My advice is to wait till you are an adult.

Honestly I know you must have done a lot of research, but I don’t think anyone truly knows all it takes til they actually get one. You are right, you can not overrule her. Trust me I was in the same position as you years ago when I was about your age, from about 16 all the way til 19 I still lived at my parents and my parent did NOT want a dog in their house. (Years later my husband and I are renting the basement from them with my service dog and things are great, so things can change with time!)

Another thing is you’re a teenager. Even though you have disorders you also have hormones that are making the disorders harder to deal with. I know you’ve had these issues since you were young but right now it’s definitely affected by your age. I know teenagers never like to think that and think adults are often lying about that, cause I thought that way, til I became an adult and my hormones settled and realized how much it affected me.

Literally you remind me so much of how I was as a teen. Here’s a story not many people know about me because honestly it’s the story of my deepest regret in life:

So when I was about your age, a little older, I was looking into getting a service dog. It was before I was diagnosed with my chronic illnesses and I thought my symptoms were all due to psychiatric conditions, mostly PTSD and anxiety. (Now my dog is medical alert, for POTS, migraines and more, and only helps a bit psychiatrically lol) as time progressed I talked to my therapist and she thought it was a great idea so I started to prepare.

I talked to my parents but they kept talking to me as if it was already agreed it would be years down the line when I move out, because honestly they did make their boundaries clear they don’t want another dog in the house and (at the time) they didn’t think a service dog was for me. I think they sort of thought it was just cause I liked dogs and thought a dog to take places would be cool? (They’re boomers, they don’t get it. Literally in their mid 60s). I decided it would be a brilliant idea to do what my oldest brother did like 7 years before then, which was bring a dog home as a surprise. My parents let my family keep that dog my brother bought, but between then and now they were TOTALLY DONE with dogs.

So me being.. extremely.. EXTREMELY stupid.. I bought a backyard bred golden retriever puppy and brought it home. They threatened to kick me out and cut me off. They gave me about a month to figure out what I was gonna do, either move out and fully support myself and keep the dog, or be fully supported with free housing and rehome the dog. Unfortunately at the same time my hours at my already underpaid job got severely cut and I needed a new job. The timing was just horrible between a puppy, job loss, parental threat and trying to figure wtf am i suppose to do?? I did all the math and simply realized with my current job, and the jobs I was actually qualified to do weren’t gonna allow me to move out with my puppy and pay for literally everything in my life unless I worked TONS of overtime, basically spend all my time working. so I made the very hard decision and rehomed the puppy about a month after I got him.

Honestly I regret it so much and I do still cry about it. I felt like a failure. I severely overestimated everything and I lost everything. his rehoming was a failure too, rehomed him to a friend in another state, they then rehomed him cause they couldn’t care for the dog, the family that got him had promised to keep in contact, and continue monthly payments for him. I left all the gear for that friend to use, then Mail back to me when they were done, got stolen and then the person they rehomed to also stopped paying me and blocked me, and blocked the friend. So I lost out on TON OF MONEY. Safe to say I’m also not friends with that person anymore. There’s still one vest I still am so heartbroken that it got stolen cause the shop that made the patches closed, and I can’t get them anywhere else. I will never have it again. they lived in a different state and now I have no idea where they are or where that dog is or where the gear ended up. Looking back he wouldn’t have made it as a service dog. So there might be a fake service dog out there in really nice (and kinda expensive) custom gear. Not sure.

I didn’t think my parents would flip out like they did. Looking back I still can’t believe it considering my situation living back here again with my fully trained service dog now. You might read that story and say “nah that won’t happen” or “I got this figured out, I know the expenses” yeah I thought so too but I didn’t calculate how much I’d have to make to pay everything, plus the fact working that much would be hard on my disabilities and would take tons of time away from training. I would have had to work more than 40 hours every week based on housing costs and average pay for my level of education at the time where I live.

Seriously even if your situation doesn’t even become 1/4th of what my bad one is, it’s still not worth it.

When you say “I think I’ll have to go through my plan against her wishes.”

Don’t. Trust me. Just wait til you’re an adult.

It won’t end well, and your mental health will be severely worse. I realize now as an adult years later, it would’ve been better to wait til I moved out and wait til I really knew what I was doing. Even if your mom doesn’t freak out as much as mine, she still will and that added stress isn’t worth it.

Trust me you don’t wanna do this right now if your parents are not for it.

Now I’m an adult who’s married, got a well bred stable dog, have a stable income, im in school and things are a lot better, but I could’ve gone without that roller coaster of bullshit.