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8:13am June 24, 2014

alliecat-person said: I feel this so much. As hard as it is to be an adult, every day I’m grateful that I’m not a child any more.

I know what you mean.

Personally, I was actually willing to risk death to avoid ever ending up in another situation like when I was a child.  And I did risk death.  And it was some of the hardest stuff I ever did.  But it was still better than being a child.  And every year I get further away from being a child, both my life and my mental health improve.

I think this may be one reason that being treated like a child is so triggering for me.  The powerlessness of being a child is not something I would wish on anybody.  

And how I escaped guardianship, I don’t even know.  I had this shrink who told me that I would never ever be an adult, because I was in the system.  He told me that for the rest of my life, he would control what happened to me.  Because if I went against him, he would tell my parents whatever it took to get them to do what he wanted them to do to me, and then I’d have to do whatever it was he wanted, because he’d have my parents on my side.  This was a neuropsychologist that I actually thought of, at the time, as one of my better shrinks.  I’m not sure why, because he was a real asshole.  Maybe because I didn’t have all that great of a selection.

Anyway, I went on SSI and moved out on my own, and isolated myself from just about everyone.  I had to do this.  Had to.  If I had stayed living with my parents, I’d have ended up back in the inpatient psych system, back on meds, and eventually dead.  I also really needed the isolation for spiritual reasons, as well as to get rid of a lot of people who claimed to be friends but who were really bullies. 

So I did this, with my parents’ help and approval.

My shrink disapproved.

He, in fact, according to my mom, threw a temper tantrum on the phone when he realized that my parents supported my decision.  He had counted on being able to control me through his authority over them.  

I tried to warn another of his patients about him, but she thought I was just being rude… until something financial came up, and she found out his bad side really fast.  Then she caught up with me and told me about what had happened.  I wasn’t surprised – we had weird financial stuff going on with him too.

But I think that if I’d stayed with my parents, he’d have eventually pushed for them getting legal guardianship of some point.  But until then, he’d settled for the de facto version where he controlled my entire life by telling me that I wasn’t an adult and manipulating my parents to get them to control me in whatever way he felt like.

Anyway, moving out was hard.  Like… if anyone had done an honest and accurate assessment of my skills, in an actual house, at that point, and seen me at the time, they’d have put me in a long-stay institutions.  But they didn’t.  I just moved into an apartment and proceeded to starve and live in really horrible living conditions until I finally got help getting services.  By which point I was really weak, sick, dirty, and tiny, and my living environment was so trashed that the first woman from the agency took one look and said “I’m not authorized for this level of cleaning, I have to call and get them to send someone else.”

But all of that was necessary.  And I would do it all over again if I went back in time.  That was some of the hardest time in my life, but I also had a lot to work through, and I had to do it virtually alone, without anyone around to fuck with my head or misinterpret what was going on.  There was only a couple people who could help me at that point, and they weren’t professionals.  Luckily my family supported my independence, or it wouldn’t have worked at all before I got into low-income housing.  I couldn’t explain to them why I couldn’t live with them, but they believed me.  They helped me get SSI and later helped me get services.

But yeah.  I can’t overstate how hard it was, nor how worth it, it was.  At first I thought I was getting nowhere, that every second of every day was such a huge chore that I might never make it through a day.  But I made it, and I’m here, and every year I become happier and more comfortable in my own skin.  These are not concepts I had as a child – happiness, or being comfortable with myself.  They just didn’t exist.

I can think of ways that would have helped when I was a child, but they are all pretty drastic things that really couldn’t have happened in the real world.  And they’re the sort of thing that could never be formalized into a ‘system’ without harming kids even more.