Tag: virtual

Well, There’s This

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What activities do you lose yourself in?

For $5.00, I can get lost for years. This is because $5.00 is about how much it takes to by “Droid Edit,” a full-featured coding notepad for Android. The free version of “Koder” on iOS seems to fit the bill nicely, but I would get the pro version if it was more like Notepad++ and Microsoft Visual Studio Code (my personal favorite because now it runs bare metal on all operating systems, even Fedora and Ubuntu. It should also be able to run on Android with those specs. Get your shit together, Microsoft. Do you think I like coding without the Dracula Official Theme? Monokai is not going to cut it, my friend.).

I use the term coding loosely, because really the only things I do in my HTML files are add italics and special characters, maybe a link. For some reason, if I do more than that, WordPress will scrub out the HTML and tell me it can’t recover the block. I need a real solution that’s completely open source, but I like WordPress. I made the decision 20 years ago to stop coding and only be known as a writer…. why my setup is simple and hopefully easy to read.

I end up using the WordPress reader included in the Jetpack app because it’s in dark mode. I rarely read my own work on my blog itself. I like dark mode. My fans don’t. They’re older and they have more insurance.

And in fact, the most sweet and vulnerable moments between Supergrover and me are when I need my Jessica Tandy, and Supergrover is absolutely as beautiful as she always was. It is not lost on me that I’m a preacher’s kid and she’s a Bee Charmer. In effect, we are “Fried Green Tomatoes,” because that movie showed deep companionate love without showing romance because of the time. Because they held down the madness with the romance, it actually fits Supergrover and me better than if they had. Of course Idgie and Ruth were best friends who ran a business together and not this torrid love affair that lasted a million years, which it absolutely was in “Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café.” Just devoted and never stopped loving each other until they died.

But female friendship is absolutely that strong and resilient, so both the book and the movie are priceless to me. In short, I felt like Idgie when she was young, with Supergrover being every bit the power,grace, and style of a young, married Southern woman. I was absolutely just a lovesick puppy dog for a couple of years, and then I realized my place in the world. “Love her anyway. Help her anyway. She may not accept you in person, but she’ll always come back here.” I am not writing for her. I am not writing to her. These are all the memories I want to be able to read when I am 70 and nothing more. I want her with me, helping to craft the narrative, but it is not necessary. It is the process of letting go and letting God, my words for going into deep discernment. My personality divides and I argue it out with my rabbi, essentially. However, I know that it is me talking back. I do not think of a relationship with God as external, but the omnipotent third eye present in so many Eastern religions.

It’s why I don’t care about semantics, I just want the protein.

I feel like in a way, all of this has been me trying to explain to her why we need to open the Whistle Stop and move on, rather than her always feeling guilty. Just start working together and having fun rather than both of us being up shit creek all the time.

Without a paddle, obvs.

So many messages that didn’t get through. Me thinking about the future and throwing ideas out there to remind myself that this was grounded and real came across as being unwilling to accept the demands on her time. This is categorically untrue. I have dealt with the boundaries on her time since day one, and our relationship has lasted over 10 years now. If I really had problems with her priorities, I wouldn’t have stuck around this long. I also don’t think that I’m all that and a bag of chips, but 10 years is a long time to feel like this relationship is fake with her insisting that it’s not.

Now, I really believe it wasn’t. It was as real as a heart attack. But that’s because I’m not going to get that message through placation. I’m going to get that message through truth. The longer you put off telling the truth, the angrier I get. I don’t want to handle someone else’s avoidance, I want them to realize they’re being avoidant because I’m not an entitled prick who wants to tell you how to run your life until you’ve stomped on my feelings so hard that we’re going to have to have it out. Go drive someone else up the wall because I am struggling.

It’s one thing to be on the bottom of the totem pole for a year- two or three. But after 10 wouldn’t you be furious that you never got airtime? Especially when we have this strong pull towards each other that also has its limits? It’s a dramatic tension that could be solved in an afternoon. I don’t understand keeping that weirdness in place all these years. I think I could solve a lot of her problems with me in one beer….. most notably that our relationship might not translate.

We are not guaranteed to bond just because we like the same Instagram influencer. But thinking we are both sides of Fried Green tomatoes, the Idgie and Ruth and the Idgie and Evelyn is the journey we’ve taken. I don’t know what compelled her to come, but I think it was my thu’um. When a dragon hears its name, it is not bound to respond, but always will out of curiosity and competition. I should give her a word of power, but Snow Wing Hunter is better than anything I could come up with on my own, and she has definitely carried me to Skuldafn many times to meet my Alduins.

I get lost in the flight.

I only get lost in the fight when the adrenaline comes down. It’s not her responsibility to keep it up. I would like it if she’d take on the responsibility of telling me up front the timeframe with which I’m dealing so it calms my anxiety that she’s not always mad at me. It’s hard to feel secure on three words.

What I loved about her letter the other day was twofold. I fell in love with her prose about her family, the everyday life she leads while also being powerful, the dynamic that Lindsay and I have so I could relate on a spiritual level. What it takes to be superhuman at staying awake, because she’s on call a lot of the time (as is Lindsay- news breaks). What it takes to be a big sister in her family. Or, what she wants it to take and I can feel her emotions regarding it from a million miles away. I know the particular pain of losing a mother and finding yourself as the new matriarch suddenly….. especially not being prepared in any way to do so because I feel like it’s my responsibility to be providing for her. She’s the little sister that could. She’s just so sweet about giving me experiences I never would have had otherwise while totally cheering me on as a writer.

That’s been Supergrover’s role in my life as well. I think one of the pricks on my skin that won’t heal is saying that I portray her as a villain as often as I do a friend and rages about it……. while also raging that I paint her as a “Flat Stanley.” I feel that the ups and downs make her a 3D character. Everything she sends me that shows me a real feeling, I include it, because since it’s her real feeling, it’s my real feeling, too. I have said this line before, but I will remember it forever. I didn’t know who “Flat Stanley” was, but I told her that “Flat Stanley has a history of amazing topography.” She is a 3D character, but she isn’t if you take every entry individually instead of reading me like a book. Start in January of last year and read forwards and a 3D character will emerge no matter who it is in my life.

Most people trade the forest for the trees. As I have told her, I feel like my years are so much more important than my days. No one has ever loved her the way I have, and not in terms of depth. In the way that love is executed every day. I became a journalist from the day we met, tasked with telling my own story while not revealing my source. Any misstep on my part feels like a little betrayal, and Supergrover doesn’t talk to me about my writing, so I have no idea how close to the line I am or how I can protect her more in the future. She said that I mentioned something she wanted to keep quiet, but I have no idea what it was that she wanted to keep private, for instance, so I couldn’t go back and fix it.

I want to know what touches her, because everything I write about her is something I’ve gotten lost in, because it was kind of like meeting The Oracle and finding out I’m Neo. My mind went into hyperdrive, and I began to think differently, and on as big a scale as possible because all of the sudden I knew I was capable of it. I’ve realized that I would be happy in a think tank if that were a thing that could happen, mostly because I’m a “plant,” the employee who comes up with great ideas by synthesizing information in the room and building off what other people have said until there’s a consensus.

But I never would have believed that I belonged at that particular table until Supergrover told me I was too smart for my own good.

I get that a lot, but I didn’t believe it until 2013 (a typo when I said that the Argo message came in 2003, I remember). She’s not the president, nor elected to anything, nor can I tell you whether she’s private or public industry (except that she and Zac both speak “acronym.”). What I can tell you is that her compliment had a lot of power behind it. Her CV makes me constantly wonder who she’s met all over the world, especially movie stars.

I miss her pithy comments on my entries, because when she was an e-mail subscriber, instead of commenting here, she’d just forward me the e-mail and flip me shit. She can say so much in so few words, even better when they’re teasing directed at me or our favorite Instagram influencer. Speaking of which, we need to talk about that, too, beautiful girl. It’s probably nothing, but it’s a “how dead am I?” sort of question. Another thing that whether this makes her land on my desk to my thu’um is up for grabs. What is important is that I will remember exactly what this means for a hundred years because all of these feelings are burned into my brain.

The rhythm has calmed, but we still have to dance. I’m not trying to be her partner, I’m trying to be her co-author unless her husband also writes. Maybe she’d rather collaborate with him if that’s the case, and I don’t have any ill will toward that. And it’s not that I have this desperate need to write about her because she’s a powerful person. It’s not. It’s that she became a big part of my story personally, and not of her big shot mess ever mattered.

I love the absolute smallest part of her, because that’s the part I love about everyone. I like vulnerability because I can make accurate decisions on how to behave next. The only reason I spiraled out with her is that I was medically falling apart and I want to throw up every time I think of that time in my life because it cost us so much trust and time. To think that she thinks all of this is her fault is horrible because I’ve been trying to make amends for so many years and it has come across as accusation.

She did indeed throw a bomb over her shoulder and walk away. The truth hurts. But it wasn’t the bomb that hurt. It was walking away and not dealing with the fallout. It showed the ultimate disrespect to me because it was like “I get to tell you whatever I want and then not care how it makes you feel.” She says she’s not responsible for my reactions. No, she’s not, but if she wants to stay my friend she better well be willing to clean up her own mess, because I didn’t ask for it. I’m not guilting you (universal), I am holding you to the standard of being a good friend. How is it anyone’s right to leave the other person so much worse than they found them by listening so closely at first that we were breathing in the right direction……… then holding a wrong over my head for so long that we never moved back into safe space for her? She lost the ability to be a decent friend, her words, not mine.

Then she opened up and told me that my guesses about her behavior were right on target and also that it was too late while also saying “story for another day” while also writing me something so beautiful I’m still chewing on it days later. I don’t know what to think, but I know what I see, and it is a spectrum. We’re better writers as a team than we are alone.

It just depends on whether writing means as much to her as it does to me. It doesn’t have to be blog entries because I’m an audience of one, and the same goes for me- the safe space where I sandbox.

She’s not the love of my life where I get lost in her beauty, wishing like a lovesick puppy for just one hug or what the fuck ever. She’s the love of my life due to writing being the only real partner I have. And she’s the brain that comes with that package, because I feel like she whipped my ass into shape by editing me and giving me feedback on letters as well. I miss that relationship, because it exists outside of time and space. I’d be happy if it always did, but my mind sees so many futures that it’s hard to decide and I’m grateful to also have enough closure to let go. Just because she let her walls down once doesn’t mean she has the strength to do it all the time, and that’s what I need from her if she doesn’t want to meet me in person. I will never be able to pick up subtext if I don’t because I won’t be able to read it in her voice.

I take everything literally, and I’m a “get off my lawn” personality. I rarely apologize for it, but it’s an important flaw in my character in this relationship. But I’m not “get off my lawn” years old on purpose. I’m autistic and lecture as such. I become an overexplainer to avoid awkward silence, of which there has been a lot.

It’s not awkward silence anymore, because she told me she loved me in two different ways. The first was “if I hear your call, I will always come…. because I love my girl.” It was the ending of my letter to Michael writ large. I was right on the money, dear reader. I cannot believe it. Seriously. She swooped in with all the big sister badass no bullshit love I’ve come to know. She doesn’t have to say a word. She said that she was constantly overwhelmed because I was demanding, when I was dreaming. The second was letting me know she things about me all the time, the thing that would have calmed me the most.

I don’t want to be around anyone who doesn’t want to be around me, and I got my answer. Maybe. As it has been for 10 years…… and where I get lost.

Finding Out I’m Just Me

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

As the year comes to a close, I’m starting to do some reflection on what actually happened. In a lot of ways, I found who I was. In others, things are vastly different. Over the last 10 years, my popularity has grown dramatically. I have regained most of the ground I lost when I tanked “Clever Title Goes Here,” a blog that does still exist, but you have to search for it in the Wayback Machine. Everything I’ve written that I originally wrote there that has meant something to me has been transferred over, and the marriage article I published in 2013 (the most successful entry so far in terms of its promotion) was originally a post using Facebook Notes. It was an offhand set of observations that maybe a couple hundred people (if that) read there, then it exploded once I changed to a different platform.

Apt.

I’m shifting my whole life to a different platform. As a result, I’ve gone from thousands of hits a year to millions (if I count all the bots- let’s not get stupid). It’s astounding that all I do is talk about my reaction to life and people show up. And not only that, they don’t just show up when I’m adorable. They show up on my worst days, too (and seem particularly jazzed about my Anthony Bourdain-type patois). What I’ve learned over the past year is twofold. The first is that monotropic thought processes have all but stopped me checking my stats. As in, I am bleeding all over the page and using it as self-help, not looking to see who has read me and where (although shout out to India, where I have a much bigger audience than in the United States- noticed that before, really took it in after looking at year-end stats). Year-end stats are the only ones to which I really pay attention. Having a general sense of where I am and where I’m going is much better than being anxious about it.

I am also not trying to impress anyone. I am completely self-absorbed, and by that, I mean self-contained. I do not want to write about things over which I have no control, thus reacting and responding to stimuli without assuming that everything I say is correct. It is true and factual to the best of my ability, because obviously I cannot root around in your head. The information I have is only what I’ve been given. I don’t have the right to write about something you didn’t want me to know, but I have the right to talk about my reactions to you separately from your reactions to me. That comes across to everyone else but me as total bullshit, because I am not working with the same knowledge/experience/brain capability that you have.

And yes, I’m judgmental about everything, and I need to stop apologizing for it because a hell of a lot of people process this way. Meyers-Briggs dedicated a whole ass letter to it. You’re either a Judger or a Perceiver, and neither one is bad. You Think your way through a problem, or you Feel it.

I am the combination of all the quiet traits, INFJ. That means I am:

  • Introverted
  • Intuitive
  • Feeling
  • Judging

That being said, I sound like I am judgmental of people rather than the situation I’m in. I have no problem with telling people their actions make them look like an asshole, but I won’t tell them that they’re bad or wrong. I just won’t sit at your table anymore. But that’s if we’re not close. If you’re worth fighting for, I’m scrappy and I’m down to spar until we shake hands. If there’s no handshake at the end of a fight, there’s no more relationship. This is because if it’s a big enough fight and you don’t work it through, then you both view each other with suspicion and the effect snowballs.

I have become more introverted because I stopped engaging with everyone who wouldn’t engage with me. I might have been angry about it, but I’m not now. I benefited from focusing on myself and not worrying about what other people thought. I stopped worrying about whether Supergrover cared about anything because she didn’t deserve it anymore and thought I should know just how awful I was for being angry that she was a steel trap. Whether she believes it or not, I lost nothing in that transaction because she wasn’t here even when she was here. She coasted and I let her. My fault entirely because when I stopped pussyfooting around something and brought it up, I was instantly a bad person. No one gets to think I’m a bad person and tell me about it anymore. That’s because they can think that all they want, but my self-esteem dictates “get the hell out of Dodge,” because I am not going to spend another eight years trying to solve a problem for which I am only 50% responsible. That’s because there’s a huge, overarching problem and I’ve owned my part publicly and privately, but we can’t move on from it because my emotions are different than hers and are therefore wrong.

I don’t feel like I’m a real person to her, and she is a real person to me. Therefore, I withdrew to focus on what I was putting out there, not what I was receiving. I’ll make other friends with whom I actually have a clean slate when other people are refusing to erase my black marks while I wipe theirs clean. It doesn’t seem like it, I’m sure, because I will want to solve the underlying problem, not move on and hope for the best. That’s because without true forgiveness and healing, a problem never goes away. It will just revisit you in the night.

But I had to learn how to feel that way, because my first instinct when someone found fault with me is to stop taking up space in the world. Clearly, when someone else is angry or put off by me, it must be all my fault. I am sure that I have attributed things to my friends that have nothing to do with me, but that’s what happens when you leave someone in the dark. The moral arc of the universe is indeed long and bends toward justice, but the arc doesn’t move itself.

I am not in charge of moving the arc personally, but I am responsible for my piece. I am trying to lower the heat so that I’m in a different part of the prism. AuDHD rage sometimes steals blue because I see red. I cannot help that. It is a symptom. However, the more I can find coping mechanisms, the less chance there is for a Red Dawn…. I am resting comfortably at about Mood Indigo.

Writing this blog is sincerely trying to come down from all of that. It’s looking at old patterns of behavior and picking out my ADHD and autism moods, much more important than the way my depression and anxiety stem from it. It’s an important distinction because my personality is so different depending on which processing disorder is driving the bus. ADHD has no problem with changing environments and thriving on noise/activity. I don’t even like changing the brand of my socks.

But honestly, I haven’t paid much attention to those things because I refused to see it. I refused to realize how much comfort and the Internet go together, because when I am secure in my body, I am secure in my thoughts. When I am secure in my thoughts, lack of stimulation in the room where I am writing takes all my barriers to communication away. I am just not as quick in conversation. I also tend to look around at how people are talking and try to mask my way through a conversation, rather than putting everything down on the table and seeing who responds to it. That’s really the only thing you can do, otherwise, you’re just driving yourself crazy trying to anticipate everyone’s needs and that will always backfire. It’s like handing a surgeon the wrong tool; they didn’t say “scalpel,” you just assumed that they would need something else first and it was wrong. That happens to me all day, every day and I am so done. How can I anticipate other people’s needs when dollars to donuts we don’t even process information the same way, much less my reactions to it.

I am just sorry that an Internet relationship had to go so wrong for such a length of time that I learned all of this the hard way. But it’s because I went the hard way that I am so flexible now. Hell in the moment, but after doing so much processing, I feel like I really understand myself (and observation tells me this is unusual). I don’t know what it would be like to be so mentally ill AND physically different and not write it out. That’s because depending on external validation was eating my lunch. My self-esteem went up and down with every comment on my blog, Facebook, and in real life. I cannot have that, especially as my audience grows. If I continued on that way, my self-esteem would be dependent on more of you, not more of me. And more of me is the only thing that makes me feel secure. No one can tell me how to feel about something, and my blog would be poorer for it if they could. I know because I’ve succumbed to that vulnerability as well- that if people hammer on my writing long enough, I’ll just nuke the whole thing and move along with my day. That’s why Clever Title is in the Wayback Machine, my back turned on the site that made me. The site I started before Dooce started hers. The site that made it where I could meet other bloggers and have them say, “oh! Yeah! I have heard of it. You’re Leslie, right?”

Until now, I wasn’t even sure of that.

There’s a Crazy World of E-mails in This Crazy World

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I have loved e-mail since I first used it in the mid-’90s. Typing was so much easier than handwriting, and to me it had the same heft. It allowed me to “think in longhand” because e-mails felt like actual letters as opposed to text messages. I was not particularly fond of my handwriting (still not, really), and because I was also on IRC, I had to learn to type very, very fast to keep up with the conversation. Hunt and peck was so slow that by the time I hit Enter, what I was responding to was already five minutes gone. DeletedI started touch typing by watching my friend Luke. It was basically osmosis. Now I’m so fast that I can literally type an entire paragraph with my eyes closed, as long as there aren’t too many numbers. My fastest typing test was 100wpm with six errors.

Now, I hover around 74 perfectly. It’s the entire reason I carry a Bluetooth keyboard around with me everywhere. I can’t text for shit. As I was telling my Facebook friends the other day, if I don’t have a keyboard with me, you’ll be watching those three little bubbles for a half hour (and you better not be surprised if you only get back “k,” because most likely I’ve typed a paragraph and then hit something with my hand and accidentally erased it, too enraged to do it again). So, of all ways to communicate, I love the blank screen in front of me. I use Gmail exclusively, with occasional ventures into Hotmail to retrieve ancient messages. 21st century archaeology at its finest….. Hotmail is old school, but I still feel infinitely superior to those who use AOL. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. There isn’t much in this world that makes me feel superior. Let me have this one. I do, however, like the Hotmail interface, because it reminds me of old-school Outlook (before the ribbon).

I switched to the Gmail suite when I learned that ads were few and function was overwhelmingly good, even with a basic web interface. Most of the time, though, I set it up in Evolution or Thunderbird with Lightning and Provider for Google Calendar so that it catches all of my appointments, as well. However, Thunderbird does not have pop-up notifications unless it’s running, so I don’t use it for anything, but I also plug my e-mail account into Mail for Windows 10 so that Gmail is integrated into system notifications. When they go off, I then open my client of choice.

This tiny dissertation on e-mail is brought to you by the movie Love, Simon. Basically, I spent most of it saying to myself, see! E-mail does create real emotion! It was fascinating to watch feelings evolve the longer the e-mails went back and forth.

It was horrifying to see that homophobia still exists… but it’s become nicer, I suppose. For instance, coming out is still a big damn deal. Straight people don’t have to come out. Straight just is. In an ideal world, gay would be the same. But parents cry. I have no doubt that some parents wonder where they went wrong, as if it’s somehow their fault for not being harder on their sons to gravitate toward boy things and their girls to gravitate toward girl things.

It doesn’t work that way. I have plenty of lesbian friends who played with dolls, still wear a face full of makeup, and spend an hour on their hair. I have plenty of gay friends who played football and joined the military.

As a sidenote, I also know straight girls that have turned out every bit as military jackass brotard and straight men who love Broadway and tote bags. In the end, we’re all just people, and the spectrum is large.

I think, though, that gay men have it harder than lesbians, and that’s because in this society, it’s not cool to be feminine, because you’re seen as a man submitting yourself to another man. We really have to examine that prejudice, as if seeming feminine is the worst thing in the world. I think that some people are homophobic because they’re misogynistic. I could be wrong, but it’s probably a fair assumption.

I also think that since more and more people are coming out every day, straight people have this idea that you can catch homosexuality like a cold. It’s not the number of gay people that’s changed. It’s the number of people that are willing to tell you they’re gay, because they’re not afraid of you turning them in to the police anymore.

It is also my opinion that gay and straight are subsets of bisexuality, and bisexuals are mostly invisible, even though they’re the majority. People tend to base their identity on what kind of couple they’re in, but wouldn’t seem gay or straight if you looked at their behavior over multiple years. Even I, someone who looks like a 15-year-old boy, would never be uncomfortable identifying as bisexual, because I never want to make it seem as if only the women in my life matter. In fact, I’d even go so far as to say that I am still mother-lion fiercely protective of my first boyfriend, and that feeling will never go away. We were the cutest couple in the history of the world, and that is a stone cold fact.

I identify as lesbian because I want a woman to be my life partner, because I can’t imagine spending my life with a man. I gave up on heterosexuality when I realized how I could utterly destroy a man’s heart with my inability to look into the future and assure myself I could still feel an attraction. It wasn’t because I didn’t care about them as a person. I just didn’t want us both to be stuck in an unhappy relationship, which I can see much more easily.

All of this is to say that there’s really no difference between being gay and straight, because we all go through the same stages in life. All couples talk about the same issues behind closed doors, with the exception of procreation. That is a separate and expensive process. But then everything returns to being the same after the children arrive, because all parents speak the language of Cheerios and bath time.

Love, Simon bothered me…. that coming out still rattles people’s cages. Simon doesn’t want to at first and still views it as a secret. Once Simon does come out, his parents take it well, but still cry and feel like it’s A CONVERSATION. He’s still bullied at school. The movie is tempered with a lot of love and support for him as well, but the problems I experienced from 1992-1996 are all still there…. although I didn’t have a girlfriend willing to come out, so in a lot of ways, my experience was similar and different. I was this blabbermouth activist with a girlfriend who treated me….. Ummm, badly is not quite the right word, but I did feel hidden like a cheap mistress. I put up with it because it wasn’t like anyone else was out and proud. I was it.

That slowly changed once we graduated, but by then the relationship was mostly over, anyway…. like most high school relationships…. earth to straight people.

Just like Simon, though, I was outed to my entire school at once when someone taped a flyer to my locker talking about “scary lesbians” my freshman year. I was mortified because it was the only time my ex-boyfriend and I went to the same school, and I wish I’d been given the opportunity to talk about it privately with him before the rest of the world knew. I think we maybe had one conversation in which I told him I thought I could be in love with one woman, but it wasn’t THE TALK that said this is who I am now. I don’t have one isolated crush. I was embarrassed to talk to him because we’d just broken up about six months earlier, and he was embarrassed to talk to me for completely unrelated reasons. So this boy that I loved more than life was suddenly not my friend anymore. It took a few years, but now it’s on like Donkey Kong, and he only lives about three and a half hours away.

The opportunity to come out to my parents was also taken away by my high school counselor, and I didn’t learn this until I sat down to have THE CONVERSATION with them and they told me they already knew. I can’t decide whether it was a relief or not, and it’s over 20 years later…. Additionally, this same counselor did nothing to punish the kids who bullied me or prevent it from happening again by saying, well, what did you do to provoke them? Ummm, I just exist?

I was bullied way more at HSPVA than I was at Clements, which was also a shock to my system because HSPVA is located in the most liberal part of Houston and Clements one of the most conservative. Maybe there was a lot more going on behind my back in which I just wasn’t aware, but for the most part, I was just seen as eccentric, which is definitely not an untrue statement regardless of orientation. My favorite conversation of the whole year was, do you wear that rainbow necklace because you’re gay or because you’re an idiot? Being outed at HSPVA and the homophobic kids being merciless in their hatred of me was much, much worse. I wrote about my experiences at HSPVA in Creative Writing at Clements (see last link), and my teacher said that it was too private to share with the class…. which also made me feel different, even though I wasn’t.

E-mail was a way for me to connect in the air with people who weren’t out on the ground. In recent years, it’s been a safe place to be who I am with people I truly adore, even though e-mail is the only chord that runs between us… because now, being who I am does not include sexual orientation as this wholly other thing. Straight or gay, we all just love writing letters, and that’s the thing. It’s a stranger on a train, often easier than talking to people in real life. Letters to people who don’t know the people in my life mean much because they’re not trying to be friends with my friends, so they’re solidly on my side. It creates real emotion because of that very fact. They see everything through my lens, because they’re only getting my side of the story. Therefore, they’re rooting for me even when I’m clearly wrong.

The best part is having a long-term pen pal. I’ve been writing to some of them since my college years.

I would have liked to see Simon and his pen pal remain anonymous, or maybe a different movie altogether that is only about writing to people you don’t know. There’s a ton out there on catfishing, but few pieces of media that focus on real relationships created “in the air.” I am certain that movies and books on catfishing are more popular because they’re dark. News and art tend to run that way…. whereas lots of relationships created on the Internet are deep and lasting. They’re cherished friendships precisely because they’re not on the ground and not in spite of it.

For instance, it’s great to be able to talk to someone who doesn’t know your high school bullies, but has a lot of ideas on how to get back at them.

Love,
Leslie