Yes, I’m still disabled, meaning that I couldn’t work a full-time job and can’t go to college full-time either, because I’ve yet to find ways to fully cope with my anxiety and the “aftershocks” of Trikafta. But, physically speaking, I’m not disabled in any meaningful way. It bothers me that most people just can't figure that out. 

But, what bothers me more than that, is the fact that when people find out about my conditions and my past, that's all they tend to see of me. People tend to see my disabilities before they see me (assuming they know a thing or two about me from my family). People tend to treat me very differently when they don't know me, verses when they do, and not in a good way.

Oftentimes, when people find out about my CF, they go from treating me like everyone else, to treating me like a fragile little flower on the verge of death. When people find out that I'm Autistic, they go from treating me like everyone else, to treating me like I'm a feral kitten with a traumatic brain injury. Unfortunately, when people are introduced to me by my family, they already know about the CF and ASD, and therefore treat me differently right off the bat. It's damn near impossible to get people to see me for who I am, once they find out that I was born the way that I was. 

That is largely why I'm writing (or, publishing, rather) a memoir. 

Also, my memoir writing serves as a form of therapy for me. After all, I grew up in chaos. I also grew up in the middle of a blended family's bullshit. Indeed, I was (and, in a way, still am) the glue that kept a broken, blended, fighting family together. Needless to say, I'm sure that alone dealt a lot of damage on my mental and physical health.

But, someway, somehow, I survived my childhood relatively intact. 

One of the many reasons why I miraculously survived as well as I did, was because I've been memoir writing ever since I could scribble a coherent sentence down on a sheet of paper. I wrote to get my feelings off my chest, and to just document whatever happened to me on a given day. When I first began my writing, I don't recall ever talking about the big issues impacting me at the time. However, as I entered my teen years and began to fully realize the severity of the circumstances I was born into, my writing began to look a lot more like what I write today. Albeit, a little less... polished... but the spirit was still there (if that makes sense). 

When I ran out of storage space on Google Docs for the first time, I got the idea to attempt to put together a publishable memoir from the 15+ gigabytes of documents I'd typed up ever since I created my first email account. This happened around the same time I had to drop out of school for awhile to fight off a major Pseudomonas infection.