The Bricks I Laid: On Being Treated the Way I Allowed

​My entire time here, I've felt as if I have had things held over my head. Not by one person, but by many.

​When it comes up, I'm genuinely shocked—appalled, really—because how do they not remember? How can they not grasp that I’m not used to living like this? Alone. Without family. Without my lifelong friends. Without just about everything I once knew?

​How can they forget that I don't know how to do this? I don't know how to be this poor. I was the person most people turned to for help. I had an open-door policy drilled into me since childhood, and I would rarely turn someone away. Anyone who walked through my door had to make a plate—there was always enough food for everyone.

​How don't they realize I forfeited my own utilities so I could clothe a child that wasn't even mine? Multiple times.

​How don't they know that when I'm finally done—pushed as far as I can be pushed—I won't look back?

​How do they not see that I'm smaller now, not as tall, with smaller hands, and shorter arms and legs? That I don't know how to swallow my pride? That asking for help is something I was once incapable of doing?

​That before this, I was never truly "alone" or "by myself"?

​That identifying different types of saws is not common sense to me, just as knowing a roux, a base, or binary code isn't common sense to them?

​That my life consisted of second and third shifts, that I excelled and succeeded best when the crisis hit (for reasons that still baffle me). I've never had a hard time getting a job. I never had my utilities turned off (except for a mere day when identity theft truly made the world crash down).

​And then I remember—this, too, is my fault.

​The walls, the bricks so carefully placed not to fall, can’t even be deciphered by me, their creator. I also remember that my beliefs, my deep-seated values, are not everyone else's.

​And it is my fault that I am treated the way that I am. I allowed it.

​I put people on pedestals they may not have deserved, pedestals they certainly did not put me on. I sat on the sidelines, patiently waiting and allowing. I didn’t set boundaries until it was too late. I didn’t think of myself until it was too late.

​And I didn’t realize how far I had pushed, and had been pushed, until it was too late. Too late to set boundaries. Too late to speak up. Too late to save what I had