content warning: family ableism/abuse (nonspecific)

(note: this is just me sharing my own story. i'm not trying to say this to compete with you.)

i learned from prior chronic illness that telling my supposedly supportive family about my health is a terrible idea. suddenly i had no medical privacy. anything i told them was shared with everyone. they'd out me as disabled to complete strangers when wasn't relevant to accessibility or urgent health issues, even when i wasn't present. they started using my disability and their self-appointed "caretaker" status (they weren't doing anything to care for me, and were instead abusing me) to lift up their own egos and earn pity points from their friends.

nothing in my life has destroyed my relationship with my family quite like being disabled. not even after coming out as trans were they this awful to me. they are no longer family to me--just people who exploit me to make themselves look more sympathetic. if i were physically and financially capable of moving away and going no contact, i would without a second thought, but i'm trapped here tethered to them.

when i started developing new developing and it became clear clear i was going to be diagnosed with MS, i lurked the top posts in this sub, and found a concerning number of posts talking about how they regretted telling people close to them that they had MS...and i made up my mind to never tell my family. i haven't, and i don't feel the least bit bad about it.

i realize that having a prior severe disability and toxic family relationship puts me in a position where that's an easy choice. my prior disability masks my MS symptoms. if MS were my first chronic illness, i'd probably have told them simply because i didn't yet know what i was in for.