‘It’s a very lonely place, all the more when nobody really understands nor cares and the discrimination continues. At the end of the day we’re on our own.’
Apart from society’s usual presumption that you’re okay if you seem okay or unless, so to speak, you’re visibly missing a limb or something or if you have a bandage wrapped around your head, my experience of hidden disability is about life in a straightjacket of inconceivable forms and levels of detail and effort. Of minutiae and perfectionism, of anxiety, of a very individual OCD (obsessive compulsive ‘order’) and of subsequent depression confining and restraining mind, body and heart.
A form of paralysis is not being melodramatic; a life in treacle…
Yet outward normality means nobody knows unless I enlighten them, and even then it’s too complicated to properly explain. People don’t really believe nor care, even those who are supposed to.
I’m/it’s an inconvenience, an inconvenient truth to be swept under the carpet, and anyhow ‘it’s everybody’s duty to rise above and cope with whatever challenges they are faced with’. Lifelong experience tells me that therapies and medication don’t change a thing for me, which in turn means people lose patience and interest.
In my mid-fifties after a lifelong struggle I am tired and have little fight left in me. What was a potentially promising life has long since been lived in survival mode, and I have not been able to cope with and sustain a career, marriage and children nor hitherto a girlfriend even. My preoccupation is such that I don’t pursue my interests, live semi-reclusively, and also don’t even have a dog/god (whom I consider to be one of the wonders of the world).
It’s a very lonely place, all the more when nobody really understands nor cares and the discrimination continues. At the end of the day we’re on our own.
In my experience, some of life’s personal challenges are insurmountable, but people still won’t consider this might be so, nor modify their judgement. I dream of a bar chart drawn-up by God so family and friends irrefutably know… a low column showing their perception and another, sky high, showing God’s all-seeing and knowing reflection of my exceptional and extraordinary lifelong effort – and the integrity and truth of my exceptionally conscientious initiatives for mutual understanding.
Don’t believe everything you see or think.
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