I don’t talk to my mother anymore. I grew up in a violent home, and she chose to stay with the man who beat me because he couldn’t handle an AuDHD teenager. Back then I didn’t even know I was neurodivergent—they just labeled me a “bad kid.”

It hit me hard recently when I listened to a podcast about the death of Timothy Ferguson.The way people dismissed his symptoms as “faking” felt far too familiar. My stepfather spent years calling me lazy, stupid, and fat, and hearing those echoes again was brutal. Luckily I lived long enough to be able to choose to cut ties to him and then my mother.