This year is probably the biggest year in ever both losses and gains. Yes, I will give both :)
The first big gain of the year was finding my friend Amber again. Yes, again. Almost 10 years ago our attempt at romantic involvement was killed by her parents with whom she was living with at the time. The situation was not pretty for her at the time. Her parents were terribly evil people and her dependence on them because of her disability was unbreakable for the longest time. Even with no communication for 10 years because we were both impossible to find, we never forgot about each other, and on one evening while I was doing a google search on Toby Keith, I came across a blog that turned out to be hers. What makes it even more incredible is that her mentioning Toby Keith was a mistake, and if you know Amber you know that she never ever makes mistakes about music. Never. One tiny uncorrected mistake on an obscure blog 10 years later brought me back to a wonderful friend who then quite literally saved my life last month.
The major loss of this year surprisingly enough turned out to be the biggest gain in my life, ever. I lost the final remnants of the person who had been my best friend for almost 3 years. The friendship had really died over a year earlier but I held on hoping she would once again become the person I met years before. If you know me personally or only read any of my last few journal entries, you would know that for the better part of my life I was under this misguided conviction that it is better to die than to intentionally hurt someone you love. Rather than tell them things that could have really made a friendship or relationship more stable in the long run, I internalized all of it until there was nothing left of myself. For her there was nothing good in life and no good deed ever went uncriticised. So many people try to good things for her and she invariably returns hostility. Until the very end I remained silent and depressed but when I was finally able to tell her some of the things she did to hurt and invalidate me, hoping that she would realize them and perhaps change for the better, she went straight for the jugular. Metaphorically speaking, if she had a knife I would have been as dead as the potato she once slaughtered in my kitchen. It didn't hurt me though, because I was already free of the pain.
But from that trauma, a great change came about. I am truly a new person, almost like being born-again. In the following days there have been dramatic changes in my life and the fear I had for so long is completely gone. I am now able to relate my feelings instead of hold them in and I regained long lost perspective. My friends see the change in me too. Once again I am the happy person I used to be and I didn't need drugs or any other crutch to do it.
So what were the gains?
First, the gains from her so that I don't sound like I am as bitter. In the beginning I learned from her that a good way to learn about new friends is to every day ask them to tell you one thing about them that they don't already know, be it good or bad. From her I learned simple word games that expand both vocabulary and thought. One game was to take any word and using several or even all of the letters or sub-words in that word to make up other words. Another was to simply write twenty things that you know. I learned that nothing on earth feels better than both giving and receiving oral sex. I learned that I have it in me to walk a million miles even if I am only expected to walk only one.
Another gain is Laura, my love of 5 years and the woman who was to be my wife. We have not been together together for 3 1/2 years and until very recently have rarely talked. In the past few weeks we have done a lot of talking and it is nice to have her as a friend again. She is now engaged to a wonderful man and I'm incredibly happy for her. Because she asked me to to say it, just to keep her sounding real, yes, we had some incredibly shitty problems back then. Happily, we both survived.
A gain just in the last few days is with my online friend Carly. She and I have talked almost every day for the past 11 years. We started chatting online when she was just barely 17 years old and she went on to be my partner in starting Disabilities-R-Us. She and I share the same disability, Arthrogryposis. She now seems to be taking the next evolutionary step in understanding herself and others and it looks to be good. It has been fun watching her grow up as well as me growing up with her. I am sure we will get the chance to meet someday.
I guess the sum of this entry is to say that I'm still here everyone. Nobody ever knows how much time they have left but I am here now and I am me again.