Recently, something came to mind that yet again makes me so happy that I cut out so many of my “family” members.

When I was living with my father and my stepmother, someone in our house got COVID-19. My stepmother noticed that my stepsister was exhibiting symptoms, but it was actually my stepsister’s boyfriend who ended up getting COVID-19. Due to the fact that my stepsister often hung around her boyfriend, my stepmother tested my stepsister, but her test actually ended up coming back as negative.

Unfortunately, during this time, I started to realize that I had symptoms too. This was rather tragic because, the next day, I had to work, but my job had a policy stating that anyone who exhibits COVID-19 symptoms and even anyone who’s been around someone who was confirmed to have COVID-19 should remain off of work for a certain period of time. I fell into that category, but this did not make my stepmother happy.

My stepmother, knowing that I had to work that day, noticed that I ended up staying home. She knew I was developing these symptoms as I brought them up the day before I even talked to my boss about it, but she got very pissed off at me because she thought I was lying about my sickness just to get out of work. I tried to make it very clear to her that my boss told me that this is what I have to do because I felt far too ill to go in to work that day. Despite that literally being true, she told me, with no basis whatsoever, that what I said about my job was a lie, and then she shouted at me saying that she wants me to pay for myself to get a test to prove that I should stay home.

She was very furious in her tone when this happened, and it got to me so much that I ended up crying because I thought I fucked up very bad. People like my grandparents and my father heard of this, but nobody ending up pushing back against my stepmother’s anger, so this is why I’m bringing this up today. I think back to this moment, and then I realized that nobody gave a damn about how much it distressed me.

What ended up happening later is that my stepmother did test me herself, and I did come back as having COVID-19. Another thing is that she tested my stepsister again, and the same was true for her this time around. This is funny because she said that my stepsister initially testing negative was one of the reasons why she was skeptical of the legitimacy of me claiming that I had COVID-19 symptoms.

She later ended up “apologizing” to me saying that she got upset because, a few days before this all went down, I mentioned having sick time at my job. She “connected the two dots” and thought that this meant I deliberately used this as an opportunity just to abuse sick time even though that was not the case at all.

What really grosses me out about this in particular is that, with no basis whatsoever, she assumed that I acted in bad faith. This is actually something that my stepmother, my father, and many other elders in my life have done to me. If something wasn’t going right on my end, then that must mean I’m doing something with malicious intent. This is something that they did to me since I was a fucking kid, and being neurodivergent especially made that hard for me to navigate around.

It’s been a long time since I’ve addressed this to anyone, but I’m not crazy for finding this situation highly frustrating, am I? I have gone completely no contact with many of these people, and when I think about my stepmother in particular, this exact incident was so daunting that I have not even a single shred of forgiveness in my heart for her. She sucks in a lot of others way too, so regardless of this situation, I’d feel the same, but this is especially concerning for me.

Also, this isn’t even the first time that I’ve had skepticism on whether or not I “deserved” some cruel treatment I got due to a lack of people siding with me. When my father called me queerphobic slurs and told me that he wanted me to kill myself, with all of this eventually leading to me getting kicked out, nobody condemned my father for it, so I felt like I was the “bad guy” when this happened. I thought I deserved that simply because no one told me otherwise.

Keeping these people out of my life seems fundamental for me moving towards legitimate progress in my well-being, and that’s ultimately what I can finish with, whether I deserved the pain I endured or not.