me, and I felt dirty for talking to you when I’d had a dream like that because it wouldn’t be fair to you to reopen that wound. But I hope you’ll hear that I told you 11 years ago it would come up again, and that it wasn’t an overarching problem. That I would deal with it as it came up, on my own. I have these intense feelings for you both because of who you are, who you have always been to me, and the edge on which I love to ride in terms of high on life.

Loving intelligence is my only vice these days, but I had to step back and reassess when I couldn’t make it through Jimmy Carter’s funeral without falling apart and thinking of Tony and how I hoped he was there to receive him…. you have to call in a Moses….

I will probably never finish “In True Face.” It’s too painful now, because I know more than one character. I’ve read “The Moscow Rules” and saw you skulking around Georgetown. I felt like I’d been stabbed, because all my feelings about our loss of possibility spilled onto the floor…. yet another time in which we’d become too volatile for words.

I know that’s what we both wanted to stop. I was trying to explain autistic red mist rage, PTSD, mental illness, everything from my point of view and how I saw you as a mirror to me, a broken child who needed to take refuge in a system. When it failed to be the UMC, I skulked into the shadows….

That’s where I found you, and want to live with you in the cloud as I have always said. But I think there were a lot of misconceptions that made me full of rage where you would berate me for my actions without taking responsibility for what triggered them. That I was wholly affected by your silence when we could have written something together that actually would have reflected both of us instead of just “Leslie’s Memory Trove That May or May Not Be Accurate.” Do you think that I wanted my story to be inaccurate? No. I wanted it to be as our relationship was- painful, honest, real.

I just cannot have that if you are not comfortable with me being in love with you once every 11 or 12 years. Whatever. It’s my bag, and I realized it will never go away. But what I can do is not think about it, not bring it up, not ever hint that I feel this way because you never said things shouldn’t go back to normal. You just let me trigger you until you couldn’t stand it so that my anxiety went through the roof. What would it have looked like if you corrected me in the moment rather than popping off and reaming me out for everything I said in jest? Why were you so fucking pissed that I was impressed with both who you are in real life and who you are in mine?

Why are you so fucking pissed when I treat you like a princess AND when I fuck up? How do I do anything right?

How do I get you to see that your reaction to me saying Aino was AuDHD was ableist BULLSHIT because you treated AuDHD like some sort of mental retardation, thus offending ME? Again, if you’re going to be offended by something, be offended by the fact that she’s probably smarter than you….. except she’s not because you have the pattern recognition of an autist as well. You just cannot predict autistic people because you’re social masking. You know what a neurotypical person is about to do, which is why you’ve been treating me the way you’ve been treating me for 11 years.

I wasn’t some stupid jackass fuckboi. I was charmed. Just head over heels. It was never supposed to happen and all of those feelings were above my pay grade. It cost me everything, but it was worth it. I am no longer the smartest stoner dumbass in my group of friends, but a fresh writer with a voice.

That’s because you taught me not to take any shit, even from you.

Fuckbois don’t learn anything. They just keep trying. I have been up front with you every day on where my emotions are, and they’re not rational because *emotions* aren’t rational. Logically, I can see every point you make. But there’s no emotion behind it. There was more emotion in your writing when you were mad at me than at any time in our relationship. That only lets me know one thing. You are comfortable with anger and avoid joy.

I will never get over “no one needs your help,” so I’m hoping to partner with Street to Kitchen and World Central Kitchen to bring a homeless ministry to West Baltimore that does pop-ups with famous chefs to make sure that homeless people get better meals than they could ever afford on their own. Our tagline is “dinner with dignity.” We’re working on shirts for the kitchen that say “No tattoos, no earrings, no profanity, no service.”

I am not a narcissist, Aada. I process empathy differently and so do you. We both have terrible gaps in our memories and everything that comes with all we’ve been through. I have always wanted to stop fighting you and start hugging you, but I have never known how. It has been like trying to hug a cactus on both sides….. because our dance of intimacy is so finely tuned. We have a close moment, wig out, and separate. Where is the balance we had in the beginning where we could both laugh?

Why did it become so defensive all the time as if I was out to get you, when the truth is that if things had been different I never would have let you go? That does not mean that I am bitter and angry and don’t accept you for who you are. That means your pattern recognition is off by a large margin. I have never wanted to hurt you. I have always been autistic and off my rocker, incapable of emotionally regulating myself and you incapable of emotionally regulating me in turn. You’re right- not your responsibility, but something that would have made our relationship instantly better…. a different sensory experience of each other than our writing personalities. We’re both professors when we want to be, because I listened to five beautiful pages about you and your sister’s relationship in which you analyzed her perfectly. You analyze my family perfectly. When I do it, it’s rude, offensive, and “why do you even think you know me?” Maybe because I’ve spent time with you every day for 11 years.

Time is relative. You visit me in the quiet. We talk it out. I try to understand you better even though I feel it’s all over. I won’t move forward without understanding why we fell apart, and now I know that. I wanted a secure connection, you wanted anxious/avoidant and not to change it. I won’t live that way, because it’s not a goal that you’re working towards. It’s a goal that you said you would, but I’m not worthy anymore because one thing wasn’t clear to you. I did not push you away forever. I pushed you away for asking a simple question and getting defense back, with you having no recognition that it had been 11 years’ worth of you not sharing anything and me trying to come up with things to talk about. You acted as if you had no agency to change anything, and we floundered.

But you know who I am. I’m that person you rescued and yet also hate my guts because I didn’t handle it well. How was I supposed to handle it? Like you. Except I’m your mirror opposite, the thing you were attracted to about me in the beginning- just energy. I’m not saying you have ever had feelings for me in any way. You are logic. I am emotion. The Twain don’t meet on that one.

Maybe we’ll never fix this, but learning I’m autistic has given me new ways to cope, but I assure you that I thought I was being kind. You coming across as STEM autistic and lacking in emotions once you stopped social masking was a clue to me that you weren’t a narcissist, either.

You used your power, Aada. You scared the hell out of me in a way I could never scare you. And then you expected me to pick up the pieces from that level fear all by myself. I spent years scared of you, unable to get over it and jumping up and down to make things better, horrified that I was just digging the hole deeper because you thought it was intrusive and I was trying my best.

I didn’t know what to do, because I’d managed to piss off someone I loved due to my own bad behavior and I’d never done anything like that before or since. I know myself better, can deal with myself better, can retreat when I feel any kind of blush. It’s not fair and it never has been, but I feel like in the beginning you didn’t care and now you do. Valid. But you didn’t send a memo so that my memory banks could be updated. You just expected I would know. I cannot pick up social cues in person. What makes you think it’s easier over the Internet?

I still stare at your pictures trying to get the sense of you that I missed. Everything you were trying to tell me and couldn’t.

I was trapped in the cycle of “don’t bother Aada because there’s nothing in your life that can compete” and “you’re her friend, too.” Except it’s been years since I really felt like that, because nothing has ever gone back to open communication.

You won’t share yourself with me, and you don’t trust me. What relationship is there to save? We would have to start completely over and there’s no way to do that. I feel like your dirty little secret and I always will. That’s because you don’t tell me how much you talk about me as if I’m a real person in your life. I had to guess that, too.

I also think that I had a right to be scared that you weren’t my friend. You were keeping your enemies closer. That it wasn’t genuine anymore, you just wanted to watch and be assured I wasn’t going off the rails. You could have done that a lot easier in person than you could as a disembodied voice.

You just kept telling me that my narrative was tired. Well, if you’re tired, imagine how tired I am bringing up the same problems all the time and they’re never fixed? It’s like talking to a brick wall, and I’m sure you’d say the same to me. You accept your feelings as valid, but won’t say “I hear you, see you, understand.” When did that become the norm?

I was never trying to diagnose you. I was trying to see you, hear you, understand. That’s what someone who loves you does, and I have been resolute that the blushing teenage feelings are never what mattered. It was all the ways we were able to come through for each other without it.

I don’t know why I’m even writing this except to say that you’ve created tapes in my head that will never go away, and I choose to talk about them while you keep yours hidden. Therefore, you’re always enraged and I’m always clueless. Keeping me clueless makes you angrier, but of course that’s all my fault. It couldn’t be that you purposefully left me with no information.

Our relationship is a tapestry, some of it beautiful, some of it terrible. I think that’s why I keep coming back. The benefits outweigh all the negative. But I stay away from you in order not to hurt you. I don’t want to add to your stress and I am done letting you interrupt my peace. I am happy to be the villain in your story if that’s what you need, but I have never been that. You made me that and admitted to it.

You’re afraid of me or something, and I cannot fix it. So I shrink away. I cannot care. I cannot love you because it only drives me mad without feedback. I don’t need to be driven mad as it’s a short trip.

You make my brain better when you don’t crash my dopamine and adrenaline with defense and anger. I am not saying I’ve never done the same to you. But the way I feel is that I tell my story, you don’t tell yours, and then get angry at the result.

When you knew I was a writer, you were my first fan, and then I wasn’t worth helping anymore. I could just sit in my fear and anguish while you were in actual danger because stop lying. I know you have to, but you’re too senior for every trip to be a pleasure cruise.

You wanted to ride off into the sunset. I wanted to give you a biography without telling people who you were, because in the end, you gave me all the important things. USG just gets you at work, and you’re so much more than that. My adoration is real and it’s deep- it has nothing to do with the trauma bond that makes me itch occasionally. I just cannot pretend it’s not real if it came up 11 years later in a dream. Dream analysis says it’s just “I miss you,” and that’s true. So I’m taking that part seriously and ignoring the rest.

My brain is a land mine. I didn’t mean to get my crazy spatter all over you. I was also panicking. I was also scared. We are equally yoked despite not being married because our problems are bigger than that. Or, I think of them that way. Maybe it’s not true, and you’re perfectly happy without controlling what I say. But I always think you want to and can’t, and that’s part of your frustration. That you won’t collaborate, you’ll just let me twist in the wind.

There’s no statute of limitations on guilt, as you said of our mutual friend many years ago, but I hope that one day we will actually have a conversation about what exactly went down and how much you cost me. What you have never taken in is that I was so glad to do it. The problem was not what you told me. It was hyping up my adrenaline that much and then saying that you weren’t going to talk about anything anymore, so I just had to sit there and guess.

You didn’t give me anything to work with, so I talked about myself and what I wished for you in the spirit of you getting healthy. But that was all taken as something negative and not I love you and want to help you.

I got tired of everything being an attack, because I was so fluid in my emotions and you had one tool- a hammer….. except in the few instances where you actually wanted to go to bat for me and that drove me crazy as well. Like, are you in or are you out?

I never decided violence was the way to your heart. You decided that we would work on fear and intimidation and I’ve never gotten over it. Then, you glossed over that part of my life and just showed up with an “I’m concerned about your family.” I cannot expect you to remember anything about any of this because it’s been so long. They’re just the moments that affected me more than they affected you (or that is my perception).

I am not who you think I am, and that is why I need separation. You will not allow yourself to see me as three dimensional character. You treat me as a “Flat Stanley” and make yourself one because you won’t give me room to grow and you won’t grow in your letters, either.

But the way to your heart is food, good hugs, and more food.

I at least know that.

If you write back, I will respond. Otherwise, goodbye and thank you. It wasn’t always fun. It was real.

I’m Still Figuring That Out

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What are you good at?
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I treated myself to new-to-me running shoes today, because my old ones were bought in 2015. I do not know what happened to them, because they’re still perfectly comfortable. However, the rubber is starting to fall off and the tread feels like it has been dipped in chemicals so that they do not grip. Instead of being able to walk/run, I tend to slide around when I’m wearing them, particularly at the gym because everything is tiled. When I changed into them, I could tell an immediate difference because the floor at the store was polished concrete and I was able to jog in place without slipping.

I suppose that I am good at shopping, because a parishioner at one of our churches when I was a kid gave me a black belt in Goodwill. I have bought everything there, including important occasion outfits, just because I know my brands. That’s the secret to being really good at shopping, in my humble opinion. Even if I struck it rich, I would still rather have a $3-500 suit that’s been laundered a thousand times to make sure it’s soft than something brand new off the rack. My best find was in the early aughts, a full London Fog trench with liner for $24.

I also don’t mind not having the latest style of anything, because my clothes could best be described as the “Visiting Professor’s Collection” at Macy’s. Anything I buy is going to look timeless, because my shirts tend to come in three colors:

  • White
  • Blue
  • White and Blue pinstripes

However, I also like a bit of whimsy. These shoes remind me of Warhol and Lichtenstein, so I think they’ll look perfect with jeans and a button down. I am going to calm down the orange laces a bit by changing to UpUGo elastic laces. They’re not quite as bright, and I don’t have to tie them. I’m certain they’re mostly for children, but I wear boys’ shoes, anyway. Plus, who doesn’t love shoes with a cute little button on top?

I suppose I am good at writing, although writing is like courage. In the moment, you’re just doing what it is you need to do to survive. You don’t realize until afterwards that you’ve been courageous. I do not think I am a good writer. I put things out into the world and other people tell me if I’m a good writer or not. My therapist said that I must know I’m a good writer…. I did not know what to say to that. I’m glad she thinks that, mostly, because she’s more learned than I am. I have learned that I do not want to be an egomaniac, I just want to have confidence. I know that’s what she was talking about, but even telling people I think I’m a good writer sounds arrogant to me, so I don’t.

I do think that I could do a good job handling communications for modern executives, though, because most people do not know how to write introductory e-mails for basic correspondence. I was actually talking to my sister about this the other day, that the secretary she would have been given in the 1950’s would have handled the heavy lifting that AI is trying to do currently. First of all, it is unlikely that a woman would have had her job in the 1950s, but I definitely could have been the Peggy Olson to her Don Draper if given the chance.

I might be happy as a church employee of some kind, because that’s the type correspondence I can manage easily. I was reminded of this today when my sister asked my dad if he’d had a mobile phone in the early 1990s and I replied how I used to answer it. In the car, it was “Rev. Lanagan’s rolling office!” At home, it was “Lanagan summer home… summer home, summer not.” One of the parishioners had some alternatives to this which are really, really funny…. and also unprintable.

I have a good memory because they’re not really memories. An autist sees everything, everywhere, all at once as if no time has passed. This is both good and bad as I also have no friendship degradation mechanics. That’s a psychological term for calling up your best friend in third grade as if they’re still in the same place you are. If they are also neurodivergent, like as not, they are. If they are neurotypical, “Lucy, you got some ‘splainin’ to do.”

I am not good at reading a room, and that has served me well in some cases. Please believe that I have crashed and burned in others, but sometimes not reading a room correctly takes away the fear one feels in an unfamiliar situation and allows me to talk to people I never would have otherwise. For instance, I wasn’t approaching Jonna Mendez, chief of disguise and better than a mere mortal. I was approaching an old friend of Aada’s. Now that I know Aada lied and there’s no connection between them, I fear Jonna like the goddess she is.

That’s probably not healthy, but it is what it is.

Realistically, I know that Jonna puts on her running shoes one foot at a time just like me. But in my head she has attained a mythical status. I got all my books signed when I went to see her, so I have no need to bug her again. It’s probably just embarrassment on my part and she wouldn’t think twice.

But in my head, what if it’s not?

What if I’ve embarrassed myself to the point where I’m no longer wanted? I’d rather just keep my memories sacred and walk away, because I’d rather not find out what happens next in this particular story. I have other friends that work in intelligence and can regale me with stories when we’re both old and, more importantly, “outside with a drink in our hands……………” as Jonna so eloquently put it at the book talk for “The Moscow Rules.”

Those are the friends to whom I’d like to be a research assistant on their books, because I like writing non-fiction. I am not a novelist, and doubt I ever will be. I’m not running away from writing fiction, I just don’t get it. For instance, I don’t visualize inside my head, so I don’t really know how to write setting. I’m a gardener, so I have problems with plot. Because I’m a blogger, I’m solid at character studies……………. sometimes.

I am sure that I could learn these things over time, but conventional wisdom is to write what you know. So far, what I know is the world around me. Washington reads like a novel whether you aim for fiction or not. The characters and plots are interesting in and of themselves, and you do not have to make them up. I will never know what my real story in Washington is, because a lot of it happened behind my back. This is not a bad thing, as I fell into a safety net of sorts. One I hated, but still. That whole time in my life would just be a book called “Heytch,” because the trap I fell into was wanting to love her the way she wanted to be loved.

For the record, I showed up at the hospital because two incredibly unlikely stories were presented to me and I was betting that at least one was true. It was the one where she and her husband were wild about each other, and I could just come and live with them as a member of the family. That she was not poly and never had been; that she made it up to entice me when she didn’t need it. I would have followed her into the ocean no matter what.

If you really know me, you know just how little dating means to me, and how much I love deep conversations over coffee that never lead to romance. I could picture us as little old ladies together, and that meant more to me than gold, especially with her big sister right there to kiss the top of my head as she walked by on the odd occasion we ran into each other. Maybe I will write that story, if only for me, because of course it’s fiction now.

Sometimes I wonder how much of fiction is really fiction, and how much of it is people writing down what they thought was happening to them that later turned out not to come to pass. Fiction equals nonfiction plus time, I suppose.

Lots of people will tell you that I had hallucinations, and it is up to you to decide whether I really did or not. It has to be fiction now because all of the evidence has been scrubbed, even by me. I wish I had taken many, many screenshots…. but I didn’t. It would have been nice to have the photo of Heytch’s hand bound to mine, her saying that she was my River Song, because even if it wasn’t real, it was beautiful.

I would have been excellent at telling fact from fiction in person, but everything was presented to me over the internet with the ominous phrase “you are always the best.” One version of the story took this literally, a woman laying her heart at my feet. The other talked about all the destruction I’d caused with my blog because I was too arrogant to see I was causing it. Both stories are true, because I have never pretended to be the best at anything and yet, these people are also entitled to their opinion. What I believe to be true is that no one in that bunch believes in second chances, and I could have explained a lot with one, but in person.

Adding more to our internet history was only adding fuel to an enormous fire with no opportunity to put it out.

I just thought “Heytch” was cute once upon a time. I would have cut off a limb to meet Aada. Both were unique experiences, but they were completely different. I’m also in a completely different emotional place regarding both of them, that I will continue to write what I want because they had no shame in absolutely submarining me. I will never feel credible in the way that I did before I was hospitalized, because when I talk about their internet shenanigans, they are written off as hallucinations that never happened…………. all the evidence is gone.

I’m not sure whether I should thank them or not, because I am good at being sober. I was never abusing any substance, but I wouldn’t have given them up if they hadn’t intervened. It’s not that I realized I was an addict, it’s that I got a better offer. I don’t know what that offer is yet, because I haven’t chased it. My cognitive behavioral health counselor says that I’m not ready for a job, and I believe him for now. We’ll be reevaluating that in the future, because I know that I am capable of a lot more than I’m doing right now, and in fact, capable of a lot more than most people when I can give up my habit of assuming everything.

It’s not possible to be an autist in a neurotypical world without assuming things because if you don’t, people will talk down to you as if you are stupid and just don’t get it. I have found that I needed to switch to a neurodivergent workflow, and that was the kitchen at first. It just cannot be now because everything is too heavy, too hot, and too sharp. I am done with the hit parade of injuries at every shift because I cannot move fast enough and my balance leaves a lot to be desired.

I’m not healed enough from my trip to the hospital not to dwell on it here, because it threw me for such a loop. Because it was over the internet, I can tell you that many things were told to me that simply were not true. That’s part of my not making assumptions gig. Just because I was told I was talking to someone over the internet doesn’t mean I actually was. For that, particularly to Dana, I am sorry. She got roped into this because she was there from the beginning, not because I had this burning need to reach out to her after 11.6 years.

I still think of her fondly and hope she is well, and wish I could take back the e-mail I sent her because she did not deserve it. If I could have words with these internet people, I definitely would. They know who they are, and they haven’t stopped reading. I assume that I am still always the best, both for evil and for awesome.

I’m quieter, though, and take up a lot less space in the world because I don’t want it. A writer is a person who wants you to hear all their stories without knowing you’ve actually read them. I will take these running shoes and use them to propel me further away from controversy because I’m done with it.

I got a better offer, but it remains to be seen whether it still stands. We shall find out, though, because I am always the best.

The Long and Winding Road of Words

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What is the legacy you want to leave behind?
View all responses

The legacy I want to leave behind is obviously this record that I was alive. It is not valuable to everyone, all the time. That’s because I do not write what anyone wants to hear except me. If it was not a real record of what I was thinking, I would not have a character arc, the ups and downs of mental health in real time. I do not want to be an influencer, because that gets people killed. Their neediness for likes makes their self esteem rise and fall depending on how often people respond. I need people to come toward me rather than trying to attract you. One leads to a sustaining career as a working writer built on mutual respect. The other leads to jumping up and down for attention in hopes that someone will notice me, eventually giving up my real self for someone that more find palatable.

It’s important for women to have a voice, and as an enby, that’s part of my identity. The other part is trans man….. but I’m pretty sure I also identify as a train wreck. Sandi Toksvig brought it to my attention that women are not given equal airtime on Wikipedia, therefore they’re not given equal airtime in AI, either…. even though Microsoft Copilot’s begat is a matrilineal line (Ada Lovelace). I am trying to add to the diaspora and it does not matter to me whether history judges me as right or wrong. I need it to judge me as being marked “present.” I know that I was a C student, but lots of neurodivergent people are. It’s not that we’re not bright. It’s that we’re not all that clear on how school works and don’t care enough about authority to find out.

I am certain that if I’d played the game better, I would be in a different place now. One of the things that occurred to me when I was thinking about my writing is that my mother, Dana, and Ada all came from military families. Yet none of that military structure passed onto me. I didn’t just pick it up by osmosis, much to my detriment.

Let’s be clear. I already know I’m a mess. I’ve told life experiences that other people just aren’t brave enough to put to paper, but I am because I am full steam ahead. Write now, think later. Writing now and thinking later is what allows growth and change. I pore over the entries where I’m angry, then figure out why. I was so angry in “Doubt” that I spent money on a gym membership. I thought, “at least if I cannot flood my brain with good feelings through care and connection, I can do it through exercise.” I don’t think Aada is ever coming back because she reads my web site and decides what kind of person I am based upon it. She reads my letters the same way. Therefore, there is nothing to indicate that a hug or a handshake would make things better. It is incumbent upon me to move away from her, because she was gone many years ago. She just decided not to tell me.

If she hadn’t been, I might have been invited to get to know her and her family on a different level than our relationship sustained. I realize all of the ways I isolated her, but I would have isolated myself from her if she’d said “this is all our relationship will ever be. You will never meet me in person.” The longer we went without meeting and kahvi was a daydream, the weirder I felt about the state of affairs.

She’s a people pleaser and didn’t want to hurt me. I’m a people pleaser except when it comes to my blog. It’s the one place I have to call my own. Therefore, meeting me in person would have led to us both trying to please each other, and she would have gotten a much different version of me than she was used to seeing.

Aada was always inordinately funny, and that’s the person I wanted to meet. The hardass she displayed could kick rocks. I am sure that she would say that I was funny, and the blogger could kick rocks. But that’s the thing, right? People fall in love with you, or your writing. They rarely fall in love with both…. not that Aada was ever in love with me. The “in love” butterflies were my domain, but they were reigned in and settled into a comfortable nest; I didn’t give into them, I worked through them. That’s another legacy piece for me….. that I felt such incredible intensity for someone and realized how to walk it back into something viable and sustainable….. I think. I will never know if I did or I didn’t, trusting in my own intuition. Aada’s story will always be that I betrayed her.

She made up an egregious lie that is too detailed for me to ever believe that it was a lie, not really. Not when she accused me of having people’s lives in my own hands if I published something she wrote. This is where my mental health nose-dives, and where Michael steps in to remind me that Aada was the pathological liar, not me.

She’d been lying so long she didn’t even realize she was doing it, and I had to remind her that “the receipts go to fuckin’ CVS, Aada. We met in 2013, which by my count is not very recent.” She said she did it because that’s what I needed from her, as if I asked her to foster this ridiculous fabrication.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again- she could have worked at a car wash and I would have been no less impressed. I’ll be spending the actual 12th anniversary of when we met without her (I’m guessing), because Michael told me that there is a game afoot based on a novel here, and I have to figure it out. The only hint I’ve seen so far is that I’m probably the Ethan Allen.

Obscure joke. Talk to your parents.

Aada would say that I left myself with no options, because I did not play the game correctly. If I’d played the game correctly, she could have made all my dreams come true. I saw that in the curated version of our friendship’s future. There was a job, a dog, support services, and all of it taken away because I wouldn’t do exactly what she said at all times. I have no respect for authority and I never have. Her life is ruled by it because she doesn’t follow rules, she makes other people follow them.

When I go off-book, it’s a disaster. When she goes off-book, they just write a new one.

I could cry about it, and I have in the past. Not so much anymore. I realized that I did not want to be subject to her laws, that I wanted to be treated like an equal. Where was the part where she showed up for me? Where was the part where she proved she was capable of being my friend? She said she’d done all of this to meet a blogger, and I surmise freaked out when it worked.

I wish I’d been the person I am now when we met. The person I was then was too brash, too boastful, too full of herself because that person could social mask. There was no easy entry into the softest parts of me until baby Aada whispered her name.

I struggled with recovery from sex abuse and got my wires crossed in a way that couldn’t be undone, and in some sense, may never in terms of sentimentality. It’s not the big picture that makes me cry. It’s things like looking in my Apple Watch face gallery and seeing that Apple has used the picture she took of herself for my contact list to create the most beautiful watch face I’ve ever seen and cannot bear to use.

She has never gotten her wires crossed, which made her a safe person with whom to lose my mind. I’m not saying that I didn’t cause her emotional trauma as well, only that she’s trained to deal with crazy people and I’m not.

(This might be a clue we’ll use again later.)

I didn’t guard against her in any way, and therefore all of her emotions controlled mine. She did listen to me there, because what I had to say resonated… that yes, I’d gotten my wires crossed, but that wasn’t the sum total of me. That the part of me who views her as family in an “I’m so sorry, this meeting is over because I have to get on a train to Virginia RTFN” kind of way was hurting in the same way her other family members would hurt if she was in trouble.

It was my error to separate myself, but that was a mark left from childhood. It’s gone now. I am constantly trying to appeal to my better angels and to not repeat the mistakes of the past, because I didn’t just hurt Aada in my own misery. I hurt everyone around me because I couldn’t see them.

I couldn’t even see me.

Thankfully, you could.

Balance

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I am seeking a new balance to home life and work life because I know I’m a writer and need to keep at it. I’ve been the same character for 12 years, and now is a time of explosive growth as I no longer have a hard shell around me keeping me from connecting to other people. I have hid not only in my one house, but one room of one house, trying to avoid the simple act of being a blabbermouth. Now, that restriction has been lifted and I can tell what I want, when I want, within reason. I just had to choose. Do I want a relationship with Aada, or do I want a relationship with me?

I chose me, because her idea of choosing me was simply to write to me over the internet. I would keep living in a small room, my life incomplete, while I stared at the ghost in my shell. I think the nickname is apt because we slowly hacked each other from the inside out. I say that I fell in love with the wrong woman all the time, because she did not fall in love with me. I was stuck, because she loved me in the way that she could…. deeply, grabbing for approval at times. She just didn’t need my approval and didn’t trust in her own instincts. Her last interaction with me was a huge fight in which I fell asleep and I woke up to, “you know what?”

If someone starts a sentence with, “you know what?” then you don’t have to read the rest to know someone is going to take a bite out of your ass. I told her not to assume that just because I was taking a nap that meant I was abandoning her. Just recently, I went back and re-read our conversations and what I found is that I did not want to connect with her anymore. She was offended by everything and I could not find a topic that made both of us happy. Michael told me that I would be happier without her, and he turned out to be right, but not for the reason he said. He calls her “the fraudster.” But the things she lied about were inert. Nothing that couldn’t have been forgiven because I liked the goofball she was inside when she let loose.

But I wasn’t allowed to see that person. Every sentence I wrote caused defense, and I became an angry person in response. I hated being that person and so did she. I can tell because she has blocked me on everything as if I never existed. That’s how she gets through life. There’s no working through something and coming to resolution. There’s just moving on. I don’t do that. I work hard at changing what was wrong. I commended her for being vulnerable. And yet, her e-mail to me was still a flame war in which her therapist supposedly said that I was responsible for manipulating her for 12 years. Maybe that’s true, because her therapist will never know my side of the story unless she’s reading me here. I hope they are. Because I am as angry as I was in “Dope” and as sweet and sentimental as I was in “All the Things You Never Knew.” I do not have one attitude when it comes to Aada because there’s not a single day that describes our relationship except the distance of never working together in person. I believe it would have solved a lot, and there would never have had to be a flame war in which I felt threatened.

The impossible position she put me in was that she wasn’t real. She just taunted me saying that I wanted fame and fortune by publishing something she wrote, when in reality I was starting to look like a crazy person, in love with a ghost who never showed up. In love with my own imagination. For one shining moment, she was there in all her glory and it didn’t matter that I looked like a manipulative asshole. It didn’t matter that she thought that. I could deal with those consequences easier than I could deal with my friends and family always saying that she was a figment of my imagination.

Now, the whole world thinks I’m an absolute lunatic and that just has to be okay. There’s a reason I am the way I am, and it’s because it was revealed to me how the Internet actually works. I cannot speak to that, either, except to say that I discovered that the mirrors talk to each other. We are skating on an ice rink in which the machines underneath control the hardness. While you’re “elbows up,” everyone underneath is making sure you don’t fall through. It was a wild ride, and I talked how I normally talked…. I’m sure managing to offend several people in my life because I thought I was only talking to “my girl.”

It was a dream, all of it, a conspiracy to get me to the hospital. I needed it, but their methods were absolutely cruel. I will never forget thinking that my night was going to be flying to Finland with someone I hadn’t seen in 12 years and really liked, after 12 years of sitting alone. She was already married, but was telling me she was poly and her husband was cool with it. I didn’t want a full-time girlfriend because I’m working on myself. This seemed like the perfect solution because she doesn’t even live in my state. She works in media, or did, anyway, and would have been good as a sounding board no matter whether the date lead to something else or didn’t. I wasn’t ready to commit; I was ready to hear her out.

This is because I wasn’t sure she was out as poly to anyone but her husband. There was a big chance she’d hide me away in Africa or Asia and I had to know if it was worth it first. All of my emotions were stirred in a way they hadn’t been because I’d been so cut off from feeling anything that it was nice to feel something genuine. My move to Baltimore had just been one more way to isolate myself because I was having trouble taking care of myself in light of all the pressure I was under. It was just more social masking so that no one had to see me suffer because I didn’t want them to. And in fact, they wouldn’t have without Aada’s access. She’s the one I told everything, and I don’t regret it. I regret that she is too angry to see that me publishing her e-mail is not her biggest problem.

Her biggest problem is that she crushed me for 12 years and I just took it. I just fell down and let her, because it wasn’t my secrets that were killing me. I got to where I was fucking feral. I can’t apologize enough to make a difference, because I’ve already done all the apologizing I’m going to do. So has she, because every time she says, “I’m more sorry than you’ll ever know,” I know it’s just words to placate me. She’s never going to actually do anything different.

“I’m more sorry than you’ll ever know” would have been “I’ll meet you at the hospital.”

In the immortal words of my friend Aaron Brown when I asked him if he was making room for grief, “I don’t have to make room for grief. It makes its own.” I’m just sad. Everything I’ve known for 12 years is gone and I am going to be blamed for it ad nauseam. I should, in a lot of ways. I was the one that sexually harassed Aada over the internet 12 years ago, when my marriage was ending and I was trying to make Dana angry, not Aada. But Aada decided what kind of person I was from the very beginning, and treated me like a jackass even when I was on my knees praying. There are some sins that cannot be forgiven by another person, they can only be forgiven by God. I didn’t take the hint. I wrote volumes. I sent presents. I changed how I thought of her because you don’t think about your heroes that way. Anything I could do to move on from that one time in my life was positive progress, and she accepted me for who I am…. eventually…. without telling me that she’d never see me in person just in case.

We could have started there.

We could have started with honesty, but that’s not her policy. Her policy is a web of lies in which no one can get through. Try, and she’s the spider that has no problem injecting poison. She won’t listen to reason, that vulnerability is necessary to survive a relationship with someone who is all vulnerable, all the time. Because I was never angry she lied for a living. I was angry she lied to me.

I justify publishing what I did because there’s no way to unpublish it, not because I actually meant harm. They’re all the lies I tell myself to keep myself alive. She didn’t deserve to have her e-mail published in its entirety because I was a dumbass and didn’t proofread, but there’s a million reasons why it was necessary to save my own sanity. It’s a sacrifice I’ve made along the way, and now I think I’m getting it back.

I didn’t choose to stop smoking weed when she said I should, or when the twins said I should, but when I was given actual anxiolytic medication to replace it. I didn’t decide to start taking care of myself until my anxiety was solved. When I was trapped between her lies and my silence, I didn’t know my next move and staying in my room was the only one I could think of that wouldn’t cause damage. From the Internet, I could be watched. From the Internet, there are no private conversations. From the Internet, she is “from whom no secrets are hid.”

The problem was when I treated her like God, I treated myself like a worm.

It was a bleak outlook for the rest of my days, when what I wanted was freedom with her. She hid from me when it would have delighted me to see her flash a smile in my direction at least once. Even the picture she took for me only has a hint of a smile, but I’m glad I have it in my box of treasures from that time in my life. I cannot look at it, but someday.

Maybe when I get my smile fixed, I’ll be able to return one. My medications have ruined my teeth and I haven’t done anything about it. I only now think I am deserving of a new smile. I only now think I am capable of growing into the person I was meant to be, because the last 12 years have been so stunted. I was trying to take care of someone else’s inner child, and ignoring my own while she cried.

All I got in return for that was lots of defense and anger. That’s not my bag. I own that I did sin against her, and what I said was not small or easily forgiven. But what should have happened is blocking me on everything immediately and letting this process happen 12 years ago if she wasn’t going to put on her big girl panties and work it out. She just got the chance to snipe at me every day instead.

I put up with it because I thought I deserved it and didn’t have enough strength to block her…….. until I did. She noticed and sent me two e-mails reading me the riot act over shit I never said. That should have been even more of an indication that this was going to end badly, but I did not pay attention. I just let her have her say….. because she only pays attention to the ways in which I hurt her.

She’s never really taken in my pain, and never will. That’s because she cannot see it. Having boundaries means teaching people how to love you, and she’s a people pleaser. No one knows how to relax around her because she does not give them any directives. If you tell her that it doesn’t matter what she does now, she takes that as “you hate me.” When I literally meant “I can welcome you or I can push you away, but the next steps are on you.” She chose to step away, as I knew she would. Abandonment is the only skill she’s actually practiced.

I have grieved this relationship over and over because she doesn’t want to work on it. She would like to say she worked on it. But she’ll get to three internet exchanges and get so heated that she tells me to fuck off before I can even breathe. I have done the same, but less and less over the years as I have dealt with my trauma and learned how to breathe.

Bryn and I have a code phrase for this… “HOW DARE YOU LET ME HELP YOU?!”

I used it on Aada, and she said, “100%.” She understands that she’s the one standing outside the group of people who will accept her for who she is and catering to the people who see her for the way she’s curated.

She doesn’t like people that are fucked up because she cannot admit that she’s fucked up. She has to believe that she has it all together. I could have offered her friends and a future not based on social masking, but based on who she actually is….. a six year old covered with layers of PTSD that made her invincible to the outside world while she’s dying inside.

I’m in this position because I wouldn’t join the narrative that she’s fine. I’m in this position because publishing her e-mail was just the last thing that happened. The real truth is that she was never going to unmask.

She’s a trademark, and she likes it that way.

I’m a spoonie, and I don’t have the ability to mask anymore. As I got more and more into finding my true self away from other neurotypicals, she became more defensive. Because as I’ve said, I think she’s neurodivergent and a spoonie as well. She just pushes herself to the very limit of her abilities and explodes when it comes to her personal life. Or, at least, I hope that’s only my experience of her. She makes me think that everyone around her is in danger of the cold disconnection I got. I wonder if her divorce from her first husband years ago actually happened the way she thinks, or if she didn’t know all the things about herself that she does now.

Because in Aada’s life, everything happens to her. She doesn’t cause anything. Everyone is toxic but her. If you view your life that way, you will end up only talking to yourself, only connecting with yourself, and thinking that’s normal. For instance, I’m toxic because I hurt her, but she’s not toxic because she hurt me. I have a more nuanced view. We both caused each other damage that could be resolved and our relationship healed.

But there’s no room for nuance with Aada. She’s not vulnerable enough to admit that her trauma causes me pain. She’s not vulnerable enough to admit that she causes problems inasmuch as I do. It’s so much easier to “blow ’em off and keep goin’,” but at what point do you just run out of people to lean on? I hope that in our conversations, it led her to let other people in to everything that I know, because the disembodied voice of a stranger on the internet didn’t help me over time. Hugs might have, though. Since I can’t hug her, I hope someone did.

I chose to move to Baltimore so that there would be no one around to hug me. I chose to be alone because I thought I was doing the right thing. Now, I’m trying to leave my house as often as I can, because eventually I hope I’ll find someone to love that is actually available.

No internet connection needed.