Do you set personal goals for yourself?

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A disability lawyer has agreed to take my case, because my case worker was starting to get mad at me because I hadn’t filed. He said, “this is your life. You need to live it.” I haven’t filed because the message from my stepmother my whole life is that everybody on disability is faking it. She treated her patients with kindness; she just wanted to reassure me what she thought of me and my program. She created an environment where disability was thought of as weakness, and my life has been on hard mode since I was 16. My guess is that she was also neurodivergent and trying to raise me the way she had been raised…. throw them to the wolves and see what happens.

But Angela was that kind of personality. She decided that she was ready for the wolves and chose to go at it, ending her career as an internationally respected physician. I believe that my needs tarnished her image, too. None of my parents were ever in a position to support me because of what it said about them, so they just decided not to do it and hold me to impossible standards, dripping judgment about me and the way I do things because it has to be so different from them by necessity.

No one protected me from the time they KNEW I WAS DISABLED at 18 months.

It was 1978. I get it. Attitudes about disabled children were quite a bit different back then and I would have been “the show” at the church. This is not reality. This is the fear they were picturing and what led them to say “Leslie is fine.”

I am not, and everything my parents didn’t do for me has fallen on me to do for myself. I had to fight to get the ADHD/Autism battery because their first move was “you’re making it up” and a service dog was written off as “just too expensive,” the line they have used on me for eons. Angela was brutal about making me feel like a line item while rewarding everyone else. She was cruel.

I’m sorry we got rich after you left home.

She didn’t have beef with me, she had beef with my mother and took it out on me. I can forgive her because she finally acknowledged that my life had been harder than the other kids and told me to scream at her. By the time she did that, I didn’t have any words left. She died without hearing a damn thing from my perspective, because all I wanted was to be seen. Once that was done, the words didn’t matter.

But the truth is that she never saw me as a child, and neither did my dad. I was parentified early, and my workload doubled when my stepsisters were added to my care without my permission. I was never allowed to be wholly other, just an accessory. I was hired at Angela’s practice and paid for babysitting. The hierarchy was in place all the time. The message was “you are not a child of the house. You are an employee.”

If I liked something, everyone made fun of it. Then, weeks later, someone would tell me about this cool new thing they’d found and it was the thing I told them about three weeks ago. If it happened once, okay. But it’s happened for 30 years. My needs are discarded, my likes are met with repulsion, and my presence is expected. That is starting to change now, too, because my family realizes that I have a choice whether to come home now or not. Before, they could demand it because there were too many financial strings.

They could not see why I would not want to return to a place where I felt like an outsider in a room filled with people.

But they created that environment by saying that me being disabled was bullshit, I was just lazy. My mother hid the official paperwork so that I couldn’t make a case until after she died. But the case part was not disability in terms of the law. I couldn’t make the case that I was whole and worthy. That I am not broken. I am unscaffolded. 

I shudder with grief thinking about how my life could have been improved with early childhood intervention. I am committed to righting what was wrong, because my disability case is solid right now just based on mental health issues alone, but the support equation changes as my diagnoses are added on. It is why I walked into a lawyer’s office before I even filed. I didn’t need the lawyer to win. I needed the lawyer to say, “yes. I will take this case. It is serious enough that the state needs to see it.”

My father says that the thread was dropped and I deserve this. He’s right, I do. I deserve to live a life filled with people who believe I am telling the truth. The truth is that I was shamed from filing because everyone was wealthy enough to pretend I didn’t need it.

Now, our income as a family has changed and the myth doesn’t hold.

It never did. I was just a part of the machine, and I had to have outside parties tell me that my childhood was devastating because the family line is that it was perfect. The reason it was perfect is that my unpaid labor made it happen for everyone else.

I also know for certain that my dad did not have the money to move me to Portland. That idea did not come from him. It is a nonbinary. I wanted to go, and it was convenient to get me out of the way. I am not blaming Angela for icing me out, I am just saying that my mom and dad would not have sat me down and given me a pile of cash to leave town immediately. But my dad and Angela would.

But they were clear that it was a one-time cash gift and I had to make something of myself, which of course I couldn’t do without any support at all. I thought I had some, but Diane and Susan were just more people who valued my labor and threw me away.

Dana’s family treated her the same way my family treated me, so their treatment was not better; it was familiar. And out of that family, Aada and I created our own family in the cloud (of sorts). Now that Aada doesn’t want communication, I feel untethered emotionally because the landscape is changing. She was the last tie to my old life, and that is also a nonbinary because I finally decided to take care of myself instead of waiting on her to take care of me.

She said that if I published X or Y, it would end our friendship permanently.

Your offer is accepted. No one threatens me.

She threatened me because I embarrassed the everliving hell out of her at work…. because of course that was worse than gaslighting me for 12 years. I should have laughed in her face. She could have taken the time to cultivate a real relationship, but she didn’t and she decided to make me pay for it.

No ma’amela, Pa’amela.

She thinks it is about vengeance because she thinks it is all about her. No, my story doesn’t track together if I do not tell people I was gaslighted for 12 years. My story loses validity if I do not tell you the ways in which I was slowly isolated from everyone else. My story also loses validity if I do not tell you that I struggle with mental health issues and all of that, because the way to be a reliable narrator when you have mental health issues is to say it up front.

The story is not “Aada was mean to Leslie.” The story is “Aada and Leslie are both beautiful and complicated people who both did a number on each other.” It is texturing, layering that makes it where both sides of the relationship sing. In a lot of ways, I bring Aada’s energy into my life because I’m looking for someone else who has some of her qualities. If this was about vengeance, I wouldn’t want anything to do with her. I can rest and relax in the ways that she enriched me, but I’m just not willing to put myself through reaching out. I get enough satisfaction from an occasional wink from her general direction in web stats.

I also know that I am done with those family dynamics, because I know what her family looks like and the emotional temperature isn’t different from mine or my wife’s.

I am done with systems who think of me as broken and lazy.

But here’s the thing……

It took the unpaid employee of another family to recognize I needed a new path.

For that, Aada can have anything she wants from me. Anything.

She just doesn’t.