Tag: truth

Home

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want “home” to look like, because where I live now is literally it. I live in a huge house in a great neighborhood and I’ve been here long enough that I know all my neighbors and the family I rent from actually likes me (most of the time). Giving that up is a hell of a lot, and this room isn’t big enough to rent to a couple, nor do I want to add another person to this house at all.

I waffle between living in the middle of nowhere and over a bar in the city, but that’s not the important part. I need to think about how I function, because the common denominator in every relationship is me. Just because my beautiful girl paints the picture that I acted like a victim doesn’t mean it’s true. It means that she heard my story and I wanted her to write her own. In my story, I’m the protagonist. In your story, you are. I don’t get the story where you’re the protagonist unless you put it in my hands. That does not mean that I do not have speculations about my own behavior. I am harder on myself than I am on anyone else, so to actually hurt someone to the point it was painful to even talk about rebuilding was my worst nightmare. I mean, I talked plenty, but I never knew what she thought, felt, or wanted. Then I realized it was probably nothing. That she put up with me because she had to, in some sense. If that was wrong, it was her job to tell me I was wrong. She didn’t, so I don’t think I was.

Even the thoughts she had about me were none of my business, and that’s kind of where I draw the line.

I am not in the business of reading minds and trying to anticipate needs, because I have been a people pleaser my whole life. All of it built up so that I could not do it anymore. I would become a shell of a person if two of my friends needed different things and I could not do both at one time. This is because I am devoted to my friends, and disappointing anyone ruins my day to an absurd level. I now have two modes…. Going completely silent in a conversation so that I am making sure to take in everything you say…. And hiding from everyone because I do not want to tell you what my needs are and for them to be ignored. If I don’t have relationships, no one can be disappointed or hurt.

That’s just no way to live life, to stop interacting because you’re afraid. You cover up that fear in all sorts of ways, from isolating to covering it up with the mask you wear in public.

I don’t want to be moving mountains when you’re not even really sure you want to see me again.

I am really in a bad way because the relationship with my beautiful girl was so off it was crazy, and I went a very long time without even addressing it. When I did, I was putting out nastiness. Every flaw was mine because I wasn’t trying to shed light on something dark. I was trying to guilt her, hurt her, provoke her, whatever choice words she had for me that day. So problems would continue to fester and I’d suffer the weight of it because I’m the one who thought about it more.

It was just tiresome because I thought, “why do you think I’m trying to guilt you? I’m the one who hurt you. Even though we have problems, that doesn’t mean they’re all your fault and you’re a terrible person who can never do enough for me.” I just didn’t talk about her side of it because I wanted her to do it- to tell me her feelings so that both of us could write to each other without any of that crap. But the longer it went unresolved, the longer I was treated to “I’m not enough.” I had to break contact not because she actually wasn’t enough. Because she wouldn’t do the work to get through the dark part of the tunnel. She didn’t think that resolving anything was worth it, and that superficial was great. It just wasn’t what I signed up for, and would have been wonderful had we either always been that to each other or worked though enough that I was comfortable doing so…. Because the message I received so frequently was that I was just stirring up shit for no reason at all.

That’s because she didn’t have a problem. I did.

We told each other things that both changed and enriched our lives, and it would have been nice to have that be a lifelong gig. But our approach to conflict was completely different. I’d lay out thoughts and feelings, she’d respond with annoyance or anger. I’d respond in the same tone, and what I originally intended to be a heart to heart conversation where we both walked away feeling better turned into the biggest fights known to god and man. We’re both writers. We fucking play for keeps.

It was too much. I couldn’t handle the thought that I was hurting her, and I couldn’t find a way to write that wouldn’t. Instead of addressing our real issues, she’d pick me apart and push me away.

I got tired of this pattern always repeating instead of just having the damn conversation so we can move on. There was no moving on. There was constantly irritating each other because we weren’t really talking.

Things got dramatically better, then dramatically worse. When we hit the maybe, sixth time when I’d been accused of blowing up everything, I was done. Seriously, what does it even mean to blow up a relationship when it seems like only one of us is participating at all?

The biggest break to me was not telling me that the guy she was dating when we met that wasn’t serious was now her husband, because I felt like that was a very, very basic piece of information. It’s not a relationship when I don’t know the first thing about you anymore.

She quiet quit.

I was loud. I wouldn’t have been bent out of shape if she’d just told me she didn’t want that level of friendship anymore, that I’d been relegated. Then, I wouldn’t have put as much energy into writing to her at all. I’m not trying to communicate with anyone who doesn’t want to hear it. I lost all my remaining hope and confidence when she said that she wanted to throw all my e-mails away. Whether she meant it in the moment or it is still true, it felt like being put out with the trash.

What gift do I possibly have that would be worth anything but my words?

It just didn’t feel like home anymore.

I don’t want to fight against the tide. I don’t want to be foolish enough to think I can change anything. I don’t even want to emote. I’d rather get through grief on my own, because it’s a hell of a lot better than being told I’m just putting out nastiness. I don’t want to send you a letter telling you how I’m hurt, and for you to ignore it and say it’s all crap, it’s all designed to provoke you. It’s not provoking you, it’s getting my needs met, too.

I started realizing that nothing mattered. I’d never be able to regain lost trust capital, I’d never be able to relieve her guilt (still, about what?), I’d never be enough. I’d always be too much. It’s a lot, to be thought of as too much.

I wasn’t too much in the beginning, and no one told me what changed. I had to guess.

And what I guessed is that I was in too deep to ever be the kind where we just send a hello every once in a while. I wanted to be hers. Not in every way possible. Just that person you go to when you can’t go to anyone else. I knew that on some level, she’d never agree to that. I’d broken her trust in a major way.

I still hoped I was redeemable, though. I wasn’t. I was lost somewhere in the Dagoba system of my mind.

This is because for all the wonderful conversations we’ve had over the past few years, nothing has been more than orange juice glass deep. This is not because both of us don’t feel deeply. She felt how she felt without me. I feel lost now, and yet somehow found. I saw that something needed to change or I would continue to hide from everyone, thinking I was too much.

I didn’t want to read her mind. I wanted to read her words.

It felt like home.

No Stairway (to Kevin)

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I am really bummed out. The National Zoo does not have giraffes anymore. Therefore, wherever Kevin the giraffe may be, it’s not DC. I didn’t stay very long- that’s the nice thing about Smithsonians. You don’t need to spend all day there to get your money’s worth. The cutest thing I saw was a sloth bear, because he was just trying so hard to make it up a staircase and the staircase just seemed angry. The snake was just funny…. slithering on the main trail like it was a lost tourist…. similar to the other crowd around me. This is the last Friday of school, and it seems like every kid in the nation bumped into me today.

I just love the neighborhood, though. It would be amazing to live on the main drag, Connecticut between Adams Morgan and Cleveland Park. Those houses are as small as condos and about four million dollars, and yet, it’s cool to think about living in the middle of the city…. until I’ve been there all day. I’m so glad I live in Silver Spring.

That sloth bear is actual footage of me walking around DC.

Observations

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Zac’s office is just big enough for the two of us. He’s working at home after working at work. I’m sitting behind him on a futon with Oliver, the dog, at my feet. The plan is to go out for Korean fried chicken, because I’d seen it on YouTube and Zac remembers stuff. Dooce’s death is rattling in my head, and I needed to be with other people. It wasn’t planned this way. It just is. The randomness of needing Zac close and already having had something planned weeks in advance is the silver lining on this cloud. I don’t have to grieve by myself if I don’t want to, and I also don’t have to talk about it at all. He’s just here in all his redheaded brilliance for whatever it is that I need.

I love these simple moments, where we can be in companionable silence. All I hear is the rhythm of two people typing, and it’s better than a white noise album. It reminds me of other times I’ve been in grief. I didn’t need anyone to say anything. I just needed another presence in the room.

If I had to pick one thing that I miss about being married, it’s being able to have someone around all the time. I don’t care what we’re doing. Just having that person you can be quiet with is enough. I just get caught up on the idea of someone living with me again. I have to think long and hard about what I want my life to look like, because most of my friends are extroverts because I realize that someone needs to drag me out of the house.

I find that most of the time, I am my own best company because I’m internally driven to write. I am irritating as fuck to live with sometimes, because I’m a lot. A lot. I sometimes feel like I’m protecting people from me, because my relationships have gone two ways. If I’m with someone neurotypical, they don’t understand. Living with someone who doesn’t get it is bad.

Living with someone who does is worse. If you both have mental health issues, it’s a lot to be a partner. You have to work so much harder to keep yourselves strong so you don’t get your crazy spatter on each other. Living with someone who does have mental health issues but can’t be arsed to go to the doctor is the worst kind of punishment. The fights hurt so much more because there’s too little serotonin in the room. You descend into each other’s madness, but can rarely see outside the situation.

Deciding to be with someone who also deals with mental disorders and/or alcoholism vs. someone who’s never struggled with depression at all is a huge decision. I have had neurotypical people reject me because I’m too much within weeks. I have a cavernous inner landscape, and asking someone to share it with me is frightening. Neurotypical people resent the hell out of the neurodivergent because they have no frame of reference for our moods and behaviors…. and even then, they’re human. If we are irritated with our own illnesses, God help the person who tries to help us. Our brains are trying to tell us that we’re too much for everyone. That no one needs us because we’re too much. It’s depression’s main playbook, and it works too much of the time.

It’s hard not having that person who comes with me to doctor’s appointments so we can debrief what new meds might do, etc. Having my partner actually present to hear what the doctor says is important to me, because repetition is essential to retaining information. The other person also might remember something I missed. Being responsible or my own health is exhausting, I don’t need someone to fix me, I need someone to empathize with me, or sympathize as the case may be.

Giving someone that power is equally dubious in my mind. I trusted Daniel because he was the military equivalent of an NP. I didn’t want to put all my stuff on someone who couldn’t attribute behaviors to my personality when they were my disease, and be able to know the difference.

It is my job to keep myself strong, I just miss support in doing so…. the equivalent of getting a lollipop after a shot or a kiss on a bruised knee.

What I don’t want is for someone to jump into a relationship with me so fast that they don’t have time to take in the whole picture. This has been problematic because I am also trying to meet other people, and they seem to be so bent out of shape that I’m dating someone else, as if we should be married on the first date. It doesn’t mean that I’m incapable of monogamy or commitment. They just don’t know me well enough to have that discussion after one conversation. Zac is one of my best friends. Why would I tell him I didn’t want to date anymore because I’ve known someone new for five minutes and she already expects for there to be no one else? It just seems crazy to me on both sides. I can’t count on emotional support from people I don’t know well. I also don’t lie or play games. I will tell you the truth, whether you like it or not. You cannot imagine how long I was alone, blaming myself for anything and everything I possibly could. Denying myself a full spectrum of emotions because I’d caused emotional devastation in my wake when I was sick.

I also don’t give myself any slack when it comes to being sick. Just because I’m sick doesn’t mean your reactions don’t matter. What matters is whether we can adapt to each other’s quirks, or whether they are so incompatible that it creates more problems than it solves.

I had to give up caring that I’d find my forever person, because that would take so long to build. I wanted something manageable, to be able to date someone that wouldn’t put restrictions on what I could and couldn’t do because we aren’t building a future together and compromising all the time. I just get to sit here and watch him be cute.

But while I’m sitting here watching, I’m not thinking about defining anything but this moment. If there is a future being built here, it’s having a friend that accepts me for who I am, and wants to be in my life at whatever level works best for both of us.

Now Oliver is snoring and kicking his feet, and I am subconsciously competing with Zac to see who types faster. Every minute, someone else is winning. I love that, because the sound of someone playing a mechanical keyboard is one of the most beautiful sounds on earth when they’re good at it.

As soon as I finished that paragraph, Zac was finished working and we headed out to the park behind his house with Oliver. If I lived in the ‘burbs of Virginia, I think I would get isolated over time, but there is nothing like having hiking trails very near your backyard. Zac has also promised me a trip to Great Falls, because I was lamenting how much I missed driving out The Gorge. Some of my favorite memories are hiking alone and with friends. Hiking alone is a totally different pace, because I’m me and need to take pictures every 50 feet. With Zac and Oliver, I hang all right, but we move faster.

I’m actually writing this from the Woodley Park-Zoo area Starbucks because hiking last night reminded me that the zoo is the best place to work for me, because the animals are the perfect background noise. What I did not take into account is that it is really, really hot right now. So I stopped in for a second cup of coffee and the ability to write in the air conditioning.

I’m having a grande cafe misto (cafe au lait) with an extra shot and four Splenda. Sometimes that’s called a red eye or a wizard jump. It’s my favorite thing on earth because it’s not candy. There’s real coffee in there somewhere. In fact, it was funny. I got off the metro and looked around for the gayest twink I could find because if there was a good coffee shop around, he’d know where it was. I said, “do you live in this neighborhood?” When he said yes, I said, “is there a good coffee shop around here…. or a Starbucks?” He laughed and gave me directions.

Starbucks is okay. The coffee tastes better with steamed milk and sweetener because it’s sort of bitter. I just prefer trying local brands, and rely on Starbucks when I flat need a cup of coffee and it’s getting serious. They’re everywhere…. and because I live so far away from some of my family and friends, the ones who know I like coffee make it possible to come here a lot, because digital Starbucks money is stupid easy to send for Christmas.

I also like my coffee ratio better than Starbucks, so if I have a large enough gift card, I’ll buy the beans I like by the bag instead of using it for multiple outings. Komodo Dragon and Caffe Verona are my favorite, because I like a coffee that can stand up to fat. They are big, bold roasts. I wish they didn’t have a flavor graveyard, because I wish that Indivisible and Morning Joe were still available.

I just love coffee shops in general because of the ’90s vibe. Starbuck’s has modernized, but plenty of shops are still retro. If you walk in and there’s some sort of lesbian music playing, you’re in the right place.

I don’t even have to define “lesbian music.” There’s a reason I didn’t listen to Indigo Girls in public for the longest because I thought to myself, “I look gay enough.”

But that relaxed vibe of a bar with drinks I’d rather have? Priceless. Yes, cocktails are delicious. But there’s an intimacy to drinking coffee and tea together. It’s the tiniest sacred ritual that exists. What is it about coffee and tea that makes us just as vulnerable as drinking beer or cocktails? Maybe it’s different for extroverts, but to me, drinking coffee together at one of those places that has mismatched couches and tables in an invitation for conversation to go deeper. It’s the feeling of the mug in your hand, the lighting of the early morning or late at night…. the acidity of the coffee and the sweetness of the milk… a type of communion that honors each other rather than a higher power.

I even feel that connection with the people who are sitting next to me, and they just got here.

In a bit, I’ll be leaving. I need to go and visit Kevin (what I call my favorite giraffe. I can’t be arsed to actually ask its name). We haven’t talked since last year. There are tables and benches that are very comfortable, vending machines so that you can get stuff even when the zoo is closed, and the comfort of feeling like the park itself is your own habitat/enclosure. You look around and see so much green…. and it’s an actual, working park because it doesn’t really close. People jog through all the time.

I can be focused and calm while also enjoying the outdoors. Kevin doesn’t mind if I work while we’re talking. He is also doing his own thing. When I need interaction and companionable silence, both Zac and Kevin are excellent choices.

Especially if I’ve had coffee.

Heather

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 5 Comments

Trigger Warning: Suicide

I am sitting in shock at my computer, too numb to do or say anything. Too far down to emote, I just need the time stamp on this entry.

Heather “Dooce” Armstrong just died by suicide.

I wouldn’t be who I am now if she hadn’t been her…. And yet, I am still her. I have to monitor my mood and behavior like a hawk. She took her eye off the ball, and her disease managed her. On a different day, it could have been any one of us who suffer under the weight of the mental health alphabet.

So I’m going to sit here and think about it. How mental health manages you in so many ways you can’t see. How tiny interactions add up.

How devastated Pete and the kids (and their dad) must be.

In time, I’ll have more to say. All I want now is to go back and remember Dooce the way she was when I found her. I’ve been reading since before she got Dooced. I even know that Dooce is the typo she’d make when she originally started typing “dude.” I was there before Asian Database Administrator, before meeting Jon Armstrong…. “dry humping and Sprite” vs. mommy blogging.

I’m thinking about what I want to borrow from her to honor her memory…. And not in a way that people would know. I’d be able to look at my own work and say, “I borrowed style from Dooce here.”

I know that because I’ve said it to myself since 2003 when I started Clever Title. In fact, I don’t think I need to honor Dooce any more than I already have, because a tiny thread of her runs through every entry. I pour out everything here because she did it first.

There’s so much I would have liked to have told her, asked her, wish we could reminisce about- the good old days of blogging when it was me and Wil and Ernie and Mrs. Kennedy, with a smattering of Anil Dash and Jason Kottke for good taste.

She was the first one of us to make it. I don’t count Wil because he already had a huge platform from Star Trek. She started that blog from literally friends of friends and built an empire.

Though it was definitely the start of huge social media influence for moms with the introduction of “mommy blogging,” it wasn’t what made her site great.

What made her site great was being willing to talk about the fact that she had a disease that might kill her, and being honest about how hardcore that is. Your friends aren’t prepared to hear that’s a reality, and it makes them retreat. You just have to keep reminding yourself not to take it personally and to keep talking. Someone will listen. It just may not be the one you thought you needed. We can’t help each other when we’re in downward spirals, so we need to reach out before we start circling….. and in the end, it’s still just a numbers game. That’s not mental health. That’s medicine. You can run the numbers on any disease. We just treat diseases of the brain as foreign. Neurotypical people understand things like multiple sclerosis and diabetes to the extent that they understand that their friend needs help on a practical level.

Part of the reason being sick mentally vs. physically is so difficult is trying to translate why you look all right, but you are definitely, definitely not. You isolate because of the exhaustion of trying to explain something you’re not real clear on, either. I’m sure I’ll have more to say over the coming days, but right now I just need to sleep to save strength for tomorrow, where we will again face the blank page together.

If there is a heaven and St. Peter is indeed at the pearly gates, all I want him to say is “the former Congressman will see you now.”

What Do I Do Now?

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 1 Comment

One of the things that happened during the relationship with my beautiful girl was a very skewed sense of self. This is because she would say things that were completely counter to what the rest of my friends said about me. This was a very good thing in some ways, because I needed an outsider’s perspective. It was therapeutic to be able to talk about everyone in my life with no strings back to her, because we existed out of each other’s time and space. The dark side of it was believing a lot about myself that wasn’t true, because she wasn’t there. She was commenting on “there.” It took me a long time to take in that difference. It made me wonder what we’d have been like as a part of a larger group, because it would have made her commentary on my behavior so much different (I think).

The thing that reads universal to me is the difference between how you present in person vs. online. Seeing someone in their context matters. Isolating so that you’re only seeing each other is a blind spot. Tone of voice matters. How I see you treat other people matters. It is a different feeling of inclusion, physically and virtually. I will always be this person, the one that prefers virtual to physical, and the one that shouldn’t doubt its power. I get caught up in my writer personality, which leads me to ignore meeting in person until long after I’ve needed it- absolutely starving for a hug.

I wouldn’t even have suggested to said Internet friend that we should meet if I hadn’t discovered every single way my writing personality could fuck something up first. I wanted to meet up because I was tired of being misunderstood, but wouldn’t have cared about meeting in person if it wasn’t affecting us negatively. Text can only impart so much, and comprehension is due to context clues. It’s freewheeling to disconnect from anything that provides them. This is why I use the phrase “the emotional equivalent of freebasing cocaine.” Everything is coming at you straight, no chaser.

What would it have been like to know her as a girlfriend and mom- not because she told me she had a boyfriend and a kid. Because I was there and I saw them interact? Neither of us were keeping those things out, they’re just impossible to add as attachments (at least with Gmail). I would have loved to see her wipe the floor with her husband, because if she’s as brilliant with conversation as she is with writing, I could have popped popcorn. What I can do virtually is love him as an idea, a concept. What I can’t do is look at him while he’s looking at her to make sure he knows he’s the luckiest bastard on earth.

I also know that anyone she didn’t like wouldn’t last long…. Except maybe for my own amusement. Hearing her get bent out of shape over my dating life led to some of my favorite quotes ever…. All of them unprintable. I wonder what it would have been like for her to see me as a wife and a friend, and how fiercely devoted I am to both roles. I could tell her about it, but so different than her observing everything.

I’d want her to tell me when my girlfriend wasn’t looking at me the way I wanted her husband to look to look at her. She’s an excellent judge of character, and I could make a meal out of watching her feral nature when it comes to the people who are allowed to date me. I laugh when I think about how different it would have been had we experienced her physically meeting these people. I double over picturing asking her “what do you think?”

I grieve for that image as well. I feel like a bad writer when I cannot capture exactly what I mean, and I am sure a lot of what I’ve written has made wanting to meet me impossible. She thought I was a loose cannon as often as I thought she was, because physical interaction wasn’t slowing anything down. Anonymity helped at first and was hard over time, and not because of anything illicit or bad. It’s that only so much of each other comes through when you are not physically sharing the same space.

It’s a weird feeling knowing that there is so much I would have said with my body language that was cut out entirely. For me, it is similar to having a conversation with someone in Spanish. If they only spoke to me in Spanish, they’d think I was an idiot because I can’t even speak in more than one tense. I don’t know how to tell you what happened or what will. I can only tell you what is happening right now…. And even that is garbled. They will have missed what I can do with language when I have it. Choosing to be only virtual pals was the equivalent of being limited to Spanish when we were both natural English speakers.

It informs how I proceed. I make an effort to see Zac and not just Facebook Messenger him all the time. I make the effort to video call Bryn (though right now she’s on vacation). I try not to write so much down, because it’s not exhausting to write, but it is to read and it’s too much to ask of people who are too polite to say anything. Part of my love language is hearing the emotions that come up for you when you’re reading, and I know that if I send too much at one time, it’s overwhelming. When I have physically spent time with someone, it lessens my need to write to them because we just talked. Not having that guardrail is also problematic, because the last thing I want is for people to think that I am just rambling on for attention. From my perspective, I am including you in my life by describing it. It comes across to others as too much homework. Therefore, I am reticent to begin relationships over the Internet when I know there’s not a chance we’ll meet. You can only be so vulnerable with me in a vacuum, because I might know things other people don’t know… and yet I don’t know anything they do, either. Everything I know about that person has been distilled into black and white, where their pictures are all in color.

Color in a black and white relationship blossoms in commentary. Connection is so easy on one level, complicated on another. You can’t get to know a person’s natural rhythms, even in speech. The tendency on the internet is to pick out the angry things and comment on them first, without seeing what kind of day the other has had in any real sense… over time, it just becomes your perception of what their life is like. Perceptions attach certain moods and behaviors that compound in the other’s mind without ever being founded in reality.

I don’t know whether I am foolish for thinking it was better not to have this friendship than it was to live with the disconnects, because the perks were great. She’s my favorite humorist because there is literally no topic on earth she doesn’t know about, so no matter what ball I’m lobbing, she’s there with the world’s best pithy comment…. And the best ones are unprintable.

At the same time, I was carrying a lot of pain knowing that in some ways, I’d made meeting me feel scary. It made me afraid of myself. Not knowing where I stood gave me more reason to doubt our relationship would ever be more well-rounded, and that there would be an end to feeling like I was hurting her all the time. I knew innately that if I could emotionally injure her, I could emotionally injure other people. So I absolutely fixated on trying to make things right because if I could be redeemed from this mistake, I might be capable of a relationship where no one got hurt.

I had these perfect pictures in my head, changing as she and I did. Funny moments teaching her how to cook, joking with her husband because we know we’re the roadies on a pretty great tour. If the fates had aligned differently, I know I would have been Paul Child, not Julia…. And that’s why I needed her in a nutshell.

I don’t want to be the Julia. I want to be the Paul. I want to be the one cheering people on to do what they do and be who they are. Being supportive of her fills my purpose in life, too. But in this case, I am not limiting Julia to my beautiful girl. I just know I was born to help other people be great. Not having been that for the one I love the most is an exercise in torturing myself and leads nowhere good. Now, I absolutely know what I want in order to avoid the same mistakes. It is learning to negotiate those desires with others so that they also feel heard where the sharpest pain lives, because now I am overly protective of myself. I don’t let people in the way I should, because I’m thinking constantly about what I have done versus what I will do.

Telling me what you think while looking at me has become important again where it wasn’t for a very long time. I was afraid to come out of my shell for fear of rejection, so I just wouldn’t. Asking my beautiful girl if she wanted to hang after she’d already witnessed the worst things about me mattered. However, it was not a moment I knew I could take. It had to be given. So, when she said she wasn’t ready, I didn’t bring it up for years. It didn’t seem important in the grand scheme of things.

It became important because of all the things being lost in translation. Particularly, not knowing if saying that someday you might be ready is real or is something you say when you don’t know what to say. It is impossible to glean from mere words.

I made a meal out of someday without really looking at the amount of time that went by, engaging in the same behavior patterns over and over. It wouldn’t resolve without one of us doing something. I couldn’t stop feeling these large feelings, but I could do something to discourage them. I could turn my attention. I was tired of all of it. All the self recrimination. All the guilt. I have learned that I am not a bad person, and I should stop treating myself like it. I was holding myself to my worst mistake, reliving it in a way that she never would have endorsed. She would have protected me from me if I’d let her.

Dear God, how she tried.

Knowing she loved me that much, to try and understand something that wasn’t tangible or explainable, made me ferocious in trying to understand everything about me that repelled her. This is what I mean when I say that she’s always been the most honorable part of me even when I couldn’t be that for myself. She was rock solid in all the areas I was blind. She taught me to me in a way that will never be duplicated, because I had a yardstick to measure my success. Not in terms of material things, but in terms of emotional strengths she had where I was weak and needed time to grow.

But if the other person isn’t learning and growing with you, the imbalance shows quickly. There are too many chances for things to go wrong when 93% of you is somewhere else.

The Very Beginning

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

This blog is the beginning. I have to remember that it is not my end goal. It is building an audience, slowly but surely, for people who actually would like to see something out of me that’s not a complete mess. Plenty of people would buy it just to make sure it was finished.

The urge to blog is relentless because you and I are always talking. I say too much because I need it, not you…. And yet, you’re an amazingly kind and tolerant audience for something I thought would be maybe three people and a few cats.

It’s funny how I got the idea to blog. At first, it was writing letters to the woman who abused me, because I thought I had to think big thoughts to keep someone older interested in my little musings… When I started Clever Title, I thought of her as my blog before I could type……… but it was the same style. Just lay out all my crap, see what sticks. Her lines are housed in my head (though no longer enshrined) to this day, the few genuine moments I remember. Those words will stay between us, but they explain explicitly how a young writer could fall in love with another’s work. The way she writes is more flowery than she talks, but more direct because there’s no one in front of her. The words are smaller and carry more weight. Clearly there was something there besides us both being queer. We were both young musicians, exploring the world in secret…. And each other, but only to the extent that nothing was off the table in terms of what I could and couldn’t say. My letters ran the same gamut as five years’ worth of entries.

My second biggest influence was Doogie Howser, MD.

I wish I’d had the self-deprecating meme back then that I did with my beautiful girl…. “Sending you six unrelated texts in a row is my love language, and I’m so sorry….” She was my blog within a blog, because she read everything I can’t show you. She was the one who listened as I floundered around on every topic imaginable in order to discover how I felt to the point I could write about it. For people who garden as writers, we are discovering the plot as we go along. We don’t make an architecture. Therefore, this blog-within-a-blog was the very beginning of crafting an idea. Before I can write about it here, I have to let the raw emotions fall on the page.

What I am finding is that I was so shaken up by the experience that I thought because I’d wronged one woman, I didn’t deserve any of them until I could truly make amends with her. I wanted her to stop being sorry that she chose me to be her confidante, and I think she was trying to tell me that she was sorry for opening up to me for different reasons, but I only saw rejection and pain. So, whether I tornadoed this relationship or she did is up for grabs, because I couldn’t tell from one day to the next how she felt. It was always precarious, and I didn’t like that anxiety at all. I was given the choice- live with that anxiety or don’t. My grief is unlearning that pattern. I had gotten so used to uncertainty. I had gotten so used to not knowing because it was all my fault we were in this mess to begin with.

Not being able to move on was not about being so blindly in love with another’s letters that I was ignoring my own life… although I can see how someone would get there. It was that I was suffering under the weight of all my guilt because things would get better and worse at such a rapid pace. If my narrative was wrong, I wanted her to lay out all those feelings and let me respond to them. Let me hear what really went on in her mind so that I can take it in, bless it, and release it. So that I can clear up any misconceptions. I can explain where I absolutely was not trying to guilt her, telling her what she had nothing to feel guilty about. In fact, all I ever wanted her to do was to look at my letters as if they had more to say than she should feel guilty.

For almost ten years of my life, I got to be a part of someone’s life that I desperately needed to meet. I regret all of the bad and celebrate all of the good. Nothing in my life matters more than the gifts she gave me of self confidence and belief in my own intelligence. I have managed to fool her into believing that I am smart, and somehow she made me believe it, too. I also know that I am wrapped into her equally wild and crazy mind, but what was too painful not to know was whether she still felt the same way about me.

I don’t know why I didn’t just say “what exactly are you regretting here?”

Actually. Yes, I do.

I didn’t ask, because I was afraid of the answer.

I knew what it would be because I was focusing on what I’d done rather than what she said. However, it wasn’t all beating myself up. It was getting mixed signals that were probably caused by not normalizing having conversations on the phone or in person so that when I was reading, I heard her voice instead of the one I made up for her in my head. I also didn’t make enough effort to hear her when she did emote, because I didn’t lift myself out of the situation long enough to be able to tell her that she was focusing on the wrong thing and so was I.

Neither one of us were very good at saying when something made us feel loved and when something made us want to stab each other with a fork…. We’d both hold it in fearing the other’s reaction. I’d finally get tired of sidestepping something and then all hell broke loose. It seemed like the thing that attracted her to me was the thing that repelled me the most over time…. Being able to communicate on the Internet and yet….. not.

I think it’s because we had different ways of being in this relationship, not due to us actually wanting harm for the other. We both spoke to each other in our own love languages, disappointed when the other didn’t respond the way they’d hoped. It wasn’t manipulation on either of our parts; I think it was just plain frustration because when we thought we were winning, we were behind. I never got the message in terms of how our relationship needed to change, because I was all in and I didn’t know if she was or she wasn’t. She wouldn’t set new boundaries, new rules of engagement so all topics of conversation were so hit or miss I didn’t know where I stood. Perhaps I overfocused on the negative responses and there’s a lot I’ve missed…. But I’ll never know whether I did or not because I couldn’t sit there long enough to wonder anymore. What is real? What is in my head? What can I expect from you? What do you expect from me?

As I told her, “I am not trying to take a plate that’s been smashed into a million pieces and make it look like it never broke. I am trying to work with you to mold new glass.” The cord connecting us to each other was massive because there were no constraints and no context.

I got tired of wondering what I could do better because I’d already laid myself bare in as many ways as I could, and none of it was coming across in the way that I meant it. I spent so much energy trying to figure out what I could say and how that I lost sight of the big picture. I needed her forgiveness in a very solid and concrete way.

I needed to know that I was worth meeting, not because I am perfect and need to be gladhanded, but that forgiveness is real with no lingering aftereffects. For her, that forgiveness was given on the surface, and it was murky whether it was real or not because even though we were still interacting, the tape that I was worth nothing to her wouldn’t leave me alone.

I realized no relationship was worth that much in self esteem, because it was dependent on whether I thought I was good enough for her or not. Who cares whether I thought I was good enough for me? Hadn’t I already proved I wasn’t worth anything?

How I conflated not being worth her time with self worth is not new or interesting. I ended the longest relationship with anyone in my adult life because I was so wrapped up in my own thoughts. I’d constantly think of ways to explain something that only served to make her feel worse, when I was trying to solve a problem, not create one.

It was a weight I could no longer carry, because living on wishes was not nutritionally filling. Neither is grieving someone that I thought I knew well, and also never met. The realest thing in my life, and also the most precarious.

“Hope is a thing with feathers,” but no one talks about how extraordinarily difficult a thing it is to get off the ground. A lot of blood, sweat, and tears went into that hope. I wrestled it like Jacob, and my hip is permanently disfigured.

The belief in this message of hope is that I tried the best I could, and I’m sure she did, too. Being able to communicate is a rare and beautiful thing; in this case, we never relearned each other. I know I missed a lot and am personally responsible for the initial break. Feeling the weight of that pain and embarrassment consistently undid me.

I am having dreams about what I wish would have happened, because it moves the story along with a natural denouement instead of a lens cap. The thing that keeps reappearing is that moment. The one where the other becomes real…. A handshake to anchor us so that finally, we are facing each other.

And I’d get to say, after almost ten years, “Hi. I’m Leslie.”

Going back to the very beginning.

Marketing to Me

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What are your favorite brands and why?

I used to think that it was easy to market to me. That I’d buy anything with a sticker that said “new and improved” or “20% more real cherry flavor.” Now, it’s because I know I am a hard audience. That if you’ve won me with your wordplay, you have accomplished something because I do not suffer fools gladly. In order to be a wordsmith in my world, you have to earn the “smith.” You have to show me that you sweated over this ad and it’s actually the best you’ve got and you’re proud. When an ad hits me just right, I feel parental toward the writers and choking up with pride. The feeling in me is always Don Draper watching Peggy Olson…. “Think Different.” “Crazy” for Apple Computers. “1984” for the Macintosh. These ads are all for Apple because I like shopping for technology the best, and they put out stunning commercials.

What Apple ads don’t do is work on me. You do not need a Macintosh for anything, ever. It’s the same chipset as a Dell or HP or whatever so there’s no practical difference between buying a Mac and buying a PC…. the Motorola PowerPC chip vs. Pentium debate was worth having, and I wonder if M2 and ARM are going to come to blows in the same way. I doubt it. Linux has so much that will run on bare metal without having to rewrite software that MacOS just fails all the way around. That translation layer between hardware and software takes most of the power difference away because the OS may be written perfectly, but it’s going to take app developers a while to catch up. There’s just no reason to install MacOS as your main unix box when you can get rid of that translation layer altogether with ARM. I also hate not having a desktop and having the graphical user interface on my desktop feel like an iPad. Lastly, I don’t need a $4,000 Facebook machine. If I wanted to edit video, I’d still go with Linux over Mac software because I can download it for free without stealing. I suppose what I’m saying is that Jonny Ive has made Apple money because there was a market for great design in computing. I’d rather have computers I can work on myself. We are not the same. There is nothing like praying that plug and play works, but then also being able to find the drivers you need and they’re generally only a few megabites- came on a floppy disk or CD that you lost after you made a disc image and put it on your Google account. Learning to compile drivers and download dependencies like a boss. It’s the basics, and it’s more than most people could do and I’m proud of it.

Doesn’t mean the marketing at Apple isn’t inspiring, though. Apple products are great for the people who don’t want to be me. I can hate the player, not the game. They’re winning and I don’t mind being the underdog. I just like what I like. For instance, there are way better MP3 players than an iPod because the iPod died a slow and horrible death without ever supporting SD cards or terrestrial radios. MP3 players that run on linux (Android) can hold as many songs as you can throw at it because most support up to 512 gigs’ worth of music…… or be able to hold your entire library at full quality with no degradation of quality? Being able to rip your own collection and sneaker pimp the rest while never having to change the disk inside the mp3 player *ever?* People don’t do that anymore, but they still do if they’re nerds and my age. (I also know how to rip DVDs at full quality as well.)

What is even having a portable music player and not being able to listen to NPR? At the same time, MacOS is unix. They just don’t want to play. No one in my world wants to fool with that. Desktops are serious business, and by limiting home repair and making the computer report to the mothership, they’re convincing people that’s normal. It’s totally normal that your computer wants to know everything about you….. so it can create an ad profile for things you don’t need so they can sell you more stuff through your Facebook machine….. for which you spent way too much money.

But damn are those amazing ads.

Anger Management

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I am often so poor at controlling my anger when typing, because my mind works faster than my mouth. Because of this, it often takes me a bit to respond, because I need time. I would rather sit in an extra second of silence than stammer and sputter my way through a conversation. When I am the most angry, it’s when I’ve isolated the most and only use my keyboard as my voice, because I forget to add in as much love and humor as I would while watching someone’s face.

Because when I sound angry on the internet, I’m not. I’m scared. I feel powerless and alone, taking on your emotions to an enormous degree without being able to express the ways it moves me in ways that don’t sound like I’m nitpicking, because anger is a PTSD response. I often don’t even realize I sound like I’m nitpicking. In Daniel’s case, it was a double edged sword, because on video and the phone, he could tell how I felt about him. What he couldn’t see was my alarm. I was trying to get him up to speed on a lot of things very quickly, most of them having to do with escalating fears for Cora’s safety and how we could protect her as a family. It had to start with her family not hurting her, first.

Everything he was going through changed me as I navigated what I was doing emotionally in response. Anxiety I’d felt for years mixed with anxiety I’d felt for weeks, and on top of it my new mother love created powerful fear that I could not do enough for her. I could only get Daniel to understand that I needed him to change. I could not get him to see how freaked out I was, how I needed him to look at what the situation was doing to me and not just assume I was trying to reprogram him. I was walking with him in a world he’d never had to think about until his daughter transitioned. I also wasn’t saying that he wasn’t doing the best he could. I was saying “we need to do more,” which he heard as “you are a failure.” I can’t go back and undo anything, I can only explain that he was very certain I was wrong and asked me to walk back some of what I’d said, even though it was true. I’d just done a lot more work on my white fragility. I even said, “I’m not picking on you because you are a racists. White people are racists. Period. It’s baked into the system.” To me, it’s all the same struggle. If you’re talking about one, you’re talking about them all. It’s all about getting respect.

White people think they’re hilarious when they say something the way a black person said it as if their impressions are cute and won’t said people be impressed at their astute mimicry? Sometimes, it’s true. I used to imitate Chris Rock all the time, but stopped when I found out that it wasn’t received in the way it was intended. The joke was about OJ Simpson. Some people thought the joke was the way I was imitating him. So my conversations with Daniel would run the gamut on this topic, me thinking that I was getting him up to speed and him feeling constantly guilty and irritated. If we’d been talking on the phone, I would have changed subjects a lot more, able to notice when a subject should drop. But at the same time, I didn’t say anything wrong. I said how I felt. I didn’t watch my tone because neither did he. I let him gut me with an axe over and over and over, and called him on it so he would stop.

He didn’t. He said some really, really terrible things on the way out. Stuff that will stick around in my head and make me wonder what happened with me for years on end. I don’t know why he didn’t see that I was taking on his pain as much as my own, and asking that he carry his load when it was all mixed together. He also broke up with me by text, and even that was okay because I knew what kind of pressure he was under to get himself well. I am left with a lot of pain that doesn’t actually belong to me, because I agreed to carry it.

I don’t like to believe that I was too harsh, and at the same time, I know it’s true. I don’t like to believe that Daniel was too harsh, but at the same time, I know it’s true. If he couldn’t see the enormity of what I was giving, why would he see that he needed to give me anything in return? Some words of encouragement would have gone a long way toward resting my fears that he heard my alarms. But that’s my best hope for what should have happened, not my expectation. People are going to react the way they react, and I give myself that same right. I think he also really needed someone to blame for all the guilt he felt and I was a great target because I was calling him on his bullshit at a time he didn’t want it….. and couldn’t ignore it anymore, either, if he wanted to be with me. I don’t regret standing my ground because ultimately it would have devolved into him feeling like I was trying to reprogram him all the time when I was trying to teach him. I needed him to let me be the subject matter expert on this one because he wasn’t queer. I already let him be the subject matter in other ways. This one was mine.

I am left shaking in righteous, Christ-like anger because I wasn’t trying to hurt Daniel. I was trying to liberate Cora.

I am right, and I am wrong….. all because I wasn’t looking into his eyes, searching them for what was real. How would this conversation have gone had we had more ways to express love and fear? With coping mechanisms that allowed us to open up?

I think I want that. He’s in my dreams, always. But then I go back and read our old letters and think “it’s going to take so much work now, because there’s so much more here than I thought.” And it’s not because I don’t want to do it. It’s because I don’t think he does. I don’t think he’s brave enough to admit that though I was wrong with my tone, nothing I said was inaccurate. He does lead a charmed life because of his straight, cis, white male perspective not because he is never discriminated against in terms of his skills and what he can bring to a job. His path to employment is not hindered by his skin or his sexual orientation. That he thinks it is while having a bisexual fiancee and a trans daughter is completely laughable. And that’s probably what felt so pedantic….. that I’d spent years and years studying this stuff and he was in 101. I didn’t have the patience to stick with 101 AND have a trans child living in NE Texas where I was afraid for her physical safety.

They’re problems in which both of us would have to be extraordinarily vulnerable, and say that we were both right and wrong…. but for different reasons than we think. Daniel is so wrong in thinking that I don’t have empathy for him. I absolutely do. I just want the same in return, and feel cheated when it doesn’t happen. If you want me to be all in, I am, but I can give what I require. I need patience, but it’s more than that. I need the people closest to me to see when I’m panicking and asking why so that I can release the pressure valve. Sometimes, it’s society. Sometimes, it’s between us. Sometimes, it’s between me and someone else and I don’t want to talk about it, I just want you to let me cry. What I don’t want you to do is think that I am being panicked for no reason at all. Just because my problem is big in this moment doesn’t mean that yours aren’t big to me the rest of the time.

I am programmed to think of everyone else first. So please believe that if I have a problem I believe is worth talking about, it really is. I am a people pleaser by nature, and would rather stand there and apologize for my existence most of the time.

It was a big deal to give up my label as a lesbian, because traditionally bisexual women are thought of as untrustworthy. We are not more untrustworthy than anyone else. Lesbians also have no problem screwing you six ways from Sunday, only a few of them enjoyable. (And straight girls are just the top shelf you can’t afford). Humans are not remotely clever in the ways they screw people over, and to get cheated on hurts no matter what. To cheat on someone hurts no matter what. We all go through it, all the time, male or female, mono or poly.

That doesn’t mean it isn’t a big deal to change what you’ve always known is true and haven’t because of flat embarrassment…. mostly because the stereotype for bisexual women is definitely not “I’ve been with women my whole life until now and I’m old.”

That lesbian label for me fell apart when I realized that I could love myself better when I was with him, that I didn’t want to fight him. That we were fighting each other because we were both in the shit, both intimidated, both directionless because it was too much to take in all at once and be comfortable at the same time. The flip side of the coin was that I chose it. I chose to be there and I was punished for it, and I’m sure Daniel feels the same way.

It’s just a shame that when he felt punished, he didn’t also keep in mind that I would have turned him out. The fact that he would have done the same to me definitely kept my feeling punished at bay. It’s hard when you can’t change the direction of an argument by unbuttoning a button…. and does it matter if it’s yours?

Many, Most of Them Mine

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Do you have a quote you live your life by or think of often?

This is going to sound like the most conceited thing ever, but the quotes I live by the most are my own. This is not because I count on them to tell me what I’m doing right, but what I’m doing wrong. I can hold myself accountable for my actions, publicly, and I am hugely capable of dealing with criticism given enough time and space. I can’t say that I never feel rejected, because it simply isn’t true. I react because I don’t take time for myself and really figure out what I want to say. My trauma reflexes work faster than my superego, where everyone should be able to operate. I go back to id over and over because I’m in survival mode. If I am writing down what I am feeling over time, then I can tell when I’m solidly all id and need to protect my energy, because giving more emotional energy to myself so that I can fly under my own power is the most important thing on earth. That’s because in order to get rid of my rejection echo chamber that turns everything from a simple mistake to life-ending crisis, I can never, ever count on external validation. I have shown that I am willing to run my life based on what other people think, and it doesn’t pay off for anyone on earth. I am not special.

I think one of the things that bothers me about the internet relationship is that because it was all written word, all the time, the punches felt so much harder. I’d hear whatever she said in my head constantly, and focus on the ways I wasn’t serving her by being her friend, because I didn’t get the reaction I wanted. I think that’s because she was unwilling to notice we had a problem and face it head on. When we’d get the most angry, we weren’t even seeing the other. We’d go into id jointly and severally. Or, I thought we were, anyway. I think this because she never thought she could do enough for me, either. We had that same worthlessness loop inside us because I felt horrible that we had problems at all and wanted to move past them, she thought I was being a drama queen and making it worse than it was.

It was even worse when she’d get offended at the smallest amount of teasing her ever. I don’t mean the big things that actually were offensive. It was even offensive to joke about our city mouse, country mouse existence. To not even notice that your reaction probably comes from something bigger than that always came across to me as “I don’t care how you feel.” When I told her how she was coming across, she’d change the subject. It didn’t matter if she changed how she treated me… to her, that is. I wanted to know it was going to get better in the future, and the only way to do that was to talk about it. You can’t build a relationship with someone who always sees conflict as the other person trying to hurt you, which we both said to each other on multiple occasions. We hit the same triggers in each other all the time. What wasn’t getting better was either one of us turning them off. Now that she didn’t fit into the mold of friend I needed her to be, of course I was out. It wasn’t because I couldn’t be that for her, it’s that I couldn’t be that for her anymore. She’d told me too much for me not to be absolutely wound into her the way I’m protective of Bryn, Cora, and Lindsay. When I say that just because she was chronologically older than me and it not meaning anything, I mean that I am older emotionally because I was allowed to grow that much more early on. In fact, she’s never had a big sister, and I have a feeling that went into our demise as well. Once we had one fight, she couldn’t see me as trying to protect her anymore. Being stern with her the way I would if any of my babies had problems- trying to say what I felt in a way that would help them without seeming judgmental. And stern is even the wrong word here, that’s just how I’d describe my writing because I can’t hug someone while I’m only writing to them.

I can’t tell them all the times that tears have been running down my face in empathy, and at the same time, knowing that if I don’t say what I mean and mean what I say, then I won’t get what I need out of our interactions, either. I can’t tell them how much they mean to me if they’re not looking for it. All I can hope for is that my words matter to them enough to go back and hear the message they missed in the middle of the mess. She thought I was ragging on her, I thought I loved her more than life itself…. but how can someone take in that message if they’re determined to believe that someone is hurting them, or wants hurt for them?

What I’m learning is that every time I go back to this topic, I hurt a little less because it’s a shallower well of injury. I care so much less about the outcome that I’m able to do the emotional work more objectively (I hope). I am trying to explain what happened so that I understand where I’m coming from. To acknowledge that I’m an angel and an asshole. That I am capable of every emotion in the spectrum. Sometimes I use my power of empathy for good, sometimes for bad, but generally when my propensity for bad decisions comes out, it’s from trying to get approval from someone else.

It bothered me that it pleased her to be thought of as the mom in my life, not because she became my mother, but because I’d describe her mother love as that feeling inside me when it was good. She’d cut and paste those lines into an e-mail and tell me she loved them…. while also not letting me talk about problems we had on that level, either. I took the good with the bad, loving her whole spectrum of emotions and respecting all of them. Hers were even bigger than mine if she looked at them that way. I chose to focus on her superego, she chose to focus on my id. I don’t blame her for that in the slightest, because I barked up the wrong tree. But my god is it easy to see how I got there.

I am not letting myself off the hook, nor her. Because for all the up and down, hers are the quotes I live by…. even the tiniest.

Sausage, bacon, light mushrooms.

In More Ways Than One

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Have you ever been camping?

My church had a campout on Mt. St. Helen’s so yes. I have camped. I hope it’s the last time until I find a place that’s warmer. It was great during the day. I froze my ass off every night. To her credit, Kari tried. She gave me a sleeping bag that was rated -20. It says more about me than it does about the sleeping bag, because my body temperature didn’t get high enough to provide the insulation and that’s on me.

Therefore, I have nothing against camping, per se. I don’t mind being dirty at all. It’s just that I’ve never been able to sleep outside without massive amounts of bedding. Which I have at home. In my bed. In a house.

Even my coldest outing wasn’t as bad as camping out in my mind tends to be every day. That’s because in order to maintain the good, I have to look at the bad. I have to go back and read what I’ve written so that I understand the context in which it was written and what I’ve actually written down…. and I can only go back long enough before the context fails, and then I can see if an idea is local or global. Am I ranting, or is it a problem that lots of other people deal with? Is it my bipolar spinning out? I have to make sure it’s not that, because it’s the kind of mood and behavior that isolates people. In a lot of ways, I camp out in my mind to make sure my story is consistent, and letting my emotions evolve day by day. The facts are consistent. It’s how I “treat myself,” and I’m delighted by that little double entendre.

When I see what my behavior is doing to people, I can look at others and see if my problem reads universal or personal. I can separate reactions from responses. I can separate their childhood shit from their adult behavior because I do it to mine all the time, comparing against the heuristics of all the human behavior I’ve seen my whole life. I had a platform to be able to see down, but I was looking up. My congregation has been teaching me to be a better human since I was born, both in learning to lead and singing in the choir.

The most disturbing thing I’ve ever thought is that if the woman who emotionally abused me had stayed, I might have been the pastor of the church. That she would have made me into her partner, and I mean the one she has now. If you look at who I am and who she is, it’s a fucking jump scare. She didn’t pick a person, she picked a pattern.

I could have turned into an arrogant asshole, but I didn’t. It probably wasn’t how she came across to her congregation, because when you’re already in love with yourself, you have the ability to lead and it’s whether you like it or not how the ones around you are treated. If you need to feel powerful because you feel powerless, you’ll take it from people who you deem inferior to you…. according to your own personal ranking system. Nature does not deal in absolutes.

I would like to think that I would have remained myself, and realistic about the fact that it was just the hand I was dealt. I don’t know what I would have done had I actually taken on pastoring a church… but here’s what I wouldn’t have done. I wouldn’t have made everything dependent on my mood and behavior so that pleasing me was a guessing game…. because microaggressions don’t lie. If someone picks it up, they won’t believe your words for a second because the energy is off. Your words and behavior don’t match. That way, other fixer/pleasers don’t feel like they’re not getting recognition, because it’s the easiest and kindest way to let them know they matter…. because they do. To treat them as anything else is crazy and won’t win you any points. If you have turf wars because you can’t delegate, it’s the beginning of the end because no one is empowered except you. Let your board feel like they’re failures long enough and berate them when they complain, and then either they’ll replace you or you’ll throw a fit and go tell them to fuck off and fire yourself. Picking up your toys and going home is never a good look, and you’ll burn down your legacy in any church at all. It was a difficult thing to stand in the flames because I had bought tickets to the show for 20 years.

No one will ever win an argument by thinking they’re always right. But let’s be real. In a congregational church, you have a boss… and the boss is the equivalent of an Episcopal vestry. In a large denomination, you have a bishop, and the conference is responsible for conflict resolution because they’ve SENT you to a church instead of you applying for the job. If you’re not humble enough to work by committee, it’s a losing argument in the congregational church. The board’s general problem is thinking they’re smarter than the pastor, and it makes the pastor feel like “if you wanted to lead the church yourselves, why did you ask for someone with a Master’s and treat them like crap?” Doesn’t expertise count for anything? It’s a give and take, a spectrum just like whether there’s a Bible or not, a God or not. It takes a tremendous amount of vulnerability on both sides, and torture when either can’t do it. The pastor isn’t always right, and neither is the committee. They will repel and attract for the entire length of their stay, and it very much depends on whether you were on a committee or not as to how you feel the church is being run. Only the people in the room know what happened.

So if you are in a church, and someone tells you the pastor did something or another, have empathy for all this. Listen objectively, and don’t let them get away with anything, either. It keeps both parties honest to hear the ways they can help each other so their future keeps getting brighter. The same things that work with leaders and groups work in marriages. People in homosexual relationships know this better than anyone else, because marriage between a man and a woman comes with a very strict power dynamic. Letting your penis inside something is good, being vulnerable enough to give that power to your partner is bad….. and leads straight men to treat gay men like they’re sinning. Not because they’re gay…. because they’re vulnerable and men don’t do that.

Straight women don’t get their glory because straight men won’t switch hit. They know it will change the power dynamic and they just don’t want to do it. That’s because most of the time, it’s the only power they’ve got. They’ll do everything from raping women and children to pretending it’s not sex with men if they’re on top. That way, one person thinks they’re in a relationship and one doesn’t. It is……. problematic. I remember getting dicked around by a straight girl that way. I knew I was an experiment…. the next morning. Speaking about not looking at microaggressions… she was a walking time bomb.

It was just a coincidence that I started hanging out with her ex later, because she’d already left my life for good. That didn’t stop her from calling my answering machine and saying that Kat had been abused and listed all the ways in which it happened. That time, Kat was in the room where it happened. It filled me with love for her that I was able to hold her while she cried about it, to say to her honestly and completely that I loved her and that nothing her friend had said made any different. Her friend had outed her about something that I would never have wanted to hear about her unless she told me, but it did give me the opportunity to be even more loving than I could have been because we started the relationship both knowing everything about everything and nothing was holding us back from honesty. That’s why I called the police when the ex showed up at our house unannounced and Kat said she didn’t want to talk to her and stood her ground. The ex wouldn’t leave and broke our screen door. Whether that was on purpose or by accident is a non-issue. It happened, and facts are facts.

Being me is knowing that I’ve also felt like her, but never done anything to that degree in my life. Thinking is free. Saying something is optional. I try to wish things into being, and work toward it. But that doesn’t mean I’m not human. It doesn’t mean my words come out right all the time so that people never misunderstand anything because I’m so great. It depends on how much they desire to understand that makes listening to me get easier. That’s because the less I need to process something, the less you’ll hear about it unless something pops up suddenly that connects to something in the past………

Probably because I’m camped out in my mind.

Every Minute of Every Day

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

When do you feel most productive?

There will never be another moment in which I think I’m not productive. If anything, I am prolific. My ideas about writing flow through me, and I am just standing by the river. Speaking of which, I thought of another fictional character that is just like me. Literally the spitting image. It’s Norman McClean from “A River Runs Through It.” Never have I wanted to marry a fictional character (in terms of the movie, not the person) as bad as him. Most people love Brad Pitt. I love Craig Sheffer, because he explained me to me in such a deep and profound way. Norman McClain is the Mr. Darcy of my life, because every woman I’ve ever known who reads literature has told me they pine for him on a spiritual level.

Norman’s dad was a minister, caring for people and me with a liberal perspective. He had the same idyllic childhood I did, but with the same pressures. He was also the oldest, and the bag that comes with. They literally acted out all the “my brother’s keeper” plays. Norman’s ideas, and his father’s, flowed out of them best when they were fly fishing. I chose to believe it’s because rivers talk.

The best preaching advice I’ve gotten has always come from my dad, but I had to adapt it to my own style and not his… for two reasons. The first is that I wanted to be fierce about establishing my own thing. That I was doing it because I wanted it, not because I was jumping for his approval. The second is that we couldn’t be the same preacher because my perspective was so wildly different from mine. He didn’t wrestle liberation theology to the ground like I did because he didn’t need it. He didn’t need to believe that “the cross and the lynching tree” extended to him… that I would be rescued from horrible oppression by setting my sights on the one who came to liberate me. That is very much the best of what the black church has been able to do for its people, and James Cone criticism is where I start any sermon ever. I want to take being responsible and mindful to the next level, freeing you from your bonds so that you can love yourself. That you have strength to move on, because your prayer life is telling you what to do. You can trust your intuition, because your brain will do everything it can to protect you from harm. You just won’t allow that protection in if you can’t sit with yourself long enough to contemplate letting it in.

It is when you become God, to let in that protection so your intuition is accurate. But in order to receive it, you have to look at your emotions in third person. If you don’t, ego gets in the way. You’ll just run on lizard brain because you’re surviving and not thriving. Praying is a way to clear the obstruction. In your prayer life, when you are asking God to give you relief, you find that you already have it because you prayed about it. It doesn’t matter if God is listening. What matters is whether you are.

I’ve talked a lot about God on this web site, but I rarely talk about what I believe. Here is my creed.

Heaven and hell were created to keep people in line. The resurrection could have been literal or a marketing campaign, and there’s no way to know that because there are no eyewitness accounts. The gospels were written down long after Jesus was crucified. But to take the Bible seriously is to pick up the lessons we can learn from those stories whether they’re factually accurate or not.

In my prayer life, I use a person as an image so that God feels like a literal person instead of a green screen. That was the moment I connected to David Morse’s character in Contact. Incidentally, I also loved that movie because Matthew McConaughey played me in a movie. That connection is very, very deep. My dad was Matt’s pastor and my mom was Matt’s middle school choir director. If you ask Matt’s mom, she’ll say my dad was amazing because he was the first one to pronounce their names right before she told him how…. and according to my dad, Matt’s dad was a mess, in that Texas way- completely affectionate the way good ol’ boys talk.

When we lived in Longview, I was a toddler. He wouldn’t remember me from Adam, but he’d remember my parents in a heartbeat. My mother’s favorite joke in life was “I’ve seen Matt in a bathing suit.” Then, when everyone expressed excitement, she’d say “of course, he was 12 at the time.” Sometimes I wonder what kind of interactions we had. Whether he’d ever asked to hold me or joked with me in a memory I can’t recall. That’s because if my mom went to a pool party at all, I was also there.

Swimming has always been where I experience God the most, and my dad reminded me of it the day I preached my first sermon. He said “it’s a river. When you get up there, just step into the flow.” Here’s the even bigger part. I didn’t have my cell phone on me, so he called the church. I wasn’t the one who answered it, so when I was sitting there borderline panicking because I couldn’t ask for a blessing, someone came up to me and said, “Leslie…. it’s your dad.” I’m crying right now just feeling that relief.

Some of you may not know that when I preach in person, I do a pastoral prayer before I get rolling. It’s not for them. It’s for me. I need to know that I have the confidence to lead people by being humble. That opening up won’t hurt, because I might be able to help people more than hurt. It is asking God to work through me so that hopefully, my words resonate instead of making them feel like they have to listen to me to be polite. I want to be worth their time, because nothing is more precious to me than time. To waste other people’s makes me feel terrible toward myself. Letting myself suck until I got better was a necessary evil, and I apologize for ever misstep ever made.

Here’s the most intimate moment that has ever happened to me with a parishioner. At our church, we only did communion once a month. One of the Sundays when the senior pastor was going to be out of town fell on it accidentally. Before the service, I was so nervous I could have thrown up, because I’d grown up in a church that had very strict requirements on who could and could not do communion, and the United Church of Christ doesn’t have any to my knowledge. But it didn’t matter. Someone I wasn’t close to gave me the biggest moment I think I’ve ever had.

I was on the Worship Team, and we were the people gathering before the service to make sure it was going to run smoothly. The question at hand was whether we should skip over communion, because it was already in the bulletin and I was freaking out. It was something I wanted to do because I knew I could, and knowing that it was not a moment I could take. I needed it to be given. I needed someone else to tell me I was worthy before I launched into something that shouldn’t have been done in the first place according to the tapes in my head.

I was standing next to a full length mirror when a woman came up behind me and placed a rainbow stole on my shoulders. She said I should look like a minister, but holy God. In that moment, she became my only ordination to date. It was worth getting raked over the coals by the senior minister when she got home, because I didn’t ask to do communion, I just hoped I would be allowed it. I was, because my support team said that it was more important to follow the bulletin than it was to leave something out. I had my moment not because I asked for it, but because said pastor didn’t proofread…. so she couldn’t take it away from me even if she was going to beat a dead horse for all eternity. She couldn’t steal the gift that I’d been given…. self confidence.

The United Church of Christ is not what’s called a “creedal church,” one that sets in stone what should be said for every occasion… see “Book of Common Prayer” for details. 😛 Since there wasn’t a template, the United Methodist words of institution floated off like I’d been doing it my whole life, completely comfortable in my skin because I knew I wasn’t stealing anything. I was serving everything. I held he literal body and blood of Christ in some traditions, an honorarium in others, right in my own hands. My faith allowed me the strength to believe that I was worthy enough to give people that gift of resolution and redemption that comes with believing in the risen Christ. That rainbow stole was everything when it came to believing that I was both the Moses that killed the teenager in the desert and the one that led the Canadian houseguests out of Iran. I wanted to know if I had enough strength to take on the mantle of being able to lead people rather than follow. I didn’t.

But Brenda did.

She let me know in 60 seconds that my words had value. The table had been laid. I was present in an intentional way. The river was flowing beside me, and all I had to do was step in.

Teaching Me

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

It’s starting to set in that the relationship with my beautiful girl, my SuperGrover, my whatever term of endearment I’m thinking of that day is really gone. Traditionally, by the time I’ve made the decision that she’s really gone, that’s the moment I get an e-mail and the cycle starts up. Now, I’m left alone with my reality and I can’t decide whether it’s better or worse. That’s because she was my real friend and a figment of my imagination the whole entire time. She has lived in my head for three different cities, numerous sets of friends, and so much to talk about besides the things I never should have said. Now I just feel like I’m losing my mind, literally.

At nine years, she was a reflex. I had to change her e-mail address to my phone so that I knew I could still use that reflex, she just wouldn’t actually receive any of the e-mails. Funny how I set that up a month before all this happened because I knew it was what I wanted and tried to keep fixing everything, anyway. I don’t think I even really wanted it for me. I think I thought it would be easier on all of us if we were a foursome, the way we would have been had I not opened my big mouth.

But what I have to sift through now is regret, because I don’t think I’ve ever done the wrong thing for me except telling her that I wanted her, because she knows I loved her long before that. I didn’t leave Dana behind because of this relationship, and I didn’t leave Houston because of it, either. It made me feel guilty for living in DC in the past and thinking of it as my home, because no one else thought that. I cried the entire plane ride here, because I was walking into the belly of the beast. I was being vulnerable because I had to put physical distance between Dana and me, because after the physical fight, I was scared of her.

You’d have to understand context here. When I started feeling those butterfly feelings, I knew my relationship with Dana wouldn’t last much longer, because I’d already broken up with her for something else. We reconciled, unfortunately, and I only say that because the emotional swings got worse until I ended up on the floor with a bruised eye socket. So, to say I did anything because of my beautiful girl is just nonsense. By the time I got to Washington, I was done.

I wanted to apologize, and again, it made our relationship go up and down with me never knowing what was going to happen from one day to the next. In retrospect, if things were going to change, they would have long before now. The hardest part is not missing her, but missing my safe space, where I was both talking and listening. After it began to be only me that was talking, I felt like she was keeping me under her thumb, afraid of what I could do to her as a writer. I was asking her to think about what she was doing to me because she’s a writer.

It was never important to her to go back and clean up a mess, so I just began ignoring it because it was easier not to tell her things that hurt me and just let them slide. When I didn’t, I could count on being body slammed into the ground. She said so many times that she wished she’d never said anything, never met me that I believed it with my whole heart, and tried constantly to ask her questions that would reveal both her anger and her hesitation.

It being over was when she said she disagreed with a lot of what I’d written, and didn’t want to tell me why. That’s when I decided that what she was really saying was that she was ready to move on and I was asking her to let me go. It didn’t feel fair for my emotions to be that large and for her to blame everything on timing, as if there was going to be an alternate future in which she was willing to disagree with me without going nuclear every single time. She took all of the affection out of her tone, as if I was going to forget for one second of a single day that she wasn’t interested. As if I wasn’t paying attention to her and intentionally trying to gut her with an axe. I’m sure it feels that way if you don’t know how to navigate conflict, or you do and your way of doing it is you’re a hammer and everyone else is a nail.

I can’t think of a time in the past seven or eight years where our relationship didn’t heat and cool like April in DC. The day I arrived, there was snow on the ground, and it was almost May.

I know now that I wished for too much, and the only one keeping me company is me. That’s because I go back and read what I’ve already read to make sure that I know reaching out is a bad idea, because I’ll have time go by and regret the way I acted and apologize. Alternatively, she’ll forget we had a fight and reach out without resolving the last fight, so the triggers keep multiplying because only I’m talking about what they are. Telling someone that they’re creating the narrative that they’re a victim is easy when you’ve never created a narrative of your own. If someone feels victimized by what I’ve done, and she has every right to her feelings if it’s true, it would help if they just said that.

Because I certainly have no problem with taking responsibility for everything I’ve done and left undone. I cut my own heart out with a knife because I was tired of feeling like there was this seething anger in her that she wouldn’t tell me about, she just alternated between being loving and furious about everything else under the sun, things that were covering up our real issues when we were both hurt and afraid of what the other would do.

Because I really was the bad guy here, I have problems starting new relationships because I don’t want to hurt anyone else. I see the ways I’ve participated in our mutually assured destruction and I don’t want to be that for or to anyone else. I didn’t even want to be that for her the moment I realized the horror of what I’d caused. I made someone else feel fear, and I didn’t care that she made me feel fear, too, until I’d apologized for my actions so many times it basically became a form letter.

I couldn’t undo what I’d wrought, and yet, neither of us pulled up. We got in a tailspin and trying to right it was futile. Just the worst thing I’ve ever done because it didn’t allow me to move on. I just beat myself up, all day, every day. I told myself that I was doing better, that we were mending our connection, and then a fight would start out of nowhere.

So, in the end, I wish she had asked herself if she was really going to change, or if I was going to be stuck apologizing for everything, forever… and been honest about the answer, telling me before it took me eight years to figure it out on my own. Nobody is that busy.

Which is what I remind myself as I read my own words without ever going back to hers. I still have everything, but I keep it for sentimental value. I can’t look at it yet, but I know I will hate myself if I delete everything. Perhaps it would give me a new start, but I’d rather just archive them so I don’t have to look at them until I’m ready.

My stuff is probably already gone, because she’s deleted everything else in recent memory. I used to think I made a difference in her life, and now I feel like a burden to her…. that I am only the person she keeps in her sights to make sure I can’t hurt her, when I was out of my mind to do it in the first place.

But like I’ve said before, if it hadn’t been this, it would have been something else…. because conflict resolution doesn’t change with relationships. It’s based on how your first family dealt with it and how you learned to deal with conflict in the first place. It is not a comfort, it is reality that this relationship would have gone the same way with a different monster conflict because we didn’t just have the one.

I wasn’t asking her to take responsibility for my actions. I was asking her to take responsibility for hers. But then it was that I was asking too much and I needed to find other friends, because who cares what she thinks?

And still nothing is resolved. I’m finding closure on my own…. and finally, I have enough reading material to tell me that I’m doing the right thing and heading away from feeling like a failure a hundred percent of the time.

Today, though, I’m crying like a butt hurt little girl. Tomorrow, everything will look better. That doesn’t make it easier right now.

I am teaching me, and it’s okay to be in 101 this semester.

How Are We Talking Today?

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 1 Comment

What topics do you like to discuss?

I will discuss anything, but it’s different in person and in letters. I weight my letters because it’s the easiest way to go deep without expecting the immediacy of a response. I would even snail mail people if it were a viable option, because I don’t think printing out an e-mail is worth it. Plus, the strength in my hand to write with a pen is all but gone and my handwriting always reminds me of both the person who taught me to write and the person I’m currently thinking about, because I’m picturing the letter they wrote me and matching style…. for instance, Meag always used block letters and I thought it looked cool, so I’d waffle between block letters and the flowy, left-handed scrawl of the woman who emotionally abused me, because we were writing those letters to each other when I was learning to write in the first place. That part is permanent, and another reason not to put out the energy to hand write something. Giving people time to sit with what I’ve said without putting them on the spot is the most important thing if you really have something to say. It is my belief that if you have the ability to sit in the cognitive dissonance of waiting, use it. Seeing everyone’s first reaction when it could be anger is something I avoid… and yet, I don’t run away from problems, either. I want you to know what they are, but in a way that is non-threatening because I am not expecting you to have the answer today, right this minute. I learned that because I don’t even trust my first reaction to something. I react, and then I think about what I think.

I’d rather have the knee jerk reaction on my own, then give you a weighted response to show that I am taking you seriously; I have thought through all the implications of what you said and can see how my first reaction was wrong because of three things I wasn’t thinking about.

In person, I have learned that the best way to get close to people is just to let them talk about themselves. It’s what they know. I’m not trying to rope people in, I just have that personality where people want to spill things to me, because my personality dictates that I can help them. Most INFJs end up in social work of some kind or another.

In order to meet someone, I look around for the person I feel is most dressed like me…. has one item that stands out, like wearing solid black and having tye-dyed shoes or red glasses. Then, I go over to them and compliment them on that one item that stands out, asking where they got it. If they’re excited to start talking, I recognize that energy. If they’re not, I walk away. I think I mentioned this- that I met the chairman of the National Black Journalism Association because I ended up next to him at a bar and said I liked his shoes.

Whether the person is Joe Nobody or Joe Scarborough, it doesn’t matter. I say the same things. That’s because I can’t be offensive if I am only complimenting them on where they got something and not trying to broadcast “I know who you are and I care.” It doesn’t make the other person want to open up to me, and what is communication without a two-way street? I’ve never been impressed by anyone in terms of them having a much bigger life than me, a much bigger platform. This is because I know that people knowing who you are is not the flex you think it is. What’s important is what you did to achieve recognition. I like standing next to greatness, not to soak up fame, but to see brilliant people do what they do best.

I choke up with pride when I really think about the work my sister is doing. She’s one of the most powerful people I know, and yet my favorite thing about her is an energy she’s had since childhood. She’s a leader. People have wanted to follow her into the ocean since she was born. She has a charisma that is literally magnetic. She can do in person the kind of things I only write down. Watching the way she negotiates with the world without letting it get to her publicly and listening to her privately is astounding, because she makes everything look effortless even when it’s not.

It was a long time before I realized that I could lead people as easily as she could, I just wasn’t emotionally capable. I didn’t have the stomach for feeling rejected in person… which is why when I’m given power, I can be trusted, because I don’t want it. She feels exactly the same way in terms of not wanting to be powerful, she just is. Her physical appearance disarms people, which also goes into the way the world reacts differently to each of us, because our barriers to entry aren’t even close. She’s so self-aware and so compassionate because of it… probably the reason she works in queer issues today. Here’s what I want her patient population to know, and know it well. She will fight for you like a three-headed dog, because no one has ever been able to pick on her big sister, either.

Where I start to lose the plot in a discussion is when I think you just want to emotionally vampire me, because I’ll say something and you’ll go on forever about yourself without realizing that you haven’t even acknowledged what I’ve said. I get uncomfortable always fading into the woodwork, because I don’t have a God complex, but I would like to feel included. It makes me feel like a ghost when the only thing that matters is the other person feeling important. Our relationship should coexist, because the more I feel lonely even though we’re talking, the less I’ll show up at all.

I would rather spend time by myself if every time we get together, it turns into your therapy session and not ours. Meaning, I will listen to anything and everything you say, but I expect that you will, too. The most exhausted I get is when people say “we’ll circle back to it” and funny how that doesn’t seem to ever happen.

That’s generally when I resort to letters. It’s not easy for either party to feel put on the spot, so I’m taking care of me, too. Yes, I am an INFJ. I am built for doing exactly what you need me to do- listen. However, just because I can be that for everyone else doesn’t mean I don’t need someone as well. I’m already as introverted as I can possibly be to protect myself from having to be constantly drained. I need friends that give me energy, not take it.

So, basically I’m using the least intrusive means of telling you what I think no matter what. I calculate my responses in terms of whether I’m letting people in closer whether I’m in person or writing, dependent upon how open they are to hearing. I sense changes in energies very quickly, because the same things that work with feeling like you’re losing a crowd work in a conversation. Although, you work a crowd. You don’t work a person. You can just feel that shift and know you need to regroup…. like knowing it’s okay to come out to someone by getting their opinions on a few other topics, first. I feel similarly to Roy Wood, Jr. that we shouldn’t get rid of the Confederate flag so we can tell which white people are all right…. because where prejudice against skin color goes, so does their view of me. I hate walking into traps, and I’ll do anything to avoid it because I don’t like who I am when I feel caged.

Therefore, protesters at Pride parades never phased me. I knew they weren’t the right white people. I have never, ever seen black people protesting against Pride marches. Doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen, that’s just my experience. I know that discrimination against queer people is rampant in the black church, but there’s a line drawn there. I would like to think it is sympathy for the struggle, that there are big differences… and too many similarities to count. For instance, we have both struggled with law enforcement. If you were caught in any homosexual behavior, the newspaper could absolutely ruin your life, because the news would be out publicly, both that you were arrested and why.

Getting your name published in the paper went away, but not the stigma. On a very basic level, humans are taught that sex is gross, but their particular brand of sex is right and good while someone else’s is bad and wrong. When you teach 80% of the population that they are right and good, what is the other 20% supposed to feel?

This is still happening today in classrooms across America, kids getting indoctrinated that those who don’t struggle with problems due to race, gender, sexual orientation, and/or religion matter so much more than the others…. that their lives are worth more because they were born “perfect.” This system reached ungodly levels of insanity during the Holocaust, where I never forget that Anne Frank and I are the same person. If I had been there, I would be dead…. she in her yellow star, me in my pink triangle.

If you’ve never had to carry that burden, you don’t have empathy for it and minimize it until it doesn’t exist. The best we can hope for is “I don’t see color,” which means that you’re okay as long as you don’t seem any different from them and understand completely when they’ve misgendered you or misnamed you for the 50th time that day… White, straight, cis people have no idea just how relentless it is… how much work it takes not to feel that pain all the time. How much we can’t laugh off your forgetfulness.

And if I feel this way, someone with browner skin than mine feels this phobia about themselves in a way they can’t hide from anyone else… same with trans people. They are physically different from me, so their differences get noticed quicker than mine…. but it’s all the same struggle. There are many, many basketball courts in that one gym.

When I’m really turned on in a conversation, it’s generally about issues like this, that affect more than just me. I can talk for hours about how I owe everything to Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bayard Rustin. I have often pictured what their conversations look like back at the hotel.

Mostly because I’m a Bayard, constantly seeking their Martin.

Am I Being Punk’d?

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

When is the last time you took a risk? How did it work out?

I take risks all day long. Up until now, I’ve been in relationships with women. I’m genderqueer on the outside, genderfluid on the inside. Stepping out my front door is an act of courage, and not cowing to the demands of what society puts on women is another. I do not owe it to the world to put on makeup.

It might not make me look like a drag queen, but I certainly feel like it sometimes. I’m just not used to it anymore. It doesn’t feel natural like it used to. It feels like paint. So, I’ll still wear some (occasionally), but only mascara, eyeliner, and a bit of lip gloss. Jeremy Renner was a makeup artist before he was on camera, and he said something that made sense to me. All you need is to frame your face.

I have cut foundation out entirely, because that’s where skin problems start. I had horrible systemic acne as a teen, and fixed it with Accutane. Since then, I’ve just taken care of my skin. I don’t really have to do much- soap and water is just fine, as long as it’s not the cheapest soap you can find. Right now, I’m using African black soap, which clears up acne naturally…. And yet, Dove works fine, too. All I’m saying is that I chose to clear up the problem with pills rather than a multitude of creams that probably wouldn’t have worked, anyway.

After a time, it became impossible to control my acne with just topical applications, and it was a risk taking Accutane at all. There were horrible side effects- bone pain in my back and legs, dry skin (which wasn’t that bad until it was my lips), and my emotions were all over the place. I wasn’t on any psych meds at the time, but it wasn’t unrelated, either. One of the primary warnings is suicidal ideation….. probably because it makes you feel so bad that if you’ve been on it, you know that some days death would have been a welcome relief rather than trying to stand up fifteen minutes in a row.

In the end, it was worth it and I would do it again. But while you’re going through it, there’s really no end in sight. It takes six months, at least, and if it’s bad enough, you have to do it twice. You’re basically trying to kill all the oil glands in your face. It works, but it is a bitch and a half.

It was most embarrassing having to say to people so often, “no, I am not pregnant. I am not planning on becoming pregnant.” No one was being mean to me, the effects on the baby would have been that severe. But of course, it tapped into my worthless feelings because I knew I’d never have a baby. That’s crazy talk. Keep in mind, I was like 19. I finally just started saying I was a lesbian, and it stopped cold…. And then lesbians just HAD to have kids and make it normal….. God, you guys. 😛

I was completely obsessed with myself, but not in terms of vanity. I hurt all over, from constant headaches to backaches to period cramps being ten times as bad. That kind of constant pain wears on you, and I was waiting tables at the time. Just pain on top of pain.

When I think of that time in my life, the pain resurfaces, but it’s filtered through the fact that I only had to endure it for a short while…. Maybe a year. But I know chemo patients who have had it less rough than that.

Now, I have really good skin, but other problems with my health that need addressing…. And that is a risk, too, just because I don’t like going to the doctor. I think I know everything. But as I’ve said before, being the best doctor you’ve got isn’t a ringing endorsement.

And the truth is that I hate going to the doctor because no one knows me in Maryland. Outside my little Texas bubble, I don’t have any connection to a medical family and doctors get pedantic with me right away…. Even when I say things like “I have Aleve at home and it’s not working. Could I try Celebrex?” Then the doctor will say something like how I don’t need anything that strong and I’ll say “I don’t need a stronger dose of anything. I need both the Cox-1 and Cox-2 inhibitors” and all of the sudden a light dawns AND I CAN SEE IT HAPPENING. “Oh, she wasn’t kidding when she said she came from a medical family. Maybe she does know something.”

I am not here to give medical advice to anyone. I know my own body… and I am perfectly fine with OTC pain meds 90% of the time. If I was asking for Tylenol #3 or Vicoprofen, I could understand a doctor’s hesitation. No one is trying to scam you for narcotics, dude. I have enough issues. I don’t want addiction to be one of them.

Plus, I’m an introvert, and I don’t like dealing with people. It is a necessary evil. So, if I am not in any danger and I already know what’s going on, I can treat myself within limits. I don’t need to go to the doctor for bad allergies or a cold. I don’t need to go to the ER because dollars to donuts my pain won’t be taken seriously and I’ll be given a prescription for 600mg ibuprofen when I CAN COUNT, thanks (regular is 200mg). The one thing I won’t do is argue, because I don’t want to be accused of drug seeking behavior. That means even when you’re *really* bad off, no one will pay attention to you. It’s The Boy Who Cried Wolf…. Even when it’s not.

It’s a risk to see a doctor because you’re working off a thousand assumptions that have nothing to do with you. The doctor is running heuristics on my pain as easily as I do with emotional situations. However, I have never had a doctor be compassionate enough to see that I needed more than over the counter medications and I’m not dumb enough to insist that’s what they should do. I grit my teeth a lot.

In fact, the one doctor who did think I was in that much pain didn’t go to medical school in the United States, and therefore, could hold my hand and do little else. I had a housemate from Nigeria, Franklin, and one night I was cooking for us. I managed to slice into my finger while cutting a raw sweet potato, and the knife came down on my finger with force…. To the point I was scared to cook for a while. Franklin said later that he should have taken me to the ER because I needed stitches. I told him he was right, but that I had enough experience in a professional kitchen that it wasn’t an emergency. It was Tuesday.

It took forever for the finger to heal, but luckily, no nerve damage. The only nerve damage is from before I was a cook. I was 16 and still living in the parsonage when I sliced my thumb while cutting a lime for my Diet Coke (yes, I was 100% That Bitch). I’m 45, and there’s still a dead spot on the palm side.

Learning to cook professionally was a risk because I knew I wouldn’t be spectacular at it, I’d just have a ton of fun. And I did. Even when I was injured, it was fine…. Most of the time. I won’t lie and say I was always Mama’s brave little soldier, but in that kind of pressure cooker, losing your shit has to be in very small increments. There’s no time for anything else.

The job that came with the best perks was working in a restaurant at the Portland airport, because I had a badge that let me walk directly onto the tarmac. It was refreshing to go and take a break and watch the planes, which you can do in an airport restaurant because you can look at the loads for the day and tell when the pops are going to be.

It’s also a big risk to take a kitchen job, because there’s always a definite start time. Good luck finding the end.

I had a love-hate relationship being the last one out, because the last one out is the first to get blamed in the morning. Part of it was petty day crew/night crew bullshit. Part of it is that I’m physically weak and forget a lot. So whose fault it actually was in each instance isn’t important. What’s important is that it was relentless. I couldn’t win either way. So, whether you believe I am the best cook or the worst, it still sucked to walk in to a laundry list of my failures…. Particularly when another cook told management that I was the one who left something out, and he did. I took the fall for his raw chicken sins.

Being a writer is a risk. People think I flippantly post things, and I sweat blood. I had to get into the habit of hitting post as soon as I was done with an entry, because to wait was to let imposter syndrome set in. Nothing would ever be good enough…. And it still isn’t, but you people are too kind.

I would like to take a risk and go sit with the bees, but I can’t today. They don’t like rain, and today it is big, fat drops. I’m not sure I would love it out there, either. But Magda has grown lavender in the side yard or at least a year, and the bees love it more than life itself. I just wanted to clear it up that we do not have a hive. I have not had an audience with my queen. I just know all her loyal subjects, who listen to me as if they have nothing else to do because they’re better at multitasking than I am.

If I wear my blue hoodie, I am more attractive to them. I can’t decide whether I like that or not. They’re never aggressive, not ever. I just have to decide how comfortable I am with bees on me… because if I make a bad move and it is misinterpreted, there is no “Undo” feature.

I’m just glad that we have a safe space for bees in our yard, because I feel emotionally connected to them in more ways than one. Claire talks to her bees in “Outlander,” which makes me feel like less of a crazy person for doing the same. And I’m a cook. The plight of the bees is mine as well. Incidentally, my favorite version of “Flight of the Bumblebee” is twofold. The first was hearing Wynton Marsalis on a recording. The second was hearing Clark Terry do it live in a master class.

Speaking of which, I love meeting famous people. It’s always a risk, but it pays off. I come away with an interesting story, some of them interesting enough where the famous person will remember me, some not so much.

I could tell that I tickled the hell out of Wynton Marsalis when I told him I’d been waiting my whole life to meet him…. Just stifling his laughter at how long that must have been in all of my 15 years.

It’s kind of fun being able to say that I met so many people at HSPVA before they were famous, because the part of them that’s not famous is what I like best.

One of my favorite random conversations happened at the pub where I worked before the pandemic. I sat down at the bar for an ice water and a shift drink, and asked the guy next to me what he did. He said, “I’m a sound engineer for NPR.” He said, “what do you do?” I said, “I sling hash for a living.” The fucking bartender said, “I thought you worked here. You didn’t tell me you were a drug dealer.” The NPR sound engineer laughed until he cried.

I couldn’t even breathe I was laughing so hard, because this bartender was young enough to be my son. “Slinging hash” had a different meaning in his world.

Moving to DC was a big risk, but it paid off because I get to have these conversations all the time. I am permanently stuck at the smart kids’ table, right where I need to be just to soak up information…. And not filling my ears with hot air. So much more interesting to talk to people who make the news than watching it at night or listening on the radio.

Also, not going to lie…. Pretty great standing in front of a gaggle of groupies and talking to Robert Glasper when he says, “SHIT! You from the crib…” Grabbed me and hugged me like Mr. Hattox’s history class was yesterday and not 30 years ago. We didn’t take a selfie that time, but I think I got one on the next tour. By the time I got to talk to Robert after the first time I saw him, we were both exhausted and I didn’t think either of us would look good, anyway.… nothing to put on the refrigerator, anyway. I prefer it. I didn’t capture the look on Robert’s face when he saw a high school friend. That look was just for me.

I think I’ve said this before, but I knew Jason Moran back in the day better than I knew Robert Glasper, but yet still a risk to go and talk to him because I wasn’t sure if he’d remember me or not. He absolutely did, and I felt silly for wondering. I told him that I’d written to one of his albums, Ten, for a year. He turned around to the whole band and said, “hey guys… she wrote to Ten for a year.” I was so honored, because it meant something to him that his music fueled me, and meant something to me that he thought it was important enough to tell the band.

One of the big risks I took in high school was attending Summer Jazz Workshop, where I got integrated into the Houston jazz scene. My one claim to fame is that I was the trumpet soloist when my band was on a local television show called “Black Voices.” It was hilarious because the “Black Voices” logo appeared, and then my big white face with even bigger glasses.

Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t a prodigy at trumpet or anything else. I just decided to take a risk, because getting to be in the band at all was the point. I remember Doc Morgan, my jazz director at HSPVA, saying that he was going to miss me getting to do the traditional “senior tune,” where every graduating member of the band gets their own solo. I told him not to worry, that he’d featured me so much as a ninth grader that I felt like I already had mine… and it was true. I remember one solo that went extraordinarily well, and he said, “Leslie Lanagan… Ninth grade, ladies and gentlemen… NINTH GRADE.”

I peaked too soon, but it was worth it. I got the experience of a lifetime before being thrown to the wolves in marching band. That was its own special kind of risk…. But at least I only fell in rehearsal once. That is because I was marching backwards and either I ran into a bass drummer or he ran into me…. Unclear.

It was physical and alien, made torturous by the Texas heat. I do not regret the risk of staying in, of feeling embarrassed until I didn’t, allowing myself to suck at something until I didn’t. Being in the marching band was required to stay in the symphonic band, and came with a free trip to San Antonio, where we were presented The Sudler Flag, honoring the best of Texas music education…. And since my mom was a music teacher, she was already at the (Texas Music Educators Association, or TMEA) convention and got to hear me.

The last huge risk (huge) was preaching at Bridgeport, and I didn’t even do that until I was asked. No one really knew me, didn’t know where I’d come from, and didn’t expect anything. Sometimes, I was on fire (according to me) and sometimes I sucked (also according to me). But the thrill was becoming experienced at something I’d only watched from a distance…. And as it turns out, I’m like every preacher in the world. The sermon you think sucks is what everyone remembers, and the sermon you thought was gold is straight trash.

So that’s how I view this web site, too. It’s a risk, but I know that the very worst entry I write, someone will absolutely adore. Something I like will languish, because people don’t think the way I do, and thank God for that. Otherwise, I would be preaching to an echo chamber.

A risk all its own, and one that never pays off.

The War Daniel, Part II

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Describe a risk you took that you do not regret.

I took a risk in getting close to The War Daniel, and it paid off in spades. Yes, I went through so much, but I am hugely capable of dealing with things so it never felt like a burden. I know I came across as harsh, but that’s because I wasn’t holding him while we talked. I hope he understands, even if we never reconcile, how much he changed my life for the better just by having the courage to ask me to marry him… because it showed that he was dreaming of a better life down the road as well. I want nothing more out of him than that; I want him to find his best life, even if I’m not involved. I want him to be Secretary of Veterans Affairs or a war journalism professor or a lazy bum on a beach in a country where you can live on $20 and a coupon for frozen yogurt.

I just want him to live like he means it, because that’s what I want for myself. To free myself of the bonds that make me think the world is better off without me. The War Daniel and I have both gotten close, and it’s an institutional memory of what we hate most about ourselves, because it matches up so closely. I spoke the other day about my conversations being tough on anyone who doesn’t live on my “Island of Misfit Toys,” and Daniel knew enough right off the bat he bought a house.

Can you see what that means to me? Out of all the people in the world that could have picked me, he did. He knew every single thing he needed to know and nothing frightened him, because if I’d been through it, so had he…. Just from vastly different perspective. In fact, the only thing that gave me pause before I said yes was wondering why a Doc of that magnitude was even interested in me. Who even am I next to all that?

I empathized with his problems to the point of not being able to move at all. My mirror neurons were constantly overloaded, and it was because we were having the same experience. I was awed with him because I felt worthless, and vice versa. Neither one of us believed we truly deserved each other, and it showed quickly. However, I won’t ever believe that he’s not the perfect match for me, because we have just enough in common and just enough difference to change lives just by being us. We change each other all the time.

Cora is part of my story now, and in some sense, we are raising a child together. This is because my mother love kicked in the moment she realized she wanted that… a queer mom to help her translate her feelings so that her parents could hear her better. To teach them queer history so that they knew what our triggers were so that at least when they hit them, they’d know enough to apologize. I needed us to be one big happy family, three parents and a child, because I can’t think of a child that needs it more than Cora.

I cannot underestimate how much danger I feel she is in, both with Texas laws and attitudes toward trans women in particular, and to get even more granular, if white trans women have it bad, the darker your skin gets, the worse the crime statistics. Everything in that regard is par for the course.

When she told me how bad it was down there, my first reaction was “I want you to move in with me. Can we make that happen? I don’t even know if I can make that happen, but we can work on it together.”

She told me that she’d be open to it, and that she’s wanted it since I said it. Whether The War Daniel is an active participant or an NPC is of no consequence. They can walk away from me, but I will never in my lifetime walk away from her. That is my daughter out there, and I dare you to prove it’s not true. The only evidence you don’t have is DNA. Good luck. God bless.

So now I need to start researching the best place for us. If it was a cheap city, ideally it would have enough room for both her parents to visit, together or separately. It’s not that I have my hopes up, it’s just that if you commit to a kid, their whole famn damily comes with them. It doesn’t matter how they react to me, because I can only control what I’m putting out. So, The War Daniel is free to tell me he made a mistake and free to move on all in one breath, because I can’t care about him anymore. I need to care about her.

I have entirely pure motives because I can’t afford to be wrong on this one. I cannot live with a world in which I do not do everything I can to convince Daniel to get her the fuck out of NE Texas. I left because I got tired of fighting the system. I needed to live with other grown-ups.

So do I regret opening my heart so quickly to Daniel? Absolutelyfuckingnot. I got the best relationship of my life out of it. I just can’t be the only one getting up in the middle of the night when the baby is telling us she needs help. My best hope is that he does choose me again, for all sorts of reasons, a lot of them practical. I had to let go of wanting a man I couldn’t have because all of this is bigger than me. But that doesn’t mean I am counting on it. That would be insane. I want to be wanted, and a campaign for anything else is beneath me.

I think the biggest reason I’m loud on the Internet where it comes to Daniel is that he knows it’s here. He can look it up. He can see that he is wanted, loved, and cherished even when he irritates the shit out of me. He struggles with feelings of inadequacy, too, so more than anything I want him to know that I love him despite his flaws and failures because he loved me in that same extraordinary way. There were also so many callbacks to our childhood that we could pass on to Cora, and it’s not as fun doing it without it being a tennis match.

I took a big swing, and I’ll hit home plate one way or another. I can support Cora from a distance or she can live with me, but there’s not a person alive who, if they had a chance to get a trans kid out of Texas, wouldn’t.