0930 and 0530

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

What time do you go to bed and wake up currently?

If it seems like I’m really old, I’m going to be 46 on my next birthday. Sometimes I feel old, sometimes I feel like three little boys in a trench coat. Waking up so early doesn’t come from anything but being able to be creative in a much more solid manner, because morning is when I write best. I always write something that early, even if I don’t publish it until later because I’ve taken a break and we still have shit to discuss.

Just yet another reason my beautiful girl would have dumped me in a heartbeat. Don’t poke the bear.

And yet it would be worth it because I didn’t settle for fine. I got hit by lightning.

It’s not lost on me that someone else has to deal with her when she wakes up, because fuck. That’s what he’s for. We both had different roles, and in retrospect it’s the best thing that could have happened.

I am really annoying at 0530 to people who don’t have a circadian rhythm that wakes them up naturally and they feel good. I have learned over time that it’s the best time to write because I can sit quietly until everyone has had coffee.

It helped me to get past what she didn’t want to think of him as an ally. I’m so thankful to him in ways he’ll never understand if she doesn’t tell him that. It would have been a big moment for us to look at each other and understand. The fact that I didn’t get it says everything to me about what my beautiful girl meant in terms of friendship,

For her, I was a hot mess because she didn’t know me. She didn’t take the time to say “now that I’ve talked to you in person, you seem more solid than you’ve ever been. However you are now, you’re good.”

Meanwhile, if I continue the analogy of my sister being my first priority and not my wife, the baby’s needs woke me up every night.

And that’s the crux of the last 10 years. I could hate her for it, but I don’t. I’m letting her off the hook in a way she never let me, and to be the bigger person makes me happy….. mostly because I’m so much smaller. It’s not that she’s so much bigger. It’s that I am about as tall as a party size bag of Doritos and about a buck 25 soaking wet. She looks like a real adult with suits and crap and everything.

To let her off the hook is to release her back from whence she came and just feel peaceful about that. I can do all my emotional work here. She doesn’t have to look at it. But she damn sure will. She has to make sure I’m not a problem to be solved, because she knew I’d be a problem for her and she told me that very, very recently. Why I didn’t tell her I thought that was a dick move, I don’t know. But she thought I was trying to meet someone for the sole purpose of making her blood pressure boil, a running theme because she thinks I seem to do everything that way, because she’s being a jackass and not listening. Jackass is, of course, not a permanent state (estoy, not soy). So, she can think I’m a judgmental dickhead for all eternity, because I have a lot more pet names than that. I will never let go of “judgmental dickhead,” because that’s all she let me be.

The problem is that I very much wasn’t.

She had someone who’d absolutely bleed out for her, and reacted poorly to it. I’m guessing because she thought she’d heard this story before and used all her heuristics to tell her she was fucked.

The problem is that she very much wasn’t.

I loved her, she tolerated me, and she didn’t think that way. She thought that talking at me and sending me stuff was enough and to just shut up about it. That’s because she wanted to be a fan, and I wanted to be a friend. So she didn’t set down boundaries and acted as if I was out to get her.

I wasn’t responsible for what she understood, and yet, I stayed. Things eventually got to fantastic and then slashed into ribbons once again. That’s because we couldn’t solve the base issue. She’s a thinker. I’m a feeler. She doesn’t understand touchy feely crap. I don’t understand treating your friends as if you don’t have any.

For the last eight years, only her pain has mattered.

She made the choice to keep her pain away from me, so I couldn’t help her be less angry. I couldn’t call her out on being avoidant. I couldn’t call her out on playing games, because she insisted that she doesn’t do passive aggression or play games. She is firm in her belief, and then I get shit like “I don’t have time, of course, not good enough for you.” I never said that being busy was a problem. Her being a judgmental dickhead was the problem, because she’s every bit the asshole I am. The game was “how long can I get away from feeling guilty?” and “no, nothing is wrong. Someday you’ll realize I’ll tell you when something’s wrong.” Fuck THAT. No, you won’t. You’ve proven it for eight years.

She’s not the sort of person that looks too deeply at patterns, so we had the same fight eight times and she never noticed because she didn’t want to. In the beginning, she didn’t understand why I pulled back and didn’t talk to her for three months and called me on it and I said nothing, because I was in over my head and it had nothing to do with her. Every time we talked, it wasn’t a thought exercise. It was strengthening our bond and only making me want to dive deeper into her at a time I couldn’t afford it.

When I took my armor off about it, I told her that it was getting damn hard to look in the mirror because I felt so guilty. If I’d ever looked up polyamory, it would have helped. I am unsure whether it would happen again, but I was over the moon for both her and Dana. I have enough love in my heart for both of them, especially since I was married, so it provided a natural safety net until I spiraled out with bipolar bullshit.

It was navigating how much of me both of them could have that got difficult. Before that break, neither one of us went an hour without talking. It was the most intense relationship I’d ever had, because it caused such a struggle within me that made Dana jealous and her deeply uncomfortable. I was fucked six ways from Sunday, and the only answer was to disengage. I didn’t tell her all that at first. I just disappeared and it mystified her.

How she had no interest in learning why I felt that way, I’ll never know. Because even though she knew some of it, she didn’t ask any questions, either. She didn’t recognize that even if it was always platonic, I’d always need her. I’d always need her to look over my blog (it was only creepy when she was doing it behind my back), and I’d always need to be able to reach out because I’m a moron and she’s not. Instead of letting me go off the deep end, she could have helped create the narrative, because none of my shit includes how she felt. It’s only a guess.

I never felt like she saw the situation as the problem. She thought it was her. She moved me deeply, challenged me, made me want to fight together instead of each other. We were never back to back shooting out. We had guns on the table, pointing toward each other (I don’t want to argue about semantics, I just want the protein). She thought I wanted it that way, when I just wanted her on my six.

She didn’t seem to get that once the fight was over, all I wanted was to move on and let ourselves connect, but too much happened to make that a reality on both sides. If she eventually remembers who I am to her, She will not be received with open arms unless she’s willing to own her shit and give me what I need. In short, stop dicking me over and stop saying that you wish our relationship never happened because you have this wrongheaded idea that I also think it shouldn’t have happened.

I absolutely think that the relationship should have happened, I just don’t think we should have moved so fast. We excited each other’s brains, but she excited my body as well because she could. Not that she was malicious or held any culpability in my feelings. I mean that if I’d been straight, too, none of this happens. It didn’t happen because she said she didn’t want it and did, or did anything to promote that kind of behavior. I’m just not sure she was aware that she’d be playing with fire, even though I told her that and she still showed up…. so, okay. You’re not threatened.

She couldn’t see the forest for the trees, and that’s not her fault. She’s not enculturated the same way.

So, she’s telling me things that would spark anyone’s interest in her and was completely oblivious. That’s not her fault, either.

However, she could have helped Dana and me immensely if she’d told us she had a boyfriend already. I thought I was flirting with someone who was single, and then I REALLY freaked the fuck out. That is not my wheelhouse, and lesbian wasn’t hers, either.

There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that she thought she was protecting me, and it did. It protected me from seeing reality. By the time she lowered the boom, I couldn’t walk away for love or money. Still can’t in some ways. Obviously. I wouldn’t write about it if I didn’t care.

What has been good is seeing how much of my crap was harmful and not internalizing it as “everything everywhere at once is all your fault.” It wasn’t all fighting, either. Some of it was just miscommunication because for as much as we thought we knew each other, we were strangers.

For instance, it was idiotic to say she’d marry Brene Brown, and not because I wanted her to marry me. It was that she was kidding and straight women do that too much of the time while ignoring the fact that it would hurt me. Why wouldn’t it? If straight women want to get married, that’s fine. I don’t care. But qualify it. It’s not a marriage. It’s a Boston marriage. The difference is that Brene Brown will never invite her to metaphorical dick o’clock. And I know her well enough to know she’d think that was fucking hysterical, so I’m leaving it in even if she finds it.

Straight girls, stop doing that shit. It fucks us up.

That’s because now we know you think our marriages are playtime.

If you think that, then you’ve probably never seen what we want to do to you and how we know you’ll react. That’s because we’ve been with enough women who didn’t think they were bisexual before scream so loud the neighbors needed cigarettes. The fact that you want the Fisher Price version of that tells me all I need to know.

It’s time for them to throw away their fucking rainbow pins, because when push comes to shove, lesbian marriage isn’t real.

You’re not bad people, it’s just not funny. It’s taking something serious and making light of something serious, mostly because you think we’re just like you. That we’re besties who just happen to dig each other more than you dig Pam at the office.

If you believe that, you’ve never seen a butch work a room, and I am NOT talking about me. If I was, Zac would call bullshit and I’d get sued for false advertising. I do not need that today. 😛 (But I do need Zac and Oliver.)

Do they really think that women’s sexuality is that tame? It’s wild, hair pulling passion, and I’m not going to tamper that down for her or anyone else, and I don’t mean in terms of pursuit. I mean in terms of understanding that if you’re an ally, you don’t know shit. Stop pretending you do.

It wakes me up at 0530.

Your Blog Makes You Sound Like a Dick, Part II

July 12, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What strategies do you use to increase comfort in your daily life?

One of my now former friends said that to me, and I will never let go of it because it makes me angry and it’s also the truth. It makes me angry because I’m a spectrum. I have every emotion known to God and man coursing through me all the days of my life. To overfocus on my anger and not accept my love is based on what you see, not what you get. I am responsible for what I say. I am not responsible for what you understand. If you go into it looking for the fact that I’m an asshole with a God complex, you’ll fucking find it. This is my web site. It is the only thing I own cold, therefore it’s the one space I have in my life to figure out who I really am. You don’t want to see the actual struggle? I can recommend quite a few web sites that are crappier than mine. Enjoy.

However, if you focus on all the love inside me, you’ll find that, too.

I do not want to be the sort of person that lives to please anyone, especially now.

Remember I was talking about a guy who wanted to date me that completely went off the deep end and I laid down some truth for him? He deactivated his Facebook account. Therefore, I know he overfocused on “I don’t want to waste time on a man I don’t know” and not “if you want to know me, do it.” I meant that he was already so into it that I didn’t have a chance to catch my breath before he was talking marriage. Again, it had been a little over a week.

This is someone that I could see being friends with and possibly more down the road, but I’m not going to commit to anything on no information. I ran headlong into my beautiful girl before I knew what was up, and it was a mistake. I was reading over our conversations last night, and it has been a dumpster fire from the beginning. We bonded, and then spent the next ten years trying to undo it. We fought gloves off, constantly, and it became harder and harder to remain calm because writing letters to each other was just a clarion call to attack, because on the Internet, that’s what people do. They become disconnected from their compassion because of the wall of anonymity.

I think that’s why I don’t meet many people in person. I need to think in longhand, because I want to make things clear. I cannot do it as easily while talking, because I’m generally too flustered to get things out.

In the deep dive, here’s something that struck me as funny. At about 3 years, I started borrowing style and structure from her. Without even realizing it, she was fighting with herself in a different body. She Googled it, and she did not like it. My words in the way she would say them drove her up the fucking wall, and I didn’t even realize it so I couldn’t fix it. If you knew her, that boundaries conversation with “Michael” would have been out of central casting, and I doubt she would deny it.

At ten years, I am so much more comfortable writing because she whipped my ass into shape. It was like exercise. What I didn’t do was develop breathing techniques to kill the burn in my muscles. I’d put out feelings, she’d go nuclear. She said something about her ire only being in response to my shitty words, and that’s not true in the slightest. She took a sword and made patterns on my skin, drops of blood gathering at my brow, because I couldn’t afford to lose her and she was slipping through my fingers. She was right and I was wrong, but that didn’t stop the trauma bond from making me feel like I needed a hit.

Most people would think that’s because I’m a narcissist. That is incorrect. I was groomed by one, so when I was a teen/tween I craved her physically and she craved me mentally, because she was all about getting those dopamine hits. In retrospect, it was the best thing that ever happened for me that she finally decided we were done. I was discarded, and it felt like death.

I was reborn, and she was absolutelyfuckingnot.

So, when my beautiful girl and I trauma dumped, my physical reaction was based (somewhat- ngl, not all of it) on my past history, not what she actually said. I do not mean catching feelings. I mean the physical feeling of craving dopamine that’s now missing and finding things to replace it. The way I know I’m not a narcissist is that I recognize the symptoms for what they are and I am working on the problem. I am not trying to find a new “source…” I am fining that I am having fun being a creative and not worrying about my relationships.

Bryn makes gummy bears for a head shop, and she takes pictures of them for brochures and stuff. She said she needed a theme, and I said, “Teddy Bears’ Picnic.” She ran with it and did a balloon, a blanket, some ants, etc. I said, “I know you weren’t on Worship Team, but this is what it was like. Take a theme and fill in the details.”

It was actually good remembering a Big Yellow House memory that was good…… at first. Then, I got frustrated because I thought, “this is not a real church.” Pastors don’t have debates with people over whether we can drink at meetings….. although in other parishes, it would have helped a lot. No one asked me, but you can’t drink at church. Ever. I absolutely participated because I was new and they weren’t. Plus, it wasn’t like we were getting wasted. It was like having a working lunch with one drink. But if you drink at meetings, you’re excluding people who don’t drink and church isn’t about excluding anyone. People who choose not to drink are in a different situation than people who can’t drink. Alcohol is everywhere they look, and it’s hard to sit through a meeting without losing your mind when you need the dopamine so bad. Pastors aren’t supposed to be that person, the one that steps over complaints as if they are invalid.

The next pastor walked into a shit show and didn’t even blink. It was fascinating watching her “handle” a congregation. I mean, she fucking kicked ass and took names in a “no, we’re not going to do that” kind of way. She also never picked favorites, made them her inner circle, and actively sabotaged congregational growth so she could micromanage it. We got healthy over the next few years, and she is personally responsible. She stepped up in a big way, and I will never forget it.

It’s why I’m frustrated that I had no trust capital with my abuser’s partner, because she never asked me anything. She knew she was GREAT. She didn’t even have to ask me. There were several ordained pastors and preacher’s kids in the congregation. Not gonna lie here, either. I have no idea how those ordained pastors put up with her shit, and I’d definitely want to have THAT conversation.

For all practical intents and purposes, she was the stepdad with anger management issues. She saw me as a threat, and treated me as such. The carnage in her wake was also massive, because she couldn’t find objectivity with a map and a flashlight. It bothered me that she wouldn’t talk to me about complaints, because I saw her as a parent who needed help and she………….. did not. It all made sense to me, though, because she was my abuser’s partner. Eventually the abusive relationship settled into our version of “normal.” This is because since I thought of them as parents, I went to visit and then basically to live with them.

Why would I do that if she told the partner she thought I would go away? When the abuser was single, she was all about me coming to live with her because sh thought I needed to get out of the Bible Belt, and she wasn’t wrong. Portland was good for me, even though she dumped me within a month. She stopped hanging out with me and found a new source, pretending she wasn’t having an affair and everyone talking shit behind her back. By that time, the spell was broken for me. I said nothing, but I realized yesterday that her partner is also a victim in all of this.

For instance, Dana’s and my joke was always that there would come a time when _________ smothered would smother her partner with a pillow, and quietly go live with ______. I don’t care if my abuser likes the mirror, or whether the woman she had an affair with does either. Here’s why. I could fill that position with one of a hundred names. Even if she wasn’t fucking them, she had them by the short and curlies. I couldn’t get away, so they couldn’t either…… they were just smarter and eventually lost their minds like I did. It just didn’t take 23 years.

Things were good because I didn’t see myself as abused, I just didn’t understand the panic attacks and from where they were coming. They were flashbacks to being dicked around. They were flashbacks of all the confusion regarding drugs, sex, relationship issues, you name it. I was 14. I was the lockbox for her secrets and lies because she wanted it and I gave it willingly. I just didn’t know what contract I was signing.

Here’s the reason I started talking.

Her college friends came to visit and one of them told me that yes, she had wanted to sleep with me. When she denied it, her voice was fucking dead. She’s a sociopath, and I knew it then. No one goes into that tone, scary and emotionless, when they’re trying to lay the truth on the table.

Say I’m wrong. Say she was absolutely telling the truth. If you were me, would you have believed her, knowing her capacity for lovebombing and discarding? So, I took her shitty behavior and wanted to sleep with the messenger, because the given me the truth. It wasn’t believing them over her so much as it was a pattern for her to lie, and they had no such history with me. There was no reason to believe they were lying, and I’d been told she was trying to abuse me since I was young, because apparently, people have eyes. Who’da thunk?

No one was ever going to get me away from her without putting me in jail, a psych ward, what the fuck ever. That’s because if anyone said that, I never talked to them again. I snuck around like we were having an affair, because we were. Again, it wasn’t sexual. It was that her emotional energy was going to me and not her partner. Not that one. The other one. It was far easier to trauma dump on me than it was to tell her partner she was a train wreck and to get her shit together because she was going down and didn’t want to go with her. Instead, there were numerous stories about her alcoholic, drug dealing partner and how her job might be affected, like the time her partner brought home a POUND of weed.

If you’ve ever seen a pound of tobacco, you know the partner would have been in jail for at least 20 years. It was Texas in 1992. Please.

So, obviously when you want someone to process those problems with, you choose a middle schooler.

I was living at Neverland Ranch, all right.

My strategy is writing through it stream-of-consciousness style because then I can go back and analyze. My judgment is never off about me. It’s off about other people because I hold no authority. I can’t make them emote. I can’t even make them be truthful.

The strategy is learning to put responsibility on the other person to understand. I am not responsible for their reaction or emotional work, so stop doing it. It is unappreciated and invalid to people who don’t want to feel in the fist place, so shoving emotional work in their faces feels like an attack. It’s wasted energy, especially since in looking back over the last decade, I learned that she’d said originally that she didn’t have emotional bravery and never would. It was too hard and hurt too much. But then she would also thank me for calling her out on avoiding something, and I didn’t have that trust capital very long.

To be honest, I was frustrated that she told me through her words that I was her friend, but her actions didn’t line up. I really, really went out of my way to speak in her love language and not my own. It eventually destroyed me because it didn’t work.

I didn’t trust her no forgiveness plan, and not because boundaries aren’t a good thing. It was because she didn’t set any boundaries at all except putting her hand on my forehead and letting me windmill. To me, if you tell me I am forgiven, you mean it. I am not all of a sudden going to pick up on your shitty passive-aggressive attempts to push me away because I don’t see them. She thought I did, and that I was trying to hurt her. That I saw the manipulation she said I was doing, when she wasn’t even taking the time to get to know me to be able to read me like that. She doesn’t understand mental health issues on a practical level and beat me over the head with that, too.

I am not responsible for what she understands.

My reality has always been different from hers, and she’s treated me like I am lesser than because of it. As if her reactions are the correct ones and mine are just designed to piss her off. Meanwhile, I’m thinking about her all the time. I am trying to figure out how to be a better friend, because clearly I am falling down on the job. I had a complex about ever displeasing her ever again, and she treated me like a stalker because of it. It was terrifying, and she had no empathy for it because she thought she was sooooooo right about me.

I did move to DC to be near her. I did, and now I won’t cover it up. But at the same time, it wasn’t why she thought I did. Being terrified absolutely solved my need to be around her, so when she came barking up my tree after absolutely losing my mind with grief, I was unimpressed. I’d already tried to apologize, and she was a jerk about that, too. She wasn’t trying to get closer. She was trying to control me, because she thought that I’d blow her life to hell on my blog and I couldn’t convince her otherwise. If she didn’t have time to read, she’d sic an attack cat on it, and I know that because referrer stats don’t lie. If you’re dumb enough to come to my page from your work web site because you don’t know how web sites work, that’s not my fault. So yes, I knew she was watching, and I knew who she picked to do it. I’m not impressed with the heavy, either.

I always knew.

That didn’t stop me from absolutely groveling, because my dopamine was so low after complete isolation of my own doing. It also didn’t stop her from throwing me a bone once in a while, and it would make me insane. I won’t say more, but she fucked me over in every way imaginable in a divide and conquer move that cost me dearly. I didn’t hold her accountable because she wasn’t. I am responsible for what I hear, as well. I can tell when the difference between idiocy and malice aforethought.

She never thought in a million years that our trauma dump would cut me off from other people. That’s not all on her, but she does bear some responsibility in retrospect.

As I have said before, getting into a relationship with her hits different, and because she’s already her, she’s not so aware of that fact.

The difference between us was clear when I told her that it was terrible when she decided I was worth something, needed something, or read something on my blog and had to interject. Even when her opinion was beautiful, it sucked ass. I needed her so bad, and all she wanted was to be a fan. She had no awareness of the fact that every time she dropped in a propos of nothing, of course I’d react like a lovesick teenager without all the romantic crap. She knew how I felt. She did not need to hear it again, and it was too embarrassing to lay my guts on the table anymore…. and yet, I did it anyway, because I thought being vulnerable was the best way forward, because I thought she’d have more empathy if she understood where I was coming from. Nope. After a while, she continued to be so angry about everything while still ramping up my dopamine that she cared. We have never been telling the same story to ourselves, and it cost both of us dearly.

It surprised me that she absolutely cratered me every time I had feelings. She invalidated my feelings all the time, and I invalidated hers in return. We weren’t making the effort to get to know each other. After all this time, she knows me. We’d tell each other to fuck off. Sometimes I’d apologize, sometimes I got her attention, but it didn’t mean resolving jack shit.

She never realized that it wasn’t a case of chasing her. It was “if you’re going shopping, I know my place is sitting on the chairs outside the fitting room and holding your bags.” Every lesbian in the world knows that schtick. Its not a play. We just want to be near you, because if we can’t have you, we don’t kick you out of our lives if we’re not struggling with rejection. If we are, we’re fucking miserable because we go hard.

I don’t miss feeling miserable in the slightest, I just acknowledge that they were difficult emotions to dam, and of course she had no concept of how I would feel because she’d never been there. Or, I assume she’s never been there….. but I’m betting I’m not the only woman it’s ever happened to, either. I learned how to be direct from her, actually, and it was better to deal with a hard no than sugar coating, which she did at first because she wasn’t confident in my reaction and dicked me over by treating me as if I’d done something wrong when I absolutely hadn’t. She’s done that twice, actually, but I can’t dive into that one because it would be telling her story.

But I keep in mind that now I’m not invalidating her feelings because I’m not “Angry Anymore.”

Now I’m humming in my head

Growing up it was just me 
And my mom against the world.
My sympathies were with her,
When I was a little girl.
Now I've seen both my parents play the hands that they were dealt.
As each year goes by 
I know more about how 
my father must have felt.

The first line of that song just makes me want to get wasted, because it applies to most people I know.

When you see the range of human behavior, if you’re like me, that’s where you start with strategy. I’m trying to heal the world, one child at a time. Some are older than others.

Stability

July 11, 2023July 11, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What are you most excited about for the future?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Self-centered alcoholic is almost tautology.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Melody

July 10, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

Here’s where that stops.

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

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

Shut it. Snitches get stitches.

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

Trauma Bonds -or- Go to Hell, Michael Jackson

July 9, 2023July 9, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Dear Bryn,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I fucking noticed.

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

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

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

Leslie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Have a blessed day.”

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

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

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

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

So.

Fuck Michael Jackson.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To everyone else, CHECKMATE.

Wordless

July 9, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What is your favorite genre of music?

I am the one that provides the words.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With Whom?

July 8, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Describe your most memorable vacation.

Describing my most memorable vacation is hard because I’d have to pick between my childhood and taking vacations with partners. To say that there isn’t a story that takes the cake is incorrect. Here is the story of the first time I got married. I hope I made it sound as funny and terrible as it really was……… we just needed health insurance….. famous last words of all couples who have been together for a while and say “what the hell?” The only reason you get a link to this entry is that you *really* couldn’t find it unless you were dedicated to swallowing Stories whole. I posted it for the first time on Clever Title in 2005.

With others, there are snippets, like having fried dill pickles at BB King’s in Memphis with my family. It’s something that is commonplace today, but they blew my little kid mind. I also remember having bright yellow lemon ice cream on Beale Street, as cool and refreshing in my mind today as it was 30 odd years ago.

I remember coffee at Cafe du Monde, like everyone does, but I’m not sure all people think it should be a religion. All things being equal, I think Bryn and I could live in New Orleans quite easily. I should ask her. Moving isn’t a thing with me anymore because I’ve realized I’m using the Internet wrong. I can totally get a house in New Orleans for two weeks or a month via Air BnB.

I’m never talking about moving permanently, because I have friends that have worked at oil companies for longer than I’ve been alive who’ve lived all over the world for a few months at a time. For instance, I wouldn’t want to get a hotel and rent a car in Helsinki. I’d want to put down roots and make home base, even i it was only ten days……. keeping in mind that I have absolutely no idea how to make friends in Finland because everyone is like me. None of them want to be here, either.

It’s only a shell, though. I’ve watched so many videos of people moving to Helsinki (it’s *fascinating* when they’re POC). Finns are the nicest, kindest, sweetest people and also gaurded af if they don’t know you. Same. Hilarity ensues.

Helsinki is a vacation I want to take, though, and not a memorable one from the past.

Again, I’m not sure my “wedding” could beat anything I’d write today. It’s Saturday morning, and I’m trying to figure out how to use Threads effectively (and by that I mean I’m doomscrolling and need to eat).

Things Are Going Well

July 7, 2023July 7, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

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

Hey. Who turned out the lights?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My mother never……………

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I actually said was…….. nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WHY GOD, WHY?

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

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

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

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

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

Because things are going well.

Me, Myself, and I

July 7, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

On what subject(s) are you an authority?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trust me. I’m the authority.

This is a Family Show

July 6, 2023July 6, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What’s your definition of romantic?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh my God that is so apt it hurts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is because she’s novel AF.

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

I would teach the hell out of typing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Needs Work, tbh

July 5, 2023July 5, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

How do you express your gratitude?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guess you had to be there.

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

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

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

And that was that.

Meeting “The One”

July 4, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What are you most worried about for the future?

One off the reasons that my beautiful girl destroyed me is that we affected each other with our secrets to an absolutely enormous degree, so over time she’d forgotten how deep our rabbit hole went. We went deep enough that in order for me to move on, we needed to start managing practical consequences and she told me she wasn’t interested. What didn’t mean anything to her might have ruined me for anyone else in terms of priority, and she didn’t think of that, I guarantee it. I’d met “The One” in a very roundabout way, because it wasn’t an affair I had to manage. It was off the wall feelings on both sides. She had to protect what I knew and vice versa. It was mutually assured destruction because she asked me to forget an impossible amount of shit.

I thought it was better to love each other through it, she thought it was better to tell me that I thought she was a bad person. That was never an issue, ever. At issue was “if you’re going to tell me something like this, love me the way I love you. I won’t accept less.” It wasn’t that I was goading and provoking. I had a genuine issue in talking about an issue because she had a genuine talent in avoidance.

I shouldn’t have settled, and I didn’t. But we’re still managing each other’s secrets and lies without our refuge in the cloud. It would never be worth that kind of devotion without that kind of love. I do have to forget, and not because I wanted to. Because she thought I couldn’t handle it. I could, as long as she could take it as easily as she could dish.

That’s what ruined our relationship. If I said something negative, she’d rip me a new one. If I said something positive, I’d never hear from her. My emotions frightened her, always, and they should have. She helped make them that intense without recognizing me, ever, so whether she appreciated my willingness to be hers or not, it was a stone cold fact.

If I say I would have done anything for her, I mean it. I got brownie points for an e-mail about busting my ass at her house after a storm, because we live close enough that it wouldn’t be a weird offer at all. It would have been a weird offer from Houston or Portland, but the move was a coincidence because I didn’t want to just pick up and start over in a new city, and I lived here 20 years ago from the time I made the decision to move back. If Minneapolis had been my hometown, I would have moved there. The first is that because our relationship was virtual, we could be anywhere. The second is that planes exist. I would have eaten it up if she’d come to Portland or Houston. I would have shown her on a platonic date in either city, and I only say that because that’s what it would look like now. In the beginning, we could have been a threesome if Dana hadn’t decided to be jealous. Polyamory is a thing, not that I’m necessarily that in practice, but if I hadn’t been so wrapped up in new relationship energy, I think she would have easily forgiven me and I would have gotten over it and the negative aspects of our relationship would have smoothed over in time.

New relationship energy ate my lunch because it was so different for me and so normal for her. Getting into a relationship with her hits different and because she’s already her, she’s not so aware of it.

Which scares me about the future.

Teaching Me, Part II

July 3, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I found a poem which expresses my feelings toward my beautiful girl, the platonic soul mate sent to shake me out of complacency… yet so far not designed to be a lifetime appointment. I am not letting that change me, however. Love does not depend on the recipient.

I told Kristina that she had saved me trying to translate my soul. Everything she writes guts me, but this takes me back. It is my entire personality, and the heart of miscommunication in a hundred percent of my relationships with neurotypical people. I have been this person in every relationship I’ve ever had.

It’s nice to see it clearly.

It’s More Simple Than You Think

July 3, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What makes a teacher great?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was more simple than I thought.

…because I had to.

July 2, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

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

I am looking at my character.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s the thing about Lone Star, Texas.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I did it because I had to.