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cursed-umbry · 4 months

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I've finally figured out whether or not I'd been doing the right thing or not. I haven't been, but I have the opportunity to start redeeming myself. Such opportunities in life are rare, and I'll try to make the most of it.

That's the short version. The long version is... complicated, as tends to happen with relationships between romantic partners or between relatives. The people involved other than myself are my mom, my dad, and my girlfriend. For further context, my girlfriend is MTF transgender, and she suffers from many of the mental health problems that can occur for trans individuals.

I live in Florida with my girlfriend currently, while Mom lives in Virginia (where I was born and have spent the majority of the 30 years I've been alive), and Dad, whose field of work is very specialized and thus he goes where the work is, is in Oklahoma.

My girlfriend lived in Florida before we ever had a romantic relationship and we were friends on Discord for years before we got together. She divorced from her wife to be with me after they'd fallen out of love, and I did my best to step up and support her long-distance while she was alone. Her bills would fall behind when she only had one income after the divorce, so I'd CashApp her. I helped her find a used car before the divorce was finalized because the one she was always driving belonged to her ex. Even made it to Florida for a four-day visit at one point. Eventually, I got the money put aside and took some time off, and I moved her in with my mom and me at the rental house we were in. Rent and utilities were supposed to be split, two-thirds for us and one-third for Mom.

We did okay living together, but Virginia took its toll on my girlfriend's mental health. She used to live with her dad some years ago until bone marrow cancer resulted in his death when she was 25. However, he was also the parent who made her feel like she couldn't come out as trans safely. She has mixed feelings about him sometimes, but ultimately, she knows he raised her and acknowledges his importance for her being who she is. All this to say that because the part of Virginia we moved into was where she lost her dad, she was more prone to being not okay when she was in that area due to the memories tied to many of its landmarks. Eventually, she outed herself to a manager at her job (on the premise that maybe that manager would keep it between them and not share that information with the rest of the management team) to explain her depression episodes, but that manager told the whole management team anyway. She felt she could no longer be safe at that job, so she quit.

After that, it was very hard for her to have a steady income. I make alright money, but paying all of her bills on my own wasn't going to be possible. She did Uber the rest of the time we were in Virginia, but rarely did she do enough Uber. Like, we would need for me to do Uber too since my job was three 13-hour shifts and I had four off days, my goal would be to make $300 on my Uber days while she shot for $600, but most weeks we came away with $450-600 put together. As we kept falling short, I would prioritize our car bills, our car insurance, her medical insurance, her medications, our storage unit bill, and her phone bill over our rent and our utilities (including my phone bill) since those two bills were jointly shared with my mom who makes a lot more money than me but who is also paying off a lot more debt than me. I kept telling Mom I'd pay her back. I knew what I was doing was unfair to her, but ultimately, we fell probably about $4100 short of rent and utilities over the course of six or seven months. While this was going on, we declared our intention to move to Florida so we could move in with my girlfriend's mom, so my mom was house hunting. Her intention was to use her retirement money to buy a property outright because her credit would no longer support a mortgage, but as my girlfriend and I fell further behind, that was eating into my mom's already limited house budget. She told me it had real effects for her trying to make offers.

I borrowed from my dad to fund the move to Florida. So now we sit $4000 in debt to my dad and about $4100 in debt to my mom, with the added wrinkle that Mom feels like I used her and trampled over her to get my girlfriend and me to Florida, but I try to defend that with the argument that there was a very real possibility my girlfriend would harm herself the longer we stayed in Virginia. Mom also has a lot of belongings to downsize, and I left all of that to her when I left, even though she's not so physically able anymore. She asked me to promise I'd come back to VA as soon as I could after moving to help her with the stuff at the rental so that she could move. She's bought a condo, so now she's paying to be at two properties at once, and she's stretched very thin.

I'm about to change jobs in Florida with a 50% pay jump. I'm interviewing today for this new job. If I had not found this new job and was thus going to stay at my current one, I was planning to use PTO to take a day off so that I could come back to VA for a few days and help Mom. Depending on whether or not I get hired, I might instead work the visit to Virginia into the gap between resigning from one job and starting the other. I view this visit to Virginia as an opportunity to redeem myself for taking advantage of Mom before we moved out. However, due to our dog, my girlfriend cannot go with me. It's the first time we might be apart since we moved in together. She's not taking it very well because I am her main support system.

She and I had a big conversation about this last night before bed to figure out all the emotions involved from both ends. I've been distant for a while since we got here, and I've been less attentive to my girlfriend than I should have ever let myself be. I believe that guilt for my actions in Virginia weighs on me, so if I can relieve that weight by helping that situation, I'll be able to be a better partner again. She is upset that I'm leaving her because I did at one point promise I'd never leave her behind again (after my four-day visit before she moved in with me), she's angry at my mom for not dealing with her stuff sooner, and she's scared of how she'll feel watching me drive off without her.

With all that said, I swore to her I'd come back more focused. I want to make the most of the help I can give my mom when I go back home so that this pain isn't holding me back or distracting me anymore. I love my girlfriend, but I love my mom too. I want to make things right for everyone involved.

#confession #relationships #working on myself

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cursed-umbry · 5 months

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I've heard folks say "everybody's a little ADHD" or "Aren't we all?" whenever I tell them I have ADHD. It's probably an attempt to show empathy, but the way it comes off is that what I have isn't legitimate.

I fucking knew it, I SAID it: they're making ADHD people the next culture war targets. They will 'just ask questions' until we lose every scrap of ground we've gained in the last decade and more. We may not quite inspire the same level of hatred as a sexual minority, but we can very easily be made to inspire disdain and that also works.

They will strip us of our accomodations and our medications and try to stifle any sense of shared identity, and if that kills some of us, oh well. So long as it fuels another outrage cycle, fine.

So many of the tropes they've been using on trans people work extremely well on ADHD people too! "There are too many of these people suddenly! It must be a fad! It spreads through friend groups! And online! People are going private for diagnoses and that's bad! They are using pOwERfUl medical interventions and we think it's freaky!"

I saw the first ripples of this in terf circles about two years ago. And of course it's spread.

6% of British ADHD people lost their jobs in the last year thanks to the meds shortage. SIX PER CENT! And that just made these ghouls go "ooh, tasty, what else can we do?"

Recently an 'expert' was on the BBC saying people see ADHD diagnosis as a "golden ticket." Laurence Fox has been ranting that the condition doesn't exist and threatening "'you won't poison my child's body [with ADHD meds] against my consent"

People need to be aware this is going to get worse. Maybe, if we're lucky, it won't get really bad. But it's going to get worse than it is now.

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