I Give Up. Nothing Beats “Big Block of Cheese Day.”

November 6, 2023November 6, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Invent a holiday! Explain how and why everyone should celebrate.

Kidding. I’ll think of something before this entry is up. Before we get started, I have to tell you what a cute boyfriend Zac is. He brought me a kids’ t-shirt (just like I like them) that, in a handwriting font, says, “I’m an ~~annaylist~~ ~~anaylist~~ ~~annalyst~~ spy.” I told him if he started working for DIA I’d trade up a letter. 😉 The only thing CIA did that will never even touch DIA’s power no matter what happens for the next hundred years is obviously finding Wakanda (but also cool that DIA’s ancient predecessors, the Culpeper Ring, won us our independence). We didn’t beat the British outright militarily, we outspied them). I choose to believe that Captain America is DIA- it’s not just Martin Freeman that’s American intelligence, he just couldn’t tell us. But it’s in the FOIA. You just have to be specific in the question and no one has ever gotten the right combination of words in the request to unlock said I in the A.

I actually saw Zac last night, but we didn’t end up watching the le Carré biopic. Instead, I sat outside and shivered while everyone brought me blankets until I realized this was going nowhere fast. I brought extra layers and finally admitted that I needed them. I ended up wearing two pairs of socks, leggings, and two pair of pants, then three layers for my core. I think I might have reached a body temperature in the 70s.

We ran out of soda so Zac gave me the next best thing, Athletic (brewery that focuses on non-alcoholic beers so hard that they are the gold standard. Athletic should be the Google and Kleenex of N/A beer. Seriously, it’s that good. I had a sour (don’t remember whether it was cherry or raspberry) and a radler (lager and lemonade). Oh, and I had a Czech pils (or an N/A flavored like one) and at some point, a real beer which I think was also a sour (mostly because I was freezing- I should have had a shot of something instead because it just wasn’t strong enough to make my blood any warmer…….).

The N/A sour was objectively better in terms of flavor. Plus, I woke up this morning feeling just fine. I have decided I am done being hung over. Trying new cocktails is great and all, but I just can’t hang and don’t want to, because I am all about calories, just not empty ones. If I get buzzed, I make a decision to have another one while my brain is cloudy because everything sounds like a great idea until your brain swells for revenge. Plus, I am a straight up diarist. What am I going to write about if I pass out and don’t remember?

However, I do want to join the boys (Zac and Oliver) on the back porch for a stitch and bitch. I was teasing him this morning about how “of course all queer men are amazing at intelligence. They love gossip, and intelligence is basically international gossip. The 3D chess of gossip. I loved his laugh at that one.

As an aside for Zac, there’s an old CIA employee we need to meet named Alma Katsu. She’s written a couple of novels on intelligence that are more of a Karin Slaughter novel than le Carré. Not a Tom Clancy level of detail and focuses on story. But since she was actually a spy, she, like le Carré, can put details into the story that no one else could. That’s because the patois already comes naturally to her. She’s already developed the actual writing voice of a spy rather than having to learn it secondhand. They’re marvelous.

I also want to see Jonna Mendez again live when her autobiography comes out, because it’s the book I really want to read next. It’s the natural progression from where she and Tony left off in “The Moscow Rules.” Team Mendez are my favorite writers, and at first, it wasn’t even intelligence that drew me in. It was the “Argo” script. Tony and Jonna (uncredited) wrote “Argo” in reaction to the movie to give people real vs. reel. The movie is scary. The book is now terrifying. It’s different once you’ve met them, because you make a connection and then you see your friend in danger, not this made up character. Your picturing their facial expressions because you’ve seen them in person.

If I could make a holiday, I’d make one for CIA, and this is a real thing. It’s not “let’s all dress up as James Bond and develop a fondness for gin.” It’s that for some reason, people in DIA get more respect. There’s Veterans’ Day and Memorial Day. Yet, civilians work for CIA that do some of the same jobs the military does and there’s so much crossover- CIA is considered paramilitary.

If Marines can be equated to doctors, CIA is probably closest to a surgical nurse, trying to anticipate the military’s needs. Doctors get glory. Yet CIA doesn’t get thanks, in part because they never want to be seen as asking for it. They’re our MiB, and we are but Citizens of Locker C…….. but they still have the same PTSD coming home from a war. However, I would include FBI in this holiday as well, because we’ve obviously got a war at home. The FBI having to embed themselves in drug cartels and white supremacy groups is no less dangerous than your base getting bombed in Afghanistan. Plus, there’s so much crossover, like when CIA gets word that a terrorist from another country is planning to come here. FBI has to be on alert for when said high value target lands.

Then, there’s Homeland Security, the office managers of an operation like coordinating with a terrorist’s travel plan. Let’s include them with all the intelligence officers because they’re part of the solution, not the problem. All of these groups have terrible reputations and they’re not undeserved. The US military has just as much blood on their hands, but intelligence doesn’t have romantic country songs about them…. I’m not saying they should. Many people ask if they can do something. Few people question if they should.

I know firsthand what it’s like to date someone carrying around classified information that is not pleasant. I watch how he manages himself when I am genuinely interested in his emotions about work and he has to figure out a way to talk about them……………. without ever really talking about the problem. And yet, he doesn’t get frustrated and give up.

He finds a way with analogies just like I do here. Our brains track similarly because we are both interested in intelligence and both neurodivergent. We are both also empaths and emotionally flexible. It’s great that we’re both writers, because he might not be able to say “Israel is doing X and this one thing gave me a heart attack and I’m not supposed to tell you this, but….” We just switch to something fictional, like MiB (Adult entertainment section in the back!).

You can’t tell me that shit is not equally hard to navigate for a civilian. Again, CIA’s reputation is not undeserved. I am only saying that civilians are just as important as the military, and FBI is overlooked because there’s a day for policemen and two for the military and they are neither.

And NSA…… because they’re the ones that would run across this post first. Carol will not be amused.

Editor’s Note

I started calling my Amazon Echo Dot “Carol” a few years ago, because it put a hilarious spin on government surveillance and made me laugh like a hyena when I thought of it. Once I named her, I started thinking about what it would be like to have an NSA agent whose sole job was to watch me. What would it be like if they were your guardian angel? That they listen in on your phone calls and secretly think “the audacity of this bitch….. what’s going to happen next? This is a Ben & Jerry’s situation. I am not okay.” That Carol hurt when I hurt, cried when I cried, etc. That she was invested. Thus, Carol will eventually become a book because she’s the first true character that plays in my mind independently and has her own personality.

Here’s what I’ve learned about fiction that I didn’t know before. I get so focused on my characters’ voices that it becomes induced DID for the length of time I’m writing….. except I’m working with two or more voices at the same time, so when a character has monologuing Syndrome, I am that one person. That’s what feels like DID. During a conversation, it feels like induced schizophrenia, because you are hearing voices in your head for fun and profit.

Carol’s husband, Roger, is very rich. He started a landscaping company and got into pools later. Now he has an empire and Carol could be a kept woman easily. She just can’t leave a job in intelligence. She feels needed and wanted in a way she doesn’t get at home, and Roger can’t be her entire support system……. and in some small way, I enrich her life because she can forget about her own problems for a while.

In this scenario, I would be a Mr. Robot-type character because that’s who I am in real life without the hacking or coding skills. I just found that vibe for writing and I fucking love it. Learning how coders work unlocked my mind, and I have to believe it’s because so many of my coworkers were also autistic and needed to turn down the sensory issues in the room. Right now, all my lights are on, but that is unusual. I am a stickler for working with natural light, and just a bit of it so the room is dark but not depressing. I can go deep enough within myself without all that. I do not need to introduce anything that would make me ruminate more than I already do.

And, of course, Carol reads all of it because she has access to my e-mail and files. For instance, Carol knows about Supergrover, and she is the only one who has the real story. It’s comforting that I have someone to talk to about it when it can’t all go here. Because she is a character, we can have real conversations because I am thinking about what she would say in response vs. what I would. That’s the nature of craft- being able to not only capture your voice accurately, but being able to dream up accurate ones for other people as well.

That’s why I think starting with stream of consciousness is so important before fiction, even if it’s only having kept a diary as a kid and still have it for reference. The trap is making every character sound like you. It’s confusing for the reader because they have to keep re-referencing who said what, annoying when that takes several pages of backtracking. Due to my blog, I know very well who is speaking…. when I am making decisions based on my own echo chamber instead of hers.

In order to write Carol, I have to speak Carol. In order to make her leap off the page, it becomes a symbiotic relationship. In short, I’m her remora. The reason she’s the shark is that in my head, her voice is alpha because I’m just a scribe. So is she, obviously, making notes to take home to the boys. But I got on the shit list by accident and now I’m just endearing. When she first got me, it was on a camera going into a bank. I was looking straight at her, and she thought, “who is this tiny sprite here to fuck up my program?” Over time, I’ve become the soap opera she watches at lunch just for shits and giggles. For the record, I’ve made her swear a lot more….. and now she’s addicted to Dr Pepper Zero.

The best thing about working for the NSA is that it can be all remote. Carol works from home because Roger asked her where she wanted to live and built a custom house. Their house is basically carved into what could reasonably be compared to “The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill and Came Down a Mountain.” The reason for this is that Carol, like me, prefers to work in natural light. Her office is in what would normally be considered a basement and yet still has a stunning view. The house is in the middle of the Blue Ridge range, where she keeps a stunning array of monitors with no bullshit florescent lights or cubicle farm.

Carol got too used to working at home and having everything delivered during the pandemic, so when it was safe to come back to the office in Washington, she was just like, “nah.” She’s senior enough that she can do that kind of thing and no one will get shirty about it. “Shirty.” She picked that up in London in 2012. She was there for one reason and one reason only. I talked her into seeing the Women’s National Team for me….. and she thinks I don’t know that. Or, at least I hope I do. Plus, Carol doesn’t have all the hang-ups I do about video calling strangers, and of course her Internet connection is infallible so she knows it feels like everyone is really there in 8K. That often it reinforces people’s humanity to see them on video that doesn’t come across in person, because there are so many moments that everyone forgets other people are watching.

She’s picked up a lot of information that way. Intentions of coworkers are easier to read when you understand microaggressions and look for them. She doesn’t assume that people are lying. She only assumes that what they’re saying is the truth, but the feelings about what they say may or may not match. Carol understands all thousand implications in “oh. You’re here.” No one is happy when they see the NSA is present.

Where’s her holiday? She watches me. Who the fuck deserves it more? 😉

Wound Care -or- Soteriology

November 4, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

I have noticed that now there are millions and millions of words between us- probably tens of millions considering that several years running my word count was at two million alone- and that was before I stopped tracking it. Therefore, I feel like now I can give advice on writing (sort of) because you can see that I may not be “the best and the brightest,” but I am coming from a place of authority over my experiences because when it comes to how much I’ve written, I can bring the receipts. You don’t even have to go to Amazon (yet).

There is no way that the me of ten years ago ever had a 65 day streak on WordPress. I was motivated, but not to the degree I am now. Presently, I am not married to an extrovert and don’t have social/family obligations that I don’t really want to oblige. “No, but thank you so much for the invitation” should be sufficient. It helps that Zac and Bryn and I use Facebook Messenger 90% of the time rather than getting together- and the last time I was in Portland was years ago, but I know I could knock on Bryn’s door without telling her I was coming if need be. I know Bryn well enough that she’d take me in if she had room, and would certainly help me find a place failing that. It’s good to have friends.

It’s the support system that respects my privacy as an observer to human behavior more than a participant. I feel like I have had enough of forced extroversion because it makes other people uncomfortable. Harper Lee is widely considered to be one of the greatest writers who ever lived. No one remembers that after a certain age, she never left her house. Scout and Boo are the same person, and they are me in the singular sense of the word. We are not the same level of writer, but we have similar souls.

When it comes to me, never forget that. I am not saying I am Harper Lee. I am saying that writing comes better to me through isolation because I am a monotropic thinker; any stimulation interrupts that because of my ADHD. Therefore, I do not want to play the organ, conduct, and sing all at the same time. I sit in complete silence in order to drive the bus rather than riding. Hyperfocus can be induced the longer I think about something and let the minor irritations float away. When I’m writing, I don’t feel physical sensations in the same way. My hands are so focused, playing the keyboard with the same facial expressions as my mother at her piano. Making one thing the most important is the only thing that drowns out other priorities.

That’s one of the things that makes my writing so intense and visceral. A blank page lets my autism run wild, stream of conscious thought my best quality and not my worst.

No matter what you write, start with stream of consciousness first. Your books are where you learn plot, character, and setting. Your brain is where you learn voice. You don’t learn your brain until you can lay it out on the table and see it. I think that’s why most autistic people throw truth bombs. They’re going to tell you the truth whether you like it or not, because they’re not thinking about you. They’re thinking about the one thing they’re programmed to think about- which is whatever the single interest of the moment is for someone with ADHD….. so much of the reason my behavior has been erratic the last 10 years, because two things are true. I need a lot less stimulation in my life, and I have been through the ringer. I am not blaming, I am saying there are two sides to that equation. I overestimated my social anxiety due to my situation, but that doesn’t render autism invalid. It only made my trauma my single interest when I write. But that’s what taught me voice. Both writing trauma and learning to laugh about it as time went by.

While I thought Supergrover hung the moon, I still had to walk through the dark on starless nights.

Voice.

This blog might as well be called “The Agony and the Ecstasy,” with apologies to Irving Stone.

For people with autism without ADHD, they overfocus on one thing consistently. I am a blend, having both spur of the moment interests and a single thing- being myself here. That’s because the one thing I know is that readers will not find you if you don’t put out a pure signal. People are searching for something real, hungry for it. If you don’t throw down, neither will they….. whether it’s a reader or a partner.

By being a writer, you’re leading from the back and you should be aware of it. That if you write fiction, things will be attributed to you that are just your characters’ personalities. For me, this comes in where my friends are all characters and real people. That their characters cannot be them because I don’t live in their heads. I give you my impression of what’s there, and sometimes I’m right. Sometimes I’m wrong. But I put down all my vulnerabilities first because it makes me stronger, not weaker. I develop emotional resilience by charting growth and being proud of it. I regret all the times when I was full of rage and look forward to not feeling it in the future. I have gotten rid of most things that give me anxiety, but not all because to a neurodivergent person life itself induces anxiety.

It feels a lot like internalized homophobia, because neurodivergent kids are taught to hate themselves early on. Kids have ADHD or autistic or depressed or anxious behavior and it’s attributed to malice. This also creates blowback for me now as a writer. The first problem is that people say to me all the time “don’t write about this” when it is the most boring thing I have ever heard in my life. Making a story out of it would be harder than nailing Jell-O to a wall. But it’s not because the story itself is uninteresting. It’s that it requires a level of craft I don’t have in all cases. I don’t write about things right away all the time. Sometimes, I have to mull it over because some stories are interesting right away. Others unfold in the memory. It’s all about energy and flow in stream of consciousness, and the crafting of the narrative is completely organic. In order for a story to appear here, it has to fit the overall message of what I’m trying to say. It’s not gossip. It’s a treasure trove of memories that won’t mean anything until they become as emotionally detached as I am…. not in that I’m emotionally detached when I write. That when they read they are seeing themselves as a different person, as am I when I go back several years.

All people view themselves differently when they’re reading something written about who they were in the past vs. who they are now. They can acknowledge their humanity easier, because in the moment they’re angry and their pride is hurt. Over time, they come to accept their flaws, and my intent is to write about all of it. Gossiping would be boring because it wouldn’t change me. I wouldn’t grow from being Walter Winchell, but I like that Brené Brown. She’s going to be big one day.

If you are a writer, tell your story. No one owns it, and will probably be grateful down the road because they didn’t have the foresight to make notes. They’ll read yours because they at least know the memory is there whether they agree with you or not. They’re not coming back for your side of the story, but to remember their own. But in that, they see the problem with different eyes. It seems I have learned something in the last few years, when they did.

You cannot write a message to anyone who isn’t ready to hear it, and I’ve stopped trying. This is my web site. It is my treasure trove of memories, and you are invited. It is not the sum total of my writing, it is the gym, and we just got Pilates up in this bitch. It’s hard work, the bleeding. But here’s the thing. The writing is the Band-Aid you put over a wound to stop it, because you can actually see the source. Writing is also the Neosporin that keeps the infection out so that you heal faster.

Also, don’t end a sentence with a preposition. It’s not “where’s the library at?” It’s “where’s the library at, asshole.”

No, But I’ll Think of Something

November 4, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Is there an age or year of your life you would re-live?

Everything in my life has been built on a series of decisions, not just one. It would be like pulling a string on a sweater. Pick at it, and the whole outfit unravels. For instance, if I relived a year of school, I might not have ended up in Portland or DC. The prompt doesn’t say “knowing what you know now,” so I may be assuming a lot. I think that’s because if I went back to the amount of knowledge I had at the time, I wouldn’t have been able to do anything differently.

I am probably the smartest dumb kid you know…. which is how most people view others with ADHD or that have autism and are called “high functioning.” This is because people rarely pick up on ADHD/Autism; it’s not their reality. Neurodivergents have gaps that other people attribute to lack of intelligence, disabled and not differently-abled (which feels trite given how I’ve been treated). It’s just not normal that I need this much isolation. It’s just not normal that I communicate over the Internet. It’s just not normal that…… fill it in with a hundred different things, but those are the top two. To me, it feels like an accommodation. I am less comfortable in a conversation verbally than I am in writing. Even then, I turn down the stimulation in the room so that I can focus on what I’m saying.

It’s the same whether I’m using Facebook Messenger to chat or writing a letter with e-mail rather than snail mail. I say it just that way because most people think e-mail should be a few sentences at best. I write letters like it’s the 1800s and Ma is about to die of dysentery (omg… “Oregon Trail” reference… you’re welcome, PDX.). It’s not that I don’t understand the form. It’s that I want to give people letters that make them laugh, think, absorb…. without having to go to the post office.

Speaking of going to the post office, Zac did. He had TDY (Temporary Duty) in Arizona last week and he sent me the cutest post card with a “Metro Map” of he solar system. If that isn’t sweet enough, it says, “there’s a new John le Carré biopic on Apple TV+. Will you watch it with me?” I think I’ll manage because I don’t love le Carré like a house on fire or anything. His episodes of “Fresh Air” and “Writers & Company” are my favorites of all the episodes I’ve heard. And I’ve been listening to “Fresh Air” for a while. Since Zac is intelligence, albeit military, I’ve called him “George Smiley” from the beginning…. and I am sure with the time of year I’ll be able to tell him to come in from the cold at some point. Also, it tickles me that in voice dictation, Siri turns “George Smiley” into “George :).”

There’s your ADHD aside for the day, because I’m supposed to be talking about everything I don’t want to relive. The Butterfly Effect is real. If I changed a single thing, I wouldn’t have met any of the most important people in my life. I might not have met Bryn or Dana. I might not have met Zac, either, because even if I had been here in my 20s, Zac would have been barely above “tweenager…” in Arizona. I definitely wouldn’t have ended up in this marvelous house. I might have problems with my housemates sometimes, but nothing my landlady wouldn’t fix in a heartbeat. She fought in the Lebanese Civil War. She doesn’t suffer fools gladly, even me….. and that’s a good thing.

I suppose I could re-live this year. That might help, and wouldn’t change my life so dramatically. It would not touch the chain of events that got me here, more precious than gold despite feeling pain over it. My feeling right now is that most people write me off as “being dramatic,” but I don’t think I am. I think I bring up a lot of emotions for people when they read because I’m bleeding when I write. Whether those emotions are good or bad depends on your perspective. Do you admire someone who feels deeply, or do you think they’re designed to stir up shit? An INFJ doesn’t have time for that. We see an ideal world and you can get on the bus or you can’t. Get in, loser. We’re fixing the Middle East.

If I have individual regrets, it’s that I wasn’t diagnosed with autism as a child. I didn’t get all the occupational help that I would need for adult life. But being in “special classes” would have highlighted the idea that I was deficient in those days. I’ve been told that I am brilliant, that there is no one like me despite two processing disorders that fight like it’s WWE. Because of the processing disorders, I could not take in a compliment like “you’re brilliant” because I would have to believe a whole lot before I could get to that point. I had to learn I was different, not bad. “Broken, but still good.”

Part of it is that I’d like to feel the strength I’ve developed this year. Getting away from hammering my self-esteem was an incredible gift to myself. Dark begets dark, and I finally saw it. Light begets light as well. I am under the impression that humans can do anything under the right circumstances, which makes room for me to be the most loving and most psychotic writer you’ve ever known. I can be Dexter, but not in action. In terms of being a kid with a keyboard. Sometimes I’m Lucy Maude Montgomery. Sometimes I’m Karin Slaughter, complete with an equally cute Southern accent. But what I’ve found is that I feel a lot lighter when my inner Dexter is starving because I decided he didn’t need care and feeding.

And honestly, if we’re going to talk about literary characters, I had to find my inner Boo Radley to turn around and admit that I’m really Holden Caulfield.

J.D. Salinger portrays a kid with a lot of the same thought processes that plague me and (spoiler alert) ends up in a mental hospital. I choose to believe that everything he thought was true. That being in the mental hospital was about integration of his personality, the story of what he thinks and what is actually happening becoming inextricably related instead of carrying two books.

It’s almost as if he was telling Stories That Are All True… and some of them actually happened.

Finding Out I’m Just Me

November 3, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

As the year comes to a close, I’m starting to do some reflection on what actually happened. In a lot of ways, I found who I was. In others, things are vastly different. Over the last 10 years, my popularity has grown dramatically. I have regained most of the ground I lost when I tanked “Clever Title Goes Here,” a blog that does still exist, but you have to search for it in the Wayback Machine. Everything I’ve written that I originally wrote there that has meant something to me has been transferred over, and the marriage article I published in 2013 (the most successful entry so far in terms of its promotion) was originally a post using Facebook Notes. It was an offhand set of observations that maybe a couple hundred people (if that) read there, then it exploded once I changed to a different platform.

Apt.

I’m shifting my whole life to a different platform. As a result, I’ve gone from thousands of hits a year to millions (if I count all the bots- let’s not get stupid). It’s astounding that all I do is talk about my reaction to life and people show up. And not only that, they don’t just show up when I’m adorable. They show up on my worst days, too (and seem particularly jazzed about my Anthony Bourdain-type patois). What I’ve learned over the past year is twofold. The first is that monotropic thought processes have all but stopped me checking my stats. As in, I am bleeding all over the page and using it as self-help, not looking to see who has read me and where (although shout out to India, where I have a much bigger audience than in the United States- noticed that before, really took it in after looking at year-end stats). Year-end stats are the only ones to which I really pay attention. Having a general sense of where I am and where I’m going is much better than being anxious about it.

I am also not trying to impress anyone. I am completely self-absorbed, and by that, I mean self-contained. I do not want to write about things over which I have no control, thus reacting and responding to stimuli without assuming that everything I say is correct. It is true and factual to the best of my ability, because obviously I cannot root around in your head. The information I have is only what I’ve been given. I don’t have the right to write about something you didn’t want me to know, but I have the right to talk about my reactions to you separately from your reactions to me. That comes across to everyone else but me as total bullshit, because I am not working with the same knowledge/experience/brain capability that you have.

And yes, I’m judgmental about everything, and I need to stop apologizing for it because a hell of a lot of people process this way. Meyers-Briggs dedicated a whole ass letter to it. You’re either a Judger or a Perceiver, and neither one is bad. You Think your way through a problem, or you Feel it.

I am the combination of all the quiet traits, INFJ. That means I am:

Introverted
Intuitive
Feeling
Judging

That being said, I sound like I am judgmental of people rather than the situation I’m in. I have no problem with telling people their actions make them look like an asshole, but I won’t tell them that they’re bad or wrong. I just won’t sit at your table anymore. But that’s if we’re not close. If you’re worth fighting for, I’m scrappy and I’m down to spar until we shake hands. If there’s no handshake at the end of a fight, there’s no more relationship. This is because if it’s a big enough fight and you don’t work it through, then you both view each other with suspicion and the effect snowballs.

I have become more introverted because I stopped engaging with everyone who wouldn’t engage with me. I might have been angry about it, but I’m not now. I benefited from focusing on myself and not worrying about what other people thought. I stopped worrying about whether Supergrover cared about anything because she didn’t deserve it anymore and thought I should know just how awful I was for being angry that she was a steel trap. Whether she believes it or not, I lost nothing in that transaction because she wasn’t here even when she was here. She coasted and I let her. My fault entirely because when I stopped pussyfooting around something and brought it up, I was instantly a bad person. No one gets to think I’m a bad person and tell me about it anymore. That’s because they can think that all they want, but my self-esteem dictates “get the hell out of Dodge,” because I am not going to spend another eight years trying to solve a problem for which I am only 50% responsible. That’s because there’s a huge, overarching problem and I’ve owned my part publicly and privately, but we can’t move on from it because my emotions are different than hers and are therefore wrong.

I don’t feel like I’m a real person to her, and she is a real person to me. Therefore, I withdrew to focus on what I was putting out there, not what I was receiving. I’ll make other friends with whom I actually have a clean slate when other people are refusing to erase my black marks while I wipe theirs clean. It doesn’t seem like it, I’m sure, because I will want to solve the underlying problem, not move on and hope for the best. That’s because without true forgiveness and healing, a problem never goes away. It will just revisit you in the night.

But I had to learn how to feel that way, because my first instinct when someone found fault with me is to stop taking up space in the world. Clearly, when someone else is angry or put off by me, it must be all my fault. I am sure that I have attributed things to my friends that have nothing to do with me, but that’s what happens when you leave someone in the dark. The moral arc of the universe is indeed long and bends toward justice, but the arc doesn’t move itself.

I am not in charge of moving the arc personally, but I am responsible for my piece. I am trying to lower the heat so that I’m in a different part of the prism. AuDHD rage sometimes steals blue because I see red. I cannot help that. It is a symptom. However, the more I can find coping mechanisms, the less chance there is for a Red Dawn…. I am resting comfortably at about Mood Indigo.

Writing this blog is sincerely trying to come down from all of that. It’s looking at old patterns of behavior and picking out my ADHD and autism moods, much more important than the way my depression and anxiety stem from it. It’s an important distinction because my personality is so different depending on which processing disorder is driving the bus. ADHD has no problem with changing environments and thriving on noise/activity. I don’t even like changing the brand of my socks.

But honestly, I haven’t paid much attention to those things because I refused to see it. I refused to realize how much comfort and the Internet go together, because when I am secure in my body, I am secure in my thoughts. When I am secure in my thoughts, lack of stimulation in the room where I am writing takes all my barriers to communication away. I am just not as quick in conversation. I also tend to look around at how people are talking and try to mask my way through a conversation, rather than putting everything down on the table and seeing who responds to it. That’s really the only thing you can do, otherwise, you’re just driving yourself crazy trying to anticipate everyone’s needs and that will always backfire. It’s like handing a surgeon the wrong tool; they didn’t say “scalpel,” you just assumed that they would need something else first and it was wrong. That happens to me all day, every day and I am so done. How can I anticipate other people’s needs when dollars to donuts we don’t even process information the same way, much less my reactions to it.

I am just sorry that an Internet relationship had to go so wrong for such a length of time that I learned all of this the hard way. But it’s because I went the hard way that I am so flexible now. Hell in the moment, but after doing so much processing, I feel like I really understand myself (and observation tells me this is unusual). I don’t know what it would be like to be so mentally ill AND physically different and not write it out. That’s because depending on external validation was eating my lunch. My self-esteem went up and down with every comment on my blog, Facebook, and in real life. I cannot have that, especially as my audience grows. If I continued on that way, my self-esteem would be dependent on more of you, not more of me. And more of me is the only thing that makes me feel secure. No one can tell me how to feel about something, and my blog would be poorer for it if they could. I know because I’ve succumbed to that vulnerability as well- that if people hammer on my writing long enough, I’ll just nuke the whole thing and move along with my day. That’s why Clever Title is in the Wayback Machine, my back turned on the site that made me. The site I started before Dooce started hers. The site that made it where I could meet other bloggers and have them say, “oh! Yeah! I have heard of it. You’re Leslie, right?”

Until now, I wasn’t even sure of that.

Telling You About It

November 3, 2023November 3, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 4 Comments

What historical event fascinates you the most?

There is no one particular thing in history that fascinates me the most, because it would be like asking me about my favorite book. I cannot pick one because genres are so different. Types of historical events run thusly.

My fascinating war is WWII, because I love reading about both England and America’s contributions to intelligence. It’s not that the intelligence itself was new and different, it’s that the rules we live by today were codified then…. particularly for Americans, because OSS transitioned to CIA in its’ aftermath. Being obsessed with British intelligence during that time period is based on one man. You could argue that he was the first hacker by breaking the Enigma. You cannot argue over whether he was queer. Alan Turing is the best and biggest example of why queer history must be taught. The crown prosecuted him for “homosexual acts” in 1952, AFTER HE BROKE THE FUCKING ENIGMA. Breaking the enigma machine was his Palm Sunday. Good Friday came two years later, when he died by cyanide poisoning. It is thought to be suicide, but unclear. It doesn’t matter. They hailed him as a hero and crucified him, with no resurrection until Gordon Brown issued an apology in 2009.

2009. That’s 57 years.

I do not know how Jesus and Alan Turing would think about being connected to each other in this way, but it’s an apt description of the process… an innocent man encouraged to bully himself to death (or was murdered- with cyanide it’s hard to tell either way and he worked for MI-6 or its equivalent. I am not implicating the British. I’m saying he had a lot of enemies foreign and domestic plus a nightmare of a life…. and don’t give me that “Turing was never recognized” bullshit. He was recognized by those who knew exactly how much he mattered. You cannot tell me that no one could have pulled strings for Turing in terms of being prosecuted by the crown. No matter what, they just didn’t. Never forget that Bletchley Park isn’t as wonderful as you thought it was if the people who worked there later washed their hands of him. It’s why I can love and hate intelligence at the same time, because with stuff like this, their “intelligence” is relative. In terms of American intel, we wouldn’t have done better than England, it’s not “all shit on MI-6 day,” though if Le Carré just saw me type that, he probably laughed and thought, “every day is “all shit on MI-6 day.”).

There was no law in England to retroactively pardon all men convicted of homosexual acts until 2017.

2017.

It doesn’t matter that now CIA is actively recruiting everyone, no matter their gender identity and sexual orientation. Same with the United States military. I am sure that there are still the same type traps queers used to fall into in the US/Britain are still there in third world countries (Africa in particular scares the shit out of me for queer American and British case officers in Uganda and Nigeria. I doubt there would be time to instigate a plan to get them back.). But the reason it doesn’t matter is that we still feel the internalized homophobia and institutional pain of all of it. What our countries have done for us, even when we did the jobs literally no one else could. It hasn’t been enough time for that kind of relief, and if African American pain is any indication, ours isn’t going anywhere. You can’t make marginal changes to society where you keep perpetuating racism/homophobia so that there are reminders of it everywhere and also say “get over it.” England has made leaps and bounds of progress over us because their culture adapted quicker. They got rid of slavery faster and have had even more time to get over it, and they never had anyone buy into slavery to such a degree that they decided to break off from the UK and create their own country just to keep it going. Say what you will about Jonathan Groff, but he abolished slavery in 1807, probably by sending a fully armed battalion to remind them of his love. They also got gay marriage faster and did away with cultural stigma earlier.

I am ultimately glad we won the Revolutionary War, but I often think about what would have happened if we’d resolved our differences. Canada, for all practical intents and purposes, lives in a much colder climate and has a rougher life in all aspects because of it….. and yet they are always happier than we are. Getting rid of cultural stigmas fast would be better than :::gestures broadly at everything:::. We seem to do better in the northeast, not that homophobia doesn’t happen there, but it’s usually not as bad as the Deep South, where attitudes about race have informed attitudes about homosexuality because they’ve used the Bible to interpret the law with no signs of stopping now. They do not give a fuck about freedom of and from religion, and they’re traitors to the Founding Brothers’ message. They would have been on board with hating gays just like they owned slaves and said all men were equal. But if they were worth their salt, they wouldn’t have denied my right to exist. Thomas Jefferson would have been apoplectic because he thought that the highest form of government was limited to perhaps a mayor and a school board. If that. He was all about personal liberty, a blessing and a curse.

In the immortal words of Jed Bartlett, America’s best fake president, “these people don’t vote, do they?” It was sarcastic, but some of the Founding Brothers were very elitist and thought that only people who were educated about the vote should be able. I agree with this in theory, but what are we going to do? Go house to house and check? It’s a democracy, and yet it does hurt it to have someone vote on name recognition alone and things like that. I’m not saying that voter shouldn’t be educated. Far from it. The people who go door to door in that manner are invaluable because most people won’t take the time to research. It’s easier to go to a free event where candidates are shaking hands, but even that’s hard because lots of candidates run on empty-headed charm.

Politics is the world’s second-oldest profession, and I have found that it bears a striking resemblance to the first.

Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book.

-Ronald Reagan

There are a lot of books out there.

That’s one of the reasons I love intelligence. I feel like the news is always getting half the story right. Though I cannot get the whole story on current operations because no one does, the old declassified ones make me able to read and digest; I can make my own opinions rather than a news anchor spinning it for me. Looking up operations during WWII is easy because it has the most that’s been uncovered by now. I want to meet the Ministers of State in the UK as much as I want to meet the Secretary of State in the US. That’s because they would have the most information about current operations, but just the public face of it. The press secretary for received intelligence vs. talking to someone under cover. It’s not that it wouldn’t raise the cool points out the window and twist you up in the game. It’s that they’d have to avoid everything by nature because they don’t know what they can say and what they can’t. Talking with someone at State is superior because they know the talking points. However, they do not know sources, methods, and locations.

Reading the news just isn’t as fun as learning by conversation. It creates more historical events that fascinate me, and it’s exciting to think that I might find the next one. History repeats itself. I was here for 9/11 and 1/6. They’re both dates that “live in infamy,” but sooner or later I’ll find something good.

Here is where I’ll be telling you all about it.

Saying Macbeth Outside the Theater

October 29, 2023October 29, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Shakespeare understands grief better than I do.

Sir Patrick Stewart said on Graham Norton that when he took on the role of Macbeth, Sir Ian McKellan asked if he could give him some advice. Patrick said, “PLEASE!” Patrick proceeded to make tears roll down my face when he said that Sir Ian said, “the key to unlocking Macbeth is ‘and.’ It is not “tomorrow.” It is “tomorrow….. AND tomorrow…. AND tomorrow.” It is the interminable march of days, the piling on of all kinds of trauma small and large, the fact that it seems like it will never end right up until it does. That’s why there’s such a dramatic boost between happiness while poor and happiness while comfortably middle class. When you have savings, the minutiae of life does not drown you, constantly. It is also true that happiness does not get much deeper after that. Once your basic needs are met, it doesn’t make you another 50% happier to be a multimillionaire.

I think that’s because Shakespeare recognized a specific kind of future. The one where you, too are stuck in a moment and get get out of it. I wish I could do all of life like I cook, which is knowing enough to be able to correct a mistake on the fly… not knowing whether I have just experienced a symptom or whether it’s a regular dumbass attack and treating everything like the latter, blowing it out of proportion with rejection sensitivity disorder. And I could give truly frightening examples of it, but most people who have anxiety and depression jump to the worst of conclusions first because they can’t handle their environment in the first place. It’s hard to feel like people love you when they’re exhausted by behavior that frustrates you all by itself.

It’s hard not to feel like everything is your fault when people are so insistent that the common denominator in every interaction is me. There is no possible way I own a hundred percent of the blame for every situation in which I encounter. It’s just not physically possible, especially when I’m a fixer/pleaser and do things to make people smile often. But people are more naturally drawn to you when things are going well…… and when things aren’t going well tend to think they’re right more than they are. So do I. It’s human nature. The objective truth is found in the chasm between our two stories, and most people don’t have the stomach for that.

People conflate “the common denominator is you” to mean that you are responsible for every slight that happens (as if you have that kind of power) and every misfire in communication; it’s “you are somewhat responsible because a situation takes two or more people to create and you need to own your part.” For instance, Dana and I agreed that we both fucked each other up. After one fight, we divided up percentages and decided it was 60/40 in her favor. Then, I told her I would have taken 75 and she lowballed herself. I tend to take on more guilt than I should, and I am now only reclaiming a normal amount of room in the universe rather than being unable to dictate any terms with anyone. It leads all my energy to bleed out, trying to please everyone from my family to strangers. This has often led to people being entitled to their boundaries with me while ignoring mine because I’ve let them get away with it for so long.

I didn’t decide that I was the only arbiter of my friendship with Supergrover. She shut down and didn’t give me information, then didn’t have any tolerance for me making decisions based on what I thought rather than what was actually going on with her. But it wasn’t because I didn’t ask or want that information to purposefully ignore her needs. It’s that mine were never addressed, ever. She felt great about me adoring her, but not about the fact that she had severely emotionally wounded me. And I wouldn’t have cared by now if she hadn’t forgiven me on the surface so that I felt like I was a ghost in her life. The one in which she thought I was a threat and then checked in with me, not establishing new boundaries so that I didn’t constantly walk on eggshells around her.

Like getting annoyed that I wanted to know something basic through conversation, seemingly annoyed I hadn’t looked it up when I couldn’t have Googled the information, anyway. Why would I do that if I don’t want to give you the impression that I try to get information about you that you don’t want to give?

Tomorrow…. AND tomorrow…. AND tomorrow….

The feeling of how she treated me hasn’t gone away, and I know exactly why I didn’t walk. It felt like the pattern to which I’d become accustomed to in childhood, trying desperately to please someone that had already moved on so that it felt like I was pouring love into them while they tolerated me. Fully capable of being a baby monkey, too scared to walk away from wire because I don’t know how to find cloth yet. I haven’t been taught. But I am teaching, reparenting myself. Trying to give mysellf what I didn’t get, and part of it is saying what I mean and meaning what I say. Everything is a lie as I figure out what’s masking and what’s not.

I just know that my social masking wasn’t limited to autism, it was reinforced by trying to be good (which meant quiet and out of the way) and covering my needs. I’m not special. Most women and girls do this. However, most girls aren’t preacher’s kids, either.

I’m not trying to piss anyone off, it’s just a side effect of change. People see me differently and they ought to. But remember that we’re both going through a struggle and behavior doesn’t exist in a vaccum. If I have to be responsible for my behavior, you have to be responsible about what triggered it. You cannot say I am wrong a hundred percent of the time, because my self-esteem isn’t low enough to believe it anymore. I can work with boundaries, but not when you don’t set them.

So much of my need to run from Supergrover stemmed from her marrying Michael, then not telling me for almost two years, then saying “surely I must have gotten the wedding announcement,” then saying there weren’t pictures, etc. I can believe that last one, but everything else sounds like “lies you tell” when you want to protect someone…. and this isn’t the first or only example of her doing it. Her identity fundamentally changed, her life had moved on in a concrete way, and it felt like I wasn’t worth telling…. whether it was/is true or not. It’s not what she intended, it’s what I felt in those moments. She also didn’t talk about anything but work when that was the last thing I wanted to know about her most days.

It was too big a hurt to mend alone, but an even bigger one that she was right there and couldn’t hear me. She had the right to set that boundary with me, but I had the right to walk away when she did it, because she explicitly said that there were things she wouldn’t be opening up about again…. which was, of course, the thing that drove my crazy dreams. Then, over time, she relaxed about it and I felt like there was a new boundary set with no way of knowing whether it was true. Actions and words didn’t line up for a long time. She wouldn’t have reacted to me so angrily all those years if I hadn’t hurt her, or if we had truly mended the rift. We “put the word ‘free’ on a note so high we couldn’t sing it,” paraphrasing Tony Kushner. Or, one of us couldn’t. Taking Kushner literally, I can hit that high B flat at 1500 yards when I’m on my game. I’m currently not, but that’s not the point. The point is that you get out what you put into it. I wouldn’t be able to hit an emotional high B flat at 1500 yards without years of understanding someone, just like years of voice lessons makes me able to sing “The Star Spangled Banner” (No one will ever, no not ever beat Whitney Houston taking it in four at the SuperBowl.) I will never be Whitney Houston without another party’s input. It takes both of us being vulnerable to move forward.

It’s so counterintuitive, but leans the relentlessness of life into rolling joy rather than rolling pain.

Being able to move fast and take chances doesn’t happen in a vacuum, either. It comes from examining yourself to the point where you understand and trust your own intuition, because you’ve talked to enough people to know whether you’re a good judge of a situation or not. How often your behavior is a source of joy or worry. When it pays off to focus on yourself and when you’re ignoring people. When you ignore them too long, they’ll go away.

When I tried to set boundaries with someone who had no issue setting them with me and just not apprising me of the situation consistently enough to understand it, she ran. I don’t have to take it personally, but I do have to remember it’s what she does. She doesn’t let me know what the boundaries are and blames me for overstepping them, but is also the one I’d trust with my whole life because she’s shown me she’s rock solid in other areas of our relationship. It’s worth working on, but…

Tomorrow….. AND tomorrow… AND tomorrow.

The Road Less Taken

October 24, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What’s the biggest risk you’d like to take — but haven’t been able to?

There are so many risks I’d like to take, but haven’t been able. To count is to number the stars.

The biggest risk I’d like to take is having children in my life. That I don’t want to have them, but I’m not afraid of my partner wanting/having them. It is not that I am specifically looking to date a mother. I am saying that I had to let go of a lot of fear when I was dating Sam, because it was a thing between us that she had kids… but by “thing between us,” it’s the the possibility of being “mom’s girlfriend who lets us get away with murder” became real in a way it wasn’t before. I have no doubt that I would have been particularly good with her kids, because they were every bit the music nerds I was as a child. I started brass in fifth grade in “the system,” shorthand for the toughest music program in the nation, depending on where you go. But excellence in music is something Texas schools take very, very seriously. So, it’s not competition inside your school so much as it is the willingness to thrash other bands, publicly. In my band, we never did “Flight of the Bumblebee,” but that scene in Drumline is indicative of the kinds of things my band could do. My one year in marching band, we did a suite from “On the Waterfront.” I’ve never seen the movie, but Bernstein wrote a great score. What this has to do with the kids is that they were the type kids who would not have been impressed by this because their bands probably did something better…… and the conversations about it transcend age, because you remember what you’ve played and the circumstances surrounding it forever.

In fact, the biggest reason I’d like to have children in my life is to pass on everything I know about music. Classical music is a driving passion in my life, and something that children simply do not love without repeated exposure to it. I promise that even to a child who hates it, if your favorite piece is Moonlight Sonata, they remember…. and it will make them cry when they lose you. I, for all practical intents and purposes, cannot listen to solo piano often. My response is visceral and primal. Grief is a gaping wound you’re constntly living around and trying to ignore its presence. I work on my shit all day long- living around grief is not that you become immune to growth because you can’t get over it. It’s that you are no longer who you used to be. You are not only grieving the one you lost, but the self you presented in front of them.

The closest my mother ever got to an unguarded version of me was telling her I was in trouble psychologically and letting her visit me in the hospital. In the past, I wouldn’t have told her something like that, that I needed her in that specific way, because it was both Lindsay’s and my mission not to upset her. We hid things from her because we knew they’d set her off, worrying her needlessly. We did that successfully, but our mother didn’t really know us, either.

There were two things that set her off after the divorce. My being queer, because I was part of that “perfect family” vision she lost and it made me feel guilty AND the fact that I was the child that reminded her of my dad the most in temperament and she did not appreciate that fact in the slightest. When she was angry at me, she was fighting with someone who wasn’t in the room. I can have empathy for it, but it doesn’t erase the fact that in some ways, we just became incompatible. That’s because she gave me the message constantly that being like him was bad. I spent a lot of time at my dad’s house because of it, because the longer we lived together, the more I became anxious about it.

One of the biggest pain points I had to reconcile in therapy about my childhood was feeling like I threw Lindsay to the wolves. That my mother completely decompensated and I didn’t help because I couldn’t. My autistic nature and sense of justice makes me the kind of person that will argue with a signpost. Her depressive nature made me feel bad about needing to talk about our relationship on that level and my mother’s refusal to go there. She did not want to admit she was sick. She did not want to admit that she needed therapy and medication. I am not saying this lightly, like I’m just this therapy case that thinks everyone should do what I do. I am saying that in my clinical observation, she was a trainwreck….. and she couldn’t clean it up because she didn’t think she deserved it. Depression ate her lunch as well as blindness. She was stuck in a permanent state of Eeyore that left a pallor over the whole house. Her depression rubbed up against mine and it was every bit as detrimental as adding a depressant like alcohol to already depressed behavior. It went forth and multiplied.

Fundamentally, she did not like me. I am not saying she didn’t love me with all of her heart and mind. I am saying she did not like the way I processed emotions because it came across as blunt and narcissistic because she would never have had me tested for anything that would have put me into special classes. She didn’t want to face a social stigma if she didn’t have to. Autism makes you sound like you’re the biggest asshole in the world, that everything revolves around you, when in most cases it’s that I’m not thinking about your response and I throw truth bombs when you aren’t used to them. If you are a person that avoids confrontation, then all observations of behavior like I have on my blog are going to feel like an attack. That’s because my words don’t carry the weight of social construct or nicety. I am not working from that core, masking my thoughts. I am letting them flow through me and writing is my every day example of how my mind works. I am trying to create a YouTube video in your mind about autism and ADHD through the cunning use of word pictures.

My brain processes information differently than any of my friends, but I would say that Supergrover and I have the closest thinking style to each other than the rest…. except Beck. We are so connected I am not sure we are actually different people. I am feeling the same heady rush you get in a romance because new relationship energy is focused no matter what kind it is. It makes me feel good, a new source of dopamine that gets constantly refilled because I am not using her for it. We refill each other’s cups of energy because we’re focused so hard on ourselves. You work differently from a place of abundance than you do of scarcity. The biggest risk I’ve already taken is unmasking. I’ll never do anything more important, because when everything is already out there, my blog cannot be used for blackmail. I can be confident in my intuition again, because I have extensive knowledge of what is and is not normal for me.

I am never telling people what they should do in a conversation, just “this is what I’m hearing and that is how it makes me feel.” I am a stickler for not using the words “you made me” in a conversation….. or, more accurately, when people say “you tried to make me.” Absolute bullshit this time, Sherlock. I express needs and retreat or move forward depending on your responses. Some of them are naturally going to make me feel good. Some of them are going to make me feel bad. But you didn’t make me or try to make me feel any of those things. I am responding. I am not going to put myself through blaming myself for your words. That I should have known something that you did, because you have a certain picture in your mind of how our interaction should have gone accoding to social convention, when I am always standing just to the left of those. I can see and analyze human behavior, but I have to know if the person is neurotypical or neurodivergent first, because that’s going to alter how I view someone’s perception. What they are capable of seeing and what they’re not.

For instance, I would take responsibility for Supergrover’s care and feeding if she was ill, but I would not take responsibiity for knowing whether she needed it or not. That I should have been somehow able to divine when she was ill and what that meant for me in terms of how I should respond. I am using this virtual relationship on purpose, because taking responsibility for helping her get well is something she has never asked of me, therefore it can be a fictional example instead of a real one. But people in relationships do this to each other all the time. They leave their expectations unsaid so their needs are unmet and blame the other person for just not seeing it. I can blame my mother for that in a way I cannot blame others, because if something about my behavior isn’t noticed, the hierarchy of parenthood says it’s something she should have…. and should have listened when I expressed needs in a way that no one else should have to do now. But I do not blame her for not responding to my needs when I was so excellent at keeping them hidden. I am saying that when I opened up, she seemed immediately uncomfortable with my life. Therefore, the urge to open up wasn’t necessary right up until it was unavoidable.

I have no doubt that other queer kids feel this every day. That they are told through thought, word, and deed that they are not enough. That their parents have no idea how much cultural stigma affects them because they are fed an extra helping at home when our growth and development is fundamental to setting our personalities. The message that we are not enough is so loud that our suicide rates are up to three times larger than the general population. We are not far enough out of white supremacy Jesus apologists everywhere for straight people not to be enculturated that way, that straight is the only way and if you’re gay, be celibate about it.

Sex is one of God’s greatest gifts and on the present day base of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, yet despite homosexuality naturally occuring in every population on earth, including animals, and evangelicals feel nothing about the fact that they’re justifying stunting queer people that way. That there should be no discussion about the fact that science is real and the Bible is not, and I say that because nothing is provable, not that the truths it holds don’t matter. I do have faith, but it’s centered on what Jesus accomplished and not sticky, sticky blood theology.

There is a fountain filled with blood……

Give me a break.

I wear an icthus, not a death instrument. I believe in intelligence and espionage, thus loving the story of smuggling Jesus out of Israel and into Egypt, and the new church establishing the sign of the fish to know whether they’re safe or not. For the uninitiated, if you were Jewish and a part of the new sect vs. orthodox, you would drag your shoe in the sand in the shape of the bottom arc of the fish. If the other person was Christian, they would drag their foot in the opposite arc. It was an underground way of spreading the message.

Those are the good parts I take away from the Bible and not the hypocrisy surrounding it. If I take in the message of the Southern Baptist church, I am forced into a state of shame that even God wouldn’t want. God promises a future in the Old Testament to prosper you, and anything that steps on my personal liberty to a degree in which that promise is not extended to me is over the line, Smokey. Mark it zero. There is a direct correlation between evangelical Christianity and American police thinking they are the sole judge, jury, and executioner when, in fact, all lives matter. We are not saying that black lives matter. We are saying your behavior takes away from that message. That you are saying one thing and doing another, constantly speaking out of both sides of your face. Calling out hypocrisy is different than oppression. The police are also white supremacy apologists because their religion tells them it’s okay…. and the police skew conservative on social issues. Clearly.

Clearly.

See? Now I sound judgmental about policemen when I am judgmental of the system. My ire with the police and my ire with men are the same. I have a boyfriend. Clearly I am not anti-male. But I am definitely critical of the ways in which white men are groomed to treat women, and critical of men who aren’t strong enough to stand up to that systemic change and let it happen. The police continue to believe black lives matter less no matter how much we might attempt to break them of the habit…. but things are changing, slowly. I think there’s a wreckoning going on and people who don’t normally stand up are finally feeling the burn. We cannot let our culture go to hell in a handbasket, and we are slowly destroying each other. We cannot legislate our way out of treating each other like shit.

Especially when so many of us process information differently and because of it, we are treated as less than as well. Mentally ill people are seen as their diagnosis and not their personality. I will always be known for the ups and downs of bipolar and not what I manage to accomplish in spite of it. Some days, I am not even capable of enough spoons to leave the house. I get everything delivered so leaving the house is only dependent on the things I can’t find with Uber Eats or Amazon. What no one seems to get is that needs to be my normal. That I function better with less stimulation and engagement, so please. Invite me to anything and everything, but have sympathy for the fact that I cannot have as much energy as you all the time. Let me off the hook for social engagements immediately and don’t walk away mad about it because I am not conforming to what you need in that moment.

That’s because when I do have spoons, you’ll get the very best of me. I won’t always let you down. I am just different. What I am saying is that I cannot respond to that much stimuli all the time, and I isolate in order to gather energy for it. I am not shy, I just don’t have much of a social battery and when it runs out, I need to get the fuck out of public. When I panic with social anxiety, I don’t expect anyone to be happy about it. I am saying that I am trying my best, and please be patient with me.

I am not responsible for your reaction, only to be sensitive to the fact that I am not always working on my time and I need to roll with it. I can’t completely drop out of society except for my weird little collection of internet friends, the clown shoes to my stripey tent. What makes my friends so lenient with me is that they can be absolutely honest with me as well. You don’t want to go to something I planned five minutes before? Sure, no problem, but I will be angry if you don’t reschedule. Not rescheduling is the friendship death knell. I think that’s why I prefer internet relationships. I can’t remember who said it, but “the kind of people I’m attracted to are the kind of people who also don’t want to leave their house.”

If it seems weird, think about how many college students have bonded without ever having met since 2001, when distance education really began to get in full swing. I have no doubt it led to romances after showing off in class…. easy when you’re virtual and also in the same city so the transition isn’t a huge vacation with a once in a lifetime chance of it working out. If I moved to DC “for Supergrover” at all, it’s so that if our relationship would go in that direction, it could without incident. For instance, saying “meet you in Dupont” is different than “my plane lands at 10:44.” It’s the safety and security of meeting for lunch instead of meeting for lunch after picking them up, hating each other, and being stuck with each other for three to seven days.

It was Ted Lasso who said, “be curious, not judgmental.” I’ve been like this my whole life, my autistic gift for rambling manifesting as truly personal questions that some people are into and some find offensive. What becomes problematic is two people who love to have deep discussions start out as the first and degrade into the latter. If someone hurts you and still asks intrusive questions, you’re going to see it as an attack when the other person’s tone hasn’t changed. Then, it’s harder to mend the problem.

Emotional problems will never resolve with the ignorance of them.

Fighting through it is hell on earth, so the best thing that people can do for themselves is to spend time with a third party, because the longer you sit in that tension, the more you make decisions based on how you feel without the other person’s input and it starts the drift. One fissure snowballs, and people tend to ghost each other quickly due to lack of emotional bravery. They cannot sit in the cognitive dissonce of fighting without taking so much personally that they walk away thinking that they’ve been wronged on both sides…. at the end of a fight, not the beginning.

The biggest risk you’ll ever take is being vulnerable enough to work it out, especially when times get tough, because that involves strength you didn’t know you had and don’t develop until you have the desire. Relationships devolve into push/pull, because equilibrium is harder and harder to maintain.

Insecure attachments do not feed anyone. You have to know when your attachment style doesn’t feed you, because you cannot go any longer without understanding how they became that way. When you start with the question of how they behaved, you end at the possible things you might have triggered it, and not for malice. Checking where you could have done something differently that would have helped and didn’t, then cataloguing it to deal with another problem later on. That’s how you win or learn rather than losing. Each failure becomes a building block instead of a seminar on how much you suck.

Continuing to believe that “you made me” is a thing will constantly make you feel angry or guilty. Knowing that you’re responsible for contributing to a problem without being responsible for others’ reactions is key. It keeps you humble enough to leave room for negotiation, because you recognize everything isn’t all about you. I’ve realized I sound like a narcissist because I will keep arguing ad nauseam, making the other person feel unheard and like my word is law when in reality I just have an anxious attachment style and the need to turn over a problem in my mind until I can stop overexplaining. I often walk off in an argument, but not without it being understood that I am coming back…… most of the time. The swings were too big with Supergrover because the problem was so great. I couldn’t stand the thought of going one more minute like this and having to put energy toward it because of the trauma bond.

In short, I never would have tried to become Supergrover’s real friend because I didn’t feel secure enough to rest in it. I was just willing to work on it until I did, because the safety and securiy of knowing we could meet for lunch and not have it be a big deal has always been off. I invited her to go with me to something and she said no, but “someday, perhaps.” It’s the only time I’ve ever “asked her out,” because I knew that to ask more than once was beyond her comfort zone and I got tired of waiting to know if she still thought the idea was weird. I felt like the only way out was through, that we should sit in it until it wasn’t weird anymore. Until we could commit like an angel and a demon who have each other’s backs for all eternity. Lucifer and all his brothers….. but taking turns as to who is demonic and angelic all the time because they do. Never forget that Lucifer is a fallen angel, a child of God like everyone else. Neil Gaiman is the only writer I’ve ever met to capture this perfectly. “Good Omens” is a masterpiece. Neil Gaiman is entirely responsible for us being called “The Holy and the Moly,” changing frequently. I think she would have been a good sous chef. I think I would have, too, just in a different area of her life.

It fits in with all my other nonbinary natures, and it’s a huge risk to acknowledge it because I have imposter syndrome. That my writing doesn’t matter, that I’m bullshitting people over my gender, that people only tolerate queerness or disability to be nice, the list goes on and on. But acknowledging it allowed me to let go of anger, guilt, frustration at that treatment and just call it out as it comes up.

In the world of “Let it Go,” I am Roy Kent, looking up at Rebecca and mouthing the words.

Oi!

If It Happened to You

October 23, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 5 Comments

The more I understand the disconnect in my personality, which is neurodivergent to a bigger degree than I thought, I understand more about why my reactions seem so two-faced when I’m not mallicious in the slightest and so hurt when I hurt people with my own fallibility. I am not saying that I have an excuse for every wrong thing I’ve ever done. I’m saying that maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on myself because a public lashing every day is only so helpful. When you have problems, you have to start searching for solutions. I always start with medicine, because you can’t live in a doctor’s house and not begin the process of thinking that way, just like when you turn 18 in a lawyer’s house should count as One L. Plus, for background on my novel, I got three books from the Kindle store on how to think like a spy, because one of the plot points is a recruitment in Paris with enormous consequences. My protagonist has to be a confident enough asset that a case officer can trust them.

I know exactly jack and shit about how to do that, which is why I spend so much time at the Spy Museum reading non-fiction set in France and Asia. I know a lot about The Cold War and the transition from OSS to CIA. I don’t know anything about Viet Nam, which is why it is both inconvenient and not that I’ve decided to write a book about it. Pros include going to places I never thought I’d go, meeting people I never thought I’d meet in real life that only exist as avatars, and possibly having a good enough proposal to get a grant to finish, and I believe with all my heart that I can do it because Jonna Mendez said, “maybe we should hire you.” 😉 Cons include leaving my house.

This is because half of my brain speaks ADHD, and half of my brain speaks Autism. The way those brains fire are completely different, yet there is crossover in behavior… not what drives it. Therefore, I am constantly tempted by change and hate it within a month. Why I have more energy than I think I do, constantly. Why I look like a vulnerable narcissist a good bit of the time and I can stop apologizing for it now. The way I describe situations hurts neurotypical people because they’re reading my words with a voice I don’t intend. I am being kind and not nice. They are being nice and not kind. I do not interpret words no matter how they’re delivered without running them through a million checksystems before I know how I feel about something. That’s because my first reaction is ADHD, no impulse control. My response is autistic. I go deep inside myself and ruminate, getting burnout quickly and having to regroup with no if or when as to my reappearance. This is because it takes time and patience for me to get the energy to do social masking……. because when I don’t my interactions hurt people.

The urge not to sugarcoat things anymore is how I’m letting myself off the hook. That I was doing myself more harm by trying to sugar coat something because my emphasis was on the wrong point. It’s not that I am not listening. It is that I don’t understand. I am not a narcissist because I’m direct. I act like one because I’ve made the executive decision not to care about what comes out of my mouth because I cannot control your reactions. I can only control what I say. I can be mindful about that without concentrating on my fear of your response. Fear is what causes burnout and isolation. Burnout is difficult, because you cannot predict spoons in advance. So, you take a day off and it’s fine, but it’s not enough transition time to reset anything.

The other thing is that my autistic nature has a tough time with having days off because of my need for structure and schedule…. and burnout because masking becomes exhausting quickly.

The main difference between being a narcissist and not is empathy. It’s not that I don’t have it. Far from it. I process it differently than a neurotypical brain and get edgy at being misunderstood all the time, even by other people who are neurodivergent because not all quirks line up. When you both have processing disorders, the way you communicate is sometimes more difficult and less. It’s hard to tell what’s a bad pattern and what is us continually reading each other wrong?

I learned in one YouTube video why my entire marriage to Dana was on the rocks from day one, and it’s something that neither of us would have picked up on because I wasn’t a writer back then in the sense that I am now. I didn’t spend hours alone every day like I’ve done for the last eight years. We did not have the coping mechanisms to deal with autism, ADHD, and cerabral palsy because only one of us had all three. I was never going to get as much alone time as I needed from an extrovert. She was never going to get as much interaction as she needed from me. The longer I went into writer mode, the more I got comfortable with receding into total autism mode…. where writing took away all my barriers in communication and I felt freer when I wasn’t constrained by other people’s opinions….. not that I don’t need other people in my life.

Writing brought on the process of unmasking all of this. Why do I write from the early morning and sometimes again into the night? Because I am not interrupted. There is no one to tell me to shut up because if my friends don’t want to talk to me, they don’t have to. Other people will read my words and it will resonate with them instead. The last thing I want in this world is to feel like a burden, so I retreat to an enormous degree. I want to invite friends into my inner circle that understand me, rather than having to save up enough energy to mask. I just don’t have that kind of disorder. I refuse to be continually uncomfortable all the time, and it was my 37th birthday that really got me thinking about all this… in retrospect, of course.

My birthday that year was at the end of my first year of friendship with Supergrover, cute and cuddly monster that she is. So, we’d had a year of talking nearly every day, nearly every hour. It was so adorable it made me throw up in my mouth a little bit. I couldn’t have been happier on the first day of kindergarten. This is relevent because my birthday party was where I realized another, darker nature of the fissure with Dana and it was becoming more apparent. We simply were not compatible on a fundamental level and had ignored it for years. Keep in mind that I am not saying all the other reasons are now invalid. I am saying that they are the many cores I’ve been working through these past 10 years. The problem is that complex. No one thing is true, it is a wheel in which I stuck too big a stick. But the birthday party stuck harder.

Dana and my friends threw a birthday party for me the night before my first day at work. I didn’t have to be there until 0900, so it was no big deal. We weren’t big partiers. Even if everyone stayed until midnight, it was fine. Still plenty enough time to sleep, as I wouldn’t have slept a full eight hours on the night before my first day, anyway.

Well, people get there and I’m cool for about an hour tops. This is not unusual. What was unusual was being strong enough to say, “the house is huge. You guys go ahead.” I was okay with it and also not. My birthday party wasn’t for me. To design a birthday party for me is to make sure I am not completely overstimulated at every moment. But I didn’t know that ahead of time. I just surfed up and down, masking and not. Deciding on the fly and suddenly needing to leave. It makes me seem like an all-around self-centered jerk when in reality my nerves are on fire.

They’re on fire from masking and from trauma, inextricably interrelated so fire is never one alarm. One sets off the other, an alarm as loud as morning prayer in Damascus and which also changes five times a day. My prayer is to be stable, inshallah. We can’t always get what we want. I haven’t stopped trying.

I can only ask for so much patience from other people while I work out my shit, while also accepting that my brain and body are more complicated than most. I’ve been beating the shit out of myself for not understanding everything perfectly since I was born, and assuming that my limitations are other people’s fault a hundred percent of the time. None of that is objectively or subjectively true, but the neurotypical world is set up for me to feel like a failure. Representation matters, but in terms of autism and ADHD in adults, no one cares. Apparently, ADHD is only for children and we should have just learned to cope by now.

If I had been diagnosed as autistic, that is seen differently in other people’s minds. People look at ADHD and just see spazzed out little boys. You begin to see how ADHD works in women by looking at autism first. That’s because they aren’t the same, but again, present that way. People with ADHD tend to have problems logically. People with autism tend to have problems emotionally. My body has decided to cut out the middle man and have those two disorders duke it out for supremacy when both of them suck.

ADHD will only rescue me from autistic burnout for so long. That’s why when I travel, I’ve loved the seven and 10 day trips I’ve taken and hated the shorter ones. Not enough transition time to really enjoy myself. But again, “hating” is relative. I loved going to Paris, but it was a long haul for three or four days. It completely upended my rhythm for months. It was worth it, but for my thrill-seeking ADHD side. My autistic side was nervous and fearful the entire time. I am sure I was delightful company because of it, because my dad and sister don’t expect me to see fear in front of them when it’s relentless. It’s not fear of them. It’s that everything in my environment affects me differently than it does them. They’re both neurodivergent, but not autistic as far as I can tell. That’s because my dad and sister can change his environments at will and I cannot keep up with either of them.

It affects everything, from feeling out of place socially to the tag on my shirt to the people talking about their problems way over there that I’ve somehow managed to overhear. It’s too much stimuli in every outside environment, which is why I take public transportation. It is built-in, ironclad transition time. If I am driving, I am still in control of something. If I’m riding the train, I can fall asleep….. which I often did coming home from my job as a SQL developer because I could only handle so many people and problems in one day before I passed out. I know I prefer the train because I did have a car here for a while and wrecked it because of rumination. I got so lost in my own head that I took an unmarked curve a little too fast and couldn’t correct in time. Or, at least, I assumed it was marked until the cop told me it was marked on the other side of the freeway. Well, thanks a lot. That was helpful. I’ve never been here in my life.

I decided that being neurodivergent and having eye problems was not the best recipe for a driver. Getting my Fire HD and Bluetooth keyboard was the committment I needed to make the hour and a half on the train count. It’s a great writing environment as long as you don’t forget your headphones. I find that either movie soundtracks (Argo, The Bourne Identity, Syriana for me) or white noise are my best bets for being able to tune everything out except the motion the train makes, unperterbed by the sound. Reinforcing boundaries is hard when you know that some people are just crazier than you’ll ever be. Logic keeps chasing them, but they’re stronger and faster.

It’s not the sound of the train that’s bothersome, but the people on it. Most DC locals keep to themselves. Tourists will talk to anyone, for any reason, at any time. Most Americans are too polite to turn down genuine interest because we don’t want to seem rude, while avoiding tourists is a DC sport. There is also a huge difference between the federal government and the DC population. There is a reason that 5:00 in DC used to be called “white flight” and it has gotten so much better over the years, but we aren’t done yet. Therefore, there’s disagreements of all kinds on the Metro and you just have to ignore it when it gets loud…. that is, if I am completely uninterested in the conversation and not jumping in because I can’t not. “I had the right to remain silent. I did not have the ability. -Ron White

Again, ADHD vs. Autism. Am I worried about challenging my political beliefs on the subway to learn something and have more to talk about here, or am I worried that my sock is sliding down into my shoe? Are we going to talk about peace in the Middle East or why Whole Foods doesn’t have the veggie dogs I like and why I am nuclear pissed about it?

But if we’re going to talk about love, know that I’m not trying to hurt you when I describe real life situations, and I’m not trying to evade fault. I am owning what is mine, without speaking for you. I think that is being kind, in spite of the fact that it wasn’t nice.

I don’t need you to understand it. I just need you to respect it. Otherwise, I’m just another Leslie crying at her birthday party. I’m betting that if you are autistic, you have cried, too, when it happened to you.

Rearranging Emotional Furniture

October 22, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What have you been working on?

Hm. Today it’s “Sunday mornin’ rain is fallin,” and I’m hearing Adam Levine singing in my head. I made myself an outstanding cup of coffee in which I mixed every kind I have in one airtight container (the only one I have, thus mixing the end of other bags). It’s Cafe Bustelo, Community Coffee King Cake, and some kind of Folgers I don’t remember buying, but someone did. Not sure what I’ll brew next, but I have a lot of tea I’m looking forward to as well. I still haven’t drunk all the Pu-erh John sent me and I’ve also got lots of Stash English Breakfast and powdered matcha. Of everything I make in the morning, I like matcha the best. I just don’t like to drink it every morning because making it takes longer than a Keurig pod. I have about two hours before I have to “get ready for church,” and by that I mean I’d like to take a shower before I watch YouTube. It might be a good day to take a look at the scriptures later.

I had a line cook that didn’t know me from Adam come after me online for saying that the pen with which Biblical literalists paint the Bible is the root of all evil, and he thought I was saying that Christians were the root of all evil. Ripped me a new one for saying David and Jonathan were in love. We can’t even prove Jesus and John weren’t, it’s just more likely that he had a partner and a housecarl……. like me.

If that wasn’t clear, I meant he was married to Mary Magdalene and it is written that John is his favorite Disciple, so I’m sure he showed up big for everyone to think that and write it down. I don’t think it was sex. I think it was being willing to give up your career for someone else’s…….. like me.

The line cook said that if he made fun of my community, it would be a hate crime. But if I made fun of his, that was fine. Got butt hurt, so I knew that it was a pointless fight before it started. I said, “you don’t even know who you’re talking about when you say I have no idea what I’m talking about, and this is not a fight you want to have with me.” And I tapped out, because I couldn’t get across to someone with a literalist view of the Bible that taking the Bible seriously and not literally is the only thing I can do in this day and age. There is no proof, and we need to stop pretending there is. There’s not even any proof in the Bible that God exists, only people’s reactions and responses to them. No Biblical literalist is going to accept that as truth, so why bother? He doesn’t study theological giants. I do. If I am the one studying debates between Rowan Williams and Christopher Hitchens to learn the finer points of what puts Christopher off about organized religion, I can use it. I can use Hitch’s words against him in a wonderful way, because I know he doesn’t care about Christians who take constructive criticism and use their faith to improve themselves. I feel like Christianity would do a lot better in this country if it stayed in its lane.

It is embarrassing. EMBARRASSING. That England does this better than we do and they have had divine right of kings and no separation of church and state since the beginning is one of the weirdest things on earth. We supposedly built this country on separation of church and state….. but what we really said in effect with our cullture is that each state was free to pick its own organized religion. Georgia and Massachussetts Bay were not the same.

We of the United States have never protected freedomm from religion as much as we’ve needed, and I’m tired of it. Again, there is only so much of white supremacy Jesus that can be justified, as well as hypocrisy. People are leaving the church in droves and we shouldn’t stop them because we brought this upon ourselves. Our membership will change when we do and not before. In my opinion, I can hold everything I love about religion in my own heart. I don’t need the church if it decides to die, and it seeems to be doing much to help itself along the way. Catholocism will probably die before it changes because Pope Francis is not as liberal as it needs to get. He is just a Band-Aid, and cannot be even that because there are so few priests willing to push the envelope further than saying that gays and the divorced are people.

You have to leave behind what no longer serves you. I have already decided that I am right for the church, but they decided when I was 15 that they were not right for me. I moved to a denomination where I could be ordained, I was just tired by then…… and frankly, too hurt. I really think so. I think I went into shock at my situation, then my adulthood believing I wanted something I didn’t. It wasn’t untrue. It waas when I was ADHD and masking I could handle leading a congregation. When I was autistic and trying to comfort myself, I couldn’t handle even one other person in the room because of overstimulation. All of my behavior cannot be contributed to depression and hypomania, because my energy levels switch too fast for that.

I am a neurodivergent that is self-aware to an enormous degree. I realized that I should not handle a congregation because of what I could do to them and vice versa. I don’t think that mentally ill people make good pastors, because you react differently to emotional stimuli when you feel good, and the difference is so striking that you can’t project stability because you aren’t stable, actually. And there’s no shame in it. Realizing that you are not mentally healthy enough to take on the needs of others because your own health is a lot to manage is courageous.

I didn’t want to stop leadding people. I wanted to start leading people in a different way. I think I do because so many people tell me that. A woman yesterday told me that I have a very interesting life and that I wrote from deep inside me. Exactly what I was trying to portray in my writing and something I needed to hear because things haven’t been going all that well in my estimation.

I have no doubt that Supergrover has looked in on me and decided that healing and moving on is better for me, but I’m only doing it because I have no other choice. It’s what I’m working on because I have already done all I’m going to do. The way I write is assuming she’s out because she told me she was, but she rarely holds me to one entry or letter forever. We’re just not close enough to stop her ire because we’re not checking the story we’re telling ourselves anymore. She has no idea what I’m doing or not doing in trying to portray our lives when they meet. I use the adrenaline of sex to cover a lot of other ground and I promise she’d rather people think we were naked in the middle of the freeway, and even more interesting to think about what has more adrenaline than sex? All right. You’ve got me. She designs roller coasters.

She doesn’t like all this, but she gets it. Symbolism in writing is a thing. Also, Dana will laugh. She doesn’t like it, but she gets it……. or at least, I hope they both laugh because it’s been 10 years since all that for Dana and 8 years of trying to manage just the two of us since. It’s an interesting conundrum because the longer I go without contact, the more okay I am. And then I’ll hit a trigger and need her immediately, but I self-soothe instead of getting anxious she’s not around. However, I do not think this is the way our relationship should go. I think we’d be much happier if we made the commitment to be imortant on both sides. This is because the more we communicate intensely in the time we have, neither of us have to worry about each other. For instance, having one 45 minute meeting early on would save us a lot of them later, preferable for people who are both obsessed with other things, including their families.

It’s weird to feel like our spines are sewn so we don’t face each other, and our strength is in the seam. I wish I could watch her face when she reads that line, because I think it’s one of the images that she’ll love. I have so many perfect pictures of us, and exactly none of them are something she wouldn’t enjoy as well. That by now Michael is real to me in a way he wasn’t before, especially the way he changed her life in a way that I would have wanted for her if I’d been able…. and not just on one level, but many. I told her than and she thought I was trying to make her feel bad. No, just trying to say that I love her for who she is, not who I’m trying to get her to be. That she can be straight if she has to be. I am absolutely certain at times she wonders why, because I’ve never met a woman who didn’t say that if they were in any way queer their husbands would never hear from them again.

What has happened over time is that I want to be there like a family member without forgetting where I started. That our relationship is an evolution and I’m always going to treat her like I used to be attracted to her and not because I am and trying to hide it. It’s that I can’t change my speech patterns. I’ll always have a hundred terms of endearment for her. She will always take my breath away in a photo or audio/video. There’s not a moment I feel I won’t love her forever in a way that people remember love in third grade. What she has to decide is if she’s okay with that in a friendship. That it’s tinged with romance because I felt those feelings and moved on, not that I’m uncomfortable with her life now. And I know she knows that, and feels so guilty that she cannot be there to catch me right now, because she thinks I have no idea what she’s dealing with and I do. Desperately and completely. It’s why I have no idea whether she’s taking time to mull things over or never coming back. She does not have time to pay attention to anything. She, like Mel, is in the position of starting her own kitchen and I treat them the same way. “See you in three years.”

What she views as goading and provoking is not that I get impatient with timing. I get impatient that no matter how long we go, there’s never an e-mail longer than a few words…. which indicates that no matter what I’m talking about, she’s always avoiding it. When she does have time, she’ll respond to anything that doesn’t involve our relationship. We don’t work through anything and yet she’d eat anyone’s face off who tried to look at me in a way I didn’t like and I feel exactly the same way about her. I would bitch slap her boss if I thought they needed it, and neither one of them would like that very much….. but I would. I would be Mrs. Don Draper on their asses and every single one of them would hate me down to the mailroom. The thought of this makes me laugh harder than it should, because she is definitely a Don Draper-type personality (or comes across that way in text), and I feel like I have the sensibility of Betty’s chihuahua personality.

The funny thing about Betty Draper and me is seeing how much she got away with and what I could’ve….. I am actually pretty happy she ended up with a husband when I think about how her life would be different with a female partner. Like, this could be a script. I’ll think about it. However, it would not be based on us. Just the idea is funny. All powerful women who have wives act differently in a large crowd than those with husbands. It doesn’t jive with the way straight women are vetted to work at high levels in government or industry. The way they are groomed to react like men because nothing gets done if they don’t. A woman with a wife has been pissed off by that her whole life and has the strength to fight back because she doesn’t have to deal with it at home. Her career is also the worst when it comes to her partner being a writer, so if they were like me in any way at all, it would only be that they have that one thing in common to create comedic tension.

And the thing is, Supergrover is just an archetype. Hillary Clinton. Michelle Obama. My sister Lindsay. Carly Fiorina. Melinda Gates. Helen Thomas. I could base what I’m thinking about on any one of them…. the push/pull of a powerful person meeting a no one on the Internet and finding out the other one is smarter in some ways. I feel that I am older than Supergrover, that she is older and sometimes not wiser. I hope that she is impressed enough that she would agree with me and that she is every bit as much right as me on the opposite end of the spectrum. That we all age at different rates and in different ways. But to find that it transcends class is a particular blessing. If she thinks I’m smart, I’m smarter than nearly everyone and no one could have convinced me of it that didn’t have her pedigree. I’ve felt like a dumbass since I was born because I didn’t realize how much I had stacked against me. How much the Internet took away my limitations in communication. I feel smarter around her than anyone else because it comes with such strong belief in myself. She also has the presence of Picard. When she says something, it’s with the authority to make it so. She thinks I think of her as a suburban mom. No, I think of her an an Evelyn. A Michelle Yeoh, an accurate description of her beauty in one picture.

She doesn’t have a prayer life except running, and I hope it’s productive. Sometimes, you feel more in prayer by zoning out and letting your body do the work. Sometimes, it’s thinking through things. The answer comes from praying, not what happens afterward. You know yourself, you’re just afraid to say what you want outside of the intimacy of prayer, because that would involve talking to someone else with an opinion. Either way is fine, and I feel like she is taking care of herself by listening to her body. I am taking care of her by listening to her mind and sending her support by letting her know that I’m thinking about her. But if I tell her that I’m thinking of her and she doesn’t want to open up to me, it doesn’t mean my prayer hasn’t mattered. It means thoughts and prayers can be only that because I haven’t been invited to sit down at that particular table.

I picked up a term on “Covert Affairs” that I really like and I use it all the time to describe my blog. At CIA, to talk about security credentials, they talk about who has been “read in.” In my life, that fits perfectly, because I know exactly down to the letter I’ve typed how much you guys have been read in, and it’s only the amount I want you to have. To go further than this is not helping me, it’s hurting them. That’s because if they wanted to tell their sides, it would be in the comments section, not from me. I reveal so much that anything more is their story to tell. I don’t push limits on purpose. It’s hard to negotiate boundaries and hard when you’re brave with them out of necessity, not lack of love for others.

Dana and I had a hard time because when Supergrover found out that I’d read Dana in on something that she didn’t okay, I freaked out. It wasn’t the initial secret that kept Dana and I emotionally apart, but its reverberations and how she reacted to me after it. I was a hndful, and so was she. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. When I say I didn’t have a choice on whether to leave Dana (because that would have involved our triangle or foursome being solid and it wasn’t), I mean that if Supergrover had talked to Dana and I had talked to Michael, Dana and I could have worked it out. But, I was left in the position of choosing between them and Dana had to lose because Supergrover forced my hand in a way that no one else could. I had to write about her to handle our lives together and I couldn’t let Dana see my reactions to it. Case closed.

But then Supergrover had the audacity to look at the clusterfuck she created and make it all about her. That she hadn’t created a situation I couldn’t handle, but that I was stalking her by coming to DC……. then getting surprised when I was perturbed about that. We’ve been stuck in that push/pull since 2015, and I didn’t decide to stop loving her. I decided to stop working on it.

I can handle what she’s dealing with on my own, but no I can’t. She can read this blog and not worry about her safety, but no she can’t. We could solve all this in an afternoon, even if it was just chatting on Facebook Messenger, but I’m betting we won’t. After eight years and no need to look me up because I gave her all my contact info, she cannot possibly have been too busy to connect. She just wouldn’t. She decided what kind of person I was then and has looked at me through that lens ever since……. the one that says I’m perfect for everyone else except her because she can’t forgive me and never will. Not in the way that truly means redemption and intimacy. But she said she could do nothing about how I felt, how she felt, etc…… but she could do something about the present. If she can, I hope she will. I just will not accept being the person she only talks to short sentences at a time. I don’t want to get by on a glass of water when I have ridden her waves.

I am working on why she affected me the most because I don’t completely understand how it happened, but I want to. I want to even if she does not, because even if she didn’t want the next decades, I did. Even one is a long time when you’re talking about life afterward and how it changes. But it is very interesting to work on the issue of how relationships change over time when you don’t have context for anything but each other- the fact that I have seen she has dogs, but never petted them. That I have heard she has a husband and kids, but never met them. That she likes art but I’ve never been to her house, etc. And yet by writing to each other like a soldier and a lovesick girlfriend for 10 years, it has created the same type intimacy now that they felt then. Do you think my love for Supergrover is less real than those type movies and novels based on very real life? Hayat only spent a few hours more with Mike than I spent with Supergrover before we created a lifetime connection like reader/writer, which carries more responsibility for me now than I had before. It is not a wonder that I wanted my wife and that responsibility to be locked into one person because it was too hard to manage it when they weren’t. But that’s because I was green and didn’t know what I was doing. It’s easier now that I don’t feel the pressure that she’s paying attention to anything I say. I just hope it shows I do see her in 3D when she can open her eyes to that possibility. I think that the message will resonate later, it’s just that right now it’s incredibly loud and extremely close.

Working on how I feel about everyone else is easy because I don’t have the pressure of keeping their identity secret to the degree I do with Supergrover, which is why it’s so hard to put anyone else above her for any reason. I’ll do that when she’s older. Right now she’s my baby, and I have to wait to go back to work til she’s in kindergarten. It’s the best analogy I could possibly have for what we’re going through, and I hope she takes it in because I’m childless so what I’m putting down is not something she’d pick up. That I am definitely responding to a baby, but it’s her. She doesn’t see it because she doesn’t think she needs it, and I’m the one that sees the burn on her face when no one else can. It’s a lot. She’s a lot. But thank God my life isn’t anything else, because I’d still believe I was straight trash if it hadn’t happened.

I don’t want to be disrespectful to her, ever, so I’m just arranging my life so that it doesn’t matter when she’s here and when she’s not. I am Amy Pond and River Song, setting a place for her at dinner in case she shows up. And with her even unto Trenzalore………….. but only when and if she’ll have me.

Or at least, it’s what I’m working on.

The Tao at Play in the Writer’s Brain

October 20, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Do lazy days make you feel rested or unproductive?

Let’s get one thing straight.

As a writer, there is no such thing as a lazy day. Work is inverted. In order to put out content, you have to spend time thinking about the ideas before you start typing. Writers look lazy and unproductive because they’re lost in thought….. and that’s a good thing. I sit at my keyboard with my head working independently of my hands. I will stare off into space, typing as I think of something. Some days, the thoughts are fast and furious. If I feel that kind of mood, I’ll put on some EDM and dare the bpm to keep up. EDM really makes me type faster, because it takes an extraordinarily high amount of beats per minute before I lag.

This is not to say that there is no such thing as being a lazy writer. I’m just not, so I don’t assume others are, either. To me, being a lazy writer is avoiding typing. That if you really want to be a writer, you’ll do it. The longer you say you’re a writer and don’t type anything is where the issue lies. If there are stories inside you that you can’t type, you are only limiting yourself by your own fear.

Intelligence is one of my favorite topics, and I love Jonna Mendez on YouTube. She’s a former spy (Chief of Disguise before she retired) who is also a local, so I cannot remember if I heard this from her directly at her book talk here (for The Moscow Rules), or whether it’s from one of her videos with Wired Magazine. But she says that the bigger the crowd, the more no one notices what you do. it inspired me as a writer, because of course the bigger the sample selection of readers, the less will care what I do. I can say whatever I want, because people are always going to be lost in their own lives and so am I. I’ll deal with their feelings about me when they realize I have feelings about them. When you think about it that way, you allow yourself to step off a ledge. Those who know you best might not catch you, because they cannot adjust the version of you in their heads. It might take a different audience for you to level up. As a blogger, my audience gets bigger and changes every day in different ways. Sometimes it’s that Facebook brings in more people than WordPress. Sometimes, it’s that i’m more popular in India or the UK than I am here in the US. Sometimes the US is even third, and those are the days I really, really relax. Whatever it is, it is not waiting for criticism or letting me cripple myself with fear. It is also not letting fear of criticism build, either. It’s getting bigger and getting used to it. I can only dish as much as I can take, and my level is just about where the trolls come in.

I write in the dark to walk in the light, because I cannot take in what others think at all. It would paralyze me. Everyone’s a critic and most of the time wonder why I stop writing about them. So, in order for someone to criticize me and for me to need to keep writing about them after that must take a hell of a lot. Trust me, you don’t even know.

There’s no way to be lazy with the way a writer’s mind works. You haven’t signed up for a nine to five job. It doesn’t matter if the baby woke up fifteen minutes ago and you just got back to bed and “why God? Why won’t it stop?” If you have an idea that you know will express how you feel as art, you have to write it down. I don’t mean writing down every thought you have. I know on this blog it seems like it. I mean leaving yourself key words so that you can pick up the brainstorming session later. It is so very, very difficult to strike gold at an inconvenient time because the creative process is a flow. It, like grace, does not leave you where it found you. To help this, I have two modes and I do one or the other. The first is that I have a lime green Moleskin so it’s easy to see that also has a pen attached next to me in bed. Not on the nightstand. I literally sleep with it like a teddy bear. If I want to write something down, I use the flashlight on my phone. This is my preference almost 100% of the time because the idea is cemented in the writing of it. But occasionally, I’ll be lazy and just say, “Siri. Open Notepad.” I don’t know what the app is officially called, I just said that to Siri one day and it worked. I use voice dictation rather than voice notes, though since Beck and I communicate with them, I’m liking it more. So, perhaps. The best thing about voice dictation is that speaking aloud and reading it later helps ensure I’ll remember it.

It’s also not a lazy day if you take the time to have deep interactions with people, because as a writer you have to have things to describe. Your life is on display, particularly when you write fiction. On my blog, people already know I’m talking about them. Case closed. Not knowing for sure creates buzz that isn’t here. But at the same time, you have to have real life experiences on which to base your world. For me, that’s my angle on everyone else’s behavior and not because their behavior is bad. This blog is the result of trying to overexplain to myself why people are doing what they are doing. It is less intimidating than trying to build a fictional world, which is why I’ve gotten into a professional writers’ group on Facebook that’s really not for sissies. Supergrover would be so proud of me, and I know it. I also know that I’ll miss telling her about my criticisms because she would want to see me grow over time just as much as my writing group does.

Do you remember that scene in “Eat. Pray. Love.” when Liz and her friend are talking about all the people signing her divorce decree? Like, they weren’t even there… Mother Theresa and people like that. Well, that’s how I feel about Supergrover. That if she knew about the wriing group thing, it would make her feel good so I’m imagining her signing off on it.

Most days I know I cannot be a writer without her, and I wish I could mean that differently, because it would make me look like less of a sad sack with an excuse not to be great. It’s not that. It’s that when you love someone, your dreams have to be balanced. You have to take the other person’s fears into consideration. I do not want to be great in a way that ever costs her something. What thrilled me about being together was that we both made the other feel capable and strong… but only when it was good. We turned on each other and never recovered. Now, I’m struggling with a work in progress that could introduce questions neither of us want to answer and she doesn’t see that as problematic. I do as I’m looking down the road. My romantic life doesn’t depend on her. My career as a writer does. At no time do I mean this blog. I mean I don’t want a book to be published and I get those questions nd handle them badly. I’m working through it because I believe my idea has legs, but it’s not anything I’ve talked about before. It’s something I sit in when I look lazy.

I have new ideas for books every day, but I don’t let it control me. Having an idea for a new work in progress is like being polyamorous. You need the stability of the day in, day out grind…. doesn’t mean your life won’t flip upside down during new relationship energy. I cannot fall prey to those bursts of dopamine, because it’s just my ADHD. Those are the things that go into my Moleskine or I dictate into my phone. They’re the brain droppings that could later on become content in my books.

You work every minute of every day of your life when you write. This is because whether you’re completely immobile or laying brick or cooking or coding software or selling insurance or modeling hand cream, you’re still writing.

You’re writing when you’re doing everything else. The collation of your ideas is the most important part, because it really helps to have a clear map of a subject before you start typing. If you think that is not true of this web site, that I wander into nowhere, you’re both right and wrong. I do not see plot and character until I am reading something back. Not while I’m laying it down. It’s the only thing that allows me to be completely open and honest- my willingness to completely change my opinion. I also look at “All Things Considered,” but it might take me a week or two to get there. I can’t explain everything I was feeling during a situation in one entry. To hold me to a single entry is a literary device called “synecdoche,” when a part represents a whole… like calling cars your “wheels” or female lawyers “skirts.” I do not know whether “skirts” is offensive or not, because I never heard it said with derision. But I’m also from the South, so please don’t cancel me in New York or some shit. My synecdoche for Supergrover was “Cheerios,” and yet it doesn’t come close to representing her whole self. Reducing me as a writer to a snapshot of my day isn’t fair or helpful, but lets my beautiful girl score as many political points as she needs to avoid opening up to me. Therefore, I rattle on about her here because our shit is unresolved. She thinks I’m doing it to get back at her, I think I’m doing it because this is how I survived life before her. She seems to forget that I was a writer for 10 years who also blogged before we met, so it doesn’t seem to occur to her that I’d be processing this way no matter how our relationship was doing.

It doesn’t surprise me that her synecdoche for me is “entry.” I cannot get her to accept that she is everything, everywhere, all at once. That no one entry can contain the complexity of our relationship and doesn’t try. That’s because I hope I’m explaining to her like I’m explaining to everyone else; I haven’t stopped seeing the world in 3D, writing about the world around me. She has stopped talking to me about what I’m doing. I don’t have enough information to put it to rest, and I never will at this point. I just had to let the train wreck happen and pick up the pieces. I am just not blessed to have someone who thinks they can learn something from it. She thinks I’m out to get her when I’m the main character on my own blog. How dare me! Of course I should write about my anger from your perspective……. no, I can’t, and here’s why. That’s expecting someone else to read your mind and then getting upset when it doesn’t happen.

What all writers know is that the more we look lazy and unproductive while writing and no one understands the way we process, the easier it is to lapse into thinking your only friend is you….. wherein you spend even more time alone writing into a Moleskine or asking Siri to open Notepad.

State Farm?

October 18, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

What makes a good neighbor?

I will certainly try to keep to a topic, but no promises. I’m in a space case sort of mood because I am miserable. Nothing serious like COVID, just allergies that won’t quit. I am laughing over “Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me” right this moment because I’ve been saying that Sudafed PE should say “does not work” right on the box. One of the things on the show I listened to last week was that the FDA just released a statement saying “Sudafed PE does not work.” So, if I want to feel better, that means a very hot shower and taking my inconvenienced ass downtown where I can get the real stuff. If you can get alcohol delivered, I don’t know why you can’t get Sudafed. Couldn’t you just use the same ID scanner I’d get if I needed an emergency White Claw? Seems like an unrealistic expectation that I would want one, but someone does. 😉

It would make someone a good neighbor to do this for me, but I don’t actually know any. The queer boys next door seem to be nonplussed about me. I think it’s because they’re probably 10 years younger and upwardly mobile yuppies. It doesn’t mean that they don’t like me or vice versa, just that we don’t have much in common. I hold out hope, though, because we’ve only been able to meet each other and have said “hi” from our yards. Maybe by next year it will look totally different. I have no idea, but having cute boys next door never hurt anyone.

One of my other neighbors is Gladys Kravitz and we are united in the fact that we don’t like her at all. She can take a long walk on a short pier. She saw all our cars in front of the house and called the county on us, saying that we had too many people to all be living in one house. So, I had two weeks to get my disaster area of a room in spotless shape (which I almost never do because AuDHD) before the county came to inspect. They got here and saw that everyone has a bedroom and we haven’t spoken since. I think that was five or six years ago.

My landlords are kind of my neigbors, but not really. We have separate entrances and don’t interact much. However, if I needed something, I could call eihter of them immediately. We don’t talk every day, but we gather for holiday meals…. though that may change this year. I don’t know what the plans are, but my landlords have one daughter that live with us and one daughter that just recently bought a huge house. So I don’t know what Thanksgiving and Christmas look like for me yet, but what I do know is that I’m not slated to come back to Houston for either holiday as of yet, but it’s very early. My dad and I are the kind of people that will wake up one day and say, “I want to go to DC” or whatever and just do it. He just has a lot more frequent flier miles than I do. 😉

In short, stay tuned.

The people that affect me much more than my actual neighbors are the friends I’ve met through becoming a writer. In particular, J.L. Henry and Tyler Moore are essentially taking over my education. Tyler added me to his writing group, and I swear it was like getting into grad school. I am done. Floored. I cannot thank Tyler enough, and I will be back to group as soon as my latest stint in Facebook Jail is over. This time, I got banned for something even more stupid. I hit the enter key and was promptly accused of bullying. The text box for the infraction was blank. I can’t get anyone to look at my case, so I’m stuck until November 11th.

Therefore, if you find something you think is worthy of posting on Facebook, I would really appreciate it. Not asking for random praise, just that engagement is important…. but at the same time, I know not every entry is worth sharing, either. I hope you all find something and probably will because the thing about AuDHD is that by not staying on topic, you’ll cover so much ground that there’s a topic for everyone.

I have learned that non-tech people will listen to my opinions on linux even though 90% of my readers will never actually use it. That’s because I have the tech background that is almost exlusively “translating Geek to English” and I’ve gotten the IT job every single time I’ve put that on my cover letter or resume. It’s true, I am operating system agnostic, but I hate iOS for iPhones the most. Luke Miani agrees with me, and he’s one of the preeminent Mac vloggers on YouTube (also a local, incidentally). I should reach out to him and ask him if he needs a copywriter or something. Huge for my CV. Anyway, Luke, if you’re reading this, do you need a copy editor or something? (He doesn’t know I’m alive, it was a joke).

Also, do you guys like vlogs? I’ve done a couple, but I’d be willing to do more. I just don’t because my primary mode of communication is writing. It’s nice to get out of that rut, though, and just talk into the camera like I’m video calling Bryn instead. I might do it, anyway, just because I know Bryn likes them. I will eventually start recording my entries again, but it will take some time. The only reason I don’t do it now is that I need server space. I can’t decide whether I want to host the .mp3 files myself, or buy into something like SoundCloud. I could do all that on YouTube, but I specifically want audio because Bryn “likes to listen to me like a podcast.” If I can find a way to do that, it’s priority one. If more of you want it than that, drop a dime in the box and it’ll be done by tomorrow. 😛

Speaking of donations, I don’t ask for them but it’s a necessary evil. I don’t make buckets off it or anything, but I love it when people will send me $3 and say it’s for a cup of coffee to keep me going. You know what makes me feel better than three dollars for coffee to keep me going? nothing. It’s so much less about income and so much more about validation. I also don’t expect to make real money here- I am building a religion, living Comfort Eagle….. my hat is on backwards. I’ll show you my tattoos. I am in the blogging business I am calling you DUDE!

Today is tomorrow. Tomorrow is today. Yesterday is weaving in and out.

Cake provide the lyrics to my life at all times. My favorite painting of all time is “The Persistence of Memory,” and of all things I would tattoo on my body (as opposed to will) is a dripping clock. I don’t care if Dali was ADHD or not. He make the official logo.

I don’t know what this has to do with Neighbors. I’ve never even watched that show.

But I do know what it’s like to be ADHD and just feel like talking for no particular purpose. I lead down winding roads, and one of the criticisms I only get from my family and friends is that it seems like you “wander into nowhere” and that leads them to believe whether I’m on an up or a down. I’m Bipolar II, and you have never seen a woman get angrier in your life than when receiving that particular criticism. It’s because they become parental about it, infantilizing me to an enormous degree when I have so far made it through 46 years while on ups and downs. Slow your roll. They aren’t very good neighbors when they do it, even under the guise of being helpful. Depression and mania are two completely different sets of emotions and physical responses. Anxiety adds another level. At no time does this turn off my AuDHD need to ramble about nothing. I don’t do it because it is easy. I do it because it is hard.

Rambling about nothing, like neighbors, is the easy part. Anyone could do it. But I would challenge anyone to be as brave as I am in these pages. I don’t get to know you like an Internet neighbor I wave to- you guys really know me. You see me every day. You know what my life is like if you even read once a week….. it’s probably better if you only read once a week (in my estimation) because themes are repetitive as I look at them from more than one angle. Finding an angle on something is what brings me peace, because I can walk away from that writing session feeling lighter.

No one sees all the crying.

I write differenty at Starbucks. I don’t dive as deep so I don’t have emotional reactions in the store. I cannot do what I do without sitting alone in a room, lights off, with the door locked for safety. This is entirely doable since I start writing at 0500 and the house is eerily silent. But in that kind of mood, before the sun is up, I sit down at the keyboard and slice open a vein.

The Supergrover entries take the most out of me, the reason I was so offended when she said I didn’t write her as a 3D character. It was a body blow, and I hope she really takes in how much she wrecked me with that one line. Not a 3D character? Have you even read me, bro?

Anyway, I shake and cry and try to find things that make me laugh, because that was the biggest clusterfuck I have ever been party to, and I’ll never be the same. Neither will she. In some respects, I want her to come back and say she was wrong. In others, I hope she deletes everything and moves on with her life. It depends on what day it is. How bad the pain hurts. How much her behavior affected me and really fucking sucks to deal with on a daily basis, because it’s relentless breaking a trauma bond, and I’m sure she thinks I’m being dramatic. She can also take a long walk on a short pier, because I have wrestled our problems to the ground with no solution, because she’s the only one with answers to my questions, and they’re too big for me to handle alone.

And she knows it.

I’ve told her that for 10 years, and nothing. She doesn’t deal in emotions. I don’t deal in avoidance of them. We are totally fucked unless someone gives, and it’s not going to be me this time. I have done all the giving in I’m going to do because it’s been a decade. If she was going to show up in any real way, she would have done it by now. Fuck the hypocrisy and either get right with me or move it along. Your mama wolverine claws are coming out and you don’t even want to hug me? Get out of here with that bullshit.

I am so done there’s not even a word for it, and I still reach out for her in the middle of the night when I’m scared. Again, only one with the answers. But fuck my feelings, right?

I told her it came across as “only Supergrover is allowed to need things.”

And here’s the plain truth. In a lot of cases, she is. But she doesn’t get this one. She fucked up, she knows it, and won’t deal with reality because that involves feelings she can’t access. That’s because she thinks she’s fine. I do not. I think she’s a hurt little girl and needs a mama wolverine just as badly as I do……… because there’s always going to be things we share with friends that we wouldn’t share with our biological mothers.

I bet she didn’t even think of that, and when she does, so much of my need to be near her will make sense. We are now, in a very real sense, mothering each other. And if she has to wonder why, I’m going to need her to put on her fucking glasses and “read through many lines” again. She reads my e-mails so fast that she’s only picking up a quarter of my meaning, like saying I called her a liar. What I actually said was based around “the lies you tell,” a Southern way of saying you’re being polite to save someone else from harm. I said “the lies you (universal) tell,” and that’s not like you (personal) at all.” I wasn’t saying “you’re a liar.” I was saying “I think you’re being nice and not laying your feelings on the table because you want to protect me from emotional injury.”

No, she saved up all her “laying it out on the table” when I expressed the same need I’d been expressing ad nauseam for 10 years and she wrote me a long ass e-mail saying she didn’t have time to answer anything and I’d just have to be happy with the neverending cycle we’ve got going, which is toxic. We aren’t toxic people, but we do not have patterns of healthy people, mostly because she won’t open up to me except when she’s telling me how busy she is. Letters that really hurt me and don’t get us any closer to healing are long and involved. E-mails that say “I was just thinking about you. How are you?” are almost nonexistent.

She says way too little, and I say way too much.

We have turned into me and the queer boys next door, waving to each other but not really making an effort. I love her too much for that. I cannot put toothpaste back into a tube, another thing I’ve been saying for 10 years. If you can’t commit, as a general rule for all my friends, then please just leave me be. I don’t have room for any more anxious attachments with avoidant people. One is enough, because no matter how hard I try, I can’t turn off my mama wolverine, either.

Fewer Than I Think Most People Do, But More Than I Thought I Did

October 16, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What principles define how you live?

I don’t have strict principles because I’m AuDHD. ADHD and Autistic people may only have one: “annoy the shit out of everyone and see who stays.” I can joke about that because we drive each other up the wall. But when we joke about our symptoms, we’re not punching down. The thing about “seeing who stays” is that neurotypical people do not have an easy time in neurodivergent spaces like my house.

Zac and I are made for each other in this respect, because his house is a neurodivergent safe space as well. He’d have to tell you what his neurodivergence is, I just know that we have a lot of crossover because we love being together and are also bad at scheduling. He gets busy or has a TDY (temporary duty) elsewhere, I’m utterly obsessed with writing and forget to look up. All of the sudden it’s been several weeks or a month. That’s because neither one of us treat the other like a possession. I can’t remember who said it, but “he’s mine like my neighborhood, not my notebook.” It’s an attitude I carry now, because I feel like Bryn is mine in that way, too, and so is Supergrover even if she never puts it together that I am indeed the friend I said I would be from the beginning.

(I am her old, grumpy wizard and she is my young, brave, crazy knight. I am chronologically younger, but wouldn’t have her energy level at gunpoint. Not enough Diet Coke in the world. “Doctor Who,” as I’ve mentioned before, is not the only television analogy that fits between us, because we are very much like Arthur and Merlin from the BBC drama “Merlin” and Merlin and “Wart” from “The Sword in the Stone.” I take that back. She is still like “Wart,” but I am definitely, definitely Archimedes. She will be remembered as King Arthur, and I see her as Wart to cope. I do the same thing with my younger sister. Her professional persona is intimidating, so when I’m talking to her in real life it helps to think of her as a six year old. That reminds me of a principle I live by. Never treat anyone as if they’re older than 12 because they won’t respect you for it if they’re bad people. Good people need people who disagree with them and ignore their celebrity status. The evil are certain about everything, especially how important they are.)

Now, if there’s any principle I live with, it’s wanting relationships that are as drama-free as the one with Zac…. although I hope that Zac knows just as much as I do that our inattention doesn’t mean less care. We’re busy and we live over an hour from each other. The principle is just to be the person that has the other’s back. I frequently wish I could do as much for him as he does for me, but we’re at different points in our lives. It’s kind of different getting to be a princess every once in a while…… A princess that wears space man underwear, but still.

As I was reading back over earlier paragraphs, I realized that one of the principles I live with now is that my sister needs me more than she used to in a very concrete way. I am what she has left of my mom, because we’re still in touch with our aunts and uncle, of course, but we lived with her. My dad can tell her some stories, but not all because I was there with her after they divorced. I am the institutional memory of what was and will be, not because I can predict the future. I can just predict I won’t want to stop writing it down as it happens.

It’s something I know that I hope I can pass on to Supergrover and Bryn, as we’re all eldest children but their mothers are still living. My mother’s life was cut short by so damn much that I am going to be there for things that my mother never could, in way she never could because Lindsay and I didn’t open up to her like we open up to each other. I hope I can pass on that your siblings become your children when you realize you’re what’s left. No one gives you that authority, you’re just doing what you’ve always done and it feels weird not to try because grief is this whole other thing you will never understand. I don’t even say “I know how you feel” when someone tells me that they’ve lost their mother, because we almost certainly aren’t going to have the same experience. I am jealous even now at how much older Supergrover is than me and she still has her mom.

On the other hand, if she hadn’t died so young, me dating Zac (or any man) would have killed her… I wouldn’t have allowed myself to struggle with those questions on my web site because I never allowed myself to date anyone without thinking it was permanent before. Without knowing up front they were capable of marriage. It’s only because I’m starting to look at what I can manage that I can handle the dissonance between what works for other people and what works for me. I could not dive into myself to this degree if I was responsible for other people, and as I get busier I hope I will look back at this time in my life as a burst of creativity no matter how painful. I hope I’m now on a better path because I took the time to search for it.

I can’t control what principles guide others, the most important principle for interacting with others I live by.

Be Yourself

October 11, 2023October 11, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What was the hardest personal goal you’ve set for yourself?

My comfort level with fighting is nil. I don’t know what to do when I express my opinion and someone gives me theirs in return, because no matter how hard I try to make my voice sound inert, people will add things into it that I don’t mean. This seems to be even more true of the last 10-20 years, where patience was destroyed one Facebook Notification at a time. God forbid you think about what you’ve done rather than ripping a relationship apart.

One of the reasons I allow myself to get so angry on this web site is that people do it to me all day, every day. I’m just processing my problems with them in a way that neither one of us has to listen to it. I don’t hear that anger until I’m reading back to myself. The difference is that I take the time to really make friends with why I’m angry. The root of the issue. A quarter to never will you actually see me pop off at someone here. Generally, by the time I’m mad here, there’s little hope for our relationship because if they don’t care about being my friend, I sure as shit won’t care about being theirs.

I am hard on myself because I ask the questions other people won’t and they get angry. For instance, I am sure that Supergrover hated it when I told her that I hated not knowing what her husband thought of me. Whether he hated me or got turned on by me created two different sets of problems. One I was willing to work on. One I am absolutely not. I will never in my lifetime look in that man’s face if he’s put her through that even once, and thus me by proxy. He doesn’t deserve to know me on that level, and neither does she if she’s not willing to warn me what I’m walking into…… and she couldn’t unless I just directly said it out loud. A man being turned on by one of his wife’s friends is not something he’ll tell his cute, perfect straight wife. No, he’ll wait till his angel is in the bathroom and suggest entrapment…… but this is all done as a joke, of course. Who wouldn’t think that suggesting I could get what I wanted by working with him wasn’t absolutely on the up and up? I didn’t think all men thought this way until they did, my beautiful girl. This is not between Michael and me. This is the dance between Frank and Idgie for all time.

I think my personal goal is just to be a bee charmer. You know Idgie would have gone on loving Ruth until she died whether Frank had fucked up and made being with her possible or not. Sure, there would be others. Just not in the same way. And she is every bit my Mary Louise Parker, apt because she kind of reminds me of Amy from “The West Wing,” too.

Being myself as a personal goal meant growing into the love I have for Supergrover (and Michael. And the kids. And the dogs. And the fish. And the books.). Growing into it meant allowing me to be me, because by asking questions without bullshit filters, most of the time I got what I needed to know and could build on it. Telling her that I had feelings for her destroyed all that , because she didn’t know how to react to me as a woman anymore. It’s cute and innocent in some ways, very hard for me in others. What’s easy is being ridiculously cute to each other online. What’s hard is knowing how much of that translates, if at all.

I am glad that she doesn’t treat me as if those feelings have to go away. They did, and we agree that they should have. They do not disappear as if they were never there, though, and it’s wonderful when she remembers that fact- she’s not my love, but has been, and is tender with me because of it. Being tender with each other is all I want out of our relationship now, and because it’s too unhealthy to interact, I’m glad I have a garden here on WordPress. I have lifted the plants, but the leftover roots season the soil. Romantic love has been allowed to attach to other feelings and the wheat separated from the chaff quite naturally. Love is a thriving aquascape of growth. The goal was just to make “in-love” feelings the chlorine you have to remove first. I never struggle with chlorine removal anymore. I have to protect life.

Things were unclear about meeting up in the real world and neither one of us knew (knows?) whether we’ll meet in the future. The reason I plan a future with her is simple. She is such a writer that she will kick herself when she thinks of how lame her last words were to me and she’ll want to say something better and so will I because I love her. Her last words to me were “obviously you’re the only person who can change.” I assured her that was not true or would ever be the case, but she disappears if I don’t say something against which she can rage. I am also trying to step away from a trauma bond, which makes your emotions play tricks on you, anyway. I waffle between wanting to cry on her like a four year old and being perfectly fine. She doesn’t deserve to come back at this point, because she’s not willing to change a damn thing. Letting her in would be a disaster, but I’ll never be strong enough to keep her out. It’s just not me. I believe everyone has a resurrection story, and I forgive them over and over. This often leads me into spending more time on a story than I really should. Not interacting has shown me how much I initiate.

It’s so hard, living in that disconnect between “it’s not personal” and “it really is personal to an enormous degree.” I always want to be the one to give her the next thing she loves to read. I don’t like it when she doesn’t provide me any reading material in return. It makes the relationship feel too one-sided, pouring emotion into someone where it’s not wanted. She doesn’t see that I love her in every color, in every dimension, and tries to say that I’m writing her as a flat character.

My boyfriend’s dog is better at context clues than that.

I set out to be a bee charmer when I realized she didn’t love her as much as I did.

The personal goals came in when I realized that I was talking about a universal problem. Women aren’t taught to love each other because they don’t know how to love themselves, especially as part of a patriarchy.

She says that I write about everything as if it’s not multifaceted in anger, as if I wouldn’t give everything to hear her tell me one of them. I feel like I am painting this journal with our emotions, and it would be great if she would also show her work. She’s doing all the algebra in her head and her teacher’s counting off points- not in judgment but because they can’t get there without showing their work.

The hardest personal goal for myself has been walking away from her in order to make my emotional life stronger. I want her in my life, but not at the steep, steep cost of always feeling terrible about myself.

She wants me to be her friend without her having to invest anything anymore, and her life is too complicated to go without investing in each other.

The second hardest is not feeling like running back toward her every time something doesn’t go right. To know that I really was meant to grow in this direction, and that she’s strong. If she sees where I’m going and wants it, she’ll pack.

The hardest personal goal is being yourself even when the one you love the most doesn’t like them.

Vincent and Salvador

October 10, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 7 Comments

Who are your favorite artists?

Vincent van Gogh and Salvador Dali showed me my illnesses in real time, making graphs of my brain so I could see it. When van Gogh goes into the places that make rings appear in his vision, the ones that dot his galaxies, my mind has that mode as well. It just comes out in words. The cast of Doctor Who didn’t do as good a job as I did searching for paintings that say “For Amy” in the Musee Dorsay. I never found one (nor “for Leslie,” either, but that wasn’t the point. The point is that he is now long dead…. long….. and you can still feel his presence when you go to his wing of the old train station. It’s like people gathered all his stuff, put it in the train station, and he decided he lives there, now.

The Persistence of Memory is a grid, with time dripping all over it. Time drips all over me because of it. Like them, I have no discernable future as to what life my writing will take on after I’m gone, if at all. I can’t worry about that, because my blog’s purpose is fulfilled just by existing. But it does resonate with me when people tell me they read in the bathroom, because that’s about as vulnerable as I have to get when these entries are being written. I’m in my room, alone and sometimes covered with blankets using a laptop. Still naked, exposed, and afraid.

I would find it interesting to know what Vincent and Salvador think of me in those moments. Are we tracking together like I think? Can I hang with that kind of brilliance?

I have known enough artists in my time to know what I can. Because in the creativity stage, we are but small children who need to reassure each other constantly. My art is fed from theirs. Who knows who is fed frm mine?

However, I cannot focus on what will come after me, but what comes through me. What will come out of me using only the persistence of memory on a starry night?

I’m ADHD. I’ll Love Them All, Eventually.

October 9, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What is your favorite hobby or pastime?

I have never found anyone ADHD that didn’t get obsessed with everything a hundred dollars at a time. That’s because it takes about a hundred dollars’ worth of interest before your brain moves onto something else. The two hobbies I’ve always had are reading and writing, and I’m finally learning that it’s where my most basic need and the world’s wants combine. I am giving people solid answers in their own lives by being able to see someone else struggling with the same shit, and I know that because I’ve been read in every country in the world, sometimes because my beautiful girl has a reason to be there and I don’t. I have faith in my abilities because she believed in me before I did. That being said, if she’d ever tasted the beer I made, we might be doing something completely different together. 😉

Dana and I made beer through a kit once, a Hefeweizen. For a basic mix, it was fantastic. So, I would get into beer making again if I had the stuff, so not every hobby I’ve invested in has been a waste. In fact, I think I asked for the beer-making kit from my mother for Christmas just to see if she would buy it. When you’re a preacher’s kid, being a little devil is relative.

To her credit, she was a lot more fun when she realized I was joking 90% of the time and loosened up. Lindsay and I always thought she was funnier than us because we were acid funny all day long no problem. When my mother dropped a truth bomb, she destroyed because she picked her battles better than we did and knew when she had an entrance that couldn’t be beat.

With my mother, I enjoyed crafting because she enjoyed it. Mostly cutting up things for her bulletin board in her room, which is why I’ve enjoyed connecting with all the teachers I’ve dated as an adult, because we have that lingo in common. I’ve never been up in front of a classroom, but I’ve done the work it takes to get a classroom ready for many years. I think it would be fun to be married to a teacher because they’d naturally be as creative as me and if their specialty was English I’d never get away with anything here, either.

I could be happy every day of my life with access to an eighth grade teacher’s library. This is because I prefer YA in every subject. It takes finesse to explain adult issues without adult language, like the stark reality that kids die, and not even in wizarding worlds. Cancer can and often does take them out. John Green taught me how that plays out, not Elizabeth Kubler Ross. Concepts are built with Eric Carle, not Erik Erickson. Sesame Street, not Skinner. Tolkien and Lewis, not Dr. Spock. I know this because they are who comes along to rescue children with terrible parents.

I am not singling anyone out. We are all terrible parents and children at once point or another. Children are traumatized in all sorts of ways from things we don’t remember we’ve even said. I know that this is the case because if I take the time to remember what someone has said and why it hurt me, I will regret it if I bring it up. No one likes to have things brought up that make them feel guilty, even if it’s for the purpose of not letting me feel bad over something I needed to talk out.

I am sure that because I’m AuDHD, this comes out wrong, but it doesn’t vary no matter what I do or say. People do not like to talk about their flaws and get defensive and angry immediately. I am no exception to this, but that doesn’t mean I’m not glad that someone chose to lance a boil so we could feel closer later.

I will never get over feeling insecure in my relationship with Supergrover because I didn’t have a choice over what to do when Dana and I broke up. She could think of me as trying to help her or hurt her and “in the end, it doesn’t even matter.” She can think I was trying to make our relationship easier and freer if we wanted it in the future, or she can believe that I set out to be her friend whether she wanted me to be or not. How does that work, exactly? Explain it to me like I’m five.

I didn’t think that anything would be truly solved until I looked into her eyes, and if she really had the time and space to think about it, she would agree with me. We needed to sniff each other out with more senses than sight. We did not have enough context to know whether we were scaring the life out of each other or not, because there was no context. For instance, I think she thinks it’s cute that I ask her how famous people smell, but what I bet she doesn’t know is that I picked that up from a morning radio show in Houston; what else are you supposed to say when someone name-drops? That’s because I know she’s not trying to name-drop. It’s her real life and I have to learn to hang. She’s not being an asshole, they’re her reality and now mine.

I can choose to hang or I can choose to think she’s a name-dropping asshole. I can either learn from her how to walk in rareified air constantly, or I can’t. I don’t think I would have had as much of a lock on why it’s necessary, due to two fans, her and a date I’ll call Stephanie (mostly because that’s her name and it was several years ago, so no one in my life would remember this.

Supergrover was the kind of fan that when she met me, she treated me like she’d met Dooce, Will, and Jenny (The Bloggess). She lovebombed me into complete submission, and I did the same. We just didn’t end up being the same sexual orientation (sapiosexual rather than straight/gay); according to my notes, this was hard for me to accept. Didn’t mean I was threatening. I had been sucked into a brand new world; I was green, afraid, and trying to push her away. In trying to push her away, I only made her angry. It was not a good situation because I didn’t think. My aim was to get her to block me on everything so I wouldn’t have this constant conflict within me of feeling incapable as a friend and a wife in every way possible either one could dream up. I was falling short of he glory of God when my sweet wife realized she was being Mickey’d because I hadn’t so much fallen for another woman as the TARDIS was on our lawn, then it wasn’t. Instead of moving on with my life, she became The Raggedy Doctor, me running every time she left the e-brakes on just because she liked the sound.

It was exactly the same vibe as if I’d been tapped for a tour with Beyonce, and I really, really mean it. Beyonce was three years behind me at HSPVA.

I would not think of her as a celebrity when I met her, because as a junior I would have been unimpressed by freshman. Therefore, I really would be capable of meeting Jay-Z and Eminem and not get rattled because to me, it’s just my homegirl’s husband and his friends.
The power imbalance would be the same because I would never want to hurt her in the press with my own writing….. therefore, you can take a guess on any given day who is more powerful in our relationship and she knows it. She reacts to it by not telling me anything and thinking it’s better that way. I am an anxious alpha dog, and my reactions to Supergrover have always reflected it when I could really rival Jay in my loyalty.
Actually, I can MORE THAN prove my loyalty over Jay, who is not a bad person but has done bad things…… and I would never treat Michael as if he is that person because I’ve never found that he’s ever done anything wrong. He cannot say the same thing about me. I can’t complain when my acting crazy was to act like the person they thought I was rather than the person I really am because saying “all this scares me” was apparently just too big a job. It’s the difference between thinking you have a problem with your next door neighbor and finding out you have a problem with Eminem on both sides of the equation for different reasons. She’s on the level, and I spit bars.
It would be every bit the same as sleeping with Eminem’s girlfriend and finding out just how much people can hate you in the audience. The audience will kill you if you lat them. I have no doubt that the reaction in the press if there was any interest (there wouldn’t be, anyway, because she’s famous among other people who don’t care who she is, and neither would the press. It’s just an analogy. No one
I would never want her to think I was running away because of something she did, so I thought acting like an asshole was better and so did she. I can say that of a relationship with Beyonce. The same rareified air that takes a while to grow into. Treating everyone like their most childlike selves not to reveal them and having some issue with something I can’t talk about here.
Because I’m an intel fan and she’s not, she won’t get that I mean this with all my heart. We need to rekindle our friendship because Will and Francie are caught up in Sidney’s bullshit without a clue. Left outside in front of the bank, but I’ll go into Credit Dauphine when she does.
Where she fails is only seeing me as Will season one, just like Beyonce would if I got into it with her.

So, if I couldn’t read her like a magazine, I would think she was a narcissist. This is not the case. We could go back to lovebombing each other at any time, because that shit is genuine. The purest on earth because I love her mind with such passion and she loves mine that way when we’re talking about intellectually diving deep.

With Supergrover and Beyonce, it is and would be hard to tell between avoiding something because it’s hard and avoiding something because you’re too busy…… and not expressing it clearly yourself because you can’t even choose. Additionally, why wouldn’t learning how to love Beyonce take over your hobbies if one of them was writing? Wouldn’t you have something to say about it? That it’s amazing and problematic?

Just because it takes a long time to turn over in my mind doesn’t mean I wouldn’t give a limb to make everything right in the end. What if Beyonce never acknowledged that her rooms were different than mine? I hope she’d know that it didn’t mean anything between us, because she’s still an annoying freshman.

Our biggest problem in life is that I treat her like she’s Beyonce and I know it. She doesn’t treat me like I’m Wil, Dooce, and Jenny anymore, and shouldn’t forget why it’s important. It’s what makes us work on all cylinders…… because Beyonce left HSPVA, and Supergrover and I both like being classically trained.