Tag: storytelling

Stability

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What are you most excited about for the future?

The immediate future is the most exciting. My sister and I are going through a thing (together, not fighting) and I asked her if I could write about it. She said “write whatever you want” and I said “you never have to get me a present for anything ever again.” This is not that entry. We’ve decided to hold off for a little while because OTHER FACTORS AT PLAY. The point is that my next words were “but if you were going to get me a present, it would be cool if you came up for my birthday this year or next year.” I go about my day thinking it’s a pie in the sky hope and in a few hours we have tickets for Charlotte Cardin on October 24th.

I realize that Lindsay is my sister, but she’s such a badass that it kind of rattles me when she wants to spend time together because I am so insecure at times. You’d just have to know how powerful she is to even begin to understand why I feel that way. She eats Republicans for breakfast and doesn’t waste time on ketchup. I have problems with prioritizing two tasks at once. I constantly have to keep a picture of her as a teen in my mind, because Lindsay’s professional persona is intimidating, but the baby isn’t.

I don’t worry about the lobbyist, but I’m the last woman alive that changed her diapers every damn day. The baby’s needs will always wake me up. The baby’s needs will always come before mine. Nothing in my life is more important than making sure her slap bracelet never comes off.

In December of 1990, the parsonage in Naples burned to the ground. My sister heard a fireman say that the fire started in the attic, and it was lucky that no one was sleeping in that bedroom (hers), because the attic rafters would have fallen on the bed and crushed whoever was sleeping. She internalized it, and things might have been different if we’d gotten another house in Naples. But no, we were moved to Houston before the committee even formed to rebuild. The stress of the fire and the culture shock affected us differently. I got sucked into band at school, choir at home, and “my first marriage.” Lindsay developed a phobia around going to school (now does it make a little more sense why that relationship knocked me on my ass? I met her six months after the fire.).

My mother was a stay at home mom. I think Lindsay thought that if she wasn’t home to protect my mother, that something would happen to her while she was gone. A trauma therapist told my dad to have a routine with her, and to get her a slap bracelet (I don’t remember whether she said that specifically, or just something Lindsay could keep on her) so that she had something to keep the routine going in her mind.

Every day, my dad would drive Lindsay to school, and he’d say:

Lucky day…. Gonna get an E today…. Like I say…. Wave to me…..

So, touching that slap bracelet made her remember what my dad said, and we were all with her when she touched her wrist. The therapist got an E that day, because it really was excellence on her part.

So, when I think of Lindsay walking into the Texas Legislature to protect queer kids, it’s me who needs the slap bracelet.

I can’t breathe when I think of how hard her job must be and how much stress she’s under…. And how none of it is her fault. God is not making her life more difficult. People are. People who think The Bible is an authority in the lives of American politicians are trying to make the rest of the country believe it as well. It’s maddening because we supposedly have separation of church and state, but Texas doesn’t believe in it so they just live around it.

As my friend Rev. Chuck Currie has pointed out, “Jesus said ‘let all the little children come unto me.’ He did not say ‘let all the little children come unto me….. except trans kids.’” My sister has to tell the Texas and federal government why trans kids need their medication. Their medication. She’s not fighting them on their wants and desires. She’s fighting conservatives for trans kids’ basic needs.

Meanwhile, Lindsay and I are both the preacher’s kid from “Saved.”

When it comes to Texas Republicans, I want to crash a van into their Jesus, and my Jesus would let me.

Their Jesus is about power over, and is a reflection of white supremacy. The church universal has wasted too much time worshipping whiteness. It’s not just an American problem. Desmond Tutu crashed a van into South African apartheid Jesus long ago.

It makes me laugh talking about my sister crashing her van into Jesus because over the years we’ve both loved Mandy Moore.

Ok, I’m going to take a second. We’ve got to talk about this. Mandy Moore didn’t win nearly enough awards for “This is Us.” Her craft was simply outstanding. OUTSTANDING. Every actor should watch her, because watching Rebecca Pearson is a master class, particularly when time jumps back and forth so that she’s playing different ages in the same episode. It’s a tour de force performance, and she kept it up for YEARS.

I needed to take a break and focus on Mandy Moore for a second, because I started flooding out at “slap bracelet.” There are tears and snot all up in here.

To keep it light for another moment while I collect myself, I think Coca Cola needs to start sending thank you cards to all the Diet Coke drinkers. This is because everyone likes soda, for the most part. Diet Coke drinkers are straight up addicts, and because of the world I inhabit, most of them are musicians. I have never met anyone who drinks Diet Coke that doesn’t drink a hell of a lot of it.

I’m not sure whether it’s the caffeine or the aspartame or whatever, but it does make you crave it with unusual intensity. I used to drink six a day, and I was a rookie. Every soprano I know carries it around like a water bottle. Diet Coke has even made it into a music joke.

How many sopranos does it take to change a light bulb? Two. One to hold the Diet Coke and one to go get her accompanist to do it.

It’s a riff on “how many SMU sorority sisters does it take to change a light bulb?” “Two. One to mix drinks and one to call daddy.” I’m betting that the capitalization of daddy varies by age.

Quitting Diet Coke is relentless, and part of it is the carbonation. It’s hard to give up fizzy water altogether when you’re not used to still. Now add caffeine on top and quitting becomes even more useless.

The only thing that helped me was thinking that even if I was rich, $10 for 12 cans would still seem ridiculous.

Now I’m addicted to drink mix. It doesn’t even have to have caffeine in it because I’ve found that the reason I needed so much of it is that I wasn’t sleeping. Now, I take medication for that because especially during hypomania, I won’t sleep for several nights in a row. That doesn’t happen very often, but my sister is a lobbyist trying to get health care for trans kids and if I was going to stay up thinking about a problem, this is a good one.

My daughter is trans. I hate qualifying it, but I did not birth her. It was better than that. I told her dad in not so many words that he was being an absolute dick to her and to get his shit together. She responded……………. Positively. When we met, she was going to be my stepdaughter. Her dad is out of the picture, but we’re still going strong. So, whether The War Daniel and I get married or not, I have a child adopted through the rainbow flag. I’m here for it, and it’s a lot. But to be clear, Cora is not the problem. Cora is the recipient of the problem.

I still want to marry Daniel, but I have reservations that will never go away, and he hasn’t talked reconciliation. To me, that’s that. But you leave a relationship with an *adult.* Cora is now an adult, but the power dynamic is the same. I don’t talk to her about my feelings for Daniel and she wouldn’t know anything if I wasn’t a writer. I feel that it’s okay for her to read my thoughts, because they aren’t directed at her. In writing, I can make it more clear than I could in person that she’s not the monkey in the middle. Daniel doesn’t think of her that way, either.

To my beautiful girl, I have only found out that the dog is named after a heavy metal star. So, I just have the names Virginia Woof and Sidney Brisdog in my back pocket, as well as a name I picked up for a cat on “Will and Grace.” Jack’s cat was named “Chairman Meow” and I’m still not over it.

That’s because Cora is free to talk about her dad, but I do not have an opinion on him. I can’t. He is making his own choices, and I don’t have to like them. I just have to respect them. Also, whether it’s my own echo chamber telling me this or whether it’s my intuition, I think Daniel got tired of my patois reading as male and started competing with me to see who was the bigger asshole. Unsurprisingly, I “won.”

You can’t win against someone who was raised in NE Texas and has bought in to Republican fodder. He thought I was trying to reprogram him and I was trying to impress the seriousness of what his idiocy has caused because he didn’t bother to get educated when Cora came out.

It’s not inexcusable to be uneducated. It’s inexcusable not to believe your child when they come out. Disbelief is relative. Daniel thought of himself as having to put up with us, and not because he’s a bad person. It’s that he’s a self centered alcoholic, but I repeat myself.

Self-centered alcoholic is almost tautology.

If someone is trying to tell you that you’re hurting them and you react as if it’s all about you, it’s best to walk away. Do whatever it is you need to get yourself together, because the world is not going to think of you as the protagonist in every damn story. If you have been raised male, you think a lot about this.

That’s kind of the debate between cis and trans women…. That trans women tend to step all over cis women’s asses because they were socialized as men when they were young. This is the hashtag “not all trans women,” and yet it is not untrue, either. Their voices are loud because they’ve been told they deserve it. Cis women have been property for hundreds of years. Chaos ensues.

I would also say that cis women generally don’t stand up for themselves and trans women don’t realize there’s a problem. There is a big damn problem, but it is not one that will last forever. The bitch of it is that cis women need trans women because they don’t assume other men deserve shit and act as such. Cis women, not so much.

It’s especially the debate between cis lesbians and trans women, because they have even less political power. Trans women don’t always see cis women’s complaints as real. That they’re being misogynistic and their ire is invalid.

Cis women don’t give a rat’s ass most of the time. We only react to being ignored. I am of the mind that trans women are women. Period. I also don’t think trans women acknowledge how being socialized as a man as a child affects how they walk in the world as adults. That there ARE differences even though with puberty blockers, trans kids are being socialized at a very young age in their true gender.

Cis women also need to deal with their imposter syndrome and learn to kick men’s asses the way trans women do.

My only gripe is with trans women who think it’s all about them. They don’t think that, but I see the dark side. I see the devastation it causes when trans women tell the people who care about them that they’re not doing enough. How fast do you think things are going to change in the South? What is your deal? Instead of bitching all the time, send flowers.

Notice I didn’t say stop bitching all the time. Just recognize that you’re putting a lot of your injury on the same people who are trying to solve the problem. In other words, take out your anger on someone who deserves it and stop biting the hand that’s feeding you.

I’m not sure I’ve earned the right to have an opinion here, but I’m 45 years old and people have been all over my ass since 1990. I couldn’t be my authentic self, either, and in some parts of the country my internalized homophobia still kicks in hardcore. I cannot walk into just any bar, either. I wish trans women, especially young ones, would read up on Matthew Shepard. It wasn’t that long ago. The queer community as a whole is being thrown under the bus, and I realize that trans women’s plights are bad, but I don’t think they’re worse than they were for me 25 years ago. NONE of this is getting better.

I also don’t think there’s too much difference between coming out as a trans child now and coming out as a gay kid then. Back then, gays were the last acceptable minority to hate, and they’ve passed the savings on to you. But don’t think it’s worse for you. You just aren’t looking at the problem from the same perspective, because you’re in hell and no one knows it better than me.

Cora and I have actually had this conversation, and it led to one of the biggest moments in my life. I explained some of the queer history she doesn’t know, and asked her to have empathy. She took the note and made me cry so hard I couldn’t breathe.

When I said that my middle name bothered me she said, “I have a name I’m not using. Would you like to have it?”

And that’s when I knew that there would never be another Cora, and there would never be another Lindsay, either.

I am just glad that I have them in my future. I wish everyone could.

The Melody

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What could you let go of, for the sake of harmony?

I am a soprano, but I like being an alto or a tenor. Diva is not my personality, although I was an accessory. That’s kind of my jam. I’m not the star, I’m the ghost writer. The reason I say that I am a soprano is that I don’t pick parts in choir, and the conductor never picks me for anything other than high As if they can help it. If there is a hell, my sentence will be the soprano part to Handel’s Messiah. Just hold it til you turn purple.

I actually don’t struggle that much with high notes, because I had a voice teacher that unlocked them for me. In fact, check out THIS SHIT. He increased my range from a high A to a high E flat. I am not a diva, but I do have tiny, tiny moments of it. The worst time I’ve ever been butt hurt by another soprano (aforementioned opera singer, so you know it damn near killed me) was when she said, “I think she’s an alto.” That’s because I knew she was trying to get me moved away from her because people were starting to talk.

Speaking of having an affair under everyone’s noses, we were. It was just asexual. It was confusing wondering whether we’d ever sleep together, but like I have said before, I didn’t need to be romantic with her to struggle with what real love is. I didn’t have lust. I was like every woman in America. If you need me platonically, if we’re interested in you we’ll give you everything.

Here’s where that stops.

I have never in my lifetime been this strong in the beginning of a relationship because it sets the tone for the rest of it. If I don’t state my boundaries, he’ll step all over them. He told me he wanted to marry me. We’ve been talking for a week and a half at most.

Now, he’s butt hurt because the story he’s been telling himself is that it was love at first sight for both of us. How interested could I possibly be? Zac and Bryn are all I need. I don’t have time for much more than that if you are not here in front of my face. As I told him, “that doesn’t mean pack up and move. It means that the Internet doesn’t get all of my time.”

Shut it. Snitches get stitches.

That’s all I’ve got for today. I just wanted to say for the record that boss ass bitches cure you of almost everything. Mine did.

Trauma Bonds -or- Go to Hell, Michael Jackson

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Dear Bryn,

I have to start this entry as a letter to you, or I will lose my courage and not post this at all. Clearing it up with the Fanagans that you have said “write whatever you want. I don’t care.” So, fair warning. I will.

I also know that you are not frightened by the title, because you know where I’m going with this because we just talked about it this afternoon. All of this is to avoid blowback. I know that “don’t go bitch to Bryn. You only think I’ll fuck you up. Bryn will hide your body” is sound advice.

No one would ever know. In order to be truly frightening, you have a big backyard…… of which I am stunningly aware in case I’m ever an asshole. 😛

I have loved you for three lifetimes, and I will love you for as many as we have left. I have no idea what our future holds, but I know that whether we’re together in the same city or apart is of no consequence. Facebook video calls travel, and we don’t waste time on small talk. My pain is yours, and your pain is mine.

My heart sighs in palpable relief that our lovebombing has been genuine for over a quarter of a century. As I told you on the phone, I should have known the first time we disappeared at a party that it was for life…. the way it would have been with more people in our circle if they hadn’t been such dipshits, and I only use that word specifically because our mutual friend’s partner didn’t understand trauma bonds and said friend was absolutely handfasted to me whether she asked me to marry her or not.

If that partner had wanted to undo it, she should have shown up ten fucking years earlier. Michael Jackson is more famous, but he has too many fucking faces. Some of them are round cheeked and have a great smile.

If our “friend” had been truly honest, she would have said as much. She would have said to her partner that she had roped me in and there was nothing she could do about it, so fucking deal. She should have said that it would injure us both. What she told her partner was that she “thought I would go away when I was 18.”

The partner before her was a fucking mess, so she dicked me around. She needed someone, but it shouldn’t have been me for two reasons. The first is that I was in middle school. Take that in, bitches. The second is that as an INFJ, I could feel her emotions coursing through me better than I could feel my own. I WAS IN MIDDLE SCHOOL.

I know you know the story, but you weren’t there for the beginning. You weren’t there when I lost my life and started living hers. You weren’t there when I was 14 at school and 25 at home. I’m so sorry if sitting in this shit is painful. Don’t read it all at once.

You notice that no one asked about the other little girls.

But I fucking noticed.

I talked, and most of our friend group shot me to shit because they couldn’t see me as a hurt child. They fucking wrote me off as a bipolar adult and people were STILL BEING HURT. Oh my fuck I am never going to stop being angry about this, even though she’s forgiven honestly and completely. I cannot carry that much pain, and I refuse. It’s just the lingering anger that irritates my trauma bond. Hearing Cynthia Erivo sing the Rutter Pie Jesu on Fresh Air almost sent me to the hospital because I thought I was going to die and it was just a panic attack. Do you know how traumatized you have to be to feel like there’s no difference between a panic attack and a myocardial infarction? (LMGTFY)

Yes, you know what that is (say that in a Dalek voice- obligatory Doctor Who joke).

All the love that doesn’t belong to Oliver (since you are aware that you are in second place with both puppies),

Leslie

Once I started talking about being abused, I couldn’t stop. I would drop another Google tattoo, except every time I see her name I want to fucking throw up. That’s because she fucked me up, and never apologized for it except one e-mail in 23 years….. she said, and I quote, “I can see how some of those conversations would be confusing and upsetting to you.” AYFKM? That’s it? That’s 23 years’ worth of apologies?

Then she had the audacity to make an “It Gets Better” video for young people. I won’t link to it, because it makes me vomit. She became the director of the Portland YOUTH Philharmonic, and no one knew SHIT. I protected that path for all it was worth, and I am so done. SO. DONE.

There’s going to be a lot of cursing in this one because I’m so fucking angry right now. One trauma bond snapping reminded me of that one, in which the relationship was over twice as long a time period and every bit the same outcome. It’s just that in this case, she was the one that fucked me over, and I did not stop the cycle. I took it out on someone who absolutely did not deserve it, and I cannot blame anyone for that except sitting it at that woman’s table and making sure she doesn’t return the fucking casserole dish. I had no culpability. None.

That’s because I realized that my beautiful girl lovebombed the fuck out of me, and I did it to her right back. Here’s the thing, though. People who have been lovebombed by narcissists don’t recognize when it’s genuine. They don’t recognize love that goes that deep, that crazy, that a relationship can keep up that intensity, because they’re constantly wondering when the other shoe is going to drop. There is a moment in every relationship with a narcissist where you do something wrong, the sun turns, and you’ll never see it again. You will be trapped in a trauma bond with the wrong ass person. You will grovel like a worm to get that dopamine back, because childhood PTSD doesn’t allow for much else. Narcissists fucking bank on it.

I didn’t trust Supergrover’s love as far as I could throw it, and acted as such. For her, I’m betting that’s relatable in The Later Years. I know this because changing her tune from lovebombing to no affection in her tone at all and completely shutting down emotionally let me know she was in protection mode, strengthening the fortress so that I couldn’t get in.

That’s because if you think trading dick for a live in chef is offensive, you should have seen what she let me get away with in The Early Years. It fucked me up, because I knew I had no chance at any real relationship with her again. She fucking told me she had to lose weight and I told her I’d take it off in a week. Joking was fine before, but not fine after, and it would have been a beautiful thing to know that before I stepped into it up to my ass. I even joked about having an affair under everyone’s radar, and the way I phrased it made even her laugh. So, to have that be a trigger instead of a source of amusement also ate my lunch, because it made everything seem so much worse. I would hope that she has found in retrospect that my sapiosexuality had been groomed. That I did not escape perpetuating carnage, but when I realized it, there wasn’t a hole in the ground big enough.

THANKS FOR THAT. I won’t go into namecalling, but you can imagine what’s in my head right now. It’s not great. I want to tear her limb from limb the way I wanted to take her partner apart WHEN I WAS IN MIDDLE SCHOOL. I had all the rights and responsibilities of a loving partner without any of the fun stuff, because she has had and will have emotional affairs with anyone dumb enough to fall for it. People don’t change without significant work, there’s no statute of limitations on guilt, and there’s a lot of “don’t want to” in “can’t.” If you become her best friend, which she will tell you often that she is, but really you are her pet person because she knows she’s better than you. She doesn’t pick people smarter. No predator does. I also doubt that age matters. She can take a fully functioning adult and make them a shell of a person and it doesn’t take even a week. I can name names, and I would if I could ask them first. I blocked the minors on Facebook because I didn’t have enough strength to reach out. I also didn’t have enough strength to look at their faces in my feed. If she read this, she’d be furious, because she doesn’t see what I saw. She lovebombed the fuck out of every woman around her, no matter whether they were little girls or grown ass adults. In order to find people to control, you have to put out feelers.

The relationship with my beautiful girl was a reflection of what had happened 10 years earlier, and it’s eating my fucking lunch, so may I repeat myself…… THANKS FOR THAT. She should have had to destroy herself over it. Get right with God. What the fuck ever. But let me let you in on a little secret. Her actions fucked me up so bad that a therapist told me she was too close to retirement to take me on… that healing me would take five to ten years….. and because I couldn’t see the feelers, I couldn’t take in real love, either. It was suspect. Unsafe. My heart beat to it….. “unsafe. Unsafe. Unsafe. Unsafe.” I became the Master when I took in the whole vortex at once. Here’s where I surprised Zac by going dark. All abused children are “The Timeless Child.” Even The Master and The Doctor are the same person. If I think about that long enough, it gets chewier.

It leads my mind to Dexter violence. Thank God I’m not violent, I’m just a kid with a keyboard, which is absolutely more than she’ll ever have and very effective. I won’t physically hurt you, but in a letter I’m Hattori Hanzo. I will leave you in ribbons. You’ll never get me out of my head, which is far superior to a good ass kicking. That’s because my therapy is right here where I can go back to it. If I falter in strength, I have a place to go that says fuck you and the horse you rode in on.

What killed me was pointing my sword in the wrong direction, and dear God I didn’t mean a double entendre but I see it and I can’t decide whether to leave it or save my ass. Eh, I’ll leave it. It’s a brilliant self own, if nothing else.

But what I’m really saying is that I lost my mind and she fucking stole the TARDIS and said, “drinks on the moon?” It has never occurred to me before now, but I’m not Rory the Roman. I haven’t been. For 10 years, I have been The Master and her Impossible Girl. She has no idea how much I mean this, and because she doesn’t watch Doctor Who, she won’t take in its enormity. For every bit that I felt a connection with The War Daniel, I felt the same pull toward her in a different way. I wanted both of them not just for this regeneration, but for all of them. The child, the teenager, the decades with different stories and faces. I would have loved her with this much intensity until she died if she would have only let me. Our bond makes it almost impossible for anything else to seem important, again, so personal to the two of us that I just don’t want to let go of it. I never will, even if people don’t understand and I have no choice but to look like a nutter. It makes me anxious that people will again write me off as a bipolar adult when they couldn’t find a clue with both hands.

Also. I love how The Doctor says they’re “not that kind of Doctor,” yet The Master and The Doctor are the same person and their initials are MD. To all the Whovians who will gatekeep and say I’m wrong, they just share DNA, Southerners never let facts get in the way of a good story. See title of blog.

I have to be angry here, because if I don’t, the MIDDLE SCHOOL trauma bond will reactivate. Who else would she tell her secrets besides someone she could control? It was too risky to be vulnerable with someone she couldn’t. My beautiful girl tried to control me in the same way, for entirely pure reasons. There is nothing in the world I feel more than her right to feel however she wants. It’s just that she seemed to be wrapped too tight, I was wrapped too loose, and we never rapped.

“You like Eminem? Explain exactly how I’m not going to fall in love with you. USE BIG WORDS.” (When did you say that? Day one. She appealed to my ego, and no writer in the world would react differently, especially an unknown quantity like me.) DO YOU SEE WHAT THAT WOMAN MADE ME LOSE? I perpetuated the cycle, and I lost a friend who would have moved mountains for me. I know that because she did it. In every way possible, I wanted to save her because she saved me first. I wrote that line about Dana, but only half of it did I really mean for her. It didn’t make my feelings for Dana less intense, only shared.

I spent 2003 obsessed with The Eminem Show. I am not sure she didn’t. Now, I listen to “Love Game” all the time and nearly fall apart with laughter.

“Have a blessed day.”

She’s told me what she drives, and I know damn well that if we were screaming down 66 we’d have all the windows down and the music blasting loud enough for the entire city to enjoy. I don’t think of this song as being about her. I imagine us both enjoying thinking about subject matter.

Now, when I have a genuine need from my beautiful girl, she only tells me that she is frankly tired of being guilted over it. To take an example from the song, neither one of us forgot the other’s birthday……… at first. That’s actually the thing that drew me to her the most when we started talking reconciliation. She forgot several years running and then couldn’t always e-mail me on my actual day, but started remembering again. She even sent me a fairy tale book last year, and I ate it up (it wasn’t Stephen King. It was a reimagining of Peter Pan). It wasn’t that it was never enough for me. It’s that remembering my birthday is a huge damn deal. I don’t care about the presents, I care that she’s so busy she can’t even breathe. She barely knows the date and time. And yet for a moment the clock stopped on Sept. 11th, with a note saying she’s sorry she forgot. I was completely fucking undone, because that showed me so much love and respect that I could not even. It wasn’t that she couldn’t commit to small things. It’s that she thought I was too much for her on the big things. Even the big things could have been solved with Jack Daniels on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

Eight years since the original break (seven and a half at most) and she thinks all I’m doing is trying to rattle her. Does this even make any sense if my letters are the same as my blog? That I see everything as a spectrum and not only will I let her know what is going wrong, but what is going right? I have been every bit as rabid with love as I have been with you. How she could look at that and say I see nothing but negative says I’m not the only one with rejection sensitivity dysphoria.

And yet, I am careful about painting my feelings as fact, because even though I write like that, I am relentless in saying “this is only my opinion.” Take it or leave it, seriously. I don’t care how you respond. I care whether I’m stuffing down emotions because all INFJs get ill from negative feelings. We feel everything, which is one of the reasons I think my bond with both women was so incredibly hard on me.

So.

Fuck Michael Jackson.

If you think the two stories aren’t inextricably interrelated, you’ve never seen my abuser work a room. Fuck me. She’s so powerful she can suck up everything. The carnage in her wake…..

She was a fucking opera singer. In what world would a lesbian who looked like that, had that much talent, and made it unclear whether she was romantically interested or not would I not lose my fucking mind? I was 14. My hormones had kicked in very, very recently. I had no idea what love was.

Here’s the reason I’m a ninja blade. It is now 33 years later, and I am only now able to really staunch the bleeding. To say she didn’t know what she was doing is criminal, even though she didn’t break any laws. Let’s say she didn’t. Let’s say all the other women were totally above board, even though anyone with eyes could see something was wrong. She was 25 years old.

23 years of the monster in my head and the ghost out to get me.

Now, I’m living my life by telling everyone who doesn’t believe me to go to hell, because you were there and you did nothing. You didn’t save any of the others, and you didn’t believe me. You should check in with them and make sure they’re okay, because when I saw them, they were FUBAR and you were silent, because you thought you were better than them, too…….. because she was still lovebombing you. You didn’t walk into the game, because you were stronger than her. We were weak and couldn’t hack it. Seems legit.

It’s interesting that she met me when I was 12, but I didn’t feel sexual energy in my direction until I was 14. Two things are completely fucked up about that. The first is that it shows grooming with intent. The second is that no healthy adult tells a child things that are way too big for them. It created my most devastating secret; I learned the power of what childhood emotional abuse could do. We don’t understand it, but we crave our abusers. We walk toward it because the control is complete. We feel ourselves wanting to have sex years before we’re ready, because whether you’re a monster or totally clueless, you’ve already fucked us no beers.

So, to my beautiful girl, thank you for everything. Thank you for listening all those years. Thank you for loving me to the best of your ability. Thank you for publicly declaring your love for me, because it showed me how much I mattered to you. Thank you for letting me walk away with my head held high, because you were there to catch.

To everyone else, CHECKMATE.

Wordless

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What is your favorite genre of music?

I am the one that provides the words.

I need music to flow like water around me. I love the word “soundscape.” I love how composers and writers make love to each other, birthing individual creativity that feeds the other.

Probably one of the reasons the partners I’ve had haven’t been creative (except Dana). I thought it was a good thing that we were so different, because we were feeding each other. Now, I realize that nearly every relationship I’ve ever had with a woman became based over time on division of labor. They’ll do all the thinking if I’ll do all the feeling.

I was comfortable with my beautiful girl’s availability because it was no different than any relationship I’d ever been in with a woman except the relationship I was currently in. That does not mean I choose wrong, or that I’m a bad person for not getting rid of the Internet relationship. There’s several reasons I couldn’t do that, and even when I realized it was necessary, it was too late.

I can’t remember which entry I was reading where it became clear, but I know for sure that I am trauma bonded to this woman and perhaps it just didn’t present for her in the same way. That’s fine, and I don’t expect anyone to have my experience. I was just reading over what I’d written when it hit me….. “that’s a trauma bond.” You need her so bad it physically hurts? That’s a symptom.

If she doesn’t have an itch on her skin when she thinks about disconnecting from me, then of course we are not the same. I wish I’d thought about that years ago. I should state for the record that I am not saying she caused trauma. It’s the opposite. She came into my life while I was experiencing acute trauma, and sat next to me while I took my own medication. No one who sat with me at that time isn’t bonded to me in that way, it’s just not as extremely loud and incredibly close.

I think the itch on my skin is thinking that I am too incomplete within myself to do life without her, but that’s my trauma talking, not my personality. Even she would be surprised to see how vulnerable I really am, because I don’t write from that place often. It never left my mind that she’s older and wiser, so be on your A game. Seeing her as younger comes from getting to know her inner voice. I care for that child as much as I care for that adult.

I betrayed everything I believed in because my disease started managing me. I don’t think I came back to myself until I moved to DC and had been here long enough to feel stable. I had to get away from Dana, and I had to get away from Houston. Our relationship looked so much different without those two things, and I was grateful. This is because I moved to Houston with Dana because she wanted to teach, but then when we got there, she didn’t do anything until she had to.

So I was managing my career and all kinds of PTSD triggers everywhere I went. It was unsustainable, especially the day when I learned that my new therapist’s office was a couple streets over from…. That house.

Getting out of Houston so that I could be myself again might also have been the answer to saving my relationship with Dana, but I don’t think anything could have done that. We got into a pattern where she’d check out on her phone, I’d decide she wasn’t interested in interacting, and e-mail my Supergrover. It wasn’t a big series of fights, just more that when we each looked up, the other was busy, so we assumed we could just keep on doing what we were doing. We woke up months later and didn’t have much of a connection anymore. The reason that a straight girl did not and could not have had any culpability in this is that if Dana and I had made more time to be emotionally available to each other, we would have been okay. We just stopped communicating.

Just because Dana was jealous didn’t mean anything my beautiful girl did to contribute had purpose. Dana chose to get angry at the wrong woman.

Actually, she forgot to get mad at two women. She should have destroyed me, and also herself…. Because I am betting that she does not think of herself as checking out and not caring, and how that might affect my relationship with her.

Because if I tried to engage her and it took more than a few minutes to get her to engage, I gave up. Maybe it was too fast, but I don’t have patience for saying “just five more minutes” when it comes to a video game and I am offering to take off your clothes.

Gay or straight, Supergrover whooped Dana’s ass, and here’s how she did it. Dana didn’t start acting like I had serious value until Supergrover noticed I was brilliant.

So, everyone can think I’m the bad guy until I’m dead. I don’t care. But the relationship started to fail before I shot it out of its misery.

In a perfect world, I would have seen another woman looking at my brilliance and thought, “oh, that’s sweet.” It’s not a perfect world, and she’s hot as shit…. Therefore I lost mine.

I was the one that tumbled out of reality, because at that time in my life, reality bit (if you’re my age, you wore out that disc. It’s probably scratched to shit yet still in your parents’ basement somewhere).

I just wish that I’d used music to help me more than I did. I wish I could have drowned out both women so that I could hear me more clearly. Perhaps my need would have been filled by something healthier, cleaner.

Music definitely would have helped me move on for good, but even that was confusing because I did have a relationship with my beautiful girl. Tenuous, but there. It was a note that grew up to be a symphony, because I love dissonance in the right chords.

Too much had happened for either one of us to feel the same way about each other without work, and we decided for whatever reason that this was a conflict that could be solved by writing. In retrospect, it made things more complicated because neither one of us can read when it comes to the subject matter. How would our conversations be different had she ever put her arm around me? How would kissing each other’s cheeks and hugging tight have mixed up the equation? I go back and forth.

It’s not something I think about a lot, because it’s pointless except in determining that I don’t know as much as I thought I did. It’s just not possible for each of us to feel as much fear in person, because there’s more to grab onto in terms of context.

Because of what has happened, I am wary of online dating, because I know what a shit show it has become. I’m getting a taste of my own medicine in terms of not being able to deal with others’ emotions, because a guy who randomly reached out to me now thinks we are in a much heavier relationship than I do. I just tell him everything she’s told me and surprise, it works. So obviously I know that we were not on the same page and she was trying to fix it as well. Our approaches were just so different that they prevented us from seeing what the other was doing or even understanding it.

But it’s not the same situation. I did just meet this guy out of nowhere, and he started acting enamored after a couple of conversations that had legit nothing to them. Nothing was said that could have created a trauma bond, because I don’t talk to anyone about that unless I’m writing on my web site. I feel like people get enough of my problems if they’re fans, so I won’t talk about my issues unless people ask….. or with Zac, I’ll just ramble around until he finds a point. 😉

I am finding out that being bisexual has nothing to do with sex at all, ever. I have learned that I have dated few men not because I’m not wired that way, but because men legitimately have no clue about what women go through societally and are so damn condescending about it that some dude will say two things wrong and I’m like “block.”

To be fair, I haven’t specifically started seeking out men or women. I just connect with people. However, I notice how I’m being treated and overall, men treat me like I’m little and cute. Boy, I will fuck you up. Respect me as such.

It’s because men aren’t looking at me like I’m half a husband, and it is their downfall. I will never be “the little woman.” I don’t understand most social constructs and step all over them, so expecting that I already understand everything about male/female relationships is a mistake on both our parts.

When a trauma bond snaps, it feels like quitting caffeine cold turkey and then having to deal with the headaches. So, that’s a lot of fun as I negotiate being a new person. It’s why I feel like I’m not good at dating. I go out and I’m not focusing on them, but about how long it’s been since I had at least a goddamn Diet Coke. My body doesn’t feel right, and the one friend that’s always been there for me has taken a back seat…. When music could have handled the detox on its own. Music and I have been together since I was born.

My mother was a classically trained pianist with a degree in piano performance and pedagogy. My father played both classical and jazz trumpet, getting 26 full rides for college. Curtis, Juilliard, Oberlin, you name it.

I am what happens with “the Mozart effect,” but I’m not sure whether that’s a ringing endorsement.

Music has a way of focusing me that other things don’t, and I’m going to have to make a Supergrover playlist as well, because the music I needed to get rid of romantic feelings isn’t the music I need to feel calm. I’ll start with the color green. She reminds me of new life, new growth, new everything and the music should reflect it. I’ll have to go through my music apps, but it should start with something like “Sheep May Safely Graze” yet not exactly that because I’d be whistling it 24/7.

I just need things that are mathematically complicated in a major key.

Actually, that would be a good tagline for her, if there was one. Never have I met anyone with such a range of emotions that centered on light, often shining it into my darkness while I cleaned up. It was easier because I could see.

I listen to classical music a lot while I’m doing other things, because it relaxes my ADHD mind to have at least one plug filled. One less way for another stream of thought to interrupt.

That’s how I think meeting in person would have helped. Talking would have avoided all the traps of going down the wrong road too far before having to figure out an exit strategy, which as you can see is going really well. Obviously I’m not bothered by the situation because I never write about it. Eyeroll.

The writing prompt today reminded me just how much I cannot separate the music of my life from life itself. I am put together with blood and bones and skin, and yet that doesn’t mean music’s contribution isn’t there. Music is the invisible fourth wall providing structure…. So thick you don’t even have to have a stud finder. Just decorate it up, it’ll hold. Like concrete, music drips like water into all your softest places and hardens. Music that moves you will call you to you forever, and not everyone is attuned to your beat.

To turn that back on me, my rhythm changed and I didn’t realize how different it had become. I was a basic 4/4, with a new composer who only knew how to write time signatures by subbing in random numbers. Today, it’s a waltz. Tomorrow, it’s a march. Tuesday is experimental jazz odyssey.

I am living my life with the map on the table, knowing there’s no way to fit it back into the package.

Which ultimately leads me to my favorite song in life, and a story about my ex wife. I thought it was hilarious that the Indigo Girls were on tour, and Kathleen was late to the concert…….for the “GET OUT THE MAP” tour…….. 😛 😛 😛

The thing that stays with me from the first time I heard it until now is “I’m going to love you good and strong while our love is good and young.” The hope for that love is eternal, knowing a piece of it is in me. I can stop the itch on my skin, I can go back to my life, I can move on. But there’s never going to be a moment in my life that is bigger than “you think I’m smart? You? Really? Are you sure?”

Things Are Going Well

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I have come to a turning point in my healing. It’s going to sound harsh, but I mean it in the best way. I’ve had enough clinical separation that now both my beautiful girl and her man are the characters they’ve been in my head all along. They are very real, and yet very not. I cannot have them, but I can have the memories attached to them. I have every emotion I have seen come through my Supergrover for ten years. She is an uploaded consciousness, and now there is Silence in the Library.

Hey. Who turned out the lights?

God, it would be good if I were the sort of person that could end on a line like that. Just MIC DROP. I can’t say it any better……. AND YET I’M NOT DONE TALKING. 😛

The only part that’s sad is she chose this for herself, and I let her. It was time if we weren’t moving forward, and I am sure that she doesn’t see my point and she doesn’t see that I do see hers, and I’m willing to accommodate it and I always have. She’s been holding out on me and saying there’s nothing wrong. I don’t have to live with that, and I won’t. There is a very good reason I’m all in with her, it’s just too personal to tell the whole world, because it only belongs to the two of us. Even if it’s something we’ve told ourselves or others, our reactions to it are our own and should have come with beer.

Oh, wait. It did, one night. We celebrated my divorce virtually with beer. By that time, there was no conflict. I was just glad the marriage was over and she was glad for me. There was really no turning back, and we both knew it. She just didn’t pick up the extent of it because all she saw was me spiraling out in teenage blushing madness and not the very real possibility that we’d actually need each other.

My mother is dead, and so are all three of my grandmothers. It’s just one of the reasons I needed her- that loss of female energy all around me. I hope I gave her more than she told me I did, but even if she never does, I have my guesses…. And have to try to stuff down the automatic reaction that it’s probably bullshit according to her. I lost my sense of up and down, the feeling in all relationships as to whether open and closed door personalities matter.

It would have been ridiculous to dump someone that close to me if her marrying a man was my issue. It’s not, and it won’t ever be. It’s that it changed her identity in such a fundamental way that I realized just how much had been going on in her life that she just neglected to mention. She wasn’t purposefully hiding anything, she was protective of herself and unwilling to let go on the off chance that there would be more devastation emotionally. I understand all of that. Our differences come in where I was absolutely lionhearted in my belief that I could just invite her to do something and the spell would be broken for both of us. We’d become real people, and not even the people we used to be to each other.

It has not escaped my attention that I got shut down when I asked her for any attention at all. Those two things together told me that she might love me, but she was never going to actually commit to talking, she was never going to actually commit to anything because if she was, she would have by now. She would have seen my dreams and said “that sounds cool. I will totally come visit you.” She danced around everything, his Ginger Rogers and my Fred Astaire (I couldn’t lead at gunpoint, so if she can’t, either, we’re fucked up now. I would find it devastatingly hard to believe she does not know how to lead.

I pictured coffee with both of them at different times, letting my characters play. With him, I joked to her that he’d be all “wake up, loser.” But what I meant was being that person that I could look at with one glance and tell how Supergrover was maintaining. She’s a handful, and he’s capable. I would never put him before her- that’s not what women friendship does. But don’t think I can’t tell how Lindsay’s doing just by looking at Matt.

I’m betting they have about the same Starbucks tab as well, which I’m sure is extraordinarily healthy for both of them.

Again, letting them be characters is like the show at the end of “Dawson’s Creek.” OMFG. I’m going to cry. I’ve been Dawson at the end for ten years. Happy for Pacey and Joey, glad to be along for the ride, and eventually did his own thing just to get some distance….. where Pacey and Joey were the stars of the show. My God.

They became his characters, we just work in different mediums. If my characters are playing right now, they’re watching Dawson’s Creek and telling me I got something right, but they’ll never admit it.

It’s healing to be able to walk away while treating myself. I can’t treat myself with drugs, but I can certainly spend more than an hour a week on self-improvement. Pro Tip: Therapy doesn’t work without homework.

Here’s the writing prompt that got me started on the whole healing journey in 2003.

My mother never……………

I don’t remember the whole thing, and it’s gone now (I think). It’s from Clever Title. I wrote:

My mother never found herself. She stood behind a black robe, one after the other. (Her partner once my parents divorced was a judge, and my dad was a minister, which worked very well in this piece.) I talked about how she changed things bit by bit, like adding spices to a soup, but not enough to alter the flavor significantly. This is because I thought she cared wayyyyyy too damn much what other people thought, and I didn’t for the life of me want to be her. My mother was a gracious, loving woman crippled by so much fear of not being the perfect family that we all struggled to be that for her.

It was the start of realizing I could have an opinion, because no one else ever held back on us. Then, she died, without ever realizing how big the world could get when you actualize….. when you step into yourself.

She cooked her husband dinner every night and deferred to all his opinions, which weren’t bad but definitely more conservative than mine. I was actually close to one of his daughters, because she was chair of Mexican Studies at UTSA before she died and we were both geeked out over Tony Mendez….. and she was geeked out over me, and who doesn’t like people who think they’re amazing?

If it seems like that is extraordinarily harsh, it is a direct line to my personality. The one that hurts for everyone else. The one that wants everything to give to everyone else. My mother was like that to her core, built for it, and so am I. But when the person who is helping doesn’t have somewhere to go with their feelings, they resent all the people they care for who aren’t stepping up. That’s because I have been so reticent to express any needs at all that if you wanted to help me, you couldn’t.

So, for the first time in my life, I reached out to someone for help. It was the most embarrassing thing I’d ever done, because I reached out to someone who said “why do you expect everyone to fix you?” What I should have said is that I spend most nights thinking about your issues, where’s your five minutes for mine if I don’t make you pay attention for 300 seconds in a row?”

What I actually said was…….. nothing.

It was the right move and it helped me, but it didn’t help me get rid of all the bitterness and resentment because she could justify her emotional unavailability. What ruined my relationship with her was ultimately my relationship with Jesus, because my faith teaches me that we have to own the forgiveness of sins. Remission is right out.

This is because the remission of sin is their erasure. It’s sweeping it under the rug and pretending it didn’t happen. Forgiveness is saying you’re wrong, saying your’re sorry, and letting scar tissue heal over.

We had a remission/forgiveness debate and she lost, because remission wasn’t acceptable. She wasn’t growing with me, she was fighting me. I was regressing. Like I said, mutually assured destruction because she’d pop off with the same tired crap and I’d fall for it every time, escalation mode engaged. The one time I did come out of a fight like that clear headed, I was dumb enough to go back for more. It’s not because she’s a bad person. I just should have realized that if there was going to be a pattern change, it was on her, because I’d already spent eight years doing our work for me. Relationships grow and change and tumble and climb. What got to me was being able to say emotions and not hear them. She would probably say that my ears were clogged, but in the last eight years if I’d been deep diving into something, she wouldn’t say I had a point there, either.

That’s because if I bring up the past, she’ll say there’s nothing she can do about it. She’ll say she’s not a perfect person, but she won’t say “I’m sorry.” There’s no acknowledgement that talking is a good thing.

If she really wanted to put the fear of God in me, she would have texted “we need to talk.”

Although the last really funny exchange we had was that she told me it was interesting the kinds of people I talked to on the Internet, and I said, “many women before you have taught me to be wary when they say “it’s just interesting.” 😛 When I made her laugh all my feelings spilled out. She just does that to me. If she gets tickled, I’m not far behind and vice versa.

Speaking of which, she actually still owes me some work product. A 12 page report with graphs and color glossy pictures, if I recall correctly. I mean, she did send me the bullet points, so I think I’ve got it, but concentration is key.

If you know that reference, you are REALLY an OG. All I have to say to that is “well, I guess I owe her a report, too. My graph will just ride on more metrics.“

One of the things that we talked about that’s really stuck with me is the idea of the complicated construct. We are both forceful when we need to be, Southern when we don’t. Neither of us see gender in us as much as we see gender on us, because again, she’s been a boss for a long time. Her patois reads male, her voice…… music…. and I don’t think she’d phrase it that way, but I’m the reader. If I were to challenge her as a writer, I’d ask her to write a love letter to a person, place, or thing. I don’t think people ask her to do that very often, and it’s counter to her nature.

If turnabout was fair play, it would be a task list with two things on it.

WHY GOD, WHY?

I’m just feeling good that I can laugh and be out with it. All the feelings. All the love. All the anger. All the tears.

Things are going well, because I am healing through getting to know my own version of my characters, because even though they’re based on real people, they’re not exact because they can’t be.

“You want me to write accurately about your vibe? Show it to me. Put up or shut up. Not looking for an invitation, but not looking to be punished over what I don’t know, either.”

If there’s any anger that will stay, it’s that the line above didn’t do a damn thing to change our dynamic, so I knew it ultimately wouldn’t.

I suppose I’m rattling on because it’s twofold. She’s not listening, so I need to hear me. Also, these entries won’t mean anything in a few months. Then, it’ll be another ten years and I’ll be sobbing in reminiscence.

Because things are going well.

Me, Myself, and I

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

On what subject(s) are you an authority?

The only subject I am comfortable projecting authority is me, and you would find it amazing the sheer number of people who want to revoke my degree. It is my work not to take their opinions seriously, because they simply have not spent as much time with the subject as I have. Totally nuts, completely self aware, trying to put herself back together. That’s the elevator pitch, I guess. The “completely nuts” will never go away. It just has to be managed, and admittedly it’s not such a great time right now, but it is getting better.

I feel like I lost my shit yesterday, I was so blindsided by a wave of grief I didn’t see coming. Everything I’d ever done to offend anyone was beating down on me, so of course not only did I ruin my beautiful girl’s life, but because I didn’t know she had a boyfriend/husband, I couldn’t freak out about those implications, but I did yesterday because I was berating myself for a hundred percent of everything. Yes, she was a total jerk to me, but I felt that way after not being heard on the same issue for years and then being told that it was tiresome to hear about said issue. It would have been good to know that subject was tired because I thought she hadn’t read it. So much information was lost between keyboard and chair.

And that’s what I’m thinking about. All the thoughts between us that didn’t get expressed and now need to find a box for safekeeping. In allowing myself to get that angry, that upset, I realized what a mess I had created by assuming everything was fine, writing everything exactly the way I always did.

It wasn’t fine. I didn’t start talking to her any differently, same cadence, same tone, same temperature, some everything except the reaction my words would create. I tried too hard, and it came across as trying to get attention, when in reality I was just grieving a loss and hoping I was wrong… that I’d be found.

I’m not upset that she cannot forgive me in the way that I would like to be forgiven. That is not my call. I am frustrated that it took so very long to reach the same conclusion we would have had, anyway.

Or maybe I’m just being hard on myself, because looking at her words, I still cannot find a clear path. I am just going to have to chalk it up to the nature of the Internet.

When I am not looking at her words, I recognize others’ footfalls and get in line. The path that I’m creating is walking away from her indecision, because not knowing whether I was welcome or not made me walk on eggshells a hundred percent of the time while apologizing for my existence.

I could talk about anything with her except her…. which made me in the unenviable position of having to ask myself what to say, which was invariably wrong.

She’s right. It was a hundred percent clear I wasn’t getting what I wanted, because she didn’t want to answer anything, ever, at all. It didn’t make any sense, because she liked talking about my dating life, my mental health, my cooking, my career, etc. She felt free to tell me anything she wanted to about anyone in my life, but got pissed off if I said anything about anyone in hers. When I hurt her, I set up the double standard that she could be as close to me as she wanted, and also to be angry that I wanted to know things.

She could pick apart my dates, and I didn’t even know she was with anyone officially, because she told me she was seeing someone and then never mentioned him again. I am glad that I just assumed it all worked out, because it did.

Now I’m getting tired of the story in my head and wish it would leave me alone. I’m getting the distance I need to be free, and it feels like I’m tripping into the light. It wouldn’t be me if I didn’t.

The story in my head is bigger than me and has to stop adding layers. Enough is enough. I just think I’m done and then another wave hits me.

That’s because during the original break, I never really gave myself enough time to pick out the shrapnel before I started apologizing. This time, it’s been months because something happened this time that didn’t happen before. My faith in her is broken. Hers in me had broken long beforehand, it’s just that she was polite and I was blind.

We just don’t fit anymore, and it was a mistake to think that with time, everything would look better.

Trust me. I’m the authority.

This is a Family Show

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What’s your definition of romantic?

I’m joking because of course the writing prompt made me laugh. “This is a family show” is how I generally reply when someone posts something on my Facebook wall that I know my mom and dad would have *loved.* If I could think of an example off the top of my head, I would gladly embarrass the people who said such things, because it wouldn’t be mean. It would just be turnabout as fair play. Your mom probably doesn’t want to know what I think of your rack.

Here’s my actual “fuck off” for the day. It has nothing to do with romance, but definitely fallout……………… Your dad absolutely wants to know what I think of your rack. In 2002, my wife’s best friend’s dad asked me to kiss my wife in front of him for reasons. At a party, in a bar, in front of everyone.

It’s actually the biggest reason I was scared that my Internet friend would tell her boyfriend/husband about me. I couldn’t protect her from what he would think/say, and I have no illusions as to how that conversation might have gone. Him taking me as a serious threat was never a fear for me, because I wasn’t. My biggest fear is that I would become a running joke with her husband because he thought it was funny. Every passive and not so passive joke available, that kind of thing. I do not know if anything like this happened, and I don’t think it did, really. I’ve just been through it before, and I’m betting she hasn’t. I’m sure I screwed up more for her than I can possibly imagine, but I’m not acting as if I already have. That’s giving myself a lot of unnecessary punishment, and I’ve lived like a monk for eight years in part because I thought I deserved it. I’m not saying he’s a bad guy, I am saying he is one of a species known for making jokes like that. I cannot know he’s not like that, I can only compare him to all the other men I’ve met and say it’s a probability like everything else. Maybe the percentage is high, maybe it’s low. It doesn’t matter, because no one would tell me something like that.

I hope he’s the kind of man I need him to be, and if he’s not, I hope he lays off eventually. There really is no limit to how cruel it could have gotten for her, and I thank God they’ve met. It’s not like she picked him up off the street when he fell off a turnip truck.

I do not wonder whether he’s better for her than I am, because I already have both my answers. The fact of the matter is that he is both better for her and it doesn’t matter, because there’s no changing either one of us. I’m not male and she’s not queer…. not only that, if I had been male, she would have seen the threat coming and disposed of it. I know this because I felt threatened and I disposed of her friendship first. I told her that I couldn’t be friends with a woman that excited me this much and stay married.

I knew what was going to happen and she didn’t.

Here’s what made everything go sideways. Whether it is true or not, I thought she needed me. Whether it’s my own mixed up mood and behavior or what she was actually saying, I thought she was inviting me to be a part of something bigger than myself, and it was worth the turmoil in my marriage to be that for her.

I am positive that in some ways, she feels responsible for my divorce, even though I have told her all day, every day that she’s not. That I chose her in some ways, in was an inevitability in others.What I do know for sure is that if the stars had aligned, we wouldn’t have been together very long. I’m Type B. She is…………….. not.

So, my perfect picture of romance is generally people who recognize relaxing together and talking about our feelings as productive. Relationships have problems, and ignoring them only kicks the can down the road. I can’t help but think that if we’d ever met, her husband and I would have been perfect for each other also, because we have more in common than we don’t in terms of being that support team.

The most romantic thing my beautiful girl could have done for me is to introduce me to her husband, because we love our girl. Period. If she’s in trouble, we will come. He just has to drive. 😉

That’s an old joke, too. I have vision issues, so I choose to take public transportation. I’ve said that before, but I’ve gotten a lot of new influx, so maybe catch people up a little. So, the idea that if my girl is in trouble  he’s just the wheels is ridiculously funny. He’s a moose. I’m a squirrel.

You have seen this cliched high school movie a thousand times. I don’t care if her boyfriend is a big jock. That position has been filled. I don’t want to be Freddie Prinze, Jr. in every ’90s movie. I LIKE HER WITH HER GLASSES ON, OK? To me, you don’t really love someone until you love them at the beginning of the movie and not after the glam makeover. Believe me, that’s not her husband’s vibe, either. I’m just pointing out that I am perfectly fine with him getting all the actual romance, because I’m not trying to be Jamie or Roy. I’m Keeley, and she’s Rebecca.

Oh my God that is so apt it hurts.

To me, I couldn’t have any more romance than I’d need in my life if I had a friendship like that, and not because I’m not looking for it. I mean while I’m waiting, I do not see myself as lacking in love. I do not fall into the trap of feeling lonely, because even though the relationship is virtual, it rests in my heart and mind. It is the other half of me, and because of it, I’m not sure that either one of us is individuated in the smallest of ways. We’re not a separate person because we have never been that to each other. We’ve always been inner voices, because we’ve never made the effort to hear each other out loud. I mean, we have.

We’ve sent each other voice messages over the years because it was exciting or faster or both. Her accent has a lovely lilt on some words, mine on others. She has a queer sister, and I joked that I almost wanted to hear her talk more, because it would be like one of those baby gradients…. her accent, my sexual orientation. 😛

(Queer sister is unavailable and boy, are you guys sick and twisted. Abssolutelyfuckingnot. It would be like wanting an Oreo and getting a Hydrox and pretending they’re the same thing. Queer sister is an Oreo for someone else. She would only be my Hydrox, and no amount of devotion would fix it. At least if I was missing she’d know where I’d be. In her brother-in-law’s car. 😛

Getting my priorities straight is a big damn problem. I have been relieved of all my rights and responsibilities, and yet my mind hasn’t changed pathways to stop my feral nature. I’m not sure anything could be done to stop hers, either. I have a feeling that thinking I’m worth nothing comes from my own echo chamber, not what she was actually saying, but I don’t know what she was actually saying. I figured if I got that exhausted trying to figure it out, I just wasn’t going to. If I was a priority, nothing would stop her from letting me know that. When I said, “love me the way I love you,” it doesn’t mean that I was mad she couldn’t commit to me like a partner. I was mad that I wasn’t a high enough priority to shit or get off the pot, or to even let me know where the signposts were on the map. I am never going to get it if you’re wandering around in unfamiliar territory, so am I, and we’re not working from the same map.

She did not owe me any justification of her energy or time, I just felt frustrated that she felt justified in wanting my love and care, but stopped letting me know that she wanted it. The confusing part came from shutting down and opening up, It was a cycle for which I could not prepare or make stable because once I hurt her, nothing was ever the same.

She will carry fear of me forever, and it won’t stop the good memories from coming, but it will stop her from trusting me until we’re dead. She can say she trusts me, but her actions don’t line up. In a lot of ways, I got her out of mine, because she was asking me to be less. Be less of a writer, because I don’t think you have enough dexterity with words to keep me unidentified. That every bread crumb was an assault. If they are direct hits and I am that stupid, I hope someone will let me know, because here’s what even she wouldn’t have accepted. I would burn down the whole world if I thought she needed it. Fuck this blog. I’m not that good a writer. She is the only person I want in the world more than this. I have appreciated her willingness to grin and bear it over the years.

It’s just for me to tell where I am and where I’m going. We could have worked together, she just wouldn’t show up to the group project. We got an F due to lack of effort. I’m not sure why this is. Maybe because she’s not taking this seriously, maybe because she doesn’t want me to jump in knowing she’s made it impossible for me not to feel that way about her.

I’m all like “have you read any novel ever?” 😛

This is because she’s novel AF.

Novel Jesus smiled upon me. I would have loved capers that involved me setting ’em down, her picking them up like clockwork. I picture Mme Precious Ramotswe and her secretary, the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency and the Kalahari Typing School for Men.

I would teach the hell out of typing.

So would she. She’s mastered the art of typing on her phone. I have not. How she sends me e-mails without typos or spelling mistakes while also on the go is disturbing on so many levels, mostly that I couldn’t do it if you paid me. I’m one of those people that if I was on my phone, I would get a paragraph and she’d get “ok.” Come to think of it, that might have been a good solution to the problem of me saying too much. “Leslie, if you don’t stop talking, I am going to throw your keyboard off this train” would have been very effective. 😛

She can do sportsball, so now I am picturing us sitting on the train together and watching my keyboard thrown from our seats, perfectly hitting the trash can at Metro Center.

I think we both use the Internet to show people how smart we are, and that’s how we got absolutely wasted on each other’s brain chemicals. We were trying to impress each other, and it worked. She’s an amazing writer, funny af. She manages to convey her actual voice in punctuation, and I think about her cadence more than her actual words. They hit very, very hard whether I’m laughing or sobbing. I got so tired of rain, and frustrated and butt hurt and all the things. I really screwed myself, because I didn’t see that hurting her would result in me carrying around a lot of feelings I wouldn’t have wished on myself in retrospect, because I had no idea how much it would affect my future. It will never be what it once was, I assure you.

It’s a lot to carry even now. It is devastating that our conflict was really “the stuff you’re telling me is hard, but worth it if you’ll support me” vs. “I hate that you’ve told me this because you never forget to tell me what a burden I am to you.” That’s the root cause of every issue we’ve ever had, and I think she would agree, because we’ve both planted stories in each other that would make us feel that way. Our conflict with each other is the same from opposite ends of the spectrum. I just couldn’t express that love coming forward because she was only seeing the need going backward. I wasn’t telling her that she was a burden, I was telling her that I needed to hear more of her burdens in order to feel needed, and if she didn’t want that from me, please don’t give me false hope that will change. I want and need her in my life so bad it physically hurts, but not at the cost of giving too much and getting too little. It makes me feel like crap.

I am so much more than she thinks I am in the best way possible. She thought I was too much in a bad way. I thought she was too much in a good way, which made me fluctuate between elation and frustration. Because I hurt her, it felt like she was punishing me for the things I said to try and get her to open up like I was supposed to know whether I could say those things or not. Then even her responses were cagey, and I knew why. She thought she was burdening me with information, I thought it was really hard to be in a situation where she was emotionally unavailable and annoyed at me having feelings. It is absolutely okay for her to be that……………….. for other people. I told her that she obviously had friends she needed more than me, and it was time to let her go find them, because I was tired of up and down, hot and cold, feeling like a child being punished because I wanted more than she could give and she was a jerk about it. It bothered me that she cared so much and didn’t want to talk about it. It bothered me that she couldn’t tell me what she wanted from me, and if it was nothing, stop writing to me so that I can move past the kind of bond that I want and you don’t. I doubt she calls up old exes, and because she brought up those feelings in me and not in herself, I don’t think she realized how things would play out with me. That I’d feel at times that I was being forced into dealing with my feelings about her a lot more of the time than I could afford to spend. I had to manage my feelings not spiraling out of control because every time I went on a date, I felt like I was cheating on her, because she wouldn’t have cared if I slept with anyone. She would have cared at onboarding, and she worried too much about it. I can’t imagine how much it would have meant to both of us to have this conversation in person. I would have liked to hug her while I told her she was amazing.

That’s because overexplaining is a trauma response. I spent a lot of time wrapped up in how much someone new could have of me as well. A .01 percent of me will be polyamorous until I die, because I don’t have to be romantic with her to juggle what real love is. Real love is work. A lot of it. She asked me to forget an impossible amount of shit. I’m just sitting in it until I can. I am thinking these thoughts, and they aren’t going to the right person. That doesn’t matter, either. I need a roadmap on how to fall in love again. I need someone to drag me into it kicking and screaming. I need someone to fight through all the defenses I’ve put up, because I’ll never trust in the same way, either.

The hardest part of this whole thing is not trusting my own heart not to fuck up everything. That I’m shutting down so much no one else will ever have a chance. Why am I fine with that? Yes. Why am I? That’s a question we’ll both need to ponder.

That’s because I won’t even take a chance at finding another Dana, for everything good and bad that implied. God, I love her so much and she’s blind. If I’m willing to absolutely overfocus on my flaws because I think she’s telling the truth, I think she should assume that I am telling the truth as well. That maybe my assumptions aren’t as stupid as she thinks they are, because she’s got me pegged, shiiiat. I am absolutely the dickhead she thinks I am, and also the angel. However, I am not the angel who fell.I’ve been Lucifer Morningstar the whole time. That’s because I’m not evil, I’m chaotic. I have a full rage of emotions. We are all Lucifer Morningstar, children of God and superior angels complete with witty banter and xenophobia. So many people become Lucifer by thinking they’re God. Divine right of kings didn’t always work out.

Neil Gaiman’s version of evil is my favorite, because his evil is absolutely based on fallibility. Lucifer is a more compelling character than God in some ways, because God does not identify as such until Jesus is born. Lucifer fell from heaven, so he is under the same constraints as we found ourselves when Eve “didn’t read the apple terms and conditions.” I am not being literal, it is a metaphor (explaining it’s a metaphor because Evangelicals won’t assume I don’t mean it’s a fact. See title of blog.

I just want her to can it on thinking that I am always Lucifer’s basest self. I, like him, find “oh, my Dad” moments everywhere.

It makes me feel romantic about the state of the world, even when it’s going to hell in a handbasket………. to paraphrase a church bulletin, “Helen Hunt is now in charge of the Lost & Found, so if you can’t find heaven, go to Helen Hunt for it.”

By the way, Australia is beating the United States in terms of stats right now, and I think that’s an apt metaphor for the paragraph above (please think that’s funny).

Needs Work, tbh

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

How do you express your gratitude?

I feel gratitude flowing through me like water that my mental health issues dam. If I am trying to relieve emotional pain and trying to find its source, the path often leaves out how thankful I am because I am not working on that core. Particularly with writing, it gets out of control because I am not taking time to choose my words carefully. My rage ignites and it’s not pretty when it goes off. I am constantly learning to manage it, because I didn’t know where it was coming from for a number of years. It is hard work developing self-soothing mechanisms trying to recover from PTSD. I have said unforgivable things to the most important people in my life. It’s not their job to stay when it gets bad, so I am not trying to avoid culpability. I am having compassion for myself in the wake of my own consequences. I am entitled that without infringing on anyone else’s belief system.

It’s hard going back to the life I had before I had a goddess that talked back, very much a real description because since our relationship was virtual, the voice I made for her in my head echoed in my chest. “I’m averting my eyes!” “Well, stop it.” I’ve worked for years trying to shut down “The Committee,” the tapes in my head that provide my inner monologue. It hits different when you’re trying to shut down your external monologue that is also, in fact, your internal monologue.

The best part of a virtual relationship is that it’s all still here. We don’t have to create new memories. I’ve saved them all up. When I need her, I’ve got her just as much as I ever did. That’s enough, and she makes me smile and feel strong. So whether she ever thinks working it out is a good idea or not, I think she’s fantastic. No author has ever met such a beautiful character. I hope I can do her justice, because nothing will mean more to me over time than having a real picture of her in my mind that is not all good or bad but true. That it’s possible to drive me up the wall without dulling my curiosity or want to be near you.

I’ve always thought of myself as a Merlin-type character. I’m not so much into fantasy, but my favorite character when I was a kid was Merlin from “Sword in the Stone,” because even as a child I was a grumpy old man.

If I have the heart of a grumpy old wizard, she has the heart of a knight. Brave, crazy, stupid, wild, glorious, swings at every pitch and hopes for the best while I am the world’s biggest baseball fan when she’s at bat.

I’m fairly certain that if you could call it a sport, she could letter in it.

I’m absolutely certain that if you could call it a sport, I couldn’t.

I think one of he biggest things that was helpful in our relationship is that she had to wear suits and crap for work. I didn’t. Our perspectives are completely different. She’s been a boss for a long time. It’s fun busting her balls because I can tell she’s wrapped a little too tight. I am constantly rubbing up against her ire with kitchen humor, because as she got used to me being an asshole, she could flip shit back at me like the best chef I ever had. Nobody has ever made me laugh harder or be prouder with two letters, and you have to be an OG to know that one.

Guess you had to be there.

Nothing made me more grateful than laughing together, and nothing destroyed me more than realizing she’d always see my attempts at humor as negative, because I’d hurt her. I have never avoided accountability. She has avoided talking about how we could make things better so that I don’t constantly annoy her. I feel stupid that I thought I mattered more than I did- that I could have just walked away at any time without discussing anything and she wouldn’t have noticed.

It didn’t start out that way. How it started is not how it’s going, and that meme is solid. Because I hurt her, I was not a grumpy old wizard anymore, and I would have walked away happily if I’d known then what I know now. I thought she was reaching out to get closer, and now I don’t know what she meant by writing to me at all. My guess is that she has never believed any of this is real. That people develop real feelings even when the relationship is virtual. That surely my love for her can’t be as real and solid as it is. What I love about that is she doesn’t know how stable we are, but I do. I don’t have to dwell in negativity. I can just be grateful we met at all, because in some ways she was a character I needed to meet. In others, my writing has created a character for her. I hope that character loves as deeply as my beautiful girl, because I know what her real life sunshine is like. She turned the sun away from me, but I set it in motion. I’ll regret it for the rest of my life, because it betrayed who I really am.

I’m a sweet, quiet geek who fell in love with the smallest place inside her, the one that had been missing. She was a catalyst for that change, so I fell in love with her, too. That’s because the love didn’t center around who she was entirely, but the two of us because I liked who she helped me to be. I’m stronger than I was. I’d have to be to walk away. I just got tired of trying to be less, so I asked her to be more.

And that was that.

It’s More Simple Than You Think

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What makes a teacher great?

I’ve been close to Bryn’s mom and dad since I was 19, as well. Here’s the most important thing her dad has ever taught me, because it has influenced a lot of what I write and preach. The hardest part of teaching is remembering what it was like not to know.

It’s a very difficult thing to be enlightened and also remember the dark. If you can record that transition, you might be able to explain it. You can help others by acknowledging their fear, and being their Moses.

The phrase “being Moses” means something to me, because Tony Mendez has taught me a thing or two about being a writer/teacher. In “Argo,” he tells State that the only way out of Tehran is through the airport…. That State should “send in a Moses” to bring them home. Because the meeting was speculative- so State could say they ran their ideas past CIA’s best ex-fil guy- I am not sure that Tony Mendez meant to say “it’s me. I’m Moses.”

The next scene in my mind is Tony preparing The Six for their trip to the grand bazaar in the middle of the city. Moses is sweating bullets for two reasons. The first is that if he is caught, The Agency cannot claim him. He’s working without a net. The second is that it’s not just his ass on the line. He and The Six get caught, as Jack points out, they die badly. The entire world will be watching.

That is an extreme example of having to teach someone, but it illustrates frustration on both sides of the equation. If Tony doesn’t prepare The Six, one if not all of them will be pulled in by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard for questioning. Alternatively, The Six are just basic policy wonk diplomats with no training in deception and Tony has to teach them to walk their covers in a day.

It’s not the same as remembering what it was like not to know multiplication and division, but it’s the same concept. The difference is an age-appropriate level of fear. It clutches your chest whenever you leave your comfort zone, which is not the same when you’re five and when you’re fifty. It’s a proportional response.

Remembering what it was like not to know is often a failing of mine, because things that are so patently obvious to me are hiding in plain sight for others. I am going to be able to feel you before you even say anything. I can tell what kind of mood you’re in simply by watching body language. I can feel the frustration, anger, etc. steaming off you and the moment when that energy changes. I don’t have to learn someone’s mannerisms, habits, mood, and behavior to do this. It happens automatically. I will not be able to tell that there is a problem, but I know what it looks like to move in the world showing different emotions. The more people claim there isn’t one, the more I know whether they’re telling the truth or not, because there is an energy behind truth and white lies. I can feel that shift, and can feel you bullshitting me. Your next words don’t even matter, because the way you stiffened up before you answered betrayed you.

I feel like I can tell the most about people’s personalities and group dynamics without saying a word. I stand there and soak up everything in the room. I’m not just feeling how we are interacting, but how everyone is. I can tell not just how your behavior affected me personality, but also how well you know how to read a room…………

I am not bragging on myself, because others have this gift. Bryn is better at it than I am. Having her is like having a bloodhound. She can sniff out when I’m upset, and sometimes I think she does it by reading how the phone rings. 😛

Speaking of Bryn, she told me that she feels like a celebrity when I write about her on my blog. I told her that she is not the first person to tell me this. My friend James nearly made me die of laughter when he said, “I really just go to your page and search ‘James.’ Yes, I am that fucking shallow.” She told me that my entries were the perfect length for a morning constitutional, and I told her that she was nowhere near the first person to tell me that.

I missed my calling. My blog should be called “The Shit Show.”

It was more simple than I thought.

…because I had to.

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

One of the things that makes me frustrated about this time in my life is how crazy this must all seem to the outside world because I can’t be any more specific that I can right now. It doesn’t make any sense why an Internet relationship would make me react this way, and I can’t give you any more than “if you knew, you wouldn’t think I was crazy at all.” Nothing in my life is as it appears, I can only show you what I can show you. I need to protect my beautiful girl as much as I’m protecting myself, and these entries are just for me. They are written so that I can tell what kind of progress I am making, but not telling her story. Please remember that you are missing at least 50%, and I am comfortable looking like a total wack job in front of the whole world. All I can do is rest in my belief that no one else’s opinion matters. You’re just looking at my reputation.

I am looking at my character.

If you cannot see the difference, then you’re probably not introspective. When you dive into yourself, you see the difference between what others think of you and how little it matters compared to whether you can look in the mirror every day. How others’ opinions don’t pay your bills. How no one else is going to save you, so you have to find ways to save yourself. It’s a tangled web I’m weaving. It looks from the outside like I’m a fly, but I built this web by hand in a rainstorm.

The fact that there’s a chunk missing doesn’t make me feel good, but it’s not my work to sit with that. It’s my work to look at what happened and why. I feel like it’s an important story…. Critically so as we slouch toward a digital society where everyone lives and loves like this to some degree. Also, it’s an important story, but not unusual. It is to people who haven’t lived on the net since ‘99, maybe…. If you look up “geek” in the dictionary, it’s just a picture of me and Wil Wheaton.….. where was I going with this?

It’s not an unusual story, or at least, it doesn’t begin in an unusual way. Our deal was to be confidantes. I love women, so that kind of shit made me catch feelings (an inconvenient truth). She loves women, too, but not in the same way. She caught feelings, too. They just didn’t match, and yet that doesn’t mean her feelings are lesser than. There is no such thing as “the friend zone.” Either you love someone and want them in your life, or you don’t. If you think otherwise, grow up.

I have always felt this way. It’s just that as my life starting spinning out of control, she was the unlucky recipient of shit rolling downhill, and it wasn’t pleasant for either one of us. She kicked my ass, daily, in a way that truly hurt for all the right reasons. I was in the hospital for a few days because I couldn’t get in to see a regular psychiatrist quick enough to deal with acute suicidal ideation, and it was my beautiful girl’s idea. Just move under your own power. I did, and I’ve never regretted it.

I haven’t regretted it to the point that think her strident, no bullshit personality could have saved other people struggling with depression as well, because depression uses the very best lies against you to make you powerless against your own thoughts. No one loves you. You’re too much. You’re so much no one will ever love you. No one will ever be able to put up with you.

I find it interesting that her words made me go to that place sometimes and lifted me out of it in others. It all depended on what my disease wanted out of me that day, and it was relentless. Neurotypical people want to save you, and there is no way to do that. It’s not that they’re incapable. It’s that they don’t know how to fight brain gremlins, and if we already feel like you think we’re too much, we’re not going to help you or even let you know what they are.

I got to that place with my beautiful girl. When she cut off her emotions from me, it didn’t feel safe to open up to her anymore. We weren’t dealing with our mutual brain gremlins anymore, which made me feel like a freak show most of the time. She’s neurotypical, which means that even our brain gremlins are different. But that doesn’t mean hers are less valid. It didn’t feel safe to have a sounding board that was just me talking to myself, because for as much as I got out of workshopping my issues, what makes me feel safe in a relationship is mutually diving into things. Feeling supported as well as supporting others. She supported me and wouldn’t let me support her, so I always felt like “the younger one.” I have bipolar and ADHD, which leads a lot of people to attribute my behavior to immaturity, when in reality, it’s just different. You don’t get the same behavior out of people who literally have no idea how to function in society.

It’s exhausting to feel like you’ve given 350% to something and it still looking like you’re in kindergarten because everything went wrong at once because of some fucking brain chemical or another. At night, I’m not relaxing. I’m paralyzed with indecision and it reads as lazy.

Here’s why it’s so much effort to be alive. I have to remember to do everything. Nothing becomes habit, nothing gets easier. The morning routine is hard every day. It does not “get easier once you get used to it.” Ever. You spend the same amount of energy on every task, every day.

Because I’m not just ADHD, my bipolar and anxiety remind me all the time of just how unacceptable that is, and it’s not something I can change. I just have to manage it. If I designed a house, it would have all my shit where I could see it, because my mind doesn’t store where things go. My mind doesn’t store the memory of where I put things, even if it was just a few minutes ago. I have very little peripheral vision, so I can drop something next to me and spend 20 minutes looking for it, because where I thought the thing dropped is several feet from where I thought it would be.

If it’s not one thing, it’s your mother.

Speaking of my mother, it’s a shame that I didn’t get to have the relationship I wanted with her until the very end. I think all the time what it would be like to have my mom as my beautiful girl…. The one I look to for love because I can…. The one who’d die to protect me and I’d feel the same. I would never have traded one relationship for the other. It’s just a type of female friendship that my mother and I would have enjoyed.

I’m not sure that I mentioned what it was like seeing my aunt Nancy at my grandfather’s funeral. It was my father’s father, and I knew in less than a second that she hadn’t come for her. Of course Lone Star, Texas is a tiny town and they knew each other, but she was bringing my mother’s spirit even though it was the other side of my family.

I choked up and tried not to cry the minute she started talking. She could have read the phone book and I’d be sobbing. That’s because there’s about the same age difference between my mom and Nancy as there is between Lindsay and me, so their voices are for all practical intents and purposes, the same. That voice is still in my head days later, and I’m glad that she comes to DC all the time. My cousin Nathan is a doctor in Alexandria, VA, about 40 minutes from me.

My aunt still has a house in Lone Star, very near my grandfather’s on Starlight Lake. Our family has agreed to all chip in and keep the Lanagan house so we’ll be neighbors even if I’d originally come to spend time with my dad’s side of the family.

Here’s the thing about Lone Star, Texas.

It doesn’t seem ideal until you realize that with a fast internet connection and being able to buy land for a dollar, it’s not so bad. I’d never want to be that isolated full time, but I get it. If I could get an affordable lake house somewhere, that’d be the end of it for me, too…. It just wouldn’t be in Texas, and I’m not sure there are any lakes in this area where the houses aren’t a million dollars…. Wait. Scratch that. They were a million dollars in 2001. Now they’re seven.

The great thing about buying land is that if you didn’t have a lake before you bought it, you can just put one in. 😛

(Oh, that would be so fun. I’d love swimming in water with actual fish.)

So, you can do all that in bum fuck, Texas, and nothing on God’s green earth would tell me buying property there would work out well. I would hate the politics. I’d hate the struggle. I left all that behind because Lindsay is strong enough to work with those people and try to get them to change their minds. I am a nervous wreck when it comes to that kind of stuff. In this case, I think it helps her that she’s straight because she has more clinical separation than I do.

Maybe in ten years I’ll be grouchy enough to rejoin the cadre of Texans screaming to get their state back. Dallas, Houston, and Austin are tired. Get your shit together, Texas. I realize that in some ways, Austin is the problem….. but they have the same issue as DC. The government is conservative as shit, and the locals are actually smart.

Speaking of Texas, I reconnected with a high school friend from HSPVA that lives in The District, so he’s even closer to me than when he lived in Virginia. He posted on Facebook that he needed a house sitter because his regular one was unavailable, and even though we hadn’t talked in legit years, I thought, “this is an Honors Band friend. You gotta do it.” He felt the same way, so we spent some time together on Saturday. I met his partner, dogs, and corn snake. I think it will lead to more down the road, as we both have mutual friends here, as well as having gone to PVA, so our friends come through all the time.

I learned something I didn’t know, and that’s always fun. My 10th grade science teacher gave Beyoncé a C. 😛

I wasn’t there at the time. It must have been either the year I left or the year after, because I don’t remember whether B was two years behind me or three (yes, I am older than Beyoncé. I was hoping you wouldn’t notice).

Since I’ll be in The District all week, I’m looking forward to having a home base in the middle of everything. The house is indescribably close to the Metro, easier to walk from one to the other than drive because you can cut through parking lots. It’s also a classic DC row house, just the perfect house I’d have picked for myself had I wanted to live in the middle of the city all the time.

I do not regret choosing to live in the suburbs, because for what I pay, what I get is RIDICULOUS. I chose to have the smallest room in a GIANT house. I love having a real kitchen and not a shitty apartment galley. The only thing I would change is the stove- it’s electric and not gas. When we had to replace the stove, I asked if we could switch, but our kitchen isn’t wired up like that. No big deal. I have friends who will let me cook at their houses….. even if they have All-Clad, DANA. 😛

That is an old, old joke. Dana’s All-Clad set is heirloom. Her great grandkids wouldn’t have to buy new cookware, and I was there when they were new. It took Dana a little bit to trust me with them, and it became a running joke. Here’s a story she doesn’t know. I invited a woman over to hang out while she wasn’t home, another cook so I thought she was sane. I told her that Dana would freak the fuck out if she used steel wool on the pans, so please don’t. I come in the kitchen and there she is, scrubbing the fuck out of our pans with exactly the thing I told her not to use. I didn’t care if she wanted to “get away with it.” I bitched her out and we’re not friends anymore, mostly because she thought I was crazy for telling her what to do.

It was a “keep my wife’s name out your mouth” moment.

It’s ok, though…. That I looked crazy.

I did it because I had to.

I’m Not Sure

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Have you ever had surgery? What for?

I’ve had classic little kid surgeries, but I don’t know if they count because none of them were what you’d think of when the phrase “major surgery” comes around. I had tubes put in my ears. I had the muscles shortened on one eye so it didn’t drift as bad. Nothing where I had to stay in the hospital, except for an allergic reaction. That was at least 30 years ago, and I never did figure out the trigger. Perhaps it was the stress of coming out. I was in fifth grade. It is not impossible, because it was so mystifying that Dr. Leaves thought it could be the pink dye in Benadryl.

With the benefit of time, I doubt it.

Right now I am doing emotional surgery on myself, which I have been doing all along as a blogger. I just feel like I’ve graduated from stitching myself up to removing diseased tissue. I am getting out all the good and bad things in my life, throwing them up here like a set of X-rays so that I can look at them dispassionately. It’s the only way I can direct myself, because I cannot feel this level of emotional pain and physically move without it.

I have come to a very good place. This morning, I am just empty. I have spent all my energy pouring everything out, and the tap is dusty. I have to wait for a rainstorm to access inspiration, and that is okay. When the inspiration to write is the ending of a major relationship (in terms of time, not romance), I write until I shut down.

It Is Now Safe to Turn Off Your Computer.

No lol

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Are there things you try to practice daily to live a more sustainable lifestyle?

I have no idea what this means outside of Oregon. In Oregon, there’s infrastructure for sustainability. In Maryland, it is “good luck, God bless.” I want to talk about things I do to sustain my own life.

Being a writer has changed my perspective on everyone and everything who isn’t me. I will make them me by inhaling, life as ink on the exhale.

“Life as ink on the exhale” is the perfect phrase for all of this.

“Writing is ink on the exhale” is a better sentence than I’ve written in a while. I should quit for today. 😉 I realize this is extrapolating data from an incomplete set, though, because I can never explain in a catchphrase how experiences go in and ink comes out. I can’t tell you who and what and why is most important that day. The only reason my beautiful girl pops up so often is that as I’ve said before, she’s my muse. She’s the ink. What is sad about that is the absolute confusion as to why it’s the last bottle. How do you cope with not knowing whether someone even wants to meet you or not, yet tells you nothing’s wrong and you’re the only one who ever trashes anything. I have lived long enough to know that I am only trashing the relationship she wants with me. I can have the relationship I want with her on my own, and in a lot of ways, it feels the same. To me, that is also trashing a relationship……. letting starvation rule over your compassion.

I did not want to be in a relationship that was starving, particularly one that had flourished. The problem came in when I’d wronged her and wanted to be forgiven, because she never got over how it felt to be hurt by me. She could forgive me, but she couldn’t open up again…… at least, not for years. Then, she started to loosen up and I hadn’t been so profoundly happy in years. I invited her to come with me wherever I went in the world, dreaming pie in the sky- and told her to bring her husband, kids, dogs, books, wtfever. I felt safe enough to say something like that because she was opening up emotionally.

I don’t know what would have happened with that train of thought, because she never told me what she thought and I got tired of living in grey area. I would have given her an organ. I never got a fraction of that level of emotion from her, and I’m supposed to believe I’m the one that trashes everything?

What I have to remember is that we don’t know each other. We have created characters for each other that live in our heads, which may or may not be 100% accurate. Absolutely none of that stopped me from giving her access to everything. Just everything. She’s the only one to whom I’ve ever given editorial control of this blog, and the only one that knows the code that unlocks my phone. I have never done this for anyone else, ever, and I will never do it again.

I didn’t give her either of those things to impress her. I did it to make her feel comfortable. I did it so she would know I was listening.

As I listened, ink on the exhale traveled the spectrum, inventing colors as it soaked into the page. I am now strong enough to look at her e-mails now, and I saw something that jumped out at me. She said something about how I thought she’d wronged me, and she’d read it wrong. I said that I had wronged her. Another time, she got mad at me for “the lies you (plural) tell, and that’s not like you (personal) at all.” She thought I was calling her an actual liar, and I wasn’t. I thought she had told white lies about a few things to protect my feelings, and “the lies you tell” is a classic South Texas way to say it, but you’re not talking about a specific person. You are talking about a nebulous “you.” She lit into me, and I told her I was sorry I had attacked her with grammar. In my head, I was screaming. Why would a writer decide to emotionally roast me over the coals like this? What the fuck was wrong with her freshman comp? I thought I had made my point overly clear by being sure to note grammar on both kinds of “you.” I was wrong.

I never understood why she thought she wasn’t good enough for me. Not ever. I hated the way she treated herself in front of me, as if I was a dictator and she was hell bent on pleasing me and angry that she just couldn’t do it. I am certain that my actions facilitated this, but it doesn’t mean I didn’t want a different outcome. I tried to tell her that she was beautiful, perfect over and over, an ostinato to drown out her disbelief.

If she thought she disappointed me by not also being sexually fluid, it would have been helpful for her to say that. If she thought she disappointed me because my standards were so high, it would have helped to ask me what they were. I have never known feelings this intense, but in the way I’d feel if my sister was my first priority, not my wife. She has never disappointed me a day in our lives, and she never did until she felt like she was being picked on and didn’t have enough stamina to hear me out. She thinks I don’t have enough stamina to hear her out. I do. It’s just that what’s coming out of her mouth is total bullshit, and not because she’s a liar. It’s that she hasn’t dived into the wreck. She’s going to own herself the way I have here, and it’s going to be magnificent. You know you love someone when you can see them coming into themselves before they do, and fighting you so hardcore that you know you won’t be there at the finish line. For me, that moment became clear when I realized that I should be more concerned that she has lost me. I am not nothing.

I cannot know her feelings on the matter, yet I also cannot treat myself as if I’m so disposable no one will notice.

I’ve had enough of that, and it’s not sustainable.

Ablutions

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday was an Evangelical baptism in fuck it.

Not in a mean way, like launching a bomb. In the way where you realize that you have absolutely said the thing you needed to say and it cleaned you out so hardcore that the tears actually stopped. When I am writing, I am the most vulnerable. I often cry when I’m writing, the ablutions coming from my own eyes. I touch type so it doesn’t matter if the screen gets blurry.

It occurred to me that I’ve been looking at this wrong. If my beautiful girl is telling me that she doesn’t have time, that’s why she thinks I’m goading and provoking her. She’s not taking the time to correct the story she’s telling herself, and hurting herself with my words. I know this because she could say the same thing verbatim, we’re just opposite. She’s only processing our interactions through the lens of what’s going on right now. I’m filtering her behavior through every interaction we’ve ever had. Our perspectives are different, because she is seeing me as the person I am in this minute, and not whether my behavior is out of character or not.

She thinks I bring up things a second time in order to goad and provoke her, when I’m repeating myself because it’s important and she hasn’t acknowledged. She has too much on her plate for me to expect that she’d go back to an e-mail, because there’s a thousand on top now. So, what comes across as context to me doesn’t translate.

Now do you see what I mean about wanting to clear up this crap in person? I cannot tell you how much fun we would have had if we’d only made the commitment to just be weird. Just have it out. It’s going to be awful at first. We’ll get over it. We’re fucking hysterical.

We would have owned this fucking city, and I know it. I would have done some very shady shit just to be able to show her my DC. Ashton Kutcher made me laugh the other day when he said that he just loved Jennifer Aniston, so he went up to her husband (Brad Pitt at the time) and asked him if he could take her on a date. That he would be very respectful and have her home by ten and all that shit. Brad laughed his ass off and told him to go ask her. This is the high comedy I was looking for. I would never in my lifetime do anything to make my beautiful girl uncomfortable, and that probably would have, but it made me go into the “I can’t even make any sound” laugh. I’m thinking about it again today, because he and I have a wonderful relationship in my head. Don’t think we haven’t gamed out what it’s like to be hers. Shit.

He’s the face of God when I need a higher authority.

I cannot speak for him, but I think he decided a very long time ago that he was going to marry her cerebral circus, knowing intimately that he was the Rhoda and she was the Mary and that would never, ever, ever change. This is because she’s the kind of personality that everyone who has ever loved her has felt this way within five minutes. After meeting many narcissists who’ve been like that, it was unimaginably beautiful standing up with someone who really was that genuine. That lovebombed because her love really was that big, it wasn’t a ploy or a game. Finally, someone who loved every bit as big as me. Someone who wanted to think big and didn’t think my ideas were crazy because she was in charge of lots crazier shit than my goat roping clusterfuck of a blog. I hope she felt the same way about me, but I am not sure I did enough to prove it. That’s because the story she was telling herself is that because she’s so busy, I am unhappy. This is not true. She is not emotionally available, and I am unhappy. You can spend five minutes a year with me if you’re willing to go deep and actually catch up. She told herself that she was failing me, when there aren’t even words for how much my love and loyalty branches over her, as if to provide shade.

She doesn’t recognize wanting to hear her emotions and deepen our connection as my love language, or doesn’t want to open up. This is what felt the most nebulous. If you don’t want to open up to me, that’s fine. But tell me you don’t want to open up to me so that I can leave in peace, because I have learned so much about what love is after so many years of learning what it isn’t. Those aren’t my words, but they’re true and I can’t remember who said them.

Everything she told me I was doing was passive-aggressive, because since I’d broken her trust, it was impossible for her to believe that my motives were pure. She got tired of me speaking to her the way I normally do because who even am I? Why should she even have to listen to this crap? Why can’t I just move on?

I did move on, but trauma triggers happen. Doesn’t mean I was trying to attack you when it did. I am emotionally intelligent enough to explain anything on earth. That’s when her thinking I was goading and provoking took an ugly turn, because it taught me that she really didn’t understand me at all because not correcting the story she was telling herself over the years made her think I was a dark character most of the time. Fair, but don’t keep me in your life if you think that. Go have your feelings by yourself. I let her think I was a dark character because I thought that she’d realize how much time had gone by and snap out of it.

She didn’t, and it gave me a complex because she’d do things like accuse me of trying to meet her friends just so I could get close to her. It was never even in the realm of possibility. Ever. She treated me like dirt and I let her, browbeating myself for opening up to her on a romantic level because she’d be able to use it effectively forever. She could justify emotionally starving our relationship for years on end, because I wasn’t a priority.

That wouldn’t have even registered as important to me if she didn’t also love me like a house on fire and show me that, too. It was an unusual kinship, which I thought of as a unique, quirky platonic love story we could have sold for millions and she called it “this thing we’ve managed over the years.” I should have ghosted her then, because Jesus fuck. That was harsh, even for her.

She never addressed the virtual/physical cognitive dissonance and didn’t even bother to respond when I called her out on it, a full eight years after I’d broken her trust. That’s when I knew we were absolutely fucked and to stop trying. If she couldn’t even talk about her feelings or meeting up to try and change our reactions to each other, this pattern needed to die because we were both exhausted at trying to read the other one. It’s just that because she wasn’t really seeing me, she was attributing behaviors to me that aren’t my personality at all.

I don’t think she realizes that every INFJ is thousands of years old. Every single one, from the time that they are born. If you’ve read “The Giver,” I can think of no better analogy. INFJs are the Givers and Receivers of the world, the memories. I should never have let this relationship get to where it is now, because I feel like I should have recognized what I’d done and why things would never go back. Every time our relationship started up again, it reminded me that I wasn’t enough. That I would never be enough. She didn’t see me as the same person, and a stain stands out on white fabric.

She would say none of that’s true. That’s she’s done plenty of things for me. And yet none of them were the things that would have actually said to me that we’d be all right. She felt like she couldn’t win with me, when I was constantly telling her what would work. My love language is words of affirmation. Hers is action. Because of the virtual/physical disconnect, I had to get creative, and I did.

She did the same creative and wonderful things for me, but we weren’t connecting the way that we had. We didn’t even use the same language. It felt like getting a cheap futon home and only having Spanish instructions, that we could have figured it out working together…….. but we didn’t.

I’m going to have to stop saying I’m going to stop writing about things, because I just realized that the ablutions are not the tears.

The play is the thing.

Spirituality and Religion Are Not the Same

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

How important is spirituality in your life?

I put a moratorium on writing about my beautiful girl yesterday, and then I get a prompt like this. Whelp. Here we go. Hold on to your butts.

When I said before that there is a place in everyone that feels infantile and defenseless and I’d given mine to my friend, it was that in 20 minutes worth of talking together, I’d made her God in my mind. Do you remember the movie “Contact?” That when the aliens reach out, it’s to a little girl, so they project an image of her father to explain everything so she is not afraid. What I love about this scene is that it’s not frightening to her because she’s been told that it’s just an image to make her listen harder.

That’s who she was to me. The image of God that made me listen harder, not that I was putting her on a pedestal and thought she was more important than me. It’s true that if we hadn’t been so incredibly different, we wouldn’t have lasted so long. We’d have developed a Venn diagram on friends that would have made us lose the stranger on a train feeling that made me crave her. I can’t even explain that part of it, only that our conversations were so full of emotion that at the time, my favorite song was “Your Love is My Drug.” I was the most complicated 808 percussion rhythm in existence. It was exactly like doing a concerto at Carnegie Hall, where people only expect the highest level of musicianship, or perhaps a music jury to keep your chair in a major orchestra. In the orchestral example, I was a soprano hanging off a ledge with a cadenza to rival Kathleen Battle. The music jury is realizing you’re last chair and learning to roll with it. You’re just happy you got in.

Plus, I’m an INFJ. I am built for people to trauma dump all over me. It makes me want to fix all the things and I will put lots o energy into it because they’re helping me find myself a day at a time. What she never knew that I did was how many hours I gave her while she wasn’t in the room. Therefore, I think she thought I was always winging it, when I was running things past her to correct the story I was telling myself.

She didn’t, and it made her say things to the effect that I never missed a chance to tell her how much her problems were a burden for me. If I’d thought about it, I would have replied that I think of her with every term of endearment that has ever existed, particularly “mulkvisti,” which comes from Suomi and means “one I hate less than the others.” What she couldn’t see is that I was pouring my heart out to her and telling her how much her words affected me. She thought I was rejecting her, when I was telling her that my empathy was so large I was hurting for her, and please recognize that I made sacrifices, too. If she only knew how much love I send through the chord that runs between us (in the geometric sense of the word, not a typo)………. sometimes I put Red Bull in it just in case she’s running a quart low. Those metaphysical images give me life, and I’m rebelling against the way I have seen her treat everyone else and how I am not in that group anymore.

She can tell other women that they’re beautiful, that she loves them, sign off with kisses and hugs. To me, that is what is keeping my mistakes over my head and making it drip on my face every day. That would mean we were getting back to normal, because it made me feel that she couldn’t tell me those things because she thought I’d overreact and think she’d been touched by an angel or some shit. She doesn’t know how much it means to me when she sends me heart emojis, even. To me, showing up is often hearing that I am beautiful and loved despite all my flaws and failures, too. Showing up big would be acknowledging all my love and care as much as she’s recognized my ire.

She doesn’t recognize that at times my love for her is fucking feral, and I know she feels the same way about me because she went apeshit when Sam dumped me. She doesn’t know that I allowed myself the absolute luxury of falling in love with Daniel and my queer as folk “boyfriend,” in quotes because I don’t know what the fuck to call him at this point, only to say that he’s my first thought in the morning and will be on a friendship level for life. This is because she gave me everything I needed in terms of girl power energy everywhere I looked. There is nothing hotter to me in this world than a woman with big dick energy.

Wow, it’s a good thing my feelings aren’t that intense.

So, it was no surprise to me that within days I was completely gone. I love her for everything she used to be, is, and will be. She has said it as no matter what, we have a past, present, and future. I really believed that until she didn’t tell me that the position of partner had been filled long ago, so I hoped too much that she was one of those women whose sexuality changed based on how much they felt demisexual/sapiosexual, not where they were on the Kinsey scale previously. It was a bad pattern to set up, because I’ve kicked myself over what I didn’t know for ten years, especially the part where my brain chemicals made backing down off that nerve scream in pain. I made myself a mixtape like a fucking child, and I will not apologize for going to that place, because acknowledging those feelings helped them go away faster, and I know it. It was easier to ask and move on than it was to pine for her, because I would have done it forever and I know this about myself. I’d be eighty years old without ever being vulnerable with anyone else. It’s not her, it’s the way my personality works.

I didn’t date for a long time, and the most vulnerable reason is that I didn’t want to make anyone else a priority over her. Sam would have been fucked, and now I know that. I couldn’t acknowledge it before, but my attention didn’t turn. I chose emotional intimacy over romance for years, which is why I felt starved of it after I fucked up everything. It came across as pouting that I’d been kicked out of the popular kids’ lunch table, because she was filtering it through her experience of dealing with younger people. Our age difference doesn’t show much, but that is where it pops up most in my humble experience. That feeling provoked comes from the heuristic that I’m so much younger, I’m using girlfriend tactics to goad and provoke her like she’s a senior jock and I’m a freshman.

I had that relationship when I was actually in high school.

I had enough emotional bandwidth to sit down at a table she prepared for me, at first filled with promise…. taking off the last silver cover to reveal absolute confusion……… when all I’ve ever wanted is to be her personal chef- for real, not a euphemism. I want to be a chef, and I wanted her to be my sous. I was working toward that goal by being emotionally vulnerable so that we both could heal and move on. But recognizing that we had issues didn’t come across as goading and provoking until she laid into me and I didn’t take the time not to respond with an absolutely proportional response because I was triggered too badly at being thought of as a nuisance…. and at the same time, it being held over my head that I wrote from a different perspective than what she was actually going through because I didn’t know what it was.

By the time she actually did it, she ended with being exhausted by everything. I thought, “no girl is worth this.” No girl is worth wrecking my life over, even if I do think she’s the face of God. If I left, I could use that without her. Through looking at her picture and telling it how beautiful she is, I could imagine her thinking the same thing even if she couldn’t say it out loud out of fear.

If there’s anything I’ve learned from the Bible, it’s “love people out loud.”

Poorly

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

How do you practice self-care?

My favorite form of self-care used to be taking a bath, but our bathroom got remodeled and now I don’t have a bathtub. It’s not an easy feat to have smooth legs, a standup shower, and cerebral palsy. Most days, pick two. In fact, I have two bags of Epsom salt (one in lavender, one in eucalyptus) that have never been used because I didn’t know we were getting a shower when I bought them.

Self care changed a bit when Zac and I started dating, because then self care started leaning toward getting out and walking with Oliver, and taking the train to his house, etc. I’m not a social butterfly unless I have to be. Most people take care of themselves by staying in. I’ve got that covered. I need to go out.

I find comfort in my bedroom/office more than anywhere else. This is because my house is very, very large and I am a small person. I tend to hole up in favor of feeling safe. I avoid most people in real life because I don’t live with my family.

I am fairly certain that my housemate thinks that because I’m queer, if she touches anything after me, that thing will turn her queer as well. I’ve gone out of my way to assure her that it TOTALLY WORKS. Don’t you dare pick up this peanut butter lest you suddenly find yourself noticing my sweatpants do fit extra tight today, you’re welcome.

Self care is learning to see others’ idiocy, otherwise it would bother me more often than it does that my housemate thinks I can King Midas her into submission (OMG. EVERYTHING SHE TOUCHES TURNS RAINBOW). First of all, ew.

I can also say with a healthy amount of confidence that she’s not smart enough for me.

Self care has been about creating boundaries, which I can’t say has gone all the right way, but has produced all the right results. Having a relationship that was all in my head changed my neural pathways, but there was almost always an air of flying too close to the sun.

The relationship ended my marriage, which I’ve said before; what I haven’t said outside it was all my fault is that we trauma dumped too much too fast and each made the other take on things that they wouldn’t have otherwise chosen. This in and of itself was a crack in my relationship with Dana, but I couldn’t and wouldn’t undo it for anything in the world.

How it worked out was how it was supposed to work out, because I can truly say that I did not choose one or the other. The situation unfolded over years and I retconned it so I could explain it to myself. It was too much to act and process at the same time, and I think that’s what’s happening now. I couldn’t act and process at the same time, so I ended the relationship when I realized what it would take to be on the same page and not having someone to work with on a shared goal, because no goal was set.

It was a roller coaster, when my idea of fun is more “sitting outside by the pool and/or fire.” But that doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy the ride while I was on it, or would turn down another trip if the situation were actually right to do so. I just don’t feel like she’s willing to hammer it out, because instead of seeing questions, she saw entitlement. It wasn’t my intention, but what my words said to her. As if I had an agenda she was constantly failing when I actually saw her as the good kind of trouble. I would do anything for her, and if the situation actually required it, I might even call her on the telephone (no, I wouldn’t. I’m not even that dedicated to me).

If it seems like I’m ragging on her a lot, I would tell you everything I ever loved about her if it wouldn’t result in identifying her. She is just too fun and funny to miss. I would be her second in command at anything just to watch her go off script.

I realized that if I meant as much to her as she meant to me, there wouldn’t be any doubt in my mind as to where we were and where we are and where we’re going because she’d actually want me to know all those things. Now I think she’s just afraid that I value me more than I value her….. that anything truly personal we shared will end up splashed all over everywhere. I doubt it, as we have no mutual friends, but it’s possible if I’ve managed to leave enough breadcrumbs without realizing it because that’s not something I’d do intentionally. I value her privacy, but it’s more than that. Talking about what we’ve shared means sharing things about me that only belong to her. It’s taking that tiny virtual meeting space and opening it up to others, when the purpose of our friendship in the first place was to be the other’s safe space. I would never intentionally violate that. I don’t want to invite anyone else into our space any more than she would want me to do it.

Self care is knowing that I need to turn my attention inward, that I need to protect my energy. So much of it went to her at times that I lost track of me. Not always, but enough. There’s one thing I won’t do, though, and that’s stop praying for her. It’s the least intrusive thing I can do, and probably all I ever will. I am certain that I have said enough, that she is done…. mostly because I told her if she was going, she couldn’t come back unless it was big. That us being so nebulous was kicking my ass. I wasn’t entitled. I was clueless.

That’s because I’d already done the clawing back up part, and it wasn’t happening again without major buy-in. What I didn’t do that I should have was cure her of all her shitty assumptions, like assuming I wasn’t getting what I thought I should out of our relationship. The truth is that she prides herself on not needing anything, so why wouldn’t she think that me being emotional was a weakness? That I’m needy?

I wasn’t needy. I was uneducated. If you don’t tell me what you need and resent the hell out of me for feeling, I’m going to rely on self care.

Truly, I think a lot of our differences can be summed up in our four ages….. ours and our inner children and how those developmental milestones rubbed up against each other. She’s chronologically older, and yet I see her as so much younger than I am. I wanted to protect her because of it, and I failed.

Caring for myself is now harder, because since I failed to protect her, I don’t care as much about myself because I don’t think I’m worth it. I’ve already proven I don’t take care of other people well, why do I think I can help me? I know they’re just intrusive thoughts; most of them don’t even have basis in fact.

I thought of something from yesterday that made me feel amazing. Years ago, I sent her a pen for Christmas. So. Who knows? Maybe I live in her ink, too. 🙂 Moments like that remind me that thoughts of her are not the intrusive ones. My giggle box turns over every time I think of that thank you letter…. that the pen (a novelty) was the first thing that had made her laugh in a while. It helps to think of these things, because I know that I am not chaotic evil 24/7.

Self care is being a little chaotic evil, though. No true regimen would leave out mass quantities of carbs and chocolate at any time, much less right the fuck now (the cramps are starting and I feel my uterus getting ready to scream).

Ohhhhhh……. the cramps are starting…… that’s why I was such a hot mess yesterday. Sounds like I could use some self care.