- I’m going to do another list because the dot reminds me to change topics.
- What I have learned about emotionally unavailable people is that so much gets left unsaid, because they won’t address the issue and talk about it so that there is resolution of the conflict and/or dissolution of the relationship. Relationships rarely end peacefully, which is why I try so hard to be vulnerable. It’s not so that my pain matters more than someone else’s. It’s that if I explain fully how I feel, conflict won’t pop up. You understand intimately where I’m coming from, but you might not agree. The hard part is how to handle disagreement. It’s like learning to bench press. That’s because negative emotions feel like weight. You cannot be a wimp to carry it. The analogy would be that it’s not easy to carry an infant, either. You may not be a jock, but it helps if you can consistently lift 50 pounds.
- Develop emotional strength to avoid anger, because what happens with cortisol is that it rushes in so fast you think you can’t breathe. Anger is powerful. There is no need for it, but conflict is also avoidable and people are fallible. Think long and hard about starting a conflict, because you never know what’s in anyone’s past and when you feel about them deeply, both your love and your anger are enormous.
- Anger 100% leads to regret. Always. If you want to spend your life regretting what you said, go for it, but if you’re going to be that way, don’t expect people to stay no matter how bad it gets. Think to yourself “who am I to tell someone how they feel?” If you love them, you say “I gave you the right to have an opinion because I love you.” Your job is to believe whatever comes next. Actions tell a different story than words a lot of the time and exactly none of it depends on what you understand. You can’t have empathy for a story that’s never been told.
- You will always come across as a selfish jackass to someone who can’t listen to your needs and respond. Notice when that happens early in a relationship no matter what kind it is. Even when you are a child, you are entitled to certain boundaries. It drives me up the wall when parents ask their kids to hug people, because sure as shit if they’re being abused they won’t want to and too many parents are way too fucking blind.
- If you are going to have a child, before you do it you need to ask a very important question. How capable am I of being emotionally available to a child? Maybe if you’re an addict or have trouble expressing how you feel, use more birth control. When you know that about yourself and acknowledge it, you can make the decision to heal yourself before you start trying………. or not. But you won’t hold your injury over your child’s head, either way. Your child is not equipped to hear all your shit, and they will if it’s all about you.
- Here’s a tip for working with teenagers (source? volunteer youth pastor): treat them as if they’re all grumpy old men- especially the popular kids, because that’s a mask they’re using to cover their anxiety. They are not the role models, they’re struggling like everyone else and they don’t know it, because they won’t talk about it to anyone, much less each other. They are not trying to fight with you, they are isolating to protect their energy. Recognize that it is the most emotionally vulnerable they’re ever going to be in their lives because too much comes at them way too fast. Treat them as such. Respect the process, even if you don’t understand it. Know when to be a helicopter and when to leave them the fuck alone.
- “The hardest part of teaching is remembering what it was like not to know.” -Wayne Borum
- We are all but broken children who need each other, trying to pretend that we don’t. This doesn’t show itself in just one way. We don’t allow ourselves to believe that others’ thoughts and feelings are as valid as they are. Like not thinking a monster level of neighborhood improvement came out of pain and anguish.
- I think I just wrote another line I’m going to ponder for a while.
- Maybe lists don’t remind me to change topics. Respect the process, even if you don’t understand it.
Tag: storytelling
Truth According to Me
List 10 things you know to be absolutely certain.
- The button you need is not where you can see it (ever). I can’t find the button for “ordered list,” so I will not notice if there are nine or a hundred. Good luck. God bless.
- Conservative churches and kitchens are exactly the same. Men are allowed to be great, while the women take care of everyone. Churchs love Marthas. They are not so sure about Mary. That is because Mary doesn’t fit the mold of a cis woman, so no one really understands why she wants to be taught by the men……… except Jesus.
- When you’re growing up, you’re taught that adults are making it up as they go along. Yet, not many of us internalize that and have crippling fear of not being enough. Yes, you are.
- Android is better than iOS and I will die on that hill.
- I have never been so satisfied with being single. I think I finally taught me that I’m enough just by breathing, and I’ve had so many moments of thinking I’m not that it’s a welcome relief.
- I figured out today that because Supergrover loves fairy tales, I wanted to give her one of her own. I realized that I could indeed make it up, but that would require more emotional strength than I will ever have in three lifetimes, and it wouldn’t be a fairy tale to her. I know for certain it would sell, and it would be important work if I could do us justice. I just can’t see that happy ending and be happy with it, knowing it’s false. She also doesn’t realize the fairy tale she gave me. It will last for eternity, and it’s all right here. If it is important to me, I am dead certain it will be important to others. When I think about our story, I’m not thinking of this century. I’m thinking, “what would I want people to remember about us from my perspective?” What I want people to remember is that I know for sure we are perfect in our imperfections, and to write the story we have. It is enough. I am not foolish enough to believe it will matter to her within a year or two. But what about 20? Even our story begins with “once upon a time.” Just because the happily ever after didn’t turn out to be mutual doesn’t mean it was time wasted. I am not mistaking the part for the whole and I’m sorry if it looks that way from the outside. One day I hope she’ll smile and remember that I think she’s the most amazing person in the entire universe, because she means the universe to me.
- The fact that I’m no longer struggling with what to do in any of my relationships is definitely making me feel lighter. If I am not networking, I am prone to the pain Olympics of trying to exorcise demons. Writing comes out angry in the moment, but when I’ve cooled down I can see where I went wrong and correct. But when your only feedback is you, it gets problematic fast.
- If you are white, you need a black friend. Stop with the “my black friend” bullshit, though. You don’t need someone you can CALL a friend while you congratulate yourself. Get in the shit. Listen hard. Take on some of their emotional burdens FOR ONCE, JFC. This is not about going up to a black person and saying, “I see that I have caused you pain. What can I do to help?” No. You make the commitment to be friends. It’s work, and it’s important. Probably the most important work you’ll ever do, because until you can see the United States from a minority’s perspective, you cannot see the United States.
- I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me before, but one of the most embarrassing conversations I’ve ever had was with a black friend who said she suffered from internalized racism. The reason it was embarrassing is that I’ve hated myself for being queer since I was nine. So relatable. But my dumb ass wasn’t thinking of enculturation, just “why would you hate yourself for your skin color?” OMG. Idiocy. The shitty tapes white people instilled in gay people were there long before they changed race to sexual orientation, because as one group becomes more acceptable, there are people who insist on replacing it with hating somebody else. By internalized racism, read “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison.
- My favorite classic is Frankenstein, mostly because that’s the one I’ve most recently read. What I know to be true is that there’s never been a movie done well enough that I thought it was true to the book. That’s because there are so many more characters in the original work. If I had a second favorite, it would have to be Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, because I felt like it was a blog. Stephen Daedulus and I are the same person. Where’s the lie? (I tried Ulysses and I made it to “the Sassenach requires his morning rashers.” That’s on like page 10. Can’t win ’em all, Joyce.)
- There will never be a successful movie adaptation of Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. We could get into it, but it’s impossible. However, I am far enough into it that the library of images it has given me is enormous. Even knowing what gravity’s rainbow is has helped me…. it’s the arc a bomb makes.
- I know it to be true that I am a better typist than I thought I was, because I went into my settings on my iPad and turned off everything except predictive text. It doesn’t correct shit, because when Apple thinks it knows how to use English better than me, I get violently angry.
- If Internet Relay Chat hadn’t been invented, I would not be a blogger today. Learning to touch type was the fastest way to make it where I could get my thoughts out, and I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t need to type fast to keep up in a conversation. Many, many, many A/S/L requests have gone into this blog. I am definitely sure what that says about me and glad that era is over so that only people who are my age even know what that means.
- There is absolutely nothing a cracker cannot steal with enough time and dedication…. and I’ll be delighted if you think that’s a joke about white people. No, it’s that hackers are ethical, deconstructing code to improve it. Crackers are the ones that do injections into databases and try to take down firewalls. Oh, and by that definition, Anonymous is a group of hackers, because they’re not trying to break something. They’re trying to fix it, civil disobedience style. Generally how you view them is akin to how you view politics. If you’re a conservative, you hate them. If you’re a liberal, you love them.
- Every day I tell myself that I’m going to write something beautiful, and every day I do. But it’s not the entry I’ll find glorious. It will be half a line that is still bouncing around in my head months later.
- One of the purposes of my blog is to remind people of Marshall McLuhan. The medium is the message. Therefore, use the Internet carefully. If you think I am scolding you, I am coming from a place of having ignored it and these few months is how it worked out.
- Cheese pizza is superior to toast in the mornings because either you can crack some eggs on top before you put it in the oven or heat it up in the microwave and cook the egg separately. I look forward to your letters.
- In my opinion, Craig Ferguson is the best late night talk show host that has ever been given the job, because I would watch it every night like a religion even if he never had any guests. I can’t believe I didn’t think of him for my dinner party because I was obsessed with the show for years. YEARS. Proud member of the Robot Skeleton Army.
- I know that my work gets better when people say, “hey, thanks for introducing me to your blog. I really enjoyed it.” That’s because for a moment, the tapes in my head that tell me no one’s going to like an entry stop.
- I hit post as soon as I’m done so I can be a fan, too.
Put on blast
Adventure Time
Are you seeking security or adventure?
I talk a lot of shit for someone who gets their groceries delivered so they can maintain isolation.
It’s stopping, though, because I feel stronger than I have in years. A lot of the last few months has been diving into the wreck so that now, I no longer feel those injuries. I haven’t made up with everyone, and that’s okay. I have tried my best, and all the other stuff isn’t my call.
I am thinking bigger these days because I’m exhausted. I have been told for years that I’m too much, so I’m going big or going home. I am sure that some people think it’s a mask to social climb, but what I have found is that if you want to be spectacular, stop hanging around people who don’t challenge you. I need to constantly up my game, and if there’s any justice in the world, karma will come to those who’ve wronged me and say to them that they lost something really spectacular. Whether that produces results or not is inconsequential. I’ve just noticed that more people will fawn over others when they’re popular than they will when they’re not. I wouldn’t be able to convince anyone I was a good writer if I didn’t believe it, and I shed a tear for Brandon Sanderson the first time I watched him on camera. That’s because he told me to keep going at a time when I was done. All the inspiration had leaked out.
A student asked him how he dealt with years of rejection and people saying he should get a real job. He said “I waited and got my moment. I was at a party and this guy asked me what I did. I told him I was a writer and he said, “oh, so you’re unemployed.” He said, “I hit the New York Times Bestsellers List last week.”
If you don’t start like me, you don’t turn into him.
Writing is a muscle. The longer you do it, the more your sentences are crafted. The only problem is that we don’t often see ourselves getting better and don’t recognize it. In my own opinion, I have made astounding progress because I’ve been in a writer’s room for 10 years. I am, therefore because of it.
Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc
I am ready to go big or go home, not because I’m taking a shot. I have been quietly plugging away for 20 years, and the Internet has changed around me. Most people don’t like reading stuff that’s this long, which is why I think I’m more popular on WordPress than I am anywhere else. First of all, WP was designed by my brother in arms, Matt Mullenweg. We both went to PVA (he’s younger), we were both in the jazz department, both taught by the same person, and both still count those years as some of the best in our lives. There will never be another Doc, and I am humbled beyond belief that he entered my life when he did.
WordPress is also where writers hang out. Writers like to read. My blog is slowly but surely gaining a bigger audience through the subreddit, the Threads, the comments on Wil Wheaton’s page, etc. Every tiny bit helps, because the hardest part of being a writer is having to talk to people and get them interested in what you have to say. A writer wants to share their stories as long as nobody asks them about it….. while at the same time suffering the weight of crippling anxiety that our friends make worse. Daily.
Our imposter syndrome makes it impossible not to want positive feedback, but bound and determined not to receive it. When I told Supergrover that I thought she had more to say on a topic, she thought I was telling her she was a shitty writer. There are entries I have memorized.
We internalize all the shit people say to us and constantly battle not to say it to each other.
I’m starting to make writer friends by the dozen, and it’s making me happy that we can mutually stitch & bitch. I think it’s better that I’m a blogger and they’re novelists, because if they want to pick up blogging tricks, that’s a different style than fiction and I can pick things up from them. However, they don’t know what I’m working on. That’s just for The Six. I added one of my family members at my grandfather’s funeral. She offered me a place to stay and an office. That’s what I mean about friends who see where you’re going and want to help.
The best part is that she’s another person I can ask questions about Foster, because I have to get his personality down. We are going to be that character. He was a C/DIA helicopter pilot in ‘Nam, one of the settings for my alternate history. By “we,” because he’s my great uncle, I want him to be both of us. I make characters of my friends so that they’ll have something autographed on their shelf that reminds them how much I love them.
It would be a plus if it was such a good idea that it made money. The money doesn’t really matter, though. The fact that someone bought it sure does. You should see how apeshit authors go when they have even four purchases. It is another profession that is absolutely relentless.
Absolutely all of it is to prove the people in our lives who said we were lazy that we actually are worth something. Because no one respects a writer until they’re Brandon Sanderson.
You just have to hold on to the thought that this is not just an adventure…..
It is yours.
Put on blast
Yes, Chef
Two things have tickled me this week. The first was a meme talking about how people fawn over line cooks and somebody replied that line cook energy is Pete Davidson energy and she’d dated 15 of them. I wondered why if that was the case, why aren’t celebrities asking me out?
The other thing is that because of The Bear, people are starting to give line cooks/chefs Pedro Pascal energy. Yes, Chef is the new Daddy and I think it’s also hilarious. That’s because there is definitely something to watching us work. It’s mesmerizing. The mental and physical gymnastics on the brigade while it’s 110 degrees make us crazy and yet effective. Just know that it takes a lot to keep up that energy. Baby us when you can, because we hurt all over and our brains are fried. It’s not that the thinking is hard. It’s that it’s relentless. How do you time things to make sure everything is ready together? You work obsessively the whole time. We have more in common with athletes and ballet dancers than we don’t, because they don’t turn on the heaters and crank them up to hell at a basketball game.
I think that’s why Karens bother me so much.
It’s fine to complain about a restaurant’s food or service. However, Karens don’t seem to know how to get what they want without launching grenades. They will absolutely destroy someone’s self-esteem for a free soft drink…. and that’s not the scary part. The scary part is that they keep doing it over and over with absolutely no remorse. If I went on a date with someone like that, I would absolutely walk out in seconds. Even if I think you are God’s gift to the world, I will leave boot prints on your ass if you’re ever mean to waitstaff and cooks. That’s because there are some problems that can be worked out. There are some that can’t. Most of it depends on attitude. I have been a line cook for so long that I will not let it happen twice. Ever.
That’s because I’ve been hurt so badly that I’ve been taken to the ER twice in 25 years (I was waitstaff before I cooked), but I didn’t injure myself twice. I’ve worked a five hour shift after picking up a hot spoon where the plastic fused to my skin. I’ve still got a pink triangle on my arm from touching a convection oven, and I am proud of it on multiple levels.
Pink triangle on my sleeve…….
I have worked through the flu, migraines, shingles, you name it. In every restaurant where I’ve worked, if you needed help, you got it, but that shit takes a minute and a half, get back to work.
I could cut off a finger at some restaurants and they’d just put it in the walk in until we closed, because no one leaves til we’re done.
Yes, it is that bad, and I’m telling you that so the Karen shit stops.
I still have scars on my stomach from accidentally touching it with a fry basket because someone came toward me and I grabbed it reflexively.
If you’re wondering why so many of us are alcoholics and drug addicts, a small part of that is having no health insurance, so let that sink in. If no one is prescribing you actual medication, you have to get it from somewhere. However, we are all severely addicted to caffeine to the tune of several 300mg energy drinks a shift if we think we’re in the weeds.
And people wonder why I don’t watch “The Bear.” That shit is for waitstaff. For us, it’s just “trigger, trigger, trigger.” If I am ever in a coma, just play the sound of a ticket coming in and I will have my ass on grill IMMEDIATELY. I know that *some* cooks will watch it, but that’s not the majority. Most of us need Xanax after the first episode. You think that shit is easy? Chasing down a delivery before everything opens? That scene is where I went “nope.”
I went to bed thinking about my pars.
I went in on my days off because I needed to make sure everything was prepped because first rule is don’t trust anyone else. No one has your back in a meritocracy. It wasn’t a big deal to me, though, because sometimes it was just a matter of driving Dana when I was off. It wasn’t like I made a special trip. But still. Most blue collar workers don’t spend a second thinking about work off the clock and we dream ours.
If you quit a restaurant job, the sound of tickets coming in will haunt you for years.
The other thing you have to realize is that most waitstaff aren’t required to tip out the cooks, so the income disparity is enormous. They’re getting the pay while we’re doing all the work. It’s not your job to remember to tip out kitchen staff. People hardly ever do. But it is your job to recognize that you’re only seeing the top layer of a submarine…. just Denzel and Gene smoking cigars that cost more than drugs.
……and we’re all little ducks.
To handle that kind of pressure, we’re all assholes. Every single one. There has to be a relief valve somewhere. It is not unlike being a world class surgeon. You have to have the arrogance to believe you can save a life just like you have to have enough arrogance to believe that feeding 500 people is child’s play.
When it gets bad, people drink themselves to sleep. They drink on the line when it gets worse.
The kitchen itself is a drug from the moment you walk in. Even if you’re stone cold sober, you’ll feel adrenaline coursing through you. When I worked at a local brewpub, I drank Mexican Cokes after work and it still took several hours to calm down. I’m not an alcoholic/addict, but I don’t drink often now because I didn’t want to fall into the trap. Besides, their beer was barely below room temperature and all I wanted was ICE. The sugar replacement didn’t suck, either.
When I was working in the kitchen, I stayed up all night and slept most of the day. That’s because since it took so long to come down, I’d write until the wee hours. My favorite schedule was writing midnight to 0400, because I didn’t have to go to work until at least 1500, sometimes later. I fell easily into waking up at noon or one, and I had Bourdain’s perfect life, complete with anxiety and bipolar depression. It’s why he’s St. Anthony to all of us, really.
Dooce is not the only manic rambling spiral I aspire to be. I wanted to be Tony first. I didn’t want to do the whole TV thing, I just wanted to cook and write so that I didn’t have to do IT. I couldn’t write when I was in IT. I was tethered to my phone and laptop 24/7. I loved being able to be off.
The hardest part of cooking is that very little is open all night, and even though we *can* do our business before noon, dollars to donuts we won’t. We are too tired to do anything but sleep right up until service. I can be totally sober and still look like a tweaked out addict because there’s no one who doesn’t using caffeine at that level. It is straight up abuse.
So, when you come into our houses and treat us as lesser than, we get a bit………… testy.
If you want to know the power of the high, ask your coworkers whether they’ve ever been cooks. Most people who tell you they were will tell you they got out because of the stress and pain, and tell you it was one of the happiest times in their lives without taking another breath.
We don’t do it because it’s easy, we do it because it is hard…………. and chicks dig scars.
Put on blast
Ryan Reynolds and Company
If you could host a dinner and anyone you invite was sure to come, who would you invite?
I want to meet Ryan Reynolds so much, because I love the Deadpool script. Based on that one thing, I think we’d have a great time. We’re writers who both struggle with anxiety, and if we are talented alone, we’d be hysterical together. If it was cool, I’d like to go to his house, because he has a brick pizza oven and I don’t. I know this because he invited Dave Letterman and that’s the only thing I remember. Ryan can make pizza. So, my perfect picture of a dinner party with Ryan is a large conference table decked out with food we made so that Blake Lively can eat with us before we throw down. My anxiety doesn’t help me write jokes that often, and being with other people helps tamp it down enough to get over myself. I’m really quite tired of me some days, and Ryan would relate. I know it. I can see it, feel it. There is a silent connection because he is my brother in arms, because it’s a huge fucking war.
We’d start with an MiB script because I love documentaries. ๐ If you don’t get that joke, it’s because I think MiB is a satirical look at CIA and MI-6. The Starbucks in the middle of Langley is my space port Burger King. Hot Sheets are PDBs. They’re arranged in a British hierarchy where Z = C, etc. Even K is a thing, although the rank above M hasn’t been in use since WWII. Since spycraft is built on deception, the rest of the world….. the ones that DON’T work for Mossad, we are all but citizens of Locker C (ADULT ENTERTAINMENT IN THE BACK). It’s all a send up, but if you’re looking for it, everything is there. Everything.
There’s also a *little bit* of FBI in there, because as Ken Taylor (Canadian Iranian Ambassador) points out in Argo, “I was expecting more of a G-man look.” Speaking of which, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon are invited as well, because it would be the most idiotic move ever not to invite them. Matt Damon is one of my favorite writers, and Ben Affleck drove Argo like he stole it. Just holy shit. It’s fantastic. Remember yesterday I was talking about meeting creatives? Matt has been on my mind since Good Will Hunting, because he’s the one with serious chops. Good Will Hunting didn’t start out as a movie script. It was a play Matt wrote for a college class. A COLLEGE CLASS. In college, I had some home training, but not as famous as Marshall (or Kendrick, for that matter).
I would also invite Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, Eminem, Kendrick Lamar, and Snoop Dogg. This is because people don’t think of this when it comes to rap, but it’s my next favorite genre behind classical…. because they tell stories just. like. me.
There is no justice in this world because I can’t invite Tupac Shakur. If you had anything to do with ANY OF THAT, I think I can say for all of us that we will never forgive you. Ever. There will never be another “Brenda Had a Baby.”
Oh my God. I just realized it’s hilarious that Ryan Reynolds’ first break was “Two Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place.” It makes me fall over with laughter thinking that he has a pizza oven now because he was a method actor back then.
I would be remiss not to invite my PVA friends, like Justin Furstenfeld, Mireille Enos, Jason Moran, Robert Glasper, et al. This is because I’d only want to invite the people I’d already met, because I am the type person that needs to have at least one person there that already knows me because I will stick to them like glue in order to feel safe.
Bryn is invited because we don’t have a relationship in which I wouldn’t, and not because she’s my friend. She deserves a seat at that particular table, because sometimes she’s funnier than me. I’m not being a jackass, it’s that we’re a tennis match. We trade laughs like stock.
I also have someone in mind that would go apeshit to be in that room, but she is not invited just so that I can watch her spiral out. It’s mean and it’s really fucking funny. I have a reader that will just die when they get to this part, and it’s not her. The only thing better would be popping popcorn and watching that level of crazy for free.
If I were to branch out on PVA alone, Justin Simian is also invited. I’m not sure there’s a funnier show on Netflix than Dear White People. His takedown of Scandal was just brilliant. I’m inviting writers and directors to get Mireille in something because watching her on screen is one of my great joys in life. I’m not hot for her, though I should be. It’s more than that. I love her to bits because she smiled at me on the first day of ninth grade, and I’ve never forgotten it because she was a senior when I was a freshman. That’s just not done, and she broke protocol.
I am glad that we’ve never taken a picture together, because that look? It’s just for me.
My friend Karen is also invited, because before she retired she was a kindergarten teacher and someone needs to keep me in line. I feel her professional skills would help her in that respect.
It would be a mix of people, but the writers are the most important. I don’t want to know them because they’re famous and I’m not. They don’t have anything I don’t, they’ve just hit big and I haven’t. I know because I went to High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. I am capable of being as good as they are now, because even they weren’t that good when they started.
It’s not the fame I’m after. It’s being able to workshop ideas.
It’s a working lunch….. with pizza.
Put on blast
Getting Help
I am touched to the point of tears that Bryn wants to create the audio version of โStories.โ As in, when the tracks are up on the web, it will be her voice and not mine. I said, โof course you can do it.โ Thatโs because even though I was 19 when we met, that was still enough time for her to pick up my style and structure because her family raised me. I was 19. I was an idiot. Well, I suppose it didnโt start at 19, because I didnโt have much time with them until I actually moved. Before then, it was huge summer parties for a couple weeks three summers running. She hears me in her head when she reads, so I trust her when she speaks my truth.
Sheโs the one I go hard for because I can go to her as well.
We donโt have a hot emotional temperature, which makes me relieved in all the right ways. Yesterday, I told her that she was free to feel as deeply as she wanted about me. That there was nothing she could say that would frighten me away. That itโs already been three lifetimes, letโs go get some more. Now we want to go to Iceland AND Finland, because in Iceland we found a group that lets you ride horses and bills it as business terms. The horses even walk on a giant keyboard, so I guess you could work out logistics, create synergy, table it, and circle back around.
This is totally, completely us.
Bryn had a hand in scaring Sam half to death, because I speak dog and Sam doesnโt. My alpha dog is scary because it has to beโฆ but Bryn goes a step above because she needs it. She worked with deaf dogs for a long time, so she had to train them by touch. When she told me that, I nearly asphyxiated and died. I said, โBryn is the dog toucher, because when she whispers they canโt hear her.โ Even now, tears are running down my face with laughter.
Brynโs got big dick energy, too, because sheโs kind af unless she needs to be a hardass. This is not because sheโs trying to be difficult. What I mean is that working with animals makes you a hardass while youโre in the room with them. Sheโs not forceful with people, but she can piss off a primate without blinking, because theyโre going to do what she says whether they like it or not. Bryn doesnโt work at the primate center anymore, which is a relief, tbh. She told me about two inch canines and I realized that I was a frigginโ idiot. Sheโd been in a lot of danger and I didnโt notice because I donโt know shit about monkeys. Because Iโm so geeked out over spies, my reaction yesterday was that she was probably fine, but one op gone wrongโฆ. Same with the military, where I could argue that is a primate center in and of itself. Whereโs the lie?
I am also going to be adding Bryn as an author, which means that there will be more posts here, but I donโt mean that sheโs taking over for me on some days. I just mean that youโll have more to love since we collaborate well.
This is exactly what I mean about friends who know where youโre going and want to help. We even had the difficult conversation I needed to have in order to feel safe. โIf this blows up, can you love me through that?โ She said, and Iโm going to cry, โI donโt know, but I want to try.โ Iโm not being an arrogant asshole. Iโve already been recognized in public at the level I currently occupy, and hereโs where Iโm going now that I wasnโt before.
I want to take over for Dooce, and Iโm not apologizing for it.
I am done apologizing for my existence if Iโm going to be the badass Heather said Iโd be. I wish I was talking about Dooce, because then Iโd have a memory of us meeting. We just have so much in common. I trauma dump here because she did it first, and it helped her right up until it didnโt.
I do not want to be an โinfluencer.โ I want to help the people who are already a train wreck and find comfort in realizing theyโre not alone. Bryn and I are both fucked up and we know it. Thatโs why weโre relentless in self discovery and donโt have much time for people who arenโt. We are so done with people who are emotionally unavailable, and as I told her yesterday, โwe donโt feel it in words, we feel it in energy.โ We can case a whole room that way in 30 seconds or less. Together, we are unstoppable and we know it.
You get vulnerable, you get stronger. Itโs inversely proportional. If I lay out all my thoughts and feelings, I am teaching you how to love me. I am teaching you what I will tolerate and what I wonโt, and there will be consequences for trampling over a set boundary. Iโve never had that before, because Iโve been such a people pleaser that I had no inner monologue that said โtake care of yourself.โ
Now that I do, Iโm being called difficult, off meds, crazy, all the things. But itโs not because I am those things. Itโs that Iโm not letting people walk all over me. I walk softly, and carry a big stick.
I have big stick energy.
Put on blast
0930 and 0530
What time do you go to bed and wake up currently?
If it seems like I’m really old, I’m going to be 46 on my next birthday. Sometimes I feel old, sometimes I feel like three little boys in a trench coat. Waking up so early doesn’t come from anything but being able to be creative in a much more solid manner, because morning is when I write best. I always write something that early, even if I don’t publish it until later because I’ve taken a break and we still have shit to discuss.
Just yet another reason my beautiful girl would have dumped me in a heartbeat. Don’t poke the bear.
And yet it would be worth it because I didn’t settle for fine. I got hit by lightning.
It’s not lost on me that someone else has to deal with her when she wakes up, because fuck. That’s what he’s for. We both had different roles, and in retrospect it’s the best thing that could have happened.
I am really annoying at 0530 to people who don’t have a circadian rhythm that wakes them up naturally and they feel good. I have learned over time that it’s the best time to write because I can sit quietly until everyone has had coffee.
It helped me to get past what she didn’t want to think of him as an ally. I’m so thankful to him in ways he’ll never understand if she doesn’t tell him that. It would have been a big moment for us to look at each other and understand. The fact that I didn’t get it says everything to me about what my beautiful girl meant in terms of friendship,
For her, I was a hot mess because she didn’t know me. She didn’t take the time to say “now that I’ve talked to you in person, you seem more solid than you’ve ever been. However you are now, you’re good.”
Meanwhile, if I continue the analogy of my sister being my first priority and not my wife, the baby’s needs woke me up every night.
And that’s the crux of the last 10 years. I could hate her for it, but I don’t. I’m letting her off the hook in a way she never let me, and to be the bigger person makes me happy….. mostly because I’m so much smaller. It’s not that she’s so much bigger. It’s that I am about as tall as a party size bag of Doritos and about a buck 25 soaking wet. She looks like a real adult with suits and crap and everything.
To let her off the hook is to release her back from whence she came and just feel peaceful about that. I can do all my emotional work here. She doesn’t have to look at it. But she damn sure will. She has to make sure I’m not a problem to be solved, because she knew I’d be a problem for her and she told me that very, very recently. Why I didn’t tell her I thought that was a dick move, I don’t know. But she thought I was trying to meet someone for the sole purpose of making her blood pressure boil, a running theme because she thinks I seem to do everything that way, because she’s being a jackass and not listening. Jackass is, of course, not a permanent state (estoy, not soy). So, she can think I’m a judgmental dickhead for all eternity, because I have a lot more pet names than that. I will never let go of “judgmental dickhead,” because that’s all she let me be.
The problem is that I very much wasn’t.
She had someone who’d absolutely bleed out for her, and reacted poorly to it. I’m guessing because she thought she’d heard this story before and used all her heuristics to tell her she was fucked.
The problem is that she very much wasn’t.
I loved her, she tolerated me, and she didn’t think that way. She thought that talking at me and sending me stuff was enough and to just shut up about it. That’s because she wanted to be a fan, and I wanted to be a friend. So she didn’t set down boundaries and acted as if I was out to get her.
I wasn’t responsible for what she understood, and yet, I stayed. Things eventually got to fantastic and then slashed into ribbons once again. That’s because we couldn’t solve the base issue. She’s a thinker. I’m a feeler. She doesn’t understand touchy feely crap. I don’t understand treating your friends as if you don’t have any.
For the last eight years, only her pain has mattered.
She made the choice to keep her pain away from me, so I couldn’t help her be less angry. I couldn’t call her out on being avoidant. I couldn’t call her out on playing games, because she insisted that she doesn’t do passive aggression or play games. She is firm in her belief, and then I get shit like “I don’t have time, of course, not good enough for you.” I never said that being busy was a problem. Her being a judgmental dickhead was the problem, because she’s every bit the asshole I am. The game was “how long can I get away from feeling guilty?” and “no, nothing is wrong. Someday you’ll realize I’ll tell you when something’s wrong.” Fuck THAT. No, you won’t. You’ve proven it for eight years.
She’s not the sort of person that looks too deeply at patterns, so we had the same fight eight times and she never noticed because she didn’t want to. In the beginning, she didn’t understand why I pulled back and didn’t talk to her for three months and called me on it and I said nothing, because I was in over my head and it had nothing to do with her. Every time we talked, it wasn’t a thought exercise. It was strengthening our bond and only making me want to dive deeper into her at a time I couldn’t afford it.
When I took my armor off about it, I told her that it was getting damn hard to look in the mirror because I felt so guilty. If I’d ever looked up polyamory, it would have helped. I am unsure whether it would happen again, but I was over the moon for both her and Dana. I have enough love in my heart for both of them, especially since I was married, so it provided a natural safety net until I spiraled out with bipolar bullshit.
It was navigating how much of me both of them could have that got difficult. Before that break, neither one of us went an hour without talking. It was the most intense relationship I’d ever had, because it caused such a struggle within me that made Dana jealous and her deeply uncomfortable. I was fucked six ways from Sunday, and the only answer was to disengage. I didn’t tell her all that at first. I just disappeared and it mystified her.
How she had no interest in learning why I felt that way, I’ll never know. Because even though she knew some of it, she didn’t ask any questions, either. She didn’t recognize that even if it was always platonic, I’d always need her. I’d always need her to look over my blog (it was only creepy when she was doing it behind my back), and I’d always need to be able to reach out because I’m a moron and she’s not. Instead of letting me go off the deep end, she could have helped create the narrative, because none of my shit includes how she felt. It’s only a guess.
I never felt like she saw the situation as the problem. She thought it was her. She moved me deeply, challenged me, made me want to fight together instead of each other. We were never back to back shooting out. We had guns on the table, pointing toward each other (I don’t want to argue about semantics, I just want the protein). She thought I wanted it that way, when I just wanted her on my six.
She didn’t seem to get that once the fight was over, all I wanted was to move on and let ourselves connect, but too much happened to make that a reality on both sides. If she eventually remembers who I am to her, She will not be received with open arms unless she’s willing to own her shit and give me what I need. In short, stop dicking me over and stop saying that you wish our relationship never happened because you have this wrongheaded idea that I also think it shouldn’t have happened.
I absolutely think that the relationship should have happened, I just don’t think we should have moved so fast. We excited each other’s brains, but she excited my body as well because she could. Not that she was malicious or held any culpability in my feelings. I mean that if I’d been straight, too, none of this happens. It didn’t happen because she said she didn’t want it and did, or did anything to promote that kind of behavior. I’m just not sure she was aware that she’d be playing with fire, even though I told her that and she still showed up…. so, okay. You’re not threatened.
She couldn’t see the forest for the trees, and that’s not her fault. She’s not enculturated the same way.
So, she’s telling me things that would spark anyone’s interest in her and was completely oblivious. That’s not her fault, either.
However, she could have helped Dana and me immensely if she’d told us she had a boyfriend already. I thought I was flirting with someone who was single, and then I REALLY freaked the fuck out. That is not my wheelhouse, and lesbian wasn’t hers, either.
There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that she thought she was protecting me, and it did. It protected me from seeing reality. By the time she lowered the boom, I couldn’t walk away for love or money. Still can’t in some ways. Obviously. I wouldn’t write about it if I didn’t care.
What has been good is seeing how much of my crap was harmful and not internalizing it as “everything everywhere at once is all your fault.” It wasn’t all fighting, either. Some of it was just miscommunication because for as much as we thought we knew each other, we were strangers.
For instance, it was idiotic to say she’d marry Brene Brown, and not because I wanted her to marry me. It was that she was kidding and straight women do that too much of the time while ignoring the fact that it would hurt me. Why wouldn’t it? If straight women want to get married, that’s fine. I don’t care. But qualify it. It’s not a marriage. It’s a Boston marriage. The difference is that Brene Brown will never invite her to metaphorical dick o’clock. And I know her well enough to know she’d think that was fucking hysterical, so I’m leaving it in even if she finds it.
Straight girls, stop doing that shit. It fucks us up.
That’s because now we know you think our marriages are playtime.
If you think that, then you’ve probably never seen what we want to do to you and how we know you’ll react. That’s because we’ve been with enough women who didn’t think they were bisexual before scream so loud the neighbors needed cigarettes. The fact that you want the Fisher Price version of that tells me all I need to know.
It’s time for them to throw away their fucking rainbow pins, because when push comes to shove, lesbian marriage isn’t real.
You’re not bad people, it’s just not funny. It’s taking something serious and making light of something serious, mostly because you think we’re just like you. That we’re besties who just happen to dig each other more than you dig Pam at the office.
If you believe that, you’ve never seen a butch work a room, and I am NOT talking about me. If I was, Zac would call bullshit and I’d get sued for false advertising. I do not need that today. ๐ (But I do need Zac and Oliver.)
Do they really think that women’s sexuality is that tame? It’s wild, hair pulling passion, and I’m not going to tamper that down for her or anyone else, and I don’t mean in terms of pursuit. I mean in terms of understanding that if you’re an ally, you don’t know shit. Stop pretending you do.
It wakes me up at 0530.
Put on blast
Stability
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 โwrite whatever you wantโ and I said โyou never have to get me a present for anything ever again.โ This is not that entry. Weโve decided to hold off for a little while because OTHER FACTORS AT PLAY. The point is that my next words were โbut 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.โ I go about my day thinking itโs 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 sheโs such a badass that it kind of rattles me when she wants to spend time together because I am so insecure at times. Youโd just have to know how powerful she is to even begin to understand why I feel that way. She eats Republicans for breakfast and doesnโt 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 Lindsayโs professional persona is intimidating, but the baby isnโt.
I donโt worry about the lobbyist, but Iโm the last woman alive that changed her diapers every damn day. The babyโs needs will always wake me up. The babyโs 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 weโd 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 โmy first marriage.โ 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 wasnโt 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 donโt 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 heโd say:
Lucky dayโฆ. Gonna get an E todayโฆ. Like I sayโฆ. Wave to meโฆ..
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, itโs me who needs the slap bracelet.
I canโt breathe when I think of how hard her job must be and how much stress sheโs underโฆ. 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. Itโs maddening because we supposedly have separation of church and state, but Texas doesnโt believe in it so they just live around it.
As my friend Rev. Chuck Currie has pointed out, โJesus said โlet all the little children come unto me.โ He did not say โlet all the little children come unto meโฆ.. except trans kids.โโ My sister has to tell the Texas and federal government why trans kids need their medication. Their medication. Sheโs not fighting them on their wants and desires. Sheโs fighting conservatives for trans kidsโ basic needs.
Meanwhile, Lindsay and I are both the preacherโs kid from โSaved.โ
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. Itโs 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 weโve both loved Mandy Moore.
Ok, Iโm going to take a second. Weโve got to talk about this. Mandy Moore didnโt win nearly enough awards for โThis is Us.โ 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 sheโs playing different ages in the same episode. Itโs 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 โslap bracelet.โ 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 doesnโt drink a hell of a lot of it.
Iโm not sure whether itโs 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.
Itโs a riff on โhow many SMU sorority sisters does it take to change a light bulb?โ โTwo. One to mix drinks and one to call daddy.โ Iโm betting that the capitalization of daddy varies by age.
Quitting Diet Coke is relentless, and part of it is the carbonation. Itโs hard to give up fizzy water altogether when youโre 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 Iโm addicted to drink mix. It doesnโt even have to have caffeine in it because Iโve found that the reason I needed so much of it is that I wasnโt sleeping. Now, I take medication for that because especially during hypomania, I wonโt sleep for several nights in a row. That doesnโt 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 respondedโฆโฆโฆโฆโฆ. Positively. When we met, she was going to be my stepdaughter. Her dad is out of the picture, but weโre still going strong. So, whether The War Daniel and I get married or not, I have a child adopted through the rainbow flag. Iโm here for it, and itโs 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 hasnโt talked reconciliation. To me, thatโs that. But you leave a relationship with an *adult.* Cora is now an adult, but the power dynamic is the same. I donโt talk to her about my feelings for Daniel and she wouldnโt know anything if I wasnโt a writer. I feel that itโs okay for her to read my thoughts, because they arenโt directed at her. In writing, I can make it more clear than I could in person that sheโs not the monkey in the middle. Daniel doesnโt 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 โWill and Grace.โ Jackโs cat was named โChairman Meowโ and Iโm still not over it.
Thatโs because Cora is free to talk about her dad, but I do not have an opinion on him. I canโt. He is making his own choices, and I donโt have to like them. I just have to respect them. Also, whether itโs my own echo chamber telling me this or whether itโs 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 โwon.โ
You canโt 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 didnโt bother to get educated when Cora came out.
Itโs not inexcusable to be uneducated. Itโs 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 heโs a bad person. Itโs that heโs a self centered alcoholic, but I repeat myself.
Self-centered alcoholic is almost tautology.
If someone is trying to tell you that youโre hurting them and you react as if itโs all about you, itโs 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.
Thatโs kind of the debate between cis and trans womenโฆ. That trans women tend to step all over cis womenโs asses because they were socialized as men when they were young. This is the hashtag โnot all trans women,โ and yet it is not untrue, either. Their voices are loud because theyโve been told they deserve it. Cis women have been property for hundreds of years. Chaos ensues.
I would also say that cis women generally donโt stand up for themselves and trans women donโt realize thereโs 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 donโt assume other men deserve shit and act as such. Cis women, not so much.
Itโs especially the debate between cis lesbians and trans women, because they have even less political power. Trans women donโt always see cis womenโs complaints as real. That theyโre being misogynistic and their ire is invalid.
Cis women donโt give a ratโs ass most of the time. We only react to being ignored. I am of the mind that trans women are women. Period. I also donโt 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 menโs asses the way trans women do.
My only gripe is with trans women who think itโs all about them. They donโt 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 theyโre 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 didnโt say stop bitching all the time. Just recognize that youโre 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 thatโs feeding you.
Iโm not sure Iโve earned the right to have an opinion here, but Iโm 45 years old and people have been all over my ass since 1990. I couldnโt 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 wasnโt that long ago. The queer community as a whole is being thrown under the bus, and I realize that trans womenโs plights are bad, but I donโt think theyโre worse than they were for me 25 years ago. NONE of this is getting better.
I also donโt think thereโs 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 theyโve passed the savings on to you. But donโt think itโs worse for you. You just arenโt looking at the problem from the same perspective, because youโre 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 doesnโt know, and asked her to have empathy. She took the note and made me cry so hard I couldnโt breathe.
When I said that my middle name bothered me she said, โI have a name Iโm not using. Would you like to have it?โ
And thatโs 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.
Put on blast
The Melody
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. Thatโs kind of my jam. Iโm not the star, Iโm the ghost writer. The reason I say that I am a soprano is that I donโt 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 Handelโs Messiah. Just hold it til you turn purple.
I actually donโt 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 Iโve ever been butt hurt by another soprano (aforementioned opera singer, so you know it damn near killed me) was when she said, โI think sheโs an alto.โ Thatโs 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 everyoneโs noses, we were. It was just asexual. It was confusing wondering whether weโd ever sleep together, but like I have said before, I didnโt need to be romantic with her to struggle with what real love is. I didnโt have lust. I was like every woman in America. If you need me platonically, if weโre interested in you weโll give you everything.
Hereโs 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 donโt state my boundaries, heโll step all over them. He told me he wanted to marry me. Weโve been talking for a week and a half at most.
Now, heโs butt hurt because the story heโs 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 donโt have time for much more than that if you are not here in front of my face. As I told him, โthat doesnโt mean pack up and move. It means that the Internet doesnโt get all of my time.โ
Shut it. Snitches get stitches.
Thatโs all Iโve got for today. I just wanted to say for the record that boss ass bitches cure you of almost everything. Mine did.
Put on blast
Trauma Bonds -or- Go to Hell, Michael Jackson
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. ๐
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.
Put on blast
Wordless
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 โsoundscape.โ 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 Iโve had havenโt 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 Iโve ever had with a woman became based over time on division of labor. Theyโll do all the thinking if Iโll do all the feeling.
I was comfortable with my beautiful girlโs availability because it was no different than any relationship Iโd ever been in with a woman except the relationship I was currently in. That does not mean I choose wrong, or that Iโm a bad person for not getting rid of the Internet relationship. Thereโs several reasons I couldnโt do that, and even when I realized it was necessary, it was too late.
I canโt 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 didnโt present for her in the same way. Thatโs fine, and I donโt expect anyone to have my experience. I was just reading over what Iโd written when it hit meโฆ.. โthatโs a trauma bond.โ You need her so bad it physically hurts? Thatโs a symptom.
If she doesnโt have an itch on her skin when she thinks about disconnecting from me, then of course we are not the same. I wish Iโd thought about that years ago. I should state for the record that I am not saying she caused trauma. Itโs 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 isnโt bonded to me in that way, itโs 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 thatโs my trauma talking, not my personality. Even she would be surprised to see how vulnerable I really am, because I donโt write from that place often. It never left my mind that sheโs 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 donโt 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 didnโt 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 therapistโs office was a couple streets over fromโฆ. 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 donโt think anything could have done that. We got into a pattern where sheโd check out on her phone, Iโd decide she wasnโt interested in interacting, and e-mail my Supergrover. It wasnโt 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 didnโt 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 didnโt 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 herselfโฆ. 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 donโt have patience for saying โjust five more minutesโ when it comes to a video game and I am offering to take off your clothes.
Gay or straight, Supergrover whooped Danaโs ass, and hereโs how she did it. Dana didnโt start acting like I had serious value until Supergrover noticed I was brilliant.
So, everyone can think Iโm the bad guy until Iโm dead. I donโt 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, โoh, thatโs sweet.โ Itโs not a perfect world, and sheโs hot as shitโฆ. Therefore I lost mine.
I was the one that tumbled out of reality, because at that time in my life, reality bit (if youโre my age, you wore out that disc. Itโs probably scratched to shit yet still in your parentsโ basement somewhere).
I just wish that Iโd 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 otherโs cheeks and hugging tight have mixed up the equation? I go back and forth.
Itโs not something I think about a lot, because itโs pointless except in determining that I donโt know as much as I thought I did. Itโs just not possible for each of us to feel as much fear in person, because thereโs 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. Iโm getting a taste of my own medicine in terms of not being able to deal with othersโ 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 sheโs 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 itโs 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 donโt talk to anyone about that unless Iโm writing on my web site. I feel like people get enough of my problems if theyโre fans, so I wonโt talk about my issues unless people askโฆ.. or with Zac, Iโll just ramble around until he finds a point. ๐
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 Iโm 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 Iโm like โblock.โ
To be fair, I havenโt specifically started seeking out men or women. I just connect with people. However, I notice how Iโm being treated and overall, men treat me like Iโm little and cute. Boy, I will fuck you up. Respect me as such.
Itโs because men arenโt looking at me like Iโm half a husband, and it is their downfall. I will never be โthe little woman.โ I donโt 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, thatโs a lot of fun as I negotiate being a new person. Itโs why I feel like Iโm not good at dating. I go out and Iโm not focusing on them, but about how long itโs been since I had at least a goddamn Diet Coke. My body doesnโt feel right, and the one friend thatโs always been there for me has taken a back seatโฆ. 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 โthe Mozart effect,โ but Iโm not sure whether thatโs a ringing endorsement.
Music has a way of focusing me that other things donโt, and Iโm going to have to make a Supergrover playlist as well, because the music I needed to get rid of romantic feelings isnโt the music I need to feel calm. Iโll start with the color green. She reminds me of new life, new growth, new everything and the music should reflect it. Iโll have to go through my music apps, but it should start with something like โSheep May Safely Grazeโ yet not exactly that because Iโd 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 Iโm 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.
Thatโs 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 Iโm 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 doesnโt mean musicโs contribution isnโt there. Music is the invisible fourth wall providing structureโฆ. So thick you donโt even have to have a stud finder. Just decorate it up, itโll 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 didnโt 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, itโs a waltz. Tomorrow, itโs a march. Tuesday is experimental jazz odyssey.
I am living my life with the map on the table, knowing thereโs 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 concertโฆโฆ.for the โGET OUT THE MAPโ tourโฆโฆ.. ๐ ๐ ๐
The thing that stays with me from the first time I heard it until now is โIโm going to love you good and strong while our love is good and young.โ 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 thereโs never going to be a moment in my life that is bigger than โyou think Iโm smart? You? Really? Are you sure?โ
Put on blast
Things Are Going Well
I have come to a turning point in my healing. Itโs going to sound harsh, but I mean it in the best way. Iโve had enough clinical separation that now both my beautiful girl and her man are the characters theyโve 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 canโt say it any betterโฆโฆ. AND YET IโM NOT DONE TALKING. ๐
The only part thatโs sad is she chose this for herself, and I let her. It was time if we werenโt moving forward, and I am sure that she doesnโt see my point and she doesnโt see that I do see hers, and Iโm willing to accommodate it and I always have. Sheโs been holding out on me and saying thereโs nothing wrong. I donโt have to live with that, and I wonโt. There is a very good reason Iโm all in with her, itโs just too personal to tell the whole world, because it only belongs to the two of us. Even if itโs something weโve 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 didnโt 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 weโd actually need each other.
My mother is dead, and so are all three of my grandmothers. Itโs 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 guessesโฆ. And have to try to stuff down the automatic reaction that itโs 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. Itโs not, and it wonโt ever be. Itโs 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 wasnโt 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. Weโd 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 โthat sounds cool. I will totally come visit you.โ She danced around everything, his Ginger Rogers and my Fred Astaire (I couldnโt lead at gunpoint, so if she canโt, either, weโre 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 heโd be all โwake up, loser.โ But what I meant was being that person that I could look at with one glance and tell how Supergrover was maintaining. Sheโs a handful, and heโs capable. I would never put him before her- thatโs not what women friendship does. But donโt think I canโt tell how Lindsayโs doing just by looking at Matt.
Iโm betting they have about the same Starbucks tab as well, which Iโm sure is extraordinarily healthy for both of them.
Again, letting them be characters is like the show at the end of โDawsonโs Creek.โ OMFG. Iโm going to cry. Iโve 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 distanceโฆ.. 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, theyโre watching Dawsonโs Creek and telling me I got something right, but theyโll never admit it.
Itโs healing to be able to walk away while treating myself. I canโt treat myself with drugs, but I can certainly spend more than an hour a week on self-improvement. Pro Tip: Therapy doesnโt work without homework.
Hereโs the writing prompt that got me started on the whole healing journey in 2003.
My mother neverโฆโฆโฆโฆโฆ
I donโt remember the whole thing, and itโs gone now (I think). Itโs 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 didnโt 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 actualizeโฆ.. when you step into yourself.
She cooked her husband dinner every night and deferred to all his opinions, which werenโt 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 Mendezโฆ.. and she was geeked out over me, and who doesnโt like people who think theyโre 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 doesnโt have somewhere to go with their feelings, they resent all the people they care for who arenโt stepping up. Thatโs because I have been so reticent to express any needs at all that if you wanted to help me, you couldnโt.
So, for the first time in my life, I reached out to someone for help. It was the most embarrassing thing Iโd ever done, because I reached out to someone who said โwhy do you expect everyone to fix you?โ What I should have said is that I spend most nights thinking about your issues, whereโs your five minutes for mine if I donโt make you pay attention for 300 seconds in a row?โ
What I actually said wasโฆโฆ.. nothing.
It was the right move and it helped me, but it didnโt 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. Itโs sweeping it under the rug and pretending it didnโt happen. Forgiveness is saying youโre wrong, saying yourโre sorry, and letting scar tissue heal over.
We had a remission/forgiveness debate and she lost, because remission wasnโt acceptable. She wasnโt growing with me, she was fighting me. I was regressing. Like I said, mutually assured destruction because sheโd pop off with the same tired crap and Iโd 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. Itโs not because sheโs a bad person. I just should have realized that if there was going to be a pattern change, it was on her, because Iโd 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 Iโd been deep diving into something, she wouldnโt say I had a point there, either.
Thatโs because if I bring up the past, sheโll say thereโs nothing she can do about it. Sheโll say sheโs not a perfect person, but she wonโt say โIโm sorry.โ Thereโs no acknowledgement that talking is a good thing.
If she really wanted to put the fear of God in me, she would have texted โwe need to talk.โ
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, โmany women before you have taught me to be wary when they say โitโs just interesting.โ ๐ When I made her laugh all my feelings spilled out. She just does that to me. If she gets tickled, Iโm 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 Iโve got it, but concentration is key.
If you know that reference, you are REALLY an OG. All I have to say to that is โwell, I guess I owe her a report, too. My graph will just ride on more metrics.โ
One of the things that we talked about thatโs really stuck with me is the idea of the complicated construct. We are both forceful when we need to be, Southern when we donโt. Neither of us see gender in us as much as we see gender on us, because again, sheโs been a boss for a long time. Her patois reads male, her voiceโฆโฆ musicโฆ. and I donโt think sheโd phrase it that way, but Iโm the reader. If I were to challenge her as a writer, Iโd ask her to write a love letter to a person, place, or thing. I donโt think people ask her to do that very often, and itโs counter to her nature.
If turnabout was fair play, it would be a task list with two things on it.
WHY GOD, WHY?
Iโm 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 theyโre based on real people, theyโre not exact because they canโt be.
โYou 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 donโt know, either.โ
If thereโs any anger that will stay, itโs that the line above didnโt do a damn thing to change our dynamic, so I knew it ultimately wouldnโt.
I suppose Iโm rattling on because itโs twofold. Sheโs not listening, so I need to hear me. Also, these entries wonโt mean anything in a few months. Then, itโll be another ten years and Iโll be sobbing in reminiscence.
Because things are going well.
Put on blast
Me, Myself, and I
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.
Put on blast
This is a Family Show
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. ๐
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 troubleย 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. ๐
(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. ๐
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?” ๐
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. ๐
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).
Put on blast
Needs Work, tbh
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 itโs not pretty when it goes off. I am constantly learning to manage it, because I didnโt 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. Itโs 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 elseโs belief system.
Itโs 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. โIโm averting my eyes!โ โWell, stop it.โ Iโve worked for years trying to shut down โThe Committee,โ the tapes in my head that provide my inner monologue. It hits different when youโre trying to shut down your external monologue that is also, in fact, your internal monologue.
The best part of a virtual relationship is that itโs all still here. We donโt have to create new memories. Iโve saved them all up. When I need her, Iโve got her just as much as I ever did. Thatโs 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 sheโs 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 itโs possible to drive me up the wall without dulling my curiosity or want to be near you.
Iโve always thought of myself as a Merlin-type character. Iโm not so much into fantasy, but my favorite character when I was a kid was Merlin from โSword in the Stone,โ 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 worldโs biggest baseball fan when sheโs at bat.
Iโm fairly certain that if you could call it a sport, she could letter in it.
Iโm absolutely certain that if you could call it a sport, I couldnโt.
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 didnโt. Our perspectives are completely different. Sheโs been a boss for a long time. Itโs fun busting her balls because I can tell sheโs 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 sheโd always see my attempts at humor as negative, because Iโd hurt her. I have never avoided accountability. She has avoided talking about how we could make things better so that I donโt 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 wouldnโt have noticed.
It didnโt start out that way. How it started is not how itโs 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 Iโd known then what I know now. I thought she was reaching out to get closer, and now I donโt 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 canโt be as real and solid as it is. What I love about that is she doesnโt know how stable we are, but I do. I donโt 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. Iโll regret it for the rest of my life, because it betrayed who I really am.
Iโm 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. Thatโs because the love didnโt center around who she was entirely, but the two of us because I liked who she helped me to be. Iโm stronger than I was. Iโd 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.
Stories That Are All True 