Wow she seems like a sweetheart but I can’t help but worry about a girl with CF living in her car. I hope she has friends who can get her to a hospital if she needs. I had a friend with that when I was younger but she died suddenly and young despite years of doing pretty well into adulthood. It’s a horrible disease. On being mute, actually I was like that as a kid. They actually were testing me for cognitive impairment in order to shuffle me off to a “special” school, but I kept acing the tests so they couldn’t get rid of me so easily. Eventually I became good at a couple things and used that to distance myself from others reducing the population of people who expect me to talk to them quite a lot. Then I eventually learned tight scripts to stick to that continually point away from me and towards anything else, or scripts that shut down communication quickly leading to awkwardness and for me the desired effect of ending the interaction. Hard to believe for people who know me through the internet probably but I’m basically a non-actor socially. I avoid everyone but my mother and my boyfriend. For a while I was pushing myself outward all of the time because I always saw myself as flawed or broken because of how painful things other people enjoy are for me. But in the last few years I’ve become more withdrawn, talking mostly to my boyfriend and occasionally my mother, ex-spouse, and work -specific topics with coworkers only in work environments. I got off of social media. It sounds like I’m crashing but honestly I’ve never gotten to ask myself how much is too much and where do I want the line to be before so it feels exciting. I hope kids like this are getting better treatment than when I was a kid. I really only narrowly avoided segregation, I can’t imagine how much worse it would be for a kid who also freezes under the pressure of being hauled off to a hospital, locked in a room with a stranger, and forced to do a confusing array of random actions that stranger commands in order to save oneself from adults who clearly already dislike you. I hope… but considering that hoping kids don’t have to get shot is asking a lot, that hope is very very thin.
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