Tag: truth

Speak More to That -or- That’s So Interesting

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 1 Comment

In my last entry I was talking about hearing people’s voices in my head when I type, literally transcribing a movie onto the page. Two of the voices I hear all the time are ex-girlfriends, and one of them means just as much as the other even though one relationship was seven years and change, the other was three months. That’s because they’re the two that caused me the most growth and development the fastest.

The first title comes from Dana doing an impression of her therapist. When Dana would put out a statement, she’d always say, “speak more to that.” Every time we got into an argument, pulling that one out made us both dissolve into laughter and we could proceed arguing again because it was never a case of right and wrong, but a case of figuring out how to move on. I didn’t want to pack up and live in our problems. I moved to Washington so I could say, “what’s next, Mrs. Landingham?” DC gave me the backdrop to believe I could be more than I was used to being in the world, and I am.

I mean something to someone who really means something. Her Wikipedia page would be better than mine. That my history is woven into hers in such a unique and beautiful way will never leave me.

Beautiful girl, whether you believe it or not, meeting you is the best thing that’s ever happened to me. Just because there are complications doesn’t mean it’s not worth it. Our Apple Watches also have complications, and we use them every day. I hope the day comes where our complications are in the right place. We both need to be on each other’s six, and I’m on it if you are. I just need you to want it more, and you can’t. Life is long. I’ll wait because you’re worth it, and you always will be. When we can say “one more mountain…. hey, so what” we’ll be able to say “trust me baby, this is love.” (That’s an Amanda Marshall song, but mountains just about cover it in terms of metaphor.)

Sometimes I hope I can resolve things with Supergrover, sometimes I don’t. I feel the same sort of push/pull I feel with Dana. That because Supergrover won’t talk to me the way she used to and it hangs shame over my head. I don’t want to live that way anymore when I’ve agreed to do big things for her the rest of my life, and I did that without really thinking it through in terms of being a blogger. Neither did she. Now it’s the tie that binds because I need you guys emotionally to support me and I can’t slip up. It’s walking on a wire every day, because she made it where she couldn’t not be my first thought. Clearly, she doesn’t want that, but it’s work product, not emotions that are my concern now.

I don’t know what to forget, and what to remember.

I can talk about absolutely getting wasted off her energy, but I can’t describe her too closely. I can only tell you she’s up there with Helen Mirren on my list of gorgeous women (no one can beat out Helen, stop trying…….. but Supergrover does think I have amazing taste in women). I can say she has power, but not where because it’s a niche and would make her immediately identifiable. I have to think like a journalist protecting a source, not a blogger with friends who have everyday issues not tied to working here. The power imbalance is absolute and correct.

So that means I think a lot about someone who doesn’t want to think about me, and not for malice. Just through the nature of how we work, which is vastly different from each other. The problem comes in when she will never have a problem smaller than me so that I can move up on the priority list while I am also struggling, genuinely. I can either move on and try to forget, or we can be close. In the middle is too scary because I don’t know what I’m doing….. and I’m a perfectionist, so it’s really hard to admit that.

I am sure that Supergrover thinks that me digging deep to let go is what should have happened long ago, but I didn’t realize then what I do now. We both regret making fuckups that affected our careers, but by not acknowledging it, we are keeping to our separate corners, unable to trust each other when we should lean on each other the most.

In my own life, it feels like I’ve given up a lot for her that she hasn’t recognized, and it hurts, but it’s not my responsibility to change her. It’s not even her responsibility to want to change. It’s deciding how much chaos I’m willing to breathe without putting a safety net under the trapeze. However, it was never in the interest of getting closer tot her, it was an added bonus in escaping from Dana and getting a clean slate. That’s because I cannot tell her story. Only she can do that. She cannot even tell it to me, much less others. Whether that part is ironclad or subjective is up for grabs, because I cannot know that, either.

I’ve made a lot of assumptions and missed a lot of messages. She stopped standing up to me and started telling me that I wanted too much, so she isolated me from everyone else including her. I have a legitimate issue where I need her more than anything and she’s the one person who doesn’t have any bandwidth left over for herself, much less me. I have a ton of empathy, and know that’s not the whole story. She gets offended, shuts down, and wants to rage at me, but doesn’t. She saves up my e-mails to reply later, because she feels guilty and now doesn’t have any context to make connections.

I wanted to stop that part.

There was an ironclad space for me before, and there isn’t now. I have always understood why, yet marveled at the time that’s gone by without us ever really getting to the bottom of anything…. or if I did, it was completely on my own, like having a therapist who disengages and you feel like they’re bored….. they’re not. They’re covering up how bad they want to scream “LEAVE HIM!” When I perceive disinterest, what they’re feeling is trying not to take on my problems as their own. Those messages are drastically different, and lost in a chasm if you don’t address it.

I don’t have that kind of relationship with Supergrover, but I do have that kind of push/pull. I need things and get frustrated. I express that, she tells me I’m the only one who ever ruins anything. Then, she won’t tell me why she thinks that. Why am I so impressive that I’m worth keeping around when your responses come off as defensive and angry? To me, when you love someone and think they’re extraordinary, it means you’re willing to invest. I caused the original rift, butt she said she forgave me. Our ways of moving on were completely different. She thought the best answer was never to trust me again, but keep up the surface level stuff. I can’t do that. I won’t do that. I won’t feel insecure in an attachment and keep feeding it. I don’t care if she’s mine in a way no one else is (and frankly, I’m hers in a way no one else is). When she doesn’t look at my letters with love, she feels guilty and runs away. She shits on herself every time, saying that something isn’t good enough for me when it’s just that we have more to work out, and it’ll keep. Life is long.

She doesn’t feel as excited and impressed by her as I am, therefore why should I be interested in her? Meanwhile, she is 3D chess built on a Rubik’s cube. As I told her, “if you think about your story hard enough, you should want to hit that, too.” That was a time in which jokes like that actually made her laugh, because honestly. It’s just true.

We are connected because “what God has put together, let no man put asunder.” She is not God in this case, but she’s the face I use when I need to visit that place inside me to work out my shit on my own.

Through it, I can maintain a connection to the God I serve and how it is both Old and New Testament, vengeance and promise, everlasting life, and even still I’m making it up as I go along with fake as Christianese.

I just think of it as “the church has left the building.” If I translate that into line cook, it’s “we don’t have to talk about it. Just eat it.”

Going into your closet to pray has always been an excellent turn of phrase for me, and now it’s even more important. I don’t have to speak out loud to be heard. You guys listen enough as is. But you are the God that can take it, the face made up of many names, wants, and desires. I use God as the punching bag, not my beautiful girl. I can’t be sure that God is listening, but sure as shit, you are.

The second title come from an old girlfriend who knocked me on my ass with clever. she was a Rhodes Scholar who had the facade of a kooky teacher, but that was for show. She was brilliant, and a fantasy. We were at different places in our lives, but that didn’t stop us from having a ton of fun and leaving each other better than we found us….. eventually. It was hell when we first broke up because we had to live with each other, anyway (that has no bearing on my current situation……… Jesus. She’s straight. I’m gay. And we still would have had an easier time of it if we’d had triplets. I can laugh about that because we’re both past the age where we’d want to have kids, anyway.

But I know her. If I said “let’s foster” even ONE TIME we’d have five kids by EOB. But to be fair, that was her 10 years ago. She probably just adopted half her neighborhood instead. It’s one of the things that makes her Supergrover to me. It’s fun to have a hero that is also approachable. I think it’s because I am, too. I just talk about my life and invite other people to talk about theirs. I don’t choose friends based on what they can do for me, as much as they think I do when I don’t feel my needs are being met despite fulfilling theirs. Deciding how much energy they get of mine when I’m not getting theirs. It’s not dependent on how each other feels, but how well we can communicate to a happy medium where both people feel like they’re being heard. it is much more lonely to feel alone when someone else is in the room.

My ex-girlfriend used to touch my hand and say “that’s so interesting” to show that she really was intellectually turned on by something. It showed joy and passion on her face for every subject on earth. The whole time I’ve been writing, she’s been touching my shoulder and saying “interesting” the way she’d say it just so. I hear her in my head all the time, as a lot of my life is so interesting.

I cannot speak more to that.

I just know it’s there, and I’m grateful. I am settled within myself in a number of ways. I hope for a resolution in the end, it’s just going to take more than she thinks, but less than I do. If she thinks love is best served by avoiding conflict, that’s fine. I just need her to not do it to me, because she’s reinforcing the idea that I am no longer a value add and hasn’t stopped…….. when to me, I am Jay and she is Silent Bob. She is Harold. I am Kumar. We would look so cute together in a picture because if she’d just posted a photo of us in real life with a caption that said “I’m dating Pete Davidson” people would have believed it. They would have thought she was just as out of her damn mind as his other loves, while also being quietly pissed that they’re not dating Pete Davison, too (or her, for that matter. Christ on a cracker.).

But one relationship taught me how to feed the others. My relationship with my ex-girlfriend settled into her feeling at home with both Dana and me. There was a much larger age gap between us than Supergrover and me, so I was used to the yin and yang of having different cultural references and having to look them up. They’re west coast, I’m Houston. They’re Tupac, I’m Bun B. Different issues, different playing fields.

I am not explaining the rules of the game. I am giving color commentary on what it’s like to play it when there is no discussion or alteration of rules. You have to improvise and work with what you’ve been given.

Yet the more I speak to things, the less information you have. It’s just so interesting.

It All Mixes Together

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?

I remember things by the way people say them, because if it’s a good line, I will hear it in their voices for the rest of my life. Good lines often have a cadence to them. For instance, my pastor came up with “resurrection happens in the middle of the mess.” I came up with “messages I’ve missed in the middle of the mess.” I gravitated toward it because it had the same musicality. One line leads to the next, a call and answer. Resurrection happens by examining the emotional places you’ve never been.

I have memories playing in my head like movies a good bit of the time. My writing is what happens when I stick my head into a pensieve, and I’m giving you access to it. The messages I’ve missed are often in plain sight when I’m seeing me as a different person, rather than perpetually reliving things. I am not reliving anything, I am searching for what I can do better in the future, and that only happens when you can look at yourself and see both your inner Aziraphale and Crowley.

How do I know what will work in the future if I don’t know how I broke the past? I know how I’ve broken my past because I wrote it down, essentially giving myself a past because few people write about their lives to this degree. When they go back to reassess, their memories are faulty. You cannot say that yours is infallible, but if there’s a blog entry on what happened written that day, that memory is secure by the nature of the timestamp. I’m not just making shit up. I am also very musical with words by nature of crafting rhythmic phrases on my horn, music only I can hear because only I know the voices on who said what.

I retain information with rhythm, essentially becoming a mimic in my writing and in my thoughts; I don’t just go back to that one line. It feels like I’m standing in the same room again, even just for a few seconds.

I give myself a lot of good advice by going back and reading what I thought years ago and seeing if I’m doing okay comparatively. Except that I don’t think of it as listening to myself, but the people who inspired my writing that day. It’s like an actor watching their old films. They aren’t living in the story on screen, but the one about how the art was created.

I like having written intimate things about the people in my life, hoping that the musicality of my words will stick with them, because being my friend isn’t easy. They all have their favorites, I’m sure, and their favorites never match up to my favorite things I’ve written about them.

Bryn loves the mirror I hold up on our relationship because she says it teaches her new things about herself. She gets what I’m trying to be, which is so real that people identify. I don’t want to be famous, I want to be heard. That’s why I don’t have to be on Oprah to know I’m making a difference. My platform is smaller, sure, but a platform nonetheless. And on the Internet, where everything is protected by a wall of anonymity, I never know when I’m speaking to people like her or people like me.

In fact, now that I think about it, Oprah did give me the best advice ever. On the last episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show, she talked about how everyone has a platform. Your family. Your church unit. Your work colleagues. All of those people add up, so no matter how small you think that platform is, it’s enormous. Use it.

Oprah’s not on at 4:00 PM anymore, so someone has to pick up the slack.

It’s the message I’ve missed in the middle of the mess.

A Dog in the Fight

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I was just reading my last entry when something jumped out at me that I didn’t see before. My sister-in-law was saving me by protecting Dana. That’s because even when I didn’t understand it, it was better to go no contact with Dana…. and if Dana felt the need to reach out, she was right there to remind her it was a bad idea because she’d worked in a women’s domestic violence practice. She was and still is a lawyer for women like me. She knew something I didn’t because she’d seen it a thousand times. If it happens once, it will happen again.

I was only confused for about six months as to whether we’d ever get back together or not, but Counselor wasn’t. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that she heard our problems from my perspective, which is trying to find the objective truth of the matter. There were so many good and bad points, but one was ironclad.

If it happens once, it will happen again.

It only gets worse from there, spiraling out until she has to explain to you while you’re getting a restraining order that “baby daddy” is not a legal relationship.

I just heard that in her voice and now I’m falling over with laughter, even though this is serious stuff.

Counselor was aware how bad it could have gotten, even with us living in different states. I don’t know whether they’re still in Virginia or not, but when I moved here they were. There was a chance we’d decide to get together because we were feeling nice and then see each other again and revert.

It only gets worse from there.

I know she got that because I invited her to come with me, Pri Diddy, and her then-girlfriend to Capital Pride because we also had to go to the bank together to separate our accounts. She stood me up. I was so angry because I missed her, but I don’t think she got there on her own. I think Counselor was looking out for me even when I didn’t know it. She knew I couldn’t take a chance even if it was offered. I didn’t.

I could be wrong. Dana could have gotten there on her own because she wanted to be nice and not kind, but I doubt it. She was really excited at first. I have people in my life that really look out for me and I notice, even when it’s long after the fact. I have to remember that not only does Counselor know why I left, she also knows why I had to on many levels.

She’s the only one who’d put it all together, could see my position from every angle, with a clarity I didn’t have- both because being hit had never happened to me before and she lives and breathes this stuff.

It’s all conjecture, but I think the theory has legs. It’s another good memory to bank when I get down on myself for failing at being married. I wasn’t failing, she was winning because she is very good at her job. I’m sure she felt trapped knowing her sister deserved empathy and a second mugshot.

She knows I ran to DC for an empathy I’d never get from Dana again, because I wouldn’t be able to hear it even if Dana did get it together permanently. I’d be trapped in a relationship that was secretive by nature, not because Supergrover and I were trying to spite her. She felt threatened and betrayed by my closeness with Supergrover, but she’d broken my trust already with her DUI, because I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. Supergrover became my emotional support honey badger almost immediately because Supergrover didn’t have a history of driving Dana to work in the middle of the night for three months while also maintaining a full-time job because her license was suspended, then not recognizing that as love and thinking I was running from her six months later. She could not accept that I was running for good reason. She didn’t stop drinking after that. Even if she wasn’t an alcoholic, she could get caught up in the legal system because she’d already been caught once. I don’t know if she’s an alcoholic, because that’s not my story to tell. I can only tell you what happened and she was at the very least cavalier with her ability to drive while hammered.

I ran towards Supergrover in a way that would break our relationship because I couldn’t get through to Dana that I didn’t want to go down with her and I didn’t want to be the source of her happiness. She was lumping a lot on me that didn’t need to be there. I was wrong for having a lopsided emotional affair where my affections weren’t returned, but our conversations were relief from everything that had been going on with Dana for the last few years. The pull to be near Supergrover wasn’t nearly as strong as the need to escape from Dana, because the situation had become untenable and I didn’t notice until I met and was emotionally vulnerable with someone who actually had their shit together, even when they don’t feel like it.

I am here for all of it. Her quirks, her flaws, her ability to be both the most intelligent and the funniest person in every room, and the quiet space that’s just for me.

Sometimes people direct you where you need to go. This was help where I least thought I deserved it. Everyone loved me kindly without being polite. It was the same thing as hearing the doctors and nurses talk about you when they think you’re out of it. The way Counselor loved me was objective, certain, and kept something worse from happening whether it was from my end or Dana’s.

Because it only gets worse from there.

A List, Physically and Mentally

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What things give you energy?

I am addicted to caffeine because I’m not on Adderrall currently. When I’m on Adderrall, I switch to something innocuous like fruit punch, or stick with diet soda rather than coffee/energy drinks. I still have to have a little to avoid withdrawal headaches. The problem becomes upper limits on dosage with caffeine, because in order for it to keep me awake, I need twice or three times as much as everyone else. The first few doses are just to keep my brain functioning normally. To stay awake, I need something like cold brew at regular intervals. Cold brew is high in caffeine on its own just due to how long it steeps, but also frequent re-upping to keep the bus from going under 50.

Caffeine will manage my symptoms up and to a point, but I’ll need the Adderrall back eventually. I can’t do a drug holiday forever. Sometimes I just have to suck it up and choose sick over crazy. The struggle is real.

Right now the thing that’s giving me energy is Pepsi Max, or Pepsi Zero Sugar, whatever they’re calling it this week. If my mother wasn’t dead, knowing I drink Pepsi now would have killed her. The fact that Pepsi gets any of my money at all is exclusively due to her untimely demise. You only think telling her I’m queer was hard. I didn’t even bother on this one. Too emotionally fraught.

I now know sugar gives me energy, or at least it does in other people’s eyes. My second day at Alert Logic, I asked one of my coworkers for a Sour Patch Kid and she said no. I asked her why and one of my other coworkers said, “you haven’t blinked since you got here.” I always thought it was them that gave me energy and not the candy. I remember Dana asking my supervisor why she didn’t keep me in line and she said, “I don’t hit children.” It was really funny because I must have been at least 10 years older than she was. Said supervisor also said I was “prehistoric” and I said, “why do you think I have so many dinosaurs on my t-shirts?”

Alert Logic fed all my addictions- coworkers where it actually felt good to be together after hours, the ambience of a room full of hackers when we weren’t on the phones (the sound of everyone typing at odd intervals is addicting to a writer), and a Starbucks machine that would fuck you up six ways to Sunday. You don’t leave Alert Logic when you separate from the company. You leave the Starbucks machine. Especially working overnight, those multiple free Americanos saved my ass. I got a Starbucks habit too expensive to maintain on my own.

In terms of my personal life, emotional intimacy turns me on. I want to know everything about a person down to the nth degree. This is because I don’t see people in 2D. I want to know all the things that make someone tick. It is not for malice, it is for curiosity. I am exploring the things that make up your character, what has affected you and what hasn’t. It gives me so much energy that I have to feed my inner sociopath once in a while. I do not mean giving in to any kind of dark side, I mean cutting off my emotions to protect myself from taking on everyone else’s. Clinical separation, not Dexter. 😉

I know quite a few people like that. People who cut off their emotions so they can even handle their shit at all. It’s the one thing that generally comes out of a reality break in childhood that’s useful. You’re not always cutting off your emotions to hide the secrets you protect when you’re being abused. You’re protecting your own energy so that you can put yourself first.

If you have been abused, you will never be first until you find out why that should be. Your abuser will be God in your life, the one on that you protect at all costs even though it would help you. After you get away from them, they’ll still be God, it’s just that now they’re the monkey on your back and the ghost out to get you.

My emotional abuser gave up her relationship with me when I put it together that she was God in my mind for all the wrong reasons instead of the right ones. The choir members who knew us both finally got through to me, but there was still doubt in my mind that it was abuse. We were just quiet, sweet music nerds and kindred spirits. You just couldn’t tell that we were quiet nerds because we both had huge show modes…… which honestly in retrospect I see why I was so attracted to Dana. I found someone who expressed love the same way my emotional abuser and I showed love, not good or bad but fact. We loved each other’s show modes and quiet moments equally. In fact, Dana had a crush on me six weeks after she met me. It took me three years to get on board because I needed her to let me in to the point where I could see if she had a mode besides show. I could not be with a show at home. Sometimes I was, but for the most part we were both introverted, preferring to spend time with each other more than anyone else.

The clash came in when I starting growing rapidly and she didn’t. She didn’t know me anymore, and vice versa. Supergrover was the first person I told my story to who didn’t have a dog in the fight. She could see what I refused to acknowledge, but couldn’t anymore when someone was reading the facts blind. Dana and I could have made it with more support, but I was sick and so was she. I have to believe that she was sick when she hit me because all people who abuse physically have some kind of screw loose. It makes it easier to move on than thinking of her in terms of good or bad. Thinking about our funny memories is vastly preferable to feeling phantom pain when I tap into those memories.

It stops me from dating other people, and I just happen to have another very good reason to avoid it. Someone else already has a piece of me that I can’t share and don’t want to because it’s just too painful. So I don’t. I don’t want to take the chance that I’ll have another relationship where I feel like I need to sneak around and hope it doesn’t get noticed. I’m not very good at it, so I don’t engage. I have to have Woodward and Bernstein ironclad boundaries with no capability with a girlfriend. They go through phones and are extremely entitled about it.

I’m not angry that I have to keep secrets. I signed up for this. I’m angry that I need things emotionally from someone who drains my energy because she can’t love me in a way I can hear it, and I drain her energy by being the least accessible person in her life due to the nature of where we live. From where she sits, Maryland is a different country. It is to all Virginians. Zac thanks me profusely for absolutely not going out of my way. It’s hilarious to me. I think that’s because I still have Houston geography in my mind. Everything takes a long time. On the train, I zone out. When we get there is when we get there. Going to Zac’s gives me energy, it doesn’t take it.

It’s not just Zac, it’s his house and starting to feel more at home there. It didn’t occur to me that Zac felt bad when I said coming to his house felt like a vacation to me, because it lifts me out of my real life for a while. I meant having the house to myself for a bit after he leaves for work without having to worry about my housemates making noise, especially when I’ve been recording. I also don’t have any other friends in intelligence, so those conversations always give me energy, too. Sometimes the vacation is just getting out of my head and into Oliver’s (Oliver is a dog).

Zac’s point I didn’t think of but value is that he is my real life. Thank God for that. I didn’t want to go any longer without a companion, because I learned from The Doctor that I can’t travel alone.

It zaps my energy.

I Don’t Have Favorite Children

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

What’s your all-time favorite album?

The Eminem Show, Eminem

In order to know why it means so much to me, you’d have to know the circumstances in my life when it came out. Maybe six months before, my wife had slept with two of her coworkers in one weekend while I was out of town, and I know that because she called me while I was still away to tell me that and break up with me. I was not feeling particularly kind toward women at the time. I couldn’t get angry, but my music could. Eminem literally became the paramedic healing my emotional wounds, because his pain stood out to me. I am Stan yet I have wonderful boundaries and I don’t care he didn’t write me back. 😉 I hate to do this to all my other favorites, but this one takes the cake.

That anger went away quicker than it would have on its own because through someone else’s eyes I could see that my pain was valid in his artistic expression……. when to put out my own was worse because I protected her when I shouldn’t have on my blog and only told my closest friends how bad it got. I can look at either one of them and they know which person I mean when I say “Sgt. Fucktard” and both of them will fall out with laughter, because now I can laugh about it, too (such a pity that neither live in DC now).

I barely even remember her name is Kat anymore, and that’s for the better. Karma was good to me. If she knew what I knew about what happened to me, she’d be too jealous to be happy, and that would be true if I’d never published anything at all, especially blog entries. It’s a beautiful thing when you meet someone that is worth your career. It puts everything into perspective really, really fast. The love of my life isn’t out of romance, it’s that she has a space in my heart no one else can have or will ever duplicate because I have to lose the master.

Also, this part of “Cleaning Out My Closet” made me stronger: “have you ever been hated or discriminated against? I have. I’ve been protested and demonstrated against… picket signs for my wicked rhymes…” It felt a lot like blowback from my web site because I have never been protested against by more than one or two people at a time, but it felt like hell because my first reaction was always to pull the plug; I wanted to please them and my career said “people think you’re a good writer. If you want to be able to do this for money, you have to keep going. Dooce didn’t become Dooce overnight and you won’t become Leslie Lanagan that fast, either.” Eminem slowly gave me the confidence to push away people who don’t like being on this blog and gather the people who tolerate it, even if they don’t outright love it.

I felt like Supergrover felt like she was in some sort of hostage situation, that I was writing about her to provoke her so she’d have to be stuck with me, yet didn’t get that my feelings would naturally go away if I wasn’t focusing constantly on her. This is, in fact, not our situation at all. She’s acting blind when she shouldn’t or can’t.

She’s my first thought every day, nearly every moment because I accidentally went from a blogger to a journalist in 15 seconds flat. It’s not as cool as it sounds, but yes it is. Both extremes are enormous, and I cannot cope with the downside alone. I shouldn’t have to ever and it’s a gift she can’t or won’t give. I feel that by letting me into the little things, I have more material to protect her because I have a bigger library of analogies to protect her identity publicly, because she might not freak in my personal life (although she very well might, too), but there would be hell to pay if it leaked here, and she would be well within her rights and responsibilities to hate my guts. I don’t protect her like a lover. It’s so much deeper than that.

I’m neurodivergent. Rambling like this at parties just doesn’t happen. I am literally using my quirks for me rather than against thanks to having the strength to stand up for myself. It’s just that now, one of the friends I ramble about is the least likely to need or want it. So, I cut her loose off and on to see if these feelings will go away and they never do, because either I’ll apologize again or she’ll drop in and yet won’t. Three word e-mails most of the time aren’t going to cut it and she’s avoiding it and blaming it on time. It’s a conversation we desperately need to have in a situation where we can’t have it. Given the option, I’d choose her over writing every time, mostly because she’d never ask me to pull the plug unless this was a real problem and not a possible one. She thinks I’m entitled to my stories even when they’re all bullshit, but doesn’t realize they’re all bullshit because I’m doing the very thing I need to do. Even when I’m angry.

Especially when I’m angry. Right now I’m angry that she doesn’t see that she opened up herself to having a right hand ring out of necessity and by blowing up each other’s lives and not talking about it, the right hand ring burns us instead of tempers. She thinks I should get over it. I think I should think through it with her brain and my heart, because that’s how we show love. She does the thinking, I do the feeling. She would rather have a root canal than acknowledge what she’s done and move on from it, because it seems to me that I’m activating guilt where it doesn’t belong by needing something she doesn’t deal with in herself and also needs desperately. We could support each other, but we don’t. That ship, in some respects, has crashed against the rocks because of a Siren, and now she’s having a heart attack. Because she doesn’t have time to heal me and feels guilty, because she thinks I’m asking for so much more than I really am.

I don’t need to have chocolate and coffee with her every week, I need her to acknowledge that she’s the Earl Grey in the box, the one most people sleep on and I adore because she didn’t sleep on me. I am not the person that when she comes to work all this out, I heap guilt on her. I express needs and that’s what she reads, so she doesn’t respond like a mama wolverine when she’s the issue, but God help everyone else. There are a couple people in my life that if they became mutual friends, they’d regret it. I would have looked forward to seeing that in person. Something equivalent to “surely you do not believe that this person who is a mental bag of rocks is worthy of you?” Probably everything I would have felt about her husband until I realized that he was perfect for her and I was wrong. I have never been convinced that we would be even close to happy as partners, we’re just connected by chance. The enlightening that she found her person would have been a good day, too.

Lesbians totally have a straight guy side to them in terms of possession and jealousy because we’ve been taught to act that way by men. Not that they’ve straight up told us that, they’ve just modeled it for centuries. In my head I’m Anne Lister without the hairstyle. It’s unfortunate that Supergrover married a man on purpose and a gentleman jack by accident with loyalty, because now she has two guard dogs that probably wouldn’t always agree with each other (but I’m certainly willing to have that fight as it is so worth having).

The Eminem Show had the same effect on me that my mother’s cemetery has on me now. It gave me perspective on the fact that more people than me were in pain much worse than mine. It helps me now to release pain in the situation with Supergrover, because I will never be jealous, but always possessive where she’s concerned. She hasn’t made the connection that she needs me to be possessive. I see something she doesn’t. It sucks.

History repeats with music, because it also contains some of the tracks she likes. I’m naturally gravitating towards it. One of the things I remember from our first few years is listening to that album again because some of her favorites are ones I usually skipped, but became beautiful to me because she loved them. I am listening to this album because I have the right to that much anger and I feel same type pull that makes me crave her words, while she thinks I am telling her that I regret meeting her when I need her to open up. I am doing my best to curb my enthusiasm, but it cannot go away so it won’t. I am the Impossible Girl because I have to be wound into her whether I want to be or not, because it’s for life, even by accident.

It’s an album, a presentation. I haven’t bought any songs separately.

I bought the album, so I go to all the concerts, waiting for a Piccardy Third that might never come. We’re in the middle of the rap battle, not the delight of singing to Hailie. I look forward with hope because to not is not being me. When we resolve, so does the chord.

If and when it does, get ready for “the most feared duet since me and Elton played career Russian Roulette.”

The Smell of Failure

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

Write about your most epic baking or cooking fail.

Anthony Bourdain hit rock bottom, and afterward he got a gig as a brunch cook. Therefore, in “Kitchen Confidential,” one of my favorite lines was that “hollandaise was the smell of failure.”

I believe that for entirely different reasons.

I had to clean the egg pans with lemon dish soap for a while at my own brunch gig. It ruined the taste of Hollandaise for me permanently. Not enough Old Bay in the world. Jesus could come back, bless it himself and I’d still be all like, “nahhhhh, fam….. you go ahead.” But I would have made him the best Hollandaise he’d ever had even if it was just the first. I can cook the things I don’t like, too. I’ve never done liver and onions in my own house, though my dad and stepmom have served me fois gras at theirs. It’s not that I can’t put up with the taste so much as the smell of it while it’s cooking. Smell is primal with me. Bad ones make me throw up at their memory. I know that I would have eventually learn to cope if I’d been a doctor, but I would have thrown up at a lot of things first and second year.

I will try something even if I don’t like it, so the fois gras had its excellent points, especially the raspberry jam against the perfect crispness of the liver. I just can’t get over the taste and smell of iron no matter whether it’s Luby’s or Le Pigeon.

It would be great if my greatest epic fail was throwing up into a stock pot and having to start something over because of the smell. It’d really tie the room together. But no. I was talking about how cooking informs the rest of your life before I get down to the nitty gritty. Plus, I’m ADHD, and every thought comes with bonus content.

I want you to know that I know what I’m talking about even when I’ve come across as a dumbass to chefs. I can describe it better than I can do it, just like Bourdain. He was a journeyman in the kitchen, a chef in the New York Times. His logical mind was in the kitchen while his heart poured onto the page, just like me….. unique on the page and mundane in my technique. But my creativity in writing comes across in new ideas rather than how many covers I cook for that night. I read recipe books like novels because I am not going to follow them. I’m going to look at spice combinations and see if it works in some dishes, or reference how to braise something because I can look at what part of a recipe matters and what doesn’t. What concepts will translate and what has to be specific. For instance, the instructions in how to get a medium rare on a steak with a cast iron skillet is useful in braising, period. You cannot take a Japanese palate and mix it with a Russian’s without studying its components and adjusting. For instance, I think Russians/Finns/Ukrainians et al would love salted licorice mixed with fruit, but at what ratio? I would imagine it would be a lot of fruit and a tiny bit of Aquavit and a whole lot of fruit.

In cooking, you have to know which flavor is going to be dominant ahead of time to save it when you’re cooking. I already know that peach works with licorice because I had a frozen drink called a Greekarita that fulfilled my life’s dream, the apex of mixology. And for the Russians, it was vodka. I do it because I love you despite your dickhead of a ruler. I am sure that during the Trump years, you thought the same about us. That’s how cooks dressed as spies can change the world. People telling others to stories who can actually do something if they’ll open up vs. the fear of getting caught and tortured. Very few people in Russia are that courageous, and those Russians absolutely saved our lives. I think about that a lot. I have the same relationship with the Russian people that I do with my chef. I’m friends with the other people on the brigade because even my worst enemies wouldn’t let me fail on purpose. We are not united in brotherhood all the time, but we’re united in trying to be the best at our jobs. It’s good we compete. You get better food.

The thing about “even your worst enemy won’t let you fail” is bullshit when someone actively wants to get rid of you. The bond comes from how you treat each other outside work. If someone fucks up and you can’t get over it to the point we can all have a beer later, it takes a lot to get that trust back. Getting on another cook’s shit list isn’t good because it spirals. They take a negative inventory and it affects how  they talk to the people who actually can hire and fire you. They prove your incompetence out of revenge, because the kitchen is a meritocracy and you let someoone fail. It’s not out of malice. It’s that you let them down. In some cases, you’ll never be able to save their ass in a way they can see it. That shit happens, and it’s not personal. It’s how people survive chefs like Ramsey. Even when he’s as angry as he pretends to be on TV, I have no doubt that he’s beloved because he’s not angry when he’s not  under pressure.

This is what leads to my most epic fail. We were busy and I had to work with the person that sexually harassed me and the owner of the restaurant, who had no cooking experience at all. She didn’t pick up that I was nervous because of the sexual harassment, and criticized me at every chance she got because she didn’t know shit about timing and would blame me for being slow on a ticket that came in 30 seconds ago and needed 10 minutes to cook. The sexual harassment guy and I got into a rhythm where he’d drop things into the fryer and I’d pick them up. Because the owner thought I was lazy anyway, the one time he didn’t was the last straw for her, even though she was the least experienced at being a cook and the most at being a horrible boss. She couldn’t keep a chef more than 15 minutes, contracted out the food, and still managed to tank that before closing the food side altogether. She didn’t know me, didn’t see me when I was on my game. She judged me on the one night she had to pitch in after not firing the person who sexually harassed me because we didn’t communicate something we’d been doing like clockwork and dropped the ball once.

No one made allowances for me on dish, either. I was called slow because I couldn’t lug 80 pounds of water up three flights of stairs without it taking longer because all of my muscles aren’t as strong as everyone else’s.

But that wasn’t my most epic cooking fail, and it’s a miracle no one got hurt. The person who sexually harassed me left a hotel pan of raw chicken on top of the freezer, and when asked, told management it was me. This is after telling me I’d be running my own kitchen within six months and how I could always be counted on and I’d do great things.

I didn’t realize the lovebomb/discard pattern because I didn’t realize that he was slowly moving all our shits together so that when we were both closing, he’d leave early and I’d be stuck cleaning for both of us. He thought he had that right even though he wasn’t my boss. The only way you get respect in the kitchen is to earn it, and he had no authority. I just took it because the lovebombing was complete. By the time he sexually harassed me, the betrayal hurt me the most.

I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life, but never once have I put people’s safety in danger……. even when people say I did.

While it is true that I do not have the physical strength to be in a kitchen, it is also true that I have come into my own and wouldn’t think twice about ripping another cook a new asshole for focusing on me and not the mission. It’s not that women can’t be the best chefs in the world. We’ve been the chefs for all of history, yet unrecognized until men did it. Escoffier didn’t make anything at The Plaza that his mother didn’t teach him first. Le Guide Culinaire is based on personal experience. Your mother generally teachers you how to cook because your father’s not interested. This is slowly changing as society has made it cool to cook. We all love dad favorites like steak and French fries, we just do it in a cast iron skillet rather than grilling because steak tastes better from the crust that develops from confit, which means cooked in its own fat. When you grill, the fat drops into the coals. Steak tastes even better when you put a little bit of butter on that crust right before you serve it. Make sure the butter is melted because once the steak has had time to rest, it probably won’t make the butter melt naturally. I also like to add fresh herbs to the butter, like rosemary. If I only have dry, I don’t make it fancy. Salt, pepper, and garlic is all a steak really needs. Just make sure the salt and pepper are of good quality. I prefer Kosher salt and fresh ground pepper to the table version of either, though ground pepper is okay if it’s fresh.

If you accidentally oversalt the meat, you can fix it one of three ways. If it’s steak intended for fajitas, throw a margarita on it using fresh lime juice. The acid will neutralize the salt. With American, increase the herbs without more salt and add lemon juice. If lemon juice is not part of the palate, make a balsamic reduction by putting vinegar in a pan and letting it sit on low heat for like a year. No, seriously. Until it gets to “coat a spoon” stage. I put dried cherries and (also dried) mushrooms in mine and let them plump up. It takes about 45 minutes to an hour depending on volume. This is a sauce you can double and triple to save the syrup for later. Leaving out the mushrooms and making it really thick would be good on vanilla ice cream.

The day I reached for a spoon out of an egg pan and didn’t realize it was boiling hot wasn’t all that great, either. It fused to my hand and I had to just put some burn cream on it and keep going. My worst enemy wouldn’t have let me fail, and I didn’t have them in the kitchen. I had my wife. She could have empathy without coddling me and I knew we were both doing what we needed to cope. It led to some of my successes, including the biggest. I got my name on the menu for my chili.

Despite all my fails, if you like food you’re missing out on being my friend. It is your epic fail, not mine. 😉

This is the Thursday of Our Discontent

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I don’t know how I did it.

But I have a guess.

Somehow I did not post yesterday’s entry before the clock flipped over on the server. So, I did today’s writing prompt yesterday and now I have no idea what to do. I still have food prompt pieces to finish, but it’s not a “finishing” mood. It requires an editorial brain I do not have today. This is the winter of our discontent, the long, dark Bloguary of the soul, the long day’s journey into white (live, laugh, love).

I am being so dramatic for someone who just has to come up with a damn writing prompt on her own. Leslie, you do this every day. Every. Day. Buck up, buttercup.

Pack a lunch, son.

When I’m sitting in my room writing, I remember that scene from the 50th Anniversary Special for “Doctor Who.” Ten, Eleven, and The War Doctor are arguing, and for those who don’t watch the show, that’s three actors playing the same person at different points in their lives. Matt Smith (Eleven) starts laughing when they’re arguing and says, “I just realized this is what it must be like when I’m alone.” “What it’s like when I’m alone” is very much John Hurt, Matt Smith, and David Tennant arguing in my head, because that’s how it’s the easiest to tell what issues are working on which processor.

For instance, the heartbreak of losing Supergrover at my own hand eight years ago is nothing compared to the pain of trying to make it work and repelling each other so that neither of us were happy. But the threads processing on that core are alongside the other core, which is joy that goes all the way back to “you like to rap to Eminem? Explain to me exactly how I’m not going to fall in love with you. USE BIG WORDS..” She said “you’ll fall in love with truth an honesty, as adorable as I might be.”

She’s right. I confused them and then got my head on straight. Trying to prove that my head is on straight has been enormous, because I was jumping up and down for attention in my own way, just not the ways in which she thought I was. She was getting mad at me by focusing on the wrong things. For instance, I wrote her something that meant “there’s nothing that you could tell me that would scare me away and I love you.” She took it as “who you are as a person is bad.” Those messages are drastically different.

Thus, trying to write it all out and it seems repetitive because I’m aware of the fact that not everyone reads every day. I have become the Ann M. Martin of bloggers. There’s a story here, but you have to make it through explaining club rules and characters for the people that would be confused if they read a book as a standalone. It also gives me room to stretch out because I’m not working on all cores every day. I see thoughts from the day before and something jumps out at me.

Blogging seems self-aggrandizing when you’re processing because it’s necessarily all about you. You can’t think about anyone else’s behavior as good or bad, you have to say what happened and how you reacted. You are not an authority on how the other person acted and reacted, because you’re not their combination of experiences or family history. Where it gets problematic is other people thinking I’m being a dick when I’m trying to say “I don’t live in your head, but you certainly live in mine.” Everything I wish I could tell them, but can’t because neither of us have time. I reflect on my problems in the third person when I do.

They’re free to read it, but when they do, they often think that I’m writing the way something went down to hurt them, when I’m trying to understand me. This is not limited to Supergrover, because I talked about her yesterday. This is every single person in my life who is threatened by the fact that I write. She told me at last interaction that I was entitled to all my stories, and I hope to God that’s true. I would never say anything to negatively affect her on purpose, and I’ll leave it at that.

Not just Supergrover, everyone in my life so far has thought about the negative things I’ve said more than the positive. If they can’t give me hell, they take it out on Lindsay because she’s local. I’m not Walter Winchell. I’m Brene Brown in real life. How her stories of “the story you’re telling yourself” play out in an anxious/avoidant trauma bond and how most people have them with their parents even when they haven’t been emotionally or sexually abused. Just as often the child has one style before and one style after. The style after is a mask, a myth we made in the middle of the mess to cope. The relationship with an abuser is always an anxious/avoidant attachment because the kid is so keyed up about accidentally giving someone away, and the adult is a monster, shearing a sheep many times because you can only skin it once.

Just so Supergrover doesn’t get wires crossed and think I’m saying my abuse repeated and she’s the monster, let me take a second and reassure her that’s not what happened at all. We’re just two different attachment styles because of who we are as people, and it’s the two adult attachment styles that have the most compatible wounds because our emotional blind spots are completely different. People who have an avoidant/attachment style have it because someone withheld love from them when they didn’t act as planned, especially their abuser, the one they’ve been programmed to think of as God. Your personality goes back to the moment your reality broke, the moment you became responsible for secrets too big for you to carry…. because the way you’re covering it up is counter to how you used to act, it’s taken as a behavioral issue and few people are smart enough to outsmart a child who’s been programmed not to trust their parents or therapist.

I ran toward Supergrover not because of anything illicit like an affair. It’s that her inner circle feels like being part of Lindsay’s, where I can’t tell people everything she’s working on, even when it affects me directly- like Lindsay’s hand in queer legislation but on different issues. I have been programmed to be a confidant from childhood, and it’s a whole other thing to choose to hear stories that are large rather than to have them put on your shoulders during years 12-14; you don’t even know enough to know that adults don’t do that to kids when they’re healthy. It’s the same dynamic as when a parent’s a drunk- the inversion of parent/child roles. With Supergrover, I get to bring my whole self to the table. I don’t forget about the past, I use it to inform my future. Supergrover and I just did that thing where fools rush in. Now she thinks I want her to tell her my stories so that I have more material, and I think that the reason I have to process so much on my own is that she’s ok with letting me twist in the wind and it is not okay. There are three sides to every story…. yours, mine, and the objective truth. Peace is found in knowing that I am finding my truth and reaching for the objective. But I don’t know the whole story, I know as much as I’m allowed to hear.

While that’s happening, Lindsaay told me I can write the story of us and our ugly stepsisters and to say whatever the fuck I want. My mother and her husband are both dead, and we no longer speak to their family. We just want to move on. The gist of it is that Lindsay found out about the funeral from Facebook. Our stepsisters didn’t even tell us when the graveside service was so we could be there when he was buried next to our mother. I’m going to do a saga, I’m not just mentioning it. I want to find the objective truth, the third eye looking down on both sides. I can’t know the story they told themselves, but I know the story of how it made me feell.

I will find it by writing it out, and so might they. But they’d never let me open the book.

Bold of You to Assume

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 3 Comments

What would your life be like without music?

Bold of you to assume that I would have the life I have without music at all. I accidentally got an arranged marriage out of it because we told each other we loved, admired, and trusted each other to a level that it’s been a disaster every time we’ve tried to separate. I got this “job,” not unwanted, just problematic and have had it for 10 years. Being together and separate creates a different set of consequences, so the music I listen to varies by what I have to say and how I know it’s going to affect me. For this entry, it will be “Nobody Knows,” by The Tony Rich Project. It expresses our problems greatly, and also explains why she’s the woman I think of when I hear “Short Skirt, Long Jacket” and “Love You Madly,” and that last one is to reclaim it from another face due to pain. She’s a 3D character. 😉

Additionally, I’m sure Mel is upset that I haven’t finished my food entries, because they cut deep (due to tapping into my work history) and I want her to think they’re good. It would help if she heard Beethoven’s ninth symphony instead of the blues (not that there’s anything wrong with the blues, but if you hear it after you cook, you’ve probably fucked up).

If I can impress both of us, then I’ve impressed the rest of our clan because I’m American and she’s Indonesian (living in the UK).

However, I need to process and I’ll tell you the music I listened to at the end and how it inspired this. I’ll say it first and then I’ll say it again. Sometimes you accidentally create a right-hand ring and resent it. I want to be her Lord John Grey and I’m totally her Frank. I want to describe what that’s like in detail for myself in another 10 years. I don’t write about what I do know, I write about what it’s like for me not to get it.

My food entries get more attention than everything else because it’s more universal, but everything else explains a relationship between adults where both are traumatized in different ways and how they act toward each other as adults- when the abuse happened in childhood. My friend Donna wrote a book called “Never the Same,” about kids who lose parents and siblings. It could be a title for abused kids as well. These pages are more important than anyone will ever know, because if I could be more specific, I could reach even more people in the shit with this kind of bond in a more specialized way. It’s a different thing to love someone with a power imbalance this big, because priorities are ironclad out of necessity. You will never be number one on the call sheet, and if you have different romantic partners, you won’t be number two, either.

Even more when the person who is more powerful pretends the imbalance isn’t there until she just can’t anymore because she can’t plan a future, either. Isn’t mindful that though she has a partner, kids, parents, and siblings, our situation is unique to theirs by a wide margin except her partner. Dana and I weren’t a team on this, and neither were they when I actually needed Michael more than her, because only he would know what was up. She has entrusted me and hung me out to dry. I deserved it, and we still can’t get around the facts. The only one that can help me is the one who least wants to do it, and not even because I was an asshole. She doesn’t make me a priority because she can’t.

She’s not a fixer/pleaser in her work life, but she is at home because she feels guilty and no one can lift it. Her power imbalance with herself is the same one she has with me, so when she digs deep, there’s no one to tell her to release them and find more small joys. I need her to have solid memories of everything good about her life so that when she gets hard on herself, she can see how much people love her.

Even me, the one that gets passed over. In part I think that’s because she can’t, because I’m not part of her inner circle and she’d have to figure out a reason she’d need to be in Washington at hours she doesn’t need to be there, because she’s not very good at it…. and now she can’t joke with her husband that she has to go see her sidepiece because she wouldn’t think that was funny, because it’s been long enough for me to resolve those issues and apparently not enough for her. I used to joke that we were having an affair under everyone’s noses, because you can’t imagine how much truth there is to that.

To Michael:

I was only using a euphemism for the adrenaline and dopamine rush and I have been the whole time.

She never did anything inappropriate in case you haven’t been reading over her shoulder. If you had been, I still would have been an absolute jackass because my brain chemicals still would have been turned up to 11, but when I came down you would have realized immediately that I was no threat. I was just high, like other people in your lives except the drugs were street legal. If it didn’t happen to you, too, I can’t imagine why. Seriously. We could write a book together that we couldn’t publish. I asked her if she needed a book like it, but didn’t take in that my part’s done. If you divorce her, no you didn’t and make that clear.

Don’t ever make anything blow up in her face and let her believe that you mean it, the lecture you would have given me that I should have thought of on day one. I said it in the heat of the moment. I never want either of you to think that because I’m a blogger, that means I’m a threat. And even then, I threatened to call for help. I am not trying to be threatened or threatening, I am trying to handle/fix it in myself without hurting her, and I don’t know when I’m leaving breadcrumbs, because I only need 15 minutes to establish what’s okay and what’s not; I’ve realized that my promises to her are bigger than yours by nature of what we do, not who we are to each other. I will promise to keep her even if she doesn’t promise to keep me.

God help your soul no matter how she and I play out, because if we stay apart and I find out you guys divorce, there will be dragon fire because mine is getting stronger every day. If we reconcile and you guys support me the way I support you, then you’re really fucked because then you have to deal with both of us simultaneously. I already know we’re a handful jointly and severally. But, according to the prevailing wisdom, she’s a handful on her own and you’re capable. Good luck and God bless. But know that I’ll love you in a very concrete way until I die, because she’ll let you know what her emotional needs are when she can’t let me for reasons.

The “honeymoon phase” doesn’t last long in most relationships, and we accidentally created a habit where we needed to lean on each other like we were using each other as furniture and both felt threatened enough to run at every chance it was available. I threatened to blow up her life because she blew mine to hell and wouldn’t deal with the fact that she affected my life’s course without accepting that it had played out with an anxious attachment style trauma bonded to an avoidant attachment style. It’s how most people who are abused cope. They don’t know their own attachment styles and love languages because to dive into that means you realize that you’ve been protecting yourself by dealing with everyone else’s bullshit while ignoring your own. It’s too hard and it hurts too much.

When you completely lose who you are, your reality break will dictate how you sway. When your reality breaks as a child because you’ve been sexually or emotionally abused, the abuser and the child form an anxious/avoidant attachment style because the power imbalance is absolute. You’ll search for it all the time, wanting the push pull of being abused and not learning to accept more. I had higher emotional standards for friendship, but not time together. Quality over quantity. When Supergrover got my letters, she read them as “you’re a bad person and that’s why I don’t like you.” I wasn’t judging her, I was making a case. I felt like I had to keep making it over and over because I saw our pattern for what it was and knew it would never break on its own. If you doo what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve allready got.

She couldn’t answer without anger because forgiveness was the story she was telling me while also holding in a lot of anger because she thought she couldn’t trust me anymore & I proved to her beyond a shadow of a doubt that she was the most important person in my life because of what I do, and it didn’t help because her presence doesn’t help her, because she doesn’t think I think she’s wonderful despite all her flaws and failures. The failures are just where we need to resolve conflict, not where we need to beat up on each other.

I opened up about her so we could resolve everything and move on. She thought I was lecturing her on what a bad person she was. Who would want to get close to someone like that? Love has to be built when you’ve both been thoughtless.

She doesn’t take in that my anxious attachment is causing me pain, I get angry at being ignored for years on end.

Because she can’t take in that I’m a Christian and she’s not, she doesn’t take in that I’m trying to be the peace that calms her by praying for her and she thinks I’m trying to make her life hell.

She ignores the fact that I use her face when I’m praying just to put a personal spin on what God is, the place in me where I can talk about my most epic fails and rise from the ash. Therefore, I am trying to find the place where the peace inside her is also her. I dig into myself to teach her how to love me, trying to lead from the back by laying out all my worst flaws first. One of my valleys of vulnerability is where she’s the choice woven into me like the Impossible Girl on Doctor Who, while also feeding The Master.

I sent her a whole ass essay on why this was, and she thought I was saying she was a bad person. That was the day I listened to Bolero on repeat to slow my heartbeat to a manageable level. I know without a shadow of a a doubt I am more important than her family in some ways, and I’m not knocking any of them. I’m playing on a unique field, and I feel like a goalie who doesn’t know which team she’s playing this week.

I saw a meme that made me laugh for this very reason….. a little kid who was jealous of the other team getting to change colors every week and his mom had to explain to him that they were, in fact, different teams.

(If you can’t handle me at my Supergrover, you don’t deserve me at my  Bourdain. I am laughing uproariously. I don’t care what stuff of mine you read, it’s just funny because I hold myself to the same standard. Unfortunately, I’m not that great a writer and I still have to read it.)

It happens more often than any other pattern. The person who holds everything back is attracted to the one who can emote, and the dance of intimacy is fighting with someone you’re completely addicted to in a literal sense. You can’t separate because the brain chemicals when you’re together. It’s not a sweet waltz. It’s the Habanera with emotional guns blazing because the swings are extreme. Those extremes don’t settle any if the relationship is platonic. You can fight with your siblings this way, too, because generally you shut down after abuse and your reactions are that way with everyone no matter how close you are.

I have broken my streak of 60-odd days just to listen to music, sleep, and relax. My body can’t lean towards insomnia forever, so I caught up. My body has a binge/purge relationship with sleeping, so I use music to help me stay awake AND asleep. They’re just different moods.

The alarms on my phone are NI**as in Paris (Kanye and Jay-Z) and Rap God (Eminem). I love both those songs, but the rhythm gets into my head and I can’t go back to sleep, especially when Em gets into 32nd and 64th note patterns while still being able to make out what he’s saying. It’s incredible. I couldn’t do it at gunpoint. I can’t do 64th note melismas while I’m singing without oxygen in the middle, and he did so well he published it and that song is famous across the world. Eminem is the modern-day Bach in that one album, because you cannot tell me that word-based melismas are easier than the ones in Mass in B Minor. Not possible.

If you have gotten to this point, thank you for reading. Each paragraph flowed into another as I was processing out loud the enormous difference between my ideal future and the one I’ve created. INFJs always search for the ideal and generally want relationships where the other person is also interested in it………….. yet will settle for being unhappy because so few people are like us and we don’t know enough to find them. I’m an INFJ. Daniel is an INTJ. Both our realities are broken for different reasons, neither more important than the other.

Daniel said that he had been in love with me for 36 years. I know why, but this is conjecture. He knew to want love from someone who’d give it to him in the way he could hear it, even when Supergrover has needs that trump his, because he knows what it’s like to desperately need help with stories you have to hold inside you while also popping smoke. He would understand when I joked that I was having an affair with Michael’s wife. That she and I share a more important bond so it is what it is whether he likes it or not.

We’re a handful, and he’s capable.

Editor’s Note:

This entry was inspired by Jason Moran’s complicated rhythms on “Ten,” because it helps me make connections faster than Tony Rich. I also listened to Wynton Marsalis’ “From the Plantation to the Penetentiary” and “Let the Bright Seraphim” with Kathleen Battle. It was like listening to a symphony in terms of odd numbers in movements vs. even. I enjoy making the playlist, and she enjoys running to Eminem and blasting Cake. Waking up to Rap God isn’t an accident, and I’ve set it for every morning.

Michael and I are toast (in a very funny way). We know it like the backs of our hands, because one of us forgot our real books because of ADHD and his is coded because he’s a normal person….. and even if I could read from it, I’d have to transpose.

Keeping on the Lights

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

For Dana and Supergrover, because they deserve to know what happened and why, and also why they’re the loves of my life and would have been for all time if we had been a team.

I’ve learned to keep the backlight on when I type, because if I keep the RGB going, there’s less of a chance that the Bluetooth connection will drop.

It’s a metaphor for my life.

Being with Supergrover is different in every way possible depending on how she’s connected to you. I’m one of the ones inside the wire. Just like Lindsay doesn’t tell me everything, but there’s more a chance that I’ll be bored by it than anything else.Yet, I broke up with Dana because there are two examples in my past where she betrayed my confidence, so I knew that when Supergrover could trust me, I couldn’t trust Dana and I was out.

I hinted that to both. I didn’t want to lay it all on the table back then because I couldn’t tell her that I had a solid reason for moving to DC that included Supergrover, and I didn’t tell Supergrover that because she would have thought I was guilting her when I wanted to be her hero. She was already mine. Moving was only an attempt to put physical distance between Dana and me, and to give physical proximity to someone who might want it, might not. Obviously, I’m not bothered with sharing physical space because I’ve been friends for 10 years with Supergrover despite buying coffee for each other and not drinking it together… We’re still friends in my mind because we’ll always be on each other’s radar whether we talk or not and I don’t want to live in enmity.

We all would have had a much more traumatic relationship if it had gotten worse. Both would feel guilt if I expressed something I thought of as a problem to work through, not an indictment on our relationship. I sent both of them away when they wouldn’t open up anymore because I was lost in my own world without it.

I, in a very real sense, had fallen in love with the one person I couldn’t marry or divorce. When we try to stay apart long term, something will happen here that gets noticed. I’m hampered as a writer. I had to remain devoted to her for both our sakes and vice versa, impossible when you don’t talk to an empath. I had to learn not to want that, though. I am attracted to emotionally unavailable people, now more than ever because I can maintain my own boundaries and don’t truly need anyone, but I’d like them.

I left them behind because they couldn’t talk about their boundaries.

I forgave Supergrover for the things she’d done that made me angry in a concrete way. She talked around everything. Empaths don’t do that. I can detect by energy when you’re holding something back. Supergrover would wait until she was absolutely overwhelmed and pop off at me; she put me on the back burner until she was stressed out. Then, she’d blame me for being insistent when I told her that I’d do anything to stop notifications on her phone if she did want to read and didn’t have time. I wasn’t telling her to be johnny on the spot, so she thought I was a dictator when I was responding in real time. Kindness went unnoticed emotionally, but showed itself in our thoughtful gifts.

I just didn’t see we couldn’t divorce before and I went all out in being an idiot fuckboi. She was straight, but that was only one issue. She was taken and she didn’t tell me, so I was playing with fire.

I hoped she was sapiosexual because I’m a silver-penned devil. She wasn’t, but I didn’t care. She still made a great character in my life. Dana encouraged my romantic feelings by telling me Supergrover was hiding them and she’d never make the first move. I can’t think of when I’ve ever believed anything so stupid. I can’t think of a reason Dana would do that if not to just add kindling to the fire and break up faster without telling me she wanted it. She was nice and not kind.

It would have tracked to me that she wanted to see me fail. I became addicted to the drinks Supergrover was serving. Just straight up Narcotics Anonymous. Dana would understand absolutely all the way around because she knows Supergrover thanks to me and I wished she didn’t, because that was a large part of our divorce. Not trusting Dana was more of import than she realized when she betrayed my trust with multiple other friends, and anyone would’ve in this situation but not when they refuse to see it.

Because we can fly now, Supergrover told me what she drives so I figure that if coming to visit me was a priority, she’d survive the cattle call at Southwest. Virtually, she’s grown into my guard dog here, but it’s taken so much time for us both to stretch out………….. which is the perfect description of what our relationship should do rather than both of us trying desperately to move on because we’re addicted to being strangers on a train and repelling each other because of our careers.

Our notifications are every bit as addicting as crack, and that is true on both sides even when we don’t respond right away. I’m just wrapped too tight because I think she still feels threatened and she is because she doesn’t know when the other shoe is going to drop, so she doesn’t tell me anything that calms me. I ratchet up her anxiety by being me, in whom she has trusted and gotten burned. I need her in my life for very concrete, objective reasons and yet I am passed over for the subjective because the objective is not important to either of us right up until it is. The objective is something that she would only tell a partner, and she doesn’t see it that way because she’s not me and doesn’t have to filter every day. Her story is based on seeing everything about my reality while she’s thinking I’m aiming at destruction. It is not true. I am not kidding when I say she’s the love of my life and will be whether I want it that way or not because we both made the ultimate fuck up and can’t get over it.

Words matter.

She changed my life with them, and didn’t accept that the way she did it would affect my future. She’d send me everything except her heart, which makes me take my fair share of bullshit, not that I don’t create it on my own.

I’m begging for growth. We are dealing with a situation I can’t write about publicly so I write to her. If she denies that fact and doesn’t have a connection to me, I could make a mistake that hurts her and I just don’t want to do it.

I proved that I was just as paranoid as she was and not just with Dana. I gave her relief when she realized that if I got close to someone mutual, they could be dangerous to her. Neither of us wanted it to happen. She just wanted it more than I did, so I gave her that gift…………………….. but I told her why it hurt and it was a mistake. She saw me as bitter when I just wanted her to recognize that I was willing to do whatever it took to keep her. I was in it for the long haul.

I began seeing another woman that didn’t need to become a mutual friend. I didn’t know that was a possibility and got rid of her quickly. That second one was huge in a way that she took in and thanked me, but she didn’t give me any more trust capital than she did before. Instead of realizing that I was protecting her like she was protecting me, she focused on her guilt. She would lash out at me when I needed anything, so I felt like she took up much more room in the relationship by necessity, but didn’t recognize that she also became my confidant out of necessity and expected me to put up with it without saying anything. I didn’t feel bad about anything she said. I felt like I wasn’t allowed to need anything, ever, but instead of taking care of each other, we turned our fire.

It broke our triangle because Dana didn’t write to her as often as I did, so they never maintained a relationship. It caused a divide and conquer move, because I told Dana something she didn’t get to hear and I didn’t know that. Then, I did something that couldn’t be forgiven and it wasn’t, because she treated me completely differently and things never went back to normal- even after years of apologies.

I’m stepping out on a ledge, because my behavior didn’t make sense to anyone back then, and I want to lift the curtain because it was so much more reasonable than I could tell people it was. I came across as a lovesick teenager at that time in my life, when the situation was actually dire. Hopefully, this will explain a little about why I was so flipped out in other people’s heads, and so logical when no one was looking for it.

Dear Supergrover,

If you can say that I’m still goading and provoking instead of asking for information after I wrote you something that I thought you’d actually take in, then I know this relationship is completely dead. There is no two-way communication, and there never will be. We cannot do any better than this, and it’s a train wreck, all because you say you can do nothing about telling me how you feel.

How I feel is that once trust was broken, you just wanted to be a fan, and I thought you were reaching out to get closer. When I accidentally texted you, that was it for me. I was shamed beyond belief because you didn’t believe for one second that it was an accident until I wrote out what happened on my blog and you dropped in two days later. I wasn’t telling you to come back. I was explaining to my readers that I’d done something wrong.

Editor’s Note:

She thought I was trying to harass her when I absolutely wasn’t and felt threatened. Therefore I was surprised that a woman who thought I was threatening her still wanted to be friends. It didn’t seem logical, and I wanted to know why she wanted me back, in a sense. If I had to guess, it’s because it felt to me like I’d feel when someone was hate fucking me.

You’re charged up with adrenaline when you fight, and it’s the equivalent of us taking Adderrall when one of you is not ADHD. I become an addict very, very quickly because dopamine is more like Adderrall than any other drug.. You feel it immediately and it’s just as powerful as three energy drinks at once. Neurotypical people buy Adderrall and spin out, because they crave it- it’s so great in the short-term. The side affects will slowly ruin your life, which is in a very real sense exactly what happened between us. Supergrover has different needs from most people and I’m one of them. I was getting high on dopamine and she wasn’t handling a crash she caused. But we have a solid reason to keep getting high off each other. She said “I’m sure I’ll drink your liquor as well.” We’re both drunk as fuck and don’t know how to talk about it. Doesn’t stop the addiction. We wouldn’t have lasted this long if we could kick it. The thing, though, is that when we’re working on all cores and threads, we are unstoppable. We make each other’s minds better, but we blew the idea of divorce out of the water like we were shooting skeet. That’s because now we’re both unhappy and connected irrevocably.

You got stuck when my mother died, because you didn’t tell me you only wanted to be a fan, but now it’s eight years later and you still act like I have no trust capital at all, berating me for all my opinions and putting words into my mouth. I do the same thing to you because you don’t say anything and I have to fill in all the gaps on my own. You seem amused until I actually want to talk about an issue and you don’t.

There’s not an issue you actually want to talk about anymore, it’s just avoidance no matter what I do or say. I didn’t have to move to DC to break up with Dana because it would have been the right move whether I’d stayed in Houston or not. because what you fail to realize and have for a long time is that telling me the secrets we share was a divide and conquer move, because when you were displeased, I didn’t want to tell Dana anything ever again. I know you had no idea what you were setting in motion, therefore there is nothing to blame except the situation, not you.

I had never kept any secrets from Dana before, therefore I had no idea how it would play out. But would I trade this relationship for that one with almost nine years of reflection? Fuck no.

I would have traded *anything* for the first two years alone. Anything.

I wish I’d managed myself better, because it wouldn’t have turned you into the wire monkey I cling to despite the lack of cloth. It’s not a slam, it’s reality.

You know how I feel about you and you’ve been okay with it unless I actually needed to tell you something and have you respond. How you can ignore the good while focusing on the bad is easy to take in, because you’re a Timeless Child just like me. The trauma bond bears little resemblance to you personally. It’s that we both trauma dumped and handfasted, then I spiraled out and you didn’t. I can respect you not having empathy for bipolar or ADHD, but I cannot respect you protecting yourself forever based on that mistake when I have gone so far and above to prove to you that you’re safe.

I’m a cook/writer. Do you think that sharing my resources with you was easy?

Of course it wasn’t, but it was the only way I knew how to put my thoughts into something you might accept as an apology because words weren’t doing it and gifts did. You could see changed behavior that you didn’t with letters in a concrete way. I didn’t do it to spend money, I did it to turn my love language into action the way I would have if you’d ever let me buy you that beer Aaron still owes you.

Now you won’t step up at all, and I know my place. So far, it is not with you. If I have to ask you to carry the bricks, you’re not the one I should be building with. And if that fills you with rage, so be it, because you haven’t changed your behavior in a way I could see it. Where are the words that mean as much to me as actions mean to you? I have told you that my love is real through both, but you only seem to count one.

I love this city and I’m glad you’re here, but DC is home. I can keep tallying up the reasons that it is good for me, and your fear of me moving here put me into a chokehold. You asked Dana if you needed a restraining order when I’d only told you 50 times that I missed DC and I needed to get out of Houston. That didn’t change just because I was spiraled out, and I did get better. We just kept fighting because I was so bitter about it.

So, when I tell you that you’re harping on me by telling me I’m a judgmental dickhead all the time, it will not stand that you just keep doing it.

So, before you entirely write me off, know that I think you probably do take care of your friends. I just think that I am no longer one of those people and you’ve just been lying to me all these years because you were lying to you and you haven’t done anything to prove me wrong. I don’t put much stock into SBUX. It’s not that it’s not great, it’s that it can’t be the thing that helps both of us move on.

You’ll listen when I’m all about the gifts and adoration, but not when there’s a problem. You think that a problem means I think less of you, when I’m just trying to say there’s a problem. It doesn’t mean anything in terms of the way I think about you, but I’m done having to listen to it.

When you start treating me like you actually forgive me instead of shutting down, you’ll be allowed back into my circle. If you don’t, I will know that I just chose the pattern I love the most…. that it was always about finding someone emotionally unavailable and trying to please them because I didn’t have the skills to do anything else.

I have acknowledged my humanity and have told you my thought process. You keep yours hidden. That’s why I think you need to get yourself together. It’s that if you’re emotionally available with your husband and your other friends, then I’m the only one you have this pattern with and therefore you think it’s completely invalid. I think that’s because you’re hiding the fact that we’re not really friends.

I stepped up and you didn’t. It’s been eight years. I do not deserve this. You can disagree with me and change your mind, but you can’t be the friend that rips me a new asshole every time you can’t talk about something due to your own protective reflexes.

I talk about every reaction as if you’ve done something because of me because I don’t know when our relationship is affected by outside influences and you won’t correct any of my assumptions.

When you give me no information, you can’t be angry I don’t have it. I wanted to correct that problem, and you bailed.

Nothing about this is my problem anymore. I just wanted to tell you yet again that my feelings/issues are valid. I deserved more than this. I deserve more than this.

Editor’s Note:

I should have told her I loved her at the end, but I didn’t. Everything in our relationship boils down to how I say things. If she focuses on my anger, it’s easier to push me away. So, to her, I do love you. More than you’ll ever know. See past e-mail for details.<3

Comfort

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 12 Comments

What are your favorite types of foods?

I want to tell you a secret.

When you become a professional cook, you stop cooking at home. You do not have the time or energy. There were nights when dinner was microwave popcorn over the sink, I was so tired. Just stuff a few handfuls in my mouth before I pass out. I also bought lots of junk food. We all do. Most cooks I know are absolutely obsessed with dino nuggets. Some of us even take the time to warm them up. 😉 My favorite is grocery store pizza, because it takes less time to put it in the oven than it does for delivery, and I can put whatever I want on it.

I want to tell you another secret.

Most, if not all professional cooks want you to invite them over for dinner just so they don’t have to cook it. We don’t care if it’s KD and ketchup. Just please, feed us without making us stand in front of the stove. We will help with dinner if you ask, but most cooks won’t go out of their way because they think it’s rude…. like we’re lording over a kitchen we don’t own. We’ve also been burned by people asking us to help out and then criticizing us as if we have no idea what we’re doing- or worse, something goes wrong and you’ll never live it down….. because professional cooks aren’t allowed to make mistakes, even among friends. We have to be arrogant on the line. There are too many people counting on us. But we cook the dishes in our restaurants over and over until they’re perfect.

You want something obscure, something that hasn’t been popular for 40 years, and we tell you that we’ll try. When it’s not impeccable, we can see the disappointment in your eyes, because you didn’t ask us to make something we’ve already made a thousand times and think it’s the same.

I liken it to handing someone a horn for the first time and asking them to play the third movement of the Hummel trumpet concerto four minutes later.

You’re expecting Carrnegie Hall when they don’t know a straight mute from a spit valve.

Let them have at least five more minutes……………..

Cooks rehearse like trumpet players, and are the same amount of obnoxious. I have been a trumpet player AND a cook, which means I have no problem being an absolute dick in the kitchen some of the time, because there are no seconds to spare. There aren’t even nanoseconds. Cooking is all about fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency and an almost fanatical devotion to the pope….. usually black, not cute red uniforms.

But make no mistake. The Spanish Inquisition is coming for you, and they generally look like waitstaff.

The thing is, though, you don’t go from read-through to full dress. You stage- pronounced stahj– which is basically “get your ass handed to you and if you survive, you might get the job.” These are all unpaid, though in most places they’ll either comp you a drink or make you something to eat (or both). In my stage at Denizen’s, the pub I worked for in Silver Spring, we did 300 covers that night. Just tickets on top of tickets and the entire kitchen was in full-tilt panic mode.

Rehearsal is actually during the performance, and if you fuck up anything, you just have to hope someone catches it before the food goes out. It’s your third day, not theirs.

It was a complete surprise to me that I got hired, but I did notice that I had improved considerably since my last gig. It really kept the imposter syndrome to a minimum. I had my share of shitty days, but I had to get this job. I wanted it more than anything else in the entire world. That’s because I had two reasons that gave me drive and passion for it.

The first is that I was married to a chef trained at a Cordon Bleu cooking school. she actually had her stripes. She paid $20,000 for her education, then gave me all of it for free. It is a gift I will never be able to repay, but the flip side of the coin is that I had to prove to myself that I was a cook, I wasn’t just riding her coattails.

The second is that my mother had just died, and I was a shell of a person. I was flat affect for months. I could barely take care of myself. Cooking brought me back to life. I had focus and drive on something besides earth-shattering grief. My mother was dead and yet the world kept turning as if nothing had happened, because if it did, I missed it. I was out of it during my own year of magical thinking. It took time, but I got my mojo back one hamburger at a time.

It is a gift I will never be able to repay.

In terms of the types of food I like to cook in the restaurant, I’ll tell you by station instead of dish. I like saute because it’s basically throwing prepped food into a pan, flipping it a few times, and pouring it onto a plate.

Editor’s Note: I like pantry the least because plating salads and desserts to look beautiful seems to require angle of convergence and depth perception, two things I was born without that make up 3D vision.

In terms of food I like to cook at home, I don’t. Home kitchens aren’t built like professional kitchens and when you get used to that much specialized equipment that cooking at home is a drag. I want a flat top and some scrapers, not whatever the fuck this is.

I want a gas stovetop, not electric. We can’t do that because the kitchen isn’t wired for it. I learned this because I asked Hayat for a gas stove after the fire, and I really like the electric one she bought. It’s just not the same because an electric range doesn’t let you refine the heat from the jump. I need to cook on an electric range a few times to learn the difference between three and four. On a gas range, I can just tell by how hi the flame is- consistent across brands.

If I am cooking at someone’s house for the first time, I sweat bullets because I am cooking on unfamiliar equipment with unfamiliar pans. You don’t think of this, but the thickness of pans varies, so you can’t always use the same amount of heat. At a restaurant, you don’t buy equipment piecemeal. All the saute pans are the same, all the rondeaus (wide thin pots) are the same, all the storage containers are the same. You don’t want anything to affect consistency.

The hardest part of getting an A team together in a restaurant is to make sure everyone makes everything to the same standard. If you’re on the B team (generally Sunday and Monday nights), you know why. You are not fit for Saturday night. You’re not even old enough to watch the show. Go sit in the corner.

If you start out on Mondays, when you get a Friday or a Saturday night it will feel like Ed McMahon showed up at your house with a big ass check.

The reason you need comfort food once you get off work is that all the food in the restaurant is so rich that sometimes you just want a sandwich.

In fact, it’s been 15 minutes since I wrote that last paragraph because I realized I hadn’t eaten dinner and it’s 0212. I had a cup of coffee way too late today, but it’s Sunday morning. I’m pretty sure I’ll still wake up at 0500, that’s automatic. But I’ll go back to sleep easily after I realize my entry is already done for today.

Instead of writing, I’ll roll out of bed and make my ultimate comfort food, breakfast. Yesterday I had scrambled eggs with pickled jalapenos, cheddar, and a dollop of plain yogurt. Nothing fancy except the difference between having made eggs every day of your life and making a hundred in three to five hours during every single brunch shift you’ve ever had.

That’s when dino nuggets taste best.

Every Day

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

How often do you walk or run?

I do not have a car, therefore I take the bus or the Metro everywhere. This leads to a good deal of walking, but I prefer it to driving. I didn’t think I’d like it at first, but I love all the guilt-free reading and writing time. I carry my Fire tablet and my Bluetooth keyboard everywhere, and it fits perfectly in my lap without making me take up more than my fair share of room. Plus, mobility is great for creation. My ideas come faster and more furious when I’m walking, and I’m grateful.

I never take walking for granted, although I will say up front I’m bad at it. I look untrained in the ways of walking sometimes because I have a mild case of cerebral palsy that affects my movement and balance. It is still preferable to what my life might be like if my CP was worse. I have empathy for everyone who struggles with physical issues, and there is no such thing as competitive suffering. I have perspective. I suffer much less than people with walkers or in wheelchairs, but it doesn’t mean that I don’t suffer at all.

I prefer walking when my friends are with me, because it’s ok for me to hold onto them when I need it. In fact, I think Zac prefers it. 😉 CP is not the only thing that makes me need to hold onto others. I don’t have depth perception, so sometimes I don’t lift my foot high enough for a step and trip. Sometimes I don’t judge the distance from the doorjamb to my shoulder correctly and hit it harder than one might think. I also have an alternating field of vision because my eyes don’t track together, so the worst I’ve ever been hurt is when I haven’t seen a step down. This is because my reflexes aren’t generally fast enough to save me. It is not unusual for me to have a scrape on my face because of it. I am generally covered in bruises, only some of which I can explain because it’s just too time consuming to walk back through my day and post-mortem.

When I’m exhausted, all of these issues get a hundred times worse.

My friends are helpful. Strangers are not. I have fallen and hurt myself to the point that my pants are ripped, my knee is skinned up, and there’s blood on my face…. yet no one has ever offered to help me up unless they already knew me. I do not expect strangers to help me, I’m just surprised because it’s hard for me to see other people in pain and not stop.

I would like to continue being surprised about this rather than jaded and bitter. No one is just like me, and few people are as empathetic, and I don’t mean this as “I’m all that and you’re trash.” I mean that my personality type, INFJ, is only present in 9-15% of the world’s population. We are the pastors, counselors, and social workers of the entire population. We are not all religious, but we are all spiritual. The reason we’re the empaths of the world is that we’re relentless in self discovery. We want to find us so we can find you.

People only understand each other to the level that they understand themselves, because when someone tells another their story, the listener is filtering it though all their life experiences. Whether the other person’s experience is good or bad is based on the listener’s first family, the partner they have with their family, and the way they have always operated.

I have been walking and thinking about this for 10 years now, because 10 years ago I had an experience for which very few people have filters. I didn’t know shit from Shinola™ and made a ton of mistakes. I grew from them, but I’ll never be the same person I was, either. It’s one of the reasons I love Doctor Who. We all have many lives, we just don’t change faces to do it. I never want to forget that story, nor the ones that proceeded from it. They are more beautiful to me as I age, because I never want to forget this version of me.

I am writing a story; I want it to be a good one in the end.

Right this moment, it is not good or bad. It is not time to choose. It is time to reflect, give myself distance, and pick up the pieces. My routine has changed greatly, and I am thankful for it…. most of the time. At others, the situation and people are so irreplaceable that it feels like I will never get over losing it. I set the ball in motion for all this happening, and that makes me even more prone to bouts of deep grief, because it’s harder to forgive yourself than anyone else.

If I do forgive myself, it will only be by putting one foot in front of the other, forging a new path…. without becoming so bitter and jaded that I’m unable to forgive and forget. Not only do I not want to close the door permanently, it would be incredibly unfair of me to do so considering how many times I’ve walked away and reneged. I just don’t want to go out of my way to fix things anymore. Eventually, you start noticing when a relationship has no return on investment, because we were not checking the story we were telling ourselves. It was off to an enormous degree. It hurt that my arguments were always shut down; that I was not allowed to need anything while she was allowed to ask for everything and receive it, no questions asked. The imbalance was okay for a while. Too long, actually. The last straw for me was the person who brought those circumstances into my life disagreed with me for many reasons, and wouldn’t tell me what they were.

We fought tooth and nail, when that wasn’t my goal at all. Depending on the day, we were each trying to hug a cactus. We would be able to complete each other and celebrate our differences if we were both willing to slow our roll. Our adrenaline ran too high, and we crashed. Neither one of us has it in us anymore.

But even when I’m angry, she’s still my favorite person. I call her Supergrover because even when I think she’s acting monstrous, she’s still cuddly, adorable, and blue. Ok, maybe not that last one. But she does have a double master’s in irreverence and profanity. We are so much alike that it’s easy to see how we got here. People generally hate things in other people that they hate about themselves.

We are sitting back to back, unable or unwilling to simply turn around…..

And walk back towards the other.

Absolutely, with Caveats -or- 1800 People

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Do you see yourself as a leader?

I am not a traditional leader, and I never will be. I have had the best examples of leadership in the entire world, and my process was stopping feeling inferior to them. My way of leading is just different because when the Internet went large scale, into personal computers when it was military-only before, I was an early adopter. I disappeared into that world because I’m a better writer than conversationalist, and other people wouldn’t say that about me at all.

It has everything to do with how comfortable I am writing alone and in front of people. Other people do not perceive this about me, it’s my own observation about myself. I feel happier writing alone because focusing on social propriety gives me nausea. I don’t feel relaxed in a crowd.

I lead by seclusion because I don’t have to organize events and ask you to be here. Everyone just drops by and takes what they need. Sometimes they talk to me. Sometimes they stay silent. It all matters.

For instance, I know I have roughly 1800 people between Facebook and WordPress that choose to receive updates every single day. My web stats, meaning people who visit the site without a notification from me, are exponentially larger than that. I have an awareness that I’m not Elvis or anything, but if I say something, i need to know people are listening. I don’t think of my words as innocuous. I don’t have that luxury. I shouldn’t even have the luxury of leaving in typos, but I do. That’s because I don’t have the courage to write and edit. If I go back to fix something before a piece is published, I will get so bogged down in my own insecurities that I won’t publish at all. Nothing is ever good enough when there are 1800 people receiving your words the *moment* you hit “Post.”

I think of it as power for good and evil that all of these essays are written in one shot, don’t even look at it. Part of it is erasing imposter syndrome. I don’t “want to be a writer someday.” I am a writer now. My audience never has to get any bigger for me to feel validated, because I know that if I had been a pastor instead of a writer, I would be an even bigger deal in my community because people would see me getting up in front of 1800 people every Sunday morning. I “preach” every morning like it’s Sunday and I am ridiculously happy about that because I like the feel of leadership without having to attend any committee meetings. The other part of it is that if I hit post before I read something, I get to be a fan, too.

I like looking at myself as if I don’t know me. I love me like I love The Bloggess. I love me like I love Wil Wheaton. I love me like I love Dooce. No one can tell me I’m less talented than they are. it would have been amazing to have us all in one room. I’ve met Wil, but not Jenny and Heather (Dooce). It destroys me that I’ll never meet Heather, because we would have had the same witty banter I had with Wil. It’s a unique crowd, because we were the first wave of bloggers…. or at least, Wil, Heather, and I were.

Jenny started a little later than we did and I’m so happy for her success, because our content deals with the same stuff. Sometimes even the same mental health issues. In fact, she was just talking about how she made a coloring book for adults and I asked her a question I thought needed asking. “Have you thought of writing a children’s book about Beyonce?” For the uninitiated, Beyonce is Jenny’s giant metal rooster, though I think Jenny would do a bang up job on a children’s book about Queen Bey. Of course I do. We’re all Texans.

Because I am comfortable with the level of notoriety I have right now, I am not focused on driving engagement. Engagement has become self-sustaining. I don’t have to constantly advertise because other people will tell their friends to read me. I hate advertising myself. I’d rather keep my head down and let others do the talking.

I am not trying to fit into another person’s reality, shoving content into their faces. I am inviting you to mine. This is my weird little world. I own it. I wrote the charter. By thinking of my web site as me and one other person- all of you boiled down to a singular “you” in my mind), I don’t have to feel the anxiety of preaching, singing, or playing an instrument in front of a crowd. I have no social anxiety when I’m writing. A ton of anxieties, to be sure, but none of them having to do with being in public. My reactions are my own, tightly controlled. By that I mean I will cry and scream and beat the wall and tear my clothes and all of those things, it’s just in the privacy of my own home.

I tell you things I can’t tell anyone else, because I don’t force conversations to go my way, either. I don’t mean my desired outcome, I mean the path the conversation takes isn’t entirely dependent on me in public…. here, it would be a disaster area if I couldn’t hold up my end of the conversation while you’re not in the room…. and that’s how I think of our relationship. We are very close, even if you don’t know it.

Barbie and Me

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 4 Comments

I saw “Barbie” this morning and I ugly cried all the way through it. I wanted my mom, or at the very least, the numerous friends that have mom energy holding me up in her stead. The first thing that made me cry is that Barbie has always been the ideal woman, which means that I’ve hated her most of my life. I’m genderqueer, and people that generally love Barbies don’t love me. I didn’t become “Weird Barbie.” I was born that way. The tears flowed into the ugly cry when Barbie listens to The Indigo Girls in her car. The second is that Weird Barbie was coded as lesbian (haircut, Birkenstock, etc.) Seeing all the Barbies accept her in the end was magnificent. Weird girls are their missing demographic. That’s because my reaction to Barbie has always been that it teaches women what a woman is and is not. That has never included people who look like me. There is no genderqueer/nonbinary Barbie. There is no lesbian Barbie because I’m not sure they could do that without breaking the rules of the Barbie universe.

It teaches straight, cis, hetero women that I am not a woman as well, because I don’t have “girl interests.” I don’t think like a stereotypical woman……….. anymore. I have felt all the body shaming, queer shaming, gender expression shaming, and all that comes with it. When I was a teenager, I got called fat at 130 pounds and took the most dangerous diet pill on the market to combat it. Phen-phen didn’t do anytihng for me, but it made me feel like I was doing something about how I felt rather than sitting there and feeling sorry for myself.

I haven’t always been this small, but it’s a whole ball of wax on its own. I do not recommend my diet plan to anyone ever at all. I have to take Adderall XR sometimes. I take drug holidays from it a lot because I cannot stand the appetite suppression. I’m small because I can go two days before I remember I haven’t eaten anything, and not because I want to. When the situation is dire, food doesn’t sound good at all. Even the thought of it makes me nauseous. I have said this before, but I’ve cried in a grocery store because I had to feed myself for a week and I couldn’t find anything that actually sounded good.

Drinking isn’t a problem, so I try to load up on protein shakes because they’re easy on my stomach when I’ve developed a block against eating. The worst it’s ever gotten was that I was down to 110 pounds. I arrived in DC looking like a heroin addict and I was totally sober. That wasn’t all due to medication, though. I was under a lot of stress with the divorce, the move, the homesickness, the everything. DC is my city, but it still took a while to reestablish myself.

I’ve gained weight, and I can’t decide if I look better or worse, but I feel better so the weight is staying. I already deal with feelings of inadequacy because I’m so small that most of my clothes are from “The Children’s Place.” I wear a large in boys,’ and the reason I put up wtih tags on my clothes that advertise that fact is because I like men’s clothes better, but even the small is too large in some brands.

It harps on my self-esteem to an enormous degree because when my sister and I are walking and talking around the city, it looks like a grown ass woman and her weird little nephew (this is not far from the truth of our relationship, tbh). It’s been a process to just accept what I like. Who cares if I buy kids’ clothes? They fit better, and that’s most important. If I buy an Oxford from a men’s shop, the shoulder seam will go halfway down my arm and it looks like I’m wearing my granddad’s clothes (this is not fucking awesome). So, in order to look like the clothes were made for me, I like the expensive stuff. All the stuff your sons will grow out of in a New York minute will last the rest of my life. My favorite brands are Nautica and Tommy Hilfiger. Thanks to all your sons, I can buy a $50 Tommy H Oxford on e-bay for six bucks. At Goodwill, kids’ clothes are practically free. 😉

The Children’s Place is a new favorite because they sell basics in a ton of colors.

It comes with a price, though.

Women and men look at me like I’m an alien most of the time until we start talking. Then, they’re drawn in by my personality. I’m one of those people that can talk to anyone about anything. Two things about that. The first is that I know a little bit aboout most things, if not everything. So, I can seem brilliant long enough to fool people. 😉 The second is that like I’ve said before, I have a Southern pastor vibe, so people tend to spill things to me that they wouldn’t share with anyone else. I’ve had people tell me the worst stories of their lives on the Metro. I once talked to a bus driver in Portland that confided in me that he was five hours sober now (that was terrifying). And if you don’t want me to know something, don’t tell me because I’m bad at forgetting things. I won’t tell anyone what you said, but I will write about reverberations from it. I don’t have the right to tell other people’s stories, but I do have the right to talk about how their lives have bled into mine. So, if said bus driver runs across this, I still remember and it was 26 years ago. It was a long ride, PDX to Lewis and Clark. I honestly felt llike I had to keep him talking because I wanted to observe his speech patterns to know whether he was tellling the truth about being sober or if I needed to get the hell out of Dodge.

Being the type person that everyone wants to tell their secrets to has a cost as well.

I have unconsciously been everyone’s pastor without going to divinity school and everyone’s counselor without a license. If you’re the sort of person that is currrently writing this off as bullshit, I had to give up all of that because my secret-keeping ability was at full capacity and I was living the lives of the people I’d heard instead of my own. All my energy was pouring into them in every conversation. I was conserving approximatelly zero percent for myself. When you’ve always been that person and you learn to negotiate boundares, you get “PNG’d back to Langley” (slang for treating an officer as a persona non grata and giving them a desk job, very much like the old dude in “Slow Horses.”). This is because people who are used to getting everything they want from you all the time now think you’re an asshole because you’ve realized that they’ve expected you to be there for them, but they have their own boundaris intact and you don’t. So, they’ll dump on you as hard as they can and won’t be there to help you pick up the pieces because they’re not stupid enough to give away as much energy as I do.

This is a universal problem, and knows no boundaries. Most relationships are like this. One is the leader, one is the follower. Generally, this is because women are taught from birth to be fixer/pleasers in relationships with men, who certainly have their boundaries in place because no one calls them on it. Same sex couples have the same issues, particularly lesbians, because the role of fixer/pleaser becomes muddled there when you’ve been enculturated the same way. I wasn’t raised to be queer, therefore I have all the heteronormative bullshit internalized homophobia that most if not all queer people carry their whole lives because there is no escape.

So.

I can deal with being thought of as Weird Barbie, but I will not play the game. Zac knows he’s my equal. He would never in his lifetime tell me to do anything. He’s the one who will show up for me. I got that relationship because I knew enough to want it. Why wouldn’t I want to find someone emotionally unavailable to please when that’s how male/female relationships are set up in the first place?

Doesn’t matter if it’s a wine and yoga pants girlfriend or a U-Haul girlfriend, we’re going to have that shitty, enculturated reaction to each other if we’re not careful. We can either do everything to please each other because that’s what we’ve been taught to do, or we can have it out. My choice now is to have it out, because even if there’s a fight of thermonuclear war proportions, it’s still better than holding everything inside and feeling like there’s no room for me no matter its size. I will not stuff anything down because I know what it does to my mental health when I do. I feel absolutely worthless. If there’s no blame to be had, I’ll make it up just to torture myself a little better.

No one on earth can hurt me worse than I can. And “Barbie” showed me that my feelings aren’t unique or special.

I am, though.

Honestly

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What’s your favorite word?

The reason “honestly” is my favorite word is that it rhymes just for me. If you ask me what I mean, I will tell you that I can’t do that. It only rhymes for me. It’s not even an inside joke. It’s music only I can hear…. a waltz, and Strauss is about to bring in the horns.

I love music honestly and completely, the most pure thing in my life because there’s nothing a choir and orchestra can’t fix. In my head, anyway. When I’m sad or angry, two things happen. The first is that I sing it out. The second is that I conduct it out.

The last time I had to conduct about a problem, it was Desplait. Alexandre Desplait wrote the score to “Argo,” and conducting anything on that album is a full body workout. I am a terrible conductor. Just terrible. I don’t do it to get better. I do it to get exhausted.

It’s the only way I really fall asleep. I have never slept much, and people kid me all the time. “Do you ever sleep?” is popular in my crowd, but it’s true I don’t need much. Most of the time I go to bed at midnight and wake up at 0500 unprompted. This week it’s a little different because I can tell that my mood is swinging upward, and I don’t know that because of mood and behavior. The only real side effect that I have consistently with hypomania is insomnia. I feel lucky that it’s not worse, but it’s like getting my period. I am tired and in pain all the time because of brain race. Why can’t I sleep if I’m so tired? My body is not running the show. If my brain says it’s an all nighter, my body will fight it tooth and nail. When that happens, I can take 75 or 100mg of Benedryl and it won’t do a damn thing.

I’ll have to see a doc about it eventually, but I’m a writer so I hardly notice. Have I been writing for three hours or three days? It is always a mystery when I’m finished writing as to the date, day, and time. Luckily, I can look it up quickly. I just notice that finishing writing is a lot like waking up in the morning- discombobulating because you don’t know where you are after writing, either. But that’s what makes writing worth it. If you are a writer, fiction or non, you get to live in three worlds instead of just waking and dreaming. The characters and research turn into plot and setting. You cannot see anything outside of it while thoughts are pouring forth. A bear could rip out the back wall on my house and if I was writing, I wouldn’t even notice. I don’t even need headphones most of the time.

I’m not saying that my process is any different because I have it wired and other authors don’t. I am explaining a universal concept. All writers are more than one person. Even with non-fiction, there’s your writing personality and your physical space personality. Sometimes those are the same. Sometimes they’re not. I hope Karen Slaughter is a “not.” 😉

I take responsibility for everything I write, because I know that I’m influencing culture. My platform has gotten bigger over the years, but so many people have repeated the things I’ve written/said as their own that I hear my own words out of someone else’s mouth a lot…… particularly when they’re forgetful because I have the memory of an elephant for what I read. I can remember conversations with Supergrover nearly verbatim because being friends virtually meant I had to read everything to respond. That’s the way I take in information the best. So, part of the reason that she thinks I’m judging her is that I’m actually using her words and she doesn’t remember that she said them. I don’t mean that in a “gotcha” kind of way. I remember everything she’s said, not just the words that hurt. That’s because she’s a great writer and I try to quote her as much as I can because the way she said something fits an occasion perfectly and I got nothin.’

I can’t talk about my writing without talking about my inspiration.

Honestly.

Nothing -or- Bow Before Me, for I Am Root

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What are you doing this evening?
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It’s been a whirlwind of a few days, so tonight I am sitting in front of my computer. Not by choice, really. I need the quiet. I crave it. Tonight, though, I’m rescuing a computer that I hosed myself. I’ve only been working with partitions and drives for 30 years. One of these days, I’ll make some progress. Anyway, I run Ubuntu Cinnamon and Windows 10, but I don’t use Windows except when I want to play Skyrim, so a quarter to never. I’m not a big gamer. I’m interested in how computers work and I know what I’m doing all the way up until I don’t. The best thing ever is cloud storage, because I don’t spend much time on anything. I reformat the whole thing and start over.

Today I thought I wouldn’t have to. I used timeshift to back up my hard drive in case I hated what I was installing (Kubuntu, to try out KDE Plasma), which is like Time Machine on a Mac. I thought I had a complete copy of everything. Turns out I do, but the version I restored the drive from was not the same, so the files didn’t overwrite properly. That means I was trying to boot into two versions of linux at once. Guess what? It didn’t work. I said “fuck” a lot and then got back to it. Linux gonna linux, but Wes Borg was right. Every OS sucks in its own particular way. Like in relationships, you just have to decide which disk flags you’re going to ignore. That was a little partition manager humor for you there.

For 90% of you, I can’t explain the joke without you falling asleep. Just nod and laugh. I change topics a lot. Lean in.

I’m feeling punchy because I had to use DOS. That doesn’t make sense unless you’ve been a linux user for years, because I don’t know about other IT guys, but I constantly type linux commands in DOS and get way too angry at the fact that it doesn’t work. Within linux, it’s the same way. In Ubuntu, the extension for an installer is .deb, like Windows .exe. In Red Hat/Fedora/CentOS, the extension is .rpm.

I was once looking at the folder that says RPMS in the command line and still typed sudo dpkg -i *.deb. But that’s nothing compared to the number of times I’ve reinstalled drivers because something didn’t work and then discovered after much tearing of hair that it was off/unplugged. This is very, very easy to do with network printers, when the printer could be on a different floor. Because SURE AS SHIT no employee will tell you correctly whether it is on or off. Ask a server administrator how many times they’ve driven three hours to press a button. Don’t wonder why we’re dicks anymore, because that number shouldn’t even have to be greater than one, but it is.

I laughed so hard I nearly died the first time I read “Bastard Operator from Hell.” My friend Donnie and I nearly had to call an ambulance for both of us when we heard “Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie” do “Welcome to the Internet Helpdesk.” The latter is really funny because it’s what users say to us. The former is what it would be like if we could get revenge. There is always so much “don’t want to” in “can’t.” That’s because it’s learned helplessness. Why be in any way knowledgable if someone always comes to bail you out? That’s our job and it’s okay, but years and years of questions like “can you install Firefox for me?” are great. Easy. The facepalm is when the user says, “do I have to turn my computer on?” I have also had people want me to walk them through how to do something in M$ Office when their computer is at home and they’re calling from the car. Even if I could explain it without you doing it while I’m talking, how would you ever retain that information? You’ll call back.

Being a woman in IT Support is very hard. I mean, it’s hard anyway because it’s soul sucking to watch people be that stupid that consistently. I wouldn’t sound like such a dickhead if the problem wasn’t so dire. But it’s worse for me because there are simply some people who refuse to believe I know something about computers. Some days they’re right. 😉 (Reminds me of an overhead voice at the Spy Museum that says “you’ll have to survive on your wits.” I turned around and said, “grrrrrrrrl, we fucked up now. I’m like Josh and Toby from The West Wing. If I miss wheels up and Donna wasn’t with me I’d have to buy a house.) Though I’m a bit spacey at times because I’ve forgotten more than I’ll ever know about computers, if you got a problem, yo I’ll solve it. I have managed the impossible with data recovery more than once…… as well as doing a lot of other people’s work for them because they just don’t want to do it. I understand if it’s a technical issue with the operating system. But when your entire job is putting courses online and you try to pass it off on IT because you have a technical issue every 30 minutes because you won’t learn anything about the software you’re PAID TO USE, that adds up, especially when the questions are about where buttons are laid out and you’ve helped them eight times that day. It’s the equivalent of getting frustrated and going to the bathroom at school to take a break. And you can feel guilt free about it becaue it’s not a problem with you. It’s a problem with your computer.

At other times, things spiral because people aren’t thinking. Their computer doesn’t work, and the electricity is out. Or they’ve plugged the power strip into itself instead of the wall (yes, really. I figured it out over the phone, but it took 45 minutes because I never would have assumed to check something like that. He said it was plugged in, and there weren’t camera phones back then.) It’s gotten a lot easier with remote desktop and the fact that when I ask people for pictures or screenshots, they can do that on their phones. Most people don’t know how to use screenshot programs on a PC, but they can do it on an iPhone.

Even iPhones have their issues, though. One of the professors I worked with couldn’t get her iPhone to play music in the classroom. She called IT, but the only problem was that the aux cable didn’t fit through the case.

When you get into web development, two things about that. The first is that people tell you they only want you to do the design, but they have a million changes to add in terms of copy even though I’ve set it up where they don’t have to use HTML tags at all (a content management system like WordPress). They don’t want to manage their web site, they want you to do it. They’re no good at computers. They’re making $150,000 a year to learn that kind of software, because sure as shit the person that asked me to make said web site is going to be “in charge of social media.”

The second is that web sites are like art. Everyone wants the art, no one wants to pay for it. You can design the most fabulous site in the entire world, and they’ll tell you that. Many times. You give them the bill, and it’s the shittiest web site they’ve ever seen. Plus, friends and acquaintances won’t think anything of asking you for hours and hours of coding for the “exposure.”

I would not like to work for more people that don’t want to pay me, and there’s an “Argo” quote for every occasion. I’m paraphrasing Lester, but “exposure ain’t worth the buffalo shit on a nickel.”

The other thing is that when people ask you to make a web site, you’ll give them a flat fee for the code. But they’ll call you every time they have a change for the next ten years and get angry if you say it’s $40/hr. They want you to do it for free, forever.

And now you know why I have such a hell of a time as a cook. There are no Karens there.