The things I lost this week for being di ...

The things I lost this week for being disabled.

Dec 03, 2022

My best friend since grade school who's seen me in a Long Covid crash where I could hardly walk 20 feet in a day while my hair was falling out in clumps has fully joined the "LC is just depression" camp.

Our friendship survived her mother starting a surprise fistfight with me in the delivery room while she was in labor. Just outta nowhere

But it isn't surviving conservatism, ableism, Long Covid, and ME/CFS.

Whenever you become more disabled you will lose people. Some of them will shock you.

This new belief that it's just depression contradicts her personal lived experience of watching me struggle to breathe or walk. Of seeing my fingers and feet turning blue while my toenails and hair were coming off.

To be clear: MY TOENAILS CAME OFF. She saw it. With her own eyes Toenails dont pop off like pogs from depression.

We were always each other's support person when our parents would gaslight us. We had a very close bond because we relied on each other to be each other's anchors to reality despite the images our families tried to project.

So this feels... I'm in shock... This feels like a betrayal of everything that got us through our childhoods.

She was the one who taught me how to stuff my bra in Jr high.

She would sneak me cool clothes in her backpack to change into at school my religious parents would have killed us over.

I taught her the quarter trick to get all the channels.

I thought that she was a forever person.

Now shes a trump fan who has retconned one of the more devastating things I've lived through and she was there.

This month has sucked.

She has the part of my plant collection that I considered the most essential: my entire collection of carnivorous plants, all of my rarest plants, and the plants with the most sentimental value.

Being threatened to have them thrown away or taken away from me has been a source of autistic meltdowns. I'll never be able to replace that dome or the time invested in caring for and nurturing them.

I am not going back for them. I physically am not able. I also dont have the means to travel to collect them.

It has been just back-to-back personal calamities several times a day so far this month. The holidays are bad enough I just wish the rest of the year would just take it easy on me.

I am deleting my FB on Monday. There's precious few people from my old life who seem ready, willing, or able to be part of my new life.

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