Tag: Relationships

Learning What I’m Going to Say With the Rest of You

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments
Daily writing prompt
What do you enjoy most about writing?
View all responses

Every day there’s a new blank page to fill, and I wonder how I’m going to fill it. My lifestyle really doesn’t support nonfiction writing anymore because it takes a fictional world to be interesting. No one wants to hear about my life on the couch.

I often wonder if you have to get lonely enough to write fiction. If your relationships have to fail so completely that you rescue them with tales of swashbuckling grandeur. I know that I can change my future with the things I write, dramatically. But it comes at a cost- time to write costs time to get out. I am often too busy recording life to remember to go out and live it.

It’s the intimacy with a word processor that brings me the most joy. Mining my own life for memorable interactions doesn’t endear me to anyone until I’ve stopped writing at all…. then the same people say I used to write so beautifully, why did I stop?

I decided to show myself what would happen if I didn’t stop. I ended up alone with a mental health diagnosis of bipolar disorder with psychotic features. I have no idea what happened to make the doctors think that I was psychotic, because I wasn’t entirely present when they first saw me.

However, I don’t have any history of being psychotic, so I can think of at least one real life scenario that could have gotten me that diagnosis just by telling it.

Maybe they’re right, and Aada is a hallucination.

Oh. So that’s why I should have listened to her. Why it was so hard the longer we went on without meeting. She said to tell no one, and the longer I carried her secrets the sicker I got. I wanted distance from her because I couldn’t have closeness with her- that I’d only be able to take in seven percent of her communication online. We would keep tearing each other down based on her reaction to these essays, not choosing to let time pass before gutting each other emotionally like an axe.

I began to resent the policy of not being able to talk to anyone in my personal life about her and also not talking to me. But again, our last interactions were positive until I imploded them.

I couldn’t let go of the feeling that meeting her in person would make my emotions normalize, that it was impossible to read someone without meeting them, but it was easy to let emotions spill in operatic swells on the page with the other not knowing what to focus on because they didn’t hear you say it.

I wondered why she didn’t seem to care that my life took this path. That her secrets made me unable to cope with my real life, akin to traveling with The Doctor.

The blessing of writing is being able to explain what I’m feeling in detail because life thinks it works in sound bites when clarification is necessary. My mind goes all over the place when I think of my own journey towards mental and physical health.

I loved that Aada let me love her out loud. One day I hope she’ll come back to this time in her life and read my words again. I’m certain it feels like I’m guilting her, but I’m not trying to do so. I am genuinely curious to know why she would choose to isolate me the way she did and make it impossible to cope without being able to have a real conversation? If she didn’t want me to talk to anyone else, why did she make it so hard to talk to her?

I’m not allowed to talk about this story anywhere but here, because I can tell truth from fiction here where no one else can. It’s just that my doctors think I’m psychotic because of it.

And in all of this I’ve been wondering where she’s been… where I’ve been? Why weren’t we both paying attention? Why did I give her so many reasons not to want to meet with me?

I was scared that I wasn’t enough in person. The duality in me is alarming. I craved something that I actively sabotaged, because I found out she lied to me. I realized that nothing was ever going to get any better between us because she didn’t care that she also isolated me from my support system.

My only support system has been writing. Aada has had an enormous amount of respect for my feelings, but the longer she went without opening up about getting together made me think she was never going to do so. That she was sorry, but there was nothing she could do.

I just wanted to prove to myself that I wasn’t hallucinating…… because I had someone to talk to who could empathize. That was all in writing as well, so it became the thing I enjoyed most about our unusual kinship. I just wanted to come in from the cold of being thought of as crazy and she was the one person that could provide that respite. It would have energized us in new ways, because we could finally read in each other’s voices rather than getting defensive about everything. It’s the internet. Someone’s always offended.

What I also enjoy about writing is being an authoritative source. The people that are dear to me come back years later to remember what I said, to remember how they felt when they read it in the moment and to see if anything is different. I come across softer, more vulnerable, because I will change my mind and realize when I have erred.

I accept all the times that I acted like a narcissist in Aada’s life, and forgive all the times I thought she came across that way. I don’t think it was a one-way street. We both participated in something that was good and became harmful over time. But I’m the only one that has a record of it. That’s what I mean about time changing people’s perceptions and being surprised at how much I’ve learned when they go back and read something I’ve written years later.

I don’t understand the push/pull relationship people have with my writing. How people drop in and drop out over a decade, for instance. I find that I am always more popular just by being myself than trying to write towards a goal.

I become prophetic because hindsight is 20/20.

It’s hard to believe I didn’t have enough strength to walk away from Aada on my own… that I created a situation in which she wouldn’t want to come back from… I just had to get tired enough of waiting when she was the one person whose Mama Wolverine claws would have made a difference in my life.

I wondered what on earth I was doing until I realized why I needed her. Anyone else and I would just feel crazy for the rest of my life. I can’t believe I wrecked things when she said that she would be open and not have many boundaries. I wish I had trusted more in that than exploding with anger at her lie.

I wish I’d told her how coffee with her would make me feel normal, that all this internet stuff wasn’t for me. I wish I’d thought of that in 2013. I didn’t get my goals because I didn’t think about them. I couldn’t think about overarching goals because I was lost in the muck every day.

I think that’s what I’ve given up as a blogger, because my life constantly changes when people read about themselves. They don’t like being lost in the muck with me.

If I wrote my real life story, you’d think I was psychotic, too… or maybe you already believe that? Who knows. What I know is that I’m a neurodivergent writer who takes in the world a little bit at a time. I bit off more than I could chew.

By not being as vulnerable as I needed to get, I suppose… although I wondered how I could be any more vulnerable in our letters than I already was. I needed her to be more present, to be the Mama Wolverine she said she was.

Whether she feels that’s what I need in the future is up to her, because I couldn’t get her to listen to what I was going through. I started writing toward her as my audience because we didn’t have any friends in common that knew who she was… or so I thought.

We don’t have friends in common- I just have readers that talk to each other because they love to read my writing without talking to me about it. That lets me off the hook in terms of caring about their reactions because I can’t do anything to preordain what they think when they read.

They’re my sacrifices in continuing to be a writer, the readers that don’t talk to me anymore but do talk to each other. Life goes on, but it never goes on in the same way. I have let life beat me down in the process of writing, and I’m just now starting to see how much it takes to keep going.

I have to keep growing, or people will not see the value in these entries. I have to keep making friends that are utterly unimpressed by my blogging so that we can lead normal lives around it.

Because every time I stop, people want me to come back… but they don’t want to support me when I write. I can see how I need to improve my communication skills, but my being human gets in the way. I am not making excuses, I’m asking for grace.

I’m asking for grace.

I’m asking for the ability to change my mind rather than people thinking that I’m automatically two-faced because one entry conflicts with another. It gives no credence to the passage of time. That I might have regrets and need to clarify something later on.

I was tired of the push/pull with Aada because she loved being adored on this web site and in e-mail, but didn’t have a problem ripping me a new one when she didn’t understand something, often embarrassed when I told her what I really meant.

I needed the internet dumbfuckery to stop so we could take a breath.

But I should have thought of that in 2013.

I only know that because I have records of my own growth. I read myself for patterns in behavior that I don’t like, because I lay my heart out on these pages. It’s what draws people to me, thinking I am interesting. Then, they meet me in person and wonder how I write such things…. I’m not so hot.

If Aada lied to impress me, she would have told me the first time she met me, because it would have seemed so silly to try and impress a geek like me. But over the internet I reacted with the fact that she didn’t care about the consequences she’d laid out for me.

She’s been the thing I enjoy most about writing, taking the adoration in stride. I just got the feeling that our relationship wasn’t real- that it was a lot of words on the page and not much else. That’s because she wouldn’t tell me whether it was possible or not for 12 years. My writing became more and more unhinged because I felt so ignored.

I needed empathy, and she didn’t have it. I wanted to prove to myself that Aada meant what she said about there being nothing I could say that would hurt her, surprised when she said something did.

I didn’t want those worlds to cross over, and there was no way they couldn’t.

The hardest thing about being a blogger is not knowing which of your friends’ friends read your blog and whether they talk about you behind your back. It takes a really thick skin to publish knowing that even the critics won’t be critics after some time.

Because remember when I used to write so beautifully?

When the Daily Prompt Doesn’t Jive

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I’m not feeling the daily prompt, so I decided to just set out on my own. I’m not very good at generating positive emotions, because I have bipolar depression and anxiety. I do get up with a sense of joy in the morning when my coffee is right, but I also feel the storm of my own mind gathering clouds. I’m dealing with this in therapy, so I know that it will ease over time. I just don’t have many coping mechanisms for when I feel bad about myself.

And right now, I don’t have much to feel proud of. I’ve taken in the horror of what I’ve done to Aada, because I pissed her off in a very unique way that will make her regret she ever met me. But it doesn’t stop her from reading and it doesn’t stop me from writing about her because I don’t know what to write about next. I’m in limbo, with this relationship being so at the forefront of my life and now it’s gone. I needed it to be gone, because Aada was my friend and wouldn’t prove it…. keeping me in limbo as she liked my blog entries but didn’t seem to like me outside of them.

It’s why I don’t believe she lied to impress me. She seemed so put off by my writing that I couldn’t believe she’d want to impress a nerd with a keyboard. She seemed to think she had the real story, and I was just a liar. The reason she could say that is she kept her version of the story hidden, so I couldn’t judge for myself whether I was lying or not.

I went on flights of fancy and hurt my own feelings on more than one occasion.

I call her posse “the Reston contingency,” because if someone in California reads, someone in Virginia will. And eventually it gets back up to the top of the food chain. I’m glad that someone is checking on Aada to make sure she’s okay, because she doesn’t deserve my shenanigans anymore. I’m glad that I’ve broken myself of the habit of writing to her anywhere but here, because I know that it won’t do any good. It won’t do any good here, either, except to remind me of all the things I don’t want to forget.

For instance, I have a voice clip of her cooing over her baby dog, and that makes me melt into giggles of cuteness. I am sure that this dog is no longer a baby, but she coos at it just as much. I picture sitting next to the dog sometimes, wishing that conversation had taken place in person.

What did I hope to accomplish in person? More production meetings over what I could say and what I couldn’t. More input from her over how I’m doing just winging it that didn’t include reading me the riot act because it’s harder to ream someone out in person than it is when you’re at full-tilt keyboard warrior. I wanted more humanity and hugs in our discussions rather than full-on fighting to the death.

I don’t regret falling in love with her words. I regret not taking the time to fall in love with the rest of her. To be happy with whatever she gave me and calm down. To take in that her life was full of people she didn’t see, but had fulfilling relationships with online. I don’t know why that peace didn’t extend to me, but it didn’t.

As a result, I spend my days scared that her posse is watching, because there’s no going backwards. There’s only moving forwards without my darling girl…. whom I had the audacity to push away and it’s all my fault. I maintain that even though it’s my fault, I still have the right to grieve.

Mostly because it is my fault, and forgiving yourself is a hundred times harder than forgiving anyone else.

I wonder if she misses me now that time has passed, and guessing that she doesn’t. I wonder if I ever gave anything to her in all my musings, or if I am the manipulator she says. She doesn’t realize all the ways she manipulated me, and that’s fine. The way she tells her story is the way she tells her story. My isolation doesn’t seem to matter to her, and how 12 years was a long time to hold onto it without input.

I have to wonder what I was doing when I decided to break free when I supposedly love this woman.

I have so much to tell her that’s behind the scenes, and I chopped off any hope of that happening in the future. I have to live with those consequences, because Aada says that my writing is damaging to her. If I really love her, then I need to create a bigger scope with this blog so that I’m not focusing on her as a subject. I’m realizing that when I think of her, they are intrusive thoughts and not because she is intrusive- it’s because I’m putting love into a relationship where it is not wanted.

The truth is that this blog is boring without her, because what I learned from having an internet relationship all these years is that my letters to her prepared me for writing every day. I lost sight of writing about other things because these e-mails were enlightening to me.

I did all our emotional homework because I’m the feeler- she’s the logician. It was a total breakdown of labor. I could not count on her to be emotional, but I could always count on her to be pragmatic. She became my social mask, because it was easier being her than being me. I always had a quip for everything, and I’m sure I’ve given her a few things that ended up in meetings.

My favorite part of thinking about Aada is trading lines that she ended up using at work.

I’m funny when I want to be.

That’s the hardest part of getting over all this. Not feeling like I have the right to feel good about anything. I really hurt someone that I claimed to love, because I was feeling so lonely I couldn’t cope and she wasn’t listening to me. In polyamory parlance, I “bratted out.” I don’t deserve her forgiveness, but I hope that she knows I’m being honest with myself about what really happened. She lied to me and I used that as justification to sell her up the river. Especially when she flamed me.

I posted Daniel’s flame and she said, “you’re right. My first reaction WAS ‘that motherfucker. Let me get my purse.'” I wish that just once she could have read something about herself and thought that, too. She was too defensive, always, when I was pleading for empathy. Her defensiveness caused me more anger than I’ve ever told her, the root of most of our fights.

My happy ending was coffee together instead of just buying each other digital Starbucks cards. She never said what her happy ending was, because of course nothing romantic ever happened between us and wouldn’t. She’s beat it into my head that she’s straight and I don’t think of her as anything other than a boring cis straight white girl who would eat her coat before she’d look at me twice.

But she’s my boring cis straight white girl, so let her be who she is.

The thing is that the internet is relative, you aren’t taking in all of someone there. Her words moved me in a romantic direction before she explained that she was a boring cis white girl with a long-time boyfriend (whom she’s now married). What’s done is done, but I played all my cards wrong. If I’d kept my feelings to myself, we would have indeed met by now. We had plans to get together for Dana’s birthday and I asked her not to come because we were fighting at the time. Any chance I had to make things better, I made them fall apart.

I have to live with that guilt, because our relationship got unusual, fast.

The marks left on me by my emotional abuser never left me, and that’s what I need to work on in all my friendships from here on out…. and possibly with Aada because life is long. I never know what could change her mind over a friendship with a writer. I just know that the time is most probably past because we cannot make things any better than we can right now.

But maybe she’ll remember she wasn’t always the perfect friend, either, and capitulate once she’s taken all of it in. I doubt it, but again, life is long. Maybe we need to separate for good, maybe we just need time. I’m not in charge, I just work here.

The thing is that Aada and I are capable of creating something beautiful that we couldn’t have when we first met. Whether it’s fiction or a retelling of the story on my blog from her perspective, we are sitting on piles of money. I doubt she’d hire me as a research assistant, but my services are open to her if she decides she wants to publish her first novel. AI can do that for her, but I bring coffee and bagels. Take that, AI.

I think it’s a shame to throw all of that away, because I know how capable we are as Southern storytellers.

It’s everything I should have thought of before I pushed her away over and over.

I didn’t think about endgame, I just flew by the seat of my pants. If I’d thought about goals way back when, it would be to have a stable marriage and a stable writing partner, one who knows I’m in love with her words and therefore I take in everything she says like they have the capability to wound me like a partner.

I was the one that wasn’t open all these years, and I never blamed it on Aada. I just look at my life differently now that it is past. I gave Aada reasons not to want to be close to me, but I didn’t understand why I was doing it. It’s because she has the ability to wound me like a partner, and I didn’t know how that would come across in person. Neither did she.

She didn’t even tell me when she got married, not knowing how I would react. My reaction was hurt that she’d left me out of something so big, but not hurt that she was married. Part of accepting Aada for who she is means knowing that boyfriends are going to come along and possibly become husbands.

When she opened up to me, I should have opened up to her more. Maybe if I’d explained why I needed her so bad it would have made a difference, maybe not.

I wanted to believe that she was safe and secure, that we were safe and secure.

Her words rang hollow on the page.

Like

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What is a word you feel that too many people use?
View all responses

Everyone overuses the word “like” and it drives me up the wall because I do it.

It’s a filler word, something you say when your brain has frozen and your RAM is overloaded.

That’s why I, like, say it a lot.

I need time to process because my computer was made in the 1970s. There’s only so many upgrades.

It’s when I’m at my computer that I can go back and erase all the filler I use in conversation.

Conversing with me is the surest way to get me not to write about something because I have an auditory lag that causes me to pick up about half of what people are saying. That’s why I need so much clarification. Negotiations are sometimes tense because it leads people to believe I’m off in my own little world. Everyone else understood without all these questions.

I tend to remember everything I read. That’s why I’ve loved Aada so madly all these years. She gave me her communication in my favorite medium.

But if we’d started seeing each other in person and I was responsible for remembering things she said, it would be a 50/50 shot as to whether I’d retain anything.

I’m starting to recognize the pleasure in this.

Because you cannot go back and reread conversations. You cannot relive the ways in which you’ve made mistakes. This is for good and ill… sometimes I needed to reread something from Aada’s perspective to understand why I’d done wrong.

Sometimes, I was very clear that I was wrong.

There are so many things that spiraled out of control because our emotions were distilled. We got wasted on our own dopamine with the way we wasted time fighting.

That’s what I thought meeting in person would stop. That we’d lost our humanity. We would both turn into these keyboard warriors that the other wouldn’t recognize and start tearing each other down. I was afraid to meet in person because I didn’t know how it would change our e-mail lives, but I was willing to try.

I never knew what was polite from her and what was genuine, so I cannot speak to whether she was really planning to meet with me. She always acted as if it was no big deal, then scared by the reality. I was scared, too. I just didn’t act like it because someone had to be the one to put on their big underwear.

I don’t think she thought I could hear things like, “I’m scared.”

When I’d been over our relationship a hundred times from her perspective and knew she had every right to be afraid. I wouldn’t have blamed her one bit if she’d said, “I like writing to you, but I don’t see this going anywhere past that.” She didn’t. She said, “someday, perhaps” and then asked for baby steps. So I’ll never know if we could have met in person or not, because I blew up the relationship before we could actually work it out.

I’m sure in a lot of ways that’s why I did it. That I was tired of putting someone first in my life when they had reservations about meeting in person. I turned away from her because the situation was so impossible. I lost my humanity because of impatience. The last straw was that she lied to me.

It wasn’t even that she lied to me, it was finding out she could. And not to care about the consequences for me the bigger this lie got when it would have been so easy to tell me that she lied.

She lied to impress me.

I believe that even less, but I don’t have a better story than the one she gave me.

I think a lot of my need to put her first would have gone away with seeing her in the flesh. In context, even better. I didn’t know how close her other relationships were. She didn’t know those things about me.

We could have learned to have things go unsaid, taken care of with a glance instead of a paragraph.

I sabotaged all of that, because I was tired of waiting. Feeling like there was another truth to all of this that she wasn’t writing. That her husband and family didn’t know we were friends, or they did and they hated me for it.

If they didn’t before, I’m sure they do now.

What’s a true loss is not being able to broker peace.

In another universe, Dana and I are laughing with Aada and her husband, because that’s how it should have been all along. I am responsible for why that meeting never happened. I wish I could go back and re-do all of it, knowing what I know now. If I’d played my cards right, I would have had bonus family. I played every hand like I’d looked up the worst combinations in poker.

I would have put on my big girl pants and just Skyped her while she was on vacation. We both would have been a better judge of character, knowing whether we were actually doing the right thing by keeping our relationship so on the down-low.

It drove me up the wall to be so secretive because it reminded me of dating Meagan in 12th grade. There were certain people she didn’t want to know she was dating me, so there were a lot of rules to remember in front of others. Maybe that’s why Aada isolated me, so we wouldn’t have to remember too many rules.

I know I isolated her.

I should have told her that I felt isolated from the rest of the world, but for some reason I thought she already knew it and had empathy. My expectations were off, and I hurt my own feelings.

It’s so easy to do, hurting your own feelings because you think you’ve expressed something and you haven’t. I thought I’d done a good job of telling her how lonely I felt, and how having another friend in our family was a good thing because she wasn’t there.

Flying under the radar was not a good thing for us, because it stopped us from enjoying some much-needed sunshine.

I wonder daily what would have happened if we’d met for coffee or lunch after we discovered the other online. If I could have been cool and collected between meeting online and IRL. If I could have saved Dana some jealousy because Aada absolutely is all that and a bag of chips, but not my type (really). I fell in love with her words, not her face. The more the three of us hung out, the more the glaring differences between us would appear and make that love change more quickly into something sustainable because I have no doubt that Dana would have liked Aada better than me.

She just didn’t write to her and get to know her. I did.

Over and over I hurt my own feelings as my relationship with Aada grew, because Dana didn’t have any patience for it and that’s all I needed from her.

I think she hit me because she knew our relationship would be over if she did. That I wouldn’t come back from that. She wouldn’t have to compete with Aada anymore, who was in the process of screaming “why is this happening? I like, didn’t do anything.” She’s right, she didn’t. I was making my own problems.

Aada’s answer was just not to talk about our relationship at all to anyone.

I made that work for years, molding the story to my web site because telling all of you is telling none of you. I control the narrative, so you only see what I want you to see.

Not knowing I had readers capable of putting together puzzle pieces on their own or how close I was getting. I needed guidance, and was flummoxed by getting read the riot act on some days and “lovely post, btw,” on others.

I cannot write the way other people want me to write all the time, but I do realize that with Aada’s special circumstances I should have been louder. More outrageous. Changed more details like telling people we live in Chicago or something.

The thing is that Aada doesn’t check in with me to know what literary devices I’m using to explain my own feelings, so if I tell a lie in order to protect her, she’ll think I’m telling the truth… that lie living in her brain as truth is worthless.

If she’d been smart, she would have gotten me a job as a blogger inside her company so I’d know the rules better than her and could actually write something valuable to all the people around her. Oh, wait. Her shit is boring. I can’t dress it up.

I’m glad that writing prompts are just suggestions, because what came up is what came up. I cannot get a whole essay out of filler words, but it is indeed what launched this essay.

What? Like it’s hard?

Little Entries, Big Feelings

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What change, big or small, would you like your blog to make in the world?
View all responses

The change that I would like to see my blog make is to get all people to feel. To see when I lay out my emotions on this site that I am not the arbiter of any relationship, nor am I doing anything but creating a space to feel. My story is my story, and everyone else is allowed to have theirs as well. I would love to read other writers’ thoughts about me, I just don’t have any blogging friends. Therefore, my friends are unique in that they come to this web site to see what I was thinking and feeling through any particular day. It’s not that I’m so great a writer, it’s that I remembered to write things down.

That’s another change I’d like to see in the world- that your words don’t have to matter because they’re “good enough.” They matter because they’re there. I find a tremendous amount of solace in the fact that it doesn’t matter how I’m feeling that day, people show up to read because they’re interested in how my life is going. It isn’t because I’m the best writer they’ve ever read.

I’m trying to make a case for more people having journals because it has helped me focus my thoughts to such an enormous degree. My audience keeps me accountable, especially the people who read and then we have lunch together later. I cannot go off into flights of fancy because I write about real people, real situations. Lying about them only hurts the people around me, so I never have. It’s painful reading about what really happened. It would be more painful if I twisted the truth to fit my own narrative.

But I can only write my version of the truth, which is no more or less important than anyone else’s. There are many sides to a story, depending on your perspective. Therefore, I cannot write anything objectively true in which everyone else is going to agree with me. But agreeing with me isn’t the point. The point is that this is my space, and their space is just as valuable as mine.

So many people have been with me through thick and thin. But I don’t know how often that has translated into them also writing blog entries that made their lives take on perspective. I would like to believe it has happened.

The journey I would most like to read is Aada’s, because her experience of me is so different than my experience of her. I have a feeling that she has kept her emotions close to the vest when it comes to me, and it would be helpful to know how she really feels when she is not angry at me. She has expressed anger and outrage to the utmost degree, and I hear her. But she has not expressed all the love she has for me over the past 12 years, probably because she feels like her words aren’t good enough. She has always been intimidated by my long letters, that it translates to me feeling like she cannot do enough for me. That is simply not true. Her words have been the most valuable thing in my life, and she encouraged me to delete them all. I wish I’d just ignored her. Because she is angry with me now, there is no well to go back to to remind me of when times were better. My memory box has been all but destroyed.

I am lucky that I only deleted one inbox, so that I do have a few things left from her… but the very earliest letters, the ones that meant the most, are gone.

This is both good and bad, because our history is a tapestry. Losing all of it creates an opportunity to let go and create more history down the road when we reconnect without tying our relationship to past ills. I have decided that I will just wait her out, because this blog is what ties us together. There will never be a time when she doesn’t read, even if she says she will stay away. She believes in me, and I know that is true no matter how angry she gets. I have the ability to entertain her… and if I can entertain her, I can indeed change the world.

This is true whether we speak again or not, because perhaps my job now is to make her laugh at my misadventures while also remaining a stranger to her. I think she likes my blog better when we’re not interacting because there’s less of a chance she’ll be in it. She likes reading about my other friends, she just doesn’t like reading about herself. This is a mystery to me, because in some entries I get down and dirty about the things that have gone wrong, but in others I portray her as a goddess walking among mortals. She is a 3D character, as much as she would like to complain that she is a “Flat Stanley.”

The thing that changes my world about this web site is that no one gets to be “Flat Stanley.” They all have amazing qualities and they all have conflicts with me. If I left out one and only wrote about the other, that would be manipulating a story to fit my own narrative when justice means a lot to me. If someone does something great, I will say it. If they do something awful, I will say it. I don’t want to portray people as I want them to be, but as they are.

These little paintings of people with words are what I have to offer in terms of changing the world, because they are not supposed to be “the best.” They are supposed to be real. Hundreds of years from now, someone will come across this blog and say, “Leslie and Aada are interesting.” All of my friends are interesting, Aada just gets more airtime because she is my favorite person. That journey is the most fleshed out of any on this web site, because she’s been my friend for longer than I really want to remember.

She came into my life at a turbulent time, and changed it for the better. That does not mean that the turbulence was easy. Getting away from Dana was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my life, and I miss her dearly. We took care of each other for years and got to a place where it just didn’t work anymore. Dana checked out, and it left me vulnerable to a crush I thought would never go anywhere, and it hasn’t. What has happened is that I accept Aada for everything she is, and that includes not being attracted to me. That did not mean Dana wasn’t jealous, and held it over both of our heads in different ways.

I think a lot about what would have happened if I’d come out as poly way back when, because I’ve always been in love with multiple people. It started when I was 12 without me even realizing what was happening. I couldn’t connect properly to Meagan, my first girlfriend… and that has been thematic because I’ve always tried to be monogamous and failed because there was someone else grabbing my attention. Instead of trying to fit a round peg in a square hole, I just decided that Aada was it for me, that there would never be anyone above her, and everyone else was just a secondary relationship. It didn’t matter that there was no romance in our relationship, because that’s not what I’ve ever said to her. I mean that I have her back. That if someone hurts her, I’ll be there to pick up the pieces by buying her Diet Cokes (loaded with Jack) and just sitting on the couch with her while she cries, encouraging her to get out and pick a new man. I don’t sit there and wish she was mine, because she always has been to the best of her ability. That’s enough for me.

But of course, I don’t have any expectations that anyone would hurt her. I think she’s got a very stable life with her very stable husband and that means more to me than anything, because I cannot give her everything that her husband can on any level. For as much as I wish things had been different before I knew he existed, I think things worked out the way they were supposed to. Aada shares in all my secrets, encouraging me to get out and date people so she can hear all the dirt when I come home.

She would have loved Sam if Sam hadn’t betrayed me.

I say that Sam betrayed me because she told me that she didn’t have time for a full-on relationship, so go and date multiple people. I just want your time when you can give it. Then, she called me while I was at Zac’s house and broke up with me because she just couldn’t do poly. If she had been honest with me from the beginning, I would have been her one and only, because Aada never would have gotten in our way. She would have supported both of us, loving the idea of me being a step-parent to musicians. But Sam told me that she had a habit of jumping into relationships too quickly, and didn’t want to do that with me. She was lying to herself, because what she really wanted was to dive into me and never resurface. The feeling was mutual, but I didn’t want to pressure her. So all these feelings were left unsaid, and now we’ll never get that back.

It’s been years since that relationship ended, but explaining how it came apart changed my world and how I looked at it. That people often lied to themselves until it was a crisis point.

Explaining how I felt was my way of changing the world at large, because my experiences matter. I have a unique perspective on what it means to be poly because my primary relationship wasn’t romantic. It was a matter of priority. But Aada being married meant that she’d never need me more than her husband, so I was off the hook in terms of putting the people I date off to go and take care of her. I just wanted us to be open and free with each other, and maybe one day we’ll get back to it. We both just need time to relax and learn to be open again, letting our past problems breathe.

It is possible that we will never reconnect, because the breathing is better for both of us. I don’t think she enjoys being friends with a blogger right now, and that may never change. But my hopes and dreams for the world would change if we wrote together.

Sometimes I wish I could just say, “damn it, Aada… we both destroyed each other and need the chance to rebuild trust. Why isn’t that a priority given our long history?” That’s just not how she does things. She cuts off relationships rather than rebuilding, and that’s okay. I’m sure she has some choice words for me that would change my world, but I don’t know that she’d ever say them.

But if I could do things differently, I would. If she could take back her lie, she would.

We should at least start there, because we are two writers that deserve a book together.

It would change the world.

There Are No Uninteresting Stories

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
Scour the news for an entirely uninteresting story. Consider how it connects to your life. Write about that.
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After I got this prompt, I decided to install Copilot Desktop on my linux box. To do that, the easiest way is to go to the terminal and type “sudo snap install copilot-desktop.” When I open my terminal, I have a little program that displays “fortunes” at the top, little pithy sayings or quotes from books that often jog my writing habits. Today’s was “just because a letter may never be read doesn’t mean there’s no value in writing it.” That sent me down the rabbit hole of using Copilot to find letters that had been written, but never received. Though this is more history than current news, it is a story that is worth revisiting for its outpouring of love. I feel that it is also a stunning display of patriotism, and a reminder that the cost of war is too great to bear:

July 14, 1861

My very dear Sarah:

The indications are very strong that we shall move in a few days—perhaps tomorrow. Lest I should not be able to write again, I feel impelled to write a few lines that may fall under your eye when I shall be no more.

Our movement may be one of a few days duration and great success—we may be called to a protracted and bloody conflict—but whatever it may be, I feel that you and the boys will be the constant objects of my thoughts and prayers.

And now, my dear wife, I must bid you perhaps a long adieu. The duty of a soldier and the call of my country forbid me to yield to my own longings and to be with you for a time at least. But know that I go to this strife with the utmost faith in the cause for which we contend, and with the strongest conviction that God will direct and bless us.

My dear Sarah, though we may be separated for a time, I know that you will ever be with me in spirit. You will never know how much I loved you, and how well I loved you, until after a long time.

If I do not return, my dear Sarah, never forget how much I loved you, nor forget the love of our dear boys. In the quiet summer-time, when the bee sips honey from the flower, think of me in the field of strife, and in the stillness of the evening, when the sun sinks behind the western hills, think of me, and pray for me.

But if I do return, my dear wife, I shall be with you in all the joys and sorrows that may befall us. I shall be with you in all the trials and conflicts that may beset us. I shall be with you to protect and defend you, to comfort and console you.

My dear Sarah, I am going to risk my life for my country. I am going to risk all that is dear to me in this world, and I know that I shall not return. But I know that I shall die for my country, and that is all that I can say.

Goodbye, my dear wife. Goodbye, my dear boys. May God bless and protect you all.

Your husband,
Sullivan

The way this letter involves my own life is that I view all my blog entries as letters sent but never received unless a specific person writes to me and says that they’ve read it. Not all entries are to the same person, but they all contain elements that I wish certain people would read. However, it is not up to me whether the message gets to its intended recipient, it is enough that people all over the world share in my joy and pain. Neither emotion is built to be carried alone.

I don’t intentionally write to specific people, it’s that I’m a product of my own experiences. My blog entries cannot NOT be influenced by my real life and what I’m thinking about that day. For instance, every time my ex-boyfriend was deployed I sat in my room and waited for him to come back, paralyzed with fear that something was going to happen to him while he was away. It’s not that he was doing anything dangerous. It’s that if he was, he couldn’t tell me. Though I never wrote about any of his deployments, you could tell by my mood whether he was in town or not.

You can tell a lot of things by the mood of a writer, even if they aren’t as up front as the letter above. I just happen to be a writer who does lay their heart in their hands. I have never grieved any partner more than I’ve grieved my friend Aada, and that’s because our demise was my fault, in her mind. I do not believe that in retrospect, because the relationship took two to come apart completely. Her lie made me look like a jackass, not that I needed any help. Her lie exposed me to emotions that never should have been present. She puffed herself up at my expense, and the cost was steep.

It is no wonder that I got as angry as I did, even if she doesn’t see it and won’t. It’s why I think we’ll never reconcile. She will continue to believe that I manipulated her when the relationship unraveled with her lie. That’s not something I can fix in someone else’s mind. All I can do is be genuinely sorry for my part in all this, and as time goes by be more open to accepting her just as she is, liar and all. Who hasn’t told a white lie that snowballed into a mountain over time? I can certainly understand it. I just couldn’t control my reactions in the moment and that’s my burden to carry. I am talking it through in therapy to understand why I didn’t laugh. Why it caused red mist rage.

Because my heart is as open to her as this letter, and has been for 12 years. I have often laid my heart in her hands just as much as this man loved his wife. I needed her emotional support, not her romantic love, but it didn’t make me less vulnerable. In fact, I think it made me more, because she’s the person I used to tell about my romantic misadventures. I miss that most of all.

I have to remember that I chose this. I chose to let her go, because she made her intentions very clear. If I talked to anyone, if I published anything, our relationship was over. She set a fine trap for me, and I fell in. That’s because I had to choose between being true to her and being true to myself, and I don’t think that should have happened, either. We were both supposed to show up as our full selves, and my occupation has always been “blogger.”

I hope that she’ll go back to some of our entries that have been meaningful to her and realize there’s something worth salvaging here. It would take a mountain of work, but there’s no one I’d rather work with to accomplish a goal. She’s so worth it, because 12 years of history is not easily done. She’s been my best friend through very thick and very thin, when I was a mess and when I was strong. I pray for her every night, because my anger shouldn’t be at the forefront anymore. It is an old, old prayer, started in 2013…. “God of the universe, protect my precious Aada.”

She doesn’t believe in God, but she believes that when I pray it must do something. She calls me her “pinch hitter.”

When I’m going through it, she says she will offer up her own black magic prayers. I hope she’s still doing it, because having someone out there praying for me is just as important as us being in constant contact.

But I won’t contact her directly. I will just send a message that may never be read.

I Don’t Know Yet

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
Was today typical?
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It is too early to sum up a day that hasn’t really begun. It’s 0743 Eastern, which means that I’ve done my Spanish homework, had some breakfast, taken my medication, and am now starting on the coffee portion of the morning. It’s Cafe Bustelo, and that is indeed typical for me. I love that dark, Cuban espresso blend so much that I won’t buy anything else.

At 11:00, I have a meeting with Cognitive Behavioral Health over Zoom, which is my typical Tuesday morning. We’ll talk for about an hour and then it’s back to writing or talking to my friend Josh, who is in France until August 22nd.

He surprised me today by saying that when he’s in the south, the Escoffier Museum of Culinary Arts is only 18 minutes from where he is staying, so he’s going to go and get some pictures for me since I cannot make it there myself. I am hoping that I have introduced him to something wonderful.

I have an English translation of Escoffier’s Le Guide Culinaire that I was going to give to my old chef, John Kinkaid, and I wrote a note in it for him. I am glad that the transaction did not change hands, because he was killed in a car accident last December and now I have something that meant a lot to both of us. We were just never in the same city at the same time for me to hand it to him, and now we never will be.

It’s a great reminder to love your friends and hold them close, because you never know when a typical day is not going to be typical at all.

Yesterday was not a typical day, but luckily it did not involve trauma. I just met with a new therapist that’s fairly fresh out of training and specializes in both ADHD and bipolar disorder. He’s also done clinical rotations in some of the worst neighborhoods in Baltimore and PG County, so I have faith in his ability to spot my bullshit coming. That’s the thing that no one tells you about brain disorders- the overwhelming amount of lies your brain will tell you in order to keep yourself safe.

I have no doubt that my current situation with Aada was brought on by mental illness, so now it’s my job to figure out why I claimed to love her and yet exposed her in the same breath. It’s not why I needed a new therapist, but it is why I need therapy acutely… because I do love Aada and I’m wrecked so hard I cannot leave my house and have trouble taking care of myself. That’s not normal for me, nor is it normal for anyone else.

I think that I retreat because I hurt the one I love the most, so therefore I am not fit for relationships with other people. I try to reach out with writing, because then I’m not “on the spot” and have the ability to edit my responses. This deep depression will take time to lift, because I know that under normal circumstances I would not have been so eager to let people into our little bubble. I don’t know what drove me mad about people thinking I had an imaginary friend. So what? I know she’s real.

She’s real enough to say she never wants to talk to me again, which is why I’m so reticent to open up to other people. If I cannot get it right with the woman I love the most, what hope is there for lesser mortals?

I am certain that it’s been long enough that I should stop beating myself up every day, but I do. This is what makes it a typical day- I cannot let go of my sins long enough to move on and take in other forms of hope and joy. My treatment plan is going to center around boundaries between me and this blog, because I feel the stress of blowback to an enormous degree. There has to be a way to keep writing about me without hurting others, but I have not found that happy medium…. but I want to.

In a perfect world, Aada would see that I am genuinely sorry and would agree to be my editor, seeing my entries before anyone else and improving upon them before I publish. It’s something that should have happened 12 years ago, but I was too proud to give anyone editorial control. I think that we could solve everything with one production meeting, but again, that is in a perfect world. She has the right to nope out of our relationship and I deserve such a fate. But if I can dream that Pati Jinich will find me in Mexico, I can dream that Aada will find me in Maryland.

I think she has already found me due to the large number of fans I have in her direct geographic area. I’m not stupid enough to think that when she said goodbye to me, she said goodbye to internet stalking me for information on what I’m up to these days. She actually embarrassed me a few months ago by saying that you cannot block people on Medium (I needed space), so how did I think she knew I was studying Finnish?

I needed space to say to my audience that my feelings for her hadn’t gone away… all the things I thought she wouldn’t want to read, anyway. Turns out, she was reading the whole time. My face turned a permanent shade of tomato and I wanted to crawl into a hole and die. But as it turns out, wanting to crawl into a hole and die of embarrassment is even more prevalent now, because my sense of self-preservation cost me more than I was prepared to pay.

So, today is typical. I think about all I’ve lost and spill it on this web site, because you are the people that show up to listen. I know that somewhere, out there in cyberspace, there is a person going through exactly what I’m going through… or maybe not exactly, but close enough for my words to resonate. Losing a friend like Aada is something I wouldn’t wish on anyone, especially when it’s their fault. I know I’m at fault, and that’s the worst part.

None of the disorders I have are known for their spectacular management of relationships, so I suppose that the only thing I can do is be surprised that I got 12 years of relationship with Aada at all. We certainly fought as hard as we loved. We should have separated long ago in some sense, and in others our relationship feels eternal. That, I think, is the hardest thing about this relationship, that we’ve been so angry with each other that it will take months to see whether it’s really over or whether this is just another bump in the road.

That’s because I do want to write with her. I do want a healthy relationship with her. I want to be someone she can count on, but I cannot be that for her in my current state. Not enough time has gone by for healing to take place on either side, and there’s no way she would want to interact or meet me at this point. I’m just not dumb enough to think that our paths won’t cross in the future, because that seems to be the way of it. We’re both getting up there. Maybe we’ll just forget why we were mad (I highly doubt it). But that would be the best case scenario for both of us because I’m not sure either one of us has a friend we’re so comfortable around after this many years of fighting and working it out.

I have to learn to listen better, to take her feelings into account when I write. I have to establish boundaries with other people on what’s okay to write and what’s not. That is my treatment plan, so perhaps today won’t be typical after all. I know that I need to learn, and I’m on my way.

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?
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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.