This is another one of those rambling entries because I realized very quickly I don’t know shit about sports. But most of you love my rambling, so I know it’s probably okay. 😉
When I was 17, my crush was the goalie of the women’s soccer team at school. We ended up dating for a few months, and then she moved back to Canada, where she was picked for a college team that could get her to the Olympics. There are at least 10 different reasons why she left soccer after that, and I’m not entirely sure I understand any of them. But that’s not my story. That’s hers, and she’s a great writer so I hope some day she’ll tell it.
Yes, I did write her senior English final paper, but she used to have a blog, so I’ve forgiven her.
Also, I got a C on my own English final paper, so it made me feel good I got an A on hers (extraordinarily put upon, but still….). It’s not that I couldn’t have gotten an A on both. She’s neurotypical. She had the best notes ever. All I had to do was craft everything she’d already written down.
On the other hand, when I “write a paper,” I write them just like blog entries…. except I edit. I remember everything I read, so I am putting together sentences on the fly. My interest in a subject is directly connected to how fast I can craft a sentence on it without having to look anything up, because I’ve already read six books or whatever.
That’s why when the subject matter is interesting to me, the writing is tighter. The reason I try to remember everything I read is that unlike my first girlfriend, I do not have enough executive function to be able to pick and choose what I’m supposed to remember.
I inhale it all.
I think that’s what makes my blog entries interesting. I take in most everything through sight, and then write it down. My first girlfriend being a soccer player gave me a love for watching the game, because even when I didn’t understand the rules, I understood watching movement. It’s a ballet where the main characters are grass and blood.
I also think of dance as a sport, particularly those high school cheerleaders with the complicated routines and defiance of physics. In retrospect, I gained respect for cheerleaders by being in the marching band. We were all physically exerting ourselves at football games, and then the cheerleaders upped the ante with their own competitions in the off-season.
I only remember one cheerleader from my high school, JR, and he was my favorite because he was the only guy. Every cheerleading team needs a guy to help with the throwing and the catching. Plus, JR is straight. I can’t imagine it was a bad gig.
Many, many boys in dance and choir do it for the girls, and we appreciate it as long as they’re not creepy about it. I swear to God a tenor could walk into any choir anywhere and they’d be grateful to have him.
To me, singing is a sport, and I think only other singers would agree with me. If you don’t spend time training your body to get a solo-quality voice out of yourself, you won’t. This is because so much depends on your physical strength. You basically have to be able to inhale down to your feet and control the air so that it doesn’t all come out at once. That takes tremendous pressure on your diaphragm and breath control. You have to tighten down some muscles while keeping others loose. It’s a long process, and I think while not as demanding as soccer or ballet, we all learn the same types of breath control for being able to dance, run, and sing.
Getting winded on the field or the stage is inadvisable.
When I lived in Portland, most of my friends were baseball fans. I’ve always been a baseball fan in terms of going to games, but I won’t watch them on TV like my friends will. Without hot dogs and sodas at the ballpark, it loses a lot (to me). I don’t know that the Os would do well, but I’d love to see them against the Astros eventually. Now that they’ve moved leagues, they don’t come to Washington anymore.
In Portland, most of us rooted for the San Francisco Baseball Giants. I can think of one Mariners fan from my whole time there. Also in Portland, I was much more into football because Dana was. She never gave up her loyalty to WAS, but I love Pete Carroll and she respected that. I also love Russell Wilson.
In terms of basketball, I will watch LeBron James do anything, because he walks the walk. He gives so much charity everywhere he goes that it’s inspiring. And the way Dwayne Wade is raising his trans daughter gives me hope for other families.
Oh, and even before I met my first girlfriend, Ryan played lacrosse. He said something to me that I’ll never forget, because I wanted it to be memorable and it was, apparently. He’d just gotten home from six weeks of lacrosse camp (or maybe it was shorter, but I don’t remember. It was enough to completely change his body.) I told him that I liked his new look a lot, but it made him hug different. It sent the intended message. No matter what you look like, I love you, not your body, because he told me that almost 25 years later.
Again, we were unusual for kids. We were both old AF emotionally, so we treated our parents like in-laws from the beginning, us both calling the other’s “Mom and Dad.” I don’t know how my father felt about it, but a man worth paying attention to was paying attention to her daughter…. and being sweet to both her and Lindsay. This carried a lot of weight, and I knew it because she never treated any of my girlfriends that way. It was blatantly obvious.
But in addition to Ryan being sweet to my mother and sister, Ryan had an older brother I completely adored, because he and Ryan were so funny together. Inside jokes all over the place that I could join once I heard them.
Plus, I’ve always been the oldest and it was funny watching him pull the same stunts on Ryan that I pulled on Lindsay….. both before and after.
The funniest conversation I remember between Ryan and his dad was that Ryan had fallen off his bike, and was bleeding with road rash. His dad took one look at him and said, “geez. Is the bike okay? I learned later that being in a doctor’s house shapes you so much. Those kinds of retorts are par for the course.
And Caitlin once got her butt stitched up on the kitchen counter. That was before my time, but a legendary story. I believe I heard it on the night I went to her house for dinner, and we all came to find out that Cait had been picking the crab claws out of the gumbo all afternoon.
Maybe that’s her root. She likes working in restaurants, too. For Anthony Bourdain, it was oysters fresh off the beach in France.
I remember Cait being athletic, but don’t remember her formal sports. But our whole family likes watching the big games, even though we don’t watch every one. I mean, some of them do. Some of them are die hard Cowboys fans, and when I mentioned that I was a Cowboys fan she said the only way she could respect that was she liked Tom Landry. I told her that my memories of the Cowboys were mostly rooted in the 90s and it was okay to move on.
I’ve always rooted for the teams where I’ve lived except for the Nationals, because I don’t like the curly W on the hats. I do have one t-shirt that doesn’t have it on it, so it’s the only Nationals gear I own. I am much more partial to the Orioles, and when I lived here before, I was already a Giants fan. The Nationals are relatively new because we took a long break from The Senators (to our detriment, I think).
That also means that when I lived in Portland, I became a rabid Timbers fan, and even have a picture of me with their mascot somewhere. I didn’t really live in Houston when The Dynamo was established, and because Houston didn’t have an MLS team when I was in high school. I’ve always been a fan of DC United.
Everywhere my friends go that’s overseas, I ask them for a national jersey if they want to know what I want. I know there’s plenty of cheap knock-offs, so it’s not paying DC United prices.
Zac doesn’t follow sports at all, but he’s told me that he’d go to a minor league game if I wanted because he likes it better than MLB. So, we might do it, we might not because it’s a road trip to Hagersville to see the Southern Maryland Blue Crabs.
The first time I went, I saw them play The Sugar Land Skeeters, and I was just as excited to meet them as I was The Crabs. That’s the thing about minor league baseball. You can get into deep conversations with the players because they have more time to talk after the game and they’re trying to get their adrenaline to come down.
The reason I wanted a deep conversation is that I really wanted to know how Caleb was doing. He lives in Louisiana and commutes for The Skeeters, so they were in Maryland during the height of Hurricane Harvey and he’d already been through Katrina. Because I knew what was going on in Houston/Sugar Land, I wasn’t just talking to him; I was asking questions about his experience from the other side.
My sister was running the relief effort at the George R. Brown Convention Center. He said that because of the touring schedule, he hadn’t even had time to check it out- grateful he wasn’t there and desperate to see if his house and truck still were.
I wished him well, but what even he doesn’t know is that I got a fabulous picture of him right before he hit the ball out of the park, and I took a million to get that one shot from the time the ball was in the pitcher’s mitt. The ball is several inches in front of the bat and he’s in perfect form…. and even if he wasn’t, he still got a home run. I wouldn’t have known the difference.
I think one of the things I really like about Supergrover is that she’s successful at her job (I think) because she played so many team sports as a child/teen. She already had experience with collaboration and not lording it over people. Delegation when you’re the boss is key, because you cannot micromanage the work, you have to hire the right people- the ones that are self-starters and persnickety about details on their own. It’s not on your plate and doesn’t have to be because there’s a special bond between coworkers who are invested and those who aren’t, as in, how fast productivity goes down when the boss has left the office.
That will always happen in top-down situations because the boss is so exhausting. It’s not fun to be micromanaged, especially by a narcissist.
Narcissism leads to very problematic behavior, like blowing up your phone at 3 AM and being mad you’re not awake to serve them. No family thing is important enough not to miss work. Leave your family thing when I need you.
Because in the military and all the intelligence agencies around here, that is true and ironclad no matter how your boss communicates, which is why there has to be a lot of support from your family to do those jobs. There are going to be missed birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays whether anyone likes it or not. The chessboard is at stake, the one thing that really is more important than being with your family and you can’t argue with it in any place, at any time.
Support to all those people is doing enough work on yourself to be a complete person when they’re gone. For some people, that means moving back in with their parents when their spouse is deployed so that they still have a support system. Others rely on chosen family because they live on base, either here or overseas.
According to Jonna Mendez, you have a choice as to whether you tell your family that you’re CIA or not. That’s because you don’t know if your family/friends are going to find it easier to help you live your cover, or whether they’ll blow it. One thing that Jonna talked about in the event for “The Moscow Rules” is that she didn’t tell her best friend she was CIA for 35 years… and that’s because she told her dad and her dad was impressed, so he told all his friends….. the ones who had seen her face, already knew who she was, etc. The more people that can attach those things, the more “in trouble” you feel.
However, with the military and intelligence, you just have to accept that some things are above your pay grade and you can only know so much. Like, “I can call you on a sat phone, but I can’t tell you where I am.” It’s not that the soldier/case officer doesn’t want to help you understand, it’s that they can’t because it would reveal troop movements if the sat phone was hacked.
I do not think that we are preparing for war ourselves. I think that those secrets are being kept so that no one knows who’s watching and where.
I can connect all of this to “Argo,” because there’s an “Argo” illustration for every occasion. To have people know what your face looks like reminds me of that scene where the “face book” has been ripped to shreds, and they get at least 20 people to sit there and line up the strips so they can see the pictures again, trying to stop the houseguests from getting out of Iran. This is because the diplomats didn’t have enough time to burn all the classifieds before the Iranis rushed in.
Let me say for the record that I do not have a dog in this race. Both the Americans and the Iranis have done horrible things to each other. I can understand Iran’s frustration at us getting the Shah out before they could prosecute him. I understand that it put the United States at a distinct disadvantage because we cut off diplomatic relations, closing the embassy altogether at that point.
I believe that’s why people like Tony and Jonna are every bit as effective as sending “a fully armed battalion to remind them of our love.” That’s because we can prevent a lot of boots on the ground with the right intelligence, because then we can go after someone diplomatically/politically instead of starting a war.
It is so disheartening to have a president who’s blind to the plight of Palestine. It is so complex we need to withdraw support from both sides immediately. It’s not our fight. That’s one that’s been going on for too long for us to rescue anyone. The president needs to realize that in their case, the call is coming from inside the house. We can’t police this one. It will work out every bit as well as Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and any other conflict we’ve entered where there hasn’t been a thousand years of fighting over that land.
I also don’t know what Biden’s faith is telling him about Israel, and that’s bothersome as well. It is a damn problem, because all the Abramic branches are at war with themselves over this. Christians and Jews want to protect their holy places, and don’t understand that all Muslim holy places are in the same vicinity.
I am not sure that is the message Christianity and Judaism want to spread…. that Muslim lives are worth less.
Because that’s what they’re doing…. like it’s a sport.
I’ve written about this before, but one of my best dates with Zac was when he’d just gotten a fiction prompt on robots, and we bounced ideas off each other as we were going through the grocery store. I was very emotional when he came up with a great line, because it was then that I knew I wanted to be with him for as long as he’d have me, because my love for him is limitless. There’s nothing he could do that would scare me away, and the fact that he’s poly doesn’t scare me, either, because all of our relationships with him are completely unique and separate.
I’m also not trying to scare him by saying that my love for him is limitless, because my platonic relationships run just as deep. I wouldn’t feel less love for him if he decided we were better friends than partners, or I did. You have partners that you’re romantic with, and partners that you’re not. One of Zac’s friends has a literal murder board because their red and yellow (romantic and platonic) strings are just as important to them. Emotional intimacy is important, and sometimes more important than sex. Think of all the straight women with kids who move in together so that their kids still have two parents to handle them.
To me, that is polyamory because you’re not showing your boyfriend any less attention than the co-parent (I’m assuming these women still date). Once you get to a relationship where you’re living together and taking care of a household and raising kids, wouldn’t it be harder to break up all that to move in with someone else the kids don’t know? Does it make it any less of a serious relationship when you’re not having sex?
What I have learned over the last year is that Zac is my orange string. I want him in my life to whatever level he’ll accept, and right now, everything is working out perfectly for us because I am obsessed with writing to the point where I go off the grid. Zac is so busy that he doesn’t get freaked out when I don’t reply right away, wouldn’t wander around worrying that I’m dating someone else (if I was dating anyone else, he’d be thrilled and not threatened). He’s bisexual. He doesn’t want anything but the tea.
That being said, I love our orange string and I don’t know how much I want my own time to be divided. It is not that I feel this Protestant urge to be monogamous and I’m hoping from Zac that this will turn into something more….. a something more that cannot be there. All of his relationships are secure, so that would be pointless and something a traditional woman would do. I am anything but that.
A traditional woman would be trying to weed out all the other partners so that they got more time than everyone else, hoping to eventually change Zac into something he’s not. They’d be jumping up and down to show why they “deserve the rose.” I see it all the time.
What I also see is men who have attractions to other women and instead of cheating, will ask their wives to open the relationship. The wife agrees, and one of two things happens.
The first is regret. Sometimes on both sides, sometimes on the wife because she agreed to it under duress (the first red flag it’s not going to go well).
Here’s the second. Men get controlling and jealous, wanting to shut the relationship down into monogamy when they realize how much easier it is for women to get multiple dates than men. They stop being confident that they can meet someone else, so instead of working on themselves, they start working on either forcing their wives to break up with their other partners, or trying to sabotage their other relationships so that the partner will realize “they’re the only one left.”
Here’s the third. There are heterosexual couples who are called “unicorn hunters.” The reason they are is that this type relationship blows up the most frequently, and works so incredibly rarely that it’s practically fictional.
Generally, both women are bi, so they want a female partner because it works out for both of them….. but they don’t treat their “unicorn” as a real person. They’re just there for the pleasure of a couple, because their hierarchy is so entrenched. If the couple has children, the “unicorn” quickly feels like the maid and the nanny……… because in reality, that serves the couple perfectly. Use the unicorn and emotionally abuse them. Treat them like an employee, but don’t pay them.
But that’s not the only dynamic. If the unicorn is dating both of them, the couple divides because they start fighting about time and it gets nasty quickly…… that’s because the unicorn is either not dating or “not allowed to date.” Why would they be allowed to take time off and be their own person when they need them to be chief cook and bottle washer?
The other thing that happens frequently is that couples try to find younger women and the husband abuses both women. That’s because the wife sees the power imbalance early and the younger woman doesn’t, because she doesn’t have enough life experience for that. So, one woman is too afraid to rock the boat and the young woman is too naive to leave. Eventually, they band together. But that takes time.
In absolutely all of the reading I’ve done on polyamory, there are two things that make a difference in how successful your relationships are in the future.
The first is not being in a relationship at all when you start thinking about polyamory, and not getting into a relationship hierarchy at all. You have the ability to see that all of your relationships have this dynamic and no one is mourning something they’ve lost while also trying to integrate new partners into their lives.
Failing that, you have to find a poly-friendly therapist and work out all your issues before you just decide to casually say “I think we should open our relationship,” especially when you find out that the reason one partner wants poly is covering their ass because they’ve been cheating for months. It happens more often than you think, and it’s devastating. Better to break up immediately because you will not get over lying and cheating. That’s not poly, that’s lying and cheating.
The best way I’ve ever heard polyamory phrased is that I own Zac like he’s my neighborhood, my favorite place and not my favorite possession.
The reason I’m pouring my heart into him is not so we can be more to each other in terms of time, but more to each other in terms of quality…… because here’s what I see, and I told him this. “You’re about to go on a journey, and I want to be there for all of it.” Plus, I’m getting closer with his other partners, and that feels good, too. It feels like being a part of our weird little family rather than Zac and me cocooning to the rest of the world- what has happened in every one of my monogamous relationships. They’ve been so intense that I didn’t have the time I needed to be present with all of you.
He hasn’t counted up the months as to what I mean by this, so he underestimated by a large margin what I actually meant. I am not directing him in the slightest, I am excited to see what’s going to happen for him.
What I mean by “weird little family” is that like all families, there are issues and jealousies that pop up (over time, not feelings….. all our relationships are separate except for the few times a year we’re all in the same room). I do not know why, but I believe it is because two of us live in Virginia, but people believe his latest partner is the one before me.
Even I thought that until I counted it up.
So, I laid out all my feelings about all of this to Zac, and it was the most healthy conversation I’ve ever had with anyone….. because he’s used to having these conversations all the time. Negotiating boundaries is hard, and we do it well.
He said something that I really needed to hear, to the point that I almost cried. I said something about how our relationship is easy because when we have something to work out, it’s a few minute conversation and not making things bigger than they really are by holding everything in.
My beautiful boy looked at me and said, “I think you should take a lot of credit for that, because I don’t think I’m that way all the time. I think you bring it out in me.”
It was the first time in a long time that someone had told me that I was also good at negotiating boundaries, and again, something I really needed to hear.
Then, he cuddled me and I felt safe…. because I’d brought up a problem, and we talked about it until it was quickly over. What made me feel safe is that he never once invalidated my feelings, just called me on my logic and reassured me when my perceptions were off. That he’s in it for the long haul, too.
But again, this is not about a competition. This is about making what we have solid in and of itself. If I’m bringing out something in Zac that he actually likes, then I hope he knows how often he does it for me.
I am afraid that getting lost in this relationship would cost me something else, and I’m not doing that ever again with writing time.
I don’t just have this project going, I’m doing the hard work to learn fiction as well. What I’ve learned from Jonna & Tony Mendez is that there is a world of difference becoming a respected author and being picked for Oprah’s Book Club.
I know I want the first, and I think I want the second, but the stimulation of all that scares me to death. But ultimately, it’s not on me to decide whether I’m well-respected or Oprah’s Book Club-level famous. It’s up to you, my readers.
Because I’m already good at non-fiction, perhaps I should release one of those, first. I feel that when I write about history/intelligence operations, I do it the way Rachel Maddow does…. by combing through the research and putting together the story so that it’s compelling, when you really can’t make research do that.
For instance, count them up. How many hours of research do you think that Brené Brown did on shame and vulnerability before she published her first book? Did her first TED Talk? I met her in either 1999 or 2000, and she was working on it even then. Again….. count them up.
Editor’s Note:
Even though I met Brene a very long time ago, I don’t want you to think we’re best friends or anything. We spent some time together when she was in the Master’s program at the Graduate School of Social Work, so she was a student/TA who I lovingly call “one of my kids,” what I called all the students/TAs in the GSSW because I was the supervisor of their computer lab for a year before I started web development. Meeting her was a million to one, and I didn’t even recognize her name when her books started coming out. I thought, “that looks like one of my kids” when I saw her first TED Talk. So, I contacted her team to make sure our dates lined up, and it was indeed the same person. That being said, she wouldn’t know me from Adam….. but she might….. one day. 😉
Now that I think about it, I probably have enough material for a book on shame and vulnerability right now. You could write it with this year’s entries alone, but it would be better with edited versions of the last 10 years, because this is the decade in which I’ve grown the most.
I really had to look at what I was doing in all of my relationships, and when I hit 45 and realized there were only 20 years left until I was older than my mom, all of my qualms about standing up for myself went out the window. I started vomiting up emotions at an alarming rate, because a lot of it was old information in new context and new information with no context.
I feel that everyone has seen this shift, and thinks that I’m only angry. No, I think I’m experiencing the rage older women get when they realize just how much bullshit is in the world and just how much of it will not be solved while they’re still living.
You realize just how little things matter on a grand scale, that of course you should work for social justice, but you can’t burn yourself out on it at the expense of time with your family and friends. I feel this way about any community event.
I see this all the time in church members because I grew up as a United Methodist preacher’s kid. They come to a Sunday worship, and have a meaningful experience that they’ve never had before. Then, they start coming regularly and pretty quickly get involved with committees up to their eyeballs because this church is the coolest thing they’ve ever seen. But it’s not sustainable, and people burn out after six months to a year.
I keep tabs on my religious friends because of it, because they’re the ones that will tell me it’s been three Sundays and they’re already in charge of something…. most people don’t join committees as fast as they realize that churches are hosting a special event. They get put in charge of that one event and it’s not that hard, so they sign up for a few more.
Then they join a committee without dropping all the special events, and they realize, “oh my God. We’re at church all the time.” People really don’t like to talk about their feelings, so I can only think of a few times in my life when I knew why someone left…. in those cases, it was pretty obvious. Most people just ghost because they wanted something so bad that they started excluding other things that were important to them- and that’s okay.
Churches love Marthas, and they tend to take advantage of them. Don’t forget to be Mary some of the time….. or as I phrased it in a sermon, “Don’t Just Do Something…. Sit There.”
And that’s how I feel about Zac. We have the moments where we don’t just do something, we sit there. We have quiet moments where when a problem comes up, we aren’t reactive. We hold space for each other without getting defensive. We are honest about the important things- vulnerability, honesty, negative feelings on both sides, and really being able to take all that in because either we’re walking and talking (being mobile makes me thoughtful), or we’re lying on a bed/couch where we’re already comfortable.
I don’t choose moments to talk to him based on how important my need is, but when I can sense that we’re both in a relaxed mood. I don’t tiptoe around him because I think he’ll get mad, I actively look for the moments in which he has the bandwidth to hear me. It’s one thing to have a conversation in which you are totally focused on each other, and another when you’re both slammed and overstimulated up to your eyeballs. We’re both neurodivergent, so I know how to look for those things.
I don’t want to trigger a meltdown or a burnout, or to irritate his anxiety that I’m pulling away…. because I’m finally convinced he doesn’t want me to do so. Because his other partners live so much further than me, I think he feels like it’s an imposition on me to make the trip, because he’d think of it as a drag and I think of it as free, unencumbered writing time on the train both ways.
And, just like with Sam, I’ll never have another partner who hates it that I don’t drive. If I need to get somewhere fast or need groceries, I have an Uber account and I know how to use it. If I have the time, I want to be on the train because it is just enough stimulation through movement (I wear Bluetooth cans to keep out the rest) to provide a lot more creativity than normal.
My creativity is knowing that Zac is not a red string or a yellow. He’s both, and as I’ve kidded him before, “I prefer burnt orange.
Our relationship feeds my writing not in being able to write about it, I just understand it better because I write about it. The real reason is bigger than that. We have the same commitment to each other- to be brutally honest all the time (because we’re neurodivergent, so we’re likely to do that, anyway).
I want him in my life because he makes me a better me than I could be on my own, because our friendship is so strong. I have never wanted a relationship that transcends his others, or even impacts them.
But I also know that I deserve the right to take up space, and I learned that Zac appreciates that I can do it without making it hurt…. or at least, trying not to make it hurt. Some truth bombs are just hard, and you can’t go around them, because if you did it would be detrimental to both of you.
I’m also finding out the differences between being with a man and being with a woman, because this is the first serious relationship with a man I’ve ever had- in that it has lasted so long, not that I wasn’t Zac-serious about the other, Matt.
There’s only been the three, and Ryan was 7th-8th grade, so every bit as emotionally intense without the drive of our hormones kicking in- mostly (Hi, our parents!). All of our friendships have been as strong as mine with Zac, it’s only that Zac and I have been together much longer than Matt and I were, and approaching being together longer than Ryan and me.
We were unusual for kids. I was with him for a year and two months, and I will never feel that way about anyone in my life. That’s because our relationship never complicated itself with sex. It was always a good time, and still is. We still want the tea on who each other’s dating, how work is going, all that. Plus, I trust him more than I do anyone else, because we met when I was 13. We both made relationship-ending mistakes, but his was so easy to forgive because at the time, I no longer believed I could love him the way he deserved to be loved (bullshit, bullshit, bullshit- thanks a lot, lesbians. But I’m not bitter. #eyeroll).
What I have learned from my experience with Ryan is that a red string can certainly become yellow, and I knew that was typically true of lesbians. I didn’t know it was true of men as well, but it so is, especially since we’ve both dated women. I think men trust women that have dated women more, in some cases, than straight men and women because of the outside perspective angle. I can take gender roles out of something and explain the dynamic that’s going on in their relationship…. and then whether they realize that’s what I’m doing is on them.
What I find is that men will absolutely take on female roles if they understand what they’re doing to their wives when they don’t. But, they won’t hear it from their wives, and they won’t hear it from their male friends, because they’re all stuck in the same heteronormative bullshit institution.
The best comment I ever got on my marriage article was “I didn’t know the writer was gay until the end.”
That’s kind of because I write, like another reader said, “a 15 year old boy……… and his mother.”
And on that note, I think my love for Zac is clear and why. He shows love every day to his “twinkie bitch boyfriend by sending me pictures of himself dressed for work every day, and at least a few times a week, a picture of Oliver, who is a dog, as well.
I think that’s my favorite nickname now, Twinkie Bitch Boyfriend. Zac is the first person I ever told I thought I was nonbinary, because I knew he would know what I meant, that I never wanted to change anything, I could just see both sides of my brain working at once. It’s not a slam to say I look like a tweaker at a club, he’s honoring what I told him……. that I’m so female, and so not.
I just need a better twinkie bitch boyfriend haircut, which I usually achieve by going to a stylist with either a picture of Matt Smith and asking them if they can make me into The Doctor, or taking a picture of Robert Pattinson and saying, “can you make me a sparkly vampire?”
I love both actors, but Robert’s haircut in Twilight suits me. Speaking of which, I love the Twilight movies because the people who wrote the script were a fuck ton more talented than Stephanie Meyer and also the movies have terrible moments which make them even better popcorn films.
Which I’ll have to watch, since I promised Zac “Slow Horses…” because he’s my orange string.
Before we get started today, I have to give a shoutout to Susan. When I went back over her comment on yesterday’s entry, I realized what she was actually saying and I laughed til I cried. She said, “I’m surprised at what’s coming up for people in response to this ‘innocent’ question.” I was confused because I thought I’d asked a question in the writing and I was slow on the uptake as to which question she meant……. and then I realized that THE WRITING PROMPT was a question. Face palm. Yes, the writing prompt was completely innocent, and it didn’t take me all the places I could have gone because I have so many food memories.
I stopped taking road trips when I stopped driving, but I do love them. Zac was kidding me about being a bad driver, which is valid. But when I didn’t have a choice, I drove. I got better with age, but my last wreck came from my last road trip. When I tell you the circumstances, you probably won’t be surprised. Just yet another time autism ate my lunch.
I think deeply about things, to the point of the exlusion of everything going on around me. As a driver, this is not ideal. I think everyone is like this to some extent; they get lost in their own little world and then all of the sudden, there’s a car there….. I’d just talked to my first girlfriend after years and years, and I can’t remember what it was about the conversation that had me tripped up- mostly that it had been so long and I had absolutely no idea why she ghosted me in the first place.
She came out of hiding to say she was sorry my mother died, and then nothing ever again. Because basically what I realized is that she had the ability to control my emotions because mine went up and down as hers did. If you’ve read any of my writing in the last 20 years, you know this is not an unusual thing for me. I’m an INFJ. I take on every emotion in the room, good and bad.
I did what I always did back then when I was upset. I went to Waffle House. Or I tried. The one I used to go to when I lived here before was out in bum fuck Virginia, but there was one on my side of the river in Frederick. So, off I go for salvation- which in this case was going to be a triple order of hash browns with chili, cheese, and onions. It’s my emotional support junk food.
Frederick isn’t really that far; I’m not sure that a Marylander would think of Silver Spring to Frederick as a road trip, but it was memorable. I ended up in the hospital when I took a curve too fast and slammed into a guardrail. I hadn’t been drinking (as opposed to what normally happens when you go to a Waffle House), I was just lost in thought and missed a sign for a 25mph speed limit while coming around…… or at least, I thought I did. The cop who came to ticket me (deservedly, I was really nice about the whole thing and so was he), he said that it wasn’t marked on this side. It was marked on the other side of the freeway. I remained cool and calm, but on the inside, I was livid. How is a sign a half mile away going to help me in this situation?
So, yes, I was driving distractedly, but I surely cannot be at fault for everything that happened that day if a curve was that dangerous at 30mph and unmarked. Seriously, five miles over at the entrance to a freeway and I went up on two wheels. I took my lumps, and I’ve never driven again…. unless I was in Texas and Lindsay and I were going to our grandparents’ houses or something (they used to live in the same town- our step-grandparents lived about six miles away). And even then, that’s only happened once.
Lindsay likes to control the driving and the music. You have no choice in this matter. 😉 I just don’t mind because she listens to things I’ve never heard before. For instance, Charlotte Cardin…. she’s a Canadian who had her premiere American concert at Union Stage, and we got to be there. Just a core memory all the way around.
Oh, wait. I did drive on one of our road trips, and it brings me to a really funny story even though :::waves hand::: this is not the road trip you are looking for.
When I was about 23, my mother went with her church choir to perform at Carnegie Hall. Lindsay, Kathleen, and I couldn’t get tickets for the performance, but my mom invited us to meet her in New York and just bum around. I think we spent the night? Not sure, but I put in a text to Lindsay to see if she remembers. If she gets back to me “before publication,” I might be able to shed some more light. I want to say we stayed at The Time hotel, but I’ve spent a couple nights in New York and I may be mixing up trips………
But anyway, when we were kids, my dad left an entire pound of sliced turkey in the trunk of his car. We didn’t find it for weeks. When we finally found it, my dad called it “Lanagan Lunchmeat Syndrome.” So, at one point, I think Philly, we stopped at a gas station to get sandwiches because Washington to New York is really not that far. We just needed a snack. So, that was a good move right up until I didn’t notice that Lindsay left half a sandwich in the back seat of my car for like, six weeks, so I know that Lanagan Lunchmeat Syndrome is genetic. I’m sure I’ve celebrated it more than once since then… Oh, wait. I definitely have because I can’t remember whether it was Dana or me, but she definitely knows about “Lanagan Lunch Meat Syndrome.”
The reason I can’t remember is that Dana didn’t change her name legally, but we were both Mrs. Lanagan to our friends. That’s because at the time we were thinking about having kids. We didn’t, of course, but at the time it made sense for us all to have the same last name and she had cousins with her last name and I didn’t. So, we both answered to “Lanagan” in the kitchen and I don’t believe I have ever been more touched when they called her and she answered to it. Plus, it was fun calling her “Naganalanad.” Oh, and we had two other nicknames. Dana introduced me to one of her customers that always called her “Trouble.” So, when he said, “hey, Trouble,” she introduced me as her wife and he nodded to me and said, “Mrs. Trouble.” I don’t remember what I said, but it was some version of “you have no idea.”
But in the original road trip instance of me showing signs of “Lanagan Lunch Meat Syndrome,”, we didn’t spend much time together. The part I really remember is driving down West Side Highway and the water being so incredibly beautiful. This why I wanted to go to New York, Zachary. He only gets the full name when I’m play upset.
No, I was telling everyone in another entry that I’d like to spend some actual time in New York people watching, because that’s the one thing I’d never done. Just gotten a table at an outside café, probably with a newspaper so I’m not incredibly obvious as to all the staring I want to do. How do New Yorkers live? How do they survive? I think my answer would be to slowly become Fran Lebowitz….. and honestly, I’m not even sure I’m not her already. I am 46…….
I have not had many days lately where I’m not absolutely as cranky as she is, but she’s brilliant so a lot of funny comes with her outlook/attitude. I suppose Fran is a better archetype for me because Harper Lee was much more agoraphobic than I am (though I do get that way sometimes). Fran does speaking engagements that are basically just interviews with one person and I think, “I could handle that. It’s just one person.” She also loves being at home with her books and writing, she doesn’t feel trapped there.
I saw a meme that spoke to me yesterday (the reason why I have trouble in conflicts with neurotypical people), literally to my core because it says so much about my emotional abuser, then Meagan, Kathleen, Katharin, Angela, Supergrover, and to a certain extent, Meagan and Dana (that’s because they were the only two personalities I’ve dated/been partners with that deviated from the pattern and got into it once I was just, so………….. meeee.
The meme said, “you don’t like dominant women because you’re submissive, you like domaninant women because you’re autistic and they’re direct about what they want.” I can 100 and crazy percent agree that this is why I thought Meagan was right, that we would have been good partners for each other as adults if we’d tried, because she was an athlete and is now a massage therapist. That means she is driven to succeed and also didn’t completely steamroll me every chance she got.
She was in touch with her fallibility, when a lot of women aren’t. When emotionally unavailable people shut down, whatever it is that they’re upset about becomes inflexible and there’s not a lot of compromise. I have come to realize over the years that this is not personal in any way and just to distance myself from those people. It’s not because I don’t love them to the moon and back (even Kathleen, because I’m determined not to be bitter).
The feeling I had with Meagan where there were some things I felt strongly about and some things I did was why my relationship with Sam tripped me up for a bit. I did not feel that I was absolutely steamrolled until I put all the puzzle pieces together. Just wire monkey all the way around when I desperately needed cloth after a bad relationship beforehand….. and there were seven years between Dana and Sam, so it was a very big deal for me to let my guard down even that much. So, the first red flag is that she felt responsible for my transportation because she had a car and I didn’t. Not once in three weeks did she say, “I’m going to be at X. Meet me there.”
In fact, I don’t think she ever would have, because she’s a mom and wants to take care of everyone, overextending herself in the process by putting something on herself that just didn’t need to be there………. and the biggest red flag as to why I originally said no to our first date. She picked on me for not having a car.
I told her that if we worked out, I would think about buying a car because it wouldn’t just be about me. I’d need to be able to get there faster if she was stuck for child care or whatever (I never wanted to be the stepmom unless she asked me, just mom’s girlfriend who lets us get away with murder- relative, because they’re pretty much the perfect kids.
I didn’t have the money to buy a car currently and if I did come into enough money to buy a car, I wasn’t sure it was the safest option for me unless I bought a Tesla, the only way I’d let the kids ride with me because of the technology. I also said that I was waiting for other car companies to get their adaptive driving tools in their own cars because Elon Musk is a tool. So, from the very beginning, me not having a car was a straight up problem……………. FOR HER.
It was a road trip to see her, but not any longer than I would have taken to see Zac, just in the other direction. She lived near BWI, and the train ticket on the MARC was $18 round trip. If Sam wasn’t available to pick me up, or just didn’t want to, it was close enough to Uber without spending an arm and a leg. And not just to her house- it was a small town. I could have met her anywhere, without, I might had, having to pay for or find parking.
The other thing is that Sam told me from the very beginning that she was just starting a successful clinic and she really didn’t have time to date. That she didn’t even know if she could see me after our first date. This did not sit well with me. I said, “it looks like you’re only looking for a girlfriend for a weekend, and I’m not into that at all. She promised that no, it had nothing to do with that, it was only timing both with her business and with the kids’ dad (we weren’t even close to being introduced- that would have been straight up insane). The one thing the kids did know is that their mom was dating someone, and if it worked out they might meet me, but she wanted the kids to know she was dating in case I accidentally left something at their house, etc.
So, I know that Sam wasn’t as shallow about all this as she seemed. She was trapped between two worlds; the one where she wanted a successful business, and also wanted to throw her whole heart into a relationship because she didn’t know how not to do that. Frankly, until I’d been dating Zac for a year, I didn’t know how not to do that, either. It took time and patience to learn, because negotiating emotional boundaries doesn’t wig me out the way it used to.
I was actually talking to Zac about this, that because of the way I was raised, I was taught to see men as an authority figure, as all women are and fight against it our whole lives…. and that me being 10 years older made me realize I wasn’t scared of him. That I actually was coming from a place of wisdom, but not always because Zac is every bit as intelligent and creative as I am. I feel like I have met my match, and because I feel polysaturated at one person, I don’t feel the need to date more because now I’m the one that doesn’t have time for a full-on relationship because I am pouring my energy into all of you.
And we negotiate boundaries all the time, except that most of those are on my end. You get to see what you get to see, but I do have a third dimension…………. kind of. 😛
So, I am of two minds about the breakup. I was trapped in the same world she was- content to focus on my writing and not her exclusively so she wasn’t overwhelmed at work and at home. This led to two issues. The first is that I don’t know how long it had been since her last relationship, but she basically went into it feet first and rushed everything until it flamed out. She was scared she was going to do that with me, and I know it.
You don’t have jokes like me calling her “Wilhousky” if you don’t get each other on a deep spiritual level. I am lyric soprano, and she’s an alto with mezzo tendencies….. so basically, the same kind of soprano as me. Not full of herself, first of all, because most lyric sopranos are. It’s supposed to be my job to be the egotistical nut bag, but I’m not because I’ve watched those absolute bitches for years and I will have no part of it. I already know that with pieces that really fit my voice, I am unstoppable all on my own. I don’t need to compare myself to anyone else at any time…… and Sam felt the same way.
Plus, her house was big enough that if she wanted a grand piano, I could have brought her one. 😉 But that would have taken years to build, and she was so ready and yet not. She felt it was too soon to jump in feet first, yet didn’t have any experience not doing so. Frankly, neither did I. But what I was comfortable with is loving her to whatever level she would accept, because I thought she would make a great friend if we weren’t together……… right up until she text messaged me to break up and when I asked her if we could talk about this, she said she didn’t think it would do any good. To me, that’s not an adult. That’s hiding. But there’s more to lesbian relationships moving fast than you might think. We are terrified of scarcity. We will lock down bad relationships and stay in them for years because it’s so hard to meet lesbians as a general rule.
In terms of queer women, we are very much known for this. My friend Beck and I are both surprised U-Haul has not built an entire ad campaign around it……… It’s not a secret, it’s history. As I said in a queer group on Facebook, “we don’t want to treat women like men. We don’t want other women to treat us the way men treat women. So we do what women have done for thousands of years….. use inference until someone gives or until both people die.” I don’t want to be this way with anyone anymore, because it’s never gotten me anywhere.
Most, if not all lesbians need to be told directly that you like them, because I promise you that most women have self-esteem issues and will not believe it just by watching across the room for interest. So, I feel very sorry for it, but that’s what gave me too much hubris with my beautiful girl. Because first of all, if she felt anything from my letters, I knew she wouldn’t tell me. The second thing is that I didn’t want to go my whole life without knowing the answer.
I was brave, crazy, and a total idiot. I think she didn’t tell me she was in a serious relationship because she knew it would hurt; it actually made things 10 times worse because she waited so long to lower the boom. In my opinion, she didn’t tell me things like that because she was afraid of my reaction…. because I would imagine that she has had to deal with male interest every single fucking day of her life.
With me, she got shy and absolutely didn’t know what to say. In some ways, and please forgive me, beautiful girl, just something I know to be true from other women that have been older than me- their internalized homophobia is stronger because of the era in which they grew up. Just because there are gay people around someone doesn’t mean they know how to react when someone is interested in them. My job was to make sure that it didn’t feel threatening, and at first, it didn’t. She was flattered and appreciated my thoughts.
But I was married, and basically, so was she. But there was a power dynamic between us that made our relationship stronger and different than the one with my wife. But those are all the parts I can’t explain, which is why I was such a dick in trying to shut the relationship down. I really thought she’d block me on everything and that would be the end of that.
She didn’t understand any of it because she wasn’t in love with me. She didn’t freak at seeing my picture in her feed all day. It wasn’t hard for her to see my status updates because she wasn’t reading into them the way I was into hers, because it hurt to be close and not. Nothing about our situation said that we were having the same experience, but that didn’t mean that either was wrong.
She said something to me that I’ve always remembered, because it gave me room in the relationship to be me. She said, “we both have different ways of being in this relationship, and that’s not wrong. I don’t know what else to say.” She didn’t have to- that one line was everything and I’ve remembered it for a decade. Most of the things that I’ve remembered, I’ve remembered for a decade.
That’s because those are the days in which we really opened up to each other without putting emotional guns on the table and seeing if they’d go off. What I have learned from this, many, many times, is that she must love me to some extent because no one in their right mind would have stayed and fought it out with me if they didn’t.
Even on our worst days, we still communicated. It might have been angry that day, but the connection was still there. What we didn’t have was my ability to call her out on her bullshit, when that wasn’t a problem before. There was an even more strict power dynamic because she thought I was always trying to rile her up and make her angry.
I always thought that’s because she doesn’t deal in deep emotions and I do a hundred percent of the time. So, what I thought of as opening up and trying to get closer, she thought I was “throwing emotional bombs and waiting for the shit storm to begin.” So, when she’d say that, I’d go into fight or flight and it never ended well.
But those angry conversations are the last thing that happened, not my intention for our friendship. She wasn’t always the one who escalated, but it was easy for her to blame stuff like that on me because I’d already hurt her once and she was protecting herself from it not happening again. I respect that part of it. I do not respect holding me to that wrong forever, because if I didn’t really mean that there was no friend zone, that whatever she offered me was great, I would have given up eight or nine years ago.
I feel like I’ve been acting the way women want men to react, to see that there’s more to life than sex with women and really take in that if women won’t give you that part of themselves, that doesn’t degrade their worth as a person and they still have so much to give you. So, if you take your shot and lose, walking off with your tail between your legs, you have probably lost a relationship that could grow into something strong and comfortable if you weren’t such a jackass about it.
My jackass days are over, because I cannot stress enough how my emotions happened completely organically so that even I was suprised by them, both that they existed at all and that they were intense. One year she was going on vacation and I offered to Skype her. She said, “sure,” and we didn’t make it happen. Our relationship devolved into more and more writing, less and less planning to get together as our two stories diverged in a wood, because it was deeper and more emotionally charged due to the wall between us.
But the thing is, if you’re used to really fucked up love, you’ll find it and stick with it because you don’t know anything else. I’m only calling her out on this part because she thought I was jumping up and down for attention by sending her emotional bombs. In reality, I knew that we’d be apart for a long time, so the letters were weighted so she’d actually have something to chew on before we got together again, even virtually.
But because she thought I was throwing emotional bombs, she’d reply immediately and ream me out. From my perspective, none of the messages she was supposed to get actually came across.
I wasn’t jumping up and down for attention by sending her “emotional bombs.” I was trying to clean up our toxic mess by asking her emotionally intelliegent questions, and doing things for her like occasionally picking up her afternoon coffee and sending her presents for Christmas, her birthday, and Galentine’s Day…… because I’m Leslie….. get it?
We need to remember what’s important in life: friends, waffles, work. Or waffles, friends, work. Doesn’t matter, but work is third.
The first time I sent Supergrover a Galentine’s Day present, she had never seen Parks & Rec, so it was a cute way to suprise her. She said that Feb. 13th would carry a new connotation henceforth, and it was so incredibly sweet. I knew then that she was my “poetic, noble, land mermaid.” It always makes me happy for her to feel happy at something I’ve done, and I feel all of that got overshadowed over time.
It was all my fault, In the Beginning.™
But again, I cannot abide people who forgive you on the surface and pretend everything is fine. My crush on her was not our only problem. Her problems were also on the table, and if I’m really honest, fed each other and also canceled each other out. I think we would have been a different “chosen family” altogether if we could have stopped the petty fighting and started the real one. There was no way to get closer by arguing over the equivalent of our preferred brand of toothpaste while ignoring the fact that we were both struggling underneath.
Editor’s Note:
I’m beginning to realize how long this is. Please excuse me. I took my Adderrall at 0630 and apparently it has kicked in….. JFC.
Now you know why Supergrover was overwhelmed. This entry is basically what one of my weighted letters looked like- I should have sent less of them, but she was my “first text of the day.” And in all honesty, that was all I needed from her. Just to be that person I could say good morning and good night to before I launched into a relationship that meant having to keep up with all that stuff. I knew she wouldn’t get jealous and wonder why I didn’t do it if I forgot or whatever, and I’m not even sure if she liked it or not.
And that became the root of my problem with her, and my problem with Sam. Because both women were emotionally unavailable, neither Supergrover nor Sam would have gone deep with me and said, “here are the things that are going right. Here are the things that are going wrong. Here’s things we can fix. Here’s things that are basic incompatibilities and we should move on….. because we’re wonderful, just not for each other.” I feel like I should have known this with both women a lot earlier than I did, and with Supergrover and Sam both situations resolved in much the same way.
Sam held in all her feelings about wanting to get close right away and also not having enough time for me and didn’t want me to be lonely all the time. What she didn’t know then that I know now is that we would have been as happy as Zac and I are because since he has multiple partners, he’s not dependent on me or vice versa. With Sam, if she’d wanted to be monogamous, it would have worked the same way. I would have been too involved in my own life to pay attention to the fact that she wasn’t always around.
And in fact, now I have an inside joke with one of his other partners, and I’m not sure she even knows it. I’ll use a fake name, but this is still really funny.
Leslie: No need for you to reply, just dropping a note here so I don’t forget. You are out of Diet Dr. Pepper. Karen and I would like a word. 😛 😛 😛
Zac: I’m just now headed for home after I have to stop for……. something.
And here’s the thing. He’s going to have to go to the store again if Karen won’t switch hit like I will. Zac knows that Karen likes Diet Dr Pepper and I like Dr Pepper Zero. It made me feel even more special when he walked in wiht my favorite (just like he would do for her), because Zac is the kind of man that remembers these things.
One date night turned into two because he bought us tickets for a cheese and beer tasting event.
So, the first night we hung out and watched “Sideways,” only the sexiest film in existence because Stephanie is a bad, bad girl. Then, the next night we went to the event at Fair Winds (it’s great, you should try it. It’s in Lorton.). Good lord I had flavors I never thought I’d find outside of Oregon. But I was good to myself. Too much alcohol is bad for my psych meds, so I tasted everything (a couple times), and then had a short Fruit Punch sour that absolutely blew my mind.
Then, it was still relatively early in the evening when we got home, so we watched “The Holdovers,” because we both love Paul Giamatii. Zac had heard a review (or maybe an interview with Paul) where the plot is basically “what if the guy from ‘Sideways’ was Edward James Olmos in ‘Stand and Deliver?.’ Now, I haven’t seen the movie to the end (I fell asleep because we were watching it on a tablet in bed), so I don’t know if he actually wins the entitled private school assholes over, but what I do know is that by writing that description of the movie, it’s making me laugh so hard I’m crying……. because here’s what I know.
Poor kids experience more physical pain. Rich kids experience more emotional pain because they’re surrounded by “safety.” Safety like a mom promising to take her son to St. Kitt’s for Christmas break, then calling him up while his suitcase is in his hand and saying he can’t go because it’s her honeymoon and she doesn’t want him to come. I think I only noticed one kid (not an American) who actually had a good home life. These kids are in boarding school because their parents have kids as status symbols and heirs, not the cuddlebugs they actually are. And, I’m actually not even sure that poor kids experience more physical violence, because I was talking about their neighborhoods. I am sure there are people across the income spectrum who think nothing of beating their children. Those kids learn to do everything to please their parents, so when their parents dump them, they realize that they’ll never please their parents and to find someone else…….. a large part of “Spare,” by the way. He calls out the African man who actually raised him and says it just like that. I think it would have been a dagger to the heart of any father that had feelings.
That’s why boarding school teachers and nurses are so important. They become the parents, especially for small kids. Very, very few parents send their kids to boarding school because they’re impressed with the education and truly want to give their kids a better life.
Boarding is not required at many schools. Imagine being such an absent parent that you can’t handle your kids sleeping in their own beds at night.
But I’m sure that school is also a refuge for those with alcoholic parents…… and that happens across the board, too, except kids who aren’t in boarding school don’t get a break.
I take all this in from thousands of interactions I’ve had with people over the years, often standing on my dad’s platform as a community leader (his last church was about 1600 members, so not a small sample size). I also read a ton of books on self-help, emotional intimacy, and conflict resolution. I realize that autistic rage and burnout cannot go unmanaged if I’m ever going to live with someone else, even a roommate. That’s because in my next house, I’d like to be closer and actually run a household together rather than every man for himself.
I think Zac and I would be great at this, but there are two reasons why that can’t happen. The first is that he just got a roommate about a month or two ago, and the second is that he has a hard and fast rule that romantic partners cannot live with him. I love this, and I also know that he’s said it’s not a hard and fast rule if I’m only looking for a short-term (maybe two weeks) place to crash if I’m waiting on an apartment or room in another group house (my first choice).
I also wouldn’t want to put Zac out in any way, so it would be perfect if I could crash while he was somewhere else so it didn’t feel like we were living together. The only reason I even consider him being a roommate is that I’d love him whether we were dating or not, and I have that outlook on our relationship. That I don’t know what the future holds, but my platonic relationships run just as deep and I can’t imagine a life in which we’re not coming up with book ideas and flipping each other shit while we do it. So, what I really mean is that no matter how much time we spend together, it is always quality because we’re a lot of fun.
The only thing I’m really trying to convince him of is just how beautiful a human being he is. It is not a “falling in love” sort of feeling, but recognizing a kindred spirit. We’re neurodivergent, so we have the same sense of humor- e.g. “are you suggesting object permanence is a problem?” I said, “Peek-a-Boo, bitch.” I’m laughing now even as I type this, but I still can’t believe he let me get away with that one. I’m lucky in that he’s military, because there’s very little I could say in which he wouldn’t just roll with it. And the best thing is that if something I said crossed a line and actually hurt, he’d be emotionally strong enough to tell me that. And, of course, now since he knows my sense of humor better, his digs at me are getting better and better….. to the point where I can’t wait to see what happens as we get to know each other even better. I think he is as divine as everyone else, and I want him to believe it. I believe in him, both as military, intelligence, and fiction….. plus blogs. It was a kick to be written about, and an honor…….. and then there’s things like this.
He sent me a leftist cartoon where Jesus is at the southern border with all the Mexicans trying to cross, and I said someting theologically literate and flaming liberal. He said, “commie,” and water came out of my nose.
I think it’s great that he’s an Atheist and also not offended by the teachings of Christ in the way that I use them (his criticisms of conservative, white supremacy apologist theology is valid and appreciated. Leftists need to do better at beating this down.). Sometimes, when I use a theological device in my writing, he’ll ask me what the story is behind it because he knows that I like religious discourse as an academic subject and not in any way trying to change him. We both have different ways of being in this relationship, and that’s not wrong. 😉
And now we’ve arrived at our last road trip. I need to go out into Virginia and see what’s available. I don’t need to be closer to Zac, that would just be an added bonus. No, it’s more serious than that, and something I can’t let go publicly. I just need to get all my ducks in a row regarding health care because I would be losing a hell of a lot if I couldn’t get reciprocity.
So, if you are a praying sort of person, black magic or white, ponder how this trip might turn out and wish me good luck.
No one has ever had a completely negative impact on me, because I see the good in everything and everyone. That doesn’t mean good people don’t do bad things. It means that I see both ends of the spectrum of human behavior and I don’t meet anyone that hasn’t proved it all to be true. Every human on earth is a glorious mess. We’re all a bunch of red flags, and we don’t work nearly hard enough to stay together. Not as couples, not as friends, and certainly not as states and nations. You just have to remember to live for the highs.
I won’t let anyone into my life without understanding it may not be forever- people come and go, so let them. I have had many people in my life for which I would go through hell and back before I’d admit it was a bad relationship. It’s hard when people screw you over. It’s worse when you’re at fault. People can and do resolve monster conflicts, but both parties have to buy in. You will never get anywhere if one person wants to resolve conflict and the other doesn’t.
However, “doesn’t” is relative. Sometimes, it looks like ghosting. Sometimes it looks like saying everything is fine, but it doesn’t feel right. If it doesn’t feel right, it isn’t. When you have no idea what’s wrong, do not guess. You’re wrong. Or, more accurately, the less you know about how someone feels, the more apt you are to make things worse.
I am a craftsman.
I am not good at talking about relationships because mine all go so well. I am good at talking about relationships because I’ve been through the ringer. I have made every mistake a person can make in a relationship, a lot of them way more expensive than I could afford.
I can describe the mistakes I’ve made, and also write what I wish I’d done in retrospect. I cannot breathe life into a dead relationship, but I can talk about it while it lived.
Right this very moment, the relationship that I have with myself is having a positive impact on me. I have a lot of things to think about, deeply, because I need to direct my energy and resources where it will do the most good. I don’t know what that means for me, but I do know that my life looks different than it did a few years ago, and I’m adrift…. but not in a bad way. In a way that I need to be self-sufficient for now (while also dearly wishing I wasn’t… I’m not the “adultier adult” type).
I have made so many mistakes, but somehow they have a positive impact. I think it’s because I’m driven to lead from the back. I have found over and over that people will not be vulnerable with me if I am not willing to lay all my cards on the table first. What is true of blogging is true of conversation; I just do not opine like this in person. It seems rude, because it is. If you wanted to read this, you typed in the URL or clicked the link. In short, when I’m in a crowd, I generally think “no one asked you.” I keep to myself, because I like hearing other people talk to each other. I like being around conversation more than I like being in one.
There are also many things I’ve said out loud that probably sounded better in my head…….. and stretching the definition of “several” things I’ve said that shouldn’t even have made it past my brain. The vetting process is getting better, but it’s not absolute. However, I think of those times and there’s not a one I don’t regret….. but you don’t get to be 46 without regrets.
However, I think I’ve spent long enough talking about regrets and am really starting to embrace the writer’s life…. ecstatic to be alone and also together with Zac (and Oliver, who is a dog). As a writer, I need more alone time than most. I also love dating an extrovert because he’ll drag me out of the house….. and even if we just end up watching a movie, I still got out of MY house. 😛
I’m looking forward to two dates in the future, because I’ll get to introduce him to Jason Moran (jazz pianist) and Jonna Mendez (former Chief of Disguise at CIA and my favorite living writer). We’ve got plans sooner than that, but those are important because both Jason and Jonna are important to me, and so is Zac in a completely different orbit.
Jonna, I believe, will find him completely charming because I’m going to bet she didn’t have “meet Leslie’s BOYfriend” on her bingo card.
I laughed to myself when I wrote that title, because everyone I write about is a big influence. I can’t think of anyone that has affected me more in both good ways and bad than going back over my years and seeing what happened.
Zac is my biggest influence right now, because for Christmas he got me a box of cards with fiction challenges on them. I may start a different blog for that, at his suggestion for his own site, because it would look disjointed to have fiction and non together. I will wait and see whether I’m actually prone to publishing the results first.
Speaking of Mr. Wood, I had no idea that a comment and a blog entry about me was written by him, because I absolutely didn’t see the play on words with “Mr. Would.” I was reading too fast and I saw “Mr. World.” But even if I had read it correctly, it wouldn’t have helped me, because Zac didn’t mention that he was a blogger. I am looking forward to another blogger in the house, because I need to know how it feels to be written about, and I can’t think of a person that sees more of my range of emotion.
That doesn’t make it not funny that I didn’t know that Mr. Would was actually my boyfriend. This is because I thought I was going to meet someone new in the area, and was surprised to see t hat we’d already met. We’ve been dating for a YEAR and I didn’t know he had a blog. A YEAR. YEAR, people. A YEAR.
Now I’m really laughing.
He was probably gathering intelligence to see how good an idea it was to tell me he was a blogger, and that just makes me laugh harder because of course I’m kidding. I have the same philosophy as Bryn. “Write what you want, we’ll work it out.” He actually took me to the mat over traveling, and that’s what made me think I had a superfan on my hands. He said that I didn’t include places I’d said I’d wanted to go before, and was surprised I didn’t mention them again. So, I have this entire ass blog entry written about me by MY BOYFRIEND, and all I got was a pingback.
No, it is AS IF he listens to me, and I could cry when I think about that intensity. I know I am valued because when I say something, he remembers it. I have never been in a relationship with someone so much like me, with the possible exception of Dana. The thing is, though, she would adore Zac as well because he’s like both of us. Neurodivergent and also in the military. Neither Dana nor I have served, but her dad was a Marine and she speaks acronym. I definitely have a type, and it doesn’t have to do with looks. It has to do with the way someone thinks.
So I’m sitting there reading like, “does he memorize my shit?!”
The only reason I didn’t think of Zac at all is that this has happened before. I know I’ve mentioned it, but for new readers there was Stephanie (at least, I think that was her name, it was years ago). Stephanie invited me for coffee through a dating site (the miracle is that I said yes). I sent her my URL because I separate the children from the adults fast. If you can’t handle that I’m a writer, we’re not going to have much in coommon.
Stephanie proceeded to read back four years’ worth of entries, and then pretended like my blog was law and I couldn’t change. It was an hour’s worth of “now you’re saying this, but four years ago, you said….”
I’d gotten divorced, moved to DC, and my mother died in relatively quick procession. But of course no one changes because of anything as simple as that.
But right now, I can’t dwell on anything in my real life, because tonight is not about me. Jesus is one of the biggest influences in my life, and it’s almost time. Mary can sense it. Her water is about to break. Right now? This very moment? I’m just waiting for the baby.
Tonight Luke will come out in his scrubs, and announce that he’s here. The baby that will one day change the world. Tonight is the night that the membrane between heaven and earth stretches so thin, we can touch the face of God.
The miracle is not that Jesus was a virgin birth, but that he survived at all. Can you really imagine being a baby and lying that close to cow shit? Can you imagine delivering your son in a barn? It was so long ago that they didn’t know about germs, so it probably wasn’t as scary for Mary because she didn’t know what could happen, but we do.
If your baby got that close to death, don’t you think they’re divine?
On this Christmas Eve, know that it doesn’t take a miracle to make someone a child of God. We were all born innocent, and we make the decision to resurrect ourselves all the time. It’s the message we’re missing in the middle of the mess.
Whether or not tonight means that The Messiah is being born is irrelevant to me, because this is not a story about magic. This is a story about mystery.
Jesus survived, and the odds were stacked against him. So, in remembrance, I’m mentally gathering the layette. I’m buying everyone blue bubble gum cigars. I’m writing the announcement for the newspaper. It’s all I can do, this waiting.
I think out loud by writing, and I don’t consider others’ feelings when I’m writing if the relationship is so long gone and irreparable that it doesn’t matter what my feelings are anymore. It’s why I dive into memories vs. writing about my current life. It is easier to write about people once they’re gone, because what I have noticed is that according to the people around me, I am only a good writer when I say nice things.
It is a truism that when you’re a blogger, people love when you say glowing things about them and hate you when you call it like you see it from both ends of the spectrum. If I am going to describe life as it is from my own perspective, you’re looking at my painting. But for the people in my life, it’s a mirror. Bryn likes it when I write about her because she likes the mirror I hold up. She gets that not everything is going to be sunshine and roses all the time, but it will be both ends of the spectrum for the rest of our lives. She’s so much a part of my journey now because her philosophy is “say what you want. We’ll work it out.” Zac has basically said the same thing, I just can’t get specific about where he works or anything like that. I say that because he said that to me, not because I actually want to write about Zac at work.
The only notable things about Zac working in an intelligence agency are that he has access to the best gift shops and he has seen the seal on the floor at Langley and I haven’t because God is unfair. After that, it’s more fun to talk about “our home life.” Tomorrow I’m going to his house for date night, and then the next night is his Solstice Party. I think I’m going to help him get ready (he took the day off work), and see how it goes. I might feel like going to a party, I might leave before it really gets going. I have a love/hate relationship with parties, because it’s way too much sensory overload and yet necessary to meet people. You forget how important socialization is when you go too long without it.
I need to move forward and have more life on which to reflect, because I’ve mined what I need to mine about this chapter. It feels over, because I’ll always accept Supergrover back into my life, but I will not seek her out. It needs to stop mattering to me, and it can, because I don’t have to carry my feelings around with me. They’re already here.
She could have gone radio silent for any number of reasons, but I have a wait and see attitude about all of it. It has never been true that she’s stopped reading, and it’s never been true that she doesn’t have feelings for me. She does, they’re just very different. I am lost because I don’t know what they are, and I’m tired of being treated like a judgmental dickhead when I am expressing emotions like an adult. If someone shuts you down every single time, it’s a toxic pattern. It also means I don’t have the right to tell her to change, I have the right to need it and the right to walk away when she can’t provide it.
The easiest way to get out of a conflict is to tell someone that they’re wrong or crazy because there is no problem.
And at the same time, I thought about the implications of saying that she was more important to me than Dana, because I absolutely meant it in a way that Dana would concretely understand. It was not a value judgment, but phrase with many different meanings, none of them meaning my love for one or the other was greater, but the priority list.
Supergrover doesn’t think she has a problem with being avoidant, she things I have a problem because I think in order to have good communication, she needs to stop running from it. The reason there’s so much rage is that we both have unresolved conflicts (emotional and professional) and all our reactions about more shallow things come from that black hole.
So, if I’ve said something that made her run from me, it’s 100% something we could work out, but I won’t go back to a relationship in which I am always wrong, and then if I complain about it, all of a sudden I’m extremely impressive……… but the change in tone goes back to “you’re a dickhead” almost immediately. I was not crazy to notice this, and it’s not a bad thing to want to correct it. It’s a bad thing if nothing changes and I put up with feeling horrible not to rock the boat.
I feel like most of our problem is that I’ve written her beautifully crafted pages over the years, but I haven’t met her in person. It takes away my barriers to communication in some ways, and not in others. Her tone is so brusque it feels like she’s angry all the time. It became her tone with me because I hurt her, and it never went back to how she talked to me in the beginning. I could understand in the immediate aftermath. I can’t understand 10 years later. If this was some kind of joke, it wouldn’t have lasted 10 years.
I think about the word associations I have with her all the time, because lines she wrote run through my head and they’re funnier coming out of my mouth. I owe her a lot of royalties on a few of them.
The problem is how to extricate myself from the relationship, because it’s one that’s not inherently easy to stop myself. There are so many things that are unresolved and I am getting closure on my own. It’s not that I don’t want input, none has been provided.
My story would have been completely different if she’d been open and vulnerable, because then I wouldn’t have had to explain my reactions to you based on what I thought at the time, not what she did. She is not vulnerable, she is running the entire relationship in her own head and not telling me about it. What boundaries are in her head that she hasn’t expressed?
All of them.
This is also not a relationship where I could put toothpaste back in a tube. I didn’t shy away from telling her that, either. That I can’t be a Christmas and Easter friend, because I either have to feed our bond or ignore it and there’s no middle ground. She doesn’t feel as deeply about me as I feel about her, so it wouldn’t make sense to her why I would say something like that.
Lesbians, how easy is it to be in a relationship with the straight woman you absolutely knew was going to wreck you inside and you just decided to enjoy the trip?
It’s so stereotypical I could vomit, and it’s true. If’s every bit as hard as maintaining a relationship with an actual ex, because even though those feelings didn’t exist for them, they are very, very real for you. I put away all that crack smoking foolishness years ago, but it’s still like being in touch with an ex because it’s hard to deal with the loss in priority when our “honeymoon phase” was so explosive. I don’t think I’ve ever had bigger NRE, because her energy is bigger than most people’s. Remembering that kind of dopamine and trying to to maintain a relationship that’s a shadow of its former self is something I’m no longer willing to entertain.
It still feels like a breakup because even though she was never my romantic partner, the loss of response is palpable. She’s unique, and I pride myself that no one will ever love her like I do because the situation was so weird and wonderful that it couldn’t be duplicated in a million years. No one will ever love me like she does, either. It’s just irreconcilable differences, because there was no mediation.
I had to work for a long time to forgive myself for walking into that entire wall of bullshit. The entire course of my life would have changed and I self-sabotaged. I want to get back to my Mama Wolverine, but I want her to hear me when my claws come out, too. I’m younger, smaller, and slower, but I would not hesitate to bite the ankles of her enemies. 😉
Not that she is not capable of being a badass on her own, it’s just my protective nature kicking in just like hers does when I’m butt hurt over something. I suppose now it’s just time to take those feelings away, and feel like “somewhere out there,” that love is being returned. I choose to believe that it is, both because I don’t want to live in enmity and because I know that not telling me her story is not personal. It’s controlling in a relationship not to tell someone your feelings, because then you can blame them for not doing what you wanted. It’s scary to show up to a conversation and say, “I don’t know, either, and this is difficult. I’m willing to work on it. I don’t have the answers, but I showed up.”
It’s the kind of thinking that causes the correct implications.
This time last year, Sam and I had broken up maybe a week before. It was a blessing and a curse all at the same time.
I loved being around her, being with her. I liked doing things for her, like cleaning up more than I needed while making coffee. Everything was nice and tidy, I just love all kitchens a professional amount. A mom of two is not going to go after a kitchen the way a line cook would, unless they’re also a mom of two. It doesn’t generally work like that. The mom of two kind of line cook hates that they can’t keep their kitchen as clean at home as they can at work. The kitchen is detail, and one of the few things I am quite detailed about, being AuDHD. It is through nothing but repetition, this iron will in the kitchen, because ADHD does not lend itself to remembering details, particularly if they have to be in any kind of order.
I told a friend I was cleaning Sam’s kitchen because I wanted to be a good houseguest, and they said, “clearly, you have UNDERSTOOD THE ASSIGNMENT.” It made me laugh, but I wasn’t doing it so Sam would love me. I was doing it because I love the kitchen, and Sam was the package that came with the kitchen. 😉 So, if I thought I’d be doing something differently this year, it’s that I thought I’d be spending Christmas with my girlfriend and her kids, but we broke up for a very, very good reason. I am no longer the person who will anticipate someone else’s needs. I will respond to yours, but I will not guess what they are. If you tell me what your intentions are with me and they don’t match what’s actually going on in your head, you don’t get to blame my reaction on me. I would have had a different response with different facts.
I’ve said this before, but Sam told me that she had a full-time job, two kids, and time management issues because of it. There just weren’t enough hours in the day. So, let’s not get exclusive right away. I agreed to that and she broke up with me while I was on my first date with Zac. She knew I had a date with him coming up, knew that if she was uncomfortable, I’d cancel my date with him (I made it before I met her), and sat on the information that she was upset until it would cause maximum damage with drama. She’s a singer. She is not unpracticed at this, I believe…………………….. I was hurt that she thought about this for three whole weeks and then smashed my heart into a million pieces. I was completely blindsided, but I didn’t mourn her. There was no point. Clearly she didn’t like what she saw, clearly she was horrible at communication, and clearly it would have been a mistake to get further involved, because if that’s her conflict resolution style, I’m done. Not everything is an opera.
Even our breakup wasn’t an opera. It was a text message. So, not only was she bad at conflict resolution, she wasn’t brave enough to break up with me in person. I was already in a relationship with someone bad at conflict resolution, and it was going so spectacularly poorly on some days that I was relieved I wasn’t going to have to double down on it with my girlfriend. This is because when someone else is bad at conflict resolution, I don’t deal well. I get frustrated and lose the plot quickly. That’s because when my trauma reflexes kick in, it’s normally rage. CPTSD/AuDHD rage is unparalleled, so I have to have an extensive network of coping mechanisms. The longer bad conflict goes on, the more I regress into a wet cat in a corner, claws extended. It’s not pretty, but I’m being real. My work is learning how to react when all my coping mechanisms fail.
This is because words have power, and you can say things that will stick with people for years. I try to say things that will tell people their actions are fucked up, but that I love them even on their bad days. I do not suddenly stop communicating with people because I don’t love them. I stop communicating because clearly you expect that only your needs matter and mine are just me complaining. 90% of the time, the problem is that I’m a neurodivergent trying to translate from and into “neurotypical,” and I’m very stubborn. At the same time, people accuse me of not listening when in reality, I’ve just spent 15 minutes beating the wrong dead horse instead of the right one.
I feel like the relationship with Supergrover holds this up. I don’t get angry at many people like I get at her, because we’ve known each other for 10 years. I have different expectations now than I did 10 years ago, because I’ve put my heart and soul into making our relationship better, and for whatever reason, I’ve been answered with avoidance and rage every time. Therefore, by now I feel like it’s not my problem. I’ve tried to change our dynamic over and over, and whether it’s due to information I don’t know or projecting my own insecurities onto someone who also has CPTSD, I’ll never know. For all practical intents and purposes, she has rarely had a day without PTSD. Trauma occurred very young. It is so easy to bleed out with empathy and also be severely frustrated and angry. I love her on her worst days as much as I love her on the good ones, but she doesn’t see it. I can’t make her do that, or even know if she wanted to be more to each other and didn’t get it. But, by “more to each other,” I don’t ever mean crossing the line from friendship into romance. I mean that my personality profile and my experience says that I have one or two close friends at a time, and I pour everything I’ve got into them rather than having a more shallow relationship with more people. It’s how I found out I was poly, honestly, because even though I wasn’t necessarily looking for romance, I realized that it would never not be true that she was more important to me than Dana. And to Dana, I apologize, but you and I both know this is true and for me, an objective truth rather than subjective. I can’t be too careless in my writing, and Dana was threatened by how much I got lost in it.. We connected on a deep and spiritual level, and nothing anyone says can take away from that fact.
She says that I only know random factoids about her life and I’m telling you things that aren’t true. I have more evidence than you will on why this isn’t true. It’s not that there’s not emotion in what she said, far from it. However, because she’s not connected with her emotions, she thought she was saying something logical and hated that I responded emotionally. If there’s any speech I could give to her that I’ve heard recently, it’s Ncuti Gatwa’s monologue about how exhausted The Doctor is because they never stop to think about how fast they’re moving to avoid emotional injury.
This is because when they get into a scrape too big for them, they die. And the regeneration energy convinces them that “they’re fine.” It hits close to home because we all go through it. Regeneration energy making you think you’re fine. In polyamory, this is called “new relationship energy,” or NRE for short. It’s a thing. You have to know whether you’re losing established boundaries or whether, when a partner meets someone new, they’re just “high.” No, I wouldn’t know anything about that, and I bet you don’t, either. People are poly all the time, they just call it an affair…….. when the reality is most people are afraid of cheating and lying, not that their partner is spending time with someone else. I noticed in “Christmas at My Own Pace” that I just sat around waiting for Dana to be available. I did not seek out other people at all. Even with my closest friends, I couldn’t be arsed to go out that often. And in reality, it doesn’t matter if you’re romantic with multiple people or not. I predicted and did that losing Supergrover’s friendship was worse than getting divorced because the situation has been far more tense and unpredictable than it was with Dana. Neither of us has any idea what to do with the other, and we show up with guns in a knife fight.
Meanwhile, “There’s a Place for Us” is playing in my head, because “showing up with guns to a knife fight” reminded me that Supergrover and I trade off being Sharks and Jets…… but I’d like her to settle in France. If she is 14, I’m The Doctor Leslie……. although I have never and will never be a temp in Chizzick. 😉 If we’d ever spent time together talking instead of writing, she’d also see that she’s 14 and I’m part 12 and part 15. Ncuti is at playing The Doctor as queer, and it’s a welcome surprise. I feel like this should be canon, because there’s no way they’re not bisexual after a regeneration being female. You can sort of tell because 14 had “Captain Jack” energy. Also, just because The Doctor can change genders from male to female doesn’t mean they didn’t marry River Song. Now, I just love the idea that The Doctor has settled into family life, being best friends with Donna and uncle to Rose (Noble, just to be clear).
(Speaking of which, I totally believe The Toymaker got in her head, because think about what she made with her institutional knowledge…… and it stands to reason that The Toymaker is “the boss.”)
With Sam, there was no hierarchy like that. I didn’t feel like Sam was The Doctor and I was a companion. It was a death knell for Supergrover and me because I never gained ground as an equal. The hierarchy came from her keeping information from me and blaming me for it. I knew that if we’d survived Sam’s feelings about this issue, I would slowly come undone at being steamrolled all the time. Plus, I think it’s good that she’s not run over by the autistic brain, because her son is also autistic. That being said, I may be projecting again because it’s unlikely that she’s not autistic as well- or her ex-husband is- because neurodivergence doesn’t come out of a vacuum. It’s not an indicator (necessarily) from observing mood and behavior, just Gregor Mendel’s pea plants. It is almost impossible to know whether you’re autistic or not before you start doing the work, because the quirks you think you have aren’t quirks at all. Your brain is just different. What you say when you say, “I’m autistic” is never what people hear.
And that’s why I am nowhere near where I thought I’d be this year. I didn’t know myself well enough to know I was being treated badly, and I had a right to stand up for myself. It felt often that Supergrover was annoyed by me, and I was having to fight through that annoyance to get to a better place, but she didn’t respond to it. That was my cue to leave, because I get the right to say “you’re not helping me, you’re hurting me…” and if nothing changes, to walk away, because clearly they don’t care about my feelings and it’s okay to stop thinking about theirs.
I have all my own theories as to what happened, but we’ve never talked about it, and I’ve ensured we never will. That’s because I’ve noted and observed that she doesn’t open up to anyone, and it’s not personal. It became personal when her behavior affected me….. I felt that she felt the more she annoyed me, the more I’d go away…… and got angry when that didn’t happen.
So, as of now, I am spending Christmas by myself (seeing Zac for the holidays, just not on Christmas Day). I am excited about this, because it’s my favorite day to wander around the city and take pictures. I will absolutely freak the fuck out if it snows on Christmas Eve, because it’s the best time to take photos when there’s a light dusting of snow on the monuments…………………………………………. That was an inside joke for Dana, because once she wanted to go to Beth Israel in the snow, and it was a light dusting that day. What happened was that we got in our Jeep and crossed the river, going up to a higher elevation. By the time we got to Beth Israel, we were in it up to our knees. We looked like idiots, because the caretaker said, “where were you yesterday?” He did not appreciate having to do work in the snow, I’m guessing.
It was good we had the Jeep, because we needed it. I can’t remember if it was that week or whether I’m mixing snowstorms together, but one of Dana’s coworkers came up to us and said, “I hate to be stereotypical, but do you guys have some sort of lesbian vehicle, like a Subaru?” We laughed and took six people home. One of the perks of being on the bus/train is that if we get into a simple car accident in the snow, the bus is going to win. My travel never gets waylaid by snow, because even if I don’t get an Uber to the station, It would only take 20 or 30 minutes to walk to the Metro, and 20 minutes to get there by bus. I try to walk as often as I can, because then I can justify a shake at Shake Shack or BurgerFi. That’s a once in a while treat, though, because they’re nearly $10 apiece and I get get a pint of Jenni’s for that. 😛
This year, my goal has been figuring out my sensory issues. I started buying the same food every week so that I could focus on more important things, not that my structure is so iron I don’t want to taste anything new. It’s protecting my bubble.
So, I am exactly where I thought I would be this year in that respect. So much Oregon Dark Cherry ice cream, not so much with the shakes…… although Zac did get me an immersion blender. Maybe I don’t need to buy a shake as much as I need to learn to make them. 😛 Also, so much Zac. He’s really made my year better because I had that friend I could call if I needed something and he’s always responded in a way I’m not used to and don’t expect. It’s probably the most healthy relationship I’ve ever been in because I insisted on it.
If I had guessed a year ago that I’d be perfectly happy with a boyfriend, I would have laughed in your face. But I surprise me all the time.
Tonight is a Zac night, and we’re just hanging out. He’s doing some stuff for work in the morning, and I’m writing to you. Later, we’re planning on going out for dinner and watching “The Pigeon Tunnel.” I am so incredibly happy right now, because I can’t think of a better way to spend it than geeking out over my favorite boy, dog, and writer.
Because Zac is Naval intelligence, he was able to pick me up earlier than we usually get together (normally I go by Metro to his house, but Ft. Meade is a stone’s throw from Wire Ave. It’s not that Zac wouldn’t come to me, it’s that I have a lot of housemates and he doesn’t. Zac has a bigger social battery than I do, but we both like what we’re doing now…. I didn’t even know there was a term for it, but it’s “parallel play.” He’s working now, but he’s writing for fun later. We’ll keep doing this until we get hungry. Zac was given a fiction challenge. Genre is comedy, setting is a car wash, and the word he has to work in is “interest.” You cannot imagine the places my mind went when I heard those three things.
Having the setting be in a car wash was a trigger into something great. We started riffing off each other. I said that for me right now, when I hear that word I hear “autism” and “special interest,” so mine would be about a kid whose special interest was car washes and it would be a whole comedic essay on soaps, etc.
Then, I thought of something brilliant. Zac wanted to do something with robots, and I thought, “what if the robots were the car wash?” Like, the brush arm is talking to the sprayer or whatever. So, Zac comes up with this whole dystopian landscape like Fallout 3 where the cars don’t realize all the humans are gone.
I said, “if you’re going to go there, make sure that one of the cars is a hearse. I think it would be hilarious and tragic that he doesn’t know his services are no longer needed. Every day he gets dressed up, anyway.”
So, Zac starts thinking it over and I’m checking out at Safeway- thank God we were held up so long in line because we got a chance to flesh this out, ironically. He says that he thinks he wants it to be like a bartender and some customers. He has decided the hearse will be “Frank,”and I had a small meltdown in which I was all like, “awwww, you used my idea” and I straight up cried as I held up my Apple Watch.
We have to go, and as we’re walking out Zac says something and I have blipped since then, but the end was “….and after all, aren’t we all hearses in the end?” More tears, but good ones. I said something like, “God damn, Zac…. that was a good line.” He became very impressed with himself and he should be. This is why we work so well as a couple. We’d drive each other up the wall if we lived together because two writers in one house just doesn’t work. It’s a whole basket of crazy. So, I feel like I live this great life in my own little world in some ways, and in others I look like anyone else trying to have a good time………..
Before we get started today, I finally found the perfect keyboard for me. When I use it, I feel like Jason Moran (jazz pianist). The touch feels like it’s made to help me go faster. It’s kind of like having a new car, honestly. Like, there is a big difference in the feel of an accelerator on an old Toyota and a new BMW. With the brand new Bimmer, you’re going to touch the accelerator and be a quarter mile down the road. It’s nice to have a keyboard that is not in the way of being able to jump in that fast. The amount of force on the key to make a letter is almost negligible, but it doesn’t feel cheap. It’s that middle of the road touch between mechanical and laptop. If I had to name the biggest sensory issue I have in life, it’s the touch of a keyboard. I think this is because I know how important it is. I would not know that touch was important if I hadn’t lived with a pianist.
Because of my mother, I have words to express what I need out of a keyboard in the first place.
The prompt today is about pet peeves.
My biggest one is that my housemate has a maid and I don’t. I am terrible at keeping things organized, so my room is a mess and I white knuckle through the common areas because since we have a housekeeper, it is manageable. The problem is the six days a week when our housekeeper isn’t here. There are three of us, and only two of us help. Only the entitled one shares a bathroom with me, so I am constantly cleaning up after her. The way she does this is to say that because I have touched something, she cannot touch it. She comes from a culture that does not accept homosexuality and pretends that it is contagious and I am unclean. I have been laughing at her for nine years now, and it’s not funny anymore. I cannot beg her to do it, I cannot get my landlord to make her do it, because my landlord has talked to her about it also for nine years. So, if she washes her hair in the sink, it’s my problem. Has been for nine years….. because I’m gay and that makes sense to her.
Because it’s been so long, I feel trapped between “this is unacceptable” and “this is my weird little family.” There is no way I do not have empathy for someone so twisted in their world outlook that they make me treat me this way. It’s not anger. It’s pity. I look down on her because she does clean up after our guests whether she brought them or not. I say that her culture dictates homosexuality as unclean because it sounds like very Karen behavior, and she’s the furthest thing from it. I cannot see it all the way around as entitled behavior because she’s been taught since she was a little girl that I should be in jail or dead. Therefore, I can understand and be angry all at once.
Another big one is not responding to emotion with emotion. I do not ever want to hear the phrase “you should have known” ever again. I am out of the anticipation business. I cannot be the expert on how I felt and how you felt, too. Because then you’ll berate me when I haven’t anticipated correctly. You have to be strong enough to communicate your needs with me. It is only my job to become emotionally flexible enough to hear them without reacting in autistic meltdown. It is not pretty and I always regret it. Always. However, now I have new ways to learn coping mechanisms. I don’t want people to feel like they have to walk around on eggshells, the way I feel when I’m trying to guess how to make our relationship better.
My answer for this pet peeve is time. I need to hear/read what you think and walk away. Let me have time to process, because I will look at it differently if I change my environment and come back. I do not trust my first reaction. Please always remember that about me and when I say I need time, let me go. I was emotionally abused as a child. I have trauma reflexes. That means my first reaction to everything comes from that place, and I don’t want to operate that way anymore. I react with autistic meltdown because you’ve interrupted my reality so violently that my environment feels different in panic. I often react with panic because I have been corrected so much about every little thing that I feel like a dog surrounded by an electric fence in most relationships. In anxious/avoidant, the avoidant person will move the target to avoid confrontation, so you cannot please them. Meanwhile, the anxious person feels like they can’t do anything right. Every relationship I’ve ever had has been like this to some degree, because I am the common denominator.
If you have trauma reflexes, after the trauma is over you’ll gravitate toward one of those extremes, and they marry each other constantly. That’s because one of you is social masking an abuser and one of you is social masking an enabler. The younger you are when abuse occurs, the more that pattern is ingrained. The person you really are is hidden underneath those trauma reflexes, because you built them to protect the bubble an abuser creates with you. Everything about how I react as an adult is based on how I reacted as a child to hearing secrets that were too big for me. I have learned that my first instinct is to protect myself from violence. If when I express needs, I am met with violence, I will do anything to avoid saying something and I become part of the problem. So much of writing to Supergrover all those years was learning how to walk in the world in a different way.
Because she’s a boss, her thought processes got under my skin quickly. Every time she got angry at me, I made a note of how and why. It wasn’t to throw things back in her face. It was, “I’m a nobody and she’s not. What can I pick up here?” She’s also not a politician, so she could give a fuck if she wins and influences me. 😉 If she goes back and reads my blog, she will see that it’s just a collection of things she’s said in new contexts, and so many of those lines I got when she was adding new definition to furious. The reason I love her so much is that I find lines that flatten me in letters that are meant to convey annoyance, rage, whatever. I thought, “it must be love if you delight in even this.” For instance, when she said “be careful painting your feelings as fact.” I have quoted that in this blog at least 10 times because it was an image I could use and beautifully.
I wish I could get her to see that I stare at her Renoir like she stares at my Jackson Pollack. They are both beautiful in their own way. We are so magnetic when we are both painting our feelings as fact, because what is happening is that she has so much more to work with than I do. Whether she really doesn’t have time, or whether she’s avoiding writing back to feel guilty, the effect is the same. She knows more about me and can think about it than I know about her and can do the same. She has more context about my life, my mental health, my family dynamics, my entire heart and soul on the page, basically….. because when she said I could, I started using a finer brush- that I’d give her details and she’d write back.
Writing back became a pet peeve because she’d find the things she didn’t like and leave out the things she did. I didn’t like living in negative feedback, because then she started to feel like every boss I’d ever had. Assuming malice where none was meant, turning everything back around as if I’d meant to hurt her by being honest about something, and just generally dealing with the fact that she doesn’t deal in emotions and I do. I write so much about this relationship because it became a list of what’s wrong with me and why. But instead of just saying she was wrong, I dug deep into myself and figured out what was going on.
She did not. Therefore, every time we came back together after blowing each other to bits, nothing changed because she’d react in the old way and I’d regress. I got tired of feeling like she was provoking me and telling me I was the one always provoking her. I was not, I was asking her what was going on in her mind regarding where we are and where we’re going because we have shit to deal with if we’re going to create a secure attachment.
The exhaustion came from feeling as loved as I’ve ever felt and a complete dumbass depending on the day; I never knew which woman was going to show up. As a result, neither did she. It was tumultuous and extreme because we were fighting our own battles in ourselves. My way to cope is to use my blog to be Jackson Pollack. Just like an artist, I am throwing my feelings onto canvas so I can look at them from an objective third eye. Her way is to throw herself into work and pretend that our problems will go away. So, I think it’s better to be apart, because I can’t go on having issues with her that are infinitely solvable with any kind of real conversation at all…. and by that, I mean she doesn’t have to come and pick me up or anything. Just send me an e-mail with your Renoir so that I have two pieces of art in my museum. I have only been saying “I feel neglected and this isn’t okay” because I am asking for so very little. I don’t care that she can’t be available all the time, I care that when she’s here she’s present.
I need to be less reactionary, and so does she. I don’t want to end the relationship, but I also don’t want to live in highs and lows, either. It’s too disruptive to an autistic mind, craving stability and having a volatile monotropic thought process. I am not saying I never had security. I’m saying that her coping mechanism was to end the relationship every single time she was mad about something, and then we couldn’t stay away from each other. Just binge/purge for 10 years straight. If my writing had any effect at all on her, it’s that it didn’t make her fall in love with me, but it did make a future in which we were alternately mad as hell AND also craving each other’s words. What do you think it means to her to be a voracious reader and have crafted pages like mine for long haul flights? What do you think it means to me that I’m the author she reads? That bond is unbreakable, which is how I know with a 60-70% chance that she is absolutely hanging on every word here while also not saying a damn thing. Good for her, because if I can’t entertain her one way, I can entertain her another. The delivery method does not matter, and if she isn’t reading, I also don’t care. I just think her morbid curiosity is stronger than her will. 😉
I do not pretend she is dedicated because I’m writing to her. I am explaining my experiences with her, and it would devastate me to publish something just because I thought she wouldn’t hear about it. I have to consider the possibility because it would wreck me if I didn’t, because there could be repercussions for her, not me. I am trying to anticipate what will and will not be offensive to publish, working within limits. So many things here are analogies for something else that will come across to her differently than the point I’m trying to make…. and also having to be aware of that, too. How much am I entitled to my stories and how much am I just actively hurting her? She doesn’t see that it hurts me not to know, and keeps everything close to the vest.
That’s not her fault, either. That’s just the difference between us. I have something she lacks- the ability to spill my guts emotionally. She has something I don’t- the ability to protect myself emotionally by not constantly focusing on others’ needs. We are both lying to the other- she’s as much a people pleaser as I am, she just makes it look good……. and I only know because of how much she tried to please me. I regret every single time that I “made her feel like she wasn’t good enough for me,” because her feelings are valid and yet not a message I ever intended to send. How she got from “you’re the absolute love of my life and I’ll never put anyone above you again” is just beyond my comprehension, but it’s also my reality. I don’t get the right to make that reality untrue…. and she fucking knows it. That’s my anger issue.
That she cuts and runs when it’s hard, and it’s deservedly hard because it’s so fucking worth it. She does not see that’s what I’m saying. She sees it as “you’re a bad person.” I am not asking to change the nature of our relationship and make her act differently, I am saying that “this is a thing we should manage, not avoid.” Absolutely all of this is because of who she is as a person, but it’s not a dealbreaker at all. It’s that I need someone who can deal with the fallout, and she’s insistent on it not being her while also saying I shouldn’t talk to anyone else. It’s devastating to an enormous degree for both of us, because whatever she’s avoiding in me has nothing to do with me at all. I am asking for something she does not have to give. She’s 10 feet tall and bulletproof IRL while also putty in front of me, because she thinks she’s not good enough for me…. and has thought that about many other people. It didn’t start with me, and I know that.
For most people, she’d be a walking red flag. She doesn’t see that she gets to be that with me. That I’m the person who willingly said “the flag is a lie.” My feelings were deep and immediate because of it, and she’s run from it ever since.
The first fissure was treating me like I was suspect and avoiding me because I’d done something wrong….. except the story she was telling herself was fiction. It was a diversion tactic to avoid talking about the fact that she was wigged I’d told her I’d had feelings for her. I tried to be cool. I really did. But I was wigged that both she and Dana were angry at me about it, because I didn’t have a secure environment anywhere. Not at work, not at home, not in the cloud anymore.
It was a time of trial, and instead of blaming everything on others, I got the help I needed. But the problem with Supergrover never went away. Just avoid, avoid, avoid. Checking in once in a while and gifts were enough. It confused me, and she got angry if I said so. I began to walk on eggshells in a way that I don’t for anyone else anymore. I have explained both sides of the story; Dana was going down, but that didn’t not mean that Supergrover led to my decision to break up with her. I couldn’t deal with both their anger at once, and Supergrover was the more stable choice at that point. It wasn’t the whole story….. but it made cutting ties to Dana so much easier when I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that it would benefit me.
She just got freaked that I chose to come back to Washington to do it, because she thought it meant that I was leaving Dana for her. What she did not realize was that a tiny part of it was for her, but not all of it. I could have broken ties with Dana from Houston just as easily. What I could not do is live in a city without a car. What I could not do is find impartial friends who didn’t know me from Adam…. I know my friends. I know that they love Dana every bit as much as they love me. I also knew that Dana needed them more than I did and it was easier not to give them a choice. You can keep up with me online, she needs you to jump in. Go to her.
Just because Dana was a walking red flag didn’t mean I didn’t love both of them equally. Dana just didn’t like sharing me and didn’t have a choice. Every “come to Jesus” meeting was a rehash because she treated me so differently and I never knew which Dana was going to show up, either. We all have trauma reflexes, full stop.
The entire problem was that when Supergrover pulled back, she didn’t have that choice, either. She thoughtlessly put something into my head that will affect me forever and decided she had the right to just let me cope. I don’t have the right to make her do anything, but I do have the right to be angry that she did indeed fail me in some respects, and absolutely delighted me in others. She is a spectrum, a 3D character, you might say. 😉
I loved checking in once in a while. I loved getting gifts in my e-mail. All that stuff was so rock solid. What wasn’t was all my anxiety roiling underneath, the feelings she refused to acknowledge that she had created. The feeling of “not good enough” doesn’t come from the fact that she is failing me. She is failing us. I could love her more deeply and be less reactionary with more information. I do not feel anger at her, I feel angry about my insecure attachment and environment because of it. Her conflict avoidance told me more than anything I could ask her outright, because she thought I was hysterical and overemotional…. because she doesn’t see that my approach to life is so different. She sees it as needing me to get with the program while also not explaining what the program entails. Hard to be successful when you don’t know the rules, but she doesn’t do rules, either.
Therefore, I feel like she steps all over my boundaries by withholding information, and I step all over hers for asking for it. We are at an impasse and always will be, because now it’s up to her to accept my reality. If she doesn’t, a part of me will always be angry with her, but it doesn’t mean that my love gets smaller. It only means that it will remain unresolved, and that causes feelings of injustice. An INFJ does not do well with injustice, local or global.
So, now I’m just working on the anger, and she’s not working on the anger she “doesn’t have.” She says in words that I’m just projecting. In her actions, I feel on target. That’s because she’s never vulnerable about anything. When she’s mad at me, I don’t know it. As you can see, that doesn’t cause problems at all. I didn’t walk away because I was angry. I got tired of feeling like my emotions don’t matter to her while she’s saying that’s untrue in words and deeds.
She did something enormous for me when we met, and I think in some sense I’ve come across as ungrateful because she sees me pointing out problems as throwing emotional bombs. That’s not true at all. I can handle bigger emotions than she can, so I write from that place. She reads it while being buttoned up, so it feels like an attack because she can’t receive what I actually mean. She is moving too fast and accusing me of moving too slowly. Again, the leap between a neurotypical and neurodivergent brain with the exception of both having CPTSD. It’s amazing to me how our traumas are on completely different playing fields, yet our reactions are the same, yet mirror images of each other. I forced us into a bad pattern, and it is better to walk away and lick my wounds than it is to convince her I’m right.
My emotional strength makes me care about myself in a different way than I did before……. but not entirely.
“For all our mutual experiences, our separate conclusions are the same.” -Billy Joel, Summer, Highland Falls
Hers is a gift I’ll never be able to repay, because now I have the confidence to believe that if I speak, powerful people will listen because that’s what I’ve been taught. At the same time, I can’t go on with such an inflexible power structure, because the avoidant one always has it. They don’t do things wrong, you’re a problem.
All I want is reconciliation on my terms, because we’ve been on hers for so long and it’s not helping either of us. If it’s not helping either of us, I have other friends. She thinks of me as someone who points out everything wrong with her…. and in my mind, she is everything amazing about being on this planet.
When I was in the hospital (psych emergency/med check) nine years ago, some of the people around me started telling others I was borderline personality disorder. Not only was it not true, BPD carries a stigma, like psychiatrists saying they won’t have more than one borderline patient at a time because they’re so difficult. Bluntness and seeming malice are par for the course when none is meant, but one of these things is not like the other. I am not Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde. I social mask until I can’t and the people around me have no idea what the hell to do when I stop. My problem is that social masking has been a part of my life since I learned to walk/talk. How am I supposed to know what’s neurotypical and what’s not? I have been made to believe that I’m a lot crazier than I am.
I was falling apart because my social masks all failed at once and it was a straight up crisis. How anyone could be surprised I ended up in a pych emergency after two therapists saying I was so fucked up it was going to take a very long time to heal is beyond me. You mean none of this is ever going to get any better? This is what my life looks like now? People don’t kill themselves because bipolar makes them sad. They kill themselves because managing bipolar disorder is fucking relentless.
“Borderline” was “over the line, Smokey. Mark it zero.” Here is why I am so fucking furious at the person(s) who said it. I’ve seen my chart. I was never diagnosed with BPD. Ever. I have had meltdowns, burnout, sensory issues, you name it. But I have never had an attachment disorder. I attach too much, if anything. I’ve been in emotionally abusive relationships for forever, because I assumed that people who thought I was a difficult monster were correct. I didn’t have any coping mechanisms for autism, so I just assumed I was the worst person who ever lived. I handle things wrong all the time, but because it’s not the same way a neurotypical person would handle things wrong, it’s a bigger mistake (to them). To them, they are justified in infantilizing me, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s at home or at work.
I got an incorrect label, and I was trapped in other people’s opinions with BPD; autism creates sympathy and treating me like I’m mentally delayed, and BPD means I am so unstable I cannot function. Both choices in how I’m treated blow. There’s no way not to report disabilities because social masking will fail at some point and I have no way to fit into society if I’m dead honest….. or at least, that is my belief right this very moment because I am not done with the process of acceptance. I do not even know how to function anymore because everything I’ve done in the past has been “getting by” and also incorrect for me, because I can’t just white knuckle my way through neurotypical society forever. I will die alone, and I am not kidding. I know myself. I’ll get tired of being misunderstood and just sit in my little autistic nest. It is so much easier not to engage than it is to be sure that you’re a burden on everyone. It’s also never unclear that you are. Social masking leads people to believe that I am an entitled, lazy asshole and that if I just worked harder, I’d be fine.
How long would you last at a job where people treat you like you’re five? Realistically, how long could you put up with being treated that way knowing that your life is a series of performance improvement plans no matter the field and always having meetings about your problematic behavior…… because my tone is always off or I can’t keep up or I need to go to the doctor too much. You name it. Meanwhile, I have never told an employer I was autistic for them to be able to help me because I didn’t know. Considering just how well jobs do with ADHD, I have to assume “not well.” Left to my own devices, I write the length of a novel/novella every month, not year. If I was a fiction writer, Nanowrimo would last two weeks. With a brilliant storyline I can write for six or seven hours at 90wpm. I barely look up. I am the model employee because I can tailor my environment to productivity and there’s no office “HOA.”
I do have a fiction work in progress, but I don’t know how to write fiction yet. I’m going to school for it on YouTube (no lie- plenty of college writing classes available- that kid at Harvard with the cell phone in his lap is my future….. I feel like I should be sending these kids money somehow but it’ll have to be the thought that counts. In order to learn all of this, I had to stop caring about everyone else. Also not for malice. Because they were programmed to all treat me a certain way, with certain perceptions, and none of them were correct.
I basically came to DC so I could meet an impartial set of doctors and friends. The ones in Houston weren’t it. This is because I started researching AuDHD because of several memes in ADHD groups on Facebook that mentioned it and I felt attacked. I don’t put much stock in memes, but I do in MDs/PhDs. I am tired of being thought of as this dark triad motherfucker when I talk all the time about the empathy I feel for my friends, how I bleed out trying to take care of others and come off as rude and demanding, anyway. I can certainly be clearer and better in my conversations, but there will be no conversation after “you’re not autistic.” This is because if you accuse me of not having autism, I won’t say you’re wrong. I will ask you for $3,000, the cheapest estimate I’ve found for an official diagnosis in Maryland. There is also a possibility that I would not be diagnosed as autistic, and yet that doesn’t mean it’s not true, either. For one, I’ve already mentioned that AuDHD is chronically misdiagnosed, and two…. what was two again? AuDHD. 😉 Two is that autism is missed in girls a lot. A lot a lot. I used to be an autistic girl, but I’ve had neurotypical behavior slammed in my face and social masked it for 46 years. Again, we do not have enough data on ASD to know how it presents in adults. What I can tell you is that AuDHD is more common than it’s not, a comorbidity like fibromyalgia and, well, anything.
If I was borderline, I would not notice or care that I was making an attachment worse or better. What does happen is that my brain works differently and some things just fall off my radar, including relationships. I finally decided to fix that by not looking for one overarching relationship, but a boyfriend and several emotional support girlfriends. If I meet another partner down the road, that’s a whole other conversation, but I’m happy as I am and so is Oliver, who is a dog (Zac is happy, too, but let’s remember who’s important here). I can disconnect ad be with other partners when I’m not with him, but I don’t have more than one red string (red strings and yellow strings are romance and emotional support, what a poly relationship “murder board” looks like).
I think of us as mono/poly or solo/poly because I don’t care what Zac does when he’s not with me. If he needs me, he’ll call. If I need him, I’ll call. I don’t want him up in my business with Bryn and Supergrover, he doesn’t want me up in his business with his partners, either. Believe me, it’s not that I wouldn’t respond emotionally if he was hurt. He’d just have to ask me to respond because I’m not constantly anticipating his needs. He does want to meet Lindsay, though, so make a note L Cubed (my grandfather, Alvie, always used to call me L Squared and Lindsay L cubed because her middle name starts with L as well). I asked her if she was going to be in town for Finnish Independence Day and she is, and you cannot even believe what a big fucking deal that is. I use that holiday to replace one I lost long, long ago. I needed to fill my time on that day (6 Dec) so I looked up other holidays I could get behind instead. Finnish Independence Day was absolutely it because it screamed “special interest.” Is it really your special interest if 99% of the world thinks it’s normal? I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that most people will not be lighting blue and white candles with me in the United States, but that doesn’t make any difference. I am using my strenths. I am replacing the dumpster fire of my teenage years with salmiakki, pulli, kahvi, and perhaps a bit of vodka for good measure.
Although I just remembered that the next time I see Zac will be Dec. 10, so I may celebrate it twice just to be sure to hate the Russians a little more. It’s the one war where I know I could have helped, because I’m a good skier. Do you guys know about this? Apparently, the Russians invaded Finland, so they put on their white camo and fuckin’ disappeared. The Russians never knew what hit them…… I know this because I watched several hour-long videos of the war because that’s AuDHD in a nutshell.
So, I went down the auDHD YouTube rabbit hole as well, and have listened to probably 40 hours of lectures by now. It’s all making sense….. like knowing that learning extensively about Finland is weird for an American, but if their independence had been won in June we wouldn’t be having this conversation at all. Luck of the draw. Next horrific date to block out might be independence for the Dutch….. and “if there’s anything I hate, it’s people who are intolerant of other people’s cultures, and the Dutch” (From one of my favorite spy movies, “Goldmember”).
Speaking of “Goldmember,” learning about ADHD and/or autism gave me enough confidence to say, like Foxy Cleopatra, “I’m a whole lotta woman.” That’s because by doing the work, I learned there was nothing wrong with me. I am strong and beautiful because of my struggles, not in spite of them. So many people have told me that my writing is so good that I’m going to be a very big deal. One reason, not the whole story, is that I didn’t believe it myself. I do now, because I resonate with people in other countries, not just my own. I have appealed to an international audience for almost 24 years now….. I just haven’t been driving the bus. I hadn’t really looked at ways to monetize, or ways to attract readers.
Ok, I haave to say up front thaat this keyboard is driving me nuts becaause you caan’t slow down the repeat raate aaand the aa key is out of control. Hold pleaase.
I think I’ve corrected most of it, but this is what it looks like before, so just prepare for this entry to look Dutch by the end if it doesn’t work. I’ll try switching to aanother keyboaard, but no promises. They’re aall problematic. Th other keyboard randomly makes keys stop working, and at 90 wpm, I get overwhelmed with trying to edit very fast. I could just buy another BT keyboard, but I’ve never had one that didn’t develop problems with connection if they didn’t have it already.
But let’s get back to autism and society. One of my biggest problems is that ADHD does not get the validity it deserves. I know this because there’s some argument that ADHD should be part of ASD, and yet just like autism, there are people who believe it’s not real and people who believe they can fix you.
If you ever want to see an autistic meltdown from me, mention ABA. I will not be elaborating further, but if you have plans to wipe “Autism Speaks” off the planet, please let me know where to show up with chocolate and lowers. If you even dip a toe in to videos by autistic people, you will realize that Autism Speaks is for parents, and parents are frustrated and burned out with a kid they feel is impossible. I use high functioning and low functioning for clarity’s sake, but lots and lots and lots of autistic people won’t. I think I’m not offended because I have a use case for that library of images. Trying to prove that I’m autistic in a world where disability porn shows people what I’m “supposed” to look like is cruel. You think autism means mental retardation. Incorrect. In some ways, my brain is 10x faster than yours. In some ways, your brain is 10x faster than mine. In my experience, neurotypicals want to make me solely responsible for minding the gap. It is true that freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences or anything else that would derail being a functioning adult. It does mean that in relationships, neurotypical people see themselves as superior to me because they’ve been socialized to call my actions childish and this will not change in my lifetime- die mad about it.
Should it be okay that autism is naturally occurring, yet you are okay and I am fucked up? This is how every conflict comes across to us when you are irritated with our symptoms, as if we’re THRILLED to have them. Who I projected and who I really was were always at odds until now. When my mother died, I found out my actual diagnosis and that I am indeed physically disabled when she’d gaslit me into believing my father lied to me my whole fucking life while the papers were in her effects and Lindsay found them. I went nuclear for both me and my dad, because that was fucking abhorrent. My parents have always been at odds about me, since I was a kid. I’ve always been difficult, frighteningly intense, high needs (vs. low function) and trying to be invisible, social masking normalcy as not to cause even more problems. I can tell when people don’t like me, and I’ve struggled with it my whole life because I didn’t know what it was about me that was offputting.
Now I know that my emotions are just turned up to hell and other people’s aren’t. They’ve never had to learn to manage emotions this big because they don’t manage their emotions at all. Social masking teaches you to analyze human behavior so you’ll fit in. However, you cannot replicate it because your points of view are wildly different. We dream of worlds where we’ll be understood- obsessed with sci-fi to an enormous degree.
I am not Supergrover’s partner, I just call her that because that’s what yellow strings are called. In reality, she is my Doctor, and a part of me will always be Martha Jones. She does not watch the show, so will you hear my emotions when I say something that means everything to me and nothing to her? I hope she never forgets the time that The Doctor was her.
It led me here, to this place, where I know myself well enough to be able to communicate what is right for me and what’s not. I am not constantly afraid of everything, common among neurodivergents because how they’ll be perceived sits in their stomachs like a rock. I know I’m auDHD, and if I see a benefit to an official diagnosis, I’ll get one. I do not see a benefit in trying to prove that I’m autistic. In my experience, trying to convince someone that you are less crazy than they think but still diagnosed is futile. Just like trying to convince someone that you’re disabled when you “don’t look like it.”
I do not know what to do now, but I do know two things. The first is that I am not lazy. The second is that I am not malicious.
To conclude, here is a meme to express my feelings, one of my love languages.
What’s the first impression you want to give people?
I have bigger problems when people think I am normal than when they don’t. This is because neurodivergent and neurotypical people have two different perspectives, and the neurotypical person (also referred to as “allistic”) is always going to assume I am just like them because majority is implied– neurotypical. I do not have to start every conversation with “hi, my name is Leslie, and I’m an autistic (‘hi, Leslie’),” but I do not think it would hurt if I did. When I do not, people can see that I am irregular, but they can’t put their finger on why.
I have cerebral palsy so I move and look different, but not by so much that you’d think “neurodivergent and physically disabled.” My biggest issue in life is not looking disabled or autistic enough, because I can say it all I want and there’s still going to be a look of disbelief when I actually show people I’m not Bruce Almighty. I would rather people love me backstage, because my social masks are worth nothing. It’s valuable to go through the process of an official diagnosis just for confirmation that you’re not crazy. You’ve done the research and you believe you. It is only when you believe that you know more about your own brain than other people do that they push back. Why do you think you’re the authority on telling other people who you are? “You don’t look autistic” is my favorite. I struggle with imposter syndrome because of it, or I did……….
I actually do think I look autistic now that I know. Like, I just looked around one day and realized my closet was serving Young Sheldon realness (also “Old Sheldon” realness due to all the long–sleeved t-shirts)……. which is also serving Jim Parsons realness because we are both Houston gays of a certain age (he’s older), and our accents are nearly identical when we fall back on them. If you met Jim and me together, it would seem like you met two people who have always known each other, and I mean it. That boy knows what HATCH is, maybe thought about going. For all I know, Michael has a picture of him somewhere.
Michael and I met at a Houston gay club, then found out we were both HATCHlings and he starts going through a photo album on his phone. Complete strangers, except not…….. I was in his pictures. I was in my 30s and the pictures were taken when I was 18 or 19 and he was still in diapers (15). In short, Jim Parsons has the same accent as the gays who raised me. I love him like he personally vouched for me at The Ripcord…… because that’s what you do at the end of the night in Houston if you’re with the boys.
When I’m with “the boys,” I feel more comfortable in a club, gay or straight. That’s because the club is an unfamiliar environment with lights and sounds that are way too fuckin’ loud, but the boys feel like home when the club doesn’t. My favorite memory of clubbing in Houston is the night I went to JR’s in a white t-shirt, jeans, and red leather CFM pumps. It was a great outfit, but within two hours I thought I’d never be able to walk again. My friend Brian knew that I could hardly stand up, so he carried me to my car. I looked like the butchest fairy princess on record.
Looking like a butch fairy princess is also a neurodivergent trait, interestingly enough. Neurodivergent people have loose definitions of gender and sexuality. The spectrums between gay and straight, male and female, mono and poly are all enormous, why I call it “Avatar state,” and you probably will, too, if you’ve seen Avatar: The Last Airbender (not the movie- skip it).
“How dare you make me, a bisexual, choose between two or more things?” #bumperstickerwisdom
I identify with Toph because she’s physically disabled (blind) and coded as autistic in her bluntness. This was even more apparent in Legend of Korra. But, of course, that is not acknowledged because There is No War in Ba Sing Se. Problems do not go away if you sweep them under the rug, and get worse the longer you ignore them. Local is national.
We were engulfed in flames, the embodiment of our own ignorance because the former president going after John McCain for being a POW never even raised an eyebrow. FUCK those people. How could you not see that and the former president’s treatment of the mentally handicapped thinking, “this is surely a leader?” People who think the former president is Jesus have never recognized he’s actually Brian…….. but they know he’s the Messiah. They’ve followed quite a few (I’m not convinced God wanted George W. Bush, either…… but they were).
I am not nearly as furious at the former president’s supporters as I am at the people who stood by and did nothing, and there are a ton of them. Voting participation is usually less or right at half in a presidential election, and you have to pay people to show up for the mayor/city council/state leg, dog catcher, etc. I believe that is actually an elected position in West University because my math teacher in 10th grade was mayor and I think I remember her mentioning it.
OMG, now *that* woman was a monotropic thought process…………. Where were we again? 😉
I do not know how people see me the way they do, I just know that it is the same way that people have looked at others who have raised me. I am not dissimilar from a pastor or an opera singer, because that’s what was modeled for me. I have a stage presence every bit as big as theirs, and I never want to use it ever again, because it’s everything about me that’s not really there. It’s the end of the movie, and I’m stepping out from behind the curtain……. while everything is still in color. I am trying to stop the desaturation, or at the very least, turn up the shadows to make stunning, stark grayscale photography. I have said “pay no attention long enough.”
Perhaps Jack Ryan’s archetype can’t be autistic easily, which is why it was easy to let go of that dream. I don’t think I could have taken the pressure cooker, even as an analyst. Some analysts are even forward-deployed, and though I think it would be exciting, I know through talking to Zac and Daniel that it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. They both got to explore, they both went through trauma. Both are figuring it out with me.
I have an alternating lateral isotropia which makes one eye focus while the other eye drifts. I have no 3D vision. I don’t always have the correct social masks and say things that people just don’t say in a conversation. They don’t know how to address the elephant in the room….. how to tell me that I’m weird because I obviously don’t already know.
People gloss over my limitations all the time and I am brutally honest about them. Others think I’m shitting on myself and placate me, later realizing I was right and they resent me “because I didn’t tell them.” They still feel snowed because they were seeing me through their filters and not the ones I told them existed. In essence, what is happening is that my social masking is so good, so practiced, that when I say I’m autistic or ADHD it is dismissed. I am not special. Most women with autism/ADHD face this to some extent. It’s more often for me having been raised in a fish bowl because I am skilled at making things look fine (while everything is actually on fire).
Other people seem inversely weird to me, and I could not put my finger on it, either. Until now, I’ve thought I was an alien, taking refuge in science fiction (dear God how did I not know this was coming…… I’m basically Mac and PC [John Hodgman and Justin Long]). Come to find out, it’s because people have been asking me to do things way beyond my capability and I’ve let them down because “I didn’t know any better.” It is never that I told them I was ADHD (haven’t had to tell an employer I’m autistic), explained that it meant I had limitations, and you didn’t look it up. I am only responsible for half of a conversation, and I have never been good at holding people accountable for their part. I hate and am also too weak to stand up to authority most days.
The thing is, though, I run a tight ship with an order all its own, which generally looks like there has been some sort of struggle. I desperately need structure and hate authority simultaneously, because my system is in collaboration with no one and I am lost in my own little world– no one is capable of helping me maintain it; I couldn’t explain it if anyone offered. It’s comfortable in my mind, but it also feels like waiting for God to make Eve when I don’t have a sounding board. According to Zac, this might take a while (he’s an atheist). It’s an apt description because the most beloved trees in my mental garden touch upon knowledge of humanity and the divine.
I think deep thoughts and ask the real questions of myself every day. “Why am I like this?” is a constant refrain, but not a pejorative. Fuel to keep the fire going. Writing is working and I’m getting further along in my healing journey, like just now realizing that I was programmed to look for people like my 10th grade teacher because I was already chasing a cougar (she was young, but I was 11 years younger). Oh my FUCK have I just played a huge hand in making myself feel better and someone else worse, just not her. All the archetypes that came afterward, Supergrover the last and most precious in a line because I’d never met anyone like her, and I never will again. It is all just so sad- one f the reasons I’m isolating because I don’t want to take out grief or anger on others. She calmed me and won’t let me calm her. Somehow, we’ve become a part of each other’s heartbeat despite actively disliking each other and stuck in a loophole-less Massey Pre-Nup.
Relationships like ours don’t happen often,, where both people are just too much for the other because of our different outlooks on life. We actually have little in common if you look outside our thoughts. We track together, but “for all our mutual experiences, our separate conclusions are the same.” We are in different social, professional, and relationship situations, with the difference being an absolute power balance and not one we made. Alternatively, there is no such situation in which I wouldn’t just roll with it. You need snacks? Ok. You need me to steal something? Ok. I’ll be at the National Archives by eight. LET’S DO THIS. My inner Nicholas Cage is struggling to get out. 😉
Just text me first.
I grew through wanting bugs to be features and realizing I couldn’t just release the beta as official and publish a patch later…. I am not Microsoft, and she is not Windows…… but her e-mail address does mark her as having had a 56K modem that came with a proprietary CD (Compuserve, Wow, take your pick- not even AOL? Really?), because that’s the only way you would have gotten an e-mail address that ancient, and yes, I am making fun of her. That’s because she’s basically “Windows 98 and the Plus Pack!” years old.
It would have been fun teaching her terms like “mommy save,” the idea that women only have one personal folder and it is the desktop. You know it immediately because you sit down at the computer and the icons are layered (we also have what we called “12:00 flashers,” ’cause every appliance in their house is always blinking 12.). And that line isn’t making fun of her because A) I don’t know what her desktop is like. II) I was making fun of my users and my own mother from “back in the day.”
My mother assumed that if it plugged into the wall, I could fix it. This is not untrue if we’re talking about a desktop/laptop/tablet/phone. I, like Daniel Stern, have no concept of how to program a VCR. “The cows can tape something by now.” My mother once flew me from Portland to Houston because it was cheaper to house and feed me for a few days than it was to call the Geek Squad and I provide better service. I am sure that she did want to see me as well, but she got a bargain, ijs.
All of these things combine to make me dig down on every topic. I’m creative. I like writing. I like computers because they enable me to write. I like tablets because they allow me to write anywhere with a minimum amount of effort. It genuinely seems like the longer I say silent, the more the words flow.
In Scotland, I can find no record of it, but my parents tell me that they chose my name because it meant “quiet spirit.” Today I realized for the first time just how much they actually nailed it.
There are lots of bugs, but the feature is me. The best impression I can give is that I allow myself to take up room in the world because I am not frightened of yours. Be as big as you are.
Yesterday, I made pasta with pesto. It was an entire box of spaghetti, so I just ate as much as I wanted and put the rest away. Pasta acts as a sponge and gets dry overnight in the fridge, so rather than eating too-dry pasta, I just made a second sauce. You can do that with pasta, and it tastes better than reheating the same thing. Tomorrow, I might add diced tomatoes.
Today, it was Alfredo. I browned some pumpkin seeds in salted butter, adding garlic powder and black pepper. Then, I added flour. The flour sauteed for a few seconds as I got out my whisk and milk (it’s important to have the heat very low for roux. Gives you more time to catch a mistake). I do not know how much flour. I whisk in milk slowly. I don’t know how much of that, either. If I add too much, it will take longer because I will have to wait for the sauce to reduce before I can add the Parmesan-Romano.
I am a professional cook and do everything by feel and palate. It’s not “being a snob,” it’s 10 years of experience at work, my entire adult life at home. A roux just a 1:1 Tbsp. ratio flour/butter and a half cup of milk being exact, but you can break the rules if you know how to follow them. If I know what the sauce is supposed to look like, I can change gears on the fly, where butter is clutch and flour is accelerator. Some people measure. I guesstimate accurately, and there are very few mistakes in flavor I cannot fix; I really only throw things away if they’re burnt, or, God forbid there’s blood on it now (accidents happen).
I am telling you what to do because I know what I’m doing, not because this is some kind of food magic only I possess… and that’s actually the point of this entry. When I was cooking, I was thinking about one of my last entries in which I talked about running a kitchen at home, and today I was thinking that relationships are so telling by how you work in one. If you are in a relationship, dinner is always a two-man job. I know that this is impossible every single night, I just think that whoever is home should participate. Both “stations” suck, so trade off.
One person is mostly the cook, one person is mostly on dish. There is a chef and a sous, because it’s easier for one person to manage the recipe and assign parts out. The most essential thing that a sous can do is be available. Chop the onions. Grate the cheese. Most importantly, wash every pot and pan as they’re done using it. There are some things where you can cook and clean at the same time, like if I have a rice cooker going and I want sausage to go on top or whatever. Those things are going to be done at such different times that I can handle it.
But having a pot washer is invaluable with pasta because the pasta goes into the collander, then back into the pot. You pour the sauce from the saute pan into the pasta pot so you can mix/reheat. The other person washes the saute pan and the collander, because the person mixing pasta has gone on to plating. Once the food is plated, one person can carry everything out while the other washes the pasta pot.
When the pasta pot is clean, the only thing left is putting plates and silverware into the dishwasher.
It takes teamwork to run a kitchen that smoothly, but it will change your life on days where you eat all three meals at home. Plus, it’s easier for me to social mask around all that stuff. Being in a partnership reminds me to do things like eat.
I look forward to cooking with Zac one day, because he does like it. He buys all kinds of interesting things for me to discover when I’m housesitting, like blocks of haloumi cheese that I seared with za’atar (that was so good I ate most of it right out of the pan). That being said, when we’ve gotten together we’ve either gone out or to Trader Joe’s, where inevitably there will be something new and different we must buy immediately.
My favorite meal we’ve eaten together is Korean fried chicken. I do like the flavor of southern fried chicken, but not like I love this. I could eat soy garlic or spicy chicken every day for the rest of my life (just not exclusively). Most people eat chicken, veggies, and rice in some combination most days. If you have a close, deep, personal relationship with Popeyes, Korean fried chicken will be up there on your list, too. It’s also almost as good to take off the skin if you have to avoid high-fat, because the marinade is just as good as the sauce. Plus, cooking it on the bone will yield better results than taking out the skin and bones beforehand (morbid, yet true). There’s a reason drums and flats are more popular than boneless. Not the same playing field.
Don’t get me wrong, though. I do like chicken nuggets. I just don’t like McNuggets. I think they taste fake. I do like grocery store chicken, like Dino Nuggets. They’re great with a little salt, pepper, and garlic before you put them in the oven. Season them just like you would patties for a chicken sandwich- ditto for vegetarian or vegan Quorn. Quorn nuggets and patties are my go-to at home.
This is because I also like to buy my own wing sauce rather than buying nuggets that are just “Buffalo flavored.” :::stares in Morningstar Farms::: Right now my favorite wing sauce is ghost pepper and tastes more on the Sriracha end of the spectrum than Buffalo. I pair it with Daiya bleu cheese most of the time. If I have time, I’ll make it. Cream dressings are one of the few things that it’s easier for me to make than buy because the ingredients are so cheap. Even if I was a millionaire, it would not make sense to me to pay for mayo I was going to use in a dressing. I would only use the dressing for one night. I would need the preservatives in pre-made mayo.
Thinking about the jobs you have in the kitchen requires both understanding what they want to eat. The thing that my ex-wife and I learned in a restaurant was how to divide up a recipe without thinking, at home or at work (she was my first chef… which is cute to the point of nausea). If she was grilling, I was making sides. If people were coming over and it was a bigger operation, we were both making sides and rotating who went out to flip the bird in front of the neighbors. 😉
The thing that made our relationship work in the kitchen is that I liked making sides and Dana liked grilling, but if she didn’t feel like it, I could grill and she could make sides. Both jobs were important, and we were both outstanding cooks. It was nice to both be competent so we didn’t have to do anything, we chose which jobs we wanted.
In our professional kitchen, I liked making things like eggs, pancakes, and oatmeal. She also liked eggs, but liked being on the meat side of the griddle- I can only assume because she was a butcher (butcher than what?).
When my father got the job in the Heights, my mother met another piano player and they used to do four handed duets together. I loved how all four parts fit together, and there’s not a better description in my mind now that Dana and I were always a two-handed duet and oh, dear God I just heard it.
What part of your routine do you always try to skip if you can?
It is a slight exaggeration, but I (like all other autistic people) cannot survive while skipping any part of my routine. Mine just isn’t organized by time. It is organized by sense of security. The bigger the task at hand and emotions attached to it, the bigger the sensory issues, demand avoidance, meltdown, and burnout.
Taking medication and not taking it are both things that cause demand avoidance. My routine is generally waiting to get uncomfortable enough while unmedicated because if I don’t experience physical side effects, I will avoid taking pills. Even thinking about taking medication makes me gag. If I had no physical side effects, I would set a reminder. But I don’t have to. My brain notices when a chemical isn’t there and screams bloody murder…. so I got that goin’ for me.
I very, very much wish I could just tell a pharmacist what chemicals I need and be able to choose the delivery, because it would help me a ton to be able to inject myself or drink a suspension. Swallowing pills is hell on my sensory perception, and it wasn’t that way until I needed to take multiple pills every day. My throat has a Pavlovian response to the thought “I need my meds.” It gets tight before I even put the pill in my mouth. If I taste something bad, like the salt in the lamotrigine, my gag reflex will engage. This gets reinforced by happening every day, the reaction more intense over time. It’s a lot to manage. A lot.
If you have a tendency to tell smart/successful people “you don’t look autistic,” please stop. Success is relative. Some high functioning autistic people seem successful, and whether they are or aren’t can only be self-reported because money is not happiness. In every single video I’ve watched about Autism at work, it’s been a vlogger who has at least three degrees, but still no job has lasted more than a few years. Therefore, that means whether someone is working at Wal-Mart or partner at Baker Botts, the odds of them staying employed are the same….. why I admire people like Glennon Doyle, Brené Brown, and Mark Zuckerberg. They do wildly different things, but they all created their own jobs that played to their strengths rather than fitting into a system.
I’m pointing out Zuckerberg specifically because he’s the kind of neurodivergence that best represents me. I have the same sensory issues (I wear the same things, like hoodies), I write content for the web and know how to code some stuff, I social mask through everything and notice when he can’t (watching him in front of Congress was fascinating), etc. I’m just not as rigid as he is because my ADHD pulls me away from complete sameness. He is also the kind of person that whether you were e-mailing him or talking to him the conversation would be wildly different. I promise that people like us are hated all over the world for being cogs that just don’t fit. If Facebook hadn’t been his idea, he would have been fired a long time ago because he doesn’t play well with others. He would have had a better shot at staying employed than someone like me, but only by virtue of the fact that the coding he can do is so monetarily valuable. People are willing to put up with a lot of autistic quirks if not doing so means millions of dollars down the drain. Companies throw out a lot of talent by hiring autistic people without knowing what that really means.
This is why so many people are on disability that “don’t look like they need it.” Taking a shower is not routine. Brushing your teeth is not routine. Making yourself food is not routine. The reason it is not is that for a neurodivergent person, it’s like you learn that thing every day. You don’t “get into the habit.” The reason it feels like learning it again is that you have to put the same amount of effort into taking a shower now as you did when you were eight. It’s not secondhand nature. An autistic person’s strict routine is something they built to keep themselves safe and secure emotionally, but it’s not that they’re different than me. It’s that their structure, their routine is their single interest and they get it done with laser-like focus.
It is not, in IT vernacular, a cron job. Those people are white-knuckling it through life. So am I, because I do not experience my routine as iron like a special interest. I do not demand it of myself……… letting my need for absolute structure and my ADHD impulsivity fight for dominance. I can create a system to defeat ADHD and it will be brilliant. I do not have the executive function to stick to it.
I am the most successful in a relationship when someone else has a strict routine because I social mask it. I am not “codependent,” I literally have no idea how to create a routine to take care of myself and stick to it, emphasis on the repetition being harder than the creation of a system. I swear to God there were days in my marriage I only took showers because Dana dragged me in. It helped more than anything because it kept demand avoidance from eating my lunch. I am often pulled out of my comfort zone because my sensory issues are so high. I have said this before, but I experience demand avoidance in the winter the worst because doing things like changing my clothes is a bigger swing in terms of sensory environment. This is not a bad thing. If I showered every single day in the winter, my skin would dry out too much. It’s just an example of why autism is so hard. Demand avoidance isn’t being childish or lazy. It’s a disability.
I would be great at being married to someone that had an iron structure quirk…….. in some ways…….. as long as my partner recognized that my ADHD would HATE THEM SO MUCH and my autism would never let them go.
Stuff like this is why creative autistics have millions and millions of followers on YouTube and “won’t get a real job.” Creative autistics own things like writing/producing videos about autism (and anything else, but this niché is needed and lucrative). Neurodivergence is devastating and hilarious. They’re finding both ends of the spectrum on camera while I wrestle it out here.
When you’re autistic/ADHD, you start a job with disabilities that make you look “childish.” You don’t develop weaknesses at said job. That’s why if you get put on a performance improvement plan or whatever, you might as well quit. You social mask until you can’t, and then the wheels fall off…… because being autistic at work is a lot to manage all on its own. Demand avoidance will start eating your lunch, because you don’t understand why this keeps happening. If you are undiagnosed, things won’t get better until you research coping mechanisms for your experiences. If you are diagnosed, you know that there’s an upper limit on how much you can do to fit in.
I am also ADHD. I am not the kind of autistic who “gotta be home by 4:00. Gotta be home by Wapner.” Though social masking, I am the kind of autistic person who needs to watch Wapner and would be horrified to let anyone know that. Not watching Wapner would have to feel like gum surgery before the cognitive dissonance was enough for me to say something.
I do wonder what Raymond would have thought of Tivo, though.
Interrupting me is not interrupting a process that needs to happen the same way every day, but interrupting the way I feel as I adjust to a new environment. A new environment is also an old environment by the nature of how sleep works, so “easing into the day” is not a thing. I do not need to have coffee by 0500, get into the shower by 0545, etc. to function. I am disoriented by waking up and not having anything familiar around me.
I need a partner to function and don’t really want to find one. I think I do, but my behavior suggests that I’m really okay white-knuckling my way through life. That I feel more safe and secure by myself right now than I do with someone else. Yes, I have a boyfriend, but not the kind where I have to compromise all the time or learn his schedule/habits. I am glad he doesn’t need me for that because I don’t want to overpromise and underdeliver. I don’t want our relationship to be anything that it isn’t. I love him and Oliver, who is a dog. Love for them is a spectrum from red string to yellow, and we are choosing our adventure together.
I am learning in retrospect that I wanted to marry Daniel because I’d be social masking a doctor all the time. You do whatever you can to learn ways to cope in life, and look around for people you deem doing better than you. The War Daniel, in all of his flaws and failures, has always been a train wreck waiting to happen…… and so have I. Our cars just weren’t headed towards each other until we got so overwhelmed with our environment that we changed directions. We would have been great if we’d kept attacking only the problem.
Social masking Supergrover every day was handy because she thinks in a way that gets powerful people to follow her, so I haven’t learned more coping mechanisms to deal with my disability, but I have learned ways to be more effective in how I speak….. and by effective, I mean “concise.”
Concise is not something I am here, but that’s because this is entirely my place, my rules.
Additionally, every autistic person is an amalgamation of every neurotypical person they know, because they’ve been criticized for every neurodivergent behavior they’ve ever had. Third Rock from the Sun would have worked just as well with the exact same script only substituting aliens for an autistic group house. We are all trying to learn how people do things because our own ways don’t work.
That effort is how processing disorders quickly become mental illness. You don’t develop symptoms of mental illness from autism/ADHD. You develop mental illness from not fitting into the system and feeling horrible about it. My life would be different if I didn’t have the capability to tell when my needs exhausted people. The fact that I do means “80-90% of the time.” That’s because as a preacher’s kid, I have more heuristics for social masking than most people, and I’m female, which carries a rigid structure of behavior in and of itself. Neurodivergent women are often trained into making eye contact, giving affection, and dealing with the discomfort quietly.
When women aren’t social masking, they’re punished like children because their fathers/husbands have been trained to treat them like property, anyway. For lesbians, this is less of a problem, but comes in with male boss relationships if nothing else. Autistic men get away with so much problematic behavior that it’s ridiculous, because women didn’t create a system of power over them in which they have to live up to it. When it comes to how to be a good wife, there are a thousand books explaining the job.
There are a thousand self-help books for men, too, but being a husband is not from the perspective that they should tamp down their behavior- like a 50s women’s rag with lines like “freshen up and run the vacuum around the house before he gets home.” I can understand that a man is autistic AND mansplaining. Just because it’s his autism making him look like an asshole and not narcissism doesn’t mean it’s not offensive.
Perception is reality, but men are not expected to social mask to that degree. Their opinion is expected to be better than mine…. but who knows whether it is or isn’t? There are a million men smarter than me out there (lowballing) that I could learn a ton from, but that’s because I hold their reputations in high esteem, not because I think a man’s voice inherently has more authority than mine…… but they’re programmed to think it does.
There is so much that it takes to make me feel secure in my environment, but a routine is just a good cup of coffee or two in a mug that feels right in my hand. The feel of the mug is as important as the taste of the coffee. A routine is picking up my tablet first thing so that I can look at the WordPress writing prompt for the day and get the creative juice flowing while I wait for the cup to brew (I have a pod-based system; I use Café Bustelo from the can and a refillable pod.).
I only take the time to grab coffee, refill my water bottle, and use the bathroom before I jump into the writing prompt. I think one of my best qualities as a writer is being able to see what comes out when I just let my mind wander a propos of nothing. It’s a writing prompt, and whatever it made me think is okay. If the essay has nothing to do with the prompt, who the fuck cares? It’s not sticking to the instructions. I have understood the assignment because no matter what came out of me, the prompt for it was the same. In writing, there’s no way to really “prompt someone in the wrong direction.”
I write until I get hungry, or I bring my tablet and keyboard to the breakfast table and stuff my face between paragraphs. On those days, it’s generally eggs Florentine and toast, but I’m out of spinach and I’ve started writing before cooking, anyway. 😉
For those of you who are wondering, I’ll probably have eggs and cheese later. This week, real eggs were cheaper, but my actual favorite is those plant-based folded eggs you put in the microwave.
I read that last paragraph again and now it’s about a half hour later. I realized I was starving and went downstairs to grab a sandwich (wheat toast, egg, ham, swiss, salted butter, mustard, and black pepper). The first sandwich was so good I made another one with cheddar.
Cheddar and eggs go well with mustard because it’s a very, very, very rich Mournet. You can either scramble cheddar and mustard into the eggs before you serve them, or just make the eggs plain and put on the rest separately. I don’t know which texture will appeal to you better, but I do know that the flavor is famous. Mournet is a derivative of bechamel, a mother sauce in culinary school. Bechamel is a roux and some milk, reduced for thickness. Mournet adds cheddar and mustard. Stone ground is particularly pretty…. but I don’t notice presentation first. I am trying to make comfort food, my transition into the morning.
I used to binge caffeine, then I looked up this ancient technique called “going to bed earlier.” So, I don’t need as much coffee in the AM as I used to because I’m not counting on it as a replacement. What I do need immediately is water, and I keep a few 20 oz. soda bottles in my room for it. I don’t want to knock over anything without a lid. I ease into the day better with water than anything else, because I learned that sometimes by body said “coffee” because of addiction when it was really saying “I am a plant and I am not doing well.”
The thing about being an autistic person in an alistic world is that you don’t live in a hydroponics farm. All your basic needs are not automatically scheduled. You are at the mercy of yourself, and you’re not a very good boss.
Some people deal with that by having an extreme routine. Some people are paralyzed by them and avoid all social interaction, because when you have demand avoidance over your basic needs, you cannot begin to think about fitting into public because you cannot take on others’ demands if yours aren’t met first. It’s a spectrum of behavior and the masking of it.
You’re so afraid that people will not love you if you stop social masking that it just becomes the part of your routine that you always try to skip…….. if other people will let you.
Whenever one object exerts a force on another object, the second object exerts an equal and opposite on the first. -Newton’s Third Law of Physics
I knew I was attracted to Supergrover’s personality from the moment I met her. Again, cute, cuddly, and (works) blue. She was attracted to me because I was vulnerable with her in a way no one else could be- she read my thoughts here and thought she found a safe space. She did, it just took initiation into a really shitty club, the one in which I’m not social masking so there are maybe three people in it. Her husband spoils her in a way I would have wanted, because she put up with too much bullshit for discount yogurt coupon.
She talks me down off the ceiling, and the reason I’m over the moon is that she does it whether I need it or not. In those moments, I may not be able to look into her eyes, but I see the forehead kiss coming. The problem comes in when Supergrover doesn’t take the time to correct the story I’m telling myself and we get off track. But I don’t want to be off track. I am open and communicating, which comes across as rude and demanding. It’s how she came across after she didn’t want to solve anything anymore. Therefore, I used her tone thinking that’s how she’d respond to me. That when we came back together and regrouped after I’d had time and space to think about it, there would be a continuation of her giving me no bullshit answers and me doing the same.
What actually happened is that my no bullshit answers were taken as “you’re trying to hurt me.” Meanwhile, my heart’s all tied up and I’m lovesick because she thinks that. It leads to more anxiety on my part and avoidance on hers. It finally became untenable, because I was tired of having made a commitment to her like I did and not getting a say in anything…… while she said I dictated everything. Easy to be a dictator when I’m the only one who initiates and first response is anger. I wanted her to keep standing up to me by confiding in me. Being stronger by being vulnerable. Raging inside that she couldn’t and it was all my fault. After eight years of it, I finally decided something true. I matched her tone for tone and it wasn’t all me.
Turns out if I can’t date her, she can’t date her, either. That’s because we’re annoying as shit from different ends of the spectrum. I’m laid back. She’s persnickety. “Do not miss a detail or I will incinerate you if my ire is in full force” is on brand. Mine would be “your nachos look better than mine.” That’s because she’d never ask something of someone else that she wouldn’t do herself, and she wouldn’t miss a trick with nachos, either.
There are certain songs that remind me of her.
If you said “goodbye” to me tonight, there would still be music left to write. What else would I do? I’m so inspired by you. That hasn’t happened for the longest time.
She hides like a child but she’s always a woman to me.
Those are Billy Joel lines that have come through my head recently, but I’ve attributed others.
She’s like a one-way ticket and you can’t come back….. singin’ yeaaaahhhh, you want her, but she’s so mean.
I’ll never let her go, but only in terms of the character she presents here. There will still be music left to write because all creatives use their pain as art, no matter what kind it may be. For me, it’s having a love so deep and so ethereal that it has become a mind worm, but stopping our interaction has made it healthier. I do not ruminate on the questions when I know there aren’t going to be any answers…. as in, I’m not expecting them, waiting on them.
I never should have been waiting on them in the first place, but you’d have to understand details I can’t share as to why that didn’t happen. Why she got twisted further into me rather than further away.
We leapt before we looked, and were only now starting to see real promise- or were we? I don’t think so, because our relationship hung on thinking about perhaps one day maybe never doing something and what I could do for her. She is not selfish at all. I had time to be sweet to her and I wanted to do so. When she had time, she wanted to as well. We’ve sent each other all kinds of digital shit, particularly books and coffee because Amazon and Starbucks are the easiest to transfer back and forth.
We just don’t have the same time; people are right when they say everyone’s got the same 24 hours, but wrong at both ends of the spectrum. A poor person doesn’t get as much accomplished because they can’t travel very far, very fast. You have to have money for gas or public transportation. A powerful person doesn’t accomplish very much because they can’t focus on anything with everyone pulling them in all directions. The difference is small ball. Conversations and research add up. You might have had five minutes a day, but that’s 25 minutes at the end of a work week.
An ADHD or Autistic person does not do that consistently because their thought process is not going to pick up at the same place the next day. They have to come up with a new great idea, because they had it at 3:15, then Carol had an issue, then they got back to their desks and remembered the seed. But then there was only about an hour or an hour and a half left in the day, which isn’t time to fully flesh out the idea. By 5:30, it might as well be, “what idea?”
This is why conversations with Supergrover are so important to me. She’s big picture, and I’m details in terms of spitballing creative ideas or solving a problem. But that’s because she keeps track of everything and all my brainstorming will be off the cuff. My disability comes in where she shouldn’t be expected to keep track of everything, and I’m ADHD. We both have to learn to cope if we have a shot at friendship down the road, and it will be a long time before I’m ready to say we won’t. This is because traditionally when we try to separate, no we can’t.
There are just two reasons it feels final. The first is that I have a legitimate issue with her, I’m not just trying to be an annoying little shit. I’m sorry she’s busy, but I’ve been in the waiting room for eight years. The second is that she sabotaged one of my relationships and I let her because it was good for both of us. And yet also wouldn’t compromise with me on anything later when I felt I’d proven myself trustworthy.
I never railed at her for being straight, I never railed at her for telling me what she told me so that we couldn’t separate, I never tried to make her feel bad because she married a man. I never did a lot of things, she just assumed. She’d read a shit ton of my writing and decided what it meant and how to feel about it all on her own, which she should have. But she didn’t share with me any of her interpretations so that if her assumptions were wrong, I could correct them. She also wouldn’t correct any of my assumptions, then rail that I’d made them. It was not healthy, and her last words to me were “obviously, you’re the only person who can change…” as if I’d lorded my changes over her. I’m not better than her, I’m just different. I felt like I’d done a very good job of listening to her needs and responding, and I was being repaid in anger and guilt.
Reminded me of going to the hospital after Dana hit me and her saying, “must be nice to just be able to check out like that” after she’d hit me. Both Supergrover and Dana caused me to feel things that I’d never felt before in the extreme. I will never forget what it felt like to be hit by a partner. I will never forget what it’s like to be alone in a room with Supergrover, which is how I viewed our relationship- displaced in space and time, a room of our own. 😉 Different experiences, yet not. Different environments, yet not.
In the case of the failed relationship, I felt like I’d anticipated Supergrover’s needs jumping up and down for attention and it didn’t work out the way I thought it would. I don’t know what I was expecting given the previous few years, but it wasn’t what I got.
I got a big gift from her, but there was nothing on the card to indicate that it was transactional. Most of our gifts were “just because,” so if it meant “thank you,” I didn’t pick it up. Therefore, I recognize that she spoke to me in her love language and I am grateful. I just think it’s foolish for only one of us to study the language. It means only I’m in a foreign country.
Marcus? Marcus would get lost in his own museum.
And in fact, that’s exactly what I did. I wrote into the night, creating new memories with her and reveling in her old stories when she told them. I told her I wanted to be the Merlin to her Arthur, but I know in my heart of hearts that she did not believe I was telling the truth. This is not real? I ended up wishing that it could be more than each of us curled up reading each other from thousands of miles away, but grateful for even a 30 second interaction because her time is as precious as she is.
My beautiful girl is such a force of nature that I had to be mad at God for a while. First, railing at them because I’d been born queer because the relationship would be so much easier if I hadn’t. Then, railing because since she shut down communicating with me, it felt like she thought she was them.
She thought I was mean and vice vera.
Whatever objects of mine weren’t in motion before she appeared certainly started rolling afterward. The entry before last took place at Marylhurst, the year leading up to meeting Supergrover. Before I knew it was an emotional affair on my end, and I was always preventing her from being uncomfortable because I couldn’t keep my mouth shut and I knew she would be.
Not only was I blunt, I couldn’t get a read on what was okay and what wasn’t. Our reactions used to be so similar that when she put me in motion, we moved in the same direction.
Now, for every action there was an equal and opposite reaction in which her actions were always pure and she was perfect, and I was trying to take her for a ride. This was in no way true, but I see how she’d get that impression. I thought she would see with eight years of diligence that I wasn’t going anywhere and I was taking my end of the bargain seriously, but an avoidant attachment will run from an anxious one every time because they are not used to communicating with people clearly enough to avoid small anxieties that then spiral. Slights unfold in the memory.
I also don’t know when our relationship is affected by outside sources, and she held that against me, too. She asked why I wrote like she does everything because of me. If you don’t tell me there’s an outside force, I’m not going to look for it. I have enough problems not spiraling out without anticipating even more blowback because the moving goalpost would be “why do you attribute things to my friends and family?” I didn’t want her out of my life because I thought she was a bad person. I thought our relationship was difficult because I couldn’t love her any more than I already did unless she showed me how.
She has no idea how many e-mails I’ve written with tears streaming down my face because of it. Whatever you call it- a chord running between us, wearing her metaphysical ring, two toys in the same sandbox, etc.- I wasn’t prepared for how hard it was to undo a trauma bond, and I’ve been left with no other choice. I am not holding onto hope because I think it’s realistic. I am holding onto hope because neither one of us has been able to avoid each other no matter what our feelings have been for 10 years. It’s a tapestry.
I just decided to stop stitching until we went to Target together to buy fabric softener….. and she has to drive for many reasons. She doesn’t get to have an engine that good and not let me watch her play with it :::sly grin::: because she’d know how to raise the hair on the back of my neck safely. That’s why she’s the alpha in our relationship. One of only four or five people I’d trust to catch in one of those exercises where I just have to hope I don’t hit anything as I lean back.
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. I am angry that she does not see me as someone who would catch her and it has become useless to keep saying it and hope she takes it in. Maybe she will in retrospect, but even so it’s unlikely to result in reconnection. That’s because I’ve told her over and over that if she comes back, it has to be big. She has to lay all her feelings on the table so that I feel secure.
I know her first thought when she read that (the first time) was “why didn’t she just ask me to poke myself with a fork instead?” That’s because she’s cute and cuddly, but doesn’t indulge that side of herself. Doesn’t realize that the things she sees as “darts” from me are actually the things I love most about her. I’m not criticizing her, I’m telling her I notice her “-isms.” She has personal and professional quirks that make her unique. She doesn’t see that I think she’s uniquely inspiring and stupid gorgeous because she isn’t looking for it. That doesn’t make it less true.
I say everything wrong, but no I don’t because no one is ever wrong a hundred percent of the time. All of this has become a drumbeat because if I do not concentrate on resolving the issue and keep looking back across the river, I won’t be able to rescue myself.
She has told me to find people that bring good things into my life, that don’t cause me issues. Two huge problems with that. The first is that if I move on, she still causes issues because the bond is unbreakable. We leapt before we looked, and now I’m paying for it dearly. I am sure I am not the only one, I just don’t know her side of the story because she’s so adamant about not telling it.
So now, my task is to find something that will turn my attention, and I’m finding all sorts of temporary interests, but not anything so magical that it would interrupt how I’m feeling currently. Part of it is being a monotropic thinker caught up in a rumination that won’t go away. Part of it is that the situation cannot be duplicated, so if I lose her, I lose a once in a lifetime experience. My broken heart was caused entirely by thinking that I was the only one who got the chance of a lifetime. I forgot that when I saw her trademark and thought it was cool, she had met Leslie Lanagan.™
I don’t think that because of anything but Newton. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Supergrover fell in love with my writing. I started believing in myself. Any belief in myself started with “you like Eminem? Explain exactly how I’m not going to fall in love with you. USE BIG WORDS.”
I was joking. We’d just met like, 30 minutes ago. It was a mistake, and a big one….. but not for the reason you might think. I didn’t pull a trigger in her that meant anything sexual, but I made her feel good and vice versa. We amped up each other’s dopamine so that we felt this heightened bubble around us that excluded the rest of the world for evil and for awesome. It was private and healthy until it was private and not. And I’m not even sure how private it is, sweating bullets over everything about everything.
What I know is that if I keep putting one foot in front of the other, my attention will eventually turn. I think that’s best because she’s given no indication that me asking her to step up would do any good at all, and in fact most things I say piss her off because she can only accept my truth when she sees herself the same way I do. If those stories are different, she will become defensive and accusatory. At that point, I’ll just explode because I am so tired of trying to make it work.
The reason I’m tired of seeming “demanding” is that I’m not asking for anything huge. If she actually asked what my terms were, filling them would be the bare minimum in a virtual friendship. It’s not that I blame her for always being busy. I blame her for doing everything she can not to talk about her feelings so that I constantly feel like the failure in our relationship because I’ve asked her to emote. Anything above clear communication in text, like having lunch, is above and beyond. Penciling in lunch is what I’m willing to do, not what I need.
What I need is her to stop moving the goalposts so that I actually get positive feedback. When she holds off reading because she feels angry/guilty, she opens the e-mail and responds to it with anger and guilt…… if the issue is between us. She has time to post-mortem with me if she is not a party. She will help me improve any relationship except for ours.
It felt like I was settling for a connection that would be insecure my whole life because I would walk on eggshells to keep her until I died…….. because bringing up anything about our relationship makes her avoid me. It has to stop for as much as she walks in beauty and I do because of it.
Two reasons for giving up. The first is that I genuinely don’t want to take up her time. The second is that I don’t want the occasions when we do have time to interact to be contentious. I can’t be one of those “Christmas and Easter” friends because we’ve been so close in the past that it physically hurts when we’re distant. Having that distance is the only thing that allows me to keep that thought process at bay. It’s exhausting for the feelings I have about her to rush in and out. Riding the waves is a good thing, but it’s dangerous when the water levels are so different at low and high tides.
I am astounded by the entry where she told me she had read as much as she was going to read, that it’d been okay up to now. There were tears running down my face; my face felt as if it had never really been washed before. The reason I was crying is that the entry was much later than I thought it would be, and she’d read everything that was truly important to me. She didn’t agree with all of it, and that’s okay. Just knowing she read it is enough. Knowing she was still reading while I was at full strength, not social masking. Letting my autism run wild over our experiences so that I could process them through my fingers.
Of course it hurt that she said she wouldn’t read anymore, but it hasn’t been true at any other time in our relationship, so I’m convinced if it’s not true now, it will be. I have no doubt she loves reading about you. For some reason, in her mind I am very perceptive about everyone on this blog as well as completely 100% wrong when she’s in it.
I am not surprised at this attitude, as it’s most people’s attitude about my writing. It’s irritating as shit because people will read me for days/months/years and really get a feel for my writing. They’ll fall in love with it and treat me like a hero. They’ll build me up til I think I’m James Dean on toast. Then, when they’ve convinced me they really want to be a part of my life, they see what I’ve written about them and it quickly begins a downward spiral if I say anything but “the sun shines out of their asses.” I have not changed a thing in terms of the way I operate, but they’ve changed their perspective on me.
I love that Supergrover read the entry about all the things she never knew, about telling the bees she was gone… and might have even heard me read it. If she did, I hope she likes it, because that’s the purest love letter I’ve ever written to anyone.
Falling in love with straight women is never advisable. It’s cliché for a reason, though. Happens all the time. When it comes to being attracted to someone, mistakes are made whether people are the same sexual orientation or not. Plus, even if we had both been queer, that’s no guarantee that we would have been attracted to each other. I’m not even sure I’d be attracted to her physically because I’ve never seen her in person. Yes, her photo is gorgeous; I can’t go on that because you can’t judge how you feel around them by it.
This is why I’m so sure that what she looks like doesn’t even matter. That whether we meet or not, our brains are connected and that’s what’s important to me. Our brains being connected is just not a good thing until we establish healthy patterns and tamp down all the rage.
She and I, like Dana and me would’ve if we’d gotten back together, restarted with a lot of hostility. Over time, we each came around and I kept growing. I felt like we were getting closer, but I think now that I felt the intimacy of opening up to her. That theory holds up because my feelings didn’t degrade if she stopped talking- still haven’t, won’t. What I went through with her was a dream, but a disjointed one…. the kind where you think you’re going to learn the meaning of life….. until you realize it’s all just a bunch of green glass and movie magic.
I am not sorry for wanting her to be my somewhere over the rainbow, but I am sorry that she knows it….. and I couldn’t get around it by hiding her to her because I’m just not that good a writer. Hiding her to people who don’t already know her is hard enough. The reason she knows I love her this much is not just because I told her. I thought it was easier to go the hard route and just be honest with everyone, including you.
Generally, after I talked to her, I talked about her…….. and she read it. The reason we didn’t leave it at a one-note conversation is because I wasn’t writing my feelings about her to her. I was writing my feelings about her to you and she was listening. Sometimes it made her angry. Sometimes I touched her heart. The worst days was when she perceived I was doing the former when I was trying to overdo it on the latter. All I’ve ever wanted is to change her mind and heart, because I wouldn’t be who I am if she hadn’t changed mine.
She knows how I feel about her, how I’ll always feel about her. I will stay in motion especially being acted on by an outside force. In so many ways because our relationship is virtual, losing her is losing me. There are moments when my social mask is her because none of my other friends know her and won’t pick up the imitation. We’re both good people. If something worked on me, it’ll work on someone else.
Supergrover is sort of neurotypical with ironclad boundaries and morals. Therefore, it was imperative to pick up her social masking. She is much more stable than I am in that arena (I’m autistic/ADHD and she’s not, but she has PTSD so I’d be surprised if social masking hasn’t been a part of her life since she picked a favorite Crayon.). We are both incredibly complicated constructs, what makes us attracted to each other on a magnetic level because our conversations just keep digging down.
At first, she was good about thanking me for calling her out and not immediately getting angry, but it didn’t last because I got on her last fuckin’ nerve. I’m not saying her reactions weren’t anything I didn’t deserve, just that I was thoughtless and it had bigger consequences than I could see on the current chessboard. You often don’t when you’re playing black.
I didn’t get anywhere in our relationship until I pushed over my king for the last time….. except it wasn’t, because Supergrover was used to having a fight and would provoke me when I said I needed time. I am responsible for not walking away at that point, but because autism, I’m not very good at that. So, we’d spend our days ripping each other apart when this is someone I wanted to love for all time.
It mystified me that we were fighting over how beautiful she was and I was losing. I’ve loved beautiful women since forever and I’d still never seen anything like her……… and I would say that if I’d never seen a pic.
Her letters were like uncut coke to an autistic brain. I lit up like a Christmas tree every time a notification came in. My senses were heightened because I’d been in burnout/depression when we met and the dopamine of new relationship energy pulled me out. I missed DC (I lived in Oregon then), and for as much as I thought of myself as a lovesick girlfriend obsessed with punctuation, I thought of her letters as “news from home,” too.
I had never had a relationship that was so deep emotionally without being physical, so it took a while to learn how straight women do that. Definitely something I needed to know because I’ve misinterpreted lots of signals the wrong way in both directions. One of the things that’s come from being so tired of walking in gray area is if I’m interested in someone, just tell them. Don’t stop to hem and haw over whether they’re straight or not. If they are, they’ll tell you.
I realized I was pigeonholing women by anticipating whether they were or weren’t based on a non-existent set of facts that are actually just stereotypes. I’m not saying that telling Supergrover I had feelings for her was wrong, I’m saying that I was an idiot for thinking it wouldn’t change things as much as it did, because she was already a monotropic thought process without bringing all that romance shit into it. I felt like a seventh grader. Ugh. Eyeroll.
The one thing I will not do is pretend it didn’t happen. Supergrover has to learn to deal with my feelings if she wants to be in my life because I do not want a relationship where only one of us is getting what we need. What I need is for her to stop the push/pull of adoring me when I adore her here- deeply, intimately… and saying “you’re the only one who ever ruins anything” after we have text.
If this was a movie, our indecision over whether to be good to each other or not would make the audience throw popcorn at the screen. So many times we have duelled, enough that now there’s never a winner because we decided to attack each other instead of the problem.
I want to be kind to her. I want to love her like no one else does, and I can be safe and secure in the fact that I do. It has been such a circuitous route that it is impossible to remember every turn. I do know that at some times, it has felt like Google Maps just told us to swim.
Right now what I am doing is making sure that when I’m older, I still have these memories. It’s not a lot to write down to move on. It’s a lot to write down to record. Hindsight is 20/20, and I cannot look forward before I look back. If I am only looking forward, I am not seeing the mistakes I’ve already made.
Autistic people take in information by reading a lot of the time because processing someone’s voice is more difficult than text. In effect, I’m writing down my memories because it makes social masking stick in my head.
Social masking doesn’t mean that I’m not being real with you when I do it. I am not trying to learn how to emote. I am learning how people receive it so that I can be more effective in my communication. It would be nice if people did the same for me, but neurotypical people don’t generally do that. It’s not how society works. If you are not having a meltdown and stimming by rocking, “you don’t look autistic.” If you hear people say that, they’re certainly not the type who’s prepared to be sensitive to it.
The world doesn’t owe me any favors in terms of excusing my behavior because I’m autistic. It is only a tool for me to learn how my reactions are different by having them classified into a group. I would like to make the whole world more accessible, but that’s not my call. My call is being able to act upon an outside force because it acts upon me, not cower away because I’m afraid to take up room.
For instance, I know that I rejected a lot of love in my equal and opposite reaction to Supergrover because it wasn’t the package I wanted. She thought I was being selfish, like a child who’s had their favorite toy taken away. Our problems weren’t child’s play, so I don’t know why she thought the solutions were easy. She took up an enormous amount of room in the relationship and, I feel, blamed me for wanting a solid 10-20% rather than a rolling approval rating with large spikes.
I’ve said it so many times, and mostly that’s just to convince me I did the right thing. It is torture in the moments I think I didn’t, because if so, I traded a lot for a little. There had to be multiple battles for me to concede the war, because I kept changing tacks and nothing got better. It was hell walking away, and an even bigger hell to stay and be caught in a gray area that felt like it had an electric fence. No matter how much I tried not to get buzzed, I hit a wire somewhere.
The two scenarios are so different because the honeymoon phase is so different from where we are now. It would have to have been that explosive to create this much pain.
Every action creates an equal and opposite reaction, but some elements are more stable than others.
I am not coming from a place of lack, begging her to come home. I am coming from a place of abundance that I ever got to love her at all.
For cesium, there was flourine. For me, there was you…. and the joy and light of being complete.
Even if I live without housemates, I’ll never live without a pet. In my current situation, I cannot have one unless I keep it in my room all the time. Having a litter box would be impossible because of the smell being too loud, and we already have the maximum amount of dogs on one side of the house (the owners). If I got one, too, the county might notice because of our addresses.
Therefore, I am grateful for Zac and Oliver, who is a dog.
Editor’s Note:
I say it exactly that way because I want new readers to know he’s a dog and for “Oliver, who is a dog” to be something that people think automatically because they’ve heard it so many times and now it’s funny. My inspiration comes from classical music. You can wake up a classical fan in the middle of the night and say “Sir Neville Marriner.” They’ll say “conducting The Academy of St. Martin in the Fields” before their eyes open.
(That line just made Jack laugh. I know it.)
Zac, for those just joining us, is my boyfriend. I joke that I’m his “twinkie bitch boyfriend,” but that’s because I’m closer to that stereotype when I’m with him because we don’t look heterosexual. We’re not building a life together unless the stars align in terms of being happy just as I am. I figure that it’s not up to other people whether I lived like a monk before I met them and it’s ridiculous to think I should have been “waiting for you.” I’m not Blanche, I’m Dorothy. I am sure that if Dana and I hadn’t been such knobheads to each other, I’d be joking with/about the fact that she’s Stan.
It took a lot to realize that I did a lot of negative things, but I am not a bad person. It’s a distinction that people have to make or they’ll hate themselves forever. Being a narcissist is not owning your shit because your ego would never let you admit you did anything in the first place. Narcissists feed on your love and your fear because they know they have control. It starts out small so that you give up power willingly and not notice you’re about to be a boiling frog.
It’s good to have a pet when I’m thinking this deeply about something and writing it down, because stimming to soothe myself is not limited to the feel of the keys. I don’t write at Zac’s much (sometimes I housesit or stay the afternoon to work in silence while he’s at the office). When I do, it is often sitting on the couch with Oliver’s head on or near my lap. He fits his muzzle around my keyboard.
At no time to I stop thinking about something deeply, so Oliver is a good companion when I’m walking. He interrupts my pain signals by having to keep my attention on him (also why a stick shift car is basically an ADA accomodation for me). I’m stimming through every sense and not one, keeping the parts of AuDHD that suck to a minimum. I don’t have demand avoidance with Oliver because I enforce all the rules in a rigid system, I’m not walking in the dark about how Zac trains him. Therefore, I am not spiraling out over what the demand is because I have clear written instructions for the whole process, including a credit card that will work at his vet so I don’t have to panic about how much it will cost if we get hurt.
I have to watch for Oliver’s age and neurodivergence, because he has anxiety around strangers. He also comes off as an asshole while frightened of his environment, but relaxes just like I do when his sensory perception is turned down to normal. Oliver’s not just a dog because I see the same patterns in his behavior that I do in mine, making our relationship free and easy because we understand each other. He understands English to the point where I can say things with syntax instead of direct commands and he’ll still pick it up.
“I need you to get off the couch and go lay over there” vs. “Sit”
Oliver introduced me to the reason it’s important I have a personal/service dog (depending on the plan with my neurologist/therapist/etc.) because it helped my mental state so much. I would also rather have a cat in terms of responsibility, but they only help with stimming when I’m anxious at home. A personal dog can go more places with you, and a service dog can go everywhere.
I would want something like an Italian Greyhound for portability and still being tall enough to handle more challenging walks. I prefer bigger dogs than that, but I cannot carry them…. not important for a couch potato, but Zac and I like to hike. So, small, but just big *enough.* When I get said dog, we will be going to training *immediately,* whether it’s Bryn or a class. This is because of anything that bugs me about dog owners, it’s having little dogs that are terrors and not expecting them to behave like big dogs.
It’s annoying for everyone, for me, a sensory nightmare. I don’t want my dog to breathe without my permission, and I can do it all with positive reinforcement. One of the best things you can do for your puppy is train it in sign language (babies, too). This is because before they have age and experience, they react to everything. Whatever energy is in the room, they pick it up. You need to be able to stop your dog from digging, fighting, jumping, etc. without losing your shit at the dog because if you don’t, the bad behavior will only ramp up because of your adrenaline. Not being verbal takes the energy in the room out of the equation (for the most part).
Editor’s Note
For your baby, they can communicate long before they’re verbal. They just don’t know how without signs. It keeps the crying and tantrums to a minimum when you know how to ask for more milk. They’ll be able to speak in sentences before they’re into toddler diapers. It makes communication easier when a look and similar cries aren’t all the intel you can get.
That’s a thing it’s good to know *before* you have a pet….. whether you’re the kind of person that can be so dedicated to the cause of making your dog behave that you don’t get lazy, because you can derail it by being inconsistent *once.* It’s why I’m so much more into cats. It’s not that I don’t like dogs more, it’s that I have the executive function to take care of a cat and I’m not going to bet against it until I have a partner who also wants a dog or someone I’ve hired because I can’t manage the relentlessness of its care. I don’t want to bite off more than I can chew, and I won’t because a dog’s life isn’t sitting in my house all the time. The point of having a dog is to get me to leave it.
I already know its name should be “Sidney Virginia Bristdog-Woof.” Virginia Woolf is one of my favorite writers and the joke is obvious, Virginia Hall is my third favorite real female spy, and Sidney Bristow is my fictional favorite.
Julia Child and Jonna Mendez are first and second. Don’t let Julia fool you with that “I was just a file clerk” crap. She is a tough motherfucker. I have a feeling that after working with spies, culinary school wasn’t that hard. Jonna is my second favorite because she would endorse the message regarding the first and Julia came long before her- OSS in WWII. Jonna was Cold War/Middle East terrorism…. but I honestly think she has a lot more areas of operation in her portfolio because disguises vary by climate. I doubt she was only limited to Eastern Europe and the Middle East because of it. I also know that at one point she spent time in somewhere like India or Pakistan because one of the chapters in Spy Dust locates her “on the subcontinent.” However, she could have been talking about someplace like southern Africa as well, and that’s what makes her books fun.
She is also a person who *loves* animals and would love appearing in an entry *about* dogs. I am positive she would rather write about dogs some days than her old job. But her old job makes for interesting stories that can’t be duplicated, so I’m glad she focuses on it. Having a dog is universal. Being Chief of Disguise at CIA is not.
I can say this surface level stuff because we actually do know each other on a superficial level. As in, I don’t have any more inside scoop than the rest of her readers, but I do enjoy hearing her live, talking afterwards, and sending her things I’ve written. It’s how I know she’s lost her dog within the last couple of years, but I don’t know if she’s gotten another one yet.
She would think “Virginia Woof” was funny even if you guys don’t. 😉
It’s funny how I can connect the love of a dog to even my special interest because so many people know its power. We all love our dogs because they can love us back in the way another adult can’t. No terms, limitations, provisos, clauses. No divorce unless you initiate it, and those people are generally wrong about it being time. I do not understand giving up a dog when the situation isn’t completely untenable, and I don’t understand keeping an animal alive at all costs because you think you can’t live without them. There are too many homeless pets to grieve long. I say I won’t get another pet. I won’t mean it two weeks later because I don’t like living without a pet.
I’m glad I don’t have to. Loving Zac is loving Oliver, who is a dog.
Stories That Are All True 