The Way I Was...

I've been fortunate to connect with a person I knew many years ago. I didn't know him very well, and I'm trying to be more of a friend now. However, remembering the way I was is disturbing.

I was not a nice person. I was in such a self-involved haze! Not so much drug-induced, as just checking out of life by thought processes. I wanted out of what was going on so bad, that I hardly saw what was going on around me. If someone didn't serve my immediate need - what was in front of me at the moment - I pretty much ignored them. Not the nicest way to go about things.

And of course, telling the intervening 30 years of history has been interesting, too. How to condense the history of a life into short sound bites. "I got hurt and lived in pain for 22 years" doesn't begin to tell the story of the hell it was. The financial, emotional and physical hell. Not being able to hold a job because of physical discomfort; not having health insurance to deal with the injury or seek treatment because I couldn't hold a job; not having funds to live on because I was always between jobs. The way I used people because of the pain, lack of money and no health care. The way I used drugs, booze and fantasy, to handle the pain. And the feeling of low self-worth because I was useless, in pain, and broke all the time.

All because "I bent over one day and couldn't stand up again." No car wreck to sue an insurance company or driver, no job-related injury. Just a simple movement we do everyday. I bent over and couldn't stand up again.

Even now, the thought of it makes me cry. 22 years of lost income, lost opportunity, and self-involvement.