Remember a couple of posts ago how a couple of my friends plotted and found me a new blue glass baking dish, and I cried because that’s love?
These showed up a few days after Christmas from the same two friends.
My mind is blown. I had casually mentioned around the time I mentioned the baking dish that I used to have 6 blue glass wine glasses, but 4 of them had broken over the years. They just latched onto that and did what they do.
This has been a hellacious 12 months. It was exactly 12 months ago (plus a few days) that my car got totaled when I hit that 17yo on a brand new license that ran a stop sign. I fucked myself up pretty good in that wreck too. No lasting physical damage, but I still can’t approach intersections where I have the right of way in confidence.
And the thing of it is, the bad things just kept happening again and again, not just one after the other, but with a frequent overlap in the months that followed. I still haven’t really caught a break.
2021 truly has been a shitty year!
Except, it’s also been the year where I learned how much the people in my friend group love me, and each other. There are really, by this point, dozens of examples, such as how we’re working hard to master communication skills so that we can navigate any conflict with love, compassion, and understanding. We all require a slightly different form of communication as we are all neurodivergent, and we are also all trauma victims, but we are dedicated to figuring our shit out and resolving conflict in ways that validates everyone and doesn’t lead to actual huge fights.
But that’s not even the love I’m here to talk about. I want to talk about Scissors. Scissors is an important member of our friend group, but he’s very reserved. This is fine, but I honestly kind of thought that when it came to our relationship, he tolerated me. We weren’t not friends, but I wouldn’t have assumed he REALLY cared about me, even if he didn’t not care.
Then a week and a half ago, he warned me that he predicted I would cry in roughly 2 days. Well, the two days came and he cursed that whatever he had sent was late. It showed up another 2 days later. It was a large somewhat flat box. Scissors, and my best friend who was in on the shenanigans, as he wanted to be sure it would have the desired effect (happy tears) were almost giddy with anticipation while they waited for me to get home to open the package. Finally, my shift ended, and made my way home. When I opened the package and saw what it was, I started bawling.
See, roughly 9 months ago, or so, Iris learned a physics lesson the hard way. Sammy sent me a message at work and told me Iris had broken my blue glass baking dish, and to please not be mad, it was an accident. Iris was scared to tell me themself because they come from an upbringing full of abuse and is still learning to trust me that I won’t abuse them over a mistake or accident. I took a deep breath, knew Iris wasn’t careless, and while I was devasted, I wasn’t mad. I love blue glass more than anything, and that baking dish was the favorite thing in my kitchen, but it just wasn’t worth being mad over an accident.
I messaged Iris and learned that it had gone from hot oven to cold rinse with water, and shattered. Ah. Ok. I made sure no one was hurt, assured Iris this was a failing on their bio mom’s part, and that I knew it was an accident and that I wasn’t mad. Then I went ahead and told them the physics lesson that was to be had out of this.
Then I went to amazon to see about replacing the damn thing and they had nothing. Ceramic? Sure. But not blue glass.
I told a few of my friends what happened, then basically let it go. Until it happened to come up in conversation like a month ago. Scissors asked a couple of questions at the time, but I didn’t think anything of it.
Until I opened that package on my bed a few weeks later and found a blue glass pyrex baking dish in the exact size I had lost that looked brand new, despite me being pretty sure Pyrex doesn’t make them anymore. I don’t know where he found it, but he did. And he was right, I did have a good (happy) cry about it.
Some of us are loud in our love. Some of us are just hurt from trauma and more reserved, and therefore quieter in our love. But when those who are reserved with their love show it, it is a grand statement. Like a blue glass baking dish.
This came up in my Facebook memories and hit me super hard. I walked the stage with a nearly perfect GPA and top honors. But here I sit 2 years later with too much brain damage to attempt grad school. Grad school being why I needed perfect grades.
I was dying. I didn’t know it was cancer, but I was very much dying and I knew that. I couldn’t get anyone to listen to me, but I knew. And yet I forced perfection on myself. I asked for extensions instead of just skipping the occasional assignment. I studied while in the hospital. I wrote final papers right after surgery while on opioids.
I pushed and I pushed myself to perfection. Nearly killed myself striving for perfection. All so I could have a perfect GPA so I could get into the grad program of my choice.
And now? I can tell the difference. How smart I used to be, versus where I’m at now. Yes, I’m still intelligent. But not like I was. I can feel the difference and I can tell I’m no longer cut out for grad school. I was already going to be struggling because of Autism and ADHD. But brain damage to?
I am so angry. But I’m mostly sad that I put so much importance on my grades. C’s get degrees but I nearly died achieving perfection.
My path looks different now. I spent all of therapy coming to terms with all of the above and all of the below.
My best friend is Marissa. Granted, we don’t call her that. We call her Coffee. I’ll continue to call her Coffee on these pages. But her name is Marissa. I think it’s good to attach a real name to her existence now and then.
We’ve been best friends for a few years at this point. It all started with her sending me photos of the various animals in her life on Tumblr on a bad night and then before I knew it was had a friendship unlike any I’ve ever experienced. I’ve blogged about best friends before. If you’ve been here you know those usually blew up in my face. There was the ableist girl from high school. Tried to steal not just my spouse but my kids too last time Robin and I separated. There was Nate who was emotionally constipated and forbid me to have any emotions around him ever.
Coffee. I don’t have words. We have faced a lot of the same struggles, though there are plenty of differences. She is strong where I’m weak, and vice versa. I can honestly say that while it’s strictly platonic and nonsexual, I am absolutely in love with her. She is my person. She is one of my chosen sisters and I would do anything for her and know she would do anything for me. She’s held my hand through the process of nearly dying, losing my wife, and just every low moment of the past few years. She’s not afraid of my emotions and low points. And she approaches my BPD with common sense, compassion, and basic human decency. She’s also not afraid to call me out if I need to examine and rethink my behavior. She’ll enable me buying a children’s fishing pole to go “cat fishing”. But she won’t enable me treating people like shit. She makes me want to be a better person and helps me dig deep to find who that better person within me is.
And everything that she does for me, I strive to do for her in kind.
She is more than I could ever have hoped for in a friend.
And together we have built two really solid and healthy friend groups, with some overlap. A found family full of love, acceptance, neurodivergence, and queerness. My life is so full of love these days, but I found this chosen family with Coffee by my side. And through her love and guidance, I became a person worthy of their love. I do a lot of hard work. It wasn’t all Coffee. But she offered solid support and feedback.
There is a point to this.
Coffee is going to school to get a degree in running an agricultural-based business. The plan is, she and her husband Pete will buy some land in probably Kansas and they will run a lavender farm. In 10 years when my babies are all grown and out of the nest, I’m following them to Kansas and I’m buying a house as near theirs as I can and I’ll help them run their farm. Coffee will make sure I have a thriving wage and health insurance. I’ll also do what I do now, caregiving, on the side to help add enrichment to my life.
My path is no longer taking me to grad school at OSU and a PsyD that I’d use to diagnose especially women with Autism and ADHD. But that’s OK. Because my path is now taking me to Coffee, and her little family, and that’s even better.
This will be short. It’s been a crazy week where few things have gone as planned and there aren’t enough hours in the day. Nothing bad has happened. In fact some good has happened. But I’m tired.
Anyway
My maternal grandmother had a super green thumb. So does my mom. I honestly thought it had skipped me because I spent the first 30 something years of my life unable to keep a single plant alive.
But I don’t know. Something happened in the last few years and suddenly I can keep most anything alive. Sure some things die, but I’m having more success than not.
I want to show some of my latest successes.
I have an extensive garden growing out back, but these are what I currently find the most exciting. I’ll show off the rest of the fruits of my labor (pun intended) later when I have things to harvest.
This one is a little harder and I wasn’t going to talk about it, but I think I should. Because, as it turns out, it’s really easy to join a cult and not realize it.
I’m pretty active on Tumblr. I follow a few hundred people and have a few thousand people following me. I’m on the site pretty much everyday, and both of my friend groups, with a lot of overlap between the two, are full of people I met on the site.
One of those people is Simon.
Simon is a character. Literally. He is a social experiment run by a woman named Kristina. The idea of the social experiment tied into whether she could get you to believe Simon is a cryptid. I knew most of this going in. I didn’t know the details on who was running the blog, but Simon was very open about it being an experiment. Could he convince you of his claims.
Simon was also very kind and came off as very trustworthy. Many of us became good friends with him and confided in him because generally speaking he offered good advice.
The problem is, Simon has a very cult like personality, and overtime he built up this understanding that he was an authority figure and his word, was not quite law, but not something easily doubted. It was a gradual build over many years. He attracted the vulnerable. Mostly abuse victims. So we were looking for the relief and the safety of having Simon, and each other, in our lives.
Then a couple of months ago, things went south. Simon made a bad decision and didn’t count on us to call him on it. See, where he went wrong is he built a community that didn’t really need him any longer because we’d forged actually really healthy relationships with each other and built each other up with love and support. Suddenly we were getting therapy and had found a sense of self confidence outside of Simon.
So when Simon fucked up, we called him on it. And he went ballistic. The entire persona slipped.
There is no nice and tidy way to sum things up but as we went public that the entire “inner circle” had removed Simon from our midst, those who had left us over the proceeding months, came back to us with tales of horror of things Simon had done. The truth of who Simon really is also came out, with proof. Over the course of weeks of discussion, we all agreed that while it may not 100% fit the criteria of having been a cult, Simon very much had a cult like personality and, well, we all consider ourselves to be cult survivors.
But we’re out. We still have each other. We have no central leader telling us what is what anymore, and we have relationships that are healthy in a way that our therapists are thrilled about.
There are those still swayed by Simon. They won’t listen to reason. They believe the lies he came up with about how his inner circle attacked him. But there is only so much we can do. You can’t save everyone no matter how hard you try.
And in the end, we’re walking away stronger with healthy friendships intact. So in a way, I’m thankful Simon was in my life. But I’m also thankful I was able to remove him from my life and took my found family with me.
One of my adopted kids, Vann, lives about 3 hours away from me, on the East side of Indianapolis. So when they had a medical emergency and needed an advocate to help them bully some doctors into doing their fucking job the other week, I packed a bag, grabbed Sammy, and off we went!
I was out of work for a few more weeks, and Sammy’s classes are online this year, so I planned the driving for the end of a school day and set him up to attend class from Vann’s house, and very little school was missed.
While in Indy, Sammy got to know some fellow queers, and his knowledge of the different flavors of gender was expanded. It’s true the exposing kids to queer people can lead to their own exploration of gender and sexuality. Some people are afraid of this, but Sammy followed a young adult trans masc by the name of Rin around like a puppy dog for a few days and walked away from the encounter a little more self-confident. This makes my heart super happy!
I attended a few appointments with Vann and we got their needs taken care of. The time in Indy was well spent.
As a bonus, the time away from home proved a great distraction for Sammy, though the relief was temporary and we did have to return home eventually.
Vann and my trip to Indy are a strong testament to the power of found family. I’m very grateful to have Vann in my life, and I’m deeply relieved I was able to be there for them in their time of need.