I love my sister, but I hate how she treats me like a child. I’m 18 years old today, and I wanted to go to C. J. Barrymore’s with my friends, but Tabitha insisted that it’s too loud and too crowded and that I’d melt down for sure.
I mean, I get it, I guess. She thinks she’s just watching for me, okay. I tend to get overwhelmed in situations like that, okay. And with Peter and Sammy there, too, that’s like triple the stimming, triple the weirdness, triple the fun.
I get why my sister would be nervous about that. She’s had to take care of me, mostly, since our parents died. And that’s a strain the way I am. If I didn’t know that I was a burden already, my case worker at school reminds me of it all the time.
Not in those words, of course. Ms. Harriet doesn’t literally say, “You’re a burden to everyone, you know.” She says it in that cloyingly sweet language that adults use with elementary schoolchildren: “You’re a special challenge, Toby. Your brightness can be blinding sometimes.”
Except I’m not in elementary school. I’m 18 years old! I know it can be hard to remember because sometimes I act younger and people tell me I look younger and it’s hard for me to understand why adults have to make things so complicated.
(And now that I’m an adult, I promise not to make things so complicated for Peter and Sammy. They’re younger than me. I met them in the afterschool program my case worker suggested I go to. They’re cool, and Sammy’s pretty and I want to ask her on a date one day but she’s 16 and I’m 18 now, so I’ll have to wait a little while, I think.)
And look, I know that C. J. Barrymore’s is loud and bright and crowded, full of chaos that can be a challenge for me, but I have my headphones and I have my sunglasses and most importantly I have Peter and Sammy and my sister Tabitha, and also most importantly when do I get to start getting treated like an adult instead of like a child?
It’s so frustrating. I want to scream, but that would just tell Tabitha she’s right and I’m wrong. And I don’t want that.