Okay, let's deal with the problems of now

Hi, I'm new here.

I believe I have Pure O, obsessive disorder. I've never been diagnosed with it and it's not really my problem RIGHT now, per se, because I have other problems on my plate, and besides thinking about problems I still want to have fun and live my life in a healthy way. I'm in a wheelchair, with spina bifida, and scoliosis, with a curvature of the spine, which impairs my sense of gravity and makes it hard to walk.

In 2007, when I was 19, I had a corrective surgery called a Spinal-Fusion, where they basically took out some of my spinal discs and fused a rod to my spine and put two screws in my hips. The pain was terrible and it was a week before I could sit up on my own. It took a year to properly move around again. I ended up missing two years of college to have this operation and all the complications that arose because of it, including many infections, a giant flesh wound on my back and several cases of spinal meningitis. I was in the hospital in and out.

The last time I was in the hospital, my on and off girlfriend since I was 12 decided to simply stop speaking to me. I decided not to call her and ask why, because for a while she had been acting very uptight as if I owed her something for coming to see me in the hospital during her senior year of high school. She did not call me either. A month later when I finally came home, mostly recovered, I found she had blocked me on AIM, so I had a friend speak to her instead. She claimed that I was "emotionally abusing" her, and said that hopefully some day I would learn how to be a kind person.

In fact, I'm offended that she would mention abuse, considering throughout our relationship she slapped me for siding with her friend in an argument, nearly dislocated my jaw by grabbing my throat when she thought I was sexist at her sixteenth birthday party, hit me various times and took a whack at both me and my best friend after losing to us at Wii, and then when I asked her to stop, acted offended that I would put my foot down against physically striking me.

Now I am regretting everything about our eight-year relationship that's gone on since I was a little kid. She is an unorthodox case, lives with her since mother, who once got married and divorced within six months. She has called for genocide of everyone who offended her in middle school, and blond people. Her last name means "serpent of war" and she collects deadly weapons in her closet, and likes to keep rats as pets. For a while, besides the violence and the dictator-like respect she wanted (I'm not kidding, she likes researching dictators), we had great chemistry, and she taught me to trust rats, snakes, and upper class Republicans.

She drew me a picture of me in a hospital bed with her as a gigantic snake looking down on me. Some people automatically thought the snake was going to eat me, but everyone who knew her said that it was trying to protect me. Now I don't so trust it as I did.

And I'm regretting that I let an immature, somewhat violent girl that doesn't know the ropes of life yet into my heart, and showed her my vulnerable side: being in the hospital. Because she acted awfully spoiled in the end, especially with the claim that I abused her simply by being difficult to talk to because I was in pain and decapacitated. I told her before my surgery that I was afraid, she told me not to think about it; I told her, "butterscotch" which is a codeword she has for #######4, and she changed the subject and said, "You hate me, don't you?"

I feel this is changing the way I look at life; it's making me look at my friends too, as if they might betray me in a similar way. Sometimes without her company, too, which used to take up a lot of my time, I don't know what to do with myself, and occasionally I've looked at my pain medications thinking I want to abuse them. I also have a lot of trouble sleeping, whether it's thinking about her or not, and I sometimes slip a Valium to help that. But coming down from it, and dealing with other problems, making me pretty bitter during the day. And with all the people that helped me through all this, medical and emotional, nobody deserves for me to be bitter to them.

Hi,

Your words are heartbreaking to read. Things are clearly not perfect in your life, Casy, but you're going to have to move forward. There's a big pil of crap/$#%^ behind you that you ned to just lt go of, and there's a future waitng for you too. To stay positive about things, try to always have something to look forward to. On thing that I think you could find positives from is resarch everything you can about Spina Bifida and maybe thinking about becoming something of a 'leader' in the promotion of awareness of the disease. I don't think it's unfeasible for you to actually contact doctors in this area too who wish to carry out research on Spina Bifida.

Don't let the ignorance and shallowness of a few from your past ruin your future..

Kevin

SunshineCasy wrote:she taught me to trust rats, snakes, and upper class Republicans.

Abusive isn't the word. She's downright evil. Stay as far away from her as you can!

Incorrigible wrote:

SunshineCasy wrote:she taught me to trust rats, snakes, and upper class Republicans.

Abusive isn't the word. She's downright evil. Stay as far away from her as you can!

Again, hilarious

Chucky wrote:Hi,

Your words are heartbreaking to read. Things are clearly not perfect in your life, Casy, but you're going to have to move forward. There's a big pil of crap/$#%^ behind you that you ned to just lt go of, and there's a future waitng for you too. To stay positive about things, try to always have something to look forward to. On thing that I think you could find positives from is resarch everything you can about Spina Bifida and maybe thinking about becoming something of a 'leader' in the promotion of awareness of the disease. I don't think it's unfeasible for you to actually contact doctors in this area too who wish to carry out research on Spina Bifida.

Don't let the ignorance and shallowness of a few from your past ruin your future..

Kevin

Thank you for your kind words Kevin. Clearly, I do need to move on and that's the key here. I far from gave up after this surgery. I haven't done my best to exercise and walk, but I picked up on old goals and continued my life as it was. I'm a writer and an artist, so imagination and just thinking, dwelling is what I do best, and my situation is so ironic and - hilarious - as someone pointed out that it barely escapes my eye for storytelling, and that's how I become fixated on it.

Whenever I feel a sharp pain in my knee or hip from the surgery, or the future operation I need on my knee - it reminds me of the disaster right behind me, and the bitterness of what I have to face in the future, because I know I'm going to go downhill. I need to find something, someone to care about enough to distract me from myself. After all, everyone suffers eventually, but good vibrations, favors and goals last longer. I care(d) about this girl a lot, and a lot of our arguments were me trying to act like some parental figure and give her mature advice, but she decided she didn't want me acting superior to her, and I became her punching bag. I have a suspicion that eventually I'll find my place in taking care of or advising other people.

Obviously I don't want to try and save someone who's going to bash me in, but when you take care of someone or give favors, you can't expect it always to be mutual. But I still need to save some energy and respect for myself. This is the balance I just need to learn.

And I do need to find other people who are handicapped like me and begin a dicussion forum with them. It's just that, for the longest time I felt like inside my head I wasn't handicapped, because all my friends are normal healthy walking people. And then I had this surgery and found out how squeamish and vain other people who are perfectly healthy can be, and realized that being handicapped is an element of my identity. Thanks for talking for talking to me.

No problem, and I will continue to be hear for you for as long as you want. I just want to pick up on something specifica that you've mentioned though: You said that you really care for this girl, but are you completely sure about this? I think that people can easily fall in love with the idea of being in live; maybe maybe they don't actually/genuinely love the person involved. What I mean is, you want to be loved and to love someone - and you are trying hard to let this happen with this girl - but this is clouding the personality of hers that you see. In reality, she has proven to be ignorant of your condition and needs and is not willing to help you. Is that nice? You might be fond, but try to rememner that she's not deserving of the inspiration you have for her either.

Chucky wrote:You said that you really care for this girl, but are you completely sure about this? I think that people can easily fall in love with the idea of being in live; maybe maybe they don't actually/genuinely love the person involved. What I mean is, you want to be loved and to love someone - and you are trying hard to let this happen with this girl - but this is clouding the personality of hers that you see. In reality, she has proven to be ignorant of your condition and needs and is not willing to help you.

That's right too. I am very in love with being in love. Sometimes I imagine that she's the same way as she used to be, but...it's not that way. She was a nice person a long time ago, and it hurts me how sharply she cut me off, but oh well.

I feel as if I want to end contact with all my friends at once.

My best friend Mark is 21 like me, but he's developmentally disabled, and very obsessive. He picks a few topics and cannot stop talking about them with anyone. Every time a train comes past, whether it be in front of us while we're talking, a couple of blocks away where it is vaguely visible, or even if he hears one while he's at my house, he tells me, my parents and everyone in sight about it excitedly, what train it is, where it's heading, etc etc. These days he has even regressed to telling me about each of trains he's seen when he's on the phone with me, ending with telling me how he wishes I was there with him. When I make it clear I'm glad that I wasn't there with him, he tells me to knock it off, as if to warn me not to shatter his delusion.

This is undoubtedly the same dysfunction I made friends with in high school. I made friends with him when I offered to take pictures of trains with him, saying that not enough people appreciate the simple things in life, and defended him from bullies who would mock him. Even after I graduated, I still went walking with him, went out to go see something to eat and trotted down to do some train sightseeing. But there were reasons to admire him in high school. Even though he was in Special Ed, he was a hard worker and had a photographic memory. I used to tutor him in Chemistry, where I credited him for helping me get a do-over, because I failed it the first time. With my best friend in the same class in my senior year, I aced it the second time.

However now that he is graduated, he has put himself at the mercy of his parents, who keep putting him in the family occupation, security guard, where he just does not belong. Once he abandoned his post because it started raining. He keeps getting transferred from place to place because he doesn't get along with his co-workers, and his bosses take advantage of his good nature by choosing to slack on paying him sometimes. Now all he does - literally, since he's obsessive about the things he cares about - is rant about how he's getting screwed by his job, tell me about trains, and occasionally he repeats lines from Grand Theft Auto, a game on his Playstation Portable, which he carries everywhere, verbatim. I can't stand it anymore. Once he repeated lines from the game to a random girl in his high school class (the year after I graduated) and the police we called because she took it as a death threat. He never forgave the girl or all the teachers that he used to like that held it against him.

I'm his only friend, really, so he calls me frequently. But whenever I talk to him now, I feel like I'm dripping with contempt. This doesn't feel like an acceptable friendship anymore. I wish I didn't have to cut him off - because this reminds me of how my girfriend cut me off because I was "emotionally abusing her" - so last phone call I told him we could go for a donut sometime, and I left it at that.

And my other friend - Mel - is a different case. She has ADD. She was friends with me and my girlfriend, only really my casual friend and less hers. She's obsessed with video games and the internet. She once skipped school to come see me at college, which is a pretty serious thing to do since she's a good student. Our connection pretty much is the art sharing site, deviantART, because we're both writers, and Japanese anime. In the last year she's had the habit of asking to come to my house and then only staying here to use my internet when hers isn't working. She tends to be really rude to the other people in the house, and in the case of my last birthday party, she stayed on the internet all day, and only came out for cake when she swore at other guests - I mean, geez. And my parents keep telling me she has a crush on me, which doesn't seem entirely impossible to me, because yesterday she kept bugging me to take a photoshoot of her (like I used to do with my girlfriend) of her dressing up as her favorite cartoon character, which turned out to be the one that walked around with their shirt half open. I took the pictures, but went home rather disgusted, and got madder when she yelled at me over IM because she wanted specifically the original pictures, not cropped.

This feels like a case of before and after. Before I graduate, after I graduate? Or before I had a hospital procedure and after it? I used to prize all my friends, especially my girlfriend, even in their rudeness, violence, or annoyingness, as deviant, unique, out of the box, misfits. I thought I was a misfit too, since I made friends with them instead of "normal people". Now I'm starting to feel like they were the bottom of the wastebasket sort of friends. I mean, there's stuff we have in common, and I don't want to just rudely end it, like what happened to me, but...I mean, they're not making a good case for themselves. Maybe if I had a smooth transition from high school to college, I would have stopped talking to them and made friends in college, but these have been my buddies throughout the two years I've had to stay at home because of my hospital procedure. I can't wait to go back to college.

Okay, well, forget the other friends. Nobody likes that post I guess. Too much?

I'm really anxious because my parents invited demon-ex girlfriend and her mother to to my mother's graduation party (she's graduating with a Bachelor's from Pheonix University) because they still like her mother. The party's in my backyard.

Her mother has always looked down at me because she has never found a man that suits her likes, even married and divorced within a half year and now she distrusts the whole gender of men. Which is probably a gene she passed on to her daughter. She's venomous when it comes to dropping remarks about me, who -- I don't understand if she didn't want me for her daughter or she did -- she has manipulated us both ways before.

The whole family just scares me, and since she said "we" might come over, she might bring my ex-girlfriend. A sort of misery runs through me anytime I see or hear about her... if I hide in my bedroom, I'll just be preoccupied with what's going on outside, but if I go outside and happen to bump into one of them, I feel I might end up telling them what I think. Which isn't pleasant and could cause a scene at my mom's party. And I'm very proud of my mom, and I don't want to ruin her party.

All around, I wish my parents would show some backbone and stop trying to make friends with them. They're the ones who sent us the rejection, repeatedly, and knocked me around, and talked down at me like I was a dog, ignored my parents' previous invitations, why the heck do my parents still try?

Casy,

I recently emigrated and just forgot to reply to your post again. I literally only had access to the Internet for 1 hour or so over the past week. What have you learned though? Your most recent post here makes it seem like nothing has changed. This isn't good enough, to be honest, and you'll just have to try hard to change. Your mother will always be annoying, but only if you let her. Just pass off what she says/does as silly. It's better to laugh than to hate, Im sure you'll agree.

Kevin

Hate only arises from not understanding...right? And I am seeking to understand.

I feel as if after everything I've been through, even casual ribbing from my former "mother in law" (not by law, I know) is just not tolerable. I deserve more respect than that, and I know she disagrees. I mean - I underwent spinal cord surgery, and they even almost operated on my brain - almost, but my specialist rescued me as they were about to call the ethics commitee, long story, but somehow along the way, even as I was in a hospital bed, saying few things to my gfriend between painkillers - she managed to convict me of emotionally abusing her.

I e-mailed her a few times. And she told me that me being in the hospital was not a major problem for her - she was upset about a prior argument before I went into the hospital. There's this friend of hers that frequently throws pool parties. I went to one of these parties, and found this guy insessantly flirting with her even as we were both together, laying against each other, obviously acting like boyfriend and girlfriend. By the end of the night, he asked her for a goodbye hug, and she hugged him really quickly, and then seeing my expression, hugged me too. So I thought, you know, I'm going to be a nice boyfriend, and not make a big deal about this.

Well, by the next pool party, we had both decided not to go because there were wildfires in his area, and she didn't want to inhale the smoke, and I was feeling a lot of back pain, getting closer to surgery time. However, that night she told me that her mom did let her go, and she went, and she told me all about the same guy, and how he nabbed a hug from both of them and how much fun they had. Mind you, I still wasn't mad, I just told her that I felt a little at loss because I was in a wheelchair and he walked, my injury prevented me from going to the party, and she was flirting with someone else.

I can't imagine how she would picture someone with my composure; small, meek, wheelchair-bound - injured - as insanely jealous. Quite the same way she stretched the truth to make all the harsh words in her e-mail seem like self-defense against an abusive boyfriend. All this after I come back from the hospital from trying to hold on to my livelihood.

And we were once - beautiful friends. We're both artists, and storywriters. We used to collaborate, with me as the writer and her as the illustrator to create stories.

Either way - I guess I am still having a problem forgiving her, because I don't understand what was going through her mind. And that's why I can't imagine taking a casual joke from her mom. I mean, I do not dwell on this nearly as much as I used to. It's a story that's blaringly hard to forget, obviously, but it's starting to get old for me, and I've gone through the ins and outs of "she was so mean" and "what was she thinking" and now, frankly, I care about my own goals and projects a lot more now. There're a lot more attainable too.

And who knows, maybe if I was to see her mom at a party, I could actually say the perfect thing, or explain my stance, and we could understand each other a little better.

Honestly I don't know how much I've learned here, except to try and distract myself and get new projects to separate myself from the past. But my imagination - my brain - just goes too fast just to plain forget something. Time is really being my best friend here.

Sorry I reacted that way to your absense, Kevin - everything go okay with the emigration?