I let a bully win yesterday

I didn't have a choice in the matter

For my own safety

Please do not ask about or even look into which company I am alluding to in the piece you are about to read. I literally cannot afford an altercation, and my body is too vulnerable to fugue states right now to engage in one.

Thank you for your understanding here, and as always, thank you for the honor of reading my words and being here with me.

Kindly,

Kate

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I let a bully win yesterday. I let a company that used my illness and community to sell its products off the hook for paying me in full because I cannot afford to challenge it.

It’s not in my nature to let a good fight go. Whether on behalf of myself or someone else, I’ve been standing up to bullies since I was a kid. I’ve lost track of how often I’ve been called weird for doing this. But I’ve never thought about it as a choice. It’s just the way that I was born. I was born as a being who lives by one truth and one truth alone —

There is no wrong way to be human when you are honest and kind.

And if you’re not kind, well, I’m going to tell you about it and fight until you are.

So whether I was on the playground, in the classroom, or later in life, in the psych ward, I spoke up. I always spoke up.

This practice got me in trouble more times than I can count. It landed me in the principal’s office through high school, the dean’s office in college, and, later in life, when my advocacy had grown alongside me, the attending’s office in the psych ward.

But no matter where I found myself as I sat on the verge of punishment, my words always kicked in. My words — words about how I was standing up to the bullies — words about how broken the systems are that we are forced to live under – words that alluded to the very fact that the person in power I was speaking to at that exact moment was about to join them in such cruelty — got me off, punishment-free.

But yesterday was different. Yesterday, the toll of all those fights caught up to me as I learned that the 40-odd hours I had spent over the past month working on my health insurance to get my therapy covered didn’t work — again. All my claims that had been painstakingly resubmitted had been denied, and the past few weeks of waiting on hold, talking to health insurance workers, waiting on hold again, talking to a manager, getting disconnected, calling back, calling back, and calling back once more before finally resubmitting the claims per the exact terms the Executive Claims Officer dictated did not make a difference whatsoever. Hours of my time. For nothing. Thousands of dollars worth of care. Denied. Again.

So mere minutes later, when I learned that the company that I had created sponsored content for — content that fulfilled the signed contract to the t — was not going to pay the remaining amount due because it didn’t return the results they expected, I snapped and disappeared into a fugue state — the very state my healthcare that was denied coverage is supposed to treat. And when I finally returned Earthside many hours later, I didn’t fight back like I usually do. No, I didn’t fight back at all because I literally cannot afford to.

You see — the email from this company did not only say it wouldn’t pay me. It also held a threat — the threat that if I went to a lawyer to force payment to be remitted, they would fight back with their team of lawyers and force a refund of the initial payment. And that payment — still tied up in insurance claim denials – is money I do not have to spare, let alone the legal fees necessary to engage in such an altercation.

On top of that, and maybe most notably, is the reality that the stress of standing up for myself and writing all these emails about the payment they owe me over the past few months has already caused countless fugue states. And right now, after already cutting back to part-time work to survive with my serious mental illness, I cannot afford to have any more fugue states if I want to keep my part-time job.

So here I sit, absolutely exhausted and weeping into my lukewarm, flat, diet Doctor Pepper because getting up and pouring a cup of coffee feels too damn hard right now.

Yes, here I sit while I write to you and process the fact that this reality is not a mistake. This reality is not an exception. This reality is the system working.

Yes, me — sitting here — broken, exhausted, weeping, and too terrified to fight back as the world profits from my pain — this is the system working exactly as it was designed to work in the first place.

Again, for my safety, please do not ask about or even look into which company I am alluding to. I cannot afford an altercation, and my body is too vulnerable to fugue states right now to engage in one. Thanks in advance for honoring this request.

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