I need a mimit

From my last post on this site:

I'm having an epiphany and feeling stupid. 

I was fourteen when my sister introduced me to Alex. It's taken me more than forty years to conclude she likely intentionally threw my life under a bus and that debacle wasn't unfortunate happenstance. 

It was a plot to intentionally socially isolate her boyfriend whom she later married because it was an abusive relationship but he wasn't the abuser. She was.

All the years I was homeless, she never invited me to stay with her. She never did much of anything for me and I didn't really think about it.

I'm a grown assed woman. I never felt like my relatives somehow owed me that, though I knew and wrote about the fact that my brother was essentially kept off the street due to family support. 

I didn't want to think too much about any of that. I mostly thanked my lucky stars my relatives weren't interfering with my life and I focused on getting on with getting on with my life.

I have a form of cystic fibrosis as does my oldest son. My youngest is a carrier. We were doing what made sense to us to get healthier and it's not what conventional medicine says we should do. 

Semmelweis was a physician who ended up in an insane asylum and died two weeks after being committed because he made suggestions based on data from clinical studies but couldn't adequately explain why it should work that way. I had no interest in trying to explain or justify what I was doing as someone trying to save my own life with far fewer credentials. 

My ex-husband never exercised his right to visitation and I never said one word to him about it. My sons and I believed that visitation would be a significant hardship and we just were glad it never came up and I didn't want to discuss it with their dad for any reason lest that come back to bite us.

I was internet acquainted with other women who bitched endlessly about their ex-husband and claimed their ex continued the abuse via things like using custody battles to make life miserable. 

I didn't want to discuss it with them because I only had access to her side of the story and didn't feel I could really help and didn't want to be accused of blaming the victim, but I knew multiple women who routinely told hubby to sleep on the couch when she was mad then told me he was being unfaithful and also told me everything wrong in the relationship was his fault. 

So I sort of suspected that these were women who probably did stuff like needle the ex about being a shit father because he hadn't seen his kid recently and then felt crapped on when the very next thing he did was insist on visitation at the next opportunity no matter how much of a pain it was for everyone involved. 

I had no reason to believe my ex-husband was trying to spare us all a giant hassle by not bothering to exercise visitation rights. Most likely he was just being a selfish asshole, as usual. 

I didn't care WHY. I just knew I didn't want to encourage him to insist I stick our youngest on a bus to another state so he could see him.

I know that how I handle things is not the norm. I'm very goal oriented. I'm not 5 years old and if I really desperately NEED to trash talk someone still in a position to hurt me, I try like hell to do so privately to "my people" rather than take digs at them to their face.

I'm well aware this means I'm "letting sleeping dogs lie" and choosing to turn a blind eye to evidence of issues within them. "NOT MY PROBLEM."

I knew that most likely my sister was absolutely not declining to try to help me in order to respect my boundaries and my right to pursue alternative therapies as I saw fit. If I had any doubts that wasn't the case, rest assured she did bitchy, ugly, threatening things like TELL me her friend read my blog post and based on hearsay from said friend and knowledge that I have CF, tried to dictate to me that I must see a doctor because she had concluded my unspecified pain mentioned in the post was obviously pancreatitis.

She was working at the Centers for Disease Control. I considered this to be extremely threatening behavior. 

The unspecified pain in question was a headache. There's no way in hell a physician would have diagnosed me with pancreatitis.

Anyway, I'm feeling really stupid at the moment and disappointed in myself and wondering how I can trust my own judgement.

And it's not really any comfort to look back on my policy of letting sleeping dogs lie while I was vulnerable knowing I was choosing to not poke at things that probably were not rooted in these people deeply loving and respecting me and my right to self determination and blah blah blah.

But I need a minute or two to look back on decades of thinking one thing and now thinking that's not how it was. Because at the moment I don't know how to trust myself and trusting myself and my judgment is how and why I have a long history of successfully navigating "dangerous" situations other people don't want to touch with a ten foot pole.

Footnote 

I think it might be good news that my ex was probably unfaithful the entire marriage. It implies an actually monogamous relationship might be safer than I think.