My cousin: My abuser, Collin County’s favorite diversity advocate

My cousin criticized everything about me

The more I spent time with someone who is now so dear to me, the more I realized how codependent my relationship with my cousin was.

I began distancing myself.

In 2023, I realized the disabled parts of me that consumed me were the parts she hated the most — the parts she criticized the most.

“I can’t ever let those parts of me see her light of day, or else that will be the end.”

Hiding the “bad” parts of oneself only works when you’re not around people you have to hide them from.

Because everyone’s lives are, like, intersecting with each other. Learning to accept those different, even “inconvenient” parts about other people is how humans develop empathy. It’s how they learn to accept people instead of tolerating them like ants on the curb.

You cannot know who someone is when they hide parts of themselves from you because they don’t feel safe sharing them. Someone not feeling safe with you is not a fault of theirs to solve.

Growing closer

For 5+ years, I “helped” her with a blog she started willy-nilly after being fired from one she contributed to.

She’d chosen a similar blog name and had someone create a similar logo.

She wanted loads of followers and to make money blogging, without the discipline successful blogging takes.

Having a relative interested in my special interest was a dream come true. It’s what brought us closer.

I developed a content strategy and prioritize working on her blog. She did her own thing, then wondered why her blog didn’t grow.

I think she made ~100 review posts with giveaways during its run that held no value other than giving random Amazon sellers’ products away for free.

She publicized her surrogacy with zero mind to creating anything helpful for other people, and cross-posted a magazine story featuring her to the blog.

I suggested writing helpful tips about surrogacies and pregnancy, but she “didn’t have time>

Any legal protections on the blog in writing didn’t matter. The content she created and her personal branding were not brand-friendly.

I wasn’t that mature as a blogger back then, either, but for someone who touted being the oldest of us giving her superiority, I feel her perceived authority was misplaced.

Bloggers I tried networking with were criticized and wanted little to do with me when they found out she was my cousin. We were known as “the mean girls” of a food expo we attended in Dallas.

Low-key, I would go off on my own independently and vendors wanted to work with me but wanted nothing to do with her or her blog. Other bloggers wanted to connect with me, but not her.

I didn’t completely understand why, but I was also aware of something being amiss. It lingered within me.

Antagonist to real blog development

Anything that could grow the blog for real was shot down in the name of her hating trends or not having the time.

My style guide was deemed unworthy on account of her needing to do whatever she wanted.

Anytime I gave her an example of what I was asking, she’d reply, “Yes, exactly like that.” Her answers had zero substance, so I had little to work with.

I’d push for ideas to try in vain. Sometimes I’d say I’m implementing them anyways and do it — and then be met with the silent treatment.

Then she’d blame me for being a “bad blogger” or “not having any skill” because nothing was coming of the blog.

Exploiting my skills, then holding me accountable for inaction

When I was homeless, she said she’d take me seriously as a blogger if I could go from $0 to $50k in six months.

I don’t know why I wanted her approval so much.

When she told me she was moving to another state, it triggered my abandonment wound. She said I could go, too.

But how was I going to get there myself? As an autistic — that kind of autistic who needs a lot of supports to do anything — moving states is not something I can do alone.

I mentioned hiring someone to drive my cat and me, plus a moving company, and she said it’d be a huge waste of money.

“I often need to spend money on things other people who don’t find a ‘huge waste of money’. Like precooked chicken instead of raw, so I have meat to eat. This is part of being disabled.”

She replied, “Sounds like it’s part of being lazy and not being an adult.”

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An old sorority house in Peoria, IL caught her eye.

Naturally, I brainstormed an entire content marketing strategy around the concept of turning it into a livable space.

And so, a new blog idea was born: Our Rainbow Home, a home renovation and decorating blog.

“I mean, you won’t be part of it forever. There’s no point. When you move, it’ll be all mine. I’ll be doing most of the work since I’m going to be creating the content anyways.”

Every ounce of enthusiasm disappeared. She still thought blogging was mostly content creation.

Founding a nonprofit

My cousin founded a nonprofit with two of her toxic friends. Every time I’d bring up their toxicity, she shrugged it off and said I had to look past it or be more open-minded.

One had had brain surgery and blamed her abusive behavior on that, and I was perceived as insensitive for not cutting her some slack.

My cousin went from having zero time to do anything other than parent her kids to having all the time in the world to focus on what would prop her up.

I registered the domain name and purchased webhosting for the nonprofit. They wanted the receipt for tax purposes, so I sent it to them. I still don’t know the point since it was my money.

I set up the website and was invited to be the Neurodiversity Advocate Leader or whatever. They wanted to do so much all at once. I tried to reel them in.

DARVO tactics

Princeton TX Diverse was founded as a nonprofit organization embracing the neurodiversity, racial diversity, religious diversity and LGBTQ+ diversity of Princeton, TX.

Focusing on LGBTQ+ rights — especially for LGBTQ+ youth — gave them the most attention the quickest.

In a group chat with the founders one night, I spoke out against targeting LGBTQ+ teens specifically because of the legal issues. What they wanted to do was no different from what they criticized about Christian churches doing.

When the importance of maintaining a professional image was presented, the founder who’d had brain surgery countered:

“To 14-year-olds that want to kill themselves cuz they’re gay? 100% my kid and I will not be doing these requests for Instagram. […] They may look ‘trashy’ but they sure get the followers.”

Like, this was an issue of bad boundaries and literally targeting kids in the exact way Princeton, TX City Council grew concerned about.

This was a subtle example of DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender — dismissing my concern, shifting focus to a crisis, and framing me as the problem for raising the issue.

I iterated my point:

“Not approaching it professionally sets PTXD up for not being taken seriously.”

She replied, “I’m 100% fine with that.”

When I cautioned that looking unprofessional would hinder their credibility with older Princeton residents and long-term supporters, she deflected:

“Alright, let’s just acknowledge everything else being trashy and shit and that everything that is our focus is wrong, what else lol”

And shut down the conversation entirely.

Conflicts of interest & leadership dynamics

PTXD was founded by a married couple and my cousin.

The husband of the married couple remained passive in early discussions, except to back his wife up when necessary. Their presence as a married couple on the nonprofit’s board posed a clear conflict of interest.

Nonprofit boards should represent diverse perspectives, but their dynamic risked decisions being made in favor of each other rather than in the best interest of the organization.

From an external standpoint, funders and community members may view a family-run nonprofit as lacking impartiality, further damaging credibility.

Since their marital separation, the wife had been excluded from PTXD’s leadership, though the foundation issues in the organization’s decision-making remained.

I do not know if PTXD has found a third board member yet, but I do know they struggled to find one — perhaps due to not wanting to share the spotlight or invite someone whose motives align with that of a nonprofit instead of personal gain.

My role in founding the nonprofit

PTX Diverse was founded on self-centeredness and toxic intentions to show people what good people the founders were and enable my cousin’s look-what-you-made-me-do attitude she’d presented to our mutual family.

I set up the website and was blamed for it being “unprofessional”. So the “sorry, my brain is making me lash out at you when I don’t get my way” founder took it over and set it up like a 2000s PTA mom.

I suggested creating a style guide for uniformity so people would take them seriously, and they said anyone who doesn’t take LGBTQ+ youth dying due to homophobia and transphobia dying wasn’t worth their time.

They weaponized virtue to shutdown and invalidate anyone else’s input, while also saying “no one even volunteers to help me so I have to do everything myself”.

Ultimately, I was pushed out. I couldn’t stand the brain excuse founder’s moral grandstanding and false dichotomy.

After a lot of on-again, off-again, I cut ties entirely and transferred files over.

I think my cousin thought less of me after that. Like, not helping her with her nonprofit = not caring about her. She sided with her toxic co-founders and blamed me for “embarrassing” her and “making things difficult” for her.

She accused me of trying to ruin her life.

Attention-seeking behavior

Early 2022, she messaged in our female family’s group chat intentionally stirring the pot about Shelley Luther.

Our mutual family obviously doesn’t support LGBTQ+ rights at all, but she shared that Luther was harmful to the transgender community.

“It blows my mind that hateful people like this are running for government seats and I hope no one in this family supports that kind of hateful rhetoric.”

When you text passive-aggressive statements to people you know support something, you are purposely provoking them.

But…this was a pattern she’d do with her surrogacy, too. She’d planned to use her intended gay parents as pawns at family dinners, having one sit on each side of her, to rub in the family’s faces that she was a surrogate two dads.

She’d encouraged me to find a woman in a local Facebook group to take couple’s Christmas pictures with and send to family to be like, “Look how gay I am!”

From the group chat:

“[Shelley Luther] also said Chinese students should be banned from attending Texas universities. Does anyone have any thoughts or opinions on this? I’d love to hear them.”

🙄

Obviously, our fam replied. She added,

“It makes me ill to see conservative Republicans being so boldly hateful and bigoted, as if that is just a normal way to act and be now.

“[Aunt], are you aware that intersex people exist? People with both xy and xx chromosomes?”

“Anyone here know what a eunuch is?”

…guess who taught her about eunuchs from the Bible? 🙋‍♀️

Guess who regrets it. 🙋‍♀️

Her mom told her to stop having the conversation, so she “removed herself” from it after people shared their opinions and she continued to instigate drama.

Her questions intentionally elicited discomfort.

You cannot combat prejudice with criticism, or rubbing people’s noses in the conditioning you disagree with. You also cannot disagree with people’s values because they’re their values — even if those values were conditioned into them.

People will put up their defenses and double down on those to protect themselves. You will remain the enemy.

But that’s not something she has ever been okay hearing or being told, because that challenges her perceived reality. It challenges her worldview.

She’s good with being surrounded by people who also feel like societal outsiders and seeks out echo chambers, then abandons ship once she makes too many enemies/can no longer manipulate people.

I used to be one of her pawns.

I know her patterns.

I recognized the ones she used in Princeton with the shield of her nonprofit organization.

Having coached her on positioning before, I understood how credibility can be manufactured rather than earned over time. That context helped me name what I was seeing.

Hosting drag BINGO

Drag culture is beautiful. I appreciate it. I also know it’s not for me, because it is often loud and bright and sparkly. I have sensory processing disorder and don’t engage in loud events if I can help it.

I think my cousin attached herself to drag culture performatively.

What better way to quickly position oneself as a queer advocate than to host events featuring people belonging to a culture under the most scrutiny at the time?

She’d done similar with breastfeeding in public, like, “Oh, you’re uncomfortable with that? Speaking of, let me get my boob out and feed my baby.”

It’s silent retaliatory behavior you wouldn’t think is performative in a single instance, especially when tied to advocacy.

Hence the need to stop looking at them as how she helped people and start looking at them as tools. What benefit did hosting drag shows give her and the other founders?

Attention. Scrutiny. Persecution, thus victimization.

Reason to “fight” for acceptance with more of the same instead of easing into acceptance through community efforts.

Running a nonprofit for personal gain

As with any nonprofit, it is crucial to ask,

Is the organization truly serving the community, or is it operating as a tool for the personal gain of its leadership?

Nonprofits belong to their communities, and transparency is a fundamental requirement. What happens when the leadership of an organization is not held to the same standards it demands from others?

Council members who did not enable her actions were subjected to repeated intimidation and retaliatory behavior.

This wasn’t limited to city officials.

Friends, family and collaborators who didn’t give her attention or comply experienced the same pattern.

She told me outright, “If you harass someone enough, they get tired and give in.”

She also said, “Sometimes you just have to threaten someone with an ultimatum to get their attention.”

When that didn’t work, she’d say, “I’m going to dig up dirt on them so they know not to mess with me again.”

She also said ish like, “Give them backhanded compliments that are actually insults but make them feel like you have good intentions so you get them to change something about themselves.”

“Always remember the information you can use against people later, especially if it makes them look like a psychopath.”

When I enforced my own boundaries, she said, “You only reply to me when I threaten you.”

Across all areas of her life, she used harassment and threats to get her way.

Compliance was not earned, but extracted through emotional pressure and escalation.

Once I recognized this was her pattern, I remembered the time she went to jail for assaulting her mom. My cousin said she “barely touched” her mom.

After she was out of jail, she started dating this guy she got into a fight with and dumped.

Coming from abuse myself, I realized the fine line was indistinguishable and I couldn’t trust her to not do the same to me. I decided to keep parts of myself from her.

That’s difficult when you have a cousin who makes your online presence her business.

Lying to the ACLU

What troubled me most was how a situation was represented versus how it functioned.

When the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) became involved, it seems they were told the two nonprofit organizations were completely separate.

That separation was central to the case.

What was seemingly not disclosed was that my cousin had met with the other organization’s founder to act as a proxy in private and separate organization in public.

She’d also joined the board of the second organization — effectively collapsing the distinction that had been presented.

She’d presented the agreement to me as a “loophole”, then turned to the ACLU to turn her loophole into a discrimination case.

I surmise Princeton, TX’s City Council was not inherently discriminating against PTXD, but the people behind it. I’d hosted a survey my cousin demanded I take down because I was embarrassing her, and responses pointed to the founders being most problematic.

Probably because at least one of them was straight-up doxing people when she didn’t get her way.

I can understand why a school board and city council wouldn’t want to allow people of that caliber to host any community events on community property.

Influence of local elections

With the lines blurred, differentiating when the remaining founders are speaking on behalf of themselves or their nonprofit feels impossible — so I am left to identify the following patterns in regard to local elections:

• The founders supported Doug Ellyson for the PISD school board. He has been involved in PTXD since.
• They supported Brianna Chacón until she won and seemed to feel entitled to favors.
• In the next Princeton mayoral election, they instead backed Eugene Escobar, Jr.

I don’t know if they repeated the same behavior with him they did with Chacón if PTXD’s leaders didn’t feel the gratitude for their role in helping him get elected.

If they did, did Escobar, Jr. become a member of PTXD?

Did the PTXD leaders use their influence within the community to sway elections — a prohibited activity for 501c3 organizations?

How do people know when a PTXD operator is speaking on behalf of PTXD or behaving on their own?

The inability to distinguish between my cousin’s personal brand and the organization poses a conflict of interest at worst and positions her as a public figure at best.

(As I was blocked by the couple for dissent, I don’t know if the husband’s personal brand is as associated with PTXD as my cousin’s).

Criticism of PTXD’s leadership’s actions is treated as an attack on the entire movement, shutting down meaningful discourse.

When partnerships do not serve the leadership’s personal interests, they are blocked, as seen in the rejection of a community food drive collaboration.

Collaborating with another organization to serve the community would require relinquishing some control.

Getting involved with other organizations

My cousin used her status with PTXD to become a board member on at least two other organizations — Color Splash Out and Peoria Proud.

She also became a Democratic representative when she lived in Princeton.

She got to attend fancy dinners, galas, meet prominent figures, network with media sources.

Media coverage

I think 2024 was mostly comprised of her messaging me links to media sites covering PTXD or her. Literally just a link, and then me being like ? because seriously: 🤔

I didn’t care. After a while, covering the same things, having photos of you in a paper about Pride — all that is vanity. There’s no value. As a blogger/content creator, I value value, yeah? Like, where are the juicy bits about what’s in it for an audience member?

I was never into the publicity bloggers got where they just talked about themselves unless there was something to take away from their interviews or features I could apply to my own online business.

Substance media.

For a nonprofit, to have photos of the founders, their family, their friends — that is 100% vanity, like what about including the rest of the community?

I’d pitched that as an idea, actually. Like, interviewing community members, featuring their stories. Sharing more than just what the board members were doing. Content with oomph.

Content people search for.

They didn’t care about that, even if I had a strategy for getting them donations.

They wanted donations simply for existing…which reminded me of what my cousin had said about growing her blog: “I’m not interested in doing anything ‘trendy’. People should follow me for ME. Nothing else matters.”

Perusing her social media recently, I realized that still checks out: She wants vanity metrics for existing.

Which is funny to me because every time I mentioned systemic and institutional issues, she’d insist life was hard and you had to work for things you wanted.

But much of what she has now, she has because she has a husband. She treated me like a failure for struggling to live on my own as an autistic without supports, but she has always lived with her mom or a man — never by herself for long, either.

Performative allyship

To people who knew her, my cousin was their “favorite” diversity advocate.

She ran a nonprofit organization supporting diversity, after all.

I don’t share that perception.

She witnessed me having an autistic meltdown one day and crying over my uncaring, parenting-is-18-years-only dad another.

“You’re acting like a psycho and scaring my children. Could you just stop it already?” she asked, as if autistic meltdowns and utter heartbreak are choices.

Her oldest son had an autistic boyfriend she’d used as a prop. He’d wear noise-cancelling headphones and preferred his food be prepared a specific way. She even avoided vacuuming around him.

Um, what?

I’d never seen her this way. I was so confused!

If I so much as asked her to turn the music down or change a song because it was the wrong kind of sensory input for me, she told me to “get over it” and “stop whining”.

When I ate a torta “wrong”, she and her family criticized me for making it “wrong” — even though that was sensory-friendly to me.

So…genuinely, thoroughly confused.

One day, the guy seemed to be melting down and went to her and she “fixed” it — ah, that was it. The ability to fix it. Placate him. Make him more palatable, less discomfort she needed to learn to deal with.

Once they broke up, she discarded him and criticized him to no end.

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I tried explaining to her the problem with using “psycho”, “psychopath” and “sociopath” to describe people based on stereotypes.

It didn’t do anything.

When her middle daughter cried, she’d say, “Why are you acting like such a psycho? You’re fine!”

She found out I have dissociative identity disorder by finding my system TikTok and asked, “How many accounts do you have?!” like she didn’t own at least five. She sent a friend request.

I explained to her what DID was. It was a weird conversation that didn’t stick.

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My cousin’s the first relative I came out as a lesbian to.

After that, it seemed she was more interested in LGBTQ+ pride, like as a personality trait rather than simply an addition to her identity.

Over the years, I didn’t date anyone. I didn’t like who I was in relationships.

I was also wary of being involved with someone when my anorexia recovery was so fragile.

I’m still kinda in that boat.

She tried setting me up with people she’d met, asked me my interests. I only said I wasn’t looking.

She’d say, “Are you sure you’re even a lesbian?”

“How can you know if you’ve never even slept with a man?”

“Are you sure you’re not pansexual?”

“Being a lesbian is so restricting/limiting. So you wouldn’t date a trans person?”

“If you don’t even consider dating men, you’re panphobic.”

“Are you sure you’re not actually asexual? You have no interest in getting laid.”

Her husband and sons harassed me, too, accusing me of being a “fake lesbian”.

More recently, I told her she didn’t understand lesbian history because she was pan, therefore not intricately involved in the lesbian community.

She’d replied, “I’m queer. I’m part of the lesbian community.”

I said, “No. You’re not a lesbian IN the lesbian community, aware of some very specific lesbian history. I’m not being exclusionary. I’m trying to educate YOU on how you’re being prejudice against ME.”

I don’t remember how she replied.

She often responded to my boundaries or choices with accusatory questions, like turning a personal preference into a moral failing: “So you’d rather be a monogamous bigot?”

And I’d avoid those conversations altogether.

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Relationships with people from the LGBTQ+ community she’d met through PTXD were so weird to me, because she’d accept them loudly and proudly.

She criticized them behind closed doors.

She described a local lesbian couple as “the worst kinds of lesbians, where you wonder why the woman in the relationship doesn’t just date a man instead of dating a super butch woman who acts like a man”.

Observing her relationships, she seemed to enjoy being with women for “fun” and not serious relationships. I remember watching her daughters while she had random men over for “pizza”.

Polyamory doesn’t work like that, from what I’d read about it. It’s not about sleeping with anyone and everyone to cater to your needs — and I’m not shaming such needs.

Looking at all her patterns, I can’t help wondering if this behavior perhaps played a role in her attention-seeking behavior more than it did in fulfilling perceived needs.

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Over 10 years ago, we saw Vaxxed at a special screening.

On the way home, she went on and on about how awful autism was, insisting it was a disease needing to be eradicated.

She swore off vaccines.

That night, she posted about the documentary on Facebook. She mentioned me and told her friends, “I keep telling [Jane] she needs to write about autism to educate people like us who think autism needs to be cured.”

People from marginalized communities don’t owe anyone emotional labor to convince other people why they deserve to exist, as fellow humans.

I blocked her.

Some time later, she contacted me to apologize, saying I was like a sister to her and she needed me in her life. She realized how wrong she’d been and wished she could take it all back.

I’m not sure if this was via a letter from jail or simply email, but I want to say it was from jail because I know her mom had essentially abandoned her due to her antics.

When my cousin didn’t have her mom, she had me.

When she didn’t have me, she had her mom.

Now, she’s moved across the country and has neither of us that close.

After everything, I’m not sure she really learned anything. When looking at Pre-K options in Peoria, a school required an assessment she didn’t agree with.

She kept asking “Why?” like it made zero sense.

I looked into it. “Looks like they’re screening for developmental milestones and potential disabilities to customize their learning and have early diagnosis.”

She was so adamant against the early autism diagnosis part especially, which was weird to me because it was everything I advocated for.

My cousin was so loud about neurodiversity acceptance in meme-like posts on PTXD’s social media.

She encouraged other people to get their kids diagnosed early.

But…maybe it’s like when you find out a friend’s gay, and you’re fine with it because it’s not you, while dealing with internalized homophobia amidst your own potential gayness.

Neurodivergent label appropriation

I’m not sure if this falls under performative allyship, but I’m including it because it makes sense here…probably.

My cousin shared with me she thought she had ADHD and/or autism. I remember saying maybe and even validated her. She seemed excited.

I wish I hadn’t.

Her behavior patterns weren’t glaringly obvious to me yet.

It’s also not my place to validate someone’s self-diagnosis or suspected diagnosis.

I also highly doubt she’d ever seek diagnosis herself or, if she had, reject any diagnosis that isn’t the one she wanted.

She encouraged me to endure the diagnosis process again for disability/social security income, but I didn’t because it wasn’t her business.

She said her friend’s husband got into it in the first year, implying it was easier than I thought it was.

Why did she always shut my concerns down in favor of someone else’s ease? I didn’t like how she sought to fix me.

Any “quirky” traits of autism or ADHD, she hid behind the self-Dx.

But diagnosed people, like myself, who struggled with the disabling aspects of those “quirks” were perceived as inconvenient or needing to be fixed.

And not wanting to be fixed was perceived as a moral failing, like there was something wrong with me that I didn’t appreciate her trying to micromanage my autism so I could be more palatable.

Victim-blaming

Her kid accused me of deserving homelessness and taking advantage of being able to stay there. When I texted his mom what he’d said, she replied, “What did you do to make him say that?”

When her kids got in trouble at school, she’d ask authority figures, “What did they do to make my son do that?”

If someone ticked her off or didn’t give in to her, she’d say, “You made me do it.”

Meanwhile, she cried publicly due to discrimination against the LGBTQ+ community. The tears would stop when no one watched.

All of it was interesting to watch play out.

My cousin was my abuser. Was she yours, too?

My cousin used American-centric moral posturing to erase global context, then weaponized accusations of bigotry to silence me — while engaging in bigotry herself.

She supported disability in theory and in public, but punished disabled people in practice when their needs interfered with her expectations.

My cousin weaponized our relationship, using familial and professional labels to manipulate me. She was my “sister” or my “client” depending on what emotions she wished to evoke.

She used emotional withdrawal as punishment, then rebranded it as “consequences”, a tactic that infantilizes adults and disguises coercion as accountability.

She mistook her moral scrupulosity for holding people accountable, when it often pressured or shamed people instead.

My cousin often framed her role in our relationship as indispensable, emphasizing what she “did for me” and exaggerating her contributions. It highlighted the ways my efforts were minimized and left me questioning my own actions.

She treated social constructs and social rules as tools: rigid expectations for disabled people, optional principles for herself.

When her family stopped enabling her antics, she escalated her tactics. Then she discarded them completely and found an outlet that filled her attention need faster.

Her focus on advocacy and extracurricular visibility often meant she spent less time with her children, and she framed any feedback about that as criticism of her parenting.

She once considered naming a blog Did I Fuck Up My Kids?, which felt less like introspection and more like a performative statement about motherhood and accountability.

She lacked emotional maturity and sought to fix everyone who didn’t live up to her standards, forever moving the goalposts to invalidate progress.

My cousin benefited from the labor of people around her — her husband’s income, other people’s retail discount cards, her kids’ chores — while insisting that success came purely from hard work.

After marrying a man shortly after meeting him, her circumstances improved faster than they ever would have if she’d done it on her own.

It’s the same logic she pushed on me: get into a relationship, get married — echoing the Pentecostal rhetoric our family conditions girls and women to believe.

She even encouraged me to marry someone for their money, saying things like, “If you marry a trucker, you won’t even have to see them much.”

She and her husband fought for custody of his child while publicly seeking donations for her room, then returned the child to her abusive grandparents when she exhibited untreated, severe childhood trauma while adjusting to living in a house full of kids and sought sympathy on Facebook for it “not working out”.

My cousin often dragged me into arguments by tagging me in conversations that were draining and taxing on my mental health.

It seemed the less “palatable” aspects of my autism were only acceptable as long as I was willing to be tokenized for her purposes.

Once I established a boundary to stop tokenizing me, she devalued me, started tagging others to take my place, and would even quote them at me to invalidate my experience and perspective.

Her neurodivergent props’ sensory needs were accommodated. I was called a “psycho” for my trauma disorder and autistic traits. She let her kids call me the R-word and didn’t understand the importance of teaching them why it was wrong.

To their faces, she supported her friends’ different religions. In private, she’d roll her eyes and call them idiots for believing in their higher power.

When confronted, she’d reply, “Well, I’m not perfect. I don’t claim to be perfect. I’m learning.”

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I told a friend one day, “As hard as it is to say, I think my cousin is also my abuser.”

“Oh, definitely,” she replied.

My life after her

It’s weird.

This year, I have focused on myself and growing my blog.

The whole experience has made obvious what I was scared to test: I’m doing well without her.

My blog has grown without her!

I realized she was my loudest inner critic when it came to blogging the way I knew how.

So the most telling part of my boundary to distance us has been that I am making money as a blogger.

My blog income is projected to hit full-time income next year.

I stopped seeking her approval and started seeking my own. Instead of wondering whether my cousin would approve of something, I ask myself, “Does this align with my values?”

Everything I’m doing is akin to the content strategy I proposed for her blogs that “didn’t work” because she didn’t follow them.

My cousin built her authority with friends and connections by presenting herself as principled and trustworthy, even though those who saw through her quickly recognized otherwise.

I, on the other hand, earn credibility through my work and content — not from carefully managing how people perceive me.

And I’ve not had to move across the country in the name of protecting my kids after — oh, wait, she did say she didn’t turn her former town against her, because they were going to create a program to be her legacy…🙄

Anticipating how she’d react to this post

I chose to write and publish this post because — while it’s a messy lot — sharing subtle abusive behaviors is important.

This experience is the result of years of patterns compiling until they were right in front of my face.

It’s also not going to come off as anything but volatile to her, most likely.

Based on repeated patterns, she’s likely to share screenshots of all our conversations that paint me in the worst lighting and her in the best.

The context will be erased, to me her monkeys will fly. Her narrative will focus on everything she’d done for me up to that point, how she considered me a sister to her, how I wronged her the same way her family did.

She might contact the person(s) I live with to destroy my character, in the name of her “boundaries” being that she’s allowed to contact whomever she wants to get through to me regardless of what my boundaries are.

She’ll probably flip the script and accuse me of DARVO, relating everything to a mistake I made when my brain was foggy.

She might use her daughter as a pawn to get to me, to force me to pay attention to her and then accuse me of not wanting to talk to my niece if I hang up prematurely.

Image management will likely be the utmost priority, as despite positioning herself as a public figure while claiming she doesn’t want to be known, she sure has gone through a lot of trouble in the past to maintain her public persona.

Or there could be tears.

At some point, she’s bound to insist I need therapy while airing all the things I’ve done to prove my insanity, erasing relevant context.

The vindictive nature will prove she needs therapy she won’t seek.

I think the most important questions to ask, if you were a supporter of PTXD, are,

• What if the reason the organization faced so much turbulence was not because of the human rights issues, but instead because of the people behind it?
• Were they really the best people to be leading the community?
• Where did my individuality fit into the organization?
• Did I feel I had a voice?

Nonprofits are corporations.

Building, managing and running a blog has taught me how much personal growth goes into it.

My cousin wanted the identity of a serious blogger without the discipline of it.

I can’t help wondering if she wanted the identity of a genuine nonprofit founder without the discipline of it, too.

She’d tried starting one with me in the past, and even after starting PTXD, and I declined because she hadn’t been a great co-blogger — she “didn’t have time to blog”, so how could I trust her to have time to run something else without leaving it all to me?

I think she liked the busyness and how community participation helped her position herself how she wanted more than blogging could, because instant gratification was involved.

PTXD provided her with an endless supply of drama, suffering and persecution.

Positioning is easier in comparison to living one’s values.

Some of the accusations against her were rooted in real homophobia and transphobia. That part matters.

But her response to it — volatile, aggressive, absolutist — only hardened opposition. Anyone who didn’t immediately agree with her framing was flattened into “bigot”, full stop.

She refused to recognize that people are often at different points in their understanding, or that change sometimes requires patience rather than force. There was no room for growth, context or learning — only moral alignment or moral failure.

She positioned herself as the just one in every conflict, while her own behavior went unexamined. Her flaws were minimized or justified in service of the cause, swept aside because the cause itself was framed as untouchable.

Advocacy built on moral absolutism doesn’t persuade — it polarizes.

An advocate unwilling to listen, reflect or meet people where they are isn’t doing the work of change — only the work of positioning.

You could also call it weaponized wokeness.

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This post reflects my personal experiences and boundaries. It is not a definitive judgment of her character. This post is not a timeline.