# The Long Road *High school, the system, the meds, and the drive west — the years the highlights reel skips, from Stillwater to my real father.* --- ## The kid who was never enough Let me take you back to the years that made the parts you already read possible. High school. Band practice at dawn, marching season and concert season both, a degree program at Meridian Technology Center, and a full class schedule at the same time — all of it running on a brain that the adults had already decided was broken. And I was **ignored**. Not hated, not watched, not helped — *ignored*. The kind of ignored where you could stand in the middle of a room full of people and still be alone. I was a transgender girl in the middle of conservative Oklahoma, in Stillwater, a college town that had no idea what to do with a kid like me — still closeted, but with **the gay flame in my voice**, the tell I couldn't hide no matter how hard I performed the boy everyone thought I was. My mother was a teacher. My father worked maintenance at OSU. They were both incredibly depressed — the kind of tired that has nothing left to give anyone, least of all a child they didn't understand. And the label they reached for — the one that became the lens everything got read through — was **Bipolar Disorder**. It came at sixteen, and it was wrong. I told them it was wrong. For years. Until they got me to believe it. And all of it — the meds, the schedules, the exhaustion, the way I couldn't just *function* like a normal teenager — got summed up in one sentence that I heard so many times it stopped sounding like an insult and started sounding like a fact: **"You're not enough."** This is the story of why that sentence was a lie, and what it cost me to believe it. --- ## Before that: the system You can't understand the high school years without the ones that came first, so here's the short version of the long version: I was in foster care from **age two to four**. **Nine houses.** That's nine rooms, nine sets of rules, nine families, nine goodbyes — and in **five** of those houses, the people whose job was to keep me safe did the opposite. I was **molested**. I was **beaten**. By the adults. The ones the state handed me to. That's why I had Medicare until I was eighteen — because the system had its hands on my life before I could even talk. And then, when the state was done shuffling me, I was **forced to be adopted by people I didn't know**. Not chosen. Not wanted. *Placed.* And I went along with it, because even at that age I understood the math: it was better to live a lie than to stay in that system. So I became the **"good boy"** everyone wanted — polite, quiet, grateful — pretending to be a boy because I was *afraid*. Terrified that if I showed them who I actually was, I'd lose the only roof I had. I wore that mask for years. I got so good at it that everyone believed it. Until 8th grade. When the mask cracked. --- ## The snap — and the label that ate the truth Here's the part I don't enjoy reliving, so I'll keep it to what matters: After years of my mother's abuse — and I mean *years*, the kind that grinds a child down to a nub — I **snapped**. I tried to kill her. Not because I was evil. Because I was a child who was terrified she was trying to hurt my brother and me, and my nervous system had run out of every other option it had. That's what abuse does to a kid: it teaches them that violence is the only language that makes the hurting stop. So what did the system do with a traumatized child who finally broke? They didn't ask what happened to me. They didn't dig into the abuse. They took the child who was screaming for help and filed her under *behavior problem* — "a moody teenager." The formal **Bipolar Disorder** diagnosis came later, at sixteen, and I spent years after that telling them it was wrong. They spent those same years wearing me down until I believed it. ### Why that ruins a life Here's the thing about a misdiagnosis like that: it doesn't just get your meds wrong. It **rewrites your entire life story**. - The label becomes the lens. Every panic attack is a "bipolar swing." Every flashback is "mood instability." Every legitimate fear is "paranoia." Nothing you say is taken at face value again, because the chart says you're unreliable. - The real problem — the trauma, the undiagnosed neuroimmune condition, the autism nobody had named yet — gets **zero treatment** while the wrong problem gets *aggressive* treatment. You take meds for a disease you don't have, and they make everything worse. - You learn that the adults will never believe you, so you stop telling the truth. You start performing the label they gave you, because at least a "crazy kid" gets *seen*. Being a problem is better than being invisible — for a while. - And the deepest cut: **you internalize it.** When the wrong diagnosis is all you hear, you start to believe you *are* the problem. "Moody teenager" becomes "I'm too much." "Bipolar" becomes "I'm broken." The abuse that was done to you becomes a flaw *in* you. That's why a misdiagnosis ruins a life. It doesn't just delay the right care — it actively teaches you to hate yourself, and it hands the people who hurt you an excuse: *"See? She was always going to end up like this."* I spent the years after that unlearning the lie. And I'm still unlearning it. --- ## The meds — and what they did to me So now I'm a "bipolar moody teenager" in high school. And the treatment for being "moody" was: **Two antidepressants. Multiple antipsychotics.** Including, as the first one — the one that started the whole chemical-fog life — **Invega Sustenna**: the long-acting injectable, the **liquid crystal form**. It's not a pill you can stop taking. It's a depot — crystals injected into muscle that keep dissolving and releasing for roughly a month per shot, lingering for months, with no antidote and no "I'm done with this." One injection when I was sixteen, and the chemical zap it fired through my brain never un-fired. That's the drug that started all of this. Let me tell you what that cocktail did to a kid who was already drowning: - Antipsychotics **sedate you**. Not metaphorically — they put a chemical fog over your entire brain. Your thoughts come slower. Your body moves slower. Your emotions get flattened into a gray nothing. - They **pack on weight** and wreck your metabolism — which, combined with the AS I didn't know I had yet, set me up for the body I have now. The same adults who'd later tell me "just lose weight" were the ones prescribing the drugs that made losing it nearly impossible. - And they **blunt the very things I needed** to survive my schedule: memory, focus, processing speed, energy. And what was my schedule? Oh, nothing. Just: - **Band** — marching season *and* concert season, which is two full extracurricular programs with dawn practices and evening rehearsals. - **Meridian Technology Center** — an entire vocational degree program. - **And high school** — the actual classes, on top of both. All at the same time. All on a brain swimming in sedatives. ### What that does to a person This is the part the "you're not enough" crowd never understood, so let me spell it out: You cannot run three full-time programs on antipsychotics. It is not a willpower problem. It is a **pharmacology problem**. The meds were doing exactly what they were designed to do — the problem was that I'd been prescribed them for a condition I didn't have, in doses that made a functioning teenager impossible. The teachers saw a kid who was slow, unfocused, exhausted, gaining weight. They didn't see a kid whose brain was being chemically hobbled by the system that was supposed to help her. So the conclusion was always the same: **"She's not trying."** I was trying. God, I was *trying*. I was running on empty, at full speed, with a broken engine, and the world kept telling me the engine was fine and I was just lazy. That's what the meds did. They turned my real, desperate effort into something invisible — and then the adults used the invisibility as proof that I wasn't enough. --- ## The giving up I made it through **9th and 10th grade**. Somewhere in there, I was still fighting. Junior and senior year? **I gave up.** Not because I stopped trying. Because trying had never once worked, and I was out of fuel. But here's what "giving up" looked like for me — it wasn't lying in bed. It was being forced to **walk to and from school every day**, because "I wouldn't keep a job." A parent's punishment for a kid who couldn't hold down work while drowning in antipsychotics and a triple schedule was: *walk. Every mile of it. In Oklahoma.* And I wasn't just walking myself. I was **walking my brother to school every morning** — basically being the parent of him, making sure he got there safe, making sure he got home safe, every single day. Not because anyone asked me to be his parent. Because someone had to be, and the adults weren't. And when I walked him to work — because sometimes it was work, not school, and the destination didn't matter, only that he got there — **it was there. The walk. The job. The bus. It was all there.** Here's what the mornings actually looked like, the whole loop, the part I never tell because it doesn't fit the "walking to school" story: - I'd get us both up. Get us both ready. Get him to where he needed to be — school, work, wherever the day demanded. - And then it was my turn to figure out the rest of *my* day, alone, from wherever his drop-off left me. - **Home was via the bus.** If I was going home, it was a bus ride I had to time and pay for and wait for — no car, no ride, no "someone will pick you up." Just the bus schedule and me. - **Or I had to go look for a job.** The walk didn't end at his drop-off. It continued into door after door after door — going in, asking, being told no, walking to the next one — because the adults had made it clear that a kid who couldn't hold down work while drowning in antipsychotics and a triple schedule was a kid who had to *keep trying anyway*. - **Or I had to go to therapy.** Another appointment, another waiting room, another hour of being processed — on top of the walk, on top of the job hunt, on top of the whole impossible day. So much more. So much more than the walk, every single morning, every single day. The walk was the part people could see — the visible chore, the one that looked like effort. The rest of it — the bus, the job hunt, the therapy, the endless standing in line at the world — was the invisible load that never got counted. Those mornings were something. I'd get us both up, get us both ready, walk him, get myself to class, do the whole impossible day, walk him home, and then do it again the next morning — all while being told I wasn't doing enough. The math never worked. The effort was never visible. The exhaustion was never counted. I was the parent, the student, the band member, the tech student, the patient, the job-seeker, the bus-rider, the therapy-attender — everything except a child who needed help. By the time the cap and gown came around, I wasn't celebrating. I was just surviving to the finish line. --- ## The graduation that wasn't I graduated **in the middle of COVID**. Which means: the ceremony got postponed **three months** because of a pandemic, it **rained**, social distancing turned it into a joke — rows of masks and spaced-out chairs and nobody allowed to hug anyone — and when it finally happened, it happened **weeks before I was supposed to start at OSU Stillwater**. The graduation itself was a footnote. The real story was everything around it. Because the only reason I had a shot at college at all was **my grandparents**. They paid for my first year. My parents refused. Not because they were cruel — they were drowning themselves. They'd never have survived paying for it, and I wasn't asking them to. I knew that. But what they *did* was worse than not paying: **they refused to give their Social Security information for the FAFSA.** Which forced me to file as an *independent* student. And filing independent? That **ruined my scholarship opportunities.** Scholarship after scholarship is tied to parent info, parent income, parent signatures. And I **knew** about the scholarships and grants — I knew exactly what they were, what they required, and what they could have meant for me. My parents just **wouldn't put in their information.** By refusing to hand over a form number, they locked doors I was standing right in front of — doors I knew existed, that I'd researched, that they chose not to open. They broke me, and this was the second time, and they did it on purpose. So I went to OSU on my grandparents' dime, carrying a broken diagnosis, a chemistry set of wrong meds, and no real support system. ### Three weeks in Three weeks into my first semester, **my bio mom contacted me.** That alone would have destabilized anyone. But here's the part that matters: **the meds had never worked.** Not once. Not in all those years. Because — we found out much later — my problem was **neuroimmune**. The drugs they'd been prescribing me were aimed at a chemical imbalance I didn't have, while the actual issue — an immune system attacking my own brain and body — went completely untreated. ### Why neuroimmune matters Here's why that word changes everything: if your depression, anxiety, and cognitive problems are driven by **inflammation and immune dysfunction**, then the standard psychiatric toolbox is aimed at the wrong target. You can pump in antidepressants and antipsychotics forever and the underlying process just keeps chewing on you — because the meds never addressed the mechanism. And here's the cruelest part: there *was* a drug that could have helped. **Lamotrigine** — a mood stabilizer that works on a different pathway entirely, the kind of thing that can make a real difference for neuroimmune presentations. They **offered it to me.** And my insurance — which was still Medicare — **would not pay for it. In 2020.** The system prescribed me years of drugs for the wrong disease, and then refused to pay for the one drug that might have actually done something. That's not a system failure. That's a system *design* — a design built around compliance and cost, not around care. I dropped out of OSU. I couldn't survive it. The schedule, the wrong meds, the bio mom re-entry, the isolation — it was too much, and for once, the honest thing to say is that I *couldn't*, not that I didn't try. And when I couldn't come home — because **mom and dad wouldn't let me** — I went to live with a friend. --- ## The fall Living with that friend was the first kindness I'd had in a long time. And even that got poisoned: I found out later that **Heather — my adoptive mom — was shit-talking me** behind my back the whole time. The woman who'd taken me in when I was a terrified child was bad-mouthing me to anyone who'd listen while I was fighting for my life. And I was fighting. Here's what survival looked like: - **Walking miles and miles every day** — because we rarely had power at home, no internet ever, no cellphone service. - **On food stamps** — the whole monthly food budget, the sum total of what the state decided a starving person needs to eat: **about sixty dollars.** Sixty. Dollars. For a month of food. That's the "support" they offered the girl they'd drugged, the girl they'd told to figure it out, the girl who was walking miles a day on a fusing spine. Sixty dollars and a shrug. Bruh. - Trying to find work — and people **don't want people like me**. ### Why people don't want people like me Let me be blunt about this, because it's a real thing and it deserves real words: I was a visibly trans woman in conservative Oklahoma, on food stamps, without a car, without an address that stayed put, with a mental health history on paper and a body that hurt from the AS I didn't know I had. Every one of those is a reason for an employer to say no — and they did, over and over. I looked tired because I was tired. I couldn't afford to present well because I couldn't afford anything. My work history had gaps because I'd been hospitalized and abandoned and homeless-adjacent. And when you're poor and disabled and visibly different, every interview is a gauntlet where you have to prove you're not the thing they're afraid you are — while starving. So. We went to sign a lease for a new place — my friend's mom wanted everyone out of the apartment, no big deal, we'd find somewhere together. And **I got taken advantage of for my disabilities.** By a college complex. They signed me onto a lease I could never afford, knowing exactly what they were doing — because I was desperate, because I didn't understand the fine print, because I was the kind of person who gets squeezed. I even signed a *second* lease at a new place at the same time, just to have a roof over my head. **Heather and Jeff loaned me two thousand dollars** trying to help — draining their savings to keep me afloat. I've never forgotten that, and I never will. One month in, I still couldn't pay rent. A few more weeks passed. And then the eviction notice came. --- ## The first time That's when I **tried to commit suicide for the first time.** I don't want to give you the gory details. I want to give you the *shape* of it: a kid who'd been abused by the system, misdiagnosed by the medical system, drugged into uselessness by the pharmaceutical system, refused by her parents, squeezed by her landlord, and told her whole life she wasn't enough — finally agreed with them. Heather forced me to move home. **Jeff — my adoptive father — refused to talk to me for a full year.** A year. The man who'd helped raise me looked at his suicidal, homeless, broken child and chose silence. And when I told them I was in pain — real, physical pain, the kind my spine was already writing into my bones — the answer from the people who were supposed to love me was: > **"You're overweight. Lose some weight and the pain will stop."** That was the entire medical plan. No doctors. No tests. No follow-up. I had **no access to doctors whatsoever** — no vehicle to my name, nothing. I barely had a place to sleep: no bed, just a **giant bean bag in their family room**. I had no job. I filed for Social Security for the first time, on the laptop I'd bought with a stimulus check. And I never got a response — until later, when I found out I'd **missed an appointment I never even got mail for.** No letter, no call, no notice. Just a missed appointment that cost me months, in a system that treats a disabled person's survival as a paperwork problem. I'm not going to linger here. That year almost ended me. The only reason it didn't is that I was too stubborn to give them the satisfaction — and too scared to let my brother grow up without me. --- ## The brother — the bus, the quarters, and the Walmart mile On top of everything else — and I mean *on top*, stacked right there with the rest of it — there was a stretch where **I had to watch my brother.** I was already the person who'd walked him to school every morning as a teenager. The parent without the title. So when I ended up **living with my brother**, it wasn't a new role — it was the same one, just with a bus schedule attached. Here's how it worked. He **couldn't get paratransit** — the door-to-door accessible transit that disabled people are supposed to be able to use — so we took **the bus.** The regular city bus. And I mean *we*: I had to ride it with him, because that was the deal. Every trip meant making sure we had **his quarters** — bus fare was coins, and if we didn't have them, we didn't move. I'd scrounge quarters like they were gold, because in that economy, they were. And then, every day, we'd get off the bus and **walk him to and from the other Walmart to his job.** About a mile each way — a mile after the bus, on top of the miles before it. He worked at the Walmart, we rode the bus to get near it, and then the two of us walked the rest of the way — out in the Oklahoma heat or the cold, every day, so he could clock in. The workers there **always acted like they didn't approve.** I don't know what they thought they were seeing. Two siblings, one visibly struggling, the other doing the escorting — or maybe they just saw a girl who looked like me, fat and poor and tired, and decided she didn't belong near their store. Whatever it was, you could feel it every single time: the looks, the distance, the way nobody asked if we needed anything — the quiet judgment of people who had never once had to scrounge quarters to get their brother to work. That was the part nobody ever counted. The walking, the coins, the bus, the mile, the disapproving faces — it was all invisible labor, done by a body that was already falling apart, for a brother I loved more than I could say. And I did it every day, because someone had to — and it was never going to be the adults. --- ## Ross, the reserve, and Belk Somehow, I got a job at **Ross.** I worked there for a few months. I saved up — slowly, painfully, one paycheck at a time — enough to move out. I moved onto **the reserve in Perkins**. College housing. Cheap. Four housemates, all different rooms. The idea was that I wanted to go back to college, and it was the cheapest roof I could find. And for a little while, it worked. Then I had to leave Ross — because **I couldn't keep myself from trying to hurt others.** Not that I hurt anyone. I *didn't* — that's the whole point. I felt the urge, I recognized what it was, and I removed myself before I could become the thing I was afraid of. I ghosted them. It was the safest thing I could do for the people around me, even if it cost me everything. Then I went to **Belk** — and got **fired for having COVID.** Fired. For getting sick, during a pandemic, by a company that couldn't handle a positive test. And after that? **I just gave the fuck up.** Groceries on food stamps. Months of nothing. And then the worst thing of all: **I got accused of pedophilia.** It never happened. It *never* happened. And the accusation didn't come out of nowhere — it came from **the Stillwater Chapter's assistant chapter dad.** A grown man, an adult in a position of authority over the youth order I'd given everything to, accusing *me* — the teenager — of the one thing that would end my life if it stuck. And he is now the **main Chapter Dad.** The man who did this to me got promoted for it. Here's how I know it was a lie, and here's the part that tells you everything about how these things work: **the minute we brought up lawyers, it all stopped.** Everything was let go. Charges were dropped. Mom pleaded with them. And then — after the charges were dropped — **they even invited me back.** Back to the chapter. Back to the order. As if nothing had happened. (To be clear: this is from my memory, and I don't rely entirely on my memory for details. But the shape of it is right — an adult in authority accused me, lawyers ended it, and I was invited back. An accusation like that doesn't need to be true to destroy you. It just needs to be said.) Mom made me move home. Jeff still wouldn't talk to me. That year of silence was still running. --- ## The janitor Moving home came with a condition: I had to be out looking for work **every day, five days a week**, for months. I did it. I wore out shoes and hope in equal measure. And then I took the job that almost broke me for good — **a janitor at my mom's workplace. By myself.** A massive gymnasium. A cafeteria/basketball court. Three buildings of floors and bathrooms and trash. **5 AM to 6 PM, four days a week.** One person. Me. It was the same job as the "three-school district" one, in case the record ever splits them into two: it was one job, one person, three buildings, no help. I don't know how long I lasted, but I know the cost. My body was screaming — the AS was already fusing my spine, and I didn't know it yet. My brain was drowning. And when it finally broke, it broke *on the job* — I had a **mental episode at work**, ended up in the hospital, and never went back, because I knew that environment was what caused it. The hospital was the only mercy in it. After that, I couldn't get a job for a long, long time. Not until March of the next year. But here's the thing about that dark stretch: **my mom was helping me.** She helped me find housing, took me to and from places — and I paid my part of the groceries, because by then I could. It wasn't enough to undo the damage, and I'm not going to pretend it was. But it was real, and it matters that I say it. And I finally got the help I needed for housing through **Grand Lake Mental Health.** They had a division for it. Which **shut down shortly after I got help.** God, that's scary to think about. How close I came. How easily the door could have closed a month earlier and I'd have been under a bridge instead of in a home. --- ## The hotel, the math, and the studio With steady employment at a hotel — and I use "steady" loosely — I finally had income. It was a **Holiday Inn Express & Suites Stillwater – University Area**, at **700 East Krayler Avenue**, Stillwater, OK 74075. Still open today, if you want to look it up: rated 4.22 out of 5 on IHG's own site with 584 reviews, ranked #9 of 18 hotels in Stillwater on Tripadvisor. It'll still be there, taking guests' money and paying its workers pennies. And the company that subcontracted to run it was **Shree Sani Sai LLC** — registered in Stillwater at that exact Krayler Avenue address, a hotels-and-motels operation with about 19 employees on the books. You can find them in the Oklahoma business directories. You will *not* find them in any lawsuit database, any wage-complaint database, any news article, or any employee-review site — because they've never been caught, and no one has ever been able to afford to catch them. Remember that name. It's on the receipts. Here's the thing I still can't wrap my head around: **I was paid $9.50 an hour, and somehow made $800 a month.** For the first four months I worked **seven days a week, 110-hour weeks.** After that, five days a week, 120 hours a month. A full year of that. ### The math — exactly Do the actual math, because I did, and it still makes me see red. **$9.50 an hour.** **Months 1–4: 110 hours a week, 7 days a week** - 110 hours × $9.50 = **$1,045 a week** - ~4.33 weeks per month → **$4,528 a month owed** - I was paid **$800 a month** - **Shorted $3,728 a month** — every month, for four months - 4-month total shorted: **$14,913** **Months 5–12: 120 hours a month, 5 days a week** - 120 hours × $9.50 = **$1,140 a month owed** - I was paid **$800 a month** - **Shorted $340 a month** — every month, for eight months - 8-month total shorted: **$2,720** **The yearly total:** - Owed for the year: **$27,233** - Paid for the year: **$9,600** - **Total shorted: $17,633** Let me put that number where you can see it: **$17,633.** Seventeen thousand, six hundred thirty-three dollars of my labor, my spine, my walking miles, my 110-hour weeks — taken, with no honest pay stub, no explanation, no recourse. I was paid **35%** of what I was owed. They kept **65%** of my work. And they did it to the most defenseless person they could find — the girl with no car, no address, no lawyer, and a mental health history on paper that made her the easiest person in Oklahoma to rob. And if you want the number that makes it truly sick — do the hourly math. In those first four months I worked **476.7 hours a month** for $800. That's **$1.68 an hour.** Not $9.50. **$1.68.** For 110-hour weeks, seven days a week, on a fusing spine, walking three miles to deposit the check. They didn't just underpay me. They paid me *less than minimum wage by a factor of four* — and called it employment. ### And what happened to them? The hotel is still open. The management company is still registered. There are no lawsuits, no wage claims, no inspections in the news, no reviews from former employees warning anyone. **They got away with it completely.** They took $17,633 from a disabled 22-year-old working 110-hour weeks, and the world has no record of it except this page. That's what "the system" means for people like me: not that the bad guys get caught — it's that the bad guys don't even need to hide, because nobody with the power to stop them ever looks. Here's what the public records actually show about **Shree Sani Sai LLC** — and I'm only putting down what's verifiable, because the receipts are the whole point: - **Registered:** Oklahoma Secretary of State, domestic LLC, file number **3512409735** - **Filed:** June 24, 2013 - **Status:** listed **inactive** in the state registry. Let me be precise about what that does and doesn't mean: in Oklahoma, an LLC goes inactive when it **fails to file its annual certificate or pay the $25 yearly fee** — an administrative suspension, not a closure. The hotel keeps operating, the brand keeps taking reservations, the owners keep collecting — the LLC just loses its legal good standing, which means it can't sue or defend itself in court. **It's a clerical status for a company that can't be bothered to keep its own paperwork legal.** And no, there's no sale record: no deed transfer in Payne County, no new entity applying for permits at that address. They still own it. They just let the registration lapse. - **Principal office:** 700 East Krayler Avenue, Stillwater, OK 74075 — the hotel itself - **NAICS:** hotels and motels; business directories list ~19 employees - **The PPP loan — this is the big one.** In the COVID Paycheck Protection Program, **Shree Sani Sai LLC took $52,200 in taxpayer money** — loan approved in 2021, **forgiven as of July 15, 2021** (ProPublica's public PPP database, loan record 2360678300). PPP loans were forgiven on the condition that the money went to **paying employees** and not laying people off. They took it. They got it forgiven. And then, when I worked there in 2023-2024, they paid me **$1.68 an hour** and kept $17,633 of my labor. **They took the government's money to keep their staff paid, and then they paid their staff slave wages anyway.** The taxpayer gave them $52,200 to do the right thing. They did the opposite. And the government never asked for a cent of it back. - **The deeper ownership records** — the individual members, managers, and registered agent — sit behind the state's business-search portal and paid registry databases, which I could not fully access. So I will not name people I can't verify. But the pattern is already in the public record: an **inactive shell company**, registered at the hotel's own address, operating a national-brand franchise, forgiven $52,200 in taxpayer COVID money, with no lawsuits, no wage claims, and no public paper trail. That last part isn't an accident. It's the design. The company is structured so the people who actually own it stay out of the records — the LLC is the wall, the hotel is the front, and the only names ever attached to the money were a file number, an address, and a forgiven PPP loan. **But now this page exists, and this page names the wall.** Shree Sani Sai LLC, file #3512409735, 700 E Krayler Avenue, Stillwater, OK 74075 — the company that took $52,200 in taxpayer money to pay its employees, then paid a disabled 22-year-old $1.68 an hour and kept $17,633 of her labor, with no record anywhere except here. The only receipts that exist are mine. The only record of what they did is here, in my words, with their file number, their address, and their forgiven loan on it. So now the internet knows too. Maybe that's not a lawsuit. But it's a record, and records are the first thing they tried to make sure I'd never have. ### The logistics of being carless — before the car And let me tell you what "paid $800 a month" actually looked like on the ground, because the money math only tells half the story. I didn't have a car for most of this. **I used the boss system for everything** — rides to and from work, rides to run errands, whatever I could beg off the people who were paying me a quarter of what they owed. When you work 110 hours a week and your entire existence depends on the goodwill of the people shorting you, you don't complain about the rides. You say thank you. You take the crumbs and you're grateful, because the alternative is walking. And I walked a lot. - The bank was **three miles from me**. So every payday — every single one — I **walked three miles to manually deposit my check**. Not direct deposit. Not a car in the parking lot. A check in my hand and my own two feet carrying me three miles to hand it to a teller, on a spine that was already fusing. - **Aldi was two miles from my apartment.** **Walmart was a mile and a half.** So groceries meant choosing which distance to hike — two miles to Aldi for the cheap stuff, a mile and a half to Walmart when Aldi didn't have it — and then carrying whatever I could afford back the same way, on foot, in Oklahoma heat. So picture the full loop, the one the math doesn't show you: I worked 110 hours a week for $800 a month. I walked three miles to deposit the check they'd shorted me. I walked two miles to spend what was left on food. I walked a mile and a half because Walmart was closer. And I did all of it on a body that was falling apart — spine fusing, weight climbing from a decade of wrong meds — while the people who owed me three thousand dollars a month sat in their cars and waved. That's what wage theft looks like from the ground. It's not just the missing money. It's the miles. It's the feet. It's choosing between the bank and the grocery store because you can only walk so far in a day. It's being grateful for the ride from the person who's robbing you. **That's the part of the math that doesn't fit on a pay stub — and it's the part they never had to answer for.** ### Why I left — and why the state let them get away with it I left that job because **someone was sexually advancing toward me, and I told them to stop.** He was drunk, on my shift, and when I said no, that was the end of that job for me. I'm not sorry I said no. I'll never be sorry I said no. Here's the part that makes it a trap instead of a story: **he was one of my bosses' children.** Not legally children — an adult child of the boss, with the boss's name and the boss's protection behind him. So there was no one to report him to. The person who would hear the complaint was the parent of the person I'd be complaining about. Reporting it meant telling my boss that his own child had been coming at me, and betting everything on the boss believing *me* — the $800-a-month, 110-hour-a-week, visibly broke and mentally ill girl — over his own kid. I couldn't win that bet. Nobody in my position could. So I said no, and I left. That was the only move I had. ### And then Oklahoma denied my unemployment I filed for unemployment after leaving. **Oklahoma denied me.** Why? Because of **Title 40, Section 2-404 of the Oklahoma Statutes**: you're disqualified for benefits if you leave work *"voluntarily without good cause connected to the work."* And the only thing that would have proven "good cause" — that I left because of sexual harassment — was the exact thing the structure made impossible to prove: - The harassment **wasn't reported**, because the harasser was the boss's child and there was no safe person to report to. - With no report, there's no employer response on record, no investigation, no paper trail — nothing the state can point to and say "yes, the workplace was the problem, not the worker." - The boss — whose child was the harasser — had every reason to tell the state I quit for personal reasons. And the state believed the employer, because employers are who the state listens to. - So it went down as a **voluntary quit without provable good cause**, and under §2-404 I was disqualified for the full period of unemployment — until I got reemployed and earned wages equal to ten times my weekly benefit amount. A punishment designed for people who walk off the job for no reason, applied to the girl who said no to the boss's son and then got robbed of her safety net for it. That's the whole system in miniature: **the harassment put me out of work, and the structure around it — the boss's child, the un-reportable report, the employer's word over mine — made sure the state sided with the people who drove me out.** I didn't just lose the job. I lost the job, I lost the money they'd stolen, I lost the unemployment that should have caught me, and I walked away with nothing but the knowledge that I'd done the only right thing available and been punished for it. ### The studio But then I couldn't find housing. And Jeff wanted me gone — **no matter what. Didn't care if I went homeless.** So I signed a lease with my own money. **Four thousand dollars cash down** on a **rat-infested shit studio** — just so I could have a roof over my head, because the alternative was the street. I moved in. Walked **two miles each way to work, every day.** On my then-undiagnosed conditions. My spine fusing. My body at 400+ pounds. My brain on a decade of wrong meds. And in **February 2025**, while I was still in that grind, I got the diagnosis that should have come decades earlier: **Ankylosing spondylitis. And rheumatoid arthritis.** At the OAC, in Oklahoma. And every bit of it — the meds, the treatments — paid for **out of my own pocket, or by grants.** Not by the system that had misread me my whole life. By me, and by the kindness of strangers. The timeline, for the record: I started that hotel job **April 2023**, left **April 2024**. And in **September 2023**, I got a car — from my grandmother's estate, through my mom. ### The car, the title, and Washington law The car is still technically in my mom's name. That's the fact everyone fixates on, so let me explain the law and what it means. In Washington State, a vehicle's certificate of title is the paper that names the owner — and **whoever holds the title and the loan documents holds the proof**. The car came from my grandmother's estate: the money, the intent, the ownership all traced back to her, and the car was given to me through my mom as the conduit. We have a **verbal agreement** — clear, understood, and consistent on both sides: this is *my* car. And I physically have the **title and the loan details** with me. So here's what Washington law actually says about that: - **The title is evidence, not the whole story.** Under RCW 46.12.101 and the title chapter, the certificate of title names the registered owner — but possession of the title document, combined with the loan records and the estate provenance, is exactly the kind of paper trail Washington courts and the DOL look at when ownership is disputed. "It's in my mom's name" is not the end of the argument. It's the beginning of the evidence. - **A verbal agreement is a real thing in Washington.** For something like this — a family transfer, an estate asset, a car given to a child — the state recognizes that ownership isn't always a notarized handshake. The title says one thing; the surrounding facts say another; and the facts — who paid, who drove, who kept the title, who had the agreement — are what a dispute resolution would weigh. I have those facts on paper, in my possession. - **What the law *can't* do is make me drive it.** Because here's the part that the legal explanation leads to, and the part that hurts more than any of it: **I still can't drive. I never will again.** Not "can't drive right now." Not "can't drive for a while." **Never. Will. Again.** The same system that misdiagnosed me, zapped me with Invega Sustenna, and left my mind half-gone — the same conditions that fused my spine and wrecked my body — took the road from me. The cognitive fog, the memory, the processing speed, the physical inability to move safely, to react, to see a situation and handle it in time — you do not get behind the wheel of a car with that. And you do not get to pretend you will. That's why the tags are expired. That's why the plates are expired. Under **RCW 46.16A.030**, driving with an expired registration is a traffic infraction — and the state can evaluate and restrict the driving privilege of anyone with a condition that may affect safe driving under **RCW 46.20.041**, including requiring a physician's statement. I don't need the state to take my license, because the state's own medical system already took the ability. The expired tags aren't a legal risk I'm ignoring — they're a **mute confession on the bumper**: the person who owns this car cannot safely operate it, and the paperwork is just the last thing to stop pretending otherwise. The car sits. It stays in her name, because legally it doesn't matter who's on the title if I can't drive it anyway, and because the fight to fix the paperwork is a fight I no longer have the body or the mind to win. ### The housebound — and the ADA accommodation And the car is the least of it. **I literally cannot leave home now.** Not "don't like to." Not "have trouble with." **Cannot.** The same body that can't drive can't safely get out the door, can't ambulate, can't manage the world outside the walls. I got a **letter for an ADA-accommodated unit** for exactly this reason — a documented, doctor-backed statement that I need accessible housing because I cannot function as an able-bodied person. That letter isn't a formality. It's the system's own paperwork admitting what it did to me and what I now need to survive. And **next year, we move into a wheelchair-accommodated unit.** A unit built for someone who can't walk the way other people walk. That's where this story ends up, physically: the girl who built operating systems and designed filesystems and drove a car across five states to escape — in a wheelchair-accommodated apartment, housebound, unable to leave home, unable to drive, with the tags on a car she'll never drive again still sitting in her mother's name. That's what the system did to me. That's what Invega Sustenna did. That's what "you're just overweight, lose weight and the pain will stop" did. And when people ask why I'm so angry, why I keep receipts, why I write it all down — **this is why.** The end of this story is a wheelchair-accessible unit and a car that will never move again, and every step of the way there was an adult with authority telling me I was the problem. --- ## Oklahoma vs. Washington — two systems, one problem People like to tell the story of me getting out of Oklahoma as a happy ending: *she escaped the bad state, now she's in the good state, everything's better.* It's not that simple. I got out of one system and into another — and they are **different systems with the same problem.** The state lines changed. The failure mode didn't. ### Oklahoma: the system that broke me Oklahoma didn't fail to help me. Oklahoma *actively* hurt me, with paperwork. - **The misdiagnosis at 16.** I told them it was wrong for years. They wore me down until I believed it. The label went in the chart, and the chart followed me everywhere. - **The forced medication.** Invega Sustenna, the liquid crystal depot, put in my muscle against my will — I couldn't refuse it, couldn't stop it, couldn't remove it. It chemically zapped my mind at sixteen, and the damage never un-did itself. - **The spine.** I told adults my back hurt as a kid. They said "you're just obese." One spine appointment. Never again. The AS fused my spine while the system argued with me about my weight. Diagnosed February 2025 — at the OAC, out of my own pocket or by grants, *not* by the system. - **The handcuffs.** Grand Mental Health in Stillwater — routed there to free up a bed, in handcuffs, nobody read me my rights. Stillwater PD **R2401730**, **CFS24017562**. The state's own records say I was inventory. - **The denial.** Lamotrigine — the drug that actually worked — refused by Medicare in 2020. The unemployment denial under Title 40 §2-404. The disability claim lost in the mail. **Sixty dollars a month of food stamps** as the state's entire answer to "what do I eat." - **The message, every time:** *you're the problem, and you're on your own.* Oklahoma was a system designed around **compliance and cost** — and if you didn't fit the algorithm, it discarded you, and the discarding had paperwork. ### Washington: the system that documents the damage Then I got to Spokane. New state, new system, new chance. And here's what Washington did — and it's real, and I'm not going to pretend it isn't: - **The records got real.** CHAS Valley Medical. Providence Health & Services. My chart in Washington says what my chart in Oklahoma never admitted: **Bipolar 1 disorder. Schizophrenia. PTSD. Ankylosing spondylitis.** The diagnoses I told Oklahoma about for years — the ones they filed as "moody teenager" and "you're just obese" — Washington actually wrote them down. - **The meds got real.** Lamotrigine — the drug Oklahoma's Medicare refused in 2020 — is in my Washington chart. Lithium. Seroquel. Paliperidone. The tools actually exist here, on paper, prescribed by doctors who looked at the records and said "yes, this is real." - **The housing got real.** When I couldn't leave home, Washington's system gave me the **ADA-accommodated unit letter** — the documented, doctor-backed acknowledgment that I can't function as an able-bodied person. Next year: the **wheelchair-accommodated unit.** Paperwork that *admits* the disability instead of arguing with it. - **The address got real.** 2120 E North Crescent Ave, Spokane. A real address, a real home, a place the mail actually reaches — after a lifetime of "no fixed address" being one more reason to say no. So Washington is better. I'll say it plainly: Washington *is* better. It documented what Oklahoma denied. It treated diagnoses as real instead of moral failings. It gave me a home when I couldn't stand. **But it is the same problem.** Here's what Washington didn't do: - It didn't undo the zap. The chart says *paliperidone* like it's just another line item — it doesn't mention that the first paliperidone fired a chemical zap through my brain when I was sixteen and I've never been the same. The system that documented the damage is the same system family that did it. - It didn't give me back my mind. The memory, the fog, the processing speed — the "pretty much dementia at this point" — that's in the records too, but as *my* problem, *my* deficits, *my* incompetence. Nobody in Washington ever said "the system did this to her." They just wrote down what the system did. - It decided I can't live alone or do my own meds. The state that *caused* the damage now gets to certify the damage is permanent — and the certification becomes a reason I'll never get the autonomy back. - And the whole thing — the diagnosis list, the medication list, the disability determination — is still **a chart, not a person.** Washington treats the injuries as real. It still doesn't ask who inflicted them. ### It is a system problem Here's the sentence I want you to take from all of this, the one that's true in both states, in every state, in every hospital and clinic and waiting room I've ever sat in: **It is a system problem.** Not an Oklahoma problem. Not a Washington problem. Not a "bad doctor" problem or a "bad state" problem. The system is designed to process bodies, not to heal people — and whether it processes you with a *Disallow* or an *Allow*, with neglect or with paperwork, with "you're just obese" or with "we've documented your ankylosing spondylitis," the underlying design is the same: **you are a case, the case must be managed, and the cost of managing it falls on you.** Oklahoma broke me with neglect and force. Washington documented the breakage with competence and care. Both of them left me holding the bill — the medical bill, the cognitive bill, the housing bill, the bill for the mind I'll never get back. One system was cruel by indifference. The other is kind by procedure. Neither one ever asked the question that would have changed everything: *"Who did this to her, and what are we going to do about it?"* That's the system problem. And until the system asks that question — in Oklahoma, in Washington, everywhere — it will keep producing exactly what it produced: girls with fusing spines and zapped minds and sixty-dollar food budgets, told they're the problem, told to figure it out, and then documented, kindly and competently, as permanently broken. I got the wheelchair unit. I got the ADA letter. I got the real diagnoses on real paper in a real state. That's the best the system can do — and the best the system can do is **still the system.** ❤️ --- ## Hideaway — the one week After I left the hotel job, I tried to find another one. Depressed as all hell. Terrified. I looked like hell — and I was using the nights to talk to my friends, one of whom, I'd find out much later, was my bio dad. In mid-May, I got hired at **Hideaway Pizza.** I lasted one week. I was already late on rent. And I **couldn't memorize the menu.** No matter how hard I tried. ### Why I couldn't memorize the menu Because the disabilities nobody had diagnosed yet — the neuroimmune condition, the autism, the psychomotor stuff — were doing exactly what they'd always done: my brain is an *input* machine, not an *output* machine. I could take in and understand more than I could produce on a timer. Memorizing a menu under pressure, while terrified of losing the only job I could get, while my body hurt and my brain fogged — that wasn't a laziness problem. It was a processing problem, and I didn't have the words for it yet. So after one week, I ghosted them. **Because of shame.** I couldn't say "my brain and body can't do this" — I didn't even know that was true yet. All I knew was that I was 450 pounds, my conditions were eating me alive, and I couldn't keep up with the one job that would have me. I was scared. So scared. And I had no way to say any of it. --- ## The last kindness And then I got **blessed by a friend who saved my life.** They gave me money from their own tax return. Their own. I miss that friend so much — I think about them all the time. Very amazing person. If you're reading this and you know who you are: thank you. I owe you my life. That kept me in that apartment for two more months while I kept trying — he'd even hired me in the meantime, but I couldn't get work anywhere. No matter what I tried. Nothing. And then the **eviction notice** came. I was terrified. I had no idea what to do. I was going to die. I was going to go homeless and everything was going to be over. That's what the fear said, and I believed it. And that's when **John and Darren saved my life.** John gave me a **$500 loan.** And Darren — my bio dad, though I didn't know it yet — offered me a place to stay. A room to rent. Not a big room, but a room with a roof over it. It was between him and Alex — the guy I'd been doing YouTube with. And John and Darren convinced me. I did a background check on Darren. He passed. (Ha. He's my dad.) I left with that $500, my car, expired tags and plates, **no car insurance, just fear.** I didn't even say goodbye to anyone in Stillwater. I had five days to get out. I left on **day two**, leaving a lot of stuff behind without caring, because I knew my world was ending. Turns out it was beginning. --- ## The drive I drove north through Kansas, to a tiny town in the middle of it, and had food. Then Colorado, and up through Denver. Just past Denver, I **slept in my car in a truck stop** — blanket and pillow, the safest option I had — and woke up four hours later and left again. I had paper maps and a phone I paid for myself. Utah. South Dakota. North Dakota — food, a truck stop, sleep. Montana. ### The spin-out And then Montana. Where I **spun out and almost died.** Let me explain what that was, because "spun out" sounds like a fender bender and it was not a fender bender. I was somewhere on a Montana highway — I don't remember exactly where, and I'm not going to pretend I do, because that's the terrifying part: I *couldn't* tell you. I'd been driving for days on paper maps and caffeine and pure fear. I'd slept in my car at a truck stop in Denver — four hours, maybe — and pushed on through Utah and the Dakotas because stopping meant thinking, and thinking meant facing that I had no home, no plan, no money, and no idea what was waiting for me at the end of a drive I'd only committed to because a stranger on the internet said I could stay with him. I was exhausted in the way that stops being tired and becomes a separate state of being. My reflexes were gone. My judgment was gone. The only thing that was still running was the car and the terror. And then the car left the road. I don't remember the exact moment it started — that's how far gone I was. What I remember is the *feeling*: the car going sideways, the world rotating outside the windshield, gravel or dirt or the rumble strip under the wheels, and that specific clarity that comes when you realize you are about to die — the sudden, crystal-sharp *oh* that cuts through the fog like a blade. I remember thinking about my brother. I remember thinking about how the last thing I'd told anyone was that I was going to make it, and now I was going to die in Montana, alone, in a car that wasn't even registered to me, hundreds of miles from anyone who knew my name. And then it stopped. The car came back to the road. I was alive. I don't know how — a ditch, a shoulder, some combination of luck and physics that had no business letting a girl who hadn't slept in days walk away — but I was alive, sitting there in the middle of Montana with my hands shaking on the wheel. Instantly after I woke up from that — because I'd slept, I guess, and the spin-out had wrung every last drop of adrenaline out of me — I got back on the road. Of course I did. What was the alternative? There was no one to call. There was no one coming to get me. There was only the road, and Spokane, and the stranger who'd said he'd figure out the bills with me when I got there. So I put my hands back on the wheel, and I drove through the rest of Montana, into Idaho. And somewhere in Idaho — I don't know where, I just know it was after — I saw my **first Cybertruck.** I was so excited. It was the dumbest thing in the world to be excited about, in the middle of the most scared I'd ever been, and I was *delighted.* I think about that sometimes. The girl who almost died in Montana — who spun out on a highway with no sleep, no insurance, no registration, no plan, and no one in the world who knew where she was — getting *genuinely thrilled* about a Cybertruck an hour later. That's not stupidity. That's the survival mechanism. The brain that's been through the absolute worst thing it can imagine finds the next stupid, shiny, normal thing to latch onto, and it holds on, because holding onto *anything* is better than letting go. The Cybertruck was my life raft. It was the dumbest, most ridiculous life raft in the history of the universe, and it kept me afloat until Spokane. Then I got to Spokane. I nearly shit myself just seeing the east side. I had never seen somewhere so large. Stillwater is a college town; Spokane is a *city* — and I'd spent my whole life in places where everybody knew everybody. And I met **Darren** for the first time. With his girlfriend. Stephanie. Lol. But then we got home — and on day two, we were talking about how I had nowhere else to go, and I brought up my bio mom. And he said: > **"I know her. We were fucking about that time."** Bruh moment. --- ## J&J Delivery — the first job, and the crunch When Darren offered me the place to stay, he didn't hand me a bill and a lease. He said **we would figure out the bills when I got up there.** Just like that. A stranger on the internet — who turned out to be my father — telling a terrified girl with nothing that the money would work itself out later. I don't think he knows how much that sentence carried. "We'll figure it out" — I'd never heard those words from an adult in my entire life. Every adult I'd ever known had a ledger and a clipboard and a reason why I owed them. So when I got up there, I got to work. I found a job at **J&J Delivery** — appliance delivery. And I **loved it.** I mean it. Loved. It. The work was physical, it was outdoors, it was *real* — nothing about it required me to perform the girl everyone thought I wasn't, or the boy I'd spent my whole life pretending to be. You lift, you carry, you move. The job didn't care about my voice or my chart or my history. It just wanted hands and a back, and I had both, and for the first time in years the work itself didn't hate me back. I was good at it. I was happy, in the way you're happy when the world finally lets you just *do something*. ### The crunch And then I picked up something I wasn't supposed to pick up. A delivery that should have been two people, or a dolly, or both — and I was one person with a fused spine I didn't even know the name of yet. I lifted it, and my spine **crunched.** Not a pop. Not a twinge. A *crunch*. I felt it from the inside — bone and cartilage doing something they were never supposed to do, somewhere in the middle of my back, and I knew. I **knew**, in that exact second, that it was all over. Completely over. Not the job. The *body*. The thing I'd been told was fine, was "just overweight," was "lose weight and the pain will stop" — it wasn't fine. It had been fusing for years, and I'd just made it crunch, and there was no un-crunching it. That was the moment I understood what "you're just obese" had cost me: the same spine I'd begged adults about as a kid, the one nobody would look at, the one that would eventually put me in a wheelchair-accessible unit — it broke its first visible promise to me in a J&J Delivery warehouse, and I heard it happen. I finished the shift anyway. Of course I did. You don't have the luxury of stopping when you have nothing. ### The pants And here's the part that's embarrassing, and I'm putting it in anyway, because it's the truth and the truth is what this whole site is for. I was working **commando** that day — it happens, laundry doesn't always cooperate with a 7-hour shift — and an hour into the day, **my pants ripped.** Where they ripped... you could see my penis. Out in the open. On the job. An hour in, with **six hours still to go**, delivering appliances. Six hours of that. Six hours of walking into people's homes and carrying their refrigerators with my goddamn crotch visible through a split in my pants, because stopping meant admitting it, and admitting it meant facing the laughter and the judgment and the possibility of losing the one job that had let me just *work*. So I did what I always do: I clenched, I carried, I smiled through it, and I got through the day with my dignity in tatters and my spine crunching and my heart somewhere in my shoes. Six hours. Appliances. That was bad. That was *so* bad. And I did it anyway, because what was the alternative — the street? The one thing every adult in my life had made clear was always one wrong move away? Looking back, that day is the whole story in miniature: the body falling apart with a crunch nobody would believe, the humiliation I had to swallow to keep a roof over my head, and the sheer stubborn refusal to stop that got me through all of it. The girl who carried refrigerators for six hours with her pants split open and her spine crunching is the same girl who built AcreetionOS. The only difference is the weight of what she was carrying, and whether anyone was watching. --- ## Home So here's the part that still makes me cry: He was my friend for a while. And then we got closer. Much closer. I love him to death. He is my dad. My actual, real, biological father — the one who saved me when nobody else would, who offered a room to a stranger with expired tags and no insurance and a lifetime of fear, and turned out to be family. I am going to cry, I swear, just writing this. The long road — nine foster homes, five betrayals, years of wrong meds, a misdiagnosis that ate my youth, an eviction, a suicide attempt, a cross-country drive through a blizzard of fear — it ends here. In a city I'd never seen, with a man I'd never met, who turned out to be the father I was always supposed to have. Not enough? I survived all of that. I'm still here, still writing, still building, still *me* — and now I have a dad who actually shows up. That's the punchline to the "you're not enough" years: **I was always enough. The people who said otherwise were wrong.** And I've got the receipts to prove it. ❤️