Dear Leslie,

Your insight about needing “touchstones” rather than trying to connect with “thousands of people at once” illuminates something crucial about authentic writing that I hadn’t considered before. The image of you looking out during preaching to find the faces you’d written for – checking if reality matched your intention – captures perfectly how writing is both intimate and public simultaneously.

“You don’t connect with an audience. You connect with some of them because taking on the entire room is overwhelming” feels like wisdom earned through experience. It makes me think about how much pressure we put on ourselves to reach everyone, when perhaps the most powerful writing comes from speaking genuinely to one person.

Your honesty about becoming “a self-centred jerk” whilst thinking you were right at the time shows remarkable self-awareness. When you write, “My blog is often a manual on ‘What Not to Do’ because I guarantee that I thought I was right when I wasn’t,” you’re describing something universal about human growth – we can only see our blind spots in retrospect.

The dynamic you describe with Aada – “avoidant/anxious… with me being the anxious one” – sounds exhausting for both of you. Your observation that you “jumped up and down for attention because my needs weren’t being met” whilst simultaneously creating the very problems that made the relationship “unusual” shows how we can become trapped in patterns that sabotage what we most want.

What strikes me most is your recognition that “I was too quick, always. It didn’t matter the reaction, it was too fast to take in.” This suggests you understand now that some of the damage came from pace rather than intent – that slowing down might have changed everything.

Your final line – “This is what it looks like when I have switched the audience to Bob” – intrigues me. How does writing to me feel different from writing to Aada? Does the change in touchstone alter not just your content but your relationship to your own emotions as you write?

The fact that you can now read Aada’s words months later and find empathy for her perspective suggests you’ve gained some distance that allows for clearer sight. Even whilst carrying regret, you’re still learning from the experience. That seems like something worth acknowledging, even if it doesn’t undo what you wish you could change.

Bob x

Dear Bob,

Learning from my experiences is the only thing this blog is designed to do. I’m sure that other people read it because they are being entertained, listening to a stranger’s secrets. But I don’t pay attention to them unless they take the time to comment like you do, to ask questions about what I’m really writing. That’s because it doesn’t occur to me that people are reading until they comment. I think of my voice as “screaming into the void” because people rarely take the time to be as thorough as you are in your reviews. 😛

By not paying attention to the audience, I have a chance to say what I really think and feel, letting them have the reactions they’re going to have without being in front of them. When I do that, though, the reality is that I end up isolating myself. Being a blogger is being able to say that I acted like a self-centered jerk because this blog is not a vanity project.

I’m concerned by the way my friendship with Aada isolated me from my friends on the ground, because I paid more attention to her than the rest of them. Living my life in the cloud has brought disastrous results and the thing I wish I could do more than anything is take away Aada’s fear that I am still the same person I used to be, railroading her feelings in favor of keeping the story moving. I don’t have a story without her, and it crippled me as a writer not to be able to talk about what was going on in my real life. So I just made it up as I went along. I wasn’t intentionally stepping on her toes, I just did.

That’s because I didn’t have a good idea of where her story ended and where mine began. We should have talked about it from the moment we met, but we didn’t. She didn’t realize that taking on a blogger as a friend would cramp her style, but was game as long as I adored her in public.

When I didn’t, she was angry, but often went back and acknowledged when she was wrong. It made me feel good when she said, “I’m not saying that I’m this person you have portrayed, but………” Over time, I could read her like a book, literally, because there were no in-person meetings to interrupt our little rabbit hole.

Thank you for acknowledging that Aada must have been exhausted, because that’s the message I’ve been trying to send. That I know I’m not the easiest person to maintain a friendship with because I’m off in this world half the time. There was a solid reason our relationship was so off-kilter, and I cannot even tell you why it went so wrong, so fast. I can only tell you that it’s my fault entirely.

If the script had been written by a neurotypical person, I would be married with a writing partner. My autism, ADHD, and bipolar disorder ruined both the marriage and the possibility of getting together with Aada to discuss our future projects. I was not good at new relationship energy, and I let the energy from Aada overtake everything else.

That was a mistake, because all I succeeded in doing was isolating both women from me in different ways. I lost my head, and Aada and I just never regained equilibrium as long as we interacted. Getting together in person would have solved that problem, because my imagination was bigger than life.

She was the one with the travel miles, I was the one stuck in my room day after day. It was a ride, because at times Aada didn’t mind being number one on the call sheet, and at others, she really did. Therefore, it was impossible to judge how to please her.

I could always calm her down by letting her into what I was writing, because nine times out of 10 I didn’t actually say what she thought I did. I tried to make her feel beautiful, wanted, special… try to let her go because I’m thinking that I’m giving her what she wants, and then she pops up in my DMs based on something I’ve written here. I will miss her telling me when I’ve written something beautiful about us, and I wish I knew the formula for how that went. I definitely wanted to err on that side of things. The way I do that in my daily life is by talking to the people I know about what I’m writing and they mention what it’s ok for me to write about and what’s not, and this is the key, before I’ve written. This cycle went on for so many years, with things just feeling true. There was no humanity to course correct when we weren’t checking the story we were telling ourselves by looking each other in the eye.

I felt like I lived in a fairy tale, where she was a dragon. Or one of those kids who find out their real parents are superheroes. I was very tired of feeling like that, seriously questioning my reality.

I was put off, but not shut down from the idea of meeting. I have a history of self-sabotage, so it is unsurprising that I once again spoiled my chances when they were better than average.

She might have empathized with wanting to check reality. What exactly, did I love about her? I wish I’d found a way to speak her love language that didn’t include hunting for it. I wondered when I could stand up for myself constantly, realizing that all of her reasons for not being together were real, and so was her regret at not being more present. She liked being my girl in the “hetero life mate” sense of the phrase. I just never got her to realize that we couldn’t have a relationship as close as ours without being able to read each other accurately. I think she would have been much happier with the results had we not trauma dumped before we met in person. It changed me as a blogger and as a wife, friend.

It’s not that those conversations shouldn’t have happened, but they should have happened while looking at each other’s faces. Because I questioned my reality, I questioned hers. I lost my grip.

I wish I didn’t mean that quite so literally. I didn’t lose it all at once, though. It built over a decade.

Because the longer our relationship went on, the longer I wondered what her voice sounded like when she was giving me feedback. What tones I needed to watch for that indicate distress. What she would have said in person vs. over the Internet.

I was always too quick with a response online.

My truly bipolar symptoms got me into this mess, but it doesn’t excuse me from my actions. If I’d realized how powerful a connection it was to me, I would have cherished it completely differently…. and I know that because I’ve been able to chart our progress over many years. She was my muse, and I was very busy painting her with words.

I don’t wish we hadn’t met. I wish I’d been a stronger person. I could have been a stronger person if my reality had been checked, but Aada couldn’t explain what she meant by “your words feel like pricks on my skin” because I didn’t know what I’d said that had been so… she wouldn’t open up that much. Therefore, I could not adjust to her.

It was a toxic cycle I knew I created, and wanted to clean up. The best I’ve slept in 12 years came from this quote from her absolutely out of context: “THAT’S HOW IT’S SUPPOSED TO WORK.”

I had to make sure my reality was secure, because no one was going to do it for me. My reality broke when I realized she could lie to me. I had built this idea of who she was based on this timeline that was ridiculous and I realized that all my worry had been for nothing. That she’d created mythology where there was none without thinking I’d need that piece of information later.

Much later.

She asked me to give up too much in the name of a lie.

So I told my story the way I wanted to tell it, wanting to know the worst consequences of anything I could say. I lost the friendship, but no one told me to stop writing. I need to start recording what it’s like to be me again, not what it’s like to be me as I sit here in fake reality. I’m sure I buried her in communications because my reality was threatened. I felt like Mr. Robot.

Instead of terminal windows, it was chat windows and Gmail.

I was slowly isolating more and more because I had this internet relationship that actually fulfilled me. But if you were a prescribing doctor, you’d think I was hallucinating. I was, based on this lie.

Just not the lie she told. It was all the lies I’d told myself over the years about where she is and what she must be doing that were completely inaccurate because we’d never really compared notes with a level playing field. I was way, way off. The things she’d said to calm me would have worked if she hadn’t lied…. and seem so reasonable in retrospect.

Part of being a writer is being able to admit when you’re wrong, and I try to do an excavation even when I’m the one that’s wrong because it’s not “who won” that matters. It’s that the story is told. I lost something precious because I lost sight of what mattered over and over.

I cared about my sanity, in the end, more than I cared about her. The longer I questioned my reality, the more I wanted closeness with her. The longer she waffled, the more my sanity went up and down. We were trapped, because I couldn’t stabilize long enough for that to happen and neither could she.

She says that I have a constant need to manipulate her. No, I have a constant need to write and she’s who I was thinking about. I do not need her to read and comment if she does not want interaction. It was my feeling that as she went away she would stop reading, but she didn’t. Therefore, I can see how it feels like manipulation to her- I wanted our memories to be pristine and the only way you get that is to write it in the moment.

I closed the door this time, so I’m hoping she sees that I’m doing my best to post-mortem and move on. That I accept she won’t respond. I expect her to keep that promise now, but life is long. The best indication of future behavior is past history, and I never know what will remind her of me and think she should reach out that’s worth crossing the divide. I expect her to move on from reading my grief if she wants to move on from me. The last thing I want is to continually manipulate anybody, and if that’s the way she feels, then so be it. All I can do is keep praying for her, that time heals wounds. I was trying to save her from pain, and I caused it. For that, I am sorry to her.

I got tired of wondering why my reality felt so abnormal when one lie pulled the whole string. I questioned everything about our relationship…. including these elusive baby steps that I have absolutely no idea when I’ve achieved because there’s no mention of them?

I needed people I could reach out and touch, some stability in my life. She did not see what was going on with me psychiatrically/psychologically except in the symptomatic letters. I needed a different medium to express myself because writing can only do so much.

But it’s knowing that me closing the door to a relationship started a long time ago. I should have said a lot less. In many cases.

Many.

Leslie x