I've told anecdotes, but never really explained me: who am I, what's my context, what's my damage? So here's my whole goddamn life story. I've broken it into four parts, about 1,500 words each, for ease of reading and referencing. Part 2: ages 14-22. (Part 1) (Part 3) (Part 4)
I moved to public school in 8th grade and just plain didn't make friends there. Not until high school, and even then not many. Over the summer between 7th and 8th grade, my dad sent me to Aviation Challenge, like the Air Force-oriented Space Camp. I got a chance to be at the controls of a plane for a minute and I was instantly hooked. I knew what I wanted to do with my life: I wanted to fly planes.
I began cutting. Wait, hold on. Not the normal kind of cutting. Auto-erotic cutting. I'd imagine myself being gutted, so I'd take a razor blade and cut a slit down my belly. I'd make cuts across my arms or legs and imagine amputation. Stuff like that. I'd do other things. Auto-erotic asphyxiation, self-administering half-gallon enemas, somatic counterparts to my thoughts to enhance them and make them more real. There was another thing I'd do that I was ashamed of: I'd tuck. I'd push my balls up inside my scrotum, shove my dick underneath my taint, and pull briefs super-tight. And I'd do everything but pull my dick out to get off.
Mom started to get increasingly emotionally abusive. She always ran hot and cold, alternating profuse, insincere praise with utterly vicious demolition of my confidence, but it increased in intensity. She knew how to twist the knife and she knew how to spend years inculcating insecurities she could exploit as weapons. You're hopeless, you'll never amount to anything, you'll end up just like your worthless uncles. You're disgusting, no one will ever want to be with you, no one will ever love you. Well, you're batting .500 there, Mom.
In high school, I was pretty low in the pecking order. I was socially awkward, shy, inhibited, and repressed. I found solace in flying. I joined the local Civil Air Patrol squadron, and I started taking classes for the written test to get your pilot's license. The local airport became my beacon of hope.
I had a lot more injuries along the way. By this point, since 3rd grade I'd torn my knee's synovium and messed up the meniscus, had surgery to fix that, had a concussion, broken my foot, sprained multiple fingers, sprained my shoulder, sprained my neck (that was kind of an epic ski crash when I did those last two), broke my thumb, and had another concussion. Good times.
I started to consider myself an atheist. It never really occurred to me to apply that label, but it had been true since I was young - I never got anything out of synagogue and just didn't buy this whole "god" thing.
I couldn't talk to girls. My anxiety shot through the roof if I even thought about it. What if they could see behind my eyes and see what I'm thinking about them? What if they detect this desire I have to be them? And then the intrusive thoughts came and I pictured them getting butchered like animals. No, couldn't risk them knowing I thought that about them.
As soon as I got a car, I started hanging out with an old friend from the gifted school. It didn't take long for him to introduce me to weed. I fucking loved weed. High was the third best feeling in the world (after #1; flying and #2: grinding on a pillow while hanging yourself on parachute cord and slitting your belly).
I was still active in CAP after that, and went to search and rescue school, where I got certified as a Search And Rescue TECHnician 2nd Class (SARTECH II). I got really into backpacking around that time and was fit as fuck. I was 5'6", 110-120 lbs. of pure lean muscle. I miss those days.
I became too strong for my dad to do the whole face beating thing anymore - I could hold my hands away. So he switched to things like pinning my face to the floor and punching my head until my scalp bled and the gemstones popped out of his ring.
I was an AP student, I got mostly good grades, I just wasn't active in any extracurriculars other than a year of marching band. I shat myself in class one day. That was pretty embarrassing. I lived it down, though, because I got another, more obvious reputation.
In junior year, I got an ingrown toenail. It got infected, and I was stupid, and I didn't go to the doctor the second it started oozing, and I put a liquid bandage on it, so the bone got infected. The bone infection lasted for months. I was on a crutch, I spent time in the hospital for observation, they took a bone biopsy. That's when I knew something was wrong, when I felt pain before waking up from the biopsy. The infection was gone, but I stayed on the crutch because my foot, and now my whole leg, hurt. The pain kept getting worse, and the leg became red and swollen. The orthopedic surgeon called in anesthesiologists to look at it. They figured out that I had reflex sympathetic dystrophy (RSD), as it was then called. RSD is one of the most painful diseases known, and it's incurable. It gave me an answer to why my leg was hurting, but it wasn't a good one - I could only expect it to get worse and spread (it spreads in 90% of cases).
It did spread to my other leg in a few short months. I was going into the operating room every two weeks to get nerve blocks done, then every week as it got worse. I was on terrible medications that made me forgetful, unable to think, unable to speak, and balloon up to twice my weight (I had been 120 lbs going into that; a year later I was 250). With both legs hurting, a crutch did me no good. Instead, I went to school with a cane. Thus I became dubbed "Gimpy."
I became depressed (no shit), so they put me on Paxil. Big mistake. What happened next: I had a psychotic episode and went to The Nuthouse. tl;dr: I tried to kill myself, I got locked up in the psych ward, I tried to kill myself again in the psych ward, they practically gave me a chemical lobotomy, I got molested, then they let me out of the psych ward with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder type II.
Dad wanted to cheer me up. He wanted to make a man of me. So he indulged in a family tradition: he took me to a prostitute. It was degrading and humiliating and generally awful. I couldn't perform at all, I didn't particularly like the feel of penetration, I was pathetic. I had even tried to avoid fapping to the horrific stuff for a while before hand so I could perform, to no avail. I returned home with one more embarrassment to haunt me.
I got a call from "Nick" one day (remember Nick?). She said her name was Nicole and she was a woman. I didn't know how to react. I mean, good for her, I figured, but... awkward. I had all these feelings I couldn't accept or even process. On some level, I was jealous. On another, I just didn't know what to make of it. I mean, she was always effeminate, but I didn't know what this meant. "Transgender" wasn't even in my vocabulary at the time. We talked for a while, I wished her well, and we said goodbye. I tried to puzzle over it, but eventually went "well, that's weird" and filed it away.
They gave me an implant to control the pain, a spinal cord stimulator (SCS) it's called. The implanted battery was supposed to last for years; it lasted 6 months. It was a great device, but there were a few problems. For starters, once it was implanted, I could never SCUBA dive again (I loved SCUBA diving), even if I got the RSD in remission and got the implant removed. There were other things permanently off-limits, too. Also, with a 6 month battery, I didn't want to have to go in for ass surgery (where it's implanted) twice a year.
I quit the doctors at Stanford Hospital (where I'd been going) over their dictatorial way of doing things, partly with meds and partly with not considering an externally powered SCS. I found a new doctor, one who himself had RSD from combat wounds in Vietnam. He implanted an externally powered SCS. I found another new doctor to handle my meds. Very cool guy, worked at the Haight-Ashbury free clinic for a while.
Years passed. Physical therapy, physical therapy, and more physical therapy. Mom was incredibly abusive this whole time with me at her mercy. At one point she assaulted me while I was recovering from back surgery, throwing me off the bed, leaving me helpless on the floor, and ruining the SCS implantation that had just been done, requiring a second surgery to fix the damage. I changed meds, had a seizure, changed meds some more. I got lost in the K-hole at one point.
The pain and swelling became less and less. I was able to do more and more at physical therapy. Finally, in 2005, my doctors pronounced my RSD to be in total remission - gone for now, but always waiting to come back with a vengeance.
To be continued...
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