How I ended up 32 w/no family but also the most successful I've ever been

Objectively speaking, I am the most successful I’ve ever been in my life. I am also, by far, the most alone I’ve ever been. I couldn’t have one without losing the other.



December 2024. I had just applied for medical leave after being diagnosed ADHD/Autism and was in clinical burnout. Working in child and family crisis services for the several years prior, I could feel my already shaky nervous system on the edge of catastrophe—being on call 24/7 and literally functioning as a first responder to family violence. If the police were called, I was called.

That Christmas, I didn’t set up a christmas tree (I never do), but I had a box of unopened gifts in my apartment, sent by my biological mother, JAB. Our relationship at that time was tenuous but still existed—weekly texts, occasional phone calls.

I had explicitly asked her not to send me anything for Christmas and she did anyway. just another boundary she had to cross in the name of “love”. She purchased everything in it, wrapped it, and wrote my adoptive father’s and siblings’ names to the gifts, even though I knew they had nothing to do with the purchasing or wrapping What was supposedly meant to make me feel special, always without fail, made me feel guilty.

They sat in my living room unopened for about six weeks before I finally was prompted to unwrap them after receiving a text from JAB prying me for a thank you.

I already knew what would be inside: something I didn’t want, something I didn’t like. Something that cleary did not make sense for me or my life. That’s how she gave gifts. She gave me things I didn’t want. Things that were clearly not age-appropriate (an Easy Bake Oven when I was 25, a unicorn stuffed animal in my 30s). She rarely offered me things I could actually use, and instead opted for objects that would clutter my life and my space. Then made me feel bad for not being grateful.

So that year, I explicitly asked for nothing.

And what I got was another box of guilt. Fucking classic.

Shortly after, in April 2024, I was in Prey, Montana for my grandmother’s memorial. She died unexpectedly of an unknown heart condition at 65. She and I had not been close in recent years—JAB had made it clear it was either a relationship with her or with my grandmother—but I had been communicating with her in spirit since her passing in January.*

During that visit, I realized it would likely be one of the last times I would see my family—extended or immediate.

Since my ADHD/ASD diagnosis, I had become acutely aware of my anger. It welled inside of me. Sometimes it was the only reason I got out of bed. Anger and self-discipline is jet fuel for your life trajectory. That visit, I was acutely aware of my anger at the hypocrisy and duplicity in my family system.

I tend not to engage in conflict with people I know won’t be willing to see my side or consider that they might be wrong. And after a lifetime of experiences with these people—honestly, probably multiple lifetimes’ worth—I knew I needed to save my breath and walk away.

Flying back to the PNW, I realized I had no one to pick me up at the airport. Even after living in the city for a year, even having a few connections, a few people I spent time with—including a friend of over ten years—I had to Lyft back to my apartment. This was a new low.

That moment, following directly after my family interactions from that week, something clicked. or rather - snapped.

I would rather be alone and lonely than surrounded by people and still feel alone.

I still had a few weeks of medical leave, and I used that time to apply for other jobs, to get out of crisis services and continue to allow my nervous system and body to mend.I took a position as a contracted case manager and became self-employed.

This was private-pay medical case management—lower acuity, less mental load, and significantly higher income. It was wonderful. It also meant more responsibility.

And for the first time in my life, I saw responsibility as a privilege—not a burden.

Being self-employed meant managing everything myself—things I would normally go to an agency’s IT department for were now on me: tech, devices, accounts, troubleshooting. I applied for business credit cards and got an LLC.

The LLC is actually a hilarious piece of foreshadowing, because I didn’t even need it. I could have stayed a sole proprietor. I couldn’t explain why, but one Saturday morning I was dead set on getting it, and had the paperwork filed within 36 hours. It would be one of many signs that I was about to become fully self-employed as a Medium.

That same spring, I wrote both my parents a letter and stating: I am sick of having mommy and daddy issues. You’re about to have Mistee issues.

In July 2025, I legally changed my name, removing my adoptive father’s last name. There were moments in my young adulthood where he failed me profoundly—not small things, but foundational ones.

By keeping his name, I felt like I was consenting to that version of love. And looking at my dating history, I could see I was replicating that model.

I couldn’t do it anymore. I would literally die before doing that again.

That had been the pattern: being given something I explicitly don’t want—something that isn’t good for me—and being expected to be grateful for it. I wrote a poem about this, Maggots. Some people’s love feels like that. They hand you something rotten and expect gratitude. Then get angry when you don’t give it.

By December 2025, I had moved again—same city, different apartment—one of six moves in two years. Exhausting. This time, I didn’t give my address to any family, to anyone.

Foreshadowing. I didn’t know why—I just knew not to. Classic Mistee behavior.

I enrolled in an Address Confidentiality Program. Because of a past restraining order, I qualified. All my mail goes to a separate location and is then forwarded to me.

An entire year had passed and I had released the jealous, unreliable connections in my locale (you know, the people too busy to preoccupied to pick me up at the airport). I had just put my head down and worked my ass off. Not just my new job, but really unpacking the patterns and behaviors I was sick of playing out over and over. I started posted in IG - I had not real intention or plan. I just knew it was important that I have a platform. Again. The foreshadowing is unreal.

I was lonely, having released all this dead weight, but not replacing it. I’m still lonely, still making a vacuum for nature to fill. But still, I would rather be alone and lonely than be guilted, shamed, and asked to accept relationship dynamics that that do not work for me—relationships that would require me to be dead for it to be sustained.

I spent the holidays alone and it was fine actually. I checked my phone—there were messages from my adoptive father wishing me happy holidays. I know he worries about me. But I also know I am safer alone than under his care.

Christmas 2025, I told JAB: if you send packages (to the ACP address) they will not be forwarded to me.

I didn’t receive any gifts that year.

And I felt relief.

JAB has always been skilled at inducing guilt. The last time I visited—when I was there to tell her she would never see me again—she slipped in another jab.

She said my sister had asked why I hadn’t reached out.

I had flown in less than 30 hours prior. And I knew it was a lie. My sister and I aren’t close. Even if she was curious, she wouldn’t ask to spend time together.

It was just a dig. fucking classic.

I let her have it. It would be one of the last.

That night, I sat her down at dinner and told her:

“If I learned one thing from you, it’s that sometimes you have to jump off the cliff. So this is me jumping off the cliff.”

I told her I didn’t know everything—but I knew enough. Enough about my childhood. Enough about what she had done and what she had allowed to be done.

I told her I now knew where the scars on my body came from.

And that I had always known not to ask her about them.

Her countenance fell in a way I had never seen before. Her eyes, wide, the outer corners turned down, her eye brows up in mourning, like she was a child watching her beloved teddy bear be taken off in someone else’s car. Helpless. Too helpless to cry out, to stunned to let out a cry.

She asked, “Your scars, what do they look like?”

The last time I saw her, she was doubled over her steering wheel, hood over her head, shaking with tears.

That’s how I ended up 32 years old with no family.

I have siblings. I love them. But their experience is not mine.

And I will always be grateful for what my adoptive father and what he provided.

That does not mean I accept his version of love—or masculinity—as a model for my life.

I didn’t need to go no contact with him or my siblings.

But I knew that cutting off JAB meant losing them too.

There are things I didn’t know until I developed the ability to spontaneously remote view—things my body remembers, but my mind has completely blacked out. These are not memories, remote viewing is like viewing a film in real time. It’s not recalling the scene later. It’s living it.

My healing doesn’t happen through talking. It happens through my body. Anything to by-pass my ability to mentally override emotions: that is where healing is for me. And by healing I mean it feels like hell.

Due to the nature of my profession, I spend hours a day in other people’s subconscious material. I cannot run from my own.

I thought I couldn’t really, truly, be a medium until having all of my own gunk cleared out. It hasn’t worked out that way. Basically nothing has worked out how I thought it would. Good thing I’m a better psychic than I am a thinker.

As I excavate others’ depths, what comes to the surface, a big pale white face, not quite dead, not quite alive, humanoid but not human. is my own shadow staring back at me.

Owning a business will force you to shadow work.

But if your business is shadow work ...

I am being stripped.

Of parasitic beliefs—thoughts and behaviors that wrapped around me and distorted my life, building my own prison around me. I feel like Alice in Wonderland, only instead of out growing a home, I’m encased in a not-so fun house. Distorted mirrors, dissonant sounds, dopamine dispensed at random, and the rug being pulled out from under me with nothing to catch my fall.

False identities aren’t torn off. They are starved until they fall away.

Cutting blood flow to a wart—it just dies and falls off. You don’t even need to take a scalpel, a weak anaesthesia, and dig the damn thing out.

It’s effortless you, you just have to let go.

I’m not grieving the loss of relationships. I’m grieving the relationship that never existed. But even when they were in my life, I was grieving the relationship that just couldn’t be. No matter how hard I tried. And I tried. I cannot emphasize this enough: I TRIED.

What is in your life resonates with you. Period. Tough pill to swallow.

But what is it resonating with?

You?

Or the sicknesses supplied by your blood-flow?











*I’m grateful for the gifts I have, for many reasons. One of them is that they’ve given me a deeper understanding of grief. I can feel that those who pass don’t harbor resentment—they understand, at a greater level, both their shortcomings and ours.