I went through intermittent and sparsely dispersed periods spanning nearly a decade of being increasingly confused about another person's needs. I was with barely the strength to get through each day anymore by working out how to make sense of anything I thought I once was grasping about life. It was never done on purpose, but incidentally, I was in effect continually being extremely worn down so gradually that I didn't realise. I kept believing that with just one more chance, there would be a way paved forward, but in truth, my abilities were diminishing the more I tried. Of course I was dealing with other difficult and contributing matters in life too. To my mind, the last clear insinuation finally imparted with utter contempt and disgust at me was that I would never be able to truly love and care for another until I was "independent", and that was something I would never be no matter what I said, and how hard I might try to defend my situation. It was all a bit hard to take from someone I had immense feelings for, and for me, part of this love I had meant trying all I could to suggest that I would always respect his own fierce independence. He said that I didn't know what caring meant. I can squarely take the blame for eventually accepting this and other things in my life that I had absolutely no idea nor experience at containing the effects of.

Furthermore, over the years, it had become more evident that I could barely cope and hardly understand life at all. This did not have to be said, and before it was, it had been looking more and more like that to me too. I had felt utterly useless, a continual and total waste of space, and it was as though I no longer felt like I deserved any right to be alive. Here I was with a very successful fighter for disabled rights. This person's job was at a very high level of an agency which coordinates support for disabled people. This person kept reminding me that not many others thought such people, like we both also were, could ever live independently. He knows, and has been adamant with others, about how vital it is to keep people's confidence in their abilities intact, even through disappointment. Once his temper had subdued, he would often say that he really appreciated me sticking around and that he wanted me to. Now as I look I back upon our own interacting, I believe there were ways in which he was only responding to his own historical distress throughout, but I couldn't really stop that from impacting heavily on me anymore.

I was saddened by everything I had come to know, including some glancing insight into nature of the ordeals which must have brought this man to where he was when I knew him.

"Independence" began to feel nothing but cold. I wanted nothing to do with it if I had just seen what it could do to others, and I too had grown up wanting it all my life. I no longer saw the point. I wasn't aware of how rigid anyone could be in their thinking, until then. I am including myself in how dogmatic I could be too.

After enduring what I did for so long, no matter how much the comments made in anger could have applied, these never helped. He wanted to remain in contact. Initially, when I first wrote some of these webpages, I thought I could continue just being chatty with him, and pretend that the heedier stuff we've been through was just nothing. I find out more with each passing day that there's so much I just should accept about both our capabilities. Yet I can still feel very hurt without him thoughtfully volunteering a qualification, in respect of what was said during those rages. He has - in effect - risked adding so much to hopelessness I believe I experienced, but he cannot be blamed for not knowing what I have since learnt. That is, I've learnt that I was always doing ok in knowing what is reasonable to expect from people raised as more secure in themselves. I still wish I had the strength to keep on being a person who could still be there for a friend.

Of course he is not responsible for whatever I let affect me, but it had been hard to keep believing in his proclaimed caring for much of the time, and yet I still do. I have since said how hard it is sometimes for me to hear him, and thus I then have put an end to exchanges myself, at least until I can feel much more secure with what I have known. I don't know if I'll ever get to a stage where we could talk that freely about this, as I once said that I would have liked to. There's an inordinate amount that I have written on how I'd feel if we're ever in contact again. I'd try to the best of my ability just to be myself. Given his continual presence in disability circles, this has been a pressing concern as to how to just accept him as he is too, if we ever meet up incidently again. I'd like to be kind, mature, reasonable and honest, if the subject of our history was raised. Would I be better at it, if I were prepared? Would I end up collapsing in tears? I have limited him from knowng how hard life has been for me. What he used to say to me in anger would often ricochet around in my memory, and I'd grapple inside all the time with what was once said. His life has certainly had it's own struggles, and he was certainly no stranger to depression, either.

With regards to those rages in the past, I did allow myself to be overwhelmed before arriving on my own at any sense of proportion. I could not seem to register, at more than just on intellectual levels, that there was actually a lot of fear speaking between us that I could not pacify. We were both in need of understanding. I do have reason to want to appreciate whatever a person can give, and I know of the pain when the way someone cares is not believed.

Whilst still in the throes of trying to make sense of our interactions, there have been feelings that just would not leave me, feelings that I just would not know how to describe, and feelings I thought I'd never be able to feel again without pain. I have had pain and dread crowding out anything of what once was. What of my love of life? I had only realised, when it was almost gone, that I also used to experience quite a beautifully delicate subtlety and sensitivity in much of my approach to life around me. Such feeling sounds so awkward, let alone very pretentious, in describing. Then I could just barely remember it. I thought I had lost a lot of such capacity forever, especially with no way to put into words what I wanted back so badly.

Was this a result of my brain damage that I just had to accept, and live with once I really said goodbye to youthful dreams, and never be so selfish as to let another person get involved?

Had I been that protected?

There could have been other clinical and ongoing reasons unrelated to whom I had been involved with as to why my memory and concentration were unbelievably shot to pieces. I was so run down and tried to accept the loss of my skills as becoming usual. People didn't seem to detect much difference. I just felt dumb, and I was lonely for people who I once believed knew me better. Life is becoming different for me now with increased perspective.

Little did I know that what I did learn from this eventually can go into enriching my life even more still. I went through a tremendous amount of feeling and emotion, no matter how many disastrous mistakes I made along the way. Regardless of whatever was right, and whatever was wrong, I had been hurting very much.

In some senses, I would cringe to have in writing that not a day went by in ten years when I wasn't thinking about him, what he was doing, or when I would see him again. The strength of my deep affections, admiration and regard had me scared too. It made me feel so alive in the beginning ... Perhaps this would have all evened out into something entirely usual and manageable had it been someone else I had fallen in love with. Someone who enjoyed the challenges of accepting the everyday as part of all else, and to avail himself to the mutual support a relationship brings with all it's travails. Who really knows if in other circumstances, I could have coped? I believe I'm being more accepting that, as life happens, one eventually gets past such a cringe factor about romantic love. I was naive at any rate, and I can only propose that things became much more extreme than these ever had to, even if I still always was going to be too much in an unsustainable dreamworld of my own.

There was such chaos and confusion spilling into times in-between without seeing each other, helping me disregard so much of the cost of that when contact just always happened to resume. It would be charitable for readers of this to note that my patience and ability to endure had turned so much around on itself, instead of putting this down to naive and very childish idiocy, like I fucking well frankly do...

Amongst such madness that I very much helped perpetuate, I also believe that the circumstances often did not seem to me anywhere near the tentative waning at some stages, that we both said would ensue. That is, towards an ending of whatever we had to just get on and live without. Some of what we shared was just not approached with enough apprehension as I used to foolishly think a casual fling would demand. Neither, as I see it much more clearly now, was it an overall progression of any favourable sort. It broke my heart that he wasn't letting me reach out further to him, exactly in the moments he seemed to need someone the most. Was I that insufficient, or entirely unable to read what I should have? Were my interpretations that wrong? How long did it have to be before I could be prepared enough to give sway again to what I had held back on in case others had been right, and I couldn't manage such feeling?

It's been extremely hard to forgive myself for what I let myself in for. I infuriate myself.

It was mainly the way things were said in intense rages that killed me figuratively back then. I became so frought about matters I would normally cast aside as not worth listening to at all. I thought I could not handle all the pain, because I was failing at being "independent". I felt useless.

Since ending it all, I'd say it was felt like a deep visceral shock really wracking me, and as though I was suddenly spiralling and being uneasily drawn into a collapsing vortex after hearing him, or of him, from others or in the media. I was scared to go out, read material, or approach anything that brought back memories. Continuing to risk sounding much too overly dramatic, I think such reactions needed to be felt to be believed. Excitement of an independence that had motivated me throughout my life, had now left me very cold. This was just my psychology, and no one could have known things would turn out that way. It still frustrates me that I couldn't snap out of whatever was happening to produce such reactions. It had become debilitating whenever I was still privy to all his very demonstrative ways in crying out that disabled people need to feel more valued. However, I also could still spontaneously be taken away in an eagerness to show how much regard I hold for the man, his ideas and energy. To me, it was ludricrous that I could have fallen so hard.

I ended up avoiding investigating and organising any disabled services I could well need in preparation for independent living, for the terror of falling into a screaming heap over him in front of the very people he works with and who I want to convince how much I'm capable and worthy of what they could provide. The irrational startle response has diminished in frequency and markedly in intensity now, and this is partly due to first convincing myself that these effects were not just a ridiculously self-prophesizing put-on.

The effects needed to be worked through. There were also other features in my life I had to process through conceptually after such a long period away, before attempting to return to these more fully. This was in case I was mentally too unprepared for when disappointments had to come. I was never so much of a wimp before, and this all came in on top of formidible demands I was always going to have to handle. Even before we parted, I was starting to feel as helpless in dealing with life as if I was a child again.

Eventually, all things in life that I once greeted with excitement, I learnt to approach with a dread and foreboding, and have only just shaken to a degree that I now hope will naturally wane further. I was given an insight into another person's pain, and was no longer sure if I could deal with living.

Indeed, I had known that it is integral to the capacity for intimacy to feel safe enough to let all defences come down in a way that leaves one very open to enjoy moments to the fullest extent that one can. That is, ideally there can be times of unrestraint with minimal energy needing to be diverted into protecting ourselves and then one can draw as completely as possible from what is felt to be good and what is to be cherished from our unencumbered selves.

I hope I have improved my understanding of how defences build up in the kind of lives with aspects similar to my own, and evidently much more in many of those I've been close to. Then the importance of maybe even unwittingly feeling so free to be, to grow, share and explore, and to just be loved, can be grasped further. This can be identified as a need in any human, but without noticing the depths entailed whatever the particular circumstances, it can leave someone feeling blindingly pathetic in ignorance of how much gets strewn and disrupted. One gets left feeling raw, and then overcautious, with all of what is being delvged into.

I've since built up my confidence in all the ins-and-outs of why I became so susceptable to what happened. He's still often someone I do remember, and I can't easily escape such memories. I now just let these pass, pretty convinced that the circumstances involved were inherently destructive.

It would be extremely trite to look for who is to blame during an attempt to hopefully describe and suggest some resolve in all of this, as the only sense I could arrive at with a lot of reading, was that he was hurting very much in his own way from unresolved historical pain. I think he could not process such pain enough to prevent it from interfering with the present. In essence, I believe that I have now glimpsed at what an unimaginably terrifying aspect of human nature has done to a child who went on living as best he could. I was too in similiar pain to an extent which may have festered and built up terribly as well, had I not had such a disastrous phase in my life stop me.

Life has since involved a bit of a toss up in trying to just go along with what I could without opening cans of worms, either consciously or inadvertently, and thus further risking not being able to get on with pressing matters. It was hard never knowing how much to look into, just to carry on with my own unfinished studies instead. Writing like this helps, especially relaxing me in knowing I have this all down to refer to. Psychological help in the past has produced mixed results, and those supporting me through that have thought that my communicative difficulties have made obtaining counselling harder. I am still not opposed to seeking it, and hence another reason for having this written down just in case. However, I'm starting to be very assured in feeling again. I often question other motivations I may have for pursuing my writing of this past, and how I make it so public. I absolutely should not allow it to go on forever.

Finding an understanding and an acceptance of what eventuated was extremely difficult for me - the nature of doing so, of course involved a lot more than whatever can be put into words. It is now finally rewarding to start to live with genuine joy again, albeit knowing how I can only guess at how devastating life can be for people who've only known destructive ways of living ever since their formative years. No one ever asks to have to go through their development in such a way. Although I go through lapses where I also forget to retain an empathy I need to be able to keep giving, I'd be glad if everyone involved in any such situations be treated with caring, dignity and an understanding. That is, an understanding in awareness that no one really knows with any certainty what brings others to be where they seem to be in their lives. Excuse me for sounding trite at this point where words would always fail.

Thanks for just getting through this page however
much you have, and which I appreciate has also
turned out to be a bit of an ordeal to get through.