If you could start a new business right now, what would it be?
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Before I decided to file for disability and Disabled Adult Child benefits, I wanted to start a media group. Now, starting my own company would be a liability rather than a benefit. I need the safety and security of money coming in the door to keep doing what I am doing, which is creating a body of work that has traveled and will continue to do so. It is not stepping out of the workforce to be lazy, but to attend school and to get the letters that mean “respected author” after finding out the hard way that my body will not cooperate with capitalism…. and moreover, my body has always been “broken” and I never should have entered into the workforce at all.
But for me, starting a media group was about being able to hire all my friends in the arts who are talented beyond belief, giving them the money they need to produce. I started reading all kinds of books on nonprofits, but not having a team under me that could leave their own jobs to support this idea made it an impossibility quickly. It has been a conundrum of how to fit capitalism to me instead of the other way around, and the answer is just to accept that I can earn money as a writer that will trickle in, but the bulk of my support needs to come through the United States government as defined by “disabled child.” It’s a reality that my mother left me to face on my own, and she did it on purpose.
Being a real adult is saying, “I know you tried to cover up how disabled I was, and I forgive you.” It’s making my own decisions as to where to go from here because my dad and sister can only do so much- I am the driver of my own success. I have so many comorbidities that I’m not going to bother to file. I’m going to walk into a lawyer’s office and let them do it. I can prove disability starting in 1978, but how much support I get is based on what they find. Bipolar disorder is only one piece of the puzzle. Benefits go up based on my ADHD, Autism, and Cerebral Palsy. I was also diagnosed as Borderline when I was in the hospital the last time around, but I do not think that is accurate. I think that’s what happens when people meet an autistic woman for the first time. My last hospitalization was a total shitshow and a complete anomaly from who I usually am. There is a solid reason for this, and there’s only one person in the entire world who knows the truth, but she has stopped taking my calls, literally.
All I wanted was to leave a voicemail, Jesus Christ…… My mental health issues were all about me, clearly, but that does not mean that I was not affected by outside influences. Everything about my mental health emanates from me, but I don’t think that people often think of themselves as stimuli. It is a balance of things, and it is a process of learning what is mine to own. For instance, I do not attach and detach like a borderline personality. It probably seems like it to other people, especially when I detached from Tiina so fast. But that had more to do with how I was perceived than with me. I did not owe people who pathologized me more time and energy than I’d already given. There’s a solid reason for everything I do, but it is not always clear from reading my writing. It would help me a lot if people were more curious and less judgmental.
:::stares in Alice Chilton:::
In short, I am tired of people who are big on solutions and short on support. I don’t always need someone to figure things out for me. Sometimes, I just need to have my emotions out and for that to be okay. I do a lot of processing here because people do not want to listen to me in person. But here is what I am saying clearly:
My mental health status is enough to get me enough to live on, but it’s more than that. It’s about securing my father’s benefits after he passes, which I am entitled to under Disabled Adult Child benefits. I am not being morbid, just as realistic as he wants me to be about the situation. The take-home message in all of this is that I have never been lazy, I have been misinterpreted and it is truly not my fault. I was streamlined into regular education because I was thought of as brilliant for my age…. so as a result, I am one of those people who can handle high-octane academia but managing my life is too much.
Aada called it.
She said that I’d been given a brain that runs a million miles a minute and a body that won’t keep up. That line will live in my memory because she read me correctly in that instance. She saw the talent without pigeonholing me as a slacker. That writing the way I do was really hard work. But, you know, it’s not that hard in comparison to being a full-time social media manager for myself. That part of writing really sucks, and yet there is no way around it, either. I would be so happy if people discovered me and I went viral without ever knowing it…. and that seems to be happening in mainland China.
My archives are popular there more than my homepage, but it is clearly not bot behavior. It’s small numbers of hits all across the country, which indicate that lots of people are using Chrome to check me out, one of the few ways out from under The Great Firewall. I don’t think the browser does it by itself, but I’m sure there are location switching extensions and things like that. I am grateful. I love Chinese people, food, and culture….. but I hate the Chinese government and cannot visit. It is brilliant that the Chinese are visiting me instead.
So, the business is me and the product is me. I get so tired of myself, and that is the truth. All of my Aada entries took a toll on me that nothing ever will, because I never got tired of her. I got tired of lack of change and being miserable about it. I got tired of my entries being repetitive and so did she. But she thought that the answer was me writing about something different, not her doing something different so that the writing reflected it. I don’t just make shit up.
Except in one case, and that drove Aada away. But honestly, that’s okay. If you don’t want the story behind the story, I won’t give it. But if she is ever curious later in her life, I am an open book, one that wants to hug her. It’s not about chasing her, but remaining open so that the idea of running into me isn’t scary. It’s just life. Because at 12 years, we will never not know each other, and to pretend that we can cut the geometric chord between us is ridiculous. We may not ever create new memories, but deciding not to communicate in the future did not erase my memory, nor hers.
I feel like I should clarify like I do in every entry that Aada is not and has never been my girlfriend. But she has had that function in life in the way that straight women in the 1950s called each other their girlfriends. She has been my closest ally over the years, way over a decade. So now it’s really about feeling the loss….. that my long fuse finally lit because lack of scaffolding was unsustainable.
But by “lack of scaffolding,” I do not mean a radical change in our relationship. I do now, of course. It would be ridiculous to get back into the same dynamic I left. But what I mean is that Aada didn’t manage her emotions. I did that labor. I truly felt things for and with her that most people don’t, and there was no recognition of it. There was no recognition that “buckle up, Buttercup” was never going to work on me because I’m a highly sensitive person and I will just bleed out. I have shed more tears for Aada than I have over any romantic interest, and that will always be true- full stop. That’s because Aada’s training is highly specialized in a way that most people’s aren’t, and it led to high-octane emotions as well as re-focusing on academia for me.
Because of Aada, not only do I have a new outlook on relationships, but on what it will take to change USG from the inside. I want to look where Dr. Brown didn’t, which is shame and vulnerability in government organizations, particularly surrounding race. I will have a field day at FBI, I’m just sayin.’ We’ll trace the line from Harriet Tubman to J. Edgar Hoover, revealing all the systemic injustice that has harmed the Black community even when they have helped white people beyond measure. We’ll look at all the -isms eventually, but racism has to be at the top of the list because it’s baked into the Constitution. Homophobia and transphobia are just the shit that rolls downhill. Hoover could have helped the queer community because he certainly wasn’t ignorant to it…………….. but he didn’t.
I have two weeks before school starts, so I’ve been putting myself out there on Facebook Dating to see who is out there. I have met several people thus far, and that’s the reason I went to Richmond the other day. I met someone online and instead of continuing to chat, I wanted to meet them immediately. You cannot tell very much from chatting online, and that is a lesson HARD WON.
Anyway, the cat picture is her cat. We had a great time shopping together and hanging out with her adult daughter. It was nice to do nothing with people, just being relaxed and talking. We have definite plans coming up, so I feel good about the fact that we get along as people. I have no idea what kind of connection it is, and I am not bothered about it. All connections are good and I am allergic to drama.
For instance, realizing at 12:04 that if I didn’t write something by midnight, I was going to lose my WordPress streak. I panicked for a second, and then realized it doesn’t matter.
China likes going back through years.
