I guess I should start from the beginning for the benefit of everyone.
When I was a kid, my little brother had allergies. He was allergic to basically everything. Milk, wheat, sugar, corn (specifically corn syrup) , mold, you name it. He was seriously down to eating rice bread and water for a duration during his childhood. We stopped celebrating Halloween and the candy parts of Easter and Christmas.
We would often travel downstate to Indianapolis to doctor specialists to get his arm full of shots to determine what all he was allergic to. Just welts up and down his arms, trial and error. It was excruciating for all involved (but proooobably moreso for my brother.)
When he hit his teenage years, suddenly these things were no longer a concern. He ate what he wanted, and things seemed to be fine. The end, right?
My brother told me tonight, casually in conversation while driving around, I guess for the benefit of my wife but assuming I knew, that all that was a lie. My brother was not really allergic to all those things. He was a little lactose intolerant and he did have a problem with mold, but my mom decided that he was allergic to everything, and constructed this world centered around finding more and more things he was allergic to. But my brother eventually rebelled and ate what he wanted and OH HEY i guess it was all bullshit.
So that was a shock of a thing to learn. It makes so much sense now that I think about things. My mom fakes her own allergies all the time, and what she can and can’t eat depends on when you ask her and it never lines up with what she actually eats. And once in my early twenties I told her that I had a bad reaction to eating bananas and she lit up like I’d given her this amazing gift. I thought it was odd then but now oh my lord.
Anyway.
Jesus Christ.
WTF.
Yeah, I couldn’t watch He-Man, but my brother fucking ate rice bread and water for a few years.
Holy crap. Not only is that seriously awful for your brother, but actions like this actually harm those of us who do have severe food allergies. People who encounter this type of faking and see it exposed are that much less likely to take us seriously.
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