It’s More Simple Than You Think

July 3, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What makes a teacher great?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was more simple than I thought.

…because I had to.

July 2, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

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

I am looking at my character.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s the thing about Lone Star, Texas.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I did it because I had to.

I’m Not Sure

July 2, 2023July 2, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Have you ever had surgery? What for?

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

With the benefit of time, I doubt it.

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

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

It Is Now Safe to Turn Off Your Computer.

No lol

June 30, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ablutions

June 28, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday was an Evangelical baptism in fuck it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The play is the thing.

Spirituality and Religion Are Not the Same

June 27, 2023June 27, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

How important is spirituality in your life?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Poorly

June 26, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

How do you practice self-care?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Figuring it Out

June 25, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

How do you waste the most time every day?

I waste a lot of time giving energy to problems I don’t have. For instance, I can’t just wall off my feelings about said Internet friend, so I’ve spent way too much time asking the universe to make her go away so that I don’t constantly give her rent in my head. She has a palace, and I want only a desk with a drawer that locks.

How do you get rid of a muse that has lived inside you for ten years, knowing that you’ll own a piece of them forever? How do I sort out how I feel about that? She’s not “just under my skin” anymore. She lives in my ink, bottles with many colors. Most of the time, she’s a spectrum. I see her as purple and orange, a taster in grape or citrus in which sweet and sour are inextricably interrelated. I cannot enjoy her without acknowledging it wasn’t all healthy. I’m also not saying that was ever her fault. It just is.

I feel like friends who hold you accountable love you more than the ones who just stuff things down, because they don’t care when they see you stagnating. There is worth in someone seeing you exactly for who and what you are. There is value in someone seeing all the good and bad inside you and deciding that you’re infinitely worth it no matter what lies ahead. There is a danger in love being so infinite and wild.

I think I can say it was the same way for both of us, because platonic love can go equally haywire. Every person alive knows how hard it is to make good friends, and I have read too many stories of women who are miserable because their husbands are so emotionally unavailable that their friends provide what their husbands lack. This is unsurprising to me when I look at my parents’ and grandparents’ generation. But thinking I can say it is different than knowing whether it’s actually true.

She said that I was part of her wild and crazy brain. My feelings ran just as wild, which felt like she was part of my wild and crazy soul. She’s a thinker, I’m a feeler. We are yin and yang, feeding each other when it was right. It just wasn’t the majority of the time because neither one of us ever really knew where the other was coming from. She never asked any questions, and never gave me any answers to mine.

Today, I have allowed myself the luxury of getting so angry my hair nearly caught fire. What is WRONG with me? How did I put up with that shit for so incredibly long? Why was she even interested in me in the first place? There are two answers to that question, only one of them good….. a question as important as “when silence falls, the question will be asked.”

Doctor WHO?

Everything I knew her to be blossomed and flowered and I fell headlong into the perfect trap, one I set up and decorated.

She won’t get this, but you will. I was willing to be Rory the Roman. Being him is what destroyed me, even though our relationship was The Doctor/Companion rather than The Doctor/River Song. Tell me that if Amy could have, she wouldn’t have stayed with The Doctor forever. I mean, you could, I just wouldn’t believe it. Even when they stopped traveling together, The Doctor still turned up at their house once in a while. I just don’t see that kind of break happening. And of course, now her husband (to me) is Rory and I’m little Amelia Pond……. still sitting on that fucking suitcase a decade later because she thought she’d done something that hurt me, and she did. It’s just not what she thinks it is, and she never will. That’s because she thinks my problem is with who she is, and it’s not. It’s over an action, one that is long forgiven and forgotten except when she accidentally triggered me and brought it all back, then accused me of being a little shit trying to provoke her.

I called her out on all of it, and she told me to go find new friends if I was so unhappy. I want her to choke on those words, realize she threw me away as if I was dog shit, but she won’t. She won’t even apologize for small things, why the hell should I expect better when the problem is large? That’s not her deal. That’s mine. I put up with it because I thought I deserved it. In part, I did, which is what made things so problematic. My rejection sensitivity dysphoria allowed me to accept that even after some years, I was still a piece of shit. Nothing was ever going to change and I ignored it because I wanted her in my life so bad I couldn’t see anything else. My rose colored glasses shattered, and the fragments are floating through time and space as I put together all the ways in which those lenses stopped me from seeing I was setting myself up for a lifetime of pain.

Young Amy is why I call her my Raggedy Doctor, when I should have called her Guffman and moved on. That didn’t stop me from wasting time on choreography.

I feel so stupid, and that anger that’s been buried inside me and struggling to get out is finally releasing from its mold…. a two inch pour that went REALLY badly. There’s epoxy dripping all over the floor, and I forgot to spray with mold release, so I also have a ruined mold……… and then that illustration becomes even more apt. She changed me in ways that are too unique to even write about, they’re so personal. The mold broke on her, and I could have had her for a lifetime in my gaggle of friends if I’d only been more patient and not said anything about the things she did that hurt me. Being more patient is valid. Wanting to keep a relationship even though it’s hurting you is not.

Until now, I have thought that the hurt was all my doing, and then I realized that eight years was probably enough to get over something. If she wants to hold a grudge and not let me in anymore because I’m such a terrible person, she has every right. I just thought she had more integrity than to hold something over someone’s head for their entire lives when she fucking told me she would do it. She told me she’d never let me in ever again and as time went on and she loosened up a little bit, I thought she’d said that in anger.

Nope.

She’s not responsible. I am deaf.

I’ve wasted a lot of time because there’s nothing wrong with my ears.

I’m Getting Older

June 20, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What’s your favorite thing about yourself?

Things have changed so much for me this year, and I’m reeling from it. I’m not sure that I meant to change this much this fast, but in retrospect things worked out. I’m not constantly worried that I’m a judgmental dickhead. I’m not constantly thinking of myself as less important than everyone else, and I’m finding out that not having interests as a child- in terms of fitting into society- I adopted a whole bunch of behavior patterns that I don’t like. I fell for everything because I didn’t stand up for anything.

I’m just a writer. I don’t know shit about shit.

The older I get, the more that lesson internalizes. What is different is that I am not constantly making up scenarios and conversations in my head to produce the least offensive outcome because I am a shell of a person. I was abused emotionally from the time I was 13. I absolutely lost everything I was interested in, favoring her interests. I think I carried around an opera dictionary for six weeks or something.

I feel like I learned how to be myself in a sandbox, that I was beta testing all kinds of things… and let’s be clear. Some of that software isn’t even out of alpha release. Keep checking GitHub. Good luck.

So, that’s what the Internet relationship was good for, if nothing else. I’m not a lead the charge into hell sort of person. But I knew someone who was. It felt like an ace up my sleeve, and it was.

And that’s why it hurts so much. I’m not disappointed that I never got to call her boo, I’m disappointed that our friendship had such promise.

You cannot imagine how long I just sat in silence, figuring this thing out. Or trying to, anyway. There was just no way to separate what I’d done from my level of trustworthiness, so I’ve known I’m a piece of shit for years. Intimately.

So, it lit me up inside that things started looking up. And then realized the swings were only going to get worse. If she’s not forthcoming, I’m not pushing. If e-mails are too big a deal, let me go.

Let me give all that love to someone else… not in a mean way, just that I hurt that I’ll never be able to make something right. I spent too long dwelling on how to fix a problem without realizing how much it was robbing me of any self respect. As I got older, I didn’t want to sit in it anymore. I didn’t want to cry any more than I already had. I didn’t want to wake up at 55 and see that I’d just kept at it.

So, I asked her what she wanted and where she was going.

Last time there was a huge break, I’d send her e-mails and get a few in return. It took a mountain of work to get where we are today, and I thought that we were in it for the long haul in a “sure, I can water the plants” kind of way. I don’t think I would have been wrong if I’d just kept my mouth shut, a running theme in this relationship for evil and for awesome.

My attention is starting to turn and it is a welcome relief after ten years of not being able to shake Gmail’s hand.

But it’s not all that. As I told her, “you’re in my head, Malkovich.” I do not know how to get rid of things I’ve thought about ad nauseam for ten years. I am making progress, but I’m not there yet. I feel like part of this is just delayed. That this is the conversation I should have been having with myself eight years ago instead of now. Except that some really good things have come in the last few years. I don’t even fucking know anymore, and that’s the saddest part.

Pretty much everything can be summed up by “I don’t even know anymore.” The difference is that I care a lot less in terms of what it’s going to take to keep me going and how other people are going to feel. I have to go hardline Lamott here. My story is mine. I’m not seeing what I want to read, so I’m creating it.

I loved loving a writer, because she could think as fast as me.

I’m remembering what she used to say about my writing, and letting myself fall apart for a minute. Just sit in it and let it hurt. It’ll go away.

My mother dying taught me this. That if I could just sit in the discomforts and not shut it away, I’d be better off because with tension comes release.

I keep seeing her in my mind and thinking, “do it, anyway.”

If I thought I could really help her, do it anyway. But make her come to you. Maybe reading my words will help, and that is the only thing I can hope for. I doubt anything will ever happen between us again and feel that our story is over. But I know I can help her just by being me. That if she wants, she has a wealth of information on what I was really saying- the answers to questions she might have, without any real desire to know whether she reads. I told her I didn’t want to know, and for now, I mean it.

She is a memory. I want to look at our entire relationship and decide what it should have taught me the first time around that it just didn’t. Mostly I learned that I talk too much, that I’m too much. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, just that most people aren’t ready for what I can do, and that part can fry people’s hair.

It’s not because I’m so much smarter than everyone else. It’s that most people don’t think like I do, and it’s difficult for them to relate. No one knows anyone like me. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve come off as absolutely brilliant for a little while.

My beautiful girl knows she’s brilliant for a lifetime, and she’s told me I am, too. That’s enough. I am sitting in the concept of enough. What I thought it was. What it should be. How my idealist bullshit caught up to me by creating wishes with no foundation. It’s all a lot, and not a damn thing has to do with parsing out anything she did except to point out what I didn’t know for a decade.

It’s paying to look at all the things I could have given attention, I just didn’t. It’s filling me up where I’m empty, letting me have back the parts of me that were hers…. Because after ten years, I know for damn sure that there’s a lot of her that’s in me. The best part about having an Internet relationship is that the joke you made this morning will be huge this afternoon and no one’s heard it.

Today my big laugh was Bryn being stuck behind a horse trailer and several cars going 25 miles per hour going down the back side of Mt. Chehalem and I started laughing so hard I couldn’t breathe. “Bryn…… Bryn…. I can’t believe you’re stuck in a hay pride parade.“

I couldn’t believe I’d made a joke that I didn’t have to rip off.

I lost a lot of myself, but I’ve regained it.

The blessing is that it is a lot of gray area. Nebulous whitespace that’s primed and ready for paint. Feeling like I’m making room for new things feels exciting, because if I’m going to end a relationship because I think it’s not working, then what will? I have ideas, but it’s about connecting with people who share them. I want to meet someone who’s excited to meet me.

I’ve missed that feeling for a little too long.

Failures Past and Present

June 19, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Today I’m in the process of letting myself off the hook for “making” my closest ally feel bad by “bringing up bad feelings about the past.” Here’s what she missed.

I was devastated when she married her husband and I told her that, including why. That it wasn’t because she’d said yes to him and not me. I’m not wired that way. It was because someone I thought of as dear to me didn’t even tell me when her name changed. But it was water under the bridge and trying to tell her an important part of my process… including the fact that when I saw her husband through her eyes, it made my soul relax. She had someone to lean on in such a concrete way and it made me so happy rather than wondering if she was okay and not really feeling as if I could ask that question. I wasn’t focused on anything but wanting to know why she’d chosen to keep the information from me so I could stop thinking about it. I feel like I’d talk about an issue, she’d see me as trying to intentionally point out every flaw and failure she ever had, and I’d walk off like a kicked dog.

I was trying to tell her how much things had changed, that my perspective had grown as I did. That having a 50 foot view made me see how our patterns fit together and how far we’d come over time. I was trying to tell her how much I loved her and she thought I was trying to make her feel bad. I thought it would mean a lot to her to hear that her light erasing my dark wasn’t dependent on whether she changed her sexual orientation. I don’t have that much power, and wouldn’t use it if I did.

When I was telling her that she could lean on me, she took it as psychoanalysis, which to be fair it was. But it wasn’t pointing out flaws and failures, and I didn’t write the letter like that. I wrote it with as much empathy as I could muster, saying that I knew she’d been through a lot and I wanted to help. What does anyone who’s ever loved you want more for you than having less pain? I knew that I could help her have less pain by taking it on and hurting for her, breathing through it with her so that we both smiled on the exhale. I wish I had been able to express it in a way that she could hear it, because she is perfect in all her flaws and failures. Just perfect. I feel the way about her that people feel about babies… that no matter what their lives will hold, you know you’d die to protect them. There’s a place in all of us that is that vulnerable, the one that feels defenseless, and I gave her mine.

She just took away my piece of her. Let’s be clear, though. It was my fault entirely. She doesn’t do shit for no reason, but that doesn’t mean I’m not entitled to emotions about it.

I think she thinks I don’t know why she yanked my credentials…. That the victim part is in thinking I’ve never done anything wrong. Just because I don’t say I know I’m responsible doesn’t mean that I don’t know it. I’ve said it in as many ways as I possibly could, but that doesn’t mean she heard it. But the thing is, I sound like a victim because I’m only talking about my problem with you because I’m not reading your mind and looking for your problem with me. I can take a guess, but it will come across as psychoanalysis, or so I’ve been told. 😉

I show my empathy by telling people what I think of what they’re going through, and write with such care and attention most of the time. Sure, I have e-mails that just say “thanks,” but that’s not the majority. It happens more frequently now, because I’m scared of starting friendship that doesn’t have an anchor.

I’m processing all this to let go of the past, certainly, but also to understand what I didn’t want for next time. The only way I can do that is to understand what happened so I don’t do it again. If I make a mistake, the pendulum swings to the other extreme so that I don’t have another appearance of the same mistake.

It’s not about her anymore. It’s about knowing what to do if anything like this happens again. I don’t want to lean into the surreal. I want to touch you at least once in our friendship, even if it’s just you accidentally stepping on my heel. I need to prove that you are a solid mass as opposed to my conscience. 😉

It’s hard for people to accept that when they do something wrong, it doesn’t mean I’m taking love away. I’m not rejecting them. I’m trying to grow with them and not against them. If my beautiful girl is impressed by my enormous changes, it would stand to reason that we’d be better friends now than we were, because those impressive changes would have happened together. I am not offended that she feels goaded and provoked because I know by now that she sees my concerns as bombs because she’s not that deep. It’s not that she can’t. It’s that there’s a lot of “don’t want to” in “cain’t.” I know this because she’s done it.

I’m tired of working out all our problems and it only changing me.

And if that seems harsh, so be it. I can’t think of anything I’ve said about her in recent memory that she hasn’t taken as something I said to intentionally hurt her without ever looking at the ways I was asking her to take care of me, and asking her what she needed to feel loved as well. Therefore, when she said that e-mails making her feel bad were becoming the norm rather than the exception, I had no idea what she was talking about and she wouldn’t elaborate. If I don’t know what hurts, I can’t stop doing it.

We also have issues in both being fixer/pleasers, butt hurt when we’re actively trying to fix and the other isn’t receptive… not out of malice, but idiocy. I was dialed into my emotions, she was cut off. It wasn’t personal all the way around. She’s like that all the time, and so am I. But conflict with each other didn’t help. I keep asking myself why I required that of her, and let myself off the hook when I realized that it wasn’t me being demanding, it was me realizing that I couldn’t hold back my emotions. I couldn’t wall her off. I walked around in her inner landscape more than I should have, because she gave me a lot to think about that was interesting, and I gravitated toward interesting.

It made my asshole chew crackers when she said she’d marry Brene Brown (I would, too. That’s not the point. 😛 ). I can say that to you. It didn’t help hearing that Hannah Waddingham is hot as shit, either. That’s because me saying I felt the same way about her wigged her out, and she told me that, too. So, sexuality is nonbinary when there’s not a chance in hell it’s real. I am glad that she never in a million years said she’d marry me, even in jest. She definitely didn’t do it when she knew it was my landmine, but I mean early on, when neither of us could ever have done anything wrong. That’s because I would have hurt about it long after I died.

I just don’t feel let down. I don’t feel disappointed that I just wasn’t it for her. I feel like she has the right to be completely who she is, and to wish I could change her is the height of entitlement. I hate those people. What I did wish for is integration, and not necessarily physically, as in a cup of coffee together. Just that sense of integrating our ideas so that we were both up to speed on what the other thought.

I didn’t like being thought of as an asshole, and I didn’t like that she wouldn’t tell me why. I can’t hear that I’m making you feel bad when I’ve just sent you an e-mail saying that we’re both miracles and perfect, not together (but I can see it), but in all the things that we bring to the world.

I just have no idea what she was talking about, because I can have empathy for the way you feel and also no idea how to fix your problem with me if you don’t give me a little more detail. What did I say that made you feel bad, because I am not going to go through every line and have my stomach hurt trying to read your mind.

I also didn’t think it was fair that I looked at every feeling she had about me, seeing her as a spectrum, not a binary. She had me pegged as a dickhead unless I called her out and then I was very impressive for a few minutes.

It would always go back, though, because she hated being judged and couldn’t wrap her brain around the fact that I’m not judgmental about people. I’m judgmental about situations, but not in a way that’s trying to hurt people. I mean like an ACTUAL judge. Someone who listens to all of the facts and collates what they think and feel. Judgment is a way of making decisions. How do you differentiate between signal and noise? Some people perceive, some people judge. One is not more or less than the other, they’re different.

I judge people and situations to be perfect all the time. My judgment not only sees problems and analyzes them, it also makes me an incredible gift giver because since I’ve actually spent time muddling through our issues, I remember more of what you say and little things stick. Your favorite charities. Your job. Your interests. Your teams. Just anything that will tell you that when you get a gift from me, I’ve been paying attention. For instance, if your job requires that you be absolutely wired at all times, I’ll send you SBUX to maximize where you can spend the money. If it is Galentine’s Day, I will make you waffles, or send you a gift certificate to buy them. If I find out you’ve been a fan of Arsenal since you were a kid, I’ll kit you out over the next five years.

It’s a little bit like Sherlock Holmes deducing information, because through logic, he has a more complete data set than people think he does. I have a similar example to Holmes knowing Watson fought in Afghanistan. Not that extreme, of course. It’s just that I’ve picked up things over the years because I’m reading everything she’s not saying as well. This isn’t it, but a universal example would be someone being lactose intolerant because they’ve never said that, yet when you ask them what they want from a coffee shop, it’s always vegan.

The heuristic is that it’s more likely that someone is lactose intolerant than they just don’t like milk if they’ve never indicated they eat vegan food.

But I don’t tell her any of that crap to make her feel bad. I tell her that stuff because what I think is going to make her feel noticed and appreciated makes her feel terrible. If I can’t fix that, I need to move on, because it hurts too much to hurt her.

I let her go because I loved her, not because I was being a toddler.

If I’m the only one that makes her feel bad, my reactions don’t feel amazing, either. I’m just willing to tell you why so that more information means less conflict. Or it should, anyway.

Besides, fuck marrying Brene, because obviously if she hadn’t learned Microsoft Word from me, she wouldn’t be Brene Brown. I am directly responsible for all of her success and I won’t believe anything else. 😛

The Commute

June 16, 2023June 16, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What notable things happened today?

Bryn sometimes calls me on her way to work, which gives us about 15 minutes to talk (note to Bryn- let’s do this more). Today the notable news is that we’re both obsessed with Starbucks food. The coffee I can take or leave, but no one else has egg bites and Impossible sandwiches. Eggs and cheese are cheating on my vegan diet, but I only eat mostly plants, anyway. I’m living Michael Pollan’s advice…. “Eat food. Not a lot. Mostly plants.” I was also telling her that I liked Starbucks getting Trente cups because I’m a sucker for their iced tea. Just shut up and take my money. My favorite flavor is green because it’s a bit minty, but their black tea makes me smell numbers at that quantity. I get a breve, which is black iced tea, no extra water, Splenda, and soy or oat milk. It sounds weird, but you wouldn’t think so if it was a Thai restaurant, now would you? I think the’ve caught on to my idea, because now they’re selling iced London Fog lattes (Earl Grey and vanilla syrup).

We’re also working on bringing joy into our lives. That we are responsible for our own suffering because of our rejection sensitivity, but it’s something we can improve about ourselves by relating to each other. When I look at Bryn, my heart floods with gratitude. She’s the face I look to for love, because I can. She is also safe in loving me, because she’s getting me the me that has already made so many mistakes that I’m not so closed off to her because I see how that isolation affects her. I don’t want to make her think I’m doing anything that’s pushing her away, because when I feel sad, it’s not about her. I can’t ignore her needs, and sometimes they’re more important than mine….. like not encouraging her to believe that I’m being distant because of something she did. That’s more important to me than taking care of myself, because if I don’t make it more important than I will isolate based on what I’m going through when the situation isn’t even that bad….. I just think it is.

The story we’re telling ourselves is often skewed, because we’re so unkind to ourselves. We disconnect quickly out of embarrassment or self preservation, because it hurts to think about the ways we’re responsible for contributing to another’s behavior, or giving someone else negative consequences….. true whether you meant to or not.

We disconnect quickly because we’re so digitally oriented. Think back over the last 10 years. Are you quicker to anger because of the wall of separation between you and another person? That even though this person is close to you in real life, you have a desperate need to fight with people on the Internet, leading the charge into hell and forgetting that you are creating some awkward cocktail parties…….. because being right over whatever it is has become more important than empathy.

I don’t think this happened in any organized way. It is the nature of becoming digital. Too many relationships go up and down because of Facebook and Twitter, because everyone can see how you interact with everyone else. You’re not only taking into account how people treat you, but how you observe them treating everyone else. I don’t care if you have me a kidney 20 years ago. I will not let you get away with saying watching two men kiss gives you nausea….. and that’s why you’ll never go to a gay wedding.

Someone from my high school actually said that to me. He apologized and I’ve moved on permanently. I got an apology, but I want no future contact.

It’s the same kind of bullying I endured in high school, and it’s just noise. It’s chatter designed to make me feel awful about myself. Imagine being so certain that God is telling you that you need to tell queer people they’re going to hell. Imagine that message being preached to a church that has 40,000 members. Imagine that message going to all churches that have 40,000 members. Then imagine going to high school 15 minutes away from that church so its bitchy little mean girls all go there. I can’t think of anything more psychotic than getting into a performing arts high school and being homophobic….. especially if you were in theater. Even the straight kids are queer.

Probably because actors have to be two-spirited anyway. It’s the full range of human emotion.

I think it’s notable how fast I’m putting together what has happened to me over my life and how it is affecting me now. Being gay in Texas is a rough gig, and it always has been. I am not oppressed. WE are oppressed. We did not create the system that hates us, and we can’t really do anything about it due to the 80/20 rule…. That 20 percent of the population has to convince the 80% they’re right.

………over things that shouldn’t be legislated.

Thomas Jefferson is rolling over in his grave, because his ideas of conservativism was that the highest government in the land would be the equivalent of a school board. Just as little legislation as possible. He would be incensed that conservatives were trying to parent the whole nation. You don’t get individual freedoms if it’s perfectly acceptable to treat you as if your entire personality is a sin.

Sometimes I wish that the US had lost the Revolutionary war because the Commonwealth countries are so much more progressive than we are. I would deal with Boris Johnson a lot better than I’d deal with Ron DeSantis (I’m assuming he’ll be the nominee because more people are being convinced he’s an actual criminal every day. Hiding classified documents near water? Obviously he’s a genius….. we knew that when he looked directly at the sun during an eclipse. Don’t get me wrong. Hiding documents in your house is always wrong. But putting them near toilets and sinks is a special kind of stupid.

I also think it’s great he lost the E. Jean Carroll case, because that judicial standard says that it is more likely he’s guilty than not. This is different than a criminal trial, because “beyond a reasonable doubt” is a higher standard than a “preponderance of evidence.” The best example I can give of this is FBI and CIA. FBI collects data that has to stand up to scrutiny in a courtroom. CIA has no law enforcement capability. They collect data and return it to Congress and the president. Therefore, their information only has to be analyzed in percentage of sureties on outcomes. To me, that is the difference between judicial standards in American courts as well, because nothing in intelligence is beyond a reasonable doubt. Those issues change like a CNN stock ticker.

It’s too quiet in here. I put on the soundtrack to Argo The theme in the bass is about to drop, and that’s the best feeling I get with my headphones. The bass of the strings….. omg…. Fabulous. Although my favorite track is “Hotel Messages.” Hard to describe, just listen to it. I’ve been trying to learn the whispered rhythm for years.

Second favorite is The Mission, but Hotel Messages is all you get because I want you to actually watch the movie. 😛

I know the score intimately because I had to memorize it to get it out of the way while I’m writing. I don’t want to think about walking bass, suspended chords, etc. I had to do all that stuff independently, otherwise you’d just get an entry full of bad music theory with my third grade education on the subject. No open fourths. Rules are made to be broken. That’s kind of my limit.

I love movies about intelligence set in the Middle East, because that kind of music fills me up. The melodies are haunting because they’re not using a Western sense of chord structure. It’s also different hearing Middle Eastern music with a full orchestral arrangement vs. a couple of people.

Argo was all written by a composer named Alexandre Desplait, and he’s done a lot of movie scores…. But all middle eastern spy movies have that vibe. The music in Syriana, Beirut, Three Kings, etc. is just so complex. Speaking of which, there’s a great documentary on Amazon Prime called “The Sounds of Bond” or something like that, and it’s incredible. I like Bond music, too, but it is secondary to my love of strings moving to the notes you don’t expect.

The one thing you get with American music that’s not so prevalent in the East is a good Picardy Third. It’s the term for when a piece is written entirely in a minor key, but switches to major for the final chord of a line or piece. “Coventry Carol” is a great example of this.

Comparing Hotel Messages to Coventry Carol and the difference between how scales are used is apparent.

So, just another reason to love intelligence. The soundtrack to their lives is better than everyone else’s.

Notable.

However You Are Now, You’re Good

June 14, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I have realized a problem with my introversion that needs addressing right away. I cannot tell you the number of times my friends have read something I’ve written and instead of asking me about it, talk amongst themselves and try to decipher what they’re reading on their own. People freak out about my life choices as if I’m just crazy, and not capable of thinking for myself. Then, we meet up in person, and they say “now that I’ve talked to you in person, I feel so much better. You seem more solid than you’ve ever been.” The time they’re wasting talking to themselves is hard on me, because I know that any confusion could be cleared up nearly immediately.

You cannot read me and think you know me. That’s because my mind is a computer working on several cores at once, and I can only write one line at a time. Tapes of my issues run in my head all day long, so I have an iron grip on them in terms of understanding where I am and where I’m going. I don’t think about anything else, because it informs future decisions over which I have control; my side of the equation needs to get shit done because it’s not on anyone else to create the life I want.

I feel like people talking about me is the exact same thing I do, just verbal processing instead of written. Plus, I have heard that I am interesting, so that probably plays into it, too. Regardless of what you think, you will never know me from this web site, and few of you will ever meet the real me, and not because I wouldn’t want to show it. It’s my own limitations on that one, both the fact that I feel fear and some of the things I deal with did not originate with me, thus the story isn’t all mine to tell. It’s not about being able to blame someone else. No, it’s much deeper than that. I need to understand myself to understand you, and vice versa.

The trick in relationships is to talk about behavior in such a way that the other person can hear “this has been happening more than once, and it’s having bad effects, so we need to change it.” So many people don’t like having things “thrown back in their faces,” and I agree with that. I need to be careful with my words to get my point across, because I do not mean in any way that anyone is a bad person. I mean there’s a difference between a pattern and a one-off. I’m going to notice if we have the same fight six times and wonder why you didn’t.

That’s why I’m so crazy about Daniel, even still. Our minds both work like that, the difference is that my infinite rumination centers around feelings and his centers on thoughts. We are the yin and yang of the Idealist world. Neither of us would ever get away with anything, which is why we’re not together now. We’re both too hot to handle, but I didn’t make a mistake in still loving him a hundred and crazy percent….. both in that he’s been my friend since we were seven and that he called off our engagement and I’m still sort of dazed.

It was the first time in my life where I could look at myself and say “it’s going to be okay.” I couldn’t think of anything better than me being bipolar and having an alcoholic spouse because those two things present so similarly that it’s a chicken and egg situation a lot of the time. Many, many alcoholics get bipolar when they stop drinking due to the loss of all that dopamine…….. the flip side being that bipolar people drink to self medicate, so who knows what came first?

Having that person we could each confide in was everything, because I am so emotionally driven… to the point where I wondered if Daniel would hear that my grandfather had died and just show up. He didn’t, but that’s not the point. The point is that it’s interesting I’ve never pined for a man like this as an adult. I could see marrying Ryan when I was a kid, but our relationship was over before it began in that respect. I don’t think we should have been the middle school sweethearts that stayed together through everything, but I do think that if we had been married as adults we would have had a blast. God, the Subaru jokes *alone.* (He would absolutely tease me about being queer and not owning one, but the ‘Baru jokes go back to 1992).

I feel all these new and emerging emotions because sex is sex and identity is identity and never the twain shall meet. I never thought I had much o a straight side, and I still don’t. But there’s a difference between finding the person that you want and finding the person that you need.

In that case, gender just ceased to matter.

But going through all of that made other people think I was off my rocker, then they’d talk to me in person and see that I was actually pretty level-headed about all of it. I knew what the limitations of people so alike and different would be, and how rehab could make everything go to hell in a handbasket, and it was still worth it.

However, I’m not exactly waiting, either. I’m still angry about his Fox News approach to critical race theory which feeds into queer theory which feeds into trans theory. That’s a lot of bullshit to wrestle to the ground, and I know that because I’ve done it. You have to let go of things you’ve known to be true your whole life, and even if you know it, it’s hard to do it…. to reach out for more knowledge because it’s “shameful” to admit you don’t know something. It’s hard to put that knowledge into practice. I still mess up people’s pronouns all the time, but have learned to just accept it and move on because I get misgendered all the time. I don’t have the energy to hear your extended apology that goes through your history with trans people.

So, I am “running the numbers” on whether it’s worth it to try and fail, because I don’t know the percentage on success in terms of Daniel, Cora, and me trying to gel as a family while Daniel is constantly stepping on trauma buttons installed by someone else. He’s not responsible, but when you know better, you do better. Or that’s how it’s supposed to work. He thinks of it as “the girls are ganging up on me.” I’m sure he’s still angry that I am part of the woke mob trying to reprogram him, a minority he resents. I’m not sure that’s teachable in a timeline that Cora and I could be comfortable.

I have said that I will not seriously start looking again for a partner until January, because I’m a firm believer that all the brain fog from the alcohol has to clear before Daniel is capable of major decisions. I’m not going to contact him, I’m just going to wait it out. If I don’t hear from him, I have my answer. I have no need to take on a project like educating someone who knows nothing about being queer or trans if they’re going to give me ad hominem attacks every step of the way.

I don’t ever want to be in a relationship with a white person ever again that can’t say they’re a racist. Full stop. All white people are racist. It’s baked into the fabric of our country and to ignore it is the height of privilege. I’ve never had privilege except with skin color, because being queer, female, disabled, genderqueer and bipolar has not won me any brownie points. So, perhaps I see it more clearly because that’s the only time it ever happens. You can look no further than a traffic stop or jumping the turnstile at the Metro (never done it, just saying).

But the point is that I think so deeply about anything and everything that rarely is a blog entry enough to contain what’s going on with me. Something that doesn’t add up on paper makes sense in a relaxed environment.

Something I said to my sister has stuck with me because it’s so incredibly true. I said that my depression is so profound that sometimes when people see a large amount of change from me all at once, I’ve been mulling things over for months and praying for hypomania just so I have the energy to execute an operation. People underestimate me and my decision making capabilities because they’re far away. It’s one thing to hear something over the telephone and another to be apprised of the situation at every waking moment. You haven’t seen my process to appreciate what I’m thinking and the process by which I do it. It’s foreign to most people because they’re not my personality type or my combination of meds. 😛

The title comes from something a friend said…. I was complaining about trying to find the right medication because I think I’m getting tachyphylaxis (the idea that a medication gets less effective over time, and I’ve been on Lamictal since college). She said, “however you are now, you’re good.” I’m not, but I liked the vote of confidence. And again, what I am learning is that everyone says that when they sit down with me in person.

It gets a lot easier for me when other people reach out, because I’m so anxious about feeling wanted. I’ve had enough of not knowing. However, I can control that feeling of being unwanted to a degree, because it’s a huge symptom of depression. There are so few things I can point to and say “that’s a symptom.” Most of the time, I just feel bad in a nebulous, under the weather kind of way…. but I’m not Eeyore, either. I’m very funny in person, but choose to keep to myself so that I can be a jackass on my own time.

In dreaming about my future, I want to be able to say to my future partner (whether it’s The War Daniel or anyone else), it’s that “however I am now, I’m good.”

If you know me at all right now, you know Kristen Chenoweth is playing in my head. I remember going to see Wicked in Portland, and I think Bryn was with me. I’ll have to check with her when we talk later, because it’s early AM in Oregon. If she saw the notification, she’d get back to me and go back to sleep. I know enough to know that she’s barely moving right now, so maybe text her later. 😛

I’m writing about “Popular” because I noticed that “No Fish on Mondays” is rocketing up to the top of my leaderboard in terms of hits, an ego boost because I never thought I’d write anything more popular than my marriage article, and now there are two entries beating it…. although I would like to think that “The Art of War” is educational. Don’t say anything even remotely threatening in a Facebook post, because they will can your ass even if you make “kicking your ass” part of a statement on a COOKING CONTEST.

I’m reflecting on all that has happened between the marriage article and “No Fish on Mondays.” Holy Jebus. It’s a lot. I’m divorced from Dana, which was a mistake, but one that should have been taken care of years before it happened. There is nothing I could have done short term that would have turned us back around, because we weren’t smart enough to go to a therapist, jointly or severally. Nothing that happened from summer of 2013 on was a symptom, not a disease. We never talked about the underlying issues between us, so we floundered. It happens all the time.

I learned during that time what it was like to make a mistake that couldn’t be forgiven, and so did Dana. I do not mean this to say that I have not forgiven her on my own. We’re all good. She could call me at any time for anything. But what I won’t do is go out of my way to see her again. I don’t want to intrude on her life, either, and I’m doing it enough already. My only saving grace is that I was like this when she met me. I tanked my last blog because her sister chewed me up and spit me out, then it took four years to start this one because I had such a thin skin.

It took four years to rebuild any confidence at all. Four years of sitting silently where I could have been building something. Four years of possible recognition from better writers than me. Four years of not having a safe space to go where I could say anything I wanted, because upsetting the apple cart was not my bag. It was only then that I realized that very few people saw this space as valuable for me. That yes, I’m angry and irate, but also loving and giving to the point where I don’t take care of myself. Both of those things are true of everyone on earth. They just don’t let anyone know their process for going from angry to loving.

Because of course, part of anger is shock. We’re frightened of the things we don’t know, taking off into the unknown. So part of coming down from anger is taking a step back and looking at the circumstances and identifying where that anger is coming from. What’s the root issue, because it’s popping up everywhere? You need time to mellow out, and I’m the first one to tell you that because when I don’t chill, I make mistakes. I work too fast without thinking long term.

But in terms of what happened between the marriage article and now, I don’t think I have in all cases. I think that ending this Internet relationship will be better over time, because I was giving it so much time and energy that I wasn’t paying attention to anything else. That’s why I was so angry that she read a volume on what I was going through without acknowledging any of it except to say that it was 100% clear I wasn’t getting what I needed and to go find other friends.

Meanwhile, I wasn’t thinking of anyone else’s problems except for hers. She needed silence, and I was happy to give it. Fuck all the noise, I’m looking for a signal. Why I lived in all that noise for so incredibly long is beyond me except that I thought I could make it right. I didn’t. I was an asshole because she treated me that way. I’m sure she could say the same thing about me. Neither one of us turned off our defenses and kept them firmly in place, and trying to cross that divide was unwelcome. So, I just won’t. I would have been a nicer person had I just let it lie instead of being irate, and yet I couldn’t shake my anger. Part of my anger was “I really am worth it.” I know she sure was, and I was trying to prove it to her. But you can’t help a little old lady across the street if she doesn’t want to go, and I stopped myself from seeing it because I wanted to.

I’m not going to stop her from showing up, or asking for things. But I am going to stop pointing my attention in her direction as fast as I humanly can, and “humanly” is very important here. Ten years is not nothing. I am a completely different person than I was when we met…. in the extreme, actually, because back then I was married and my mother was alive.

My mother’s death put everything on hold for me except this one relationship, because I couldn’t emote in front of people. I could only emote in front of her. She was with me from airport to airport. She listened to my cries of “Jesus Christ, just come pick me up.” Load up the kids, get it moving. 😛

She listened to my cries of “I’m empty, and I don’t know how to fill it.” I asked her if I could ask her mom stuff (she’s a few years older than me, and she’s a mom, so it made sense then). Her reply is one of the funniest things I’ve read in my life. She said something about sure, as long as I didn’t expect what she said to be what my mother would have said. The incongruous image of them having anything in common made me literally roll on the floor. I said, “I think of you and my mother being alike the same way Tom Brady and I are both 43.” Exactly none of that takes away grief now, but it stands alone as a truly bright spot.

She did everything right, I swear. I’m just not strong enough. I’m not strong enough to look at the difference between 2013 and now and not feel an inch tall. I’m not strong enough to carry all of it. I need her. She needs me. She doesn’t think so, and I can’t prove it. So here we are…. adrift until something happens in her brain that she remembers who I am. I just don’t think she will, because she would be totally happy with my own breadcrumbs for all eternity while I sat in a loss I couldn’t fix and watched her be totally fine. She could just say go and find other friends. Not sure I’ve ever felt so much humiliation.

I am sure I am not very popular with her at the moment, but I cannot care about that. I will never get over it if I don’t write about it, and I want to get over it more than anything else in the world. You’d just have to know what my insides have looked like over the last 10 years to see why I needed to step back to stop torturing myself…. to feel this desperation that she’s the only one who would understand, but only if I was talking about someone else. That my words would roll off perfectly if they weren’t about her, and she could see anger for what it was- fear.

But it would turn into “ragging her about bad feelings from the past” when I had just written something I thought was really sweet, or I meant it to be. Those kinds of misunderstandings happened all the time, and it was tiresome. I never thought that the real issue was the one at hand, because surely I wasn’t always wrong, judgmental, and a dickhead. No one is always anything. And then to sit in all that anger and to say there’s nothing wrong while you’re seething? So that when I even make dumb jokes I’m wondering if you’re going to go beastmode and destroy me? Wanting me to write accurately about their vibe and won’t meet up in person? I’m an intelligent, impressive, asshole. One of those things is not like the other.

I felt so afraid, and didn’t want to live like that anymore. Nothing I said was getting through, I just kept hanging onto a void. Holding something that slipped through my fingers. And yes, of course I’m still furious in some ways, but not at her. At me. I’m the one who decided to make myself unopular in the first place.

B58

June 13, 2023June 13, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

This is from last week. I’ll come up with something newer, I just haven’t yet. It’s unfinished, so I’m just going to leave it and move onto something else.

I’m at my gate at Hobby, waiting for my flight home. Despite the circumstances (my grandfather’s funeral), it has been a good trip. I was going to send out a touching message in case something happened to me on the flight (flying is safe, but accidents happen), and then I realized that I probably wouldn’t be posting this to the Internet until I got home…. unless it takes more time than usual for my flight to load. I just don’t care what my boarding number is on Southwest. I just put it there because if I was going anywhere, that’s the only thing Dana would want to know. It still makes me laugh to remember her being borderline diarrhea every time we traveled, finger on the mouse and victorious when making it into A group. Meanwhile, I know I’m going to be sitting next to a stranger and how strange they are is likely less strange than me.

I don’t need to sit down during the parade of weirdos at the cattle call.

The only thing that I thought might trip me up didn’t, because both of my flights have been middle of the day. I forgot to put my Known Traveler Number on my boarding pass, so I had to spend longer at security. However, both airports have been great. The only thing I can’t find is a decent cup of coffee, so I got a sugar free Red Bull instead (there was no other option. Not my favorite, but it’ll do.). I didn’t get to have my favorite this trip, Diet Big Red, but that’s only because I went to several convenience stores and none of them had it. I’ll just have to wait for another trip to Texas that’s long enough to go to HEB for Diet Wild Red, which is actually better. Everything from HEB is better. Give up.

I also didn’t get a Dr Pepper shake from Whataburger or Dr Pepper Float Blue Bell, but that’s okay. I had as much sugar as I could hold, anyway, including a “share size” bag of pretzel M&Ms, and the cutest child known to God and man wouldn’t be able to beg one off me. With snacks, the general rule is “I don’t know how many pieces are in a serving, but I’m going to go with “way less than I just ate.”

Speaking of eating, someone made a brisket for the potluck before the funeral, and it’s the one thing I would have specifically gone out for if they hadn’t. Oh, and there’s several good BBQ places in Houston. I’m not a purist and have to go to the same place until I’m dead, forever and ever, amen. I didn’t have time to go to Chuy’s, either, which is why I’m so glad they’ve built one in Rockville, MD, relatively close to my house. There are more in northern Virginia, but that’s kind of a hike for an on the fly trip.

I can’t decide if I want to go home right away, because once I get there, I will completely fall apart. Not in terms of grief, in terms of exhaustion. It was a haul having two four hour trips in two days, but I wouldn’t have missed seeing everyone for anything in the world. The only reason I didn’t go to my grandmother’s funeral six years ago is that we in DC were snowed in. So, I got to see Jason and hear him sing, ooh and ahh over weight loss and new boyfriends and how cute everyone looks in the dresses they got at Ross for $3.99! CAN YOU BELIEVE IT? Touch me. 😛

How do all women get cute dresses at Ross on clearance for pennies? It cracks me up, like Carol Burnett in “Went with the Wind….” “Oh, I just saw it in the window.” What I know is that if I wore cute dresses, I’d probably shop at Ross, too.

(They always have cute boys’ clothes, and that’s 90% of what I wear. It’s because with button downs, the shoulders fit perfectly. Nothing irritates me more than women’s clothes that try to imitate men’s clothes, because it’s just the worst of both.)

Anyway, I only have a tiny pilot case and a backpack, plus all the museums will hold luggage for you. I will just see how it goes.

Paw Paw

June 5, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I would not be the person I am today without my father’s father, and I am slightly unmoored at his passing yesterday. I say “slightly” because he was 92. At that age, it’s never unexpected, and he was ready to go. He had a health problem serious enough that to put him through the treatment was to make his chances of survival worse. He said he wanted to see Mary, my grandmother, and we were all at peace with it. Still sad, but happy that he got to make his own decision.

It reminded me of the last time I talked to him about a death in my own family. I have never seen him come unglued, and he was sobbing when he told me he was sorry about my mother. I think it’s because he’d known her since she was a little girl, and losing your child does not follow the natural order of things. It doesn’t matter that my mom and dad divorced. He was just as much a part of her life while the marriage was happening. I am grateful for nothing about my mother’s death, but see a silver lining in processing that grief with him. It made me feel less alone. I’d known her for so many less years. We chatted about “Option B.” He said he thought it was written for younger people. I agreed in sympathy. By then, he’d lost my grandmother and we were both sad and lonely. Leaning on each other was a golden thread between us.

When my grandmother died, we became closer because of the phone. I hate talking on the phone, and he didn’t like doing it much, either. Not a computer person. So, there we were, the two biggest introverts on earth, not really wanting to talk to anyone and making conversation, anyway. We found connections in movies, writing, and that there were five Gospels including Rachel Maddow…… both very religious and very liberal, two ideas that don’t always make friends but should.

My granddad worked for Lone Star Steel, the largest company in his area while I was a baby, but has dwindled now. He was the corporate version of me, writing copy and taking pictures for the steel plant. Then, he began writing a story about our family when I was older, starting with the ancestors from Ireland/England and filtering down to me and the rest of our generation. That was the original idea that my story was worth something. My granddad wasn’t rich and famous, yet my dad has five volumes on where we came from and where we’re going.

I see my story as the same thing- I’m not rich and famous. I just live here.

Therefore, my story is not valuable to everyone, but to some it is priceless. My grandfather taught me that; write it tight, shoot it anyway. The fact that copy, pictures, and videos exist may not matter right now, but it will in five. Get people while they don’t know they’re on camera to make sure that there’s at least a record that someone was there, they don’t have to talk.

Music can say what you can’t.

I didn’t get much of my theological upbringing from him, but I did get his dry wit and delivery. If there’s anything my grandfather and I share, it’s being the quietest person in the room until we’re engaged…. and then it’s generally an acid funny comment that you may or may not have been meant to hear. 😉

My granddad gave me someone in the world I could look at and say, “yeah. I’m his. No DNA test needed.” My dad is more extroverted than I am. My grandfather is where I got my style…. which is mostly to be entertained by everything, just watching and absorbing. We both get into moods where we want to hold court, but that is not our default setting. We want to cook. We want to read. We want to watch videos of PBS and the BBC.

Seriously, go find something to do. “Two Fat Ladies” is on.

I’m going to close with a video, but not because it’s of me. It’s because he made it. The video is of me being born, but the first few minutes is all made up. That’s because I was born five weeks early (my mother says eight) and at 9:59 in the morning, so NO ONE was prepared. My mom hadn’t even gone through Lamaze.

And when you watch it, please remember my family. Nearly everyone in the video is gone except for me and my dad, which makes it all the more precious. Please note my grandfather’s voice in the beginning, because it’s one that I dearly love. Remember him as young and handsome and funny as he was.

I feel that I know intimately how handsome he is, because he helped make me. 😛