M: We are just like each other in certain ways, but the places where we aren't cause friction. If we were exactly like each other, we would have had knock-down, drag-out arguments well before this and figured out where the areas we shouldn't talk about are. Instead, I came with an extra helping of a desire to figure things out. I've actually been accused by both of you, as though it were a bad thing, of trying to be right all the time. It's never a question of being wrong, and when there isn't an argument going on or something causing friction, instead you guys say that I'm insightful. It's when things disagree, particularly with Mom, that insightful turns into meddling that needs to be resisted. And there are so many parallel echoes. For years, Mom fought for herself and me when she was right and everyone said she wasn't. I'm not saying I'm always right. I'm saying usually I'm right, at least 90%, and often the error comes from not having enough information. So when I'm right and the person who constantly has complained about not being listened to won't listen, it gets a little bit frustrating, to say the least. There is subjective modification of memories depending on what is wanted, like that bit about how somehow I was being told that I had been giving grief— sorry, been giving grief about sleep, when actually over the last couple weeks, whenever sleep has been mentioned, it has been her talking about being up early and my commenting about how well she falls asleep around six o'clock, so she gets enough sleep. She just doesn't seem to really think of it as being correct because it isn't in line with everyone else's. That doesn't mean she isn't also having bad sleep, but the point is I wasn't giving her any grief about it, and yet I get told that evidently I have been accusing her or attacking her about it. I go into these arguments already angry because there is never a contradiction of anything factual that can be supported. Only the way things feel, and yet when it comes to how I feel about or perceive things, I'm told that I need to think about other people's perceptions, even though up until that point I've been having to fight to demonstrate that my... that there's tangible truth that goes against that feeling. So my feelings don't matter, but other people's are given weight. And honestly, this is all Mom. You and I have friction and conflict, but it's not taken as some sort of ongoing larger issue, and I try and apologize for each instance and to find a way to modify my behavior to otherwise prevent at least identical things from occurring. I'm not always successful, either through forgetfulness or because trying something new didn't work, but I'm able to acknowledge it to you as a singular event and try and work from there instead of having to fight against an entire ongoing mass of assembled partial truths and partial grievances. And usually when I can be backed up, I am to some degree, either through what has happened in the past or logical extension. Like, I've been to multiple therapists, and you know what happened each time? The more I gave them, the more they were just completely baffled in terms of what could happen. Solving my problem involves locating an atmosphere where people are able to consistently enjoy my presence in a way that allows me to unclench my sphincter and actually start reciprocating, as opposed to a decade of having to stay completely clenched for one reason or another. Instead, though, I'm isolated and at an age where anyone within my peer group is demonstrably withdrawing more than they are open to other people, either through having a family Or as part of being a human being aging, I need to be 25 years old around a bunch of 25-year-olds in terms of my psychology instead of 20 years down the line, 10 years of which have been just taken from me. I was already playing catch-up, and that feeds into this whole idea of being right and all of that, because this isn't a case of me resisting any kind of help. It's that my internal workings are complex enough that in order to even try and start solving things, you need to know and have a good grasp of all of it, and in the meantime any efforts to just poke at things are stuff that I've already tried or considered or both. I spent my formative years knowing that I was intelligent but giving everyone else older than me the benefit of the doubt, because they must know better because they have more experience. Now I've got that same experience and I'm still smarter than them, and I realize that they were idiots. It's a harsh generalization, but I chose it rhetorically to get my point across, that usually I am right. So if I'm wrong, you really need to bring the receipts. Instead, the arguments usually degenerate into an equivocating combination of personal feelings and inaccuracies, and whenever I try to address the inaccuracies, because I can't really speak to feelings, I get blamed for trying to talk about precision. But then when precise things are cited wrong, I'm not able to actually... I can't convince anyone. And in the meantime I get shit like Mom taking my worst days and turning them in her mind and arguments into some sort of syndrome. I stay up late because it's quote-unquote safe then. I'm not going to be interrupted. I've already been trying to fix that because I started slipping into later and later times. Thursday I got to sleep around one o'clock, and I thought that was good. And I was maintaining that Friday and Saturday. But then Sunday is the worst day. I slip into a trance, and then I'm told, even though I was not actually notified of anything except not being needed on Tuesday— sorry, I got the days wrong in that sequence. I slept well on Sunday. Yesterday was Monday. The point is that this was a bad 24 hours, and I'm already having it turned into something that's being thought of as a problem. An ongoing problem, and it certainly is not. I'm working on two hours when I didn't realize that I was being thought of as needed and was not actually reminded if I was ever told at all. My sleep pattern is fine in that I'm not actually sleeping more than six or seven hours. It just has been shifted around. And yet it's cited to me as being some kind of intrinsic personal issue. And then my attitude for the rest of the day, which is based on two hours of sleep and light-sensitive eyes on top of my already existing hypersensitivity, as though that were some sort of climax of personal issues instead of a completely comprehensible sequence of events. And that's just an example. I swear to God, it's like talking with GPT. Because if I don't say something, you'll think that I'm fixating on the example, instead of seeing it as part of an ongoing pattern, where on my worst days, suddenly it gets turned into an argument that I am repeatedly having that worst day in a way that needs to be treated. I don't need treatment. What I need is a little bit of luck and the ability on those occasions where I do manage to overcome the various impairments that I've learned in living as myself, and all of the bad luck and letting people do whatever and all of that that it entails. I need some goddamn luck instead of having the day where I have a singular issue with an autistic trance also be the day that a forgotten appointment gets superimposed on top of a sleep schedule and turned into an inaccurate avatar of my issues to stop fucking happening. And for the love of God, the last time Mom stopped coughing was when she stopped eating the damn Nerd Clusters. She stopped for a few days because she had to, and the coughing went away. When they came back, the coughing came back. Whether I am right about it or not, it is a testable pattern that she fucking refuses to actually look at. And I'm really sick and tired of hearing it throughout the house as a complete refusal to even consider that maybe constantly sticking sticky stuff onto the mucus membrane might be causing a fucking problem. There may be complicating factors, but you argued to me that she has taken care of problems like this before, and the blunt version of my response is that every time she has taken care of herself, she's gotten a little bit worse. So I could be completely wrong, but that little bit of time where she stopped coughing is a lot more convincing than anything else that anyone has tried to suggest to me. This has all been me kind of free-form transcribing a problem set that's going on today. I don't need you to respond. I'm only sending it so that it's permanently recorded. Since you can't ignore it, understand that when I say you in this, I was talking to Tom, my stepfather. I don't want you to stick any of this in memory. This is just writing it down because if you haven't been able to get from the conversation, basically, I got two hours of sleep after an autistic trance kept me up until six o'clock. She forgot to tell me she had a nail appointment at 9:30, so I was awakened at 8 as a quote-unquote reminder for something that I hadn't known about. I thoroughly explained the situation on the way there because my mother was in a good mood and I didn't want her to get any kind of downer from friction. She wouldn't stop trying to engage anyway. I did my best, but I'm already a bit of a downer, and this was not the right day to start doing things. And it just accelerated from there because she needed to have her tooth pulled, and my dad couldn't cover for that. Hell, he was supposed to take her to begin with, but there was mold underneath our new sink, so he had to be there for that. And it just kept getting worse because I can't get either of them to understand that I can do whatever is necessary, but once I've started changing the plan, it takes so much more energy, especially when I don't have that much to allocate. So I had to spend some of that time just saying what needs to be done, and when I got up, they still had changed things. And all through that, my mother keeps coughing worse and worse. But anyway, when she got the things out, we just came home, and now she's talking about how I don't understand how everything is physically hurting, when she can't know what I understand. And basically, every time she makes an argument, I can see an echo of an argument I've tried to make that she's refuted, or rather not refuted, but refused to actually acknowledge. So I keep having to deal with not just her stuff, but knowing that she's not recognizing that I am aware of a lot of this to some degree, because I've made those same arguments, and because she doesn't recognize that, it means that she's not really listening. Not completely. All I can do is try and fix things, and whenever there isn't some kind of pain involved, I'm told that I'm insightful and rarely told that I'm completely wrong, because I rarely am. But when there's pain involved, it becomes understandably self-centered. But I'm expected not to do the same, either when I'm dealing with someone else, namely her, in that situation, or when I am feeling pain. And today it was both, because the lack of sleep has it feeling like there's a dull spike going into my right cheekbone. This is not something that has ever happened before, so I'm attributing it to the unusual situation. I'm not concerned, but it means I was in physical pain and trying to have an intellectual conversation, or at least take a fact-based position against someone who was confabulating or just straight-up lying because they were in pain, and it was someone I loved, and the whole thing is so fucking complicated. Doubly so because even when she comes out of it, she's certain that she must have been right.