Disabled,no-income,abused,abandoned,Help rebuild Tyfa's life

My name is Astilio Tyfa Ostellia Zyneburger. I'm disabled and have no income and am fighting for my life amidst a world of abusers and unstable housing. I have muscle weakness including fatigue, pain, and lack of stamina, chronic insomnia, severe chronic depression and anxiety including suicidal ideation, severe PTSD including nightmares, flashbacks, and other reactions, OCD, BPD, and DID, and because the disability system is so ruthless, they keep denying me even if it would get me outright homeless or killed.

When I was 22, my brother started becoming an abusive, manipulative control freak, who started telling me to hate and fear my own family. He took advantage of me after I tried to kill myself in 2018, and offered to let me live with him if I do everything he says. One day, he got into a fight with me because I got very sick and wasn't looking for a job. I lost most of my muscle mass and was barely able to eat or walk. He accused me of faking it, and then turned around and punished me for following his way of life. He showed my father and sister things I said that were in agreement with him, conveniently leaving out the part where he said them first. Things got worse and because of recognizing patterns of abuse from my mother, I realized I had been completely fooled and conned by my brother, controlled like a puppet to his every whim... That was the day I learned how truly insignificant, lesser than, and small I really am... The day even my own father could not reassure me that self-confidence or esteem was something I should have, so I discarded it forevermore and believed I deserved it when my brother obsessively threatened over text and in person to assault me. I deserved to feel discarded and given up on.

Because of my brother's threats to never let him see the grandchildren again, my father kicked me out. I had to live with my narcissistic abusive mother who made me live in an open closet space, and I had to deal with her husband who once threatened to kill me when I was only a child. Needless to say, I needed to get out and went to college just to get away from them and their abuse, neglect, and bigotry.

College proved difficult with both my physical and mental disabilities. I couldn't continue to do full-time, but wouldn't have the financial aid to have a place to live if I switched to part-time. On top of COVID-19 happening and making things much worse, I had no choice but to leave. At the time, I was dating someone named Vivi, who I continued to date even when I found out she was cheating on me by dating someone else in a "polyamarous" relationship. I had no one at that moment. No family, and not particularly close to very many friends... I forgave her, because I had nobody and needed her. Not only that, I was introduced to her other partner, Temi and we became a polyamarous throuple.

So I moved in with Vivi in Phoenix, Arizona, the other side of the state from my homestate of Pennsylvania. Temi moved in shortly later, and it was the start of a year of abusive hell. Vivi and Temi constantly made fun of and degraded me, dismissed me, or devalued my opinions. They treated me as a freak, made no efforts to understand my disabilities, my struggles, even my autism. At one point, Vivi didn't understand that I am asexual and was only being anything else because of abuse and people forcing me to not be okay with being asexual. Vivi begged me for sex despite this and guilt tripped me into saying I don't love her anymore if I don't have sex with her. At the end of it all, at the height of Temi's lying and abuse, I almost killed myself again. Temi even lied to several of my friends that I was the abuser in the situation when I mostly avoided them because they were abusing me, and at the end of the day that's all she told me about it "You avoided us", yes, no wonder, you were treating me as lesser than, different, smaller, more insignificant. Vivi herself is a compulsive liar, she can't not lie most of the time. I lost several of my friends because of Temi's manipulation that was going on without my knowledge in a different server I wasn't in. Most of them never even got the chance to hear my side of things because they had all already believed Temi's lies. Ultimately, I was getting kicked out for a 2nd time. I needed to find somewhere else to go…

(NOTE: I have an in-depth collection of my thoughts from when this was more recent but chose not to name my abusers because I lacked the confidence in myself that I didn’t deserve to be abused. It is here.)

So I moved in with Emily all the way back in Pennsylvania, who as of writing this on March 25th at 4AM, I am living with now. At first, we were good friends, but there were underlying problems that only got much worse over time.

It started with the screaming. Emily would scream obscenities at the top of her lungs while talking to customers over the phone for her job while working at home. I wasn't allowed to have certain things, like a key to the front door, or being able to communicate with the landlord to get things fixed like my bathtub and shower faucet that remained broken for nearly a month while Emily barely showed concern or care.

Steadily, over the course of three years, she changed from dismissive to outright abusive. It started when my disability was denied after my first court hearing while living here. Emily's tune shifted from a supportive tone of trying to help me keep fighting for disability, to trying to push me to get a job despite me being completely isolated with no transportation and struggling heavily with both my physical and mental well-being.

I've been on the verge of malnutrition constantly while living with Vivi, Temi, and now Emily. Lately she's been constantly buying food out and rarely sharing whilst still having me handle all of the groceries at times. I only have 1 person's worth of food stamps so having to pay for groceries for a household of 2 doesn't always sustain and while she would cover groceries if I ran out and pay for other things like my phone bill and occasional needs, she would never be open or communicate about money, would often lie about money and make me help her with GoFundMe’s or lend her cash if i had any, while still spending a lot of her money on unshared food while I am mostly always starving or struggling to eat more than once a day.

One day, Emily in drunken anger broke a beer bottle. Glass was shattered all over the floor and she came into my room and was shouting on the floor about her problems while I sat in my chair nearly paralyzed in fear. Until reading this document, she never really apologized for this or acknowledged it was ridiculous and unacceptable and wrong. I quickly started to realize Emily was at times vain, performative, and self-absorbed while struggling with problems in life. She was often only considering things important if it attained to her needs, and often dismissed, forgot, or did not care about anything not concerning her.

The final straw of us not being friends anymore was when Emily began lashing out at me. Emily was threatening to kick me out, and lashing out at me because Trump won the election. Both me and her are trans women who have very real reasons to be upset, angry, and terrified. She took it out on me repeatedly for 2 weeks, being dismissive, talking down at me, accusing me of manipulating her for reacting negatively to her outbursts that triggered my PTSD of my previous living situations, and ultimately I had to get my friends to intervene and talk any amount of sense into her to get her to stop being directly abusive. But then things just faded completely. After that, she stopped caring about me completely. She stopped talking to me unless she needed me, she made me feel lesser than, insignificant, I slowly started spiraling really badly. I devalued myself until I no longer believed I was a person. That I am exclusively a thing that only exists to be used and then discarded. I no longer had any voice. It was not just diminished, it was completely erased. I was no longer a human being.

Then, one day, she told me she was moving out and I had to figure out where to go in only 2 months. I am struggling to tie up a lot of loose ends with my transition, name change to my true chosen name (which she gladly got for herself and did not help me for at all, all the while bragged often to me about it), and I'm generally really fucked over and stuck now. But then she even had the gall and nerve to start gloating... talking at me to brag about how her life is so wonderful now, that she has everything figured out with moving out, while she has literally discarded me into potential homelessness or some other random home, possibly not even in my home state again.

As of Saturday, April 19th 2025, things hit their lowest. On the prior day, Friday the 18th, we were discussing uhaul pricing for my move I was planning in just one week. We had a scare when it seemed like the uhaul pricing per mile would be well over 800 dollars (I did the exact math, it would’ve been $1350 dollars per mile) but we learned it was not the case and that uhaul trips that return to the same location they were taken out within the same day have a flat rate and would not be much more than $400. But before we learned that, I told her no matter what the price was, we would figure it out. I have my wonderful girlfriend, my very kind generous friend who was offering me to live with him in his 1-bedroom apartment even if we would be crowded, so long as his landlord and apartment complex would approve it (we are still looking into that), my extremely sweet cousin and her equally sweet mother my aunt, and my own father as well. Despite those reassurances, she left the car to make a phone call to her mother, and started screaming at her at the top of her lungs in the laundromat parking lot for everyone to hear that she couldn’t help with money or transportation.

While it’s very terrifying to be around when that experience is happening, I knew I could depend on my friends and family, I wasn’t worried about money, I was already prepared to make things work out. I reassured Emily this several times… however, that night, while I was enjoying an online date with my wonderful girlfriend and best friend of 7 years, I got these DMs from her:

I very immediately suspected something was up, and I know Emily. She’s panicking, therefore she wants to lash out, just like she has to myself and others before. Even some of my friends said to give it a benefit of the doubt, but I knew in my gut she explicitly wanted to lash out harmfully, and explicitly wanted to take advantage of doing it in person and not over messages so that she couldn’t be held accountable for it later.

(Some text is cut out because GFM refuses to crop this image properly but the full image is in this document. What is cropped out is her accusing me of dodging her just because I wanted to know the urgency and if I should interrupt my date that night.)

Me, calling out that this is suspicious and she obviously wants to do something bad, something which she refused to elaborate on even slightly, accuses me of “dodging this.” Notice how Emily is projecting here, as she explicitly dodged my questions about the importance and severity so I could gauge if I should pause my date. I knew she needed to cool off and sleep on her emotions because she was only acting on them. I went to bed after my time with Cam was done.

Saturday the next morning, I am awoken in my sleep (fun fact, that was the first real sleep I got in 5 days and Emily already knew this from the day before) by aggressive knocking. I know immediately it’s emotional. But I’m sleeping only in my underwear because my room traps heat a lot. I scream out that I’m undressed, but in her rush she doesn't even hear it and barges in, scaring me even further. She asks me for the key to the shed which she locked with a rather nice lock I own that I lent her. I tell her to let me get dressed and she aggressively turns on the lights and stomps out of my room. I get up, notice the key is on my desk, place it in an obvious place on my desk and go to lie back down, but before I can even message Emily on my phone not even a minute after she left my room, the aggressive knocking returns, I’m still undressed but cover up with a blanket, shout that the key is on my desk, and she grabs it, stomps towards me, and aggressively begins what she wants to say at a very fast pace, faster than I can comprehend any of it, and faster than I can respond at all. She then leaves afterwards.

So before this happened, I was discussing with my friends to set up a safety call, so that if I felt threatened when Emily raises her voice, I can press a call button to a friend and immediately shift the power balance she is forcing in her favor intentionally back to an even playing field. But she was so aggressive, forceful, and quick that I had no choice but to listen to the emotional jabs she wanted to make.

She said she would no longer be helping me move and that I now need a uhaul driver other than her to come get me, blamed me for “straining her relationship with her family and her boyfriend”, ostracizing her from my friends and telling them lies about her, and that “it’s over”. I felt like I was being gaslighted into thinking I’m crazy or the problem, I rarely ever talked to her boyfriend or mom and was only ever kind to them so it made no sense the blame was being deflected to me, I felt like I was being projected onto. The comment that I strained her relationship with her boyfriend is very funny because I never asked anything of him, barely talked to him, and helped him lend a supporting hand when Emily was suffering and crying several times before by letting him know to help her out. It’s most funny though because she literally ruined an entire relationship I had because of her aggressive demands to force me to move in with her as soon as possible, which by the person who was driven away from me’s own words, the situation Emily forced onto her was so stressful and worrying she couldn’t continue the relationship anymore. Ironic… Either way, between my extremely terrible mother, my stepfather who threatened to kill me, my brother who used those same tactics, Vivi, Temi, it's all the same, and I am so tired of being treated unfairly and feeling less than human. I put my foot down.

My friends told me this was a very mature and sensible response, which I think is true, I trust them. And for a time that seemed to be the end of it. But then I noticed, all of her stuff is gone except some stuff she didn’t want and had no use for. Time kept passing and a deep fear settled in. She’s not coming back, isn't she? I’m stranded here and her intentions were to cut me off and leave me here alone with no further involvement on her end. She abandoned me with no transit, no way to get more groceries, or renew medications I’m out of (my anxiety meds LMFAO!!!!!) and now I just need to get out of this house as soon as possible. I got mad, sent her some much less mature but very deserved assertive messages saying she isn't allowed to treat me like this and not take accountability for treating me so awfully, and then blocked her. After I spoke up and another friend of ours did, she returned home to apologize, and explain, and for the first time in a long time we had real honest conversations.

While completely abandoning me wasn't the intention, she explained that she has been getting pressured and pushed around by her boyfriend and mother to just cut me off and kick me out for months now. And the Trump fiasco makes a lot of sense now finally knowing this in hindsight. I know Emily, she does let others pressure her and give in, even when she stated she didn't want to be unfair or harmful to me. I know she can't handle stress well, I know her. I don't think she's lying at all and she fully admits that it is not an excuse, she shouldn't have said the things she said today, or ever treated me poorly, she feels shame she wasn't able to show more care in our relationship or not.

I've asked myself dozens of times, “Is this abuse?” It's a hard thing to measure. I know she acts on emotion beyond her better judgements. She knows she did a lot of things wrong and genuinely wants to improve, and I've seen her grow too while living with her, watching her find a good therapist, have a happy life with her boyfriend, and she still deserves that. Is Emily an active abuser? No, absolutely not. It at times definitely felt like it when things hurt so much, but the reasons and intentions behind things were always hard to tell without communication. Did Emily do things that were abusive? Yeah I think so. But y’know, I can’t guaranteeI’ve never been guilty of the same at some point within my long struggles in life. I’ve had several great therapists regularly since I was 15 and Emily didn’t get the privilege of finding one until 27, learning to cope with high levels of stress and anger issues takes longer than a year. Good people never want to be harmful or abusive, and how one acts after they make a mistake can often be more important than the mistakes themselves.

I probably won't be around with her to see the changes and improvements she will make for herself in the future. But I do hope she fulfills the last thing she promised me: to grow from this. As for why her mom and boyfriend push her around, I don't know, it might be a misinformed expression of care that clearly wasn't the care Emily wanted. I hope Emily both doesn't let others push her around in the future even if it's misguided love, and that her loved one's learn how to better understand and communicate with Emily to accommodate what support and expressions of care she does want. Sometimes people also just unfairly hate on disabled people without jobs or income for not contributing more financially. I always tried to contribute the ways I could whether it was washing dishes in the dishwasher, replacing trash bags, breaking down some boxes, and providing emotional support. I wasn't perfectly on top of all of it all the time but I tried my best. Their misconceptions or misunderstandings are their problems, not mine.

So now I’m here trying to fight to reclaim my voice. Enough is enough. I want to be a person again. Human again. I want to have a voice. This is my story. My whole story. Neither my brother Chris, my abusive exes Vivi, Temi, anybody, none of them can take this voice away from me ever again. I don't want to be a victim any longer. I will persevere to get what I deserve, a happy life in a safe home where I am loved. Please help me afford what I need to until the US approves my disability case that deserves to be approved. My life is a fucking ruinous mess decorated with abuse because people do not understand or accommodate my disabilities and decide to use and control me, then discard me. I deserve a regular life, please... Please help me attain that.