The Way Home

And now I don't even know how to share it.

I dont know how to comfort it

All I know is how to endure it and I'm so fucking tired of endurance.

I love to read about people who've gone through things like I have getting support and healing for their recovery.

And I hate that even years of safety hasn't been enough to allow me to ask for what I need beyond holding me when I cry and telling him that I'm struggling.

I used to not be able to do that too so it's not like I've grown

I never would have, I would have stayed in hell for my siblings to help them break free and not be alone ...

Sometimes I need to scream out that it's not fair that people keep asking me to take care of the sibling that allowed me to be assaulted under his care before I was even school age.

Then I remember. They dont know.

Which leads to a whole different level of it's Not fair because I grew up in a time and place when that's just what happened and if I'd have said anything then I would have just been blamed for destroying my family and if I said anything now they'd just gaslight me and accuse me of being a liar.

I've had tons of men offer me protection at one point or another but it seems fantastical to believe that someone would actually do it and that is what's supposed to be normal.

My partner would. I have faith that he would because he always does what he says.

But you know who wouldn't protect me? My dad. You know who wouldn't physically protect me let alone emotionally protect me was my dad. My mom.

So I feel like I have a point.

And I shatter, fight with every fiber if my dissociated brain to keep from crying, from wailing, from making any of this inside noise outside.

The country itself is tearing me apart with all the funding for mental health dwindling down to a trickle and working of switching over to a for profit model.

And beyond my job, which is important, it's the hundreds of people we are just abandoning on the street to die. Or worse.

It's everything I have to keep trying to help anyone.

But then my life and the growing pains of new support needs and while systems are in place to help, it takes time.

And that time is chewing through us. Myself and my partner, clinging to making this life better for my son and the pain of watching him struggle until we get to the next level of needs.

And trauma feeling the tension ratcheting up as our ability to accommodate battle with our limitations. Our budget. Our everything.

So I'll break today, feel the shatter, scoop myself into a pile and start again tommorow.

There's always just one more thing when I've finally got a grip on myself.

Unmasking means I haven't pushed myself past my limits for a long time, it's just sometimes there's not a choice.

My work isnt a job, it isn't even really a career, it's a CALLING, working with the unhoused, abused, and invisible population I do, I can't just not do it.

So I'm doing my best as the world burns around me and people decide that another person's humanity is not worth as much as destroying personal autonomy with anything that doesn't fit in the very straight white church lady box. They don't want their children to know there's another way to live.

They don't want them to seethe "abnormality" being perfectly happy the way they are, even with all the public conflicts with their identity.

I don't know if you can really understand it if you haven't had a personal experience with the subject. The things about myself that I had to amputate to fit in never actually went away and I have no interest in cutting myself off from myself again. I'd rather die who I am than live a stranger.

And at home, I'm a mom of two autistic children and trying to get them set on a path that allows them to be authentic and self determining and it's hard sometimes.

Not because of the kids- because of the systems. The kids are worth every second of it so it's not really optional

So I'm tired and I want to curl up in a ball and lose my shit.

But my shit cannot be lost now so I'm just drowning in it. Breathe in... Breathe out

... And have faith that my best is good enough.

I've been thinking about renaming her. Which, begs the question of why because at some point my system got significantly more covert than it was when I was younger. I thought they were gone.

But now I think maybe they aren't. Now I think they were hiding from me because he was trying to kill me with them.

It sounds so dramatic until I remember all the times he drove me so close to the edge where I was switching through whole cycles in the space of a minute again and again.

Then drop me off somewhere I'd have to walk home. (I self injured so much that day)

Until he made me read the fountainhead and I'd never been more suicidal in my life. He was so upset, not that i was suicidal but because I missed the point of the book.

Until I was begging him to touch me one more time because he was going to leave me for someone who was engaged to someone else (he didn't)

Until I remember him forcing me to get so high that I was begging God or anyone to let me come back down.

Until my life was a series of strobe light memories I couldn't hold onto.

He threw me off balance so many times. He destabilized my mental health so many times.

Being undiagnosed autistic is being taught that every instinct you have is incorrect and you can't trust your own judgement.

Being undiagnosed autistic is falling in line and fitting in and trusting others perceptions of reality more than yours but still getting shamed for getting into an abusive relationship because "you're smarter than that".

It's being taught that what you want from love is unrealistic and you'll be alone forever if you don't compromise, only to find out years later that it can be exactly that and it really isn't love if it isn't that.

Being undiagnosed autistic means being on the outside of your own family because you cannot manage the trauma and loss on your own and it just pulls you farther away from them every day.

Being undiagnosed autistic is realizing that 9/10 being diagnosed young meant the same kind of gaslighting as above only they call it therapy.

That the game was rigged.

You were never going to have a safe and healthy childhood because people never knew what to do with you.

That even if you won it would come at a price that only meant I lost in another direction.

That nothing was ever going to be fair and you'd have to fight for every accommodation you needed then outperform your team because you have to prove the accommodations were worth it.