I’m thinking about how, when I was masking, I was basing everything on sitcoms, and how I related to my family like a sitcom family, like “oh, they give me a hard time, but I know they love me”… and how that whole facade crumbled when I found out that they’d been alerted that I was #ActuallyAutistic #AllAutistics since my childhood, and refused to take it seriously, leaving the burden to me, a bomb waiting to explode my future.

It’s also on my mind with my stepfather’s recent death; how it’s been driven into my head that “family is everything, family is all that matters”, and yet… none of my mom’s sisters have been bothered to come support her. She postponed his memorial to late September, a month after his death, to give her sisters time to make plans to come… and yet, they’re not coming. At all. 

It just feels like everything I’ve been taught about “family” was just hollow bullshit to keep my sister and I in a constant state of obligation, always trying to “earn” our place in this family.
It was all just empty words the whole time, and we were the dummies who believed it. 

 @1f4c945d Despite how hollow it feels, I hope there is at least some catharsis in knowing the truth of it. There was for me and though it does nothing for my own scars, it gave me a tiny bit of foundation to build from. Sending love. 

 @1f4c945d On a related note, I was this many decades old when it finally sunk in that fictional characters are not real. 

 I realize I am old and it’s pathetic that I’m still so wound up in my family, and there are terrible disasters all over the planet and just about everyone has more pressing problems than mine.

But it’s part of my ActuallyAutistic #AllAutistics that I tell the truth (as dumb as it is) to people I care about, and I care about you.