A Different Kind of Different

Happy New Year all! I hope you all had a lovely first day of 2012 and are sufficiently recovered from whatever level of celebration you indulged in last night. I rang in the new year from my bed, asleep. This week has been just awful as far as GP symptoms. Constant nausea and pain. So I went to bed before the magical midnight hour. Anyway, this post is not really about New Years Eve. It's about difference.

I have been different my whole life. Growing up with CP I never fit in anywhere. I could never fully participate in the activities my peers enjoyed, I had some friends who very athletic. I obviously was not. Though I'm not sure if that was related to my disability or genetics, my whole family is not very athletic. We are theatre people. My friends and I had other things in common,  but I rarely hung out with anyone outside of school. The majority of  the houses in the small town I lived in were not very friendly for someone with mobility problems. This made my childhood and adolescence a rather lonely time. I desperately wanted friends who "got" me. I could not really find anyone like that in my peer group until college. I got along much better with adults. That makes sense when you consider that my only extra circular activity as a child consisted of the few hours a week I spent in OT and PT, I was surrounded by adults all of the time. I was too different from my peers to truly belong among them, but I couldn't relate to the adults in my life appropriately either. I was in limbo.

Then I went away to school. At 14, I asked my parents to ask my school district to send me to a residential school for kids with disabilities in my state. Yes, you read that right. I asked to go away. I remember the main thing I wished for when I spoke to my parents was  "not to be the only one" anymore. I wanted to be somewhere where there were kids who were struggling in the same ways I was. They agreed. I got to school, but I still never felt like I belonged. There were people there  with all kinds of disabilities. I had friends with all kinds of challenges, but I only met two other students whose stories were similar enough to mine that we grew close. Even in this environment I gravitated toward the adults.

As difficult and lonely as these years were, they taught me to accept that I would always be different. That things were never going to be as easy for me as they seemed to be for others. I developed various strategies for handling the probing questions and penetrating stares of strangers. I finally had living with a disability pretty well under control.

Then I was diagnosed with gastroparesis. This is a whole other ballgame. Not many people can relate to using a wheelchair, living with spasticity or blindness. Everyone needs to eat though. It is hard to be dealing with a disorder whose symptoms are largely hidden but that are so debilitating. I now must learn to be a different kind of different. I am not sure if I have it in me to do the 20+ years worth of work to accept this new facet of my identity.