What part of your routine do you always try to skip if you can?
It is a slight exaggeration, but I (like all other autistic people) cannot survive while skipping any part of my routine. Mine just isn’t organized by time. It is organized by sense of security. The bigger the task at hand and emotions attached to it, the bigger the sensory issues, demand avoidance, meltdown, and burnout.
Taking medication and not taking it are both things that cause demand avoidance. My routine is generally waiting to get uncomfortable enough while unmedicated because if I don’t experience physical side effects, I will avoid taking pills. Even thinking about taking medication makes me gag. If I had no physical side effects, I would set a reminder. But I don’t have to. My brain notices when a chemical isn’t there and screams bloody murder…. so I got that goin’ for me.
I very, very much wish I could just tell a pharmacist what chemicals I need and be able to choose the delivery, because it would help me a ton to be able to inject myself or drink a suspension. Swallowing pills is hell on my sensory perception, and it wasn’t that way until I needed to take multiple pills every day. My throat has a Pavlovian response to the thought “I need my meds.” It gets tight before I even put the pill in my mouth. If I taste something bad, like the salt in the lamotrigine, my gag reflex will engage. This gets reinforced by happening every day, the reaction more intense over time. It’s a lot to manage. A lot.
If you have a tendency to tell smart/successful people “you don’t look autistic,” please stop. Success is relative. Some high functioning autistic people seem successful, and whether they are or aren’t can only be self-reported because money is not happiness. In every single video I’ve watched about Autism at work, it’s been a vlogger who has at least three degrees, but still no job has lasted more than a few years. Therefore, that means whether someone is working at Wal-Mart or partner at Baker Botts, the odds of them staying employed are the same….. why I admire people like Glennon Doyle, Brené Brown, and Mark Zuckerberg. They do wildly different things, but they all created their own jobs that played to their strengths rather than fitting into a system.
I’m pointing out Zuckerberg specifically because he’s the kind of neurodivergence that best represents me. I have the same sensory issues (I wear the same things, like hoodies), I write content for the web and know how to code some stuff, I social mask through everything and notice when he can’t (watching him in front of Congress was fascinating), etc. I’m just not as rigid as he is because my ADHD pulls me away from complete sameness. He is also the kind of person that whether you were e-mailing him or talking to him the conversation would be wildly different. I promise that people like us are hated all over the world for being cogs that just don’t fit. If Facebook hadn’t been his idea, he would have been fired a long time ago because he doesn’t play well with others. He would have had a better shot at staying employed than someone like me, but only by virtue of the fact that the coding he can do is so monetarily valuable. People are willing to put up with a lot of autistic quirks if not doing so means millions of dollars down the drain. Companies throw out a lot of talent by hiring autistic people without knowing what that really means.
This is why so many people are on disability that “don’t look like they need it.” Taking a shower is not routine. Brushing your teeth is not routine. Making yourself food is not routine. The reason it is not is that for a neurodivergent person, it’s like you learn that thing every day. You don’t “get into the habit.” The reason it feels like learning it again is that you have to put the same amount of effort into taking a shower now as you did when you were eight. It’s not secondhand nature. An autistic person’s strict routine is something they built to keep themselves safe and secure emotionally, but it’s not that they’re different than me. It’s that their structure, their routine is their single interest and they get it done with laser-like focus.
It is not, in IT vernacular, a cron job. Those people are white-knuckling it through life. So am I, because I do not experience my routine as iron like a special interest. I do not demand it of myself……… letting my need for absolute structure and my ADHD impulsivity fight for dominance. I can create a system to defeat ADHD and it will be brilliant. I do not have the executive function to stick to it.
I am the most successful in a relationship when someone else has a strict routine because I social mask it. I am not “codependent,” I literally have no idea how to create a routine to take care of myself and stick to it, emphasis on the repetition being harder than the creation of a system. I swear to God there were days in my marriage I only took showers because Dana dragged me in. It helped more than anything because it kept demand avoidance from eating my lunch. I am often pulled out of my comfort zone because my sensory issues are so high. I have said this before, but I experience demand avoidance in the winter the worst because doing things like changing my clothes is a bigger swing in terms of sensory environment. This is not a bad thing. If I showered every single day in the winter, my skin would dry out too much. It’s just an example of why autism is so hard. Demand avoidance isn’t being childish or lazy. It’s a disability.
I would be great at being married to someone that had an iron structure quirk…….. in some ways…….. as long as my partner recognized that my ADHD would HATE THEM SO MUCH and my autism would never let them go.
Stuff like this is why creative autistics have millions and millions of followers on YouTube and “won’t get a real job.” Creative autistics own things like writing/producing videos about autism (and anything else, but this niché is needed and lucrative). Neurodivergence is devastating and hilarious. They’re finding both ends of the spectrum on camera while I wrestle it out here.
When you’re autistic/ADHD, you start a job with disabilities that make you look “childish.” You don’t develop weaknesses at said job. That’s why if you get put on a performance improvement plan or whatever, you might as well quit. You social mask until you can’t, and then the wheels fall off…… because being autistic at work is a lot to manage all on its own. Demand avoidance will start eating your lunch, because you don’t understand why this keeps happening. If you are undiagnosed, things won’t get better until you research coping mechanisms for your experiences. If you are diagnosed, you know that there’s an upper limit on how much you can do to fit in.
I am also ADHD. I am not the kind of autistic who “gotta be home by 4:00. Gotta be home by Wapner.” Though social masking, I am the kind of autistic person who needs to watch Wapner and would be horrified to let anyone know that. Not watching Wapner would have to feel like gum surgery before the cognitive dissonance was enough for me to say something.
I do wonder what Raymond would have thought of Tivo, though.
Interrupting me is not interrupting a process that needs to happen the same way every day, but interrupting the way I feel as I adjust to a new environment. A new environment is also an old environment by the nature of how sleep works, so “easing into the day” is not a thing. I do not need to have coffee by 0500, get into the shower by 0545, etc. to function. I am disoriented by waking up and not having anything familiar around me.
I need a partner to function and don’t really want to find one. I think I do, but my behavior suggests that I’m really okay white-knuckling my way through life. That I feel more safe and secure by myself right now than I do with someone else. Yes, I have a boyfriend, but not the kind where I have to compromise all the time or learn his schedule/habits. I am glad he doesn’t need me for that because I don’t want to overpromise and underdeliver. I don’t want our relationship to be anything that it isn’t. I love him and Oliver, who is a dog. Love for them is a spectrum from red string to yellow, and we are choosing our adventure together.
I am learning in retrospect that I wanted to marry Daniel because I’d be social masking a doctor all the time. You do whatever you can to learn ways to cope in life, and look around for people you deem doing better than you. The War Daniel, in all of his flaws and failures, has always been a train wreck waiting to happen…… and so have I. Our cars just weren’t headed towards each other until we got so overwhelmed with our environment that we changed directions. We would have been great if we’d kept attacking only the problem.
Social masking Supergrover every day was handy because she thinks in a way that gets powerful people to follow her, so I haven’t learned more coping mechanisms to deal with my disability, but I have learned ways to be more effective in how I speak….. and by effective, I mean “concise.”
Concise is not something I am here, but that’s because this is entirely my place, my rules.
Additionally, every autistic person is an amalgamation of every neurotypical person they know, because they’ve been criticized for every neurodivergent behavior they’ve ever had. Third Rock from the Sun would have worked just as well with the exact same script only substituting aliens for an autistic group house. We are all trying to learn how people do things because our own ways don’t work.
That effort is how processing disorders quickly become mental illness. You don’t develop symptoms of mental illness from autism/ADHD. You develop mental illness from not fitting into the system and feeling horrible about it. My life would be different if I didn’t have the capability to tell when my needs exhausted people. The fact that I do means “80-90% of the time.” That’s because as a preacher’s kid, I have more heuristics for social masking than most people, and I’m female, which carries a rigid structure of behavior in and of itself. Neurodivergent women are often trained into making eye contact, giving affection, and dealing with the discomfort quietly.
When women aren’t social masking, they’re punished like children because their fathers/husbands have been trained to treat them like property, anyway. For lesbians, this is less of a problem, but comes in with male boss relationships if nothing else. Autistic men get away with so much problematic behavior that it’s ridiculous, because women didn’t create a system of power over them in which they have to live up to it. When it comes to how to be a good wife, there are a thousand books explaining the job.
There are a thousand self-help books for men, too, but being a husband is not from the perspective that they should tamp down their behavior- like a 50s women’s rag with lines like “freshen up and run the vacuum around the house before he gets home.” I can understand that a man is autistic AND mansplaining. Just because it’s his autism making him look like an asshole and not narcissism doesn’t mean it’s not offensive.
Perception is reality, but men are not expected to social mask to that degree. Their opinion is expected to be better than mine…. but who knows whether it is or isn’t? There are a million men smarter than me out there (lowballing) that I could learn a ton from, but that’s because I hold their reputations in high esteem, not because I think a man’s voice inherently has more authority than mine…… but they’re programmed to think it does.
There is so much that it takes to make me feel secure in my environment, but a routine is just a good cup of coffee or two in a mug that feels right in my hand. The feel of the mug is as important as the taste of the coffee. A routine is picking up my tablet first thing so that I can look at the WordPress writing prompt for the day and get the creative juice flowing while I wait for the cup to brew (I have a pod-based system; I use Café Bustelo from the can and a refillable pod.).
I only take the time to grab coffee, refill my water bottle, and use the bathroom before I jump into the writing prompt. I think one of my best qualities as a writer is being able to see what comes out when I just let my mind wander a propos of nothing. It’s a writing prompt, and whatever it made me think is okay. If the essay has nothing to do with the prompt, who the fuck cares? It’s not sticking to the instructions. I have understood the assignment because no matter what came out of me, the prompt for it was the same. In writing, there’s no way to really “prompt someone in the wrong direction.”
I write until I get hungry, or I bring my tablet and keyboard to the breakfast table and stuff my face between paragraphs. On those days, it’s generally eggs Florentine and toast, but I’m out of spinach and I’ve started writing before cooking, anyway. 😉
For those of you who are wondering, I’ll probably have eggs and cheese later. This week, real eggs were cheaper, but my actual favorite is those plant-based folded eggs you put in the microwave.
I read that last paragraph again and now it’s about a half hour later. I realized I was starving and went downstairs to grab a sandwich (wheat toast, egg, ham, swiss, salted butter, mustard, and black pepper). The first sandwich was so good I made another one with cheddar.
Cheddar and eggs go well with mustard because it’s a very, very, very rich Mournet. You can either scramble cheddar and mustard into the eggs before you serve them, or just make the eggs plain and put on the rest separately. I don’t know which texture will appeal to you better, but I do know that the flavor is famous. Mournet is a derivative of bechamel, a mother sauce in culinary school. Bechamel is a roux and some milk, reduced for thickness. Mournet adds cheddar and mustard. Stone ground is particularly pretty…. but I don’t notice presentation first. I am trying to make comfort food, my transition into the morning.
I used to binge caffeine, then I looked up this ancient technique called “going to bed earlier.” So, I don’t need as much coffee in the AM as I used to because I’m not counting on it as a replacement. What I do need immediately is water, and I keep a few 20 oz. soda bottles in my room for it. I don’t want to knock over anything without a lid. I ease into the day better with water than anything else, because I learned that sometimes by body said “coffee” because of addiction when it was really saying “I am a plant and I am not doing well.”
The thing about being an autistic person in an alistic world is that you don’t live in a hydroponics farm. All your basic needs are not automatically scheduled. You are at the mercy of yourself, and you’re not a very good boss.
Some people deal with that by having an extreme routine. Some people are paralyzed by them and avoid all social interaction, because when you have demand avoidance over your basic needs, you cannot begin to think about fitting into public because you cannot take on others’ demands if yours aren’t met first. It’s a spectrum of behavior and the masking of it.
You’re so afraid that people will not love you if you stop social masking that it just becomes the part of your routine that you always try to skip…….. if other people will let you.
I ran across a post on Facebook about looking for friends. They said they were an enneagram two looking for another one. I had no idea what the hell that meant, so I took the test on my own. I am a four, The Individualist. Apparently, this is the INFJ of enneagram, because it had all the traits of a healthy four, and all the negatives. It was fucking brutal. Enneagram is one of those tests where it comes off like psychological “data” indicating what’s wrong with you and why……. through a web form, so that’s legit.
The good news is that my personality is as rare as I think it is. The bad news is that my personality is as rare as I think it is (before the ADHD/Autism/PTSD/Bipolar enter the chat). INFJ in Meyers-Briggs–speak is about leadership and finding yourself in order to find others. Four sounds like they want to make the world revolve around them……. but, of course, they do this while also giving examples of great “narcissist” fours in history- Jesus, Rumi, Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Jr………. and Leslie Lanagan.
Ok. I get it.
Amazing people, enormous flaws (even Jesus, die mad about it).
I believe that Meyers-Briggs INFJ is more accurate (kinder?) for me than Enneagram Type Four, because my personality does not lend itself to narcissism. My personality lends itself to being able to look at a situation from more than one angle and people believe I am two-faced. When life is a spectrum of possibilities, two things can be true at once. More than two things can be true at once.
I cannot control anything but me, and I don’t try. I, like the INFJ/healthy four I am, have retreated into the silence to regroup. I’m learning what I can about other people who are also like me, beginning the vamp to “Take Five,” and we started in common time.
With an enneagram, you lean more toward one number than the other in terms of lower and upper limits. For instance, if you are a four who also has characteristics of three, you would be a four wing three. I am a four wing five, which means that I am just as inquisitive about the rest of the world as I am about me. It seemed to be one of the few bright spots in which the results didn’t focus on telling you why you were fucked as a human. The only other bright spot is that I learned which enneagrams I’m most compatible with, so at least if someone asks me where I fall, I don’t have to pretend I know what they’re talking about…… At the same time, I also believe “four wing five” would translate to 4/5 time, not 5/4, but Dave Brubeck didn’t write a chart in 4/5. 😉
It seems to me that enneagram has a lot to learn from “Ted Lasso” about being curious and not judgmental…. because essentially what it says is that we’re some of the most unique people on earth and also have to let everyone know it….. when people don’t respond, we’ll isolate and say “I liked it better that way, anyway.” I am sure this comes out in autistic rage, but even if behavior comes across that way you can’t always attribute underlying emotions.
Because it’s a spectrum, I know that other people are going to read different interpretations into it, but I feel that Individualists/Idealists fall into the trap of alienation and have to cope. We’re not begging for attention and the description makes it feel like we are. There’s no narcissism to it, there’s only handling a lonely world for neurodivergents. What are people supposed to do when they feel lonely besides pretend they like it?
There is a strong correlation between neurodivergence, four, and INFJ; however, the enneagram four copy was very much like getting a performance review at HR where they list all your worst characteristics to your face because they can’t just say “autistic.”
Language around “INFJ” talks about the good things in your life- that you’ll love one or two people intensely (perhaps three, but no more than a partner and two friends at a time), but shun more superficial relationships. INFJs are all about relentlessly trying to understand themselves, and the enneagram does not speak kindly to this. The description makes you feel like a loser, because it seems like extroversion is an ideal.
The enneagram will straight up tell you that if you don’t make friends, you’ll have a tendency to make being alone your personality, that individualism is the point because we’re too unique for the unwashed masses (Jesus would like a word). All personality types have their good and bad sides, and it isn’t wrong as long as extremes aren’t overrepresented. They often are. That being said, I was relieved to find that I have a lot of healthy four traits, and the enneagram does tell you what they are. It’s just that the list is a lot shorter, because apparently people like hearing how awful they are in great detail.
The biggest of the positives about a four is their ability to laugh at themselves. The trap in being a four is thinking that you’re such a special little snowflake no one can possibly understand or love you. Again, the wording of the enneagram is harsh and I do not like it. In my opinion, it is ableist.
Most creatives are coming from a place of deep pain, and autistic people score four/INFJ in droves. Therefore, the population of INFJs is already a group of people who have been led to believe that they’re lesser than. There is no need for all that because we can whip our asses on our own time.
When you’re autistic, getting out of bed and leaving the house takes work. No one is making us dive into self-pity except for hearing people talk about disability as if it’s an excuse. The world is designed like that, not us. Telling you no one is listening and nothing changing is par for the course; neurotypicals put the onus on the disabled person to fit in and this is proven, not my personal opinion.
If you’re an INFJ and autistic, you probably love personality tests. It took me a while to figure out why, though. Learning ourselves in-depth helps us figure out social masking easier, because when we find out how we fit into the puzzle, it’s easier to see where the other pieces go. Output can be dangerous if you don’t know yourself well enough to know what applies and what doesn’t. It’s not an exact science, and there’s no way to score it accurately (what is true today might not be true under different circumstances later).
Reading your enneagram, to me, is like reading “What’s My Toxic Trait?” porn because then you can compare how awful you are to other people. If you have mental illness, the trap is not feeling sorry for yourself. The trap is entering the pain Olympics. I’m going to be the best at therapy by proving I’m way more fucked up than you. It’s especially gratifying to see your therapist realize this is, in fact, her first rodeo.
Part of the reason I’m such an intimidating case is that in medicine, everything combines into comorbidities. In psychiatry, if it’s not one thing, it’s your mother. 😉 When a therapist is deciding how to work with me, they’re doing a lot of processing on the backend. What they get with me that they don’t get with most patients is that I want to understand me as badly as they do, and I can speak their language. I have not done enough reading to diagnose anyone including me, but I have read enough to be confident discussing my own body and treatment. I come into therapy already more self-aware than most patients, and this is not something I’ve said about myself. This is what every therapist I’ve ever had has told me after I let them read a few blog entries. They joke about “what do you need me for?”
Technically, they’re right. I don’t need them. I want them to provide feedback on what I’m learning about myself, but therapy cannot be my only outlet for my feelings because it’s harder for me to process while speaking than writing. It takes the energy of having to social mask away, when in therapy I’d be trying to balance the energy in the room. I’d notice the therapist’s discomfort and change tacks, fully realizing that’s their job. I am not a very good patient, just like I’m not a very good parishioner. The struggle is real.
I tried “Better Help.” Perhaps it’s just that I didn’t get the right therapist, but she told me that the way it worked was that I’d write and she’d respond. The problem was she didn’t. I’d write just like I do here, and I’d get a link to a Google document about something and no actual treatment. I think their therapists are overloaded and I didn’t get the right one for me. Doesn’t mean I feel inclined to go back. I will find something- a hybrid.
What I know is that even if this isn’t the answer, it is an answer I didn’t have yesterday. Autism is a new and frightening world, because so much of it makes sense in the context of feelings and issues I’ve had since childhood. So much of it is new in terms of not knowing how far behind the eight ball I’ve been in not having a diagnosis. I have never learned coping mechanisms for rage and burnout. I didn’t know I was social masking, I just felt alone. Alone and overwhelmed with no ability to do anything except cry in frustration. You can’t get it right, you’ll never please your boss, and you can’t clock out.
With autism, you don’t have to get a job to know hard work. Life is like a full time job.
Whenever one object exerts a force on another object, the second object exerts an equal and opposite on the first. -Newton’s Third Law of Physics
I knew I was attracted to Supergrover’s personality from the moment I met her. Again, cute, cuddly, and (works) blue. She was attracted to me because I was vulnerable with her in a way no one else could be- she read my thoughts here and thought she found a safe space. She did, it just took initiation into a really shitty club, the one in which I’m not social masking so there are maybe three people in it. Her husband spoils her in a way I would have wanted, because she put up with too much bullshit for discount yogurt coupon.
She talks me down off the ceiling, and the reason I’m over the moon is that she does it whether I need it or not. In those moments, I may not be able to look into her eyes, but I see the forehead kiss coming. The problem comes in when Supergrover doesn’t take the time to correct the story I’m telling myself and we get off track. But I don’t want to be off track. I am open and communicating, which comes across as rude and demanding. It’s how she came across after she didn’t want to solve anything anymore. Therefore, I used her tone thinking that’s how she’d respond to me. That when we came back together and regrouped after I’d had time and space to think about it, there would be a continuation of her giving me no bullshit answers and me doing the same.
What actually happened is that my no bullshit answers were taken as “you’re trying to hurt me.” Meanwhile, my heart’s all tied up and I’m lovesick because she thinks that. It leads to more anxiety on my part and avoidance on hers. It finally became untenable, because I was tired of having made a commitment to her like I did and not getting a say in anything…… while she said I dictated everything. Easy to be a dictator when I’m the only one who initiates and first response is anger. I wanted her to keep standing up to me by confiding in me. Being stronger by being vulnerable. Raging inside that she couldn’t and it was all my fault. After eight years of it, I finally decided something true. I matched her tone for tone and it wasn’t all me.
Turns out if I can’t date her, she can’t date her, either. That’s because we’re annoying as shit from different ends of the spectrum. I’m laid back. She’s persnickety. “Do not miss a detail or I will incinerate you if my ire is in full force” is on brand. Mine would be “your nachos look better than mine.” That’s because she’d never ask something of someone else that she wouldn’t do herself, and she wouldn’t miss a trick with nachos, either.
There are certain songs that remind me of her.
If you said “goodbye” to me tonight, there would still be music left to write. What else would I do? I’m so inspired by you. That hasn’t happened for the longest time.
She hides like a child but she’s always a woman to me.
Those are Billy Joel lines that have come through my head recently, but I’ve attributed others.
She’s like a one-way ticket and you can’t come back….. singin’ yeaaaahhhh, you want her, but she’s so mean.
I’ll never let her go, but only in terms of the character she presents here. There will still be music left to write because all creatives use their pain as art, no matter what kind it may be. For me, it’s having a love so deep and so ethereal that it has become a mind worm, but stopping our interaction has made it healthier. I do not ruminate on the questions when I know there aren’t going to be any answers…. as in, I’m not expecting them, waiting on them.
I never should have been waiting on them in the first place, but you’d have to understand details I can’t share as to why that didn’t happen. Why she got twisted further into me rather than further away.
We leapt before we looked, and were only now starting to see real promise- or were we? I don’t think so, because our relationship hung on thinking about perhaps one day maybe never doing something and what I could do for her. She is not selfish at all. I had time to be sweet to her and I wanted to do so. When she had time, she wanted to as well. We’ve sent each other all kinds of digital shit, particularly books and coffee because Amazon and Starbucks are the easiest to transfer back and forth.
We just don’t have the same time; people are right when they say everyone’s got the same 24 hours, but wrong at both ends of the spectrum. A poor person doesn’t get as much accomplished because they can’t travel very far, very fast. You have to have money for gas or public transportation. A powerful person doesn’t accomplish very much because they can’t focus on anything with everyone pulling them in all directions. The difference is small ball. Conversations and research add up. You might have had five minutes a day, but that’s 25 minutes at the end of a work week.
An ADHD or Autistic person does not do that consistently because their thought process is not going to pick up at the same place the next day. They have to come up with a new great idea, because they had it at 3:15, then Carol had an issue, then they got back to their desks and remembered the seed. But then there was only about an hour or an hour and a half left in the day, which isn’t time to fully flesh out the idea. By 5:30, it might as well be, “what idea?”
This is why conversations with Supergrover are so important to me. She’s big picture, and I’m details in terms of spitballing creative ideas or solving a problem. But that’s because she keeps track of everything and all my brainstorming will be off the cuff. My disability comes in where she shouldn’t be expected to keep track of everything, and I’m ADHD. We both have to learn to cope if we have a shot at friendship down the road, and it will be a long time before I’m ready to say we won’t. This is because traditionally when we try to separate, no we can’t.
There are just two reasons it feels final. The first is that I have a legitimate issue with her, I’m not just trying to be an annoying little shit. I’m sorry she’s busy, but I’ve been in the waiting room for eight years. The second is that she sabotaged one of my relationships and I let her because it was good for both of us. And yet also wouldn’t compromise with me on anything later when I felt I’d proven myself trustworthy.
I never railed at her for being straight, I never railed at her for telling me what she told me so that we couldn’t separate, I never tried to make her feel bad because she married a man. I never did a lot of things, she just assumed. She’d read a shit ton of my writing and decided what it meant and how to feel about it all on her own, which she should have. But she didn’t share with me any of her interpretations so that if her assumptions were wrong, I could correct them. She also wouldn’t correct any of my assumptions, then rail that I’d made them. It was not healthy, and her last words to me were “obviously, you’re the only person who can change…” as if I’d lorded my changes over her. I’m not better than her, I’m just different. I felt like I’d done a very good job of listening to her needs and responding, and I was being repaid in anger and guilt.
Reminded me of going to the hospital after Dana hit me and her saying, “must be nice to just be able to check out like that” after she’d hit me. Both Supergrover and Dana caused me to feel things that I’d never felt before in the extreme. I will never forget what it felt like to be hit by a partner. I will never forget what it’s like to be alone in a room with Supergrover, which is how I viewed our relationship- displaced in space and time, a room of our own. 😉 Different experiences, yet not. Different environments, yet not.
In the case of the failed relationship, I felt like I’d anticipated Supergrover’s needs jumping up and down for attention and it didn’t work out the way I thought it would. I don’t know what I was expecting given the previous few years, but it wasn’t what I got.
I got a big gift from her, but there was nothing on the card to indicate that it was transactional. Most of our gifts were “just because,” so if it meant “thank you,” I didn’t pick it up. Therefore, I recognize that she spoke to me in her love language and I am grateful. I just think it’s foolish for only one of us to study the language. It means only I’m in a foreign country.
Marcus? Marcus would get lost in his own museum.
And in fact, that’s exactly what I did. I wrote into the night, creating new memories with her and reveling in her old stories when she told them. I told her I wanted to be the Merlin to her Arthur, but I know in my heart of hearts that she did not believe I was telling the truth. This is not real? I ended up wishing that it could be more than each of us curled up reading each other from thousands of miles away, but grateful for even a 30 second interaction because her time is as precious as she is.
My beautiful girl is such a force of nature that I had to be mad at God for a while. First, railing at them because I’d been born queer because the relationship would be so much easier if I hadn’t. Then, railing because since she shut down communicating with me, it felt like she thought she was them.
She thought I was mean and vice vera.
Whatever objects of mine weren’t in motion before she appeared certainly started rolling afterward. The entry before last took place at Marylhurst, the year leading up to meeting Supergrover. Before I knew it was an emotional affair on my end, and I was always preventing her from being uncomfortable because I couldn’t keep my mouth shut and I knew she would be.
Not only was I blunt, I couldn’t get a read on what was okay and what wasn’t. Our reactions used to be so similar that when she put me in motion, we moved in the same direction.
Now, for every action there was an equal and opposite reaction in which her actions were always pure and she was perfect, and I was trying to take her for a ride. This was in no way true, but I see how she’d get that impression. I thought she would see with eight years of diligence that I wasn’t going anywhere and I was taking my end of the bargain seriously, but an avoidant attachment will run from an anxious one every time because they are not used to communicating with people clearly enough to avoid small anxieties that then spiral. Slights unfold in the memory.
I also don’t know when our relationship is affected by outside sources, and she held that against me, too. She asked why I wrote like she does everything because of me. If you don’t tell me there’s an outside force, I’m not going to look for it. I have enough problems not spiraling out without anticipating even more blowback because the moving goalpost would be “why do you attribute things to my friends and family?” I didn’t want her out of my life because I thought she was a bad person. I thought our relationship was difficult because I couldn’t love her any more than I already did unless she showed me how.
She has no idea how many e-mails I’ve written with tears streaming down my face because of it. Whatever you call it- a chord running between us, wearing her metaphysical ring, two toys in the same sandbox, etc.- I wasn’t prepared for how hard it was to undo a trauma bond, and I’ve been left with no other choice. I am not holding onto hope because I think it’s realistic. I am holding onto hope because neither one of us has been able to avoid each other no matter what our feelings have been for 10 years. It’s a tapestry.
I just decided to stop stitching until we went to Target together to buy fabric softener….. and she has to drive for many reasons. She doesn’t get to have an engine that good and not let me watch her play with it :::sly grin::: because she’d know how to raise the hair on the back of my neck safely. That’s why she’s the alpha in our relationship. One of only four or five people I’d trust to catch in one of those exercises where I just have to hope I don’t hit anything as I lean back.
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. I am angry that she does not see me as someone who would catch her and it has become useless to keep saying it and hope she takes it in. Maybe she will in retrospect, but even so it’s unlikely to result in reconnection. That’s because I’ve told her over and over that if she comes back, it has to be big. She has to lay all her feelings on the table so that I feel secure.
I know her first thought when she read that (the first time) was “why didn’t she just ask me to poke myself with a fork instead?” That’s because she’s cute and cuddly, but doesn’t indulge that side of herself. Doesn’t realize that the things she sees as “darts” from me are actually the things I love most about her. I’m not criticizing her, I’m telling her I notice her “-isms.” She has personal and professional quirks that make her unique. She doesn’t see that I think she’s uniquely inspiring and stupid gorgeous because she isn’t looking for it. That doesn’t make it less true.
I say everything wrong, but no I don’t because no one is ever wrong a hundred percent of the time. All of this has become a drumbeat because if I do not concentrate on resolving the issue and keep looking back across the river, I won’t be able to rescue myself.
She has told me to find people that bring good things into my life, that don’t cause me issues. Two huge problems with that. The first is that if I move on, she still causes issues because the bond is unbreakable. We leapt before we looked, and now I’m paying for it dearly. I am sure I am not the only one, I just don’t know her side of the story because she’s so adamant about not telling it.
So now, my task is to find something that will turn my attention, and I’m finding all sorts of temporary interests, but not anything so magical that it would interrupt how I’m feeling currently. Part of it is being a monotropic thinker caught up in a rumination that won’t go away. Part of it is that the situation cannot be duplicated, so if I lose her, I lose a once in a lifetime experience. My broken heart was caused entirely by thinking that I was the only one who got the chance of a lifetime. I forgot that when I saw her trademark and thought it was cool, she had met Leslie Lanagan.™
I don’t think that because of anything but Newton. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Supergrover fell in love with my writing. I started believing in myself. Any belief in myself started with “you like Eminem? Explain exactly how I’m not going to fall in love with you. USE BIG WORDS.”
I was joking. We’d just met like, 30 minutes ago. It was a mistake, and a big one….. but not for the reason you might think. I didn’t pull a trigger in her that meant anything sexual, but I made her feel good and vice versa. We amped up each other’s dopamine so that we felt this heightened bubble around us that excluded the rest of the world for evil and for awesome. It was private and healthy until it was private and not. And I’m not even sure how private it is, sweating bullets over everything about everything.
What I know is that if I keep putting one foot in front of the other, my attention will eventually turn. I think that’s best because she’s given no indication that me asking her to step up would do any good at all, and in fact most things I say piss her off because she can only accept my truth when she sees herself the same way I do. If those stories are different, she will become defensive and accusatory. At that point, I’ll just explode because I am so tired of trying to make it work.
The reason I’m tired of seeming “demanding” is that I’m not asking for anything huge. If she actually asked what my terms were, filling them would be the bare minimum in a virtual friendship. It’s not that I blame her for always being busy. I blame her for doing everything she can not to talk about her feelings so that I constantly feel like the failure in our relationship because I’ve asked her to emote. Anything above clear communication in text, like having lunch, is above and beyond. Penciling in lunch is what I’m willing to do, not what I need.
What I need is her to stop moving the goalposts so that I actually get positive feedback. When she holds off reading because she feels angry/guilty, she opens the e-mail and responds to it with anger and guilt…… if the issue is between us. She has time to post-mortem with me if she is not a party. She will help me improve any relationship except for ours.
It felt like I was settling for a connection that would be insecure my whole life because I would walk on eggshells to keep her until I died…….. because bringing up anything about our relationship makes her avoid me. It has to stop for as much as she walks in beauty and I do because of it.
Two reasons for giving up. The first is that I genuinely don’t want to take up her time. The second is that I don’t want the occasions when we do have time to interact to be contentious. I can’t be one of those “Christmas and Easter” friends because we’ve been so close in the past that it physically hurts when we’re distant. Having that distance is the only thing that allows me to keep that thought process at bay. It’s exhausting for the feelings I have about her to rush in and out. Riding the waves is a good thing, but it’s dangerous when the water levels are so different at low and high tides.
I am astounded by the entry where she told me she had read as much as she was going to read, that it’d been okay up to now. There were tears running down my face; my face felt as if it had never really been washed before. The reason I was crying is that the entry was much later than I thought it would be, and she’d read everything that was truly important to me. She didn’t agree with all of it, and that’s okay. Just knowing she read it is enough. Knowing she was still reading while I was at full strength, not social masking. Letting my autism run wild over our experiences so that I could process them through my fingers.
Of course it hurt that she said she wouldn’t read anymore, but it hasn’t been true at any other time in our relationship, so I’m convinced if it’s not true now, it will be. I have no doubt she loves reading about you. For some reason, in her mind I am very perceptive about everyone on this blog as well as completely 100% wrong when she’s in it.
I am not surprised at this attitude, as it’s most people’s attitude about my writing. It’s irritating as shit because people will read me for days/months/years and really get a feel for my writing. They’ll fall in love with it and treat me like a hero. They’ll build me up til I think I’m James Dean on toast. Then, when they’ve convinced me they really want to be a part of my life, they see what I’ve written about them and it quickly begins a downward spiral if I say anything but “the sun shines out of their asses.” I have not changed a thing in terms of the way I operate, but they’ve changed their perspective on me.
I love that Supergrover read the entry about all the things she never knew, about telling the bees she was gone… and might have even heard me read it. If she did, I hope she likes it, because that’s the purest love letter I’ve ever written to anyone.
Falling in love with straight women is never advisable. It’s cliché for a reason, though. Happens all the time. When it comes to being attracted to someone, mistakes are made whether people are the same sexual orientation or not. Plus, even if we had both been queer, that’s no guarantee that we would have been attracted to each other. I’m not even sure I’d be attracted to her physically because I’ve never seen her in person. Yes, her photo is gorgeous; I can’t go on that because you can’t judge how you feel around them by it.
This is why I’m so sure that what she looks like doesn’t even matter. That whether we meet or not, our brains are connected and that’s what’s important to me. Our brains being connected is just not a good thing until we establish healthy patterns and tamp down all the rage.
She and I, like Dana and me would’ve if we’d gotten back together, restarted with a lot of hostility. Over time, we each came around and I kept growing. I felt like we were getting closer, but I think now that I felt the intimacy of opening up to her. That theory holds up because my feelings didn’t degrade if she stopped talking- still haven’t, won’t. What I went through with her was a dream, but a disjointed one…. the kind where you think you’re going to learn the meaning of life….. until you realize it’s all just a bunch of green glass and movie magic.
I am not sorry for wanting her to be my somewhere over the rainbow, but I am sorry that she knows it….. and I couldn’t get around it by hiding her to her because I’m just not that good a writer. Hiding her to people who don’t already know her is hard enough. The reason she knows I love her this much is not just because I told her. I thought it was easier to go the hard route and just be honest with everyone, including you.
Generally, after I talked to her, I talked about her…….. and she read it. The reason we didn’t leave it at a one-note conversation is because I wasn’t writing my feelings about her to her. I was writing my feelings about her to you and she was listening. Sometimes it made her angry. Sometimes I touched her heart. The worst days was when she perceived I was doing the former when I was trying to overdo it on the latter. All I’ve ever wanted is to change her mind and heart, because I wouldn’t be who I am if she hadn’t changed mine.
She knows how I feel about her, how I’ll always feel about her. I will stay in motion especially being acted on by an outside force. In so many ways because our relationship is virtual, losing her is losing me. There are moments when my social mask is her because none of my other friends know her and won’t pick up the imitation. We’re both good people. If something worked on me, it’ll work on someone else.
Supergrover is sort of neurotypical with ironclad boundaries and morals. Therefore, it was imperative to pick up her social masking. She is much more stable than I am in that arena (I’m autistic/ADHD and she’s not, but she has PTSD so I’d be surprised if social masking hasn’t been a part of her life since she picked a favorite Crayon.). We are both incredibly complicated constructs, what makes us attracted to each other on a magnetic level because our conversations just keep digging down.
At first, she was good about thanking me for calling her out and not immediately getting angry, but it didn’t last because I got on her last fuckin’ nerve. I’m not saying her reactions weren’t anything I didn’t deserve, just that I was thoughtless and it had bigger consequences than I could see on the current chessboard. You often don’t when you’re playing black.
I didn’t get anywhere in our relationship until I pushed over my king for the last time….. except it wasn’t, because Supergrover was used to having a fight and would provoke me when I said I needed time. I am responsible for not walking away at that point, but because autism, I’m not very good at that. So, we’d spend our days ripping each other apart when this is someone I wanted to love for all time.
It mystified me that we were fighting over how beautiful she was and I was losing. I’ve loved beautiful women since forever and I’d still never seen anything like her……… and I would say that if I’d never seen a pic.
Her letters were like uncut coke to an autistic brain. I lit up like a Christmas tree every time a notification came in. My senses were heightened because I’d been in burnout/depression when we met and the dopamine of new relationship energy pulled me out. I missed DC (I lived in Oregon then), and for as much as I thought of myself as a lovesick girlfriend obsessed with punctuation, I thought of her letters as “news from home,” too.
I had never had a relationship that was so deep emotionally without being physical, so it took a while to learn how straight women do that. Definitely something I needed to know because I’ve misinterpreted lots of signals the wrong way in both directions. One of the things that’s come from being so tired of walking in gray area is if I’m interested in someone, just tell them. Don’t stop to hem and haw over whether they’re straight or not. If they are, they’ll tell you.
I realized I was pigeonholing women by anticipating whether they were or weren’t based on a non-existent set of facts that are actually just stereotypes. I’m not saying that telling Supergrover I had feelings for her was wrong, I’m saying that I was an idiot for thinking it wouldn’t change things as much as it did, because she was already a monotropic thought process without bringing all that romance shit into it. I felt like a seventh grader. Ugh. Eyeroll.
The one thing I will not do is pretend it didn’t happen. Supergrover has to learn to deal with my feelings if she wants to be in my life because I do not want a relationship where only one of us is getting what we need. What I need is for her to stop the push/pull of adoring me when I adore her here- deeply, intimately… and saying “you’re the only one who ever ruins anything” after we have text.
If this was a movie, our indecision over whether to be good to each other or not would make the audience throw popcorn at the screen. So many times we have duelled, enough that now there’s never a winner because we decided to attack each other instead of the problem.
I want to be kind to her. I want to love her like no one else does, and I can be safe and secure in the fact that I do. It has been such a circuitous route that it is impossible to remember every turn. I do know that at some times, it has felt like Google Maps just told us to swim.
Right now what I am doing is making sure that when I’m older, I still have these memories. It’s not a lot to write down to move on. It’s a lot to write down to record. Hindsight is 20/20, and I cannot look forward before I look back. If I am only looking forward, I am not seeing the mistakes I’ve already made.
Autistic people take in information by reading a lot of the time because processing someone’s voice is more difficult than text. In effect, I’m writing down my memories because it makes social masking stick in my head.
Social masking doesn’t mean that I’m not being real with you when I do it. I am not trying to learn how to emote. I am learning how people receive it so that I can be more effective in my communication. It would be nice if people did the same for me, but neurotypical people don’t generally do that. It’s not how society works. If you are not having a meltdown and stimming by rocking, “you don’t look autistic.” If you hear people say that, they’re certainly not the type who’s prepared to be sensitive to it.
The world doesn’t owe me any favors in terms of excusing my behavior because I’m autistic. It is only a tool for me to learn how my reactions are different by having them classified into a group. I would like to make the whole world more accessible, but that’s not my call. My call is being able to act upon an outside force because it acts upon me, not cower away because I’m afraid to take up room.
For instance, I know that I rejected a lot of love in my equal and opposite reaction to Supergrover because it wasn’t the package I wanted. She thought I was being selfish, like a child who’s had their favorite toy taken away. Our problems weren’t child’s play, so I don’t know why she thought the solutions were easy. She took up an enormous amount of room in the relationship and, I feel, blamed me for wanting a solid 10-20% rather than a rolling approval rating with large spikes.
I’ve said it so many times, and mostly that’s just to convince me I did the right thing. It is torture in the moments I think I didn’t, because if so, I traded a lot for a little. There had to be multiple battles for me to concede the war, because I kept changing tacks and nothing got better. It was hell walking away, and an even bigger hell to stay and be caught in a gray area that felt like it had an electric fence. No matter how much I tried not to get buzzed, I hit a wire somewhere.
The two scenarios are so different because the honeymoon phase is so different from where we are now. It would have to have been that explosive to create this much pain.
Every action creates an equal and opposite reaction, but some elements are more stable than others.
I am not coming from a place of lack, begging her to come home. I am coming from a place of abundance that I ever got to love her at all.
For cesium, there was flourine. For me, there was you…. and the joy and light of being complete.
Name the most expensive personal item you’ve ever purchased (not your home or car).
I got the chance of a lifetime when I got the job at Marylhurst University (mostly online, now closed). I met a great group of coworkers and we had a blast together. It wasn’t the perfect job for me because we don’t get to pick the jobs we want down to the curtains, but it was damn close. The reason for this is that University of Houston had 30,000 students, staff, and faculty when I was there. The labs and helpdesk were buzzing with activity, which was great for my ADHD and hell on my autism. It was a lot to take in, and I managed because I was young and didn’t know any better. Marylhurst was none of that.
I was older by then and thus couldn’t have limitations excused. At the same time, I shared an office suite with three other people, I wasn’t taking up four square feet in a sea of fifty other people. It was massive, in the top floor of a library, and it was more at home and settled than I’d felt in years.
With age comes responsibility. By the time I got the job at Marylhurst, I was in a train wreck of a marriage that started out with so much promise I still have dreams in which none of the last 10 years ever happened. My conscience spaces it when I have PTSD triggers or something like that. It’s only my brain trying to protect me and giving me calming images. I haven’t talked to her in years, but my brain doesn’t care. Dana’s laugh always brings out mine, even if I’m just thinking about her and she’s not in the room.
Absolutely none of it excuses the moments in which she purposefully tried to hurt me emotionally and physically. That’s a big statement, that she did it on purpose, and I will not shy away from it. That’s because whether Dana’s intentions were pure or not- her actions stemming from neurodivergence or malice- the effect was the same.
First, I cannot speak to whether Dana is autistic or not. In retrospect, I did not pick up anything that suggests it, because all of the things that would fall under autism I observed fall into ADHD, too. Secondly, Dana is not ADD. She is ADHD, and why the DSM is so fucked up for not differentiating anymore. I have the kind of ADHD that presents classically in women. She has the kind of ADHD that classically presents in men. As children, we were treated accordingly. You can tell that Dana has ADHD, and mine is hidden until you’re close enough to see my lack.
Our marriage made so much sense when you look at our relationships with our sisters. There’s the same age difference between Lindsay and me as there is between Dana and Counselor, and I’m betting that Counselor didn’t pick up on this because she’s never met Lindsay………… I see it so clearly that I married Dana because she reminded me of Lindsay, and Dana married me because I reminded her of Counselor. That comes out in different ways, mostly because Lindsay has the Dana brand of ADHD and Counselor and I are so close in personality that it’s weird how you never see us in the same room. If Counselor had been queer and I’d met her first, we actually would have been better partners to each other than Dana and me. This is because opposites generally only attract in the short term.
The theory holds up because Counselor and I are more like our dads. Dana and Lindsay are more like our moms. Laser beam to her head, Counselor would agree with me. Ask her if she’d like to be partners with someone like Dana having already lived with her. It’s a mixed bag because there is everything loving and comforting about a relationship pattern you’ve had since childhood, and everything bad about continuing a pattern you’ve had since childhood.
My mother knows I’m just like my dad, and I’m sure in a lot of ways knows better about what happened to Dana and me than anyone else who ever lived. She would not have understood specifics, but could have written an essay on dynamics. She could read it blind.
But, for all my best hopes and intentions, our childhood patterns turned on us. I only once had a fight with Dana that was more explosive than any I’ve had with Lindsay. Variables were transient, pattern recognition was absolute.
ADHD and Autism combine in me, but don’t in Lindsay. That means when we turn on each other, we have equal and opposite reactions….. but when we’re tracking together, it’s so good it’s like we’re the front and back of the same piece of paper. Dana and I had that same pull toward each other and the same negative reactions. Knowing in retrospect that I “married my sister” is valuable for the future because it means that who I’m looking for in a partner is more like my mother than my father, how adult relationships are currently classified (and in fact, how I think they should because the relationship with your parents is hierarchical. You don’t learn anything about how you work when a power structure like that is in place.).
There’s more to that story, but I’m instituting a hard out because to say more is to tell someone else’s story. But from what I’ve written, you’d think that I wanted Dana back. This is not true in the slightest nor will it ever be. I will be sad if I never see her again, but not bothered. We both owe each other too much not to restart with a shit ton of resentment, so even if it worked for three months, you wouldn’t be able to check in on us three years after that.
If Supergrover is any character in this story, it is Uncle Phil. We got in one little fight and I did not want to wait around and see if it happened again, so “Bel-Air” became “Silver Spring.” The real deal is that when I decided to pick up my toys and stomp off, I did not make the agreement not to come back. At the time, I wanted physical distance for safety, but I honestly and completely believed that we’d get back together because we needed to live apart and work on ourselves. Didn’t mean the connection was dead, etc.
Over time, I began to realize that’s not how being hit works. Dana broke the physical barrier and I’m not saying I didn’t hit her back or anything like that. I am saying two things. The first is that Dana instigated. The second is that at the time, she was about 300 pounds and I was maybe a buck 20. Her last punch was at my eye, where there was a lot more force behind her fist than there ever could have been in mine. She smashed my glasses into my face, and it took about two or three weeks so that the bruise didn’t show on my face. I was embarrassed to leave the house (and in burnout/depression). I didn’t get better in two or three weeks because phantom pain set itself up on my face for about a year after that. I didn’t think about calling the police, but our next door neighbors did.
It would have had to be that painful for me to let her go. She is the love of my life, but not that I don’t/won’t have others. I think that we would have been all right with counseling and we were too stupid not to see it….. but the counseling should have started the moment she got out of jail (DUI), not when Supergrover entered the picture.
Dana indirectly cost me my job at Marylhurst and I will not apologize for that statement. She wasn’t rude to my boss or anything like that, so I’m not blaming her. I am telling you the reality of the situation. I have two disabilities that affect my executive function and Dana helped it freak the fuck out. I couldn’t regulate for months.
That’s because when she got arrested, she lost her driver’s licence. When she lost her driver’s license, I had to drive her to work. There was no other option, as there was no bus to get her where she needed to go at 0300 and this was before Uber (it also would have been crazy to spend that kind of money on Uber when we had a car).
I would try to go to sleep when she did, not always possible because I wasn’t actually on her schedule, and try to function at work despite having gotten up at 0200 and gone back to bed at 0330….. every. Single. Night.
She didn’t feel that disregulation because she isn’t autistic and it was her job. What was torture to me was a chauffeur service for her. I’m not bagging on her. It’s not like she didn’t feel bad about it or anything. We both did a better job of beating ourselves up than the other one ever could’ve.
At the end of the day, neither one of us could change how we did things. It was a nightmare, and we had different reactions to it. I started focusing on soda and not alcohol. I moved into a sober house without knowing beforehand because my “host family” is Lebanese, and even though not Muslim, they are Druse, a derivative. It’s not that they disapprove of me drinking. I could have a case of vodka if I bought it.
Alcohol is just not our culture. It’s not what we do to enjoy ourselves, therefore no one is itching because it’s not there. I think once we had a brandy together before Thanksgiving, and this will be my ninth coming up. It’s just not a thing. It’s also returning to the culture of my first family, because my parents didn’t disapprove of other people drinking, but it’s not a Methodist pastor’s vibe (in general).
For a Methodist pastor, not drinking is a source of high comedy.
Editor’s Note:
The Jews do not recognize Jesus as the messiah. The Protestants do not recognize the Pope as the head of the church. Two Baptists do not recognize each other at a liquor store.
I don’t think I even tried alcohol until I was in middle school, and even then it was just a sip of wine because I didn’t know it wasn’t grape juice at communion.
After Dana got her DUI, it changed the alcohol game in only my mind, it seems. I found new flavors in new things. She did not. I wasn’t the one with a DUI, I was the passenger that, according to a police report in Multnomah County somewhere, I was “passed out in the front seat with Taco Bell lettuce on my face.” Being able to do that was the point of why Dana was driving in the first place.
She ran a game on me that I should have seen coming and I didn’t. That’s why in an earlier entry I called her an alcoholic, and I’m sorry if I’m wrong. Sincerely. I can only tell you what I observed. She actively sabotaged my ability to drink to take it for herself by agreeing to be the designated driver. She could not see that if she had one, she would not stick to soda after that and leave me in the lurch. Then, when she realized it, she’d drink more because she figured out she could.
I’d start with a Guinness, she’d start with a double Jameson. That right there became me enabling her by anticipating that she was going to do it to me and just accepting my fate. I was always the DD, and it didn’t occur to me to fight her on it instead. If I wanted a cocktail myself, I needed a ride home and compromising on it became a drumbeat I got tired of hearing because it didn’t change. I should have stood up for myself, and didn’t. This is because it is only in retrospect that I see how I enabled her.
It wasn’t on purpose. I was used to the push/pull of that dynamic of becoming a parent to an adult who wasn’t always pleasant. I didn’t mind being a caretaker because that’s how I was raised. I realized in Houston that a DUI was absolutely going to happen again and I wouldn’t excuse a second like I did the first. That at the very least, I wouldn’t divorce her, but she’d have to move out. I didn’t want to be around her culture, and when she hit me, I didn’t want to be around her, either.
There is a direct link between her and the person who emotionally abused me as a child. They know and have loved each other in the past, but that’s not the only thing. Dana was the first of my partners to recognize that she could love us both all she wanted and that still didn’t mean that __ and I weren’t a toxic dumpster fire. She saw the obsession with which I thought of her, and even I thought I was obsessed with her until I found out I had autism. It wasn’t that I was obsessed with her, it’s that I’m programmed to think about a single interest.
Now, why in the hell would a beautiful opera singer become a single interest to someone who wants that life……. who is also an opera singer, but untrained at that point…….. and still hasn’t appeared in a mainstage role but has been offered one (Penzance). In fact, she was a great teacher, but not the one for me. She didn’t have my high range, so it took a different teacher to unlock it. However, she has amazing music comprehension/interpretation and I’m glad I have her concept of musicality (PHRASING!).
I also loved her like a house on fire, listening to all her secrets and lies. Reading her college journal. Freaking out over her emotions and not mine. She used me as a dopamine source, and don’t let anyone convince you otherwise. She has manipulated so many women in front of me that I have seen her run the same game on others because their faces looked just like mine on so many occasions. When she turns the sun on you, you feel like the rest of the world blurs. You’re drawn to the web by the beauty of the spider. In some cases, physical attraction to her is right away. In all cases, people hear her sing and fall all over themselves to meet her.
In so many ways, that taught me how to be a singer more than anything else. Watching people fall all over themselves when they talked to her taught me about conserving energy. NEVER believe your own press. Have confidence in yourself, but becoming needy for external validation will lead you down the wrong path because you’ll emotionally vampire the people around you.
Therefore, in some ways from the outside we look like the same person. Our behavior just comes from opposite ends of a spectrum. I’m anxious, she’s avoidant. She needs dopamine, I need stability. Her interest is based on getting adoration, mine is about genuinely caring and catering to her needs. Her manipulation comes in when she knows she’s avoidant and you’re anxious, because your need to be heard will be blocked at every turn when a narcissist only wants dopamine from you.
They don’t want any negatives in a relationship because they really can’t handle them whether they’re narcissists or not. Knowing whether I was a narcissist or autistic was a very important distinction for me because I knew I wasn’t like her on the inside, but my judgmental bluntness made it seem that way and I had to find out why. None of the things about obsession and getting dopamine seemed true, but that’s what everyone thought because I didn’t have either an ADHD or an autistic diagnosis at that point.
People only knew I was bipolar, and figured OCD came with it. For my friends and family, sometimes they have assumed that PTSD and the breaking of my reality has been the forward note in all of this. They don’t know how I’ve made women I’ve loved my special interest since first grade. I was seemingly obsessed with Mrs. Grant, my dad’s secretaries, Meagan, and all the women they haven’t met after that, including Dana.
I made her my whole entire world, yet separate and secondary from __ because I’d known her since I was 12. I regretted it (twice in different ways- leaving her because I didn’t want to have an affair, and coming back because I couldn’t stand not asking the question…. and not “should we have an affair?” It was “leave your partner because we’re obsessed with each other in a way we can’t duplicate elsewhere and we should stop fuckin’ trying.” But we were only as successful as we allowed ourselves to be- I could choose Dana every time over my mom, dad, and sister.
The separation that comes with establishing your second family was secure biologically. That being said, __ also raised me and whether she intended it or not, I thought there was a possibility of romance. I didn’t by the time I moved to Portland having visited several times since she left Texas. I was secure about all of it, but that didn’t mean my monotropic thought process changed. She had 15 years on Dana, and I’d been every bit as rabid about her in the past and was having trouble not scheduling an appointment to talk about penguins (Sam from “Atypical). I didn’t have any way to stop it, so I couldn’t.
It embarrasses me that it led directly to a relationship where I couldn’t hang because I couldn’t acknowledge a monotropic thought process, letting go of depression and anxiety stemming from it because everyone thinks I’m weird and I feel like an alien.
If I wrote an autobiography and was just spitting titles, at least the working one would be “Jesus, Michael Valentine, Aziraphale, and Me.” Or, more accurately, “The Holy and the Moly: A Love Story.” That’s because it’s universal enough to cover history, politics, intelligence, and my romantic/platonic relationships. Those aren’t the only subjects to which it applies. Yin and yang are everywhere.
A/Theism is the greatest love story ever told, and the truth is in the slash. -Pete Rollins
Dana and I were an overnight success years in the making, because we’d loved each other so intensely emotionally that it became impossible not to pine for the physical in a way that just didn’t take until I had to live without her. I lasted a grand total of 18 months.
And it wasn’t all Dana’s magnetic pull. It was also that I spent a month in Portland alone and my house was more peaceful without Katharin. For as much as Katharin would hate me for having an affair that lasted eight and a half hours, she didn’t realize what a toxic mess she was and felt perfectly justified in being a lunatic and pulling shit on me for life. It was always my behavior, never what triggered it.
Meagan was my ex-girlfriend and I should have known it was “our” house and to consider her feelings when we’d been together for three months. She didn’t remember ex in high school and we were 28 or something like that. She remembered that if I’d been attracted to Meag once, I still was and she felt threatened. Meanwhile, I’m like “Meag was three girlfriends ago.” Just because I now think she would have been a good partner for me as an adult doesn’t mean she actually would have been, or that I would make the decision impulsively to sleep with someone in which there would be disastrous consequences for both of us…. for years on end, not just the next morning. What I said yesterday about actually sneaking off together was based on one thing- the women who we were with the night she was there both gave us unpleasant breakup experiences- not that we were perfect.
Additionally, after we broke up, Meag and I always flirted heavily and she could see that it had an effect on me and avoided it……. but not enough to stop. until we were much older and wiser. Like, if you don’t want to open Pandora’s box, degrade your pickpocket and sneak abilities, okkkkkkkkk…… I made the mistake that we would have another night together at some point, derailing my ability to move on because sometimes it was flirting innocently, sometimes it rode the edge…….. especially in front of her girlfriends.
I think that’s because it reinforced the yin and yang I had with her beard and it stuck with us. It encouraged competition she thought was amusing, but I didn’t when I learned I was always designed to lose. If it wasn’t her beard to keep her safe, it was the excitement of feeling two women fighting over her without having to suffer the consequences because I didn’t have any boundaries. I know why, therefore I don’t care. What I care about is the fact that I let myself be snowed more than once, going home brokenhearted every time until I went to visit her on her new turf.
That’s because going to visit my parents makes all the ghosts rise from their graves. I couldn’t get over her in the same town where I met her, because grace doesn’t leave you where you were found, a running theme in my life on multiple levels.
The relationship with Supergrover doesn’t make me want to run because I don’t see her everywhere I go unless I’m specifically looking for her. I don’t except at times where it’s possible a shared interest would lead our paths to cross. Because of the insecure connection, I actively avoid those things and will until our connection is secure again.
Because she’s suspicious, if I don’t avoid these things she uses the events as evidence I’m an asshole because I’m trying to look for her or trying to get close to someone because she is. I went to school with a lot of people who are now famous.
She knows a lot of famous people. An analogy would be scaring the life out of her because we both showed up at the same theater to see Matthew McConaughey. I don’t know if she knows him, but he’s the biggest star I’ve actually met in real life (not at HSPVA, attended the same church as kids. I just don’t remember meeting him because I was three at most.).
Because he’s a household name, there’s a bigger chance she knows him. For instance, I could say the same thing about Jason Moran and Robert Glasper being threatening, but they’re not as widely known so she might not have heard of them.
Editor’s Note:
The way Supergrover and flip each other shit runs thusly with stuff like this. I make a joke or observation (here or otherwise). I will have written thousands of words around it. She’ll go for the joke and laugh at my annoyance (that’s it? That’s all I get?). For instance, the e-mail I will get in response to this whole entire ass essay (if it happens) is “I do know Matt. :)” No context whatsoever, pick your own adventure. Luckily, that hasn’t been problematic at all (eyeroll).
In return, I do shit like compare her job to one in the service industry and she says, “I accept tips.” I PayPal’ed her two dollars. All I got back was “Dead.” That laugh is worth more than I’ll ever pay for it.
When it’s good it’s perfect because she’s basically George Clooney. Beautiful and impish.
The Holy and the Moly: A Love Story
I just want her to see that she’s the whole book on her own, and so am I. We’re like a YA novel where every chapter is one of us acting as unreliable narrator, because our problems are adult and our reactions to them are not.
We are talking about serious shit with underlying feelings akin to the love and disaster of your best friend finding a new one in third grade…… not a one-off for me as I’ve fumbled my way through life.
Katharin was a narcissist because she was a dry drunk, another bird with a broken wing who treated me like shit while I walked on eggshells hoping it helped and it never did.
The absolute and only reason I made Supergrover my special interest in my writing is because it was the first relationship in which my partner could be first in my mind. Whether she was a yellow string or a red, there was no hierarchy except the hard outs. I called her on her bullshit as easily as she called me on mine. I felt freer than I’d ever been, and I’m sorry I hurt her because of it, flying too close to the sun.
That’s because we came back together afterward, the relationship was maintained with an anxious/avoidant attachment and history repeated itself. I was seemingly obsessed when Supergrover is one of the few topics where you have to make an appointment with me to talk about whales (“Extraordinary Attorney Woo”).
Another character I love is on Apple TV+ called “Dr. Brain.” I can’t remember the real name of the doctor, but the show starts with a clearly autistic child (relatively low function STEM savant in medicine- brilliant intellectually, not so much with the affection. The way he’s low functioning as an adult is what makes him come off as an asshole who “doesn’t look autistic.”).
Yet, apparently my monotropic thought processes will always be such a mystery :::hold for everyone to roll their eyes:::
I also do not know what happened to Dana after I moved to DC. We talked a few times when I got here, but not since. I feel such pain and relief. I sincerely hope that she prefers Fanta to whatever the fuck that was…… if not for her sake, for her future partners.’
These essays are how I learn what I will not tolerate anymore. I am not a judgmental asshole. I constantly want a better relationship and try to provide positive feedback, but when my sensory issues are turned up to hell and I’m having an autistic meltdown, rage takes over my whole body and my executive function goes out the window.
It is not only because autism chooses to hit hard and fast. It is because I didn’t realize that people don’t rage like that when they’re angry. It looks a lot different and you can’t put your finger on it if your brain isn’t the same (especially, but not limited to you thinking it is). My social masking taught me how to fight, how to express myself, but not the way neurotypicals do it. I could only pick out their patterns, not understand them to the degree I could replicate.
I did not comprehend that when I was angry, frustrated, and overwhelmed so were other people, but their emotions weren’t tied up in their health. When people get angry and defensive at me, I respond. I do not have “a proportional response” because I have no executive function. When I get angry, I get arrhythmia, shortness of breath, and sudden drop in blood pressure that makes me feel like I’m going to faint, but I don’t. I’m just frozen.
The reason I know it’s autism and not PTSD depends on the subject. It’s a PTSD trigger when I’m thinking about the source, and autism because the rage has happened since long before my emotional abuse was a thing. Just like other autistic people, that kind of rage can be brought on by anything during meltdown.
It could be “my parents divorced” or “I have to eat blueberries (every one is different) instead of Goldfish (every one is the same). Not seeming bothered by such a small thing is what we mean when we say “social masking.” Pretending that a whole lot of social shit doesn’t matter when we’re physically and mentally in pain.
We put up with a lot of emotional abuse because autistic kids are treated differently than autistic children and you never grow up whether you’re neurodivergent or not. We are layers and layers of social masking over a six-year-old child, and I’m not the first or only person to make this observation. Because I’m a preacher’s kid, I saw this long before Psych 101. Taking Psych 101 led me to be interested in Erickson, Skinner, and Freud to some extent. That’s because I was not interested in going into early education, but how childhood affects adults. Through education and volunteering (youth director at church), I have learned a little bit about both ends of the spectrum.
“Volunteer youth director” jogged my memory and I remembered the two times I knew I really had a win with them. The first was a parent coming up and telling me how much her son appreciated a story I’d told (sermon illustration I didn’t write) about a little boy flinging starfish into the ocean. His parents stopped him and said “it doesn’t make any difference. There’s too many.” He said, “it makes a difference to this one.” The reason it was a win is that his mother told me the story of him telling her two years later.
The second win is entirely because of who my dad and stepmom are as people. My dad was a pastor. My stepmom is a doctor. The scriptures that week were on the lepers that Jesus cured, and how only one of them came back to thank him for it (that’s on brand for humanity). Where they meet is being able to explain to the kids why the lepers were outcasts. What leprosy did to the body and why it made them look so physically different. Leprosy is now called “Hansen’s Disease, and falls under autoimmune diseases.
In Texas, we occasionally see cases because pro tip, you cannot eat an armadillo.
Anyway, the message resonated and one of the kids….. the one who everyone else considered “a mess….” said, “maybe we shouldn’t do the same thing to the Muslims.” I don’t remember the correlation because I don’t remember which country said outcasts were from, I just remember it was the Middle East.
Back to you, Bob. Let’s go to the phones.
You don’t stop having PTSD, you focus on it longer because you’re a monotropic thinker. Once it gets in, you have a hell of a time getting it back out….. and yet when you solve it, you don’t suddenly become “not autistic,” either. Again, Supergrover and I weren’t, aren’t, and never will be a couple, but I learned more about how I behave in one than I have from anyone else in the last 10 years.
I could pick up the “I should be angry about this,” but not “this is how a functional person experiences rage.” I don’t need to learn how to get rid of rage because it’s never going to happen. Disabilities frustrate and anger the shit out of me. It is something that needs constant management, because freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences. You don’t have a social mask for something, you better get it.
Autism is a spectrum, and what we mean by “high functioning” is enough executive function to be aware we need social masking in the first place. The classic image of an autistic person is someone who doesn’t, so therefore all people who can social mask “don’t look autistic.” It’s not that I don’t have the same reactions. I have different ways of expressing them. My toxic trait is being in meltdown and it looking like nagging/nitpicking. I’m not, I’m just overwhelmed and headed for burnout and can’t adjust my tone because I’m not thinking about it. So much depends on what happened before I got angry and how many sensory issues are in the room.
The way I manage it is to walk away from a conflict, but reassure the person that I am not walking away because I am angry at them. I just need to process meldown and burnout before I can discuss an issue calmly. That it’s better for me to process on my own so I don’t take out my anger on them.
The added bonus is that while we’re not interacting, they’re still seeing how I’m processing my emotions because I don’t lock them out. Anyone can read here, and I’m sure “anyone” does. 😉 (This applies to many, many people…. like Allison in Galveston, etc.). Whether someone else wants to work with me or not, they get closure if they want it. I’m doing it for myself, but that doesn’t mean they don’t benefit from it.
In fact, sometimes I’m so good at writing about things here that people don’t tell me things because they feel like they’ve already talked to me because I’ve written about them. In their minds, I’ve already “texted them.” It’s not a slam on their reputations because I don’t have much to talk about outside of what I publish to make conversations different.
People don’t have to ask me how I am because they already know. The difference is that I don’t have the same relationship with them because I’m isolated by nature of what I do. Sometimes I’m distant whether I want to be or not because it takes being completely off the grid for me to write. This is problematic when people think of my phone as a leash.
I don’t even carry it most of the time because I have an Apple Watch that will switch hit between Wifi and my cell plan. I turn off the notifications so I have it if I need to call out or if I fall, but my wrist isn’t constantly dinging or buzzing (if you have an Apple Watch, you know the hell of being trapped in a group text). I prefer buzzing to the sound, btw. The reason I don’t carry my phone is that I only need to be able to call and SMS because I use an Android tablet that does everything my phone would with more desktop real estate.
Neither an iPhone or an Apple Watch has a 3.5mm headphone jack, so I don’t get any benefit from better audio when the Bluetooth cards are basically identical. I just don’t have a use case for a phone anymore. The only reason I use my iPad is to watch Apple TV+. My iPad is more powerful in terms of hardware, more irritating in terms of software. If I could buy an iPad and install Android on it, I would. In fact, because I use both tablets as a laptop, adding a keyboard and sometimes a mouse, I could put the entire desktop version of Ubuntu and all its applications with hardware that good.
It’s not that I prefer desktop linux to Android. I can do anything on an Android that I could do on a linux box because it’s the same OS in terms of command line. But there are more applications written for desktop Ubuntu that haven’t been ported to a mobile app (damned inconvenient).
Android has been around for a long time, but really started competing with iOS when Samsung started releasing features that were years ahead of iPhones (and Apple always thinks their improvements are their ideas). I learned the most about Android when I was working for Marylhurst.
It was the storm before the TARDIS landed on my lawn, and the sweet relief of finding my own bedroom.
It’s all connected. The way I acted. Why. How I got to different locations and conclusions with multiple people who all had the same characteristics and wildly different in other ways, leading to me to believe there were no repeats, etc.
That’s why it is such a long essay over a $500 leather satchel (tablet case) I bought when I got the job. It was handmade in Ecuador. I don’t care if I paid too much, the quality makes in an heirloom. It needs conditioning now, and it needs to be worn in even still. But it is the most valuable personal item I have, because there’s way more than $500 worth of joy, laughter, and pain in it.
Even my autism turns up in a joke about it…. that my Satchel is a TARDIS in and of itself. The reason that it connects to my autism is that in bringing up “Satchel,” we have just made an appointment to talk about intelligence.
In elementary school, I had two classes. One was called “English” and one was called “Language Arts.” It has been at least 40 years since I started school, and I still can’t tell you the difference. I am 100% certain that it would only take a quick Google Search to make the distinction, but I enjoy being a writer and not knowing. It’s just funny. However, if I had to guess, it would be that “English” = Grammar and “Language Arts” = content. I’m guessing because I always got grades like 97/95 in English and I think those were the two criteria. I then, like now, wrote in stream-of-consciousness mode so my grammar wasn’t infallible, but even before I learned to type it was typo-adjacent. I only spelled things wrong when I wasn’t thinking about it. Also, in high school I wasn’t a very good typist. I caught more mistakes that way because I was going slower.
Learning how to chat online made me a better writer, because now I can touch type. In fact, I can keep up with my thoughts to the tune of only being a couple of words behind what I’m thinking. Most businesspeople can do this, but it’s a specialized group that didn’t know anything about typing and learned it because conversation moved too fast for them to keep up. My first real foray into language arts was with meeting girls (of course it was). Then, just like now, big emotional connections, but not outright flirting because I was 15 and they lived far, far away.
I will tell you about them (mostly because if they Google themselves, they’ll re-find me), but I have to tell you that I might not be in any way correct because catfishing was a thing even in the 90s. But whether these women were real or not, they were my friends and there was no sexual content to anything, leading me to believe that they were legit. Yes, I was young, but I found other young people, or at the very least, adults who did not hurt me.
The first was Rainey McMillan from Swansea, Wales. It was 31 years ago and she’s still fresh in my memory. I didn’t have a personality with her because we’d never met. In her, I found my real self- the autistic person who went non-verbal for very, very, very long periods of time because writing took away my barriers to conversation. I believe wholeheartedly that Dana didn’t see it because she couldn’t. I used to be a lot more okay with forced extroversion than I am now, which was bad. Very, very bad. I was overwhelmed a hundred percent of the time and lived in burnout often. If I can narrow down my demand avoidance to the most essential of needs, I can feel my body’s rhythm and flow. It gets lost in an overloaded schedule. I notice when my demand avoidance gets so debilitated I cannot move. My biggest job right now is to learn how to deal with these disabilities, because I cannot even ask for ADA accommodations if I don’t know what will actually help.
I could do lots of jobs in a quiet room. Very few offices have them anymore because it’s all about cubicle farms and conference rooms. People have asked me how I worked in a busy kitchen. It was a process. First, my relationship with Dana was strong and a lot of it was just us alone in the kitchen. She was a sensory experience in and of herself and my eyebrows are going over my forehead and that was meant to make her laugh because she knows her. They’ve met.
Dana becomes very excited about things. Very excited. I was irritated by a lot of it, but she also became very excited about me. It wasn’t all bad. The negative aspects of my sensory experiences paled in comparison to the positive. 😉
However, this shouldn’t be taken as a slam on Sam, either. A positive of waiting is forgetting enough about the experience to make it new, which is what 90s gays in Houston called “Baptist virginity” (because they get re-baptized all the time and we have no idea why. The first one didn’t take?).
I’ve always thought sex was hilarious, since I was a kid. One of my favorite comedy routines is the one about Jeff Foxworthy trying to make the room all romantic for his wife. He puts candles on their headboard and halfway through they realize wax is dripping on their faces. I would like to believe that I am also hilarious with stuff like that. There’s no point in getting too worked up over it. One day it’ll make a cute story between us, what doesn’t kill you makes good writing, etc.
I also think being queer had to cure me of Protestant beliefs about sex because I had to talk about it so often. The glossary of my community alone, JFC. Learning it takes years and I’m behind the eight ball. If I’m talking to someone under 30, they’re going to have to use flash cards. :::pause for laughter::: On the other hand, new terms come to me easily because I want to learn the language even if I never use it. I picked up “new relationship energy” or NRE from polyamory because it describes how I feel at the beginning of every relationship. I’m what’s called “demisexual” or “sapiosexual.” That means I am not attracted to people by the way they look, but how much they excite my brain. That’s why it doesn’t matter what kind of relationship it is, I’m going to get lost in a fog. I feel the same energy with Supergrover that I do with Lindsay- because since Lindsay only works here and hasn’t actually relocated, every time I see her it’s the brain fog of it feeling new and heightened. Strong, comfortable, and exhilarating because she’s such a big shot. What I have learned from both of them is that I am worthy of being married to someone like them. That they weren’t more powerful because they were smarter. They were more powerful because their brains were built for the system and you couldn’t find more beautiful women in a catalogue selling fuckin’ anything.
Thus the first, Rainey, eventually became Supergrover…. and not because I tried to replace her. It’s that by the time I met Supergrover, I’d had 30 years of relationships entirely in text. My relationship on the ground with my sister helps me to understand Supergrover’s life by being able to see what a powerful woman is like and how they became so without it actually being her.
When they walk into a room, it’s not only their employees that snap to attention. It’s all the men above them, too. It comes in handy because their beauty makes people trust them before they talk to them, and they’re wonderful people so being magnetically attracted to them is easy. They’re also the type of people that are infinitely kind…. the type people who other women don’t see as a threat because they go a little stupid when they see them, too. If Supergrover has had one real crush, she’s had a million “girl crushes” on her since birth. She’s the kind of person that’s gorgeous enough to have power like a mean girl, but she gets it through attraction and not malice. I know all of this because I grew up with her personality type. Every man wants to be her boyfriend, every woman wants to be her bestie.
That’s because they both have the power to make you feel like you’re the most important person in the room when you’re with them, and it not coming off as manipulation because it isn’t. They genuinely like their small moments with people that are quality, true connections. A connection is worth something even if it only lasts a few minutes, because networking is more important than mental/physical labor. Networking makes any job easier while being at work is more specific.
For instance, Lindsay has worked in both private sector and non-profit lobbying, plus campaigning and body man for the mayor of Houston and did constituent services for a while. Knowing Annise Parker was her connection to the White House because she ran Mayor Pete’s campaign. Pete losing was hard on me because even though I never realistically thought he would win, I thought “now she’ll have to move to Washington and I won’t have to make it my idea.” It’s not a priority to me because it would be so nice to have her here all the time, but I wouldn’t see her any more than I do now. She just doesn’t have time. I don’t even see her every time she comes here. I text her 99% of the time for the same reason I e-mail Supergrover, and why I say that if we had a relationship on the ground, it would look a lot like the one I have with my sister. That being close meant “I can give you 15 minutes in March.” And that’s only if I ask in December and am willing to be picked up and driven somewhere, find your own way home because I got shit going on here, man. But you know what? Those would be the most valuable 15 minutes in my entire life. I would walk differently after that. I get the impression that time with her is valuable because she makes time, never actually has it. We’d play by the rules and improvise on them as necessary. I’m ADHD and don’t give a fuck. That means spur of the moment get together or cancel and I’m great either way.
That’s what I mean about being in Washington at a time she wasn’t supposed to be and joking about having an affair with Michael’s wife. That it wouldn’t do to hide anything because it’s more trouble than it’s worth…. what I feel is happening when she doesn’t claim me outright, and feel secure when she does. It had gotten to the point where I thought that Michael didn’t even know about me because she seemed so secretive with me, I assumed she was secretive with him as well. It was a surprise to me that she wasn’t, and I had to be furious, overwhelmed, and forgiving all at the same time because her whole shtick is that adults don’t discuss their conversations with other adults and that she didn’t want any of what she said to go to Dana, or have to worry about it so she wasn’t going to say anything more when what she told me was the source of my anxiety. She destroyed me in a second, and because my environment was threatened, I completely rearranged my life in order to get peace I so desperately needed. She took all her feelings about me and told someone else, where it would do the least good.
So, in short, I felt like I kept my word and she screwed me to the wall.
That’s because now it’s 10 years later and I’m still a nervous wreck. She won’t listen when I say that because she’s programmed herself to only think of me as a threat. It helps her ignore my reality, because I know she feels guilty. She tells me that all the time without ever resolving the problem. I keep hoping, and keep being disappointed.
I decided that was all her own shit, that I didn’t think of her as a threat until she acted like one. That I didn’t paint her as a villain in every story, just the one where she was. I also painted me as the villain first. It’s not only that I hurt her. It’s that she had the high ground first, and relationships tumble and roll. She cannot win every fight, all the time, and she won’t give on anything. It’s like working with a Republican congress, but not one where we can’t get anything done. When they used to collaborate to the bare minimum.
It’s so sad because we could have been Obama and Biden.
I bet she’d look good in aviators. I don’t know for sure, but she has the personality of a flyboy…. the equivalent of Finn Hudson, the quarterback popular kid and the choir nerd (she doesn’t sing, I just mean she has a soft side). It’s more fun looking back than it has been the last eight years, because I felt so constrained by what I could say to her. Since she took everything as a negative, I was constantly searching for the right thing to say and landing on the wrong one.
One of the songs on the playlist I made to move my mind forward was a Ludacris duet that I hear in my head all the time… “can’t live with you, can’t live without you.” I only wanted to solve the swings, not kill the relationship altogether. But like I said, we both get defensive immediately, which lead to not listening on both sides. That’s because she’d only answer when she was angry. She wouldn’t feed the positive, so my reactions to her were angry as well.
I own a lot. I just don’t own everything. I am not the only person that needs to learn and grow in a relationship, and this is what happens when only one person makes the commitment. And I don’t care if it’s because of apathy or not. Whether I made the mistake of wanting her to work on something when she didn’t and not walking away, or whether she really does love me with Mama Wolverine intensity and I’ve underestimated her feelings, I couldn’t get her to say how she felt either way.
I told her I thought that and no response. I have no idea whether she’s licking her wounds or happy I finally got the message. If she’s happy I finally got the message, then I deserve more than her, no matter what I think of her. I will eventually find someone else and hopefully she’ll see she made a mistake. But by then I’ll be gone and I’ve told her that if she comes back, she has work to do with me. Nice is not going to cut it. It’s not that she can’t come back in and of itself. It’s that I will no longer tolerate this crack-smoking foolishness. I watch Doctor Who. I have standards.
She doesn’t see her hypocrisy. I’m the only one who ever ruins anything. But I didn’t ruin us. I ruined me trying to find her.
For Susan Hoefer and Sue Protheroe, my English and Language Arts teachers. If they hadn’t taught me how to express my feelings clearly then (7th grade), I wouldn’t be able to express myself to the degree that I do now. They are precious to me because of it.
I am obsessed with screen time and I have no plans of changing any time soon. We have covered why, that I communicate more naturally via SMS and e-mail/messaging than I do verbally. However, I know that not every conversation is appropriate to have via text, as well. I draw the line at text message breakup, which is why I have been so pissed at The War Daniel and Sam. It hadn’t been long enough for me to say I was in love with either of them, but it had been long enough that I knew I loved them. Even Sam, at three weeks, I knew I loved her with an intensity I hadn’t felt in a long time, but intensity was all over the map. If she wanted a bestie, I was there. If she wanted a wife, I was there. If she wanted to date other people so our relationship didn’t move too fast (the goal when I didn’t break up with Zac), I would have been there and I know that because I was.
She didn’t want to become the lesbian U-haul couple, but didn’t want to do anything to prevent it, either. I didn’t want to be the girlfriend that anticipated her needs from day one, so I didn’t read between the lines and break up with Zac, anyway. It wasn’t that I lied and cheated. It was that her ex-husband lied and cheated, so the further she got towards reality, the more she realized that she thought something was happening to her that wasn’t. She felt the emotions of him cheating and wanted to lock me down, and the bitch of it is that she could have. She just insisted from the beginning until she broke up with me that she’d gotten too involved with a female ex and they were living together within a year and it was a disaster. She thought she could be cool, and as it turns out, she likes being in a relationship and pouring everything into one person. She found another person who also does that. She just didn’t realize it because I took her at her word.
I also think she thought she couldn’t handle my neurodivergence because she already had an autistic kid, and even if I’m wrong I’m not. I don’t know how it would have been to be the partner and mom of an autistic person simultaneously. That’s because there are times when I know I would have gotten overwhelmed and had a meltdown, and she shouldn’t be expected to survive my burnout sessions when she’s already got so much on her plate. What if her kid and I were in burnout at the same time? How would I handle autistic rage in a teenager? Having done it before, I know I’m solid. This is because I (and all autistic people, frankly) get calmer when other people are in trouble.
We have the bravery to do for others what we cannot do for ourselves. When we are out of our minds because our environment is threatened, we fold into ourselves because we have been pegged as “problematic.” Neurotypical people don’t have that jump scare at a changing environment, but we will watch it happen- their discomfort- and all of the sudden the mama lion comes out. We will risk losing social masking, function, and start stimming if we have to because someone is going to pay attention to the fact that our friends are in trouble. I would be Karen on a stick to get Bryn some ketchup, but I would enjoy mine plain to avoid a social interaction.
We lose the ability to care about what we’re putting out there when others’ safety is threatened; we feel the disaster that occurs within us and try to prevent it happening to others. It’s watching for meltdowns that don’t occur in neurotypical people, essentially having an autistic person’s back because we’re used to it and unable to realize other people don’t need it.
Autistic computer programmers seem like the most narcissistic assholes on earth, because all of them mansplain and people look at female “IT Guys” and see autism. They look at men and see “mansplaining.” That’s almost certainly the biggest disconnect in IT. Autistics of every gender are attracted to IT because they’ve always worked there and adjusted their environment to fit. For instance, I have always been the kind of helpdesk person who prefers to sit with the coders. I should have stayed in web design, but I got out when databases entered the picture. That’s because I had to jump from design to development in a hurry with no ability for logic to that degree. I know this because I took Logic in college instead of math and had to take it twice before I got a D, so I might want to take it again before I decide to take on Python. I’m even shit at MySQL when it comes to complex search terms. Logic is just not my wheelhouse, because I’m a monotropic thinker. Programming would be easy if you could write a program as “one thing happening in sequence.” In coding, you have to understand everything, everywhere, all at once.
This realization hit me this morning and it stopped me where I live. In terms of autistic people being programmers and having a tendency to isolate (like in their mother’s basement) and hack or code, making fun of it is severely ableist. “Comic Book Guy” is at the same time hilarious and tragic, hopefully the point Groening was trying to make. But it’s not a sad life because he can’t talk to people. It’s that few people are willing to ignore his accommodations and see him as more than his exterior….. in effect, getting a gift and focusing on the wrapping paper.
I am a writer in coders’ wrapping paper because I can have the personality of a helpdesk person as long as it’s the sensory environment of the server room. Better yet, I am talking to them in stereo headphones that block out everything else if I’m expected to write down what someone is saying while I’m listening. The good thing is that if those conditions are met, I type 90 words a minute and can take down everything they say down to the punctuation. Even then what I cannot do is sit in a room full of people who are also on the phone. That’s how 99% of helpdesks are set up to save space and encourage collaboration, which is great for 90% of people, maybe more. ADA accommodations are critical, which makes it harder to get a job because special does not equal valuable.
My screen time is dictated by the fact that I’m not Comic Book Guy, but I’m not not him, either. I have to fight through a system that was not built for me, and I just have to be okay with that. I have to work through autistic meltdown and burnout while people see me as defective and I also just have to be okay with that…. in relationships, at work, and in my own mind because nothing will ever get better in my lifetime and I’ll die mad about it.
Things like meltdown, burnouts, and demand avoidance are disabilities, not laziness. Our brains just aren’t built to accept it because we have no executive function. Asking a request of an autistic person will immediately cause loss of function. The best thing you can do is try not to spring things on autistic people because they have to prepare their environment to accept a demand in the first place. Failing that, writing everything down and giving us concrete steps that we can refer to later is key, because we can’t retain information verbally as easily as we can in text, and repetition is key, thus rereading the instructions.
The only way you can get things done quickly is if their excitement lines up with yours. For instance, I would have strength to go to the International Spy Museum easier than I would have the strength to stomach a rave, even though both are supposed to be fun (at a rave, I do a drug heavily called “caffeine.” It’s really fun. Look into it. 😛 Kidding, I don’t drink when I party because those are the experiences I want to remember the hardest. I don’t get many dancing and lights memories. Although I had a couple of beers at the Charlotte Cardin concert because beer and Canadians go together like “peanut butter and ladies.” The concert was at Union Stage, where they make beer in-house and it’s very good. I’m glad I branched out. The difference in preparing for that environment is that I didn’t go alone and I got notice a month in advance. Lindsay was with me and it made all the difference. Home became my environment and the club was superfluous. It reminded us very much of going to see Ben Folds Five at Numbers in the ’90s, about the same size club without the contact high. I also didn’t lock my keys in my car and we didn’t have to wait for our parents to come and bail us out. Charlotte Cardin didn’t wait with us until they got there, either, but Ben Folds did. I was 19 and looked younger. Lindsay was 14 and looked older. However, neither one of us looked like adults. I loved that he felt sorry for us because he was a dad long before he had Gracie.
One of the reason that I don’t get sensory issues about going to the Kennedy Center and The Reach is that Jason Moran and Robert Glasper both play there, which is the same feeling as my sister being with me because I’ve known them since ninth grade. The second is that Ben Folds is the artistic director for a concert series called “Declassified,” so it’s another feeling of home even in someplace unfamiliar. The best part is that there are a lot of artists that make me feel this way, because I’ve either sung with them, we have mutual friends, or we went to school together, and even Beyoncé is on that list. I’ve stood in the same room with her, but we’ve never met. She falls under the mutual friends category…. as does Yasiin Bey (Mos Def) because he was on tour with Robert the last time around.
I told Robert to tell Yasiin that he was my favorite alien (he played “Ford Prefect” in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), and walked away realizing I’d lied because The Doctor is actually first. But oh, well. If they run across this, I’m so sorry.
If they do, it will be while managing their own screen time.
We all need more time to understand things than we think we do, and are trying our dead-level best to overschedule; we’re all going place to place and taking in none of them. When I travel again, I’d like to stay at least a week if possible. It takes a while for my body clock to accept a new rhythm, particularly going east. Jet lag was objectively worse coming back to DC from Oregon than it was in the moments I was taking the obligatory Portland airport photo (iykyk). I am using jet lag as an example of needing time because it’s the best way I know how to explain autism to a layperson. Imagine feeling like you have the pressure of your emotions changing to that degree all the time rather than just after a long-haul flight. Taking on change is easier when you feel normal, right? Would you enjoy living in jet lag fog permanently?
This is why transition time is essential to the autistic brain, and why I am yet again grateful that I do not drive. I caused my last wreck from rumination. I’d talked to a close friend earlier in the day, and we hadn’t spoken for years before that. She’d ghosted me without a trace and then reappeared. It was jarring, a new environment for me, so I did what any normal person would do. I thought about it so hard I ran into a guardrail trying to blow town for Frederick, the closest Waffle House. I was about 800 feet from a triple order of hash browns with chili, cheese, and onions (superior to Frito Pie, fight me) when I took a curve a little too hard. Girls with blonde hair will do that to you.
Editor’s Note:
You should absolutely add Fritos to bean burritos at Taco Bell. Also, every once in a while when I hit 7-Eleven, I buy a snack bag of Fritos for the back of the pantry because I’m a Texan and I don’t make the rules. Sometimes you have to have Frito Pie and in that instance, there is no substitute so you might as well be prepared. Not being prepared is such a rookie Texan mistake, because whoever heard of homemade Fritos? You’re going to the store. It’s not that you can’t make AMAZEBALLS tortilla chips at home. I can and they’re fabulous. But they sure as hell don’t taste like Fritos…….. just like pastry chefs are going to use Oreos/Oreo crusts. They’re not going to reinvent that particular wheel.We’ve learned it over time.
Back to our regularly scheduled program.
What you learn with enough time is how to control your environment to the extent that you can and let go of the rest. I’m not going to be able to convince Supergrover that what she read as narcissism was actually an autistic meltdown. I am sure that she regularly thinks I am the most toxic person she’s ever met because I just keep throwing these truth bombs because I’m an asshole and not because I am genuinely curious and love her more than anything on earth. If I throw an emotional bomb, it means I care about the answer and want to hear it. I heard a line from “Friends” that expresses this so well…. when Chandler looks into Monica’s eyes and tells her that she’s high maintenance, but he likes maintaining her. I am not an asshole with a God complex, she has complex problems that cannot be solved with “yeah, I’m fine.” If you want to see a question as an attack, you will.
I honestly found out I was autistic because of this relationship. I had to find out two things. The first was why I was so empathetic on the inside and yet it came across as being self-absorbed. Everyone knows that autistic person, or we know each other. Bet.
I learned over time that the meltdowns happened in a cycle because I would unmask and start letting my brain run wild on these ADHD/Autistic tangents and she would take offense at me not acting like a woman, seriously, and I’m not being dismissive toward her. It’s that traditional women are programmed to fix/please and anticipate everyone else’s needs.
We used to be a little too much alike in that arena, but I felt safe enough to stop with her because she’s so goddamn strong. She lays down the truth bombs as easily and often as I do. It’s just that hers are in the context of what she knows, and mine are in the context of what I do. Her emotional bombs are surrounded by not understanding my neurodivergence, her stepping all over my ass while I’m trying to teach her why my reactions to her are so much more intense than her reactions to me and failing miserably. Why it feels like I’ll always go a little stupid in that dreamy-eyed kind of way when I think of her, and have to stuff that kind of emotion back because it’s part of a social mask I don’t have. Just so many sensory issues that I attach to her, like the smell of coffee or the feel of the t-shirt that I kidded her I ordered that “has her portrait on the front.”
I have already said that the building blocks of our relationship are adrenaline and dopamine. My ADHD/Autism created those memories of smell when my brain chemicals were the most flooded. It’s why I’m so attached to her with a love that won’t die, but not like I loved Dana. Like I love my parents and siblings. The thing is, I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that she loves me the same way, because when Sam dumped me I told her and then she said her Mama Wolverine claws were coming in. I have never been so grateful for anything in my entire life because my next line to her was that my biggest delight in life was thinking about just how pissed off she was about this. It was that night I formed my first company. It’s called Leslie Lanagan & Pet Monsters on a Fraying Leash, Inc. We’re waiting on our 501, though.
When I become the most upset, I have a meltdown and then burnout. In those moments, burnout looks like me losing function and going mute, only communicating through writing. I get sensory issues from eating because it’s an ADHD hyperfocus interruption and I switch to vegan protein shakes. If that’s not enough, I develop sensory issues with leaving my house, reinforced by depression, anxiety, and an overactive imagination. The overactive imagination is a straight up problem because everything I imagine is a hundred times worse due to rejection sensitivity dysphoria, a common trait among neurodivergent people because we’ve been programmed to think of ourselves as problematic.
I should mention that there is also fascinating research suggesting that the number of autistic people who are nonbinary, queer, and poly is off the charts. My behavior suggests I’m not poly unless we’re talking about writing and physiciality, because emotional intimacy with multiple people is easy. Physically? Not so much. I’m just not wired that way. That doesn’t mean I’m not poly. It just means I probably wouldn’t meet someone on the ground and behave the same way. It remains to be seen whether I could manage that or not, and doing the work to see whether I’m doing the right thing for me or lending myself to getting into a situation where I can’t help myself and put someone I’ve made a monogamous agreement with completely uncomfortable because I broke the rules. Just because it happened organically doesn’t mean I didn’t cheat. Just because it only happened to me doesn’t mean I didn’t cheat. The road to hell was paved with good intentions.
I need to make it so clear that I cheated on Dana, but Supergrover didn’t cheat on Michael because of course since I’m queer, my reaction to her was different than her reaction to me. That doesn’t make my emotions to her invalid, just different. She also doesn’t have autism or ADHD, so none of her sensory issues are going to run as deep as mine, and she gave me some pictures that caused sensory issues, but not sexual ones. They activated my alpha dog and my mama wolverine. When I feel that way about someone, it makes me attracted to them…. and in fact, when I don’t feel connected to someone in that way, being physical doesn’t come up. Romance, as with all things, has two modes for me. Obsession and absolute disinterest. It’s why autistic people have trouble with relationships. If they have neurotypical partners who take everything personally, they will not be happy, and probably jump too quickly to the conclusion that their partners are lazy, unmotivated, and angry at them because of their rejection at lights out.
It was a relief to come to that resolution in my mind with Supergrover, that even though the relationship was not nor would ever be physical, I had learned a lot about the way I work in a relationship because she took so much personally that I never intended.
I remember telling her that it was really hard hearing about the abuse she endured as a child, that my heart walked out of my body and I just had to breathe through it. She thought I was trying to make her feel bad, but I was trying to explain both why our trauma bond was immediate and deep. She became a monotropic thought process, what I mean when I say she lives in my ink. I was telling her why I loved her with such intensity and drive, and that in some ways I was sorry that process came across as negative, but not sorry for loving her as much as I do. She’s amazing, and part of the reason that I haven’t fallen in love again is that I hold every woman to her standard and find other women uninteresting. Why would I put myself out there when intellectual stimulation is more important and no one gives it to me more than she does? No one will ever be able to beat her in that area, even though Zac and I are wrapped up in my special interest. It’s not because he’s not brilliant, it’s that we’re talking about history and she’s making it.
If you never believe another word I say, believe that.
She jokes that other women are the smartest woman in the room except her, but you don’t know the room where she said it and I do. She knows an actor I would kill to meet, and a director, and neither of them do what she does. She knows them by dumb luck, the same dumb luck that put us together. Karma is magic and I will never believe anything more than that. I got a gift from the universe at the exact moment it needed to drop in my lap, and my nose got red at that, the first signal I’m about to cry, when I wrote that. And yet, even Zac doesn’t know who she is and respects my privacy like I know when to stop pushing about work. She’s my “classified information,” for all practical intents and purposes. I could tell you if it wouldn’t embarrass her across the world, but I wouldn’t. I keep it tight to love her, not to diss you. The “classified information” joke just fits in with my whole vibe. I will never stop being, in the immortal words of Zac Wood, a “drooling fangirl” over CIA, but that’s only because I’ve seen the disparity between the way people treat soldiers and the way they treat spies. Civilians matter.
And I’m a judgmental bastard, just not of people. Of institutions and situations. It’s how I can feel every emotion in the spectrum about Supergrover. How love and fear are inextricably interrelated, why I have no problem walking on eggshells for years and yet struggled so hard with my needs being met that I finally walked away. It was killing my self esteem and better for me when I stopped letting it.
Doesn’t mean I don’t miss her, and at first it was every moment of every day. You don’t learn to let go overnight, and my writing has proved it. She’ll never be far from my thoughts, though, because in the last 10 years of my life, my thought processes and emotions regarding her have been so deeply ingrained. It’s why I even thought we’d be good for each other as partners in the first place, but not that I insisted on it. It was just too good a question not to ask, because it made sense at that point, a united front. But then my monotropic thought process spiraled out about that, too, and it was just bad juju. It was a question better left unanswered, I’m just autistic and ADHD. My autism made me hammer away at it and my ADHD gave me no impulse control.
I didn’t know how those diagnoses affected my behavior until I knew I had them. I only knew about one. I didn’t know about the other, that when I am in autistic mode relationships take over my whole brain because I’m also an INFJ. I wanted the best for both my red and yellow strings and got them tangled. It was a struggle to stop dwelling, but I’m glad I did it and I know the root cause.
I have learned not to let relationships take hold of me in that way because it makes me give all my energy toward making them a better person. All INFJs are attracted to teaching and social work sorts of positions because we want all of our close relationships to be the best people that they can be. I wasn’t obsessed with who Supergrover could be, but helping her to be her best self. An INFJ will not watch anyone stagnate.
It was all reinforced by the fact that it’s easier for me to talk to other people about their problems than it is for me to talk about mine, because then I can stop social masking. I can stop remembering to make my thought processes masked and just listen.
I notice things that no one else does and people call me brilliant for pointing it out when it’s something they love and hurtful even when I don’t mean harm. It’s a lost place to be when your self-esteem is dependent on other people to that extreme, because when you take off your social masking and other people react poorly, you drift toward making masking the priority and it drains your energy before you even have the spoons to leave the house. The meltdown/burnout cycle is real and it’s deep.
Neurotypical people can only take so much before they decide you’re too much for them, and that has been true of neurodivergent people since we were born. “Autism Speaks” has an awful video where a mother says in front of her child that she thought about strapping her into the car and killing them both. I am sure that she thought she could get away with it because her daughter wasn’t “high functioning,” whatever the fuck that means, and she has no idea what her daughter is capable of processing emotionally without being verbal. What if the internal tape that plays in her head is “my mom wanted to kill me and didn’t.” Being “high functioning” is being able to speak for the mute and letting them speak for me when I am….. more specifically, I am non-verbal a lot of the time but I can reach out through text.
I need the world to adapt around me, and I am not being selfish or egocentric when the problem runs as deep as children feeling like their parents don’t want them. I am not alone when I say that I feel the pain of being too much for people, driving my depression and anxiety. Everyone wants to stop me from drowning, but few people are willing to help me from falling into the river in the first place.
Supergrover did the best she could, just not fast enough for my autism not to kick in. A trauma bond is a hell of a drug. It’s what made me rearrange my life around her and not Dana. It was the same deal with her- I never wanted to have a situation with another partner where I leaked information that wasn’t supposed to go to them because I felt so bad when I did it. She forgave me and moved on, but thought it was impulsive to solve the problem.
When you have situations where your sensory issues attach to a problem and it gets deep fast, you move quickly…. often what leads to getting married in a hurry and things like that. You are always trying to create a secure environment and you’ll grasp at straws because acceptance of your neurodivergence is transient. Because of this, Supergrover is the longest of any of my significant relationships by almost three years. It was more significant to me because it was in my wheelhouse, the writing.
Her greatest gift to me was that time, and I’ve loved it despite walking away in frustration. I needed a secure environment and couldn’t get one, so I grasped at the comfort of isolation whether I wanted it or not.
I want more because she’s wonderful. I also love her enough to let her go because the relationship didn’t serve us presently like it did in the past. I didn’t have room for other people like Zac, and in some ways my pathways are so changed there might not ever be. Sam got in under the wire, but even then my attention didn’t completely turn.
I need more time to spend with her, but only in reflection if need be. I learned so much from her, and it’s time to take all that away because I don’t want to pour love into her if she does not accept it. I would rather be alone with my thoughts in that case. The affect she has on me is tremendous and I cannot underestimate its effect. She doesn’t think of her (or me) in this way, so it clouds our judgment on whether we’re telling the truth. We both have trauma reflexes, and don’t treat each other like we’re worthy of being treated like goddesses. That’s because the root of our anger is how we feel about ourselves. We are both fixer/pleasers, and both easily jump to the conclusion that the other means the worst.
For instance, when Supergrover said “I can do nothing about the past. I can do something about the present,” and “this is all I can manage,” I took it to mean I would never get anything I wanted and to die mad about it. What I didn’t say is “what can you do about the present that you haven’t in the past?” I saw the writing on the wall and pushed her away.
I will never know if I was correct, but I do know that our relationship had that cycle for 10 years and I didn’t want to do it anymore. There was quite a difference between Mama Wolverine and ignoring me because you think I’m goading and provoking you instead of asking me questions in return. We both got defensive immediately.
I never wanted a war, but I started it. I am only suffering under the terms and conditions of the surrender. My bad behavior was supposedly forgiven and I haven’t been able to express a need without nuclear war for eight years. I didn’t think she was lying because she said she forgave me. I thought she was lying to herself about how much she wanted to be friends with me because she always seemed pissed off. I know enough to know that the world doesn’t revolve around me, but I can feel the energetic difference between “I’m busy” and “I’m ignoring you” even in text.
For instance, I have lots of friends that I hope aren’t mad at me because I’ve gone mute and can’t handle conversations right now. I have enough energy for an occasional Facebook comment, but mostly I am spending my energy on changing my own thought processes here. I will never be able to sustain myself if I don’t. It is how my life is coming together, not how it is falling apart.
I had huge sensory issues that Zac didn’t tell me he had a roommate before I arrived on Sunday, but I told him that and he apologized. He wasn’t trying to offend me, just spaced it, but that didn’t render my feelings invalid. He’s a solid dude and remembers so many things I don’t remember saying, so I know he does listen to me, deeply, I just have to roll with it because he’s neurodivergent like me.
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 annaylistanaylistannalyst 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? 😉
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.”
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.
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?”
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.
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…
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.
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.
Stories That Are All True 