At A Crossroads

by Mary

It's been seven years since we posted here, and eight years since we posted original content.  A lot has changed.  In 2020, as a result of the Covid pandemic, we were laid off from our job of 32 years.  We were devastated.  We've gotten every available vaccination, but we still mask when leaving our apartment building.  If we get Covid, there's no one to take care of us or run errands.

In 2021, at body age 59, we realized that we were on the autism spectrum.  When moving into our apartment in 2018, we realized that in a neighbor family, one of the children was on the spectrum.  Because we were at home during the pandemic, we had time on our hands to do research on autism.  We remember thinking, "OMG, this explains our whole life."  We confided in the neurotypical parent of the neighbor family, who mentioned that autism is inherited, and that the child's other parent was on the spectrum.  

We replied that we were as certain as we could be that our mother, who passed in 2000 at the age of 61, was also on the spectrum.  Back in the day, when we were young, the prevailing myths included the notion that only boys were on the spectrum, and that all people on the spectrum had intellectual disabilities.  So we fell through the cracks, exacerbated by the fact that our second brother, labeled "learning disabled," had far more obvious disabilities than we did.  Our mother, an undiagnosed multiple who also fell through the cracks regarding autism, felt guilty that she had given birth to a disabled child.  She babied him and ignored her daughter and her first son because, as she later said, "you two could take care of yourselves."

Our father, who was both mother and father to his three children, passed in 2014 at the age of 76.

Our disabled brother also developed Tourette Syndrome (no swearing, just tics), and we later surmised that his "learning disability" was really an executive-function disorder, probably associated with something unusual in his frontal lobe.  He passed in 2024 at the age of 56, when his heart stopped at his girlfriend's house.

We once tweeted, "The more I remember, the angrier I get."  We have a lot to be angry about.  But I personally know that letting our anger run amok does no good for us and for the people around us.

So now what?  We developed chronic insomnia more than four years ago and are unable to look for work, let alone work.  We will be eligible for Medicare at the beginning of 2027.  We've always been good with money, and our inheritance from our father allowed us to buy our current apartment.  We invested the rest.  Our inheritance from our brother allowed us to pay off half the remaining principal of our mortgage.

But our life is far from ideal.  We'd rather not go back to work.  We've also realized that we've needed to vastly reduce our online presence.  The cost of maintaining our system's web domain (.com, .net, and .org), plus the same for our body-name domain, is getting prohibitive.  We are not giving up our body-name domain(s); they redirect to our LinkedIn page.  But our system domains are a luxury, especially considering that the farther along we go on our healing journey, the less we want or need to share about ourselves with the universe.

As they say in the rooms of twelve-step programs, "More shall be revealed."