Always Only You by Chloe Liese (z-lib.org).epub

get honest about my neurological difference.
In our traditional Italian Catholic household, dominated by Nonna’s
skepticism for anything but prayer as a solution to all problems, it was a wonder
I’d been brought for an evaluation at all. It’s a testament to how worn out my
mother was that she defied Nonna’s insistence I was just a normal, albeit
stubborn, handful. But my mom trusted her intuition, sneaking me to a number
of appointments with the pediatric psychologist who eventually diagnosed me. I
probably haven’t thanked her enough for that.
After diagnosis, I started therapy for managing my anxiety, dealing with
deviations from my compulsions and obsession through emotional regulation,
and coping with that sometimes depressing outside-looking-in feeling most
autistics experience.
Then, as I hit puberty, a growing presence of aches and stiffness creeped into
my life. For my seventeenth birthday, I got another diagnosis: rheumatoid
arthritis. Over the span of one summer, I went from a daily runner and highly
active person to someone whose knees and hips were so stiff, I couldn’t get out
of bed. A teenager whose hands couldn’t open water bottles or use can openers.
And that’s when I became a problem, not a person. Perhaps if it had just
been autism or arthritis, I’d have been allowed to be an independent, empowered
young woman. But with my mother’s fear and anxiety after my dad’s death, she
easily tipped into oppressive, infantilizing hovering. Frankie was fragile, broken,
and weak. It was suffocating.
No noisy places, Frankie doesn’t like them.
Not that ball game, those seats are too hard for her to walk to.
Frankie can’t be left alone. Who knows what would happen?
I was an impediment to fun activities and locations, a source of worry and
exhaustion, a burden. Wet blanket. Party pooper. Eeyore.
Until I moved away. My family got to have fun again. And I got a shot at
proving to myself I was capable of living on my own, strong and safe and
independent.
And I have proven myself, and then some. Even so, I can admit there are
days my life is hard. Autism is a lifelong reality that you’ll never quite catch the
cues, follow the timing, see the world like a lot of people do. And sometimes
that has isolating, frustrating, depressing reverberations.
And then there’s rheumatoid arthritis, a bitch of an autoimmune disease for
which there’s no cure, only damage control. The sooner you slow chronic
inflammation created by the body attacking itself, the better. Because I was
quickly diagnosed, medication largely spared my joints permanent damage. But
even with good medication and care, flare-ups happen.