I got an e-mail from someone who works at ExxonMobil the other day, interested because I mentioned being an out lesbian and working there in the same weblog.
So I talked a little about my experiences in Fairfax, both the good and the bad. I started with Kathleen and I walking in Dupont Circle and picking up a copy of The Washington Blade, then nearly dropping our ice cream on the pavement as we read a quote from senior media advisor, Tom Cirigliano. I’ll paraphrase it here: “ExxonMobil does not support domestic partner benefits, but in countries that allow LEGALLY BINDING gay marriage…” We started planning our trip to Vermont that afternoon.
But the real fun began after we came home.When Kathleen presented our certificate to Human Resources, they acted like they had never heard of civil unions, and to be fair, they probably hadn’t. We were assigned a caseworker and given a possible date at which we might be given more information. That date came and went. We finally called back. We were given another date at which we might possibly be given information. We went to church. We prayed. We crossed fingers.
Another month went by, and the date at which they said they’d call us back came and went, and we were assigned another date at which they might possibly give us more information. It was a nightmare of bureacratic red tape. What we didn’t know is that the senior media advior had spoken without any clear definition of what he was talking about. They were literally having to write a proposal for how they were going to include us from the moment we presented them with our certificate. No advance planning had gone into it, presumably because they thought no one would take them up on it.
Another few months went by, and I was hired by ExxonMobil Research & Engineering, which alleviated our concerns about joint health coverage. Now that I had my own, we weren’t concerned about my getting ill- but it was still a justice issue in that each of us wanted to be listed as the other’s spouse in case of a true emergency.
Another two or three months went by, and we finally sent a letter that was very kind but firm- something to the effect of “if the next time we meet we are only given another date at which we might possibly be given more information, we would like to seek legal counsel.” It was worded more diplomatically than that, but our intentions were clear nonetheless. I sent copies of every e-mail and every transcription of every voice mail to theย ACLU, theย National Center for Lesbian Rights, and sincerely thought about theย Washington Post. In retrospect, I would have had a lot of compassion for the people in HR if they had just e-mailed us and said, “we didn’t really think anybody was going to use this, so be patient with us while we write this thing from the ground up.” Wading through months and months with no inkling that any information would ever be forthcoming was the hardest part.
This morning as I sat down to write I didn’t particularly feel like writing about anything. But people who work on the assumption that you only write when you feel like writing don’t get book deals. So with that in mind, I went to Yahoo! and searched for “writing prompts.” The first site that came up was a writing resources page for people who teach junior high. Most of them were pretty inane, but this one just cracked me up: “What does Canada mean to you?”
I’m assuming that this prompt was meant for Canadian teachers wanting to bring out a small bit of patriotism in their students. But in the interest of having a good laugh, I’m going to attempt it anyway. So here it is, for your viewing pleasure:
What Canada Means to Me by Leslie Lanagan
I am pretty sure that if Canada weren’t around, it would have taken the world a lot longer to realize just how ignorant and egocentric Americans can be. For instance, when I was in high school, I dated a girl from Fort St. John. Her accent was so thick you could cut it with a knife, so when we would go out together, people would instantly start in on this conversation in various forms:
Random person: Hey, that’s a great accent. Where are you from?
Girl I Dated: I’m from Canada.
RP: Wow, I don’t think I’ve ever met someone from there. Do you guys have Christmas on the same day?
GID: (flustered) Of course.
RP: Say out and about. Come on, please!
GID: Ok, let’s just get this out of the way: Out, about, house, mouse, boot, shoe, sorry. Is there any other word in the English language that you’d like to hear me pronounce before we move on?
RP: End a sentence with “eh.” Come on, you know you want to.
GID: (turning to me) That guy is a total fucking hoser, eh?
As an American citizen, Canada also means easy access to good Cuban cigars and cheap European imports. Hey, let’s not forget that even though I am sympathetic to the fact that Canadians have little to no identity outside their own country, I am also one of the egocentric bastards they do their best to avoid.
I decided to publish some of my old stuff from “Clever Title Goes Here,” which has been archived in “The Wayback Machine.” However, I cannot download all the data at once, so I’ve been picking through things to see what’s still good. ๐ I have a list of 50 Things already, but I got a new one for 100 Thingsโฆโฆโฆโฆ
I cannot wear high-heeled shoes properly.
Current favorite beer: Bridgeport India Pale Ale
Current favorite wine: Rosemount Estates Pinot Noir
Current favorite spirit: Baileyโs Irish Cream
I am currently housesitting for my friends Ann and Scootter. Therefore, for the next three weeks, I have a dog. She is a boxer and her name is Radley. I love the name so much I might name my first daughter that, but she will never know it came from my best friendsโ dog. Unless Iโm mad.
Ann and Scootter call people they like by both their first and last names, and fortunately or unfortunately, I have picked up the habit. If I donโt call you by both your first and last names, though, it doesnโt mean I donโt like you. It just means I like other people than you MORE.
I do not like white wine, and I get migraine headaches from red. But does that stop me from ALWAYS picking red? NOOOOOOOOO.
I am married- but not emotionallyโฆ and divorcedโฆ but not legally. Itโs very complicated. In short, no matter how much you love someone, do not fall for that old โletโs get a civil union certificate in Vermontโ line.
I am a native Texan, but currently I reside in Oregon.
I have dated three women seriouslyโฆ and two boys.
I met my current girlfriend through Friendster, and it has caused no amount of grief among my friends.
Especially when we moved in together after a month. Well, technically Iโm just staying with her until I find a new apartment/house, but it was worth saying that just to give my parents a heart attack. ๐
I sing in an all-womenโs chorus called Belle Voci. It means โbeautiful voicesโ in Italian. Some days, Iโm not so sure.
My fatherโs family is from Ireland, and thereโs a fairly interesting story behind it. Apparently, our family is not related to anyone else with the last name of Lanagan in America because my great great great great great grandfather was the captain of a ship during Irelandโs cholera epidemic. Therefore, he was out to sea when it hit and our clan survived.
I am active in my church, Bridgeport United Church of Christ. I sing in the choir and I teach senior high Sunday School. If that doesnโt get me extra brownie points in heaven, I donโt know what will.
My father is the clinical coordinator for Angela McCain, M.D. Incidentally, Angela McCain, M.D. is my stepmother.
My mother is an elementary school teacher in a neighborhood so horrible that the teachers in the accompanying junior high and high school receive hazard pay. Her husband, my stepfather, is the Chief Financial Officer for the Port of Houston.
Once, on a job application in high school, I was asked this: โGive an example of extraordinary customer service.โ I replied that one time a blind man had come into the Eckerds in which I was working and needed a greeting card for his daughter. So I read him an entire aisleโs worth of cards until he found just the right one. It didnโt happen to me. But it was a damn good story, a tearjerker even, so I wrote it anyway.
By now youโve probably learned that for me, morality is a sliding scale. This happens to a lot of writers. I hope it doesnโt get in the way of our friendship.
I hope that clears up before I start seminary. I want to be a minister when I grow up.
The best book Iโve read this year is The Solace of Leaving Early by Haven Kimmel. I wish I could explain it to you, but I like very complicated stories and I only have so much roomโฆ
I also like John Grisham novels, however, as I believe that they are the literary equivalent of crack.
The man who sat next to me when I was volunteering at Oregon Public Broadcasting thought it was HYSTERICAL that I wanted to be a minister. Iโm trying to decide if he thought that because I was sitting next to Jenn and clearly indicating that she was my girlfriend, or if he just knows me entirely too well for sitting next to me in that short of a time period.
I am horrible with e-mail. I try to keep on top of it as best I can, but I get so many a day that I think my brain is going to explode. So if I havenโt e-mailed you lately, donโt give up hope. One day I WILL wade through it all.
When I was in grade school, I was such a dork. I had braces and a headgear and I wore glasses. But just look at me now, baby!
I have met most of the really great trumpet players: Maynard Ferguson, Marvin Stamm, Dizzy Gillespie, Wynton Marsalis, Clark Terry, Barry Lee Hall, Jon Faddis, Dennis Dotson, Lew Soloff, etc. The story about meeting Jon Faddis is the funniest, because when I went to meet him I was absolutely punch drunk on the experience. I had just met Lew Soloff, the lead trumpet player for Blood, Sweat, and Tears, who thought that if I knew who he was then I must be a trumpet player myself (well, kindaโฆ). He told me about an audition in New York for the Manhattan School of Music, which I took down for a friend. So after that, I was on cloud nine. I went to Faddisโs bus and told the guys already on board that I was a big, big fan and I wanted an autograph. Total MISTAKE. The guys started ragging on Faddis like, wellโฆ like junior high band geeks, frankly. So I finally get my autograph and my few minutes in the โFADDISPHEREโ and I just about walked away on air.
I WATCHED CANADA SHUT OUT CHINA IN THE 2003 WORLD CUP, AND I WILL NEVER, EVER FORGET IT! Miracles do happen, and I was there for one of them.
I have managed to turn my girlfriend, Jennโs, attic into usable space, but only because I have a futon and an electric blanket that can be turned up to HELL.
My favorite blogger in the whole wide world is Heather Armstrong of dooce.com.
My butt is starting to hurt, and I still have 70 more to go.
I was born in Tyler, Texas at a hospital that has a statue of Jesus looking like he is directing traffic.
I am still in touch with my first love.
I have always been a voracious reader, and I would rather read than do almost anything else. Currently I am rereading Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and reading David Sedarisโ Naked for the first time.
My grandfather died when I was in junior high, and I played Amazing Grace on my trumpet at the funeral.
What is really weird is that although the only people Iโve dated seriously have been my age, I donโt normally have friends that are the same age as meโฆ but I do not discriminate. Thatโs just been a force of nature.
I am three years older than my mentor was when I met her, therefore I regret just a little bit not getting to โcatch upโ to her because sheโs a different person now. We would have been great bad girls together.
I am starting a writing class on Sunday regarding spirituality. Our first assignment is writing about something thatโs a curse as if itโs actually a blessing. So far, Iโve got nothinโ.
For some reason, actresses do not appeal to me. Perhaps itโs because I prefer really down-to-earth, crunchy granola girls, or perhaps my crushes are on actors because Iโd rather be them than be with them.
Iโve had four Diet Cokes today. Itโs a sickness.
I have now been to Seattle, and while I was there, I ate at the restaurant in which the tiramisu scene is filmed. Or at least, I think itโs the tiramisu scene. Thereโs a big picture of Tom Hanks in the front window.
For the first time in my life, I am dating someone who is ALSO a first childโฆ but weโre still very, very different.
My favorite recording artists (in no particular order): Eminem, They Might Be Giants, Ben Folds, Live, Panic in Detroit, Koufax, Indigo Girls, Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park, Staind, Tenacious D, and Weird Al Yankovic.
Favorite character in the Potterverse: Arthur Weasely. His fascination with the Muggle world is endlessly entertaining, particularly in the fifth book.
Though Iโve only seen him once on Comedy Central, my favorite comedian is Stephen Lynch. He does this great show with beautiful music where the lyrics are all twisted, such as, โHad to see you one more time, thereโs somethinโ on my mindโฆ How about bitch, gimme my moneyโฆ. Gimme my money and I want it fastโฆ
No, of course Iโm not bitter. Why do you ask?
I have never cheated on anybody, but I do, much like Jimmy Carter, lust in my heart.
However, having been cheated ON does not make me a martyr. For long. Two months tops. Okay, four, but thatโs my final offer.
My favorite driving experience was loading up Kathleen and Lindsay and going to Manhattan. I drove the entire time, and I wasnโt scared once. Itโs a new record for me. In fact, it was especially cool cruising down West Side Highway and looking out over the water.
My two best friends in the whole wide world have the same nameโฆ Sorry if itโs not you.
Iโve really begun to feel the responsibility that is involved with the term โfaith community.โ
I often have ideas that do not stick with me, so when they do, I know that theyโre worth pursuing. Right now my dream is to retire in Greenwich Village. Therefore, somebody better tell both Simon AND Schuster that Iโm alive.
I wrote in my last 100 Things that my friend Giles is getting his Masterโs degree at University of Montreal and I was wrong. Heโs at McGill. In Canada, thatโs like saying, โheโs at Harvard.โ
My standards are bendable. If I truly hate a movie and all my friends want to watch it, Iโll go ahead and give in for the greater good. Though I think itโs prudent to think of a way my friends can pay me back for all the crappy movies Iโve sat through.
At ExxonMobil I had a 21-inch monitor and an Aeron chair. It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
The reason my hair isnโt red anymore is that it costs money for hair dye and Iโd rather spend that money on other things. But the hair will be red again when I have copious amounts of disposable income.
My favorite DC memory is standing on the roof of Mollyโs apartment building watching the fireworks over the Potomacโฆ and the ones in Virginia and Maryland in the distance.
Even though I am 26 years old, when I hear a song that was played a lot during my senior year in high school, I forget that Iโve aged at all. I particularly enjoy Back for Good by Take That, Breakfast at Tiffanyโs by Deep Blue Something, and Santa Monica by Everclear.
I have daydreams of the lovers/friends/acquaintances Iโve lost over the years that will suddenly flock to me when I sell my first novel, short story, and or New Yorker article.
There is a cry that comes from deep within me that I know is the sound of true sorrow. Fortunately, Iโve only cried that cry three times: when my parents broke up, when my first love left for college, and when my first wife told me that we should get a divorce.
Itโs been over a year, and I still canโt believe that I now have to say first wife. Because I still believe in marriage. It will just take a lot longer for me to enter into it.
My church is throwing a Halloween party on the 25th of October, and they have asked me to be Dr. Frankenstein. Perhaps because I have nice knockers?
Meagan was the first person to whom I ever wrote a REAL love letter, and when I gave it to her, I learned just how much time could slow down while people were reading.
My friend Chason says that I have a bigger smile than anyone he knows, and I really canโt dispute it.
My AOL Instant Messenger Buddy List has 42 people on it. My screen name is Leslian.
I was so premature when I was born that my six month old pictures look like the day I came home from the hospital.
I have a long scar on my chin because I busted it open three or four times and had to have stitches. I think each time was due to the concrete steps at my nursery school.
Speaking of injuries, I once had to be rushed to the doctor because I had watched my dad put in his contacts and then at school stuck a red sequin in my eye.
Iโm not terribly fond of the Thanksgiving/Christmas holidays.
My biggest pet peeve is when something doesnโt go with my outfit. Like if Iโm wearing a brown shirt and I donโt have brown shoes, or Iโm wearing a belt that has a gold buckle and I can only find my silver earrings. Being ADD means that Iโve just learned to deal with it because I never remember to put things back where I found themโฆ mostly because I donโt REMEMBER where I found them.
I love the heaviness of a good fountain pen, and the absolute dazzling quality of a good purple or deep red ink.
Radley just farted under my desk.
I have a membership to SuicideGirls. It was a birthday present that I did not ask for, but well loved nonetheless.
The thing I love and hate about being in long term relationships is that if they end and you move on, there are still really intimate details that you donโt need to know anymore that stay with you.
The entire time Iโve been writing this, little ants have been crawling around on my desk. Ew.
Iโve probably had 400 ideas about what to write on this list, but havenโt put them all down because I canโt think of a way to phrase them correctly. I am SUCH a writer.
My girlfriend has gotten to meet David Sedaris, and I am so jealous that I could spit nails. But not at her. Directly.
Sometimes when I wake up in the morning, I think about the piece Iโll write that will get me on Oprah. I donโt know why I like Oprah so much, but ever since she played Sofia in The Color Purple Iโve followed her career both as an actress and talk show host. I didnโt much care for Beloved, but I thought The Women of Brewster Place was great. I apologize if my admiration for all things Oprah makes me sound more like a Midwestern housewife than a crunchy granola Portland lesbian, but thatโs just the way it is.
My hair is terrible in the mornings. Scootter calls it HAIR NOT FOUND IN NATURE.
There are only three commands that I would like to teach my dog if I ever have another one of my own: 1) Sit. 2) Lay down. 3) Bring Mama a Diet Coke.
Iโve only smoked pot once, and I will (probably) never do it again. The reason why is because Matt was using a broken lighter and set my fingernails on fire. If that isnโt enough of a deterrent, I donโt know what is. You might think that one cannot set oneโs fingernails on fire, and you would be wrong, grasshopper. If there is plenty of acrylic on the tips, it lights most magnificently.
But I will sit in the backyard and smoke cloves with you if you bring me one, INSERT NAME HERE AND YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE(S).
I thought Spirited Away was the most fucked up movie Iโd ever seen in my life and I canโt believe they show it to small children VOLUNTARILY.
I never knew true natural beauty until I went to the Columbia River Gorge for the first time.
Some of my best Portland memories so far are about being in a kitchen with lots of women and making soupโฆ Iโll probably write about it- Divine Secrets of the Church Lady Sisterhood.
Iโm not afraid to disagree with people as much as I used to be. My girlfriend can attest to that.
I am not the guy that you want implementing or wrapping up your project. But I am definitely the guy you want cominโ up with the ideas.
Listening to my friend talk to her father after the Cubs lost the NLCS championships made me incredibly homesick, not only because it made me miss my own dad, but because she and her dad have roughly the same accent as we do.
I opened a tampon just to see what was inside the little plastic thing. What do you mean, why? It wasnโt that exciting, so let me save you a tampon. Itโs cotton. Itโs string. No big whoop. I thought it was somehow going to be more than that if you have to put it in your hoopdedoo. Big disappointment.
I did not like breakfast food until I found French toast flavored bread. I think you are supposed to use it to make French toast, but I just like to put it in the toaster and then add butter. Normally my breakfast is a smorgasbord of whatever leftovers there are in the fridge.
I find it ironic that when I went to Boston, I was not nearly as taken with the history of the city as I was with The Real World firehouse.
Though I have several different online handles, I donโt generally let people call me by them because to me, when you get called by your online handle it is proof that you havenโt been spending enough time offline.
Last night I went walking with Radley and Kristen whereupon I proceeded to fall flat on my face on the sidewalk because I had my hands in my pockets and couldnโt break my fall. Surprisingly, I walked away with just a scrape on my pinky and on my knee. But they both hurt like a mofo this morning.
Sometimes, if I canโt get into whatever is being said at church, I lean up against my friend Diane or Matt and think about what Iโll wear when I meet Matt Damon.
I eat too much because I am such a foodie.
Before I was asked to play Dr. Frankenstein at the Halloween party, I had come up with several ways in which I could make a SpongeBob costume. Thatโs right, kiddies. I was going to be SpongeBob for Halloween. Bring it around town.
I am often accused of being on drugs and it is always a moment of displeasure for me when I have to reassure the accuser that no, really, I am this way. Sometimes even on purpose.
I should never get manicures. Each time my girlfriend has manicured my nails, Iโve forgotten about the polish and it just starts chipping away week after week. Since the last time she painted my nails I asked her to make them โmargarita green,โ it looks like I have little pieces of booger clinging to the ends of my fingers.
I am just now starting to realize what a gift I am to the world. Before now, I needed lots and lots of people telling me how wonderful I was and I didnโt really believe them.
I still remember how cold the surf was in the Pacific Ocean when I stepped into it.
Life is beautiful, but the movie of the same name rendered me into a puddle on the couch
Some days, I talk about how much I love Diet Coke and cartoons. I talk about that to not talk about the ways in which I’ve emotionally abused people because that’s “how I was raised…” Not by my parents, but by someone who became a parent figure because my mother checked out. You cannot convince me that she didn’t let it continue because she didn’t want to raise a lesbian daughter, and you cannot convince me that despite my mother’s warnings, I got hurt anyway. However, it is a truism that the more you tell a story, the more it loses power. Supergrover is coming to mind less and less because I realize there is nothing more I can do except turn my attention. She’s going to be whomever she wants to be, and I can’t help that. If she wanted to make anything better, she would have come to me long before now.
Funny thing about that, though. Once I said something healthy and would return her fire with healthy boundaries, she wasn’t interested in me. She’s not a narcissist, so she wasn’t using me as a dopamine source…. but she only knew how to answer rage with rage, so when I answered it with “I love your anger- let it out,” she was done. It let me know that we were always going to fight like that, because I did the work and she didn’t. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have had the willingness to walk away from someone I truly, deeply love. She doesn’t understand me, because she doesn’t understand her. When she says she wants to understand her, she will- and not before.
She also won’t learn it from me. My breaking her trust was the beginning of something for her, because we had to resolve our conflicts in order to go back to loving each other as rabidly as we do when other people hurt our friends. If she learns like I do, someone else will say something that triggers her back into my letters, and they will make sense to her in a way they didn’t before, because it’ll be the same thing I’ve been saying for 10 years, but it’ll look different coming from someone else because she’s not attaching her preconceived notions about me onto their words.
It’s something she will really love learning. She’s a people pleaser, but not at work. That’s because she can negotiate logical boundaries and gets lost with emotions. If she was in the military, she’d do very well because she’s a perfectionist. If she was a therapist, she’d burn out quick because in addition to being a boss, she’s also a people pleaser because her reality is just as fractured as mine was; I started my own therapy- my blog more than my psychologist. I am almost solely responsible for my recovery and not because I had a shitty doctor or anything. It’s that there is no possible way to recover from PTSD on one hour a week. Just like having diabetes, the doctor doesn’t hold your hand every day. You go in for appointments, but they can’t manage you every moment they’re not there.
I have been startlingly self aware since I was a child, but I didn’t have the confidence that I do now. I didn’t say things like:
That’s mean. Please rephrase.
I am too tired.
It’s not that I don’t love you, it’s that I need space. Please go away and leave me alone for X amount of time. We are all good, I’m overstimulated.
I am not lazy, I am autistic.
I am not flaky, I have ADHD.
AuDHD is a lifetime gig, and we’re going to have to manage it because otherwise, you’re going to get angry and resent me your whole life if you’re my partner.
If you cannot handle any of these things, you cannot be in my life.
I am responsible for my actions, but I’m not responsible for yours.
I am not “throwing things back in your face. You don’t want to admit that you do the same behavior repeatedly.”
The reason I drop people quickly is that I have good boundaries. If I’m not happy, it’s because I tolerated something I didn’t like, some times for years and years. I am using my own examples to bring insight to others on why they do what they do………..
laying out my own flaws and failures from the mundane to the insane…….knowing joy does that, too. If there’s anything I hope people say about me, it’s that it works.
Tell us about your first day at something โ school, work, as a parent, etc.
Some of these are just vignettes in my memory.
On my first day of school, Lindsay was an infant and my mom was having a tough time letting me go to school all by myself when I was just as happy with Lindsay all day. She was the extrovert of the two of us- still is. I remember Mrs. Youngblood, and what she looked like down to the green smock she wore every day. My mother remembers that I walked over to a girl that looked sad and a few minutes later, she wasn’t sad because she thought she was going to be alone the whole time.
On my first day of work, I learned about shampoo. My first job was as a receptionist at Supercuts, and they saw me coming. My register never matched up at the end of the night, but at least the first day was a blast. I really enjoyed working there when people weren’t yelling at me about their hair, because I didn’t cut it. I swept, mopped, did laundry, and sampled everything. I was there when Tea Tree from Paul Mitchell hit the shelves. One of the first people to try American Crew (white people pomade). Those two things are my favorites today…… mostly because they don’t smell too girly.
Editor’s Note:
Apparently, this would not be a plus to a rando that just messaged me. He led with, “don’t take this the wrong way, but are you a woman?” I said, “how am I supposed to take it? I’m genderqueer and play around with gender a lot, but I’m genetically female.” He said, “I don’t even understand your answer.” I left it on “read,” because no matter what I respond, it’s going to lead to no good….. for him. Although I have to say that just because I’m not the one he’s looking for, some men love it. Some men have never had a queer girlfriend before and that in and of itself is novel, because they’re buying into something much bigger than themselves- or me. But the first step is always saying, “I bought rainbow boxers because I don’t know if I like them, but I knew you would.” I did. It made me feel incredibly loved and supported. Straight guys are getting there. Just give them another four hundred years.
The day of my first sermon, I was more nervous than I’d ever been in my life. I kept repeating something my dad said. He said it about other people, but here is what I heard. “I have big shoes to fill.” “I BROUGHT MY OWN SHOES.” I’d forgotten my cell phone that morning, subconsciously on purpose so I could focus. I was dating someone in the congregation and wanted to impress her, and I did…… but right as I was the most panicked and about to hyperventilate, someone came over and said the most beautiful words I’d ever heard. “Leslie……. it’s your dad.” He couldn’t get ahold of me on my cell, so he called the church- much to the parishioners’ astonishment. He gave me a pep talk and sent me out there.
The way I got to that time and place is not dictated by a “first day,” but first impressions. Here’s something I wrote about it in 2005 on “Clever Title Goes Here.” It’s what I remember from the day she invited me to visit her at school when HSPVA did a concert at UNT. I was 16 and so nervous I thought I was going to throw up everywhere, and now I still do, but for very different reasons.
Your stationary feels heavy in my hand, and Iโm glad there are several pages to flip through. I wish you were next to me while I read your letters, because your handwriting is so unique that even after years of reading it, there are words I canโt figure out. I laugh to myself, glad that one of my strong points is context clues.
Iโm glad grad school is going well. Itโs fun to think of you as a student again, and kind of cool that one of the requirements of being a student is teaching younger singers. Do you have any good ones this term? Better yet, any REALLY bad ones?
HSPVA is tough shit. Iโm on academic probation again because Iโm in three performing groups and rarely have time to do homeworkโฆ and when I do, itโs usually half-ass because I have four subjects all piling it on at once. I wish there were more hours in a day. Iโll probably be able to get back on track with English, Physical Science, and American History, but Algebra I is a wash. Iโll be lucky to get a 50 for the semester, never mind the six weeks. I think Iโll just drop it and take it again next year. My teacher is way over my head- she teaches at Rice for half a day, so I donโt think she has much experience with the mathematically illiterate. Well, maybe illiterate isnโt the right wordโฆ mathematically terrified is more like it.
Funny story- I had a HUGE trumpet solo in my last concert, and during the performance I came in a measure early. The ENTIRE band skipped that measure with me so that it wouldnโt look like I messed up. No harm was done, but Katrina looked at me like, โCOUNT, YOU ASSHOLE!โ Mr. Carter told the low brass that when he realized what was happening, he wanted to take them all out for a beer.
Church is so different without you.
We have a new scholarship singer, Stephanie. I wish the committee hadnโt chosen a soprano, because even though sheโs good, her voice is so different from yours that it makes me a little teary-eyed, kind of like, โyouโre replacing HER with THAT?โ But the good part is that since Stephanie sits next to me, weโve kind of gotten control of our sectional sound. Much less old lady vibrato. Itโs not the same, but I suppose over time itโll be tolerable.
I told my friend Amy that Iโm gay today. I didnโt know she was Southern Baptist, and she dragged me into a practice room and started screaming at me. Then she ran to the bathroom. Her friend Laura told me that she was throwing up. I donโt know if I believe her or not. If I called Laura a bitch, Iโm pretty sure it would insult bitches everywhere. How do you deal with all this shit? Iโm so confused. I know I was wrong because I only told her that because I like her. I didnโt expect her to come down on my head over it.
The worst part is that after I told Amy, she told everyone else. I was sitting outside with my friends when Amy and her group of airheads walked up to me with their Bibles and started reading me all this crazy shit. I ran to my counselor about it, but she didnโt do a fuckinโ thing. She just asked me what I did to provoke it.
โฆโฆ.
I sat next to Scott on the bus ride up, my palms sweating with nervousness. It had been two years since weโd seen each other, and a person can change a lot in two years.
I didnโt recognize you at first, with your super long permed hair and painted nails. And not that I would ever hold it against someone for losing weight, but you hug different and Iโm not sure I like itโฆ as if these things are up to me, right?
Thanks for the compliment on the performance. I was a little nervous about the triple-tonguing section, but I think I got it out ok. At least I didnโt have to play really high and triple-tongue at the same time. Itโs murder on my chops. Dude, a LOT of things have been murder on my chops latelyโฆ I was put dead last in chair tests this week. I must not be practicing enough, but itโs such a vicious cycle. If I play more, it really hurts- but the only way to get it to stop hurting is to play through the pain. Theresa, my trumpet teacher, says itโs an embouchure problem that will take weeks to correct. What a thing to say to a musician three weeks before a jury! Dan told me the same thing in eighth grade, but I didnโt listen to him then, eitherโฆ it was three weeks before my โPVA audition. If only the world would stop spinning long enough so I could fix this thing.
Oh, and whatโs up with calling jazz masturbatory? The only time I really feel lost in the music is when I get to write my ownโฆ and thatโs all a solo is- taking the music in my mind and putting it out there. Maybe if I was a better player, Iโd agree with youโฆ but most of my solos sound like muddy water.
That could be my jazz name. Muddy Water Lanagan. It has a ring to it.
I wrote a beautiful entry for all of you on the train. It was the best thing I’d ever written, or so I’m choosing to tell youโฆ.. because I accidentally exited out of AndrOffice before I saved the document. I had hoped there was a way to recover it, but unfortunatelyโฆ.. no. This is the entry in which I’m back at my house after having stopped at McDonald’s on the way home. I got a Happy Meal hoping it would rub offโฆ.. KIDDING. I was coming back from Zac’s after a very lovely time. I’m convinced we should write something together, but I don’t know what. I told him an idea in which I said, “I also thought you’d hate this idea, which makes you the best person to do it.” He said, “Rude.” I still can’t believe I got away with “peek a boo, bitch.” It has been my experience that few women talk like 15-year-old boys despite being ancient. I am filling a void filled by few others, and that does not suck. It makes me feel completely unique and also alone. But not. Alone together.
Basically, I realized I’d opened a door to poly by talking about it and not explaining my view on itโฆ giving an example in action and not words. Zac already has partners, I don’t except for Bryn and she’s across the country. I don’t know what’s going to happen with that, I just know that no matter what we rely on each other because the boyfriends can all go away and we still need emotional support. It also fills my need to have someone to write to outside of dating Zac, most of the reason for my being poly in the first place because I crave so much more intellectual stimulation than I ever do contact comfort. It helps that Bryn understands why I call her my partner and I’m guessing that Supergrover doesn’t because I’ve never told her why I say that. I didn’t marry her, and if she thinks so, she’s not reading between the right lines. I also don’t care that she’s pissed off I’m a writer, because she knew that before she got close to me. She knew it was going to be a hard row to hoe and she went there. So I did, too.
I need friendship with her husband like I need air, and I would have gotten it if I hadn’t been such a dick. The flip side of the coin is “what could I have possibly done that would make you this avoidant for 10 years?” So, everything I did is bad and everything she did was justified. That’s not how that works, beautiful girl. What she cannot justify is isolating me from everything that would have made me feel better about our situation. She ramped up my anxiety, so I came up big. I don’t have the right to blame her, but I do have the right not to sign up for seconds.
It’s why I require so much of her now. I don’t need her time, I need her feelings. She thinks I’m not entitled to that. If that is true, I need to step away for my own mental health. She told me I couldn’t let other friends into our bubble, so I didn’t. Now, I’m in the posiiton of needing someone to talk to about my feelings without being able to make others understand why I feel the way I feel.
But nothing about this situation makes me regret it. What I regret is her not giving me a single second of relief by hearing me out and responding to it.
So, my reaction is to stand apart from other partners and just absorb. I can’t share everything, so I don’t.
Plus, now I’m not looking for a relationship, and if I was, I’d have to be with someone who understood why I didn’t want to break up with Zac and just be okay with that, whether they choose to be with others or not. Even marriage isn’t a contract where one of you owns the other, and if there’s anything positive that Will & Jada have done for the zeitgeist is show everyone how that is possible. Everyone has to be able to look at themselves in the mirror. Poly is more emotional work than being monogamous, not less, beacause you’re having to be that vulnerable with more than one person and practice makes permanent. If you don’t practice how to negotiate boundaries, you won’t learn all of a sudden.
I believe that this very idea is why Supergrover is so avoidant. She doesn’t know how to be me, so she doesn’t want to learn. It’s just easier that way. I wanted to help bring her into the light, but I don’t want to make her. I want her to want it, too. I want her to stand up to me, frankly. She used to, and she stopped. I remember I told her what being a partner meant to me years and years ago; was when she said that she wasn’t a God person and at the time, I was interested in starting a church plant. I said, “I don’t need you for that” (being a member). I need you to remind me that I serve God when I start to believe I’m them.” She said, and I quote, “I can do that.” When the words are that concise, you can take that check to the bank and it will always cash. My favorite check is “that’s how I roll.” It is so much fun thinking about how she rollsโฆ. and also not.
She makes me want to give all the things while I can’t do any better if she doesn’t teach me the good things she wants me to give. I would have accepted anything in the way of guidance, and I’m sorry it looks from the outside that I’m not going to get it. It is so much not for lack of trying. Every time I tell myself I’m done, something in my mind thinks that’s unacceptable and to always leave the door open to reconciliation- just put everything away in terms of trying to make anything better between us. It’s my journey now, and I wouldn’t take anything for it. Even if we never reconcile, I needed this relationship to create the life I have wanted for a long time.
I have said this before, but if there’s a silver lining to having been with Dana and interacting on that level with Supergrover made me realize what I did want out of life and what I didn’t. Dana was going down and I didn’t want to go with her, first of all. Second of all, it was more important for me to learn what Supergrover knows and not Dana, because they had completely different approaches to life and S! has life wired, as much as she thinks she doesn’t. She has logic wired, and that’s the thing I needed in my life the most, because I’m all emotion, all the time.
It’s the role in my life that Zac fills, honestly, because I don’t know anyone who gets higher performance appraisals than Zac. My boyfriend is a rock star at life, and I am so proud of him because he figured it out at 18 being medically able to join the military. I would like to believe that I would have scored high enough on the aptitude tests for intelligence, but I probably would have ended up in welding. ๐ Zac retires relatively soon, and I’m going to be so excited to see what he does with his extra time.
I hope he expands the car idea. His short story was a banger, because not only did he use “we’re all hearses in the end,” he put a school bus behind it that said, “I know you’re proud to have been built as a hearse, but since all the humans are gone, we’re all carrying dead bodies in the back.”
What are your favorite physical activities or exercises?
I have floppy muscles, it’s an inborn trait. Therefore, I have success with physical activity to a varying degree. I think if I had to pick a favorite thing to do outside it’s very simple. It’s walking Oliver, who is a dog. It’s better when Zac is with us because I don’t trust Oliver to behave with me the same way he would if Zac was there, plus hiking in the woods behind his house is intimidating if you don’t know the area well. I could get lost easily and because I’d be in the middle of the woods, my GPS would only say “continue to highlighted route” and I’d be shit out of luck.
Ask me how I know this.
I’m not sure what to call it, but Zac’s townhome development backs up to some sort of nature preserve, so I have hiking accessible to me that’s just as challenging as anything I used to do in the Columbia River Gorge . Zac likes to hike as much as I do, and because he does it more often, he’s more in shape than I am, too. Yes, I weigh less, but I do not work out my muscles in the same way he does. I don’t have to have a physical fitness test to stay employed by the Navy. However, I do stay slim and trim by not owning a car, and I have decided that because ride share exists, that should always be true of me. I don’t actually want to pay money for a car when I could pay money for a car and a driver, taking the risk of driving off me entirely. If we crash, it will never in a million years be my fault. It’s not the hassle, it’s that I know I don’t have 3D vision and driving is working without a net, knowingly putting other people in danger.
Nope.
I didn’t have a choice in Houston, which is why I moved back to DC. If you’re going to take public transportation, it’s a very good place to do so because we’re not huge like New York, yet we have all the same amenities. Maybe it’s because I lived here in my 20s, but New York frightens me in a way that DC doesn’t. I don’t know whether my sensory issues were out of control in Manhattan because it was that big a city or because I’d never been there before. I now know why writers live the way they live in movies when they’re set in New York. As soon as I got there, my nerves felt like they were on fire. As a writer, I was energized by it and also needed to find a way to mute it. Thus, writers in movies being hermits in New York. They’re trying to find a manageable amount of sensory input.
Writing is a sensitive area in terms of perception because you need enough stimulation to have something to say, energy that lets the words flow naturally….. but not so much that it makes your mind lose the train of thought that’s going to hit the New York Times. Fine-tuning that instinct takes time. When I am overwhelmed, I go back to zero. This means wired or Bluetooth headphones blaring white noise like TV snow or a jet engine (because people reading this are so young they might not know what TV snow is…..). Over time, you begin adding things.
I find that I function the best under a sensory deprivation diet, because it helps me to work faster when there’s less going on in the room. I cannot write if people are talking around me, and most of the time I cannot even write with music on. Today, my soundtrack is Zac typing in his office. I’m sitting in his room with my iPad and keyboard, he’s at his government computer because he’s neurodivergent as well. I wanted to cut down sensory issues for both of us.
The funniest thing that happened this morning is that I grabbed a pink coffee mug and Zac said something about it being his partner’s mug and her being picky about it. I said, “oh, no problem. If I’d known it was hers I would have respected the rule. You don’t have to apologize for having other partners or them having preferences.” He said, “I’m just sorry I couldn’t let you have a CIA mug.” I said, “that was a CIA mug? I didn’t know CIA came in girl shit.” I loved his laughter at that one.
Editor’s Note:
Every time I’ve read that line while writing/editing I’ve fallen over with laughter.
It’s not that I wouldn’t like pink CIA stuff, it’s that I’m a purist. I like the seal they already have on a navy background and think it looks classic…… There’s no need to change something that isn’t broken. I don’t need CIA feminized for me, because to me it’s already feminine. Look up all the department heads and count the number of women. It’s staggering.
The truth is that women my age are invisible, and that’s why we run the world. If you believe nothing else I say, believe that. There’s a reason female intelligence officers at CIA and in the military embed themselves in women’s groups all the time. Getting women together is a HUMINT ATM machine. Now I’m wondering what the equivalent of a “stitch and bitch” is in Arabic…………… You can tell a lot about a man’s mood, behavior, and actions by asking the women around him, because dollars to donuts he hasn’t heard what she has to say.
I love that my love of women in intelligence is making others excited as well. It caught on for Lindsay when we went to Zaytinya the other night, because I told her about a fabulous novel I’d read called “The Secrets We Kept,” by Lara Prescott. The premise is brilliant. In Russia, female spies were trained to use their sexuality to get what they wanted, so they were nicknamed “Swallows.” The United States does not do this, so the novel explores what would have happened if there had been an American “Swallows” program. It’s danger and intrigue, but also camaraderie. Spying is the world’s second oldest profession, and it bears a striking resemblance to the first.
My favorite female intelligence stories are “constant fish out of water.” At first, it’s being approached by CIA and getting trained…. hero origin story…. then it’s being fish out of water because CIA doesn’t work inside the US. My favorite part of the journey is from the approach to graduating from The Farm. The Spider-Man where you find out how he became that way is the best. I don’t make the rules.
I feel that though typing is not something one would classically think of as a physical activity, it is my origin story.
Especially since I can write it down.
Now it is time to transition into my day, because it always starts here at the keyboard and branches out. I have coffee to drink, news to read, and a trip across a city in which it snowed this morning. I am eager to get out and take pictures.
Taking pictures for me is a physical activity because I am one of those people. One of those who thinks nothing of holding other people up for a few seconds to be able to lay down in the middle of the sidewalk or whatever to get a shot. This is because I am willing to wait eons to make sure I’m bothering the least people. It’s really the only way I’ve shot the top of the steeple at Notre Dame.
It just occurred to me that creativity often feels like exercise. Creativity often feels like exhaustion once you’ve pulled ideas out of yourself. Both writing and taking pictures show your way of seeing the world, and especially because I don’t have 3D vision, the pictures I take look different than ones taken by people with stereopsis. It’s not a bad thing. It’s what makes me driven to take pictures. I want to see how I see the world by looking back at the way I shot it.
All writers search for themselves. In this blog, you can see it transparently. With novelists, you see it through archetype and allegory. A childhood is a writer’s credit balance, in the words of John le Carrรฉ. We start there and we excavate to a degree in which most people are uncomfortable.
And yet the physical activity of writing sustains us whether you’re comfortable or not.
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………..
Ten years ago, I was working at Alert Logic in Houston, Texas. Because I’d moved back to Houston, I was hanging out with people I’d known most of my life. One of my childhood best friends has the same sense of humor that I do, so I would pick his brain for suggestions on kids’ shows because I am interested in the writing and he has two rugrats. I liked Adventure Time and continue to be a fan of Lumpy Space Princess, but I loved Regular Show.
Regular Show actually taught me how to handle my divorce in a way no other show ever has. I was in the middle of losing my Margaret, but watching Mordecai grieve her and then meet Cloudy Jane was all I needed to know. Margaret and Cloudy Jane would both mean everything to me, and loving a Cloudy Jane later didn’t mean that Margaret wasn’t in my box of memories anymore.
And in fact, Dana and I are an accurate representation of Mordecai and Rigby (or more accurately, Bert and Ernie- we were them for Halloween one year). I am sure that she is now someone else’s Rigby, but when we divorced, I promise it didn’t make me any less Mordecai. It also doesn’t matter that she’s someone else’s Rigby, because I don’t think of her in that way anymore. I think of her as pristine and perfect in my memory, which is different. All of you know that pristine and perfect does not mean that she is not flawed, and neither am I. You don’t love people based on their perfection. You love people because they aren’t perfect.
The smallest example I can think of currently is Supergrover forgetting my birthday year after year. I could choose to be mad about that, or I could choose to accept reality. Birthdays are important to me, they are not important to her. I always made a huge deal out of her birthday because that’s what my family does. She doesn’t make a big deal about mine because that’s what her family does. Because of it, there’s no foul. We were raised differently.
Over time, she picked up that birthdays were important to me, and I picked up that birthdays weren’t important to her. So, even when she can’t make the clock stop, she will say things like “I’m so sorry I missed you yesterday, but I did send a gift.” That’s because I communicated and she changed. She communicated and I changed. It wasn’t a matter of how much we loved each other, because neither of our reactions had to do with our relationship. I got vulnerable once and told her that it hurt when she didn’t remember, and she got vulnerable and said she was sorry, that’s just how she was raised- and yet, it impacted both of us because we both grew toward each other.
It was never about the gifts. It was about being remembered. This is why we were able to grow. I am able to recognize that there are times when the clock just doesn’t stop, and also my way is not more important than hers. It was a tiny conflict that in the end, turned out to be not a conflict at all.
Editor’s Note:
I realized that talking about cartoons was a good reason to make fruit punch. So, now I have an appropriate beverage. It’s Sunkist, but not soda. We are allowed to have bubbles when we finish our blog entries. ๐ I am also an expert. Make a 20oz fruit punch in a bottle, then fill my travel mug with so much ice that only 8oz fits, then keep refilling. I have the kind of travel mug where I can make at least two drink mixes before I need more ice. In fact, this morning I needed a drink of water as soon as I woke up and there was still ice water left over from yesterday afternoon.
But with a friendship like mine and Supergrover’s, we can be ourselves and communicate across all of that. Nothing has to be engineered to my specifications or hers, because we’re a spectrum of belief and action.
All of our experiences combine to make us Muscle Man and Hi-Five Ghost. Because she’s virtual, it would make sense for her to be Fives, but I need her to drive the golf cart.
She is also as sweet as Pops, and has taken me to Really Real Wrestling many times. ๐
I could do less writing. It would be worse for my portfolio and better not to spend so much time lost in my head. I am not sure I get a choice on that considering how much quiet I require, but I do recognize that my mind is a busy place and I get lost there. I have said this before, but there are times when autism makes me feel lost to the rest of the world, and I wouldn’t have said that before because I have had that constant feeling since I can remember, I just didn’t have a word for it.
Because, I mean, of course I’m not autistic. I did not equate myself with other autistic kids because my school wasn’t mainstreamed, therefore I rarely saw any. There is also more and more evidence that ADHD and Autism are missed in many, many women because of the way we were raised. I didn’t look like a “special” kid, so I wasn’t. You get on YouTube and you find out that there is no “look” to autism. I do not have mental retardation because of autism, and those two things are conflated often. Autistic people are either savants at coding or developmentally delayed in popular culture. What is missing in the zeitgeist are regular people who also have that processing disorder. The kind where some doctors say, “I’m hesitant to give you a diagnosis because I don’t want you to be unable to see outside it.” Trust me, this is not just for patients. New parents of autistic children are equally shellshocked as me.
What is intimidating is receiving the same amount of information as autistic parents because it’s a lot easier to make decisions for someone else than it is to make decisions for yourself. You don’t have demand avoidance in mentally healthy parents because it is an inborn trait, the reflex to nurture. A baby’s cry affects men and women differently, but they both respond at the drop of a hat if they see a child in trouble and they are in any way parental.
It is so much harder when you realize the child you’re trying to keep alive is you. Like, in middle school there were not consequences this dire for my Tomagotchi. I’m older and less flexible, more demand avoidant because I’ve either been guided away from handling because I didn’t know I was autistic and didn’t realize that ADHD gives it to you as well (not mentioned in any of the layperson’s ADHD books I’ve read). I also didn’t know that if you have it pathologically, that is also part of the autism spectrum, and because I haven’t been diagnosed, I don’t know which is which. Pathologically Demand Avoidance is somehow part of autism and its own thing. Basically, you get treatment. If it doesn’t work, it’s PDA.
Social stigma around figuring out your processing disorders and mental illness is big and difficult because you get it on both sides. From neurotypical people, there is a constant need to reassure you that things aren’t that bad, you’re not autistic (because in their minds what I am saying to them is worlds apart from what they hear), you’re just too hard on yourself and if you X, then……… Their answers are not my answers because I am incapable of their thought process.
It is not a matter of pity on my end, it is a matter of acknowledging disability and illness. There’s a huge difference between acknowledging something and “making it your whole personality.” No one has said this to me, I just know I talk about it a lot because that’s what I’m reading/watching right now- educational videos. It’s not that “it’s my whole personality,” it’s that you didn’t come here on leg day, capiche? I am obsessed with getting the diagnosis of my neurodivergence right, not fitting the facts to a certain outcome. There is such a thing as ADHD with autistic traits, and there is a lot of overlap between the two diagnoses, so it’s not always clear which is which. I already have an ADHD diagnosis. The “huge leap” is in your perception, not my reality.
Here is the other very serious thing. I am the same amount of different now that I will be after I’m officially diagnosed, or after I’m told I have ADHD with autistic traits. ADHD is not valid in the way that autism is, because in other people’s minds, an autism diagnosis is devastating and if your child is ADHD, it’s bad, but at least it’s not fucking autism…………. when the reality is that the introverted form of ADHD can be just as debilitating. It’s invisible because it doesn’t come with physical symptoms and again, a processing disorder that doesn’t affect the development of the brain so that you can’t figure out how a person can be so smart and so stupid at the same time. But that’s neurotypical perception/stigma, not what’s really happening.
For instance, women’s voices were largely absent from ADHD research because to the researchers, ADHD became invisible in people without hyperactivity. People often don’t see autism because I do not have extraordinarily regimented sensory issues. I do not have a meltdown when I touch or taste something unfamiliar, so therefore I cannot have sensory issues. Some people have autism but do handle sensory perception well. Some autistic people are mentally delayed and some aren’t.
High IQ autistic people have two archetypes in society…… the manic pixie dream girl and “Comic Book Guy.”
I know what you’re thinking. Shut it.
No, I don’t identify with Comic Book Guy at all……….. eyeroll.
Now that everything is so expensive, I feel like coders who live in their mother’s basement are the luckiest bastards on earth. They live with people who love them on a salary that really helps everyone while acknowledging that they- are in some ways- able to take care of themselves and also not. I feel a jealousy toward programmers that I don’t feel in other areas of my life because they created the standard that all their sensory issues being tamped down was critical to the way they work and no other department in an office functions that way…… so if you’re autistic and not a programmer you’re just shit out of luck.
For instance, lights are usually very low in a server room, as are sounds. A server room has the same decibel level as a library. I live like Mr. Robot, because CPTSD and AuDHD being comorbidities means that I am constantly more comfortable with less stimulation through sound and more information through sight. Loud noises and bright lights are anathema to all of those things. I do not have a problem with flashing lights, but office fluorescents. I have a problem with prolonged eye contact, because sensory information becomes too much; I also become self-conscious about my eye drifting. It’s why I’m much better about maintaining eye contact when I’m wearing my baseball cap. I don’t think it’s much of a distraction, but my brain believes it is.
I could do less caring about my appearance, and so much more. By caring about my appearance, I could do more in terms of skin routines and putting on makeup once in a while when I actually feel like it. By not caring about my appearance, I mean constantly worried about how I look in front of other people because it’s not whether I’m attractive or not, it’s whether my social masks are working.
If I don’t call attention to my disability, you won’t notice it and I’m grateful until we get close enough that we can’t social mask around it anymore. It gets more intense with more connection, because social masks fail on a whole other level when you live with someone. I have never had a partner that truly understood me, partly because I’m a complicated case psychologically and partially because I didn’t have the tools to express myself.
You know what I also couldn’t do? I also couldn’t say, “I know you’re feeling personally attacked, but here’s several videos of other people explaining how their symptoms affect them so that you know I’m not just ‘using my disability as an excuse.;” The “motherfucker” is implied. I do not have a problem taking responsibility for my behavior as it is sometimes problematic, but I draw the line at seeing only my behavior as problematic and not acknowledging that things don’t happen in a vacuum. I can say that moving to DC was the last thing that happened, but Dana put us on the road toward divorce originally because of my reaction to her DUI, not blaming her because she got one. There is a cause and effect to everything.
In short, I can take responsibility for developing a wandering eye in a relationship not built for it, but I will not take responsibility for Dana’s drunken mistake that changed my whole sensory perception of life.
You are not the same person at work after a full night’s sleep, and one of the things that would have saved our marriage in retrospect was me putting my foot down and saying, “you’re on your own, kid.” This does not mean me stopping helping her. I mean forcing her to quit her job and get a different one if her boss didn’t move her schedule. That taking her to work in the middle of the night while holding down an office job would bring about destruction for me because I am not capable of it. I got fired from Marylhurst for the same reasons I got fired at Alert Logic. Especially when I don’t sleep at night, I cannot listen and talk at the same time, nor listen and write things down. The reason that transcribing the constitutional law class was easy is because I was transcribing, not taking notes. I was not having to constantly make a decision on what was important to write down and what wasn’t. I got that on my own, by going back and reading what I’d written down, faster to process because I’d heard it once.
I cannot blame Dana for her mistakes, but I can blame my reactions to them. Dana getting a DUI doesn’t make my words and actions okay, or let me off of any kind of hook. I am acknowledging that in a relationship, I only own half.
The problem came in thinking that my issues were so much worse than Dana’s. That Dana needed help and I was just a bad person. There was no medical explanation for why I did what I did, so it was worse….. and yet, there was a medical explanation. I was overloaded and overwhelmed, depressed and anxious except for when I was hypomanic and at no time able to regulate those things. So much was said without thinking, which is why there’s such a disconnect between my thoughts and the words I used in the heat of a moment.
With autism, the heat of the moment is everything. If your words are charged, we will pick up all 7,000 subtexts and our brains are immediately overloaded because we don’t know how to respond. This is why it’s easier to communicate with a neurodivergent person in text. It’s a balance, though, because we have to get to know your voices well enough to have context for when we leave it out. For instance, I think our conversations would have gone a lot differently had I known in the early years that hearing Supergrover’s voice feels like watching molasses drip……. she is a velvet hammer. I might not have been so quick to attribute rage if I’d known she was so laid back in person. She does not portray that through text. In text, she’s strident and it’s “pull yourself up from your bootstraps.” I only get frustrated when she can’t see I’m barefoot.
I choose to be butt hurt over this right now, while it’s happening, because what I know to be true is that my history is to save it all up until I explode, and as Supergrover herself has said, my anger isn’t helpful. She’s right, and in a lot of cases it’s due to lack of coping mechanism. In others, it’s autism and I can’t work around it. That’s because coping mechanisms fail when sensory overload is happening.
This relationship was a new level of sensory overload because we are both so different from each other. I cannot blame anyone else for anything, but I can get it all out so that I can look at it and see what I can do about my own situation.
I think more about it now, so that I know I can and will do less later.
I could do a lot less thinking about all of this. But it wouldn’t turn out the way I think it would. I would be even less able to regulate my emotions.
What positive events have taken place in your life over the past year?
This year I started taking care of me for the first time in my life, ever. People who learn a little bit about boundaries install them with spikes, because they don’t know balancing language yet. So many, many times have I been fed this year on a meager emotional diet, because someone would cross a boundary and alarm I’d never had went off. There has never been anything loud enough in my mind to say that my opinions are valid, because I get intimidated and fold easily………………… in person.
On paper, I am not anticipating someone else’s reactions, so I come across as judgmental when I actually want your input/correction, I’m not dictating to you what our situation might be. My work to do is to learn how to control my autistic brain symptoms, like “I have explained this six times and it hasn’t resulted in any change at all, so that means I only have to explain it ten more ways and we’re golden.” I will absolutely argue with a signpost……… in text. If a waitress served me soup with glass shards, I’d be so mad I’d only leave a 20% tip.
I talk a lot about the first blush of excitement on both ends at Supergrover and I meeting each other, and it’s those memories I focus on when I feel the kind of desperation you absolutely will not admit to anyone, I am fine……… meanwhile, your eyes are rolling out of your head because you’ve thought I was an idiot about it for months why has this taken so long dear Jesus get a life…….. and actually, that’s not true at all. It’s how it feels to write out pain. It doesn’t change all at once. It changes a little every day.
I do not have any interest in telling our story as if it is our facts. No, they are only my facts, and I am a hundred percent certain that our stories are different, but I will never know to what degree. I’ve guessed at the extremes and the middle and been wrong every single time. I just don’t do that anymore. I don’t have it in me. I cannot drag a relationship kicking and screaming into the light when I only own one half…… and if it sounds like I’m holding myself up as some kind of beacon, that’s not it at all.
We fucked each other up nine years ago. Our relationship shouldn’t be so dramatic and toxic all the time. It’s not good for either one of us as we both sound like Dorothy Sbornak and Ouiser Boudreaux in text. We are both first children. We fight until someone is bleeding, because we are not used to losing…….. and I’m laughing about it now, but believe me when I say I have seen Oppenheimer and I didn’t even know it was a movie until recently.
I am just as filled with rage as she is. We’re The Holy and the Moly because one day I’m the bomb and she’s the detonator……….. and then she’s got the big red button. We installed them in each other quickly and use them to great effect. After we fight, I will say “this is what hurt.” She won’t. She says, “I was licking my wounds.” I wish that just once this year she could have seen my face when I read it. If there are moments that make me want to reach through her phone and hug her, it’s lines like that.
Autistic people are not here to be nice, because we do not have all the social masks involved in sensitive situations. I used to be very, very practiced at it, but I’m not in front of parishioners all the time anymore. As I’ve been away from being a preacher’s kid, it has been a slow, painstaking process to unmask. Everyone does the public/private thing to a degree. There is a truly marked difference in “show mode” and “autism.” Most people are trying to hide their emotions a little bit, certainly. No one wants to ugly cry if Oprah’s not handing out Beetles. Autistic people cannot regulate their emotions like neurotypical people, and we can catalogue their behaviors by the hundreds, but what we cannot do is replicate them. This is because the reason we thought you had the reaction was different than why you actually had it.
Impasses are frequent because “I just don’t get it,” and I have empathy for how tiresome that is. I really do. That’s because if your’e exhausted, you’ve experienced a few hours of my symptoms and I live this way. Not said to shame you, just to say “I need empathy here.” There are other areas in which I’m stronger than my friends and we trade off….. no one is ever getting the short end of the stick……
And unfortunately, reminding Supergrover of that didn’t go over so well because I don’t think she was picking up what I was putting down. She told me several times some version of “why do you think it’s everyone else’s job to fix you?” First of all, that’s a huge red flag. If you tell someone up front that you have a disability like bipolar or whatever and that’s what they say, that’s not the healthiest response ever. The reason I ask people for help is that they’re the first person to ask me. In this one case, the tables were turned where I needed help first….. so, of course it felt like I “was the one who always needed help.” But it’s 10 years later and those words just don’t hit the same way anymore. Healthy people do not shut you down every time you want to have a dialogue. What would have been perfectly healthy is just to walk away for both of us, and yet neither of us did it. I don’t think we meant to be in a relationship this crazy for 10 years, but those tickets are non-refundable.
In some ways, I felt like it was really hard work and deservedly so. Most friendships like ours end quickly because of who we are jointly and severally. I am sure this is conjecture, but it seems to be that the key words are “friendships like ours.” What I see as trying for connection, she sees as “telling her every bad thing she’s ever done.” Sometimes when my sensory environment is turned up to hell, I do come across like I’m nitpicking. Because it’s all text, she can’t hear my tone of voice and she doesn’t ask for any clarification. So, whether I intended to provoke ire or not, I will have done it.
I have never wanted that for her, and I had to learn not to want that for me. I stepped all over her boundaries because that’s how it works in my world. If you troll someone, they’ll leave you alone. We just both met our match and wrote checks with our mouths that our asses couldn’t cash. I will never be as strident as she is in person. She will never be as over emotional as me in text……………… but not because she’s not capable of it.
She’s my fairy tale author girl. As in, not the author of my fairy tale but the writer friend I have who is interested in creating fairy tales for actual children. I keep telling her that “50 Shades of Gray” was so terrible I didn’t even read the whole first page, but it did prove to me that either one of us was capable of writing a book on our phones while using public transportation. I have more time in a day to dedicate to it, but I will never write something akin to the main quest of Skyrim, and she could. I don’t know what her future holds, but I do know that if she wrote a book, she’d sell a copy.
What I know is that if I keep talking, one of two things will happen. The first is that repetition gives the story less power. How do I know it has less power? When I can write essays like this and I don’t end up sobbing so hard I can’t see what I’m writing anymore. There’s so much to cry about, really, that doesn’t have anything to do with her. It’s universal. You lose someone significant in your life, and you adjust- but I do not know anyone who is downright happy about it.
It would also be easier to focus on this prompt at the end of the month than it is right this moment. Finnish Independence Day is always craptastic because it’s trying to replace the parts of my heart that are black with the lights and music of Helsinki. Finlandia, yes, but also Finlandia conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen. The black parts of your heart will respond to music if you let them.
That’s it. That’s the thing I’ve learned this year. The black parts of my heart will respond to music when I let them. This means that I can author the destruction of someone I 100% regret having to cut out of my life because I didn’t have any other choice. I could no longer make decisions about the health of the relationship based on what only I thought, because what happened on a large scale a few months ago was happening all the time in conversation.
We hadn’t talked for a few months, so she was reading me without responding….. months of posts in which we weren’t checking the stories we were telling ourselves, and that always feels like “WE WERE ON A BREAK.” That’s what makes our bond cemented for life. She has editorial control and I’ve told her that. She also cannot stop herself from reading because she thinks that I’m out to get her……. or does she? Because she says it frequently and then she’ll take a line I thought about for an hour, just slaved over to capture her perfectly, and send it to me with a “thank you for this.”
The main reason this whole thing is important to me is that I have never been this person before. I wouldn’t be as safe and secure in who I am now if she hadn’t been sure of me first.
What makes her unique in my life is that she managed to get past all the barriers I’d set up. All the social masking that didn’t make me look like an alien, all the catering I do to other people to make sure everyone is focusing on having a good time and not the fact that I am standing here, damaged, in a corner because I don’t want to get my crazy spatter on you. I have never been that person on the outside. Why I don’t always come off as depressed, anxious, ADHD, or autistic. It’s all just a bunch of spaghetti code in there.
One day I’ll reach “eof,” and I know it’ll compile……………….. even when there are so many lines I wish I could have commented out. But that’s the thing, right? The first step to finding things that do serve you is letting go of the things that don’t. I wish I could say a lot of good things happened this year, and I know they did in small measures. But mostly this year was about learning to deal with pain and rage. How much I’d social masked away all of those feelings as a child determined not that my emotions were bottled, but how many six-packs.
In a lot of ways, all my social masks failed at once, and then I didn’t know who I was anymore. I had to build myself back up from 12 on, adjusting to new emotions that weren’t there before and mapping out the dead spots. If you have not done this in yourself, it is backbreaking emotional work and depression/anxiety medication make it easier, not easy.
This year I’ve felt infantilized more and bothered less. That is because I do not have a world-ending autistic meltdown if someone doesn’t like me. I just find out quickly who my people are in those cases and move on, because I’m past the point in my life where I want to justify anything to anyone, because I have enough belief in myself to know that I have limitations and to ask for help when I need it. People rush to parent the people with mental processing differences and psychiatric illness, and I have to anticipate it. I have to deal with it, because there’s nowhere I won’t. That’s a social mask I do have, though, because it feels very much like apologizing for your existence because you’re queer or physically disabled.
The hard part is being a realist without being too negative because I can control my environment, but only to a point. I do not like telling people I’m a Christian anymore because it invariably ends up being an image of me in their heads that just doesn’t compute. Either I’m a bad Christian because my exegesis is bad and God didn’t really mean all that stuff about inclusivity, helpfully written right there in the RED LETTERS……………… or their God is about the letter of the law and not the spirit; homosexuality does not occur in most, if not all animal populations……. it is a demon to which I am solely responsible for its care and feeding. If I just stopped queer behavior, I’d stop being queer.
Gay men are widely accepted as priests in the Catholic Church because especially in the third world, that’s where you go not to get bullied. Most families know when they’ve got a priest on their hands by kindergarten. Please know that this is in no way trying to be shady. Gay men are pushed toward being priests because of their sensitive/more effeminate natures, because then their families don’t even have to meet the boyfriend. They’ve been eating at his table for years.
I’m just trying to let myself evolve, and thinking about systemic issues makes me happier than thinking about my own progress or lack of it, because I have so much that’s up in the air and little that’s solid.
That’s just how it is in a rebuilding year. Next year might be one, too, but this is not to be taken lightly. I cannot be my authentic self until all the pieces are together, or at the very least, scattered on the table in front of me.
Pieces, for me, are thought fragments. The most positive thing in the world that happened to me this year, above all else, was that in January of course I knew I’d found a flawless diamond in my beautiful girl……………… but by December, I realized she had, too.
Kevin, who is a giraffe, used to live at the DC zoo. I do not know when he moved, but I do know that he has. The last time I went to the National Zoo, the keepers told me they’d gotten rid of all their giraffes…. like the entire enclosure is now something else. I was heartbroken, because I went to the zoo that day to get a picture of Kevin for you guys, actually. I believe I brought back pictures of a tiny bear instead.
Here’s a shot I took last night I love- it’s of the kitchen at Zaytinya.
I got to the restaurant a little early, so I grabbed this shot while I was sitting at the edge of the bar and I thought no one was looking. The caption on Facebook is “you have no idea how much I feel this picture in my muscles.”
There were no wild animals except Lindsay and me involved, and we are not actually that wild anymore….. not that we ever really were to begin with. Lindsay was in a couple of rock bands before she went into politics, but that’s about the extent of it. I’ve been 46 since I was nine. We had some drinks and caught up, and didn’t actually talk about why I wanted to talk to her in the first place because we had a thousand topics to cover and there’s always the phone.
In some ways, I wish Lindsay’s dinner hadn’t gotten moved to last night, because it would have been fun to spend Finnish Independence Day with her. It’s only 0730, and I’m trying to make the best of it. Finnish Independence Day is joyous….. for the Finns, and I feel like I’m stealing it for myself through the cunning use of YouTube. It’s a thing I came up with when I didn’t want a date to be a thing anymore, so I don’t acknowledge it out loud.
But I can say to Bryn later, “now that Finnish Independence Day is over, we can start decorating for Christmas” and she will get the most evil smirk on her face. God, I love that woman. Mostly because she’d be the only one in my life to know exactly how far back that paraphrase goes. Because, you see, she does not have to paraphrase. The reason I love Bryn is that I never need to paraphrase anything, because if I’d bother, she would say the thing I was trying to say the whole way through. It’s good to have a friend who’s as no-bullshit as I am, from the same viewpoint. It’s one thing to listen and shut someone down. It’s quite another to open up to someone and having them say “speak more to that.”
Wait a minute. Speak more? No one ever tells me that. ๐
With Bryn it’s always “how dare you make me feel my feelings.” And it feels so much better than keeping everything in. We lost a mutual friend recently (that I knew peripherally, but she and the rest of her family knew very, very well) and I hope that I am being respectful of her space, and also holding space for her. I will check in later, but I don’t hover when people are in grief because I tended to retreat. Not everyone is like that, but I do what I know. What I know is that the most powerful thing I can do is listen. I also know that people need support in grief longer than society usually allows. So, I’ll keep checking back in on her, but I also recognize not to smother mother, either. ๐
Maybe later today, I’ll catch her curled up with Pippi, who is a dog.
I used to be vegan, and probably would be full time if I was interested in spending all my money at Whole Foods (but God, is it fun….. I’ve found so much that I love). Now, I’m mostly vegetarian because I don’t like cooking meat, but I’ll have it if it is prepared for me. For instance, once in a blue moon I’ll get a whole roasted chicken from Safeway. I can’t eat a whole chicken, but many times I have tried. ๐ In true autistic fashion, I have my favorites and I order them every single week. This is because I truly love adventurous food, when that is my focus. I have to cut out all my sensory issues to be able to focus, so food is one of them. White bread. Pizza with extra cheese and mild sauce. Eggs. Butter. Cheddar. The most challenging thing I bought was a jar of pesto for a frozen pizza and later spaghetti this week. Sometimes I make pesto Alfredo with pumpkin seeds as protein. If I am writing while I work, it’s ham, turkey, or egg on toast with cheese, or plain pancakes with one note syrup. However, I don’t like the same sandwich forever. I don’t choose one food and eat it every day. I choose a diet for the week and buy the same thing every time. It is so comforting when every bite is the same, and also something rich in its simplicity. I can do a lot with an egg and some cheddar. I prefer the texture of cheese when it’s cold, so I learned early on how to make the perfect scrambled egg and just lay it on top of the cheese and toast.
I am also very, very fond of the classic French-style sandwich. It’s really good white bread toast (I use Wonder, there is no substitute in this country), lots of butter, Swiss, mustard, and black pepper. I’ve been eating that almost every day for lunch this year. Very occasionally, I buy spring mix to wilt into eggs, rice, and lentils…. sometimes Brussels sprouts either fresh or roasted. But again, not often, because I tend to repeat things. I don’t have to eat fancy food all the time- that’s what makes it a treat.
I had a craving for fried chicken the other day, and that’s because Uber Eats was having a sale. I got 10 pieces of chicken (first of all, I really had no idea how much food that actually was), two sides of collard greens, and a Mac and cheese. When I got the chicken, I immediately deboned it and put it away for sandwiches, because by the time I’d put everything away, I’d snacked on enough. Really good local place, cheaper and better than KFC and of course now I don’t remember the name of it. I hope I recognize it again, but there’s nothing like trying a local restaurant that hast stuff on sale. It’s how I found out you can order prepared crawfish, which is also on the list of acceptable foods. AuDHD requires stability and flexibility, which in me is an iron structure for when I experience new things and when I don’t. Sometimes I have the bandwidth, sometimes I’m a picky eater. It depends.
Today it was chicken, cheddar, and honey mustard- total Boston Market throwback. Probably Sunkist limon later, a drink that tastes like the best Mexican street lemonade in the world and is sugar free. I could mix it with tea if I could be arsed to cold brew. I know I’ve already forgotten milk this week (or haven’t checked to see if I need more, but it’s almost time). The only problem is that you can’t get the bags back out of soda bottles easily, so it becomes a two use sort of deal. But I get plenty of soda when I’m out, and 20oz Coke Zero bottles work well for cold brew. I would use one tea bag if I was going to drink it straight, two or three if I was going to add milk (shaking it with Splenda and almond milk is delicious).
I’ve also started buying a package of cookies every week because they’re good as an accessory to ice cream if someone comes over and I need something nice, or just on their own. I like the white bread biscuits with the chocolate square on top. Yes, it’s a cookie, but it tastes British so I’ll give it to them.
I also generally get bananas, because I get some sandwich meat and eggs, but that’s not enough protein for every meal. It might not seem related, but vegans live on peanut butter and, often, banana sandwiches. It’s as packed with nutrition as rice and beans. (Rice, beans, and eggs are everything you need to start your day.) I know I have these things in the pantry somewhere, but I need to look for them. Frozen pizza is life because I can’t make cheese toast that good.
In short, I believe that eating meat is fine as long as you do it in moderation. Eat food. Not a lot. Mostly plants. Michael Pollan set me on the right track, because I eat whatever I want. Most of the time, it’s something ambitious with vegetables because there are just so many recipes I haven’t tried……. or made my own.
I have “fixed” many major sauces and soups. Campbell’s is the gold standard, don’t touch it. If I had to pick a favorite, cream of lettuce or mushroom made with whole milk and extra fresh lettuce or grilled/sautรฉed mushrooms. When you eat Campbell’s, you’re generally invoking someone’s childhood and it’s hard to mess with that. With all soup bases it’s easier not to reinvent the wheel unless you just like boiling chicken carcasses. Yes, I agree with David Chang that all pre-made stock is garbage, but I’m not standing over the stove to make fresh, either. He can. I’ll just add some of his momofuku pepper sauce to my boxed setup and he can tell me if it’s not okay. I don’t need it to be perfect, I just need it to be the base when building a chord.
It’s beautiful whether I’m eating meat or not, because I actually like mushroom stocks and gravies better than chicken. To me, it actually tastes better….. particularly on poutine.
Let’s end on poutine. I’d like to think about mushroom gravy and cheese a while longer. Maybe get some collard greens with bacon to go on top.
It’s a good image, because yesterday was a day and I’m still recovering. Sometimes I think so hard I have to stop. I have reached the end of my battery, but it will recharge eventually. I always set out with the best of intentions to post, and for the last several months I’ve missed one day. Some of it is the feeling of wanting to get plunked out of obscurity knowing that blogging is not X Factor material, Most of it is that in order to be ready for what’s coming, I need to be in shape.
I get that through how I feel about eating meat- nonplussed, except on the days when I’m obsessed with it because I’ve made the commitment to truly cut down. It’s been a dramatic change, but worth it. Superfood is really a thing. You’ll like greens better with vinegar. On the poutine. That’s you’re going to eat because I suggested it.
I can get used to any schedule except being awake all night long. Either I go to bed early and rise with the sun, or I go to bed around 0300-0400 and sleep until noon. That was the schedule that worked best when I was in the kitchen, because I’d get home around 11:00 PM, and could spend my “evening” writing. I think it made me a better cook than in the days when Dana and I would go out after work, because 1) when I wasn’t in the kitchen, I was somewhere far, far away 2) I was never hung over, so I picked up all the shifts due to brown bottle flu and was probably the highest paid employee and not because of salary.
Yes, I had limitations. That doesn’t matter when you just need a body, and the one scheduled is less functional than me. I worked six and seven days a week to keep busy; my disability kept me from perfection and struggled with excellence. At no time did it mean I got less hours, because in a kitchen everyone works long hours and compete with it. If I worked 50 hours, I was lazy ’cause you worked 60. It wasn’t just keeping busy, though. The neurodivergent brain does not know what to do in the absence of structure, and I had no idea what to do with time off. If I got out of the rhythm, it was harder to do it again….. disorienting and exhausting, again trading mental health for physical.
I was a permanently exhausted pigeon, but also very happy. Supergrover was a million miles away (which is what we in MD call “Virginia”), which meant that when I wasn’t at work, I wasn’t the same person. I very much had the feeling of the protagonist in Avatar, because of my physical disability and how all of those barriers were taken away on the world of Pandora. It was amazing learning to speak Na’avi, and if there’s anything I will miss about our communications the most, it would be the ones in which I had to say, “I know you’re busy, so is it “‘wink and nod,’ ’emphatic fist shake,’ or “slow finger wag?'” With Bryn, I could shorten this to “Borum it,” because we all picked it up imitating Matt, Bryn’s older brother. That day, it was “SFW.” Duly noted, beautiful girl. ๐
I also feel that Supergrover and I came to the same impasse I’ve come to with every friend I’ve had, which started with the woman who emotionally abused me- it was her deflection tactic….. “why do you think I don’t tell you anything? You remember it.” I’m a monotropic thinker, human relationships are my special interest, and I basically memorize most of what I’ve read because if it’s not a special interest, you love it a weird amount. I was also completely honest with Supergrover. If you do this, you won’t become “my friend.” I’m an INFJ. That means if we’re going to be close, you’ll be a companion, not just a friend. My personality profile says I only have one or two friends at a time, and I love them deeply. Just unreasonably, and that will always be true of people like Zac and Bryn. If Supergrover wants her spot, it’ll always be open because of the hard out, and as you could see yesterday, I’m not happy about the fact that she is diametrically opposed to this now. That’s because for everything in which I can’t walk away, I understand the assignment and she doesn’t. That when she told me what she did, it would cement our bond for life and we couldn’t be careless with it. So, in short, she’s terrified that I remember everything and call her on it so we can stay healthy.
I know this pattern so well. Your idea of love is so fucked up that you don’t recognize it when people are willing to change their behavior to something healthy, because you don’t recognize it as love. I have so much empathy for her, but it’s time to stop caring if she is no longer willing to engage, because I cannot go without an emotional depth she doesn’t have and not because it’s not inside her. It’s the things she won’t acknowledge to herself, and therefore can’t help me. I know I’ve said this before, probably many times, but watching all these videos about CPTSD and how it rewires you got me to see that Supergrover and I were both extremely damaged people who rushed into a deep relationship before we really got to know each other……….. except did we? I saw the incompatibility within weeks. She is not built to hang with an INFJ, and most people just frankly aren’t. We demand going to a rich emotional place because we’ve discovered it in ourselves and want to drag our friends toward “enlightenment.”
What is stopping me from becoming someone like Martha Beck (interestingly enough, also neurodivergent, queer, and poly) is realizing that’s not really how INFJ works for someone who’s already introverted. I can write about this stuff, but with my processing disorders I am just not as fluid as a public speaker. I can and have to turn on the afterburners when I preach, but I still do not feel that I can process information and speak at the same time.
I thought yesterday about why I was able to transcribe Dr. Wall’s Con Law class when I hadn’t been able to do that before. It was the laptop, entirely. This absolutely is an accommodating for neurodivergetnt kids, and I will take any teacher to the mat over it that I possibly can. Because I’m not Gen Z, I would encourage them to let neurodivergent kids keep their phones. If you don’t have an app to let them respond, then have the kids put their phones in airplane mode so they can use their notepads. Otherwise, if you don’t give the kids laptops, they are in the position of having to buy a second device…… when they are probably already used to the tactile experience of typing on their phones, just like I am the most comfortable at the keyboard.
When I said I was “going to class on my own,” I did not mean that I was going to class while I was in it. I used hyperfocus to drown out everything in the room so that I could hear a voice without listening to it, getting things down without comprehending it….. just like I do with my blog. Stream-of-consciousness is basically “first draft, get it all out.” Therefore, sometimes I’m quicker at crafting beautiful sentences than others. Sometimes, it’s crap you have to wade through to get to the good stuff, because that’s how I work. I start at one point and dive, ending up at another. Overthinking makes me a good writer, because while I’m getting the words out, I am not even looking at the screen. I am staring off into space, touch typing as I think about the next sentence rather than the one I’m currently typing. My brain moves just the right amount faster than my fingers, therefore my typing is not lagging behind because I’m three sentences ahead in my mind rather than just one.
An editor at a Canadian newspaper, Janie, told me that once all this was edited, I’d be surprised what I’d written. That made my confidence shoot up, because I think I’m only writing about what I know- me and how I interact with others, and my reactions to their reactions….. and no hearsay. I don’t say “one of my friends told me that Bryn…..” because I can’t verify that it’s true. Just a for-instance, Supergrover or Bryn could tell me that Dave or Michael did something. I would not write about it unless I could verify that what Michael or Dave said was accurate, because then it’s not something that happened to me. It’s someone else’s story.
For instance, I know it like the back of my hand that even if Supergrover walks away thinking I’m the meanest person on earth, it doesn’t mean I didn’t get the story I wanted and we’re not all good. It means that I will take our memories away and be okay with not creating new ones.
Because I think of Supergrover this way, it is very, very hard to switch to past tense, but I know for sure that will come with time if she doesn’t show back up eventually. It will hurt, it already hurts, but yet it is also not my problem anymore. I have explained it to the best of my ability without so much input from anyone else because I don’t talk about our relationship in person and I don’t talk to her about it, either. It’s not for lack of trying. It’s all due to avoidance on her part; it doesn’t matter why. She’s doing what’s best for her, and I’m doing what’s best for me. I hope that she’s angry AF, because it’s the one thing that will lead her to realize that there is a life beyond walking in anger all the time.
I give her so much latitude because of her job. I know that there are times when she’s not able to respond for very good reason and not because I’ve said something wrong. But when she does reply, it’s to point out everything I’ve said that’s wrong, when it’s not my focus at all. My focus is on a healthy relationship, cleaning up a toxic mess that just doesn’t need to be there. I also have the right to step away when I cannot get any compromise on anything ever. At that point, I just need to stop caring, and I can’tโฆโฆ. also for good reason.
So, I’m in a bad way over it, but writing it out helps. It also helps that this is the only relationship that I have that’s in turmoil, so I don’t have to think about it all the time and I have plenty of love in my life that’s healthy in the extreme. It’s all about using my ADHD to change my focus, but it doesn’t mean that a monotropic thought process drops off the radarโฆโฆ again, do you have a special interest if you don’t just love it a weird amount?
I would think it was manipulation if it wasn’t a learned behavior from childhood. When I said that I wanted that bubble with an older woman and I got it when I was 12 by trying for it since I was born, it’s not because I was sexualized early or anything like that. It’s because adults treated me like a real person.
As a 16-year-old preacher’s kid who’d had many years of running behavioral heuristics on 200-1500 people at a time, the problems of my friends felt juvenile and pedestrian. I didn’t connect with anything they said, because it wasn’t monster dramatic and that’s what I was used to; people call pastors during the worst moments of their lives, and I actively tried to listen in to everythingโฆโฆโฆ.. and those times I even understood the language.
Again, I don’t process voices well, so those conversations would repeat in my head ad nauseam, special interest engaged, because there were two operations at play. The first is hearing something without context so that you can regurgitate it later by rote, even if you don’t understand it. The second operation is picking up what’s neurotypical and what’s not, so a lot of my social masking comes from the PTSD that belonged to other people, because those were the conversations I heard. Therefore, in my mind, it was completely normal to have wild emotional swings all the time and to live in that kind of pressure cooker. It’s what makes me able to work with cooks.
You can do everything by hearing and not taking it in, because you hear something, and then you own it. You don’t need to ask for clarification because there isn’t any, just get it done as quickly as possible. You are also, unless you’re on plating, only responsible for one part of a dish. A good example is a steak salad. Grill does the steak, pantry does the salad. I hand you the finished steak to slice over the salad, I am not in charge of presentation. Even if you have six burgers at once, it’s plenty of time to get all six setups and servings of fries done.
Quick, gotta move fast, gotta perform miracles. Gee willikers, Dre, holy bat syllables! Look at all the bullshit that goes on in Gotham! When I’m gone, time to get rid of these rap criminalsโฆโฆ
If SCOTUS can quote Eminem, so can I. Line cooks are absolutely rap criminals. ๐
When you work in a kitchen, it’s the same feel as working in a church. Some of the best conversations I’ve had in a church came from cooking together for a pot luck after the service, or the traditional Easter brunch (which Dana and I did with another line cook one year and the three of us absolutely destroyed itโฆ. that’s good, by the way. Just like comics, we bomb and we killโฆโฆ nightly.).
On Easter, you’re feeding three separate crowds. The first is the people who want breakfast after the sunrise service (that’s popular on Easter only). The second wave is the musicians who have come before the 9:00 or the 11:00 service (usually 10:00-10:30 in the Episcopal church). This is going to be a larger crowd of musicians than normal, because you probably already have a choir. You probably do not have a brass quintet, a harpist, an orchestra, or whatever else it is that you do to “boost the ratings.”
Church takes many forms, but for me it is ancientโฆ. the interminable march of Sundays back into the dark ages. The Episcopal church is my favorite because I know that other people I love are saying the same words at the same time I amโฆ..
We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great merciesโฆ..
I didn’t even have to look it up, and the tears have already started. It’s called the “prayer of humble access,” and it is the shortest and fastest path to getting my heart to bleed all over the communion rail. That’s because it’s The Moment. The communion rail is where I wrestle with the bomb that could destroy millions, my own internalized rage. When I knew that everything was over with Kathleen, I went to church and laid my head on the communion rail, I was so wrecked. As the choir sang “lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world” I folded because I had a lot of them.
I didn’t blame Kathleen entirely for her behavior, either, because she didn’t have the skills to deal with me. Just as traumatized as Supergrover, perhaps more so because the effects of her abuse lasted for years in what any adult except another traumatized one would see as wildly inappropriate and must be stopped. No one noticed.
One of the things that I wish Supergrover would take in is that she’s not scarred, not broken, literally perfect. This is because I have enough experience to say that there’s nothing wrong with her, she’s just stubborn. ๐ In these moments, John the Gnostic speaks to me:
This is the verdict: light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed.
We do not run from the light because it’s not there. We run from the light out of fear. Fear of not being loved. Fear that the light is too bright. Fear that our sins are too great and everyone else’s are acceptable. Fear of separation from others, thus the feeling of being separated from God while it’s just not true.
Whether I’m in the kitchen, whether I’m writing, whether I’m queer, whether I’m poly, whether I am anything I have more power when I name it and claim it than I do by keeping it all in and having preconceived notions about what others are going to think. You stop attracting light to you because of shame and not being vulnerable about itโฆ. therefore, you’ll never get to a place of acceptance through the torture of cognitive dissonance.
My life got so much better when my priest said “we are all very members incorporate in the mystical body of thy Son, who are also heirs, through faithโฆ” because it was the first time in my life I’d ever believed someone meant itโฆโฆ. after meeting the wrong priest, first, but still.
For Houstonians, Larry Gipson at St. Martins told me I’d never be a priest because I was gay. My revenge is that he’s Catholic now. Karma took care of him, because the Episcopal church as a whole disagreed with him and left him in the Middle Ages. I will not say any more about that except I can think of several people I’d like to go with him. Like, if you’re going to be a homophobic asshole, put a warning sign out, amiright?
There are many Catholic parishes who have quietly ignored The Pope for many, many years. They also have an organized queer group within the Catholic church. Just like protestants, there is a range. I would feel comfortable walking into any American Episcopal church, but I could not just walk into any Anglican or Catholic church (Anglican being the name of ECUSA churches who left over female ordination and homosexual marriage/ordination.
So, if I go to church at all, it’s St. Alban’s (better known as National Cathedral). I will never be discriminated against ever again, and I need that for me. Other people don’t. The “frozen chosen” have in the past had problems with “the most segregated hour in America,” but that has changed so much across the world, especially with the election of Michael Curry. Plus, there’s a lot of immigration from Africa going on in Houston and DC, so Episcopal churches have naturally gained more black members over the years. And that doesn’t all come from, say, Nigerians being active in the Anglican church overseas. Some of it is that you go to church once because it’s in your neighborhood, decide you’re cool with it, and stay.
My grandparents were Presbyterian, but the church in Lone Star they liked the best was Methodist. Ergo, we were Methodists now. I have to say that Paw Paw made an excellent choice. I got to meet Matt McConaughey before you even knew who he was.
My mother’s favorite joke in life was “I’ve seen Matt in a bathing suitโฆ.. of course, he was 12 at the time.” I’ve mentioned this before, but for new readers my dad confirmed Matt into the church when he was a tween, and my mother was his middle school choir director. I was three, so yes, I have met and spent time with him, but I’m going to bet we don’t remember each other and the only reason I keep up with him is because I see him everywhere I look.
Plus, his mom is in Bernie and it was great to see her, too, despite all Matthew’s justified and reported anger at her. I’m not telling tales out of school when I say that Kay wrecked him by giving press interviews about private matters, and it is not lost on me that I do the same thing, essentially, but the difference is that my friends don’t care that I do it. Even Supergrover, who is the maddest of them all, says I’m entitled to my stories and to keep at it, essentially. She doesn’t have to like it, she just has to live it.
That’s because she’s a fucking fan.
The rest of my friends are busy on self-discovery, particularly Bryn and we compare notes. We’re all driven by self-improvement and reparenting ourselvesโฆ. not to point out what our parents lacked, but to point out all the times we didn’t say anything and became part of the problem.
I was social masking because maybe if I did, I’d deserve to be loved. That’s the deepest tape I’m trying to get rid of, because that comes with altering and accepting my entire reality as an autistic and physically disabled person. If you compare yourself to someone neurotypical, you will always fall short and berate yourself. Acknowledging I’m simply not capable of some things is necessary because I cannot be held to the same expectations by other people.
I would have no relationships as a result, because they’d all walk off in frustration and still do despite my best efforts. I cannot always be in my body and respond from a place that’s not ensconced in pain. I am human. What becomes a problem is being willing to forgive anyone for anything and not receiving the same courtesy.
This is because I believe neurotypical people are holding me to the standard expectations of a neurotypical person and also get frustrated I can’t “get it together.” When I said that high needs and low trade off, this is what I mean. Sometimes, I am a functional person with a routine. Sometimes, my autism makes me get lost in my own brain and lack of function comes from the inability to change channels.
When I was a child, this presented as being emotional leaps and bounds ahead of my peers and listening to everyone’s problems, then meltdown and burnout after school making me unable to do homework. I couldn’t do eighth grade math when my then lady-love was married to a drug dealer who got drunk at a church party and threw up at one of our best friend’s houses. That stayed with me as a monotropic thought process for years on end, a 14-year-old on a mission to love a 25-year-old through itโฆ another avoidant personality who didn’t know what the hell to do with either my emotions or the situation she was actually in.
As an adult, this presents the same exact way. People are my monotropic thought process and their emotional weight stops me from carrying anything else. So, is the question isolating myself entirely so that I don’t have a jackass magnet on my forehead (the term I use for being on the Metro and someone saying “my dad hit me as a child” or something equally heavy within minutesโฆ the jackass magnet is a reference to the fact that I cannot keep myself from letting it in, not that those people have done anything wrong.
There are two words I could use right now to explain what I mean, and nearly everyone knows them but I’m so mad at JK Rowling right now that every time I say something mean about her, I wish it had been worse.
If you just can’t stand not knowing because you’re not a fan, someone put it in the comments or something. I’m done.
In short, I cannot read minds, and I cannot protect my mindโฆโฆโฆ
People expect me to read minds because the societal response is clear and I am just not on that wavelength. I think big thoughts, and I’m not going to apologize for that. While you’re thinking about how I didn’t do X when you wanted Y, I’m thinking about how the whole company should run and how to change it for the better because my scope is different than yours.
In college, I began to learn how international systems work, the chessboard, and because of my history in the “underworld” of abuse, I was drawn to government espionage (corporate doesn’t do it for me). You’re thinking about the village, I’m thinking about the world. I am not dissimilar from any spy, really, because most of them are truly damaged people who needed refuge in the systemโฆ. and that was appealing to me, not a drawback.
The reason spies are generally damaged people is that those are the people who are willing to cut ties. It’s a lot to manage, your real life and your cover identity, so it’s better to be like me and not have many significant relationships so you can keep your necessary lies straight. If you’re an abused kid in any form, whether it’s being young and raped or being 18 and getting shot, you don’t trust anyone.
I listen to everything. I talk a quarter to never. I have selective mutism often. Part of it is that I’d much rather write than talk, part of it is being emotionally abused over many years and having those threads so woven into me that I never know when that woman’s expressions are going to come out of me rather than my own. I sound just like her because that’s who I was social masking as a teen.
Again, from 12-36 years old I was social masking someone who’d been raped as a child, was currently dating a drug dealer, and had a very unstable career because opera is just like that and she was a queer teacher in a conservative school district. My memories of her are crystal clear down to the smell of the air.
As a result, I do not trust anyone or anything at anytime, but I listen to things intensely without processing their voices until after said conversation is over, because I am not both talking and listening anymore. In those cases, talking is limited to sympathetic nods and breaking eye contact when it gets to be too much sensory informationโฆ. which it always is. You don’t walk off the Metro with conversations like “my husband beats me” unscathed.
In effect, what’s happening is that I take in information like a doctor, then have my emotional response later. In a neurotypical person’s brain, they’ve “dealt with it and moved on.” I am “lost in the past,” when you’re walking around like a ticking time bomb and I’m trying to stay calm about it.
I am an INFJ, and I’m here to drag you kicking and screaming toward believing in yourselves. I am here to love the shit out of you.
Do you or your family make any special dishes for the holidays?
I don’t cook anything for holidays anymore, because when I got divorced and moved to DC, I moved in with a family who already had Thanksgiving wired, and I wasn’t the only cook in the house. One of my housemates when I first arrived had gone to Johnson & Wales, and was the chef at Jaleo Crystal City (Jose Andres is the executive chef, I mean the guy who actually ran the restaurant on a day-to-day basis). Therefore, I know Jose Andres intimately, even if he doesn’t know me…. and all of his secrets are safe. ๐
We used to laugh together about the things that happened around us that we were helpless to stop. Neither one of us in all of our cosmic culinary power could get people to stop putting knives in the dishwasher or in the bottom of the sink. More than once did we look at each other and say, “I can’t.” We honestly didn’t spend that much time together, it’s that our relationship was like all brothers in arms. We had an emotional shorthand not there for others in the house. If you are not a person with ADHD/Autism when you start a kitchen job, you will gain the ability to see the kitchen that way. Everything in cooking is a sensory issue, and you’re learning to fine-tune it. The tiniest changes will cause absolute anarchy.
For me, a big one is soap. They’re all concentrated differently, and it seems there is a large leap from generic to brand. It also affects the kitchen to change the smell of the dish soap, because you get used to how those fragrances mix with spice. For instance, going from a floral scent to a lemon scent gave me gastrointestinal issues because the lemon mixed with the scent of eggs and ruined Hollandaise sauce for me because every time I think of it one of the flavor notes is surfactant.
Soap is a trigger for a much bigger sensory issue overall. Most autistic people who have sensory issues with smell are because it’s turned up to “pregnant woman.” I throw up more due to bad smells than anything else, and why when I live alone and have a cat, I have disposable litter boxes and change them out often rather than ever force myself to change it. I was lucky in that Dana didn’t mind and had permanent boxes at her house, but I wasn’t counting on her to care for Asher. I had my own system, I just didn’t have to use it. I wasn’t allergic to chores. I traded that one out.
Being married is really the last time I had any holiday traditions, because when I moved to DC, I was folded into an established family here, Lebanese heritage and not Irish. For Thanksgiving and Christmas we have turkey and dolmades. Stuffing and kibbi (Kibbi is actually one of our dog’s names, too- “meatball,” basically, in Arabic). It’s a wonderful life. Hayat and I have talked often about the fact that “I’ve picked up Arabic,” because when I first moved in, Hayat spoke Arabic and Nasim spoke Farsi. I asked both of them if it would bother them for me to listen in on their phone calls, because I didn’t want it to feel creepy and I knew they wouldn’t really, either since I don’t understand either language. I just wanted to take away the feeling that I was trying not to watch them by making it obvious that I was.
Listening to Nasim was hearing the end of “Argo” all day long. Learning the Levantine dialect of Arabic was learning the rolling lilt of the ocean and not the Middle East RP equivalent, Cairo (I checked). Some words in Egypt and Lebanon are different, some words are the same because Lebanon has had a bigger influx of Mediterranean immigrants. In fact, my cover photo on Facebook is a picture Hayat took of the marina in Beirut, now a city on my bucket list if it ever calms down enough for me to go. I would feel comfortable with Daniel or Zac in that situation, but I would not feel comfortable traveling without someone who could defend both of us. That whole idea started the romance with Daniel, because I initially wanted a travel companion and then I realized I wanted him. I don’t know whether Zac and I will ever travel together or not, but what I do know is that he may have not been in the same situations as Daniel, but not because he didn’t train for them.
But Zac and I haven’t started our own traditions yet because we haven’t spent a Christmas together. Since he celebrates Yuletide and not Christmas proper, it doesn’t matter whether I see him on the 25th or not. What I do know is that we as people are a spectrum. Maybe we’ll go for Chinese, maybe we’ll finally watch “The Pigeon Tunnel,” the Apple TV+ documentary based on interviews and John le Carrรฉ’s last book. I would have jumped on it the moment I saw it if I wasn’t so insistent about not cheating on him. Infidelity is one thing. This is couple TV. THERE ARE RULES. There are shows I still haven’t finished because I promised Dana I’d wait. It’s getting a bit ridiculous. Still can’t do it.
I have been asked to make a Christmas list and so far the only thing on it is a long-sleeved SAS t-shirt. I’d also like a Senators baseball cap because of the Duke Ellington concert in the spring, because even if I didn’t wear it, oh my God would it ever look good with Jason’s signature on the side. For my international readers, the Senators are the current hockey team in Ottawa, but the baseball team in DC was called the Senators when we first joined the league. Duke Ellington started selling peanuts when he was like, 11?
When Jason told me that he was going to do a Duke Ellington concert in The District, I told him that he was a brave, brave man. He laughed because he knew exactly what I meant. If you come for Ellington in his hometown crowd, you best not miss. Here’s what I know that you don’t. Jason is objectively better at piano than Ellington ever was. He can take Elllington’s ideas to a place that the composer himself couldn’t- another brain seeing different patterns. Ask me how I know that? He’s been doing it since he was 17 (probably younger, but I’ve known him since then), the Mozart of jazz, too many notes that boggle the mind.
I do not say this lightly. It probably sounds like I’m just part of the Houston jazz scene and trying to promote my boy. No. Jason is different. Jason goes to places I don’t like and I don’t know why and then I fall on my ass when I figure out the chord structure. It’s not that I didn’t like Jason, it’s that my mind wasn’t big enough to hold Jason yet. I had to grow into him. He’s an artist that is perfectly capable of giving you a beautiful haircut that you don’t like until you realize you were wrong. You thought it was a mess, and it makes your whole face.
The last time I saw Jason, I left the Kennedy Center and walked around for two hours trying to deconstruct that concert in my mind. Every time I came to a new metro stop, I decided I wasn’t done thinking about jazz yet. If you’ve never been to see Jason, I do not believe you have a grasp of modern jazz and where it’s going. I hope the concert is not too esoteric for Zac, but I don’t think it will be. I just think the difference is that when he looks at Jason, he sees the finished product. I see every iteration. Tall, skinny, quiet, softspoken when he does, can’t get used to the fact that he doesn’t wear a stocking cap every day. Can’t believe he and John Schutza aren’t a thing at lunch anymore.
Zac is going to become a bridge from my old life to my new one, and I think that’s a beautiful thing. I know Jason wouldn’t necessarily look for me at the concert, but what I do know is that he would be disappointed if I came to the concert and didn’t say anything. If I had my life to do over, I would have loved to be as serious a jazz musician as Jason. But, on the other hand, I did not have the ability of Konrad Johnson to “see where they were going and go with them.” I did not have Jason’s ability to see the rules of composition in such a way that he plays as if they aren’t there. No open fourths? Here’s seven in a row. Deal. Not a real example, but on brand.
Jason, like I am, is an unapologetic artist trying to get the audience to come to him, and he’s so good at his craft that he deserves to be a leader.
If there’s anything in my family that starts with me, it’s a love of music- the only special interest I had before intelligence because the first time I ever sang in front of an audience (congregation), I was three. Never in my lifetime did I think I’d get involved with it enough to understand what an open fourth might be, but here we are.
I know that when we talk about dishes, we’re often talking about the things put on the table. To me, sharing music with someone is every bit as important as a Christmas or Thanksgiving table. It’s where my mind goes now that I don’t have to cook for either holiday.
I also talk about music not to talk about what is going to be missing.
Also, here is a meme to express my feelings, one of my love languages:
If you didn’t need sleep, what would you do with all the extra time?
I would play it by ear. I don’t have the kind of mind that would plan it out in advance. I function way better as the red team than the planner/finisher.
Some people are unfamiliar with the term “red team,” but it’s journalism slang for people who point out the flaws in your plan. There’s a whole episode on the red team in Aaron Sorkin’s “The Newsroom.” Very, very much like prepping a presidential candidate for a debate; the red team researches the blowback you’re going to get before you publish something.
It is so much easier to red team than it is to create it because an autistic mind sees patterns and can tell you what doesn’t fit. Other people can do it, too, but allistic and autistic people have different criteria for pattern recognition. This pattern recognition is created by our autism, but also our extensive social masking. We research neurotypical people, but we do not take it in. We do not become neurotypical by socializing with you. We make ourselves seem more acceptable to you and you interpret it as “getting better.”
But, if you try to tell a neurotypical person that they’re wrong about something, you’re fucked. Because mental health issues mean they treat you with kid gloves. Your opinion comes across as “why does this child think she knows anything?” There’s a huge superiority complex that comes from not having mental health issues or processing disorders. It’s such a catch-22 because you can’t hide it and living with the consequences of telling people is a concentrated tisane of depression and anxiety, served to you every morning even when you don’t sleep.
It makes people feel better about themselves when they’re in conflict with you and you have mental health issues. People are so much more likely to write off my feelings as symptoms of my mental health than actually consider the fact that they might have hurt me. I am responsible for hearing when I have hurt someone and responding; I am also responsible for knowing when people are seeing symptoms when I express needs. Normal things that people should care about, should worry about, all of the sudden become “you should take something for that.” Bitch, please. My psychologist thinks you’re a freak show and my psychiatrist says “not enough medication in the world.” Truly, there is no medication in the world that will fix someone’s perception that it’s always your brain (therefore, you’re always wrong) because you have a diagnosed problem with yours and they don’t. It would be gaslighting if it was malicious, but it’s not. It’s every bit as systemic as racism.
It’s the sign, being treated like a pest. That’s the sign that someone thinks of you as mentally ill and not a person anymoreโฆ but not consciously. It’s not personal, it’s global. I am a diagnosis to a lot of people, and I finally stopped catering to them because I started treating me like a diagnosis as well. It didn’t do anything to make me feel better and often made me feel worseโฆ. and in fact, a lot of the “symptoms” people see are indeed symptoms- of autism, not depression and anxiety or hypomania. In some ways, it was such a blessing because the symptoms I thought I had from depression were actually processing disorders. I felt lighter than I had in years, because that means my depression isn’t as bad as I think it is.
There’s never going to be a time I can wean off of my depression medication, but there is a lot of comfort in things being unique to me as a person rather than brought on by depression. They just tend to work in tandem. If my autism gives me demand avoidance, my depression will tell me I’m useless and worthless. Anxiety will tell me that if I do not get with the program, I will keep on being worthless. The boss music moves faster, and the threat never appears.
Therefore, I’ve never fallen into a pit of fire, but I haven’t saved the princess, either.
I take that back. I have saved the princess once. I bought an NES controller for my PC, and downloaded an emulator capable of cheats like a Game Genie. The only time I’ve ever beaten Super Mario Brothers was turning up the cheats to full-on invincible. I didn’t have to do that for Alduin (main storyline villain in Skyrim, a dragon).
If I didn’t sleep at all, I’d probably play video games more. I don’t have time for them, which is why I stick to Skyrim and don’t pick up new titles. If you get into Skyrim, it’s different than getting into any other game. There are so many makers of free content addons called “mods” that add quests and characters that you’ll never finish it all. I haven’t even finished all of the quests in the main game, much less expansion packs. While Bethesda is amazing, the creators didn’t make Skyrim immortal. The modders did. It’s basically a video gamer’s blog, because they keep updating the story and the software as newer hardware comes out (getting Skyrim Legendary Edition to run on Windows 10 should be in your quest journal).
Besides, I’m a monotropic thinker. I am happy disappearing into Skyrim more than once rather than getting used to new game mechanics every time. I can change them slowly over time if I want. Part of the joy of the creators’ community is that they’re able to create new animations as well.
And, of course, I love the Thieves Guild, and not because they’re bad. It’s because it’s the closest you get in Skyrim to being a spy. You’re tasked with burning someone’s beehives and stealing something out of someone’s house without anyone knowing you were there. I may not be Jack Reacher, but I get to feel like it for a little bit.
It is so easy to me looking back to see how intelligence became my special interest. Hearing about my great uncle when I was a kid made intelligence feel secretive in a good way. I know for sure that my great uncle was a watchdog on CIA and the military, part of the solution and not the problem.
I have a couple of stories that prove to me that the American government is not lily white from that era, so I also do not think of spies as superheroes. Because James Bond is, well, James Bond, no one thinks of spies as the babies they really are. Most are recruited at the same age as people in the military. CIA recruits at universities as well because they always need people fluent in more than one language. As John le Carrรฉ points out, when you’re old enough to do those jobs well, people stop asking you to do them.
What I do think is that I identify with living a double life. My personality on the street is not shown online, and my online personality isn’t me in real life. I am not hiding one from the other, you just can’t only know me in one way and see everything. It’s not the way I’m trying to present online and in person. “The medium is the message.” -Marshall McLuhan.
If I never slept at all, I think I would spend more time researching. It’s my favorite thing whether it’s intelligence operations or biographies of real people. This is because the more non-fiction I read, the more I have a library of images in my head to make correlations. Reading about intelligence is like reading any novel. You find random facts about everything while on one topic. That’s because nothing happens with one decision. With worldwide intelligence, you may have to visit Mexico and Iran in a day. So, in the course of one operation I can learn the habits and mannerisms of a policeman in Oaxaca and a tea shop owner in downtown Tehran.
I am deadly serious in that I believe the Netflix version of “Carmen Sandiego” is the most realistic show we have about intelligence available currently. Carmen is a young woman, but I’m not sure how young. Her friends seem to be teenagers, so maybe college? Anyway, she has a ground support team (ginger twins named Zack nd Ivy) and a handler, Player.
Player is not on the scene, he’s kind of like Justin Long in “Galaxy Quest.” He’s at the computer with the floorplans in front of him, but he’s never in Carmen’s physical location. And because they’re an intelligence agency unto their own, they’re not trying to mimic another one poorly. I really like the relationship between case officer and handler when it’s written as a funny and touching buddy comedy, which this is (my other favorite is “Spy” with Melissa McCarthy and Miranda Hart). In this version of Carmen Sandiego, Player is written very much like her little brother, and it makes child labor so endearing. ๐
Speaking of “child labor,” I love The Disney Channel. They’re the ones that have 14-year-old children saving the world at every turn. I believe that’s a lot more realistic than expecting me to figure it out. Plus, I love writing for adolescents, because it doesn’t take fancy language to make a good story.
It is not lost on me that I bond with these weird little families because Player is coded as autistic. Carmen is coded as CPTSD. Zack and Ivy are clearly ADHD. Ivy is also coded as queer. When you’re the ones picked to live in the shadows, you don’t get to pick and choose who comes with you. The relationships just keep getting bigger to accept who everyone is. Player is never going to be on the ground support. Zack and Ivy are never going to sit still. Carmen is never going to let other people control anything, because she deals in burning beehives.
If you love “Doctor Who,” you’ll probably love “Carmen Sandiego” as well, because it’s very much the same idea. Zack, Ivy, and Player are very much Carmen’s “fam.” And she has more important companions in her life, but that would involve spoilers I’d be devastated to give you before the story unfolded on Netflix.
Often the best representations of intelligence agencies across the world are fictional, because then people have so much more license with it. Less chance CIA would get upset with me if I changed their name and gave them global power to track down alien activity. Maybe throw in Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones as the main characters. I don’t know. Seems risky. Think anyone would watch it?
I am watching very closely at how fictional characters are written across the board. My alternate history combines my two greatest passions in life, so I don’t know whether passion for cooking fed intelligence or the other way around, but now they are inextricably interrelated into the plot of my novel. The one thing that will happen for this alternate history with certainty is that OSS will not transition to CIA. It will transition to something else (or stay OSS, because its future would also be fictional). To me, it is better to create my own intelligence agency with its own fictional structure/rules than it is to guess what CIAs structures are and be wrong. I am a Virgo. I can’t be wrong. It creates a blip in the Matrix.
I have archetypes for my characters thanks to YouTube. There are lots of interviews with people from DIA, CIA, NSA, etc. Here is the one truism I can tell you from hours of all that. In every single one, someone says, “when you were a kid, did you think about working in intelligence?” In every single one, they say “nope. It just fell into my lap.” I think this is due to age. Most of the interviews I’ve watched are with people that are at least my age. When we were kids, spies were approached. There was no “go to CIA’s web site and apply.” Future female spies will be able to say that they applied when they were 18, all they did was send in a resume.
In fact, the way Tony was recruited was through an ad in the newspaper for a government artist. He was intrigued because he thought, “what would the government want with an artist?” Turns out, when an intelligence agency wants people to forge passports and documents, they call it “government artist” in the newspaper. ๐
I am certain that people still get approached because there are people out there doing all sorts of things that would be useful to CIA. For instance, you might love languages or cartography and think you’ll end up as a professor somewhere. But when you get up to six languages or images no one else has, someone will be impressed.
And honestly, we’re starting to be impressed as a country. People loved Madam Secretary, which is a great example of a show that shows how government works (heightened, but realistic). Not everything is accomplished in the shadows, butโฆโฆโฆ.. “for everything else, there’s Visa?” When I think of CIA and State, I don’t want to picture Elizabeth. I want to read the real stories of the people in those jobs. I have read every word Hillary Clinton has ever written, both fiction and non.
I suppose I am trying to find what any writer is- the ability to find themselves while constantly researching other people.
Stories That Are All True 