The Grenade

By the time I had to put dinner on the stove Wednesday evening, I was thinking a lot about what’s maybe the best line in the late, lamented television show Terriers, when Gretchen tells her interfering and uninformed ex-husband Hank, “You’re the live grenade in my life.”

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In the middle of last month, I wrote about the risk of losing my day-to-day independence despite my financial dependence upon my mother, once she as my sole remaining parent eventually passes. The only and presumptive plan that exists at that point is for me to take her place in the home of my sister and her family, where I would be entirely dependent upon other people just to be able to access anything other than the immediate, boring suburban neighborhood. What mental health I have is inextricably tied to being able to walk out my front door into my pacific circuit and engage in those routine, everyday if superficial acts of sociality and familiarity. All of which would be lost.

Immediately in the wake of that post, my mother went off the deep end about my future and did something she’d long ago promised never to do again: she went behind my back to talk to someone about me. In the past, it was a self-appointed autistic “consultant” who then made conservatorship noises, or that time she tried to get my then-therapist to take her on as a client, too. In this case, it was calling up a local (to me,) disability lawyer. All of this occurred in a furious clusterfuck of emails that left me feeling nothing so much as bereft and betrayed.

Despite this, and wishing very much that there were some way to punish her for this transgression (because I don’t see how going back on her word and talking to someone about me without my permission shouldn’t come with some sort of fucking consequences), and only because she at least sent me email saying “I fucked up”, I agreed to talk to this lawyer through email just to get the lay of the land.

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I’ve done this repeatedly since my diagnosis: chosen to be responsive and responsible to whatever process was being placed in front of me, even in cases where better judgment probably would have told me to stop and think. Too many times, it blew up in my face. I can do everything right, and still people fail me or tell me off.

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The lawyer introduced themselves over email. I replied the same day. They took awhile to respond due to being out of the office, but sent me a short list of questions for me to answer before we switched to an eventual phone call. I replied the same day. Less than a week later I get a canned, automated solicit from the email address they’d been using. I replied the same day, asking for clarification because I’d been talking to a particular lawyer. The next day, I got another canned, automated solicit from the same address. I ignored it. 
Ten entire days after that second canned solicit—which is sixteen entire days since my last reply to the actual lawyer’s email—that lawyer emails me wondering where I am and if I got their previous email. You know, the one to which I’d replied the very, actual day they sent it to me, sixteen days earlier.

That same day—again, because this is what I did every single time—I replied asking for clarification, because between the canned solicits from the same address, and now this question asking if I’d received their last message when I had in fact not only received it but replied to it the same day, at this point I had no earthly idea what was happening. Their response to that—miraculously also the same day—talked down to me like I was not only autistic but also had an intellectual disability of some kind, despite the fact that the entirety of my confusion was based upon their communications process.

Still that same day, I replied again, explaining—slowly this time, because tit for tat—that the confusion stems from having asked me if I’d received their last email, when (as I’d already told them), I’d not only received it but answered it. Again the same day, they replied and claimed that “one of my emails to you might have gotten a little lost in the kerfuffle of the automated emails”, intimating that obviously I had lost track of it.

To be clear: I have every single email they ever sent me. There is nothing in spam, and nothing in trash, and their alleged “follow up after you responded a few weeks ago” doesn’t exist.

At this point, and again the selfsame day—something I had done each and every godforsaken time they sent me email—I replied simply saying that yes we can just switch over to the phone the following week, which is what they now were asking of me.

That was five days ago.

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Today, my mother emails me saying the law firm called and left a message that she didn’t understand. I said either it was a canned solicitation because now she’s on their list, “or it’s someone wondering why I’m not responding to email they never sent me in the first place because they are incompetent”.

The email she sent me next was a large wall of tiny text not unlike the furious clusterfuck of last month. I stopped reading early, after this line: “Which means you are not keeping after them yourself.”

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Let me back up a bit to what today had been for me up until that point, because it’s completely fucking insane how my day was flipped completely over onto its head for nothing I actually did.

I didn’t write about it here because the original incident happened when I was sort of not blogging much, but back in June when I was on my six-block walk from sitting for an hour to read over a latte in the neighborhood (yes, part of my pacific circuit), and just one block from my front door, I suddenly and quite immediately felt as if I’d been breathing wildfire smoke and carrying a backpack filled with heavy groceries—when in fact I had not been breathing any kind of smoke whatsoever and was not wearing any kind of backpack whatsoever. Checking the Health app later, I saw that my watch was convinced that I’d blown a heart rate of about 160 BPM during this incident.

Since it had never happened before, I just made note of it, put a pin in it, and told myself to pay attention to anything similar happening again, at which point I’d flag my doctor. 
Fast forward three months, when early in September just sitting in my apartment either watching television or working on the laptop or both, I suddenly and quite immediately once again felt as if I’d been breathing wildfire smoke—when in fact I had not been breathing any kind of smoke whatsoever. I did not feel as if I was carrying a backpack filled with heavy groceries, but I also was not sure if this was just because I was sitting down rather than walking. Checking later, my heart rate around the time of this incident was between 80 and 110 BPM—the typical range for both my anxiety attacks and the exertion of my evening walks.

In each instance, the incident lasted only five to ten minutes (I suspect the former, and that it just felt like the latter), and there were no other symptoms or later complications to my day. In fact, later that evening I went for my usual walk of just over a mile, clocking in at an average pace of 17’54” mile which is right in the range I call “middling” and is pretty typical of my walks.

Being, once again, responsive and responsible to the situation at hand, I filled in my doctor on both incidents. All told, in addition to wanting to get an update on my Vitamin D levels, she ordered an EKG and a cardio stress test, and told me to update my pulmonologist, whose office then ordered a spirometry test and a chest X-ray.

(Then on Monday, I messaged her the information from my Apple Watch for these incidents. I was reminded that I’d said I’d do this by the fact that suddenly after getting coffee on Monday—decaf, as always—by heart rate randomly spiked to around 160 BPM. She’s now also ordered a heart rate monitor to be sent to me to wear for a fourteen-day period.)

Today, then, became all about trying to take care of several things in one afternoon (the things I couldn’t do last Thursday), after taking myself for my regular Wednesday breakfast out in order to have a fuller than usual meal in me before doing so. Then I spent all of around ninety minutes at Kaiser getting the blood draw, three vaccinations, the EKG, and the chest X-ray. On the way home, the cardiology department called because I came up on the waiting list for the facility I can actually get to (rather than one up in Washington or one down in Salem), so now next week starts with me breathing into tubes and ends with me running on a treadmill.

All in all, a resource-draining but satisfactory day of being—oh, look—responsive and responsible to my own needs.

Then my mother sent me that email wondering why the lawyer had called her.

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Here’s how and where things stand tonight.

I’ve told my mother to fuck off, both privately and (because I’m at the end of my rope now, and I’m lashing out) publicly on social media, where she follows me. This despite the fact that she is the only financial support I have, making me in both essence and effect trapped in a room with what seems to be rapidly-degenerating toxic behavior aimed in my direction.

Then I emailed her a PDF consisting of each and every email the lawyer sent me, and each and every reply I sent back, in chronological order. If there’s one thing anyone who’s known me for any significant amount of time should know (especially if they knew me during my fandom days), it’s that you shouldn’t come for me because I almost always have receipts.

Then I emailed the lawyer the same PDF, chiding them for needlessly setting off my mother and telling them that I have no earthly idea what they are doing, and that “the lack of consistent communication has not been on my side”.

I’m done.

Everyone can fuck right off until they get their own shit straight before they come trying to stir any up with me.

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Somewhere in all of that, I also emailed my therapist all about it. I don’t have therapy until Friday afternoon. Then again, as you can see, I do have a blog.

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Then I emailed my sister telling her our mother is off her fucking rocker, and maybe she should do something about it.

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The reality is that the law firm will never actually succeed in getting me anything from Social Security. It’s been clear and decisive for almost a decade now: even if the Social Security Administration considered me disabled (they don’t), I have too few credits to get SSDI based upon my own record and yet also too many to get it based upon a parent’s record. As for SSI, see above: they don’t consider me to be disabled.

I’ve gone through this exercise of talking to a disability lawyer I did not seek out only because if they really want to do the work, I figure why should I get in their way. I’m utterly convinced that they, too, will fail, but that just leaves me where I already am. All of this I agreed to do despite knowing that somehow this will mean my mother thinks going behind my back was right, and that she’s being rewarded for that betrayal. There should have been consequences for her, but I wasn’t going to shoot myself in the foot over it.

Again: because I routinely and regularly and repeatedly choose to be responsive and responsible.

I choose to do everything right.

Then people shit down my throat anyway.

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At some point in the past couple of months, I sat down and did a little bit of math.

In the midst of ungodly sums of money being given out to billionaires in tax breaks while the social safety net is being torn apart, I was curious just how much money I’d need to survive, say, for another twenty years given my current budget. That means the rent my mother pays, the money she sends me monthly, my SNAP allotment, my energy assistance allotment, and for shits and grins swapping in Kaiser’s top plan where my Medicaid is now.

All told, that comes to about $39,600 per year.

Just a cool one million would buy me twenty-five years.

$396,000 would buy me ten years.

$198,000 would buy me five years.

I’m only just barely kidding when I say that I’ve been thinking about launching a GoFundMe to get me out from underneath this suddenly increasing storm of toxicity raging at me all the way across the country from western Massachusetts.

I don’t know what else I can do.

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Last month, after that initial furious clusterfuck of emails from my mother, after dinner I put in my AirPods, turned 50 Foot Wave up loud, and proceeded to knock out a walk of almost a mile and a half at an unreasonable and unrepeatable average pace of a 15’47” mile.

Today, after dinner I put in my AirPods, turned 50 Foot Wave up loud, and proceeded to knock out a walk of just under a mile and a quarter at an unreasonable and unrepeatable average pace of a 16’06” mile.

Responsive.

Responsible.

Unfortunately so unlike my mother.

The live grenade in my life.