…that delayed my planned entries. Every time I plan something, no matter how small, life around me goes batshit nuclear. There have been a few highs, but I’m not going to mix them with this entry. This is going to be The Bad One™.
About eight years ago, we moved into my folks’ house. Our house was falling apart–in the way that the moment one thing was fixed, some water pipe would explode or some shit–and if it wasn’t, whatever beater car we had was. We couldn’t get financially on top of it all, and between the two of us, we had so many medical things we had to save for that it all felt out of reach and impossible. We’ve both since been able to pursue some of them, whether surgical or major dental procedures, but we’re not finished, either.
The mentioned folks are my biological mother and step-father, who has been in the picture since I was around fifteen. I’ve lived with them twice in the past when I wasn’t working in Texas. There are some major strong points, such as it being a LGBT+ safe household and that it is in the middle of town, within walking distance to a lot of places, and right by a bike trail that cuts through the whole town. It’s convenient, we’ve saved gas, and over the years, paid for some big things, like paying off our car or my upper surgery and revision. I make a roof payment every month on a brand new metal roof as a sort of rent, but we kind of started getting leaned on for other things, too, like when Mom wants to go on a hike and she wants company, she brings me (step dad hates the outdoors, meanwhile I catalogue wild species) and when something in the house needs worked on or built, they lean on my partner for it, as he’s quite the handyman or at least has interest in it.
Anyway. Just know that there have been benefits to being here before I verbally lay waste to my life. I’ve been trying to find a way to structure this for weeks. It feels like the camel’s back (this household’s stability and everyone’s mental health) was broken by the addition of three key straws.
Straw One: Elderly Abuse?
I don’t even know how long ago now, my grandmother was brought into the house. To summarize her sitch, she had been abandoned by her partner suddenly, who took all of the pets, furniture, and her life savings while she was at work and drove off with it all in a U-Haul. She was suffering in silence. Didn’t even have a fridge or a tv signal (her main form of leisure) and had been relying on sleeping on a couch and watching the same handful of dvds over and over. It was coming up on winter, and my mom pretty much made her come to our house so she didn’t suffer the cold in that house.
That was fine. Noble even. It’s been a few years now, I think, and they’ve not taken her back. Brief mentions about selling her house have been made, or fixing her house, or whatever, but nothing comes of it. Her car is here, but it’s dead and rotting in the yard because she won’t drive it (combination of needing new glasses and we are very literally surrounded by roundabouts and she’s terrified of them.) Selling that has been mentioned, too, but nothing comes of it. Essentially, they brought her up, won’t take her back, and won’t help her progress. Her mental health has chronically declined.
They’ve helped her with some things, although in convoluted ways. They got her a smart phone and taught her enough about it to play games on it and get a few bible scripture type apps, but it’s somehow attached to my mom’s email and google profile, so my nana can see when my mom uploads pictures to her google photos and shit. No big deal, she only uses that for nature or vacation photos. However, something about that account connection gets wonky when there’s a problem, and my nana can’t communicate at all when something is going wrong with her texts and phone calls etc. because her ex was so ungodly controlling that she couldn’t touch the computer, essentially having less than zero understanding of anything digital. Like, we’d probably have to teach her how to use a mouse.
Mom acts clueless and gets frustrated, nana gets no solutions, we get dragged into it to navigate it instead. My partner got her a tablet one Christmas so she could put her digital puzzles together and actually see the pictures. She loves it to death. However, she is so neglected that all she does is sit in the same place on the couch by the tv, playing games on it or texting old friends, doing absolutely nothing. A few years of this and her brain is so foggy that she comes off as having developing dementia.
The paranoia went rampant. She stopped going out to anywhere but the store with my mom because of “the way the world is now’ days.” She’ll only leave the house to feed strays on the porch, check the mail, or take a trash bag out, but even then, she was coming back with terrifying stories of the guy that rode past and said ‘hi!’ to her with a smile and how she’s afraid he’s going to stake out the house and break in to rape her. (Literally. It has gotten that fucking unhinged.) We’ve had to start shutting down some progressively racist shit, too, but I won’t go there.
I don’t know why she’s afraid of every stranger walking by. She overfeeds the strays so much that she has a massive, aggressively loyal raccoon army that rallies at our front door every night.
She used to go on walks with us, though. She expressed interest in the library. Every time it came time to go, though, she wormed out of it at the last minute, getting angry if her excuses as to why she had to stay home were thwarted. Instead of pushing back, though, mom just folds and now doesn’t bother asking her to go anywhere anymore. I’m guessing that lead to not wanting to take her to get groceries, either, because I became her orderer. Doordash and walmart, an order most days of the week. I obliged for like a year straight, but her ordering became more and more vague and weirdly helpless. Like weaponized stupidity. Always asking for something we don’t carry, waiting like I can fix it when I tell her that, finally asking what she wants instead, deciphering the weird vague shit until getting to an answer. Every fucking time. It’s why we were spooked about dementia. She was forgetting basic words or alluding to everything with hyper vagueness. She wouldn’t bring up anything without being extremely meek and timid and hoping you picked up on the breadcrumb trail of hints that lead to something the brain could feasibly grab onto.
The majority of both mine and my partner’s therapy sessions have focused heavily on her for over a year, and while at first we were frustrated at her and her mental state and her unwillingness to get help, we’ve kind of united in directing the resentment at my folks for dropping the ball and essentially kidnapping her to neglect her.
I’ll get around to “progress” on those matters. But, while that’s going on and getting worse…
Straw Two: New Cats
…we got a new kitten named Max. He had a hard beginning in life… he had a major infection of a urinary nature that caused waste to drain into his leg. Gruesome details and many little surgeries and reconstructions later, he pulled through, albeit with a crooked butt and tail, and found a home with us. My step dad was in love with his story and pursued adopting him before the procedures were through. Another noble savior moment.
Because of how small and potentially frail he was, my nana became Guardian of the Cat while everyone was at work. Despite his injuries, the little rascal was a ball of playful energy and ungodly social with the other cats, who are all adults and mostly offput by him. Most of the things he does or has done would not be problematic if they were handled at the start or handled at all, but now…
He knows if he attacks another cat and screams like he’s hurt (we’ve seen him deadass faking this shit) that one of my folks will run to save him. They pick him up like a baby (he’s over a year old now) and coddle him, patting him, walking him in a big circle around the house, etc. Instead of policing his aggression, it’s the adult cats that are the problem. Every time something goes wrong, the answer is to wall off the other cats. It’s gotten to where he has the whole house while our two, who have been here the longest now, are mostly contained to the garage and the other is partitioned off in our bedroom/my nana’s bedroom.
The one partitioned with us is actually a newer addition. She’s an elderly stray that we’ve had to have dental procedures done on twice now. She came in during a winter storm and is so damn sweet and unproblematic… if it wasn’t for other cats trying to maul her. Max stalks her, does that demented arched-back-head-unscrewing shit and howls, or jumps on her back while she’s not looking and starts ripping the hair off of her. It’s terrible. Answer? Wall her off. Wall off not working? Let’s install a 400$ whole ass heavy sliding dungeon door between the living room and den room instead of addressing the issue. No joke. Door does look cool, I’ll give it that.
Everyone is so hyper sensitive about the cats now. Every day, on every other hour, you hear ‘where’s so-and-so?’ ‘where’s Max?’ ‘where’s little man?’ If it isn’t directed at us initially, they’ll find us, ‘where’s little man?’ ‘is Max in here?’ I don’t pay attention to the movement of every cat at all times. Get fucking apple air tags or something for them. Goddamn.
They are so cucked to this fucking cat that they won’t even sleep in their bedroom anymore. “That’s fetch time. That’s when he wants to play.” “He will keep waking you up to throw the ball or he’ll attack your limbs! It’s so cute!” It’s not cute when two grown ass adults in their 40s/50s are fucking sleeping on the couch like people with major marriage problems (Chekhov’s gun moment?) right by the double doors we have to open at 3am every day to enter the house and get ready for work. They’re not exactly quiet doors. Every workday, it’s a struggle to not make noise and watching them jump upright anyway because they think a cat has broken through the doors. ujhrgatoiuewrhtgoui
This is Max’s world, we’re all just living in it.
Watching that cat became one of the main excuses for my nana avoiding going anywhere, too.
Straw Three: Masks Falling Off
If any part of the above was enough to make you go “I wouldn’t stand for that, I’d be gone long ago” or “I’d escape that place in the night and set fire to it” … heh. This shit is what I’ve been struggling with how to adequately describe.
If you read me, you probably know I was diagnosed with Autism in early ‘24 with an additional diagnosis of ADHD like half a year ago. Until then, I had been in therapy several times in my life trying desperately to find the answers. Throughout that journey, instead of support, I was mostly “joked with” about being a hypochondriac and how I was “going specialist to specialist until I heard an answer I liked.” Hypochondriac and other forms of straight up not being believed is one of the most common things undiagnosed autists deal with. It’s shit, but between ‘i didn’t mean it like that, you know what i mean?’ and reading how most neurotypical people just cannot understand what you’re going through, I wrote it off as whatever.
I have answers and I’m working with people who are, for the first time in my life, helping me. I’m on medicine as well that is actually helping me. Finally, again with stress, for the first time in my life, I am getting help, support, and building (or trying to) a foundation from which I can have an actual life. I have three diagnosis that, on their own, heavily impact a person’s core functions (got dinged with OCD at like age 27.)
I’m not digging for sympathy, it’s just important to what’s unfolding.
I was trying to have a talk about it not long after the Autism diagnosis and got the remark from him ‘because you’ve always gone specialist to specialist for…’
I stopped it and said ‘you realize I had no choice but to see a gender specialist for my transition, right?’ It was over a decade ago in Texas, thems was the rules.
But it became ‘well I know that but you’ve talked about autism before and you’re really smart, you could just read a list of what autism is and go in and fake it and get told whatever you want…’
If you know anything about this shit, you’re probably having the ungodly negative reaction I did. By the way, this was after sitting them down and going over the extensive paperwork sent home with me about my various testing results, scores, and what they mean. I’ve been abundantly educational and transparent.
He seemed like he yielded off it during the talk, so I dropped it. We addressed it. Seemed settled or at least he had enough to think on for awhile.
Cut to a few weeks ago. Things have been at a mental breaking point with the entropy and negativity and downright stupidity in this household. My partner has been avoiding him outright because, while I’ve had half of three decades and undiagnosed autism at my disadvantage to be seasoned into thinking it was probably just coming off wrong and questioning my sanity, he sees right through this shit and had a much smaller threshold of patient with it than I did. SD finally comes to address it, the approach being ‘you’ve been really isolated and tense do you want to talk about it.’ My partner tested the waters and said a few starter things and told me later ‘that was a huge mistake. It instantly became a shit-on-Matt-fest.’
He accused me of using therapists for answers again. He said I was a narcissist and that I always have been and would be. I hardly remember what else was relayed to me because my brain filled with a liquid white-hot rage. That was it. We had that talk, it meant nothing. Not a single thing he has said or ever will say will matter, because that has proven that he changes face depending on the audience. To what end? To drive wedges between us all so that he can revel in our misery and play hero? It’s not mine to know or care.
I let this revelation stew in my brain for one shift and, when we got home, he was on his way out of the house heading to work, so as soon as his car door shut, I erupted to mom about it, asking ‘why the fuck is he still saying this, we talked about this’ and shit like ‘do you know what kind of person shits on people with mental illness like that?’ ‘what kind of state of mind would you have to be in to shit on people like that?’ I’ve been venting to everyone that it’s like seeing a person in a wheelchair and strutting in front of them while asking if they’ve even bothered to try walking.
No no no no no let me explain some things this has brought fully to light that I was like ‘there’s no way it could be this bad in real life, that’s just stupid, this has to be exaggerated, I wasn’t there’ or any other idiot reason I brushed shit off. I’m livid enough that this is probably going to be a rambling scattershot of what I can remember before losing my mind.
Hatred of Mental Disorders/Therapy:
- He is always making jabs like ‘therapy is just paying for a friend har har har’ but it has recently turned into ‘if a therapist told me something was wrong with me, well that’s their problem.’ (but I’m the narcissist?)
- This fucker was a coach (or whatever idiotic term Big Blue uses to mean ‘got promoted twice’) at our store and was purposely trying to set off a person with schizophrenia at our workplace so he could sit in the back with other management and laugh about her reactions.
- He is now over AP (security or wtfe) at his current store and set up someone else with schizophrenia to get fired because he knew if they gave him the choice to go to the hospital, he wouldn’t go because he was terrified the people at the hospital would kill him. As in, he intentionally used a person’s schizophrenic trigger to get them fired. This was overheard from his own mouth on a phone call he was taking, because he’s always on call and he paces when he’s talking on the phone. I want to get him fired over that, but I wasn’t the one who heard it, it was my partner. When they say retail only promotes the worst kind of people, case in point.
- Shout out to when I was saying I had autism right after the diagnosis and he quickly inserted it was linked to Downs Syndrome as if to shame me out of feeling in any way positive or empowered by it, which my dumb ass reacted positively to by saying ‘oh yeah! I actually didn’t know they were related until I was studying up on it!’ and diverted into geeking about what I’d learned.
Wallowing in Misery Through Osmosis/Savior Complex/White Knighting
- During my first mental collapse post-autism diagnosis, I was invited to come talk with the family together and get it all out, and in the midst of describing how horrible of a time I was having, he said it ‘made him feel better about my diagnosis’ because essentially if I was miserable, it was less like I was faking it (yet a year later, I’m apparently faking it again.)
- When trying to have a heart-to-heart with my partner, he impressed that he thought of him like a son, which could be taken as sweet, but my partner doesn’t even like him and he’s only six years older than him.
- We suspect a huge reason he shits on therapy is because if my mom gets real help for her trauma, it’ll shine the light on his toxic bullshit, or even just that if she can help herself, she won’t “need him.”
- Not long after we moved in, he was ordering food and when no one had a preference, told my partner ‘welcome to my personal hell.’
- Gets ungodly frustrated with my grandma, who needs him to pay her bills online since she’s been taken away from the ways she knows how. He says she’s always waiting for the right time and always picks the worst time and shit, but he’s got her so frazzled that she hates bothering him because he’s always mad at her. Bitch those bills are a monthly predictable event, you just want her suspended in hesitance, fear, and insanity. My partner and I have been seriously talking about how most of her losing her mental faculties looks like it’s being driven by him and I expressed how sorry I was now to have mentioned a damn thing to him about her possibly being in early dementia because it was like handing him a goddamn weapon.
Nothing is His Fault/No Accountability
- He left his first wife because ‘she told him she wanted to get out of Podunk, Arkansas but then had a kid and didn’t want to anymore.’ Sounds a lot like ‘left her because she was holding him back’ now, especially since every time he’s left a wife, he was cheating.
- Yeah that includes leaving his last one for my mom. He said he’d ‘told her it was over but she just wasn’t letting him go.’ Could have been the case, sure, but convenient that he left her the moment she finally got to go to the hospital to have a major cleft lip corrected that she’d been looking forward to getting done all of her life. Sounds more like he saw mom struggling after fleeing a terribly abusive relationship (my biological dad) and went ‘I can capitalize on that, be the hero, and be a manipulative abusive cunt without her knowing because it’s so much better than it used to be for her.’
- He rallied everyone to figure out who was leaving shit on the back of the toilet seat, asking anyone else to clean it because he’s not touching that, especially if it wasn’t him. We’ve all talked extensively. It was him. Mom even said he does that. He also leaves his piss in the fucking toilet and doesn’t flush. I don’t have contamination OCD, but my partner does. Yes, it is known.
- If he says something that is a filthy shit take and gets called out, it’s immediately ‘I guess I can’t have opinions/talk in my own house’ with hands thrown up and shit.
- I guarantee if I called his bullshit next time he refers to me as she, which I am primed and waiting to do, he’ll act like it’s an accident despite repeated errors that have only gotten worse since we’ve become more standoffish to him and not admit it’s an emasculation tactic (good luck btw, women are amazing, not some shameful thing to be compared to, and I am also genderqueer as fuck.)
Money
- Everything he bitches at seems to revolve around money and those fuckers make plenty of money. Solidly middle class. You can’t act like you are strained to pay to have something repaired or something medical looked at when you’ve already scheduled a cruise for next year.
- My cousin lived with us for awhile in Texas as a minor and was made to return home by my uncle so he could claim him on his taxes. The story my SD will say is how my cousin let him spend a bunch of money on him and then left without a care so daddy could spend more money on him. (??? Cousin is autistic too btw and we both hate money and the money-motivated.)
- At my worst point recently, after having to take leave for a long burning mental breakdown that was right at the psychosis line, we initiated talks with management about going part time to ease the stress and pain of it all. We didn’t say shit about it to him, but my God did he start hounding us immediately like he was trying to catch us doing something horrible.
- Oh jesus christ. I just remembered the ACTUAL first thing out of his mouth when I said got home from testing results and said “It’s autism.” It was “You can’t quit your job!!” ...........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................I’m going to fight god for boring me into this world. I was at my goddamn wits end suicidal but I can’t quit ma jerb.
Btw, I didn’t quit the jerb. Part time has helped but now that home life is absolute hell, I’m losing my mind there again even without being full time. I’m right back to borderline violence and trying not to walk out/have a meltdown. I can’t be there, I can’t be at home, I can’t dissociate. Sleep and finally being alone with just myself or my partner is the only relief, and the latter only when we know we won’t be bothered… so in the middle of the gd night.
Three people in the house are beyond their breaking point and about to go insane. One is the problem. The other dissociates and ‘just wants everything to be ok.’
They say autistic people have a higher pain threshold, but I think it’s bullshit. Whether it’s physical, emotional, or mental pain, it’s that we have to fight so hard to communicate it and then have to fight to be understood no matter how plainly we explain what’s going on. I say that to put my patience into perspective. I have been patient and enduring and passive for fifteen years because I wasn’t sure. There are enough people in this house now that can cross-check what’s being said and overheard, though, so now that the truth is being aired…
…every single thing endured or pushed back out of uncertainty wasn’t disappearing. It was charging a capacitor that was held behind a switch. The truth flipped that switch. Every initial reaction I had is now present, amplified, and seeking a channel through which it can unload and discharge.
I have taken a lot of hits and never said much. It does not mean I did not suffer for it.
I mean really, which is it… do we have a higher threshold? We’re always being called so gd hyper sensitive lmfao.
I will come back later. I can’t. I’ve been typing too long. Good things have happened too, they’re just being buried under a freighter load of everyone else’s shit.
Apologies if that was all hasty and unhinged
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