a 14-degree curvature of the spine. bulging and desiccation of the thoracic and lumbar discs. pinching of the sciatic nerves.

rheumatoid arthritis present in the hands, wrists, shoulders, hips, knees, and ankles.

osteoarthritis present in both sides of the hips.

type-1 marsh lesion in the duodenum, corroborative of celiac disease.

elevated ANA two and a half times the normal range within the last six months.

a new but strong allergy to skin adhesives.

frequent sinus tachycardia with accompanying left-side pain. possible RVH to consider in any future imaging and testing.

extreme, pervasive gender dysphoria.

a continuous, mild-to-severe risk of suicidality.

i have become familiar with words and phrases i never wanted to know.

each one, tacked upon my flesh with the dull stab of a doctor’s ballpoint pen.

each one, an additional sentence of pain to be served in this prison of flesh and bone.

i have become familiar with sterile medical settings i never wanted to be in.

each one, a cage that produces only terror and sorrow.

each one, an environment meant to be for healing, but instead acts as a battleground.

with a broken body, and an exhausted mind, i must continue to fight to prove these things are real.

with a shredded spirit, and a heart that has been sapped of strength, i must continue seeking care to stay alive.

i have been given far too many medications than i ever wanted to take.

each one, causing more onslaught in my esophagus and gastrointestinal tract.

each one, providing little to no relief for my agony, despite insistent promises that they would.

i have been given so much false hope and insincerity.

it is funny how convincing and honest some people think they are when speaking to the sick.

however, i have not even the energy to laugh.

it is less funny, and more tragic, this rotting system that the sick are made to navigate, that places profit values over that of human lives.

however, i have not even the energy to do anything about it.

and isn’t that the whole point of it?

disability and sickness are two things that people, for some reason, wholeheartedly believe will never strike them, until it does.

it struck me early enough such that i am always aware of that fact now.

but when will it get you?

no, not “if.” stop saying that. the only “if” is whether you’ll live long enough, but it will happen at some point. 

for the children, and those of more innocent and pure heart- the ones that still see the good in humanity and have optimism for our future as a species- i feel sorrow for them. they are the least deserving of their misfortunes.

i am somewhere in the middle.

the bigots, the old animals crippled by lung disease and gasping for breath after a lifetime of spewing hatred; the fools, the political pundits dying after their pseudoscience “treatments” completely backfired, taking how many innocents with them; i do not pity them. 

i will be waiting here in this hell for them. i will stick around solely to remind them that they have deserved- no, earned- this.

i will do this until i, too, die, in the vain and feeble hopes of convincing myself that i do not deserve mine.

i am a cruel father. i am the type to leave and not come back. i have not the patience to bring forth new life and sustain it, when i am already losing the battle to sustain my own life.

she jokes that our roles will reverse; i will become the parent, and her the child. i immediately grimace. i have already had to parent myself in the face of your failures. do not put this responsibility on me; i cannot and will not accept it. i know i wouldn’t be a good father; i haven’t even been a good one to myself. i look upon my own timeline of healing and cross my arms over my chest, frowning and defensive, questioning why in the goddamn hell it’s taking me so long. shouldn’t you be over all this already? shouldn’t you be better by now?

i am the type to let you yammer on and not listen. i’ll be on my fifth “that’s crazy,” not having remembered a single detail, but do you even notice that i don’t care? or do you disregard my details, just like i do yours? i’m just a repository for your bullshit, and the constant headaches make it hard for me to remember shit even if i wanted to. maybe it’s my own fault for hiding my disinterest so well. maybe it’s my own fault that i grew up in a place where even the slightest hint of discontent or discomfort was berated and beaten out of me. obviously, that didn’t make it leave; it just shoved it further inside me, deeper still, under a visage that has only ever served as a mask. hiding true feelings, hiding true pain, hiding an entire goddamn identity. but was it my fault that the lottery of fate put me in a place where none of those things would be accepted? i couldn’t be a good father; i wouldn’t know how to show the kid i care.

is it my own fault that i’m sick too? you know, if i had a dollar for every time that someone told me i could be healed through (1) god, (2) diet and exercise, (3) increased personal effort, or (4) some combination of the aforementioned, i’d be a fucking billionaire. and if i really acted on how i felt every time i heard that shit, i’d be in prison for mass homicide. i used to be normal, and i can’t tell you how many times i prayed; how many times i sobbed, shaking my swollen hands up at god, immobilized in bed, begging him to take the suffering away. but he never did, so clearly, he’s not listening, and why would i continue to waste my breath on things that don’t listen? it’s better spent surviving, huffing and groaning with every motion. an ancient automaton creaking and popping in every hinge. all i need now is a fresh layer of moss to grow over me every night, so that i might rustle and shift it and compose some beautiful spectacle of nature each time i awaken; that way, maybe it would all mean something, or, be worth something.

you know, my sickness made me this way. i remember having more capacity for kindness, for hope, for gentleness, for human touch and interaction. i remember my heart being full then. now, part of it is occupied by a void i can describe only as bitterness. a despair that this pain shall always be within me. and this pain is one that, unfortunately, is usually not understood until someone has it. constant physical agony shortens your fuse. it makes you only want to do things that will be truly worth the suffering. it limits the amount of things you can do in any given day; things you must do always take precedence and you don’t even get to all of them, let alone getting around to any other things you just want to do to find joy. it really does make you bitter. how can you fully appreciate the beautiful scent of a flower if your back feels like it’s snapping as you lean in towards it? how can you appreciate creating some beautiful work of art if your hands burned, swelled, became immobile, unusable, ached with such a fierce and hellish intensity that cutting them off seemed like the only relief, during every second of the creation? i create when i am able, nonetheless, hoping that it will salve my soul; but every night, i am seething, holding back tears, holding myself and holding ice to my hands, waiting for the drugs to kick in and steamroll me into dreamless sleep. i would not be a good father, but i have a weed problem, not a drinking problem. such problems are hereditary for me, regardless. i don’t want a kid to have to deal with that either.

in my opinion, there are no blessings to this pain. positivity and acceptance are important things to promote when speaking about disability in a society that views our lives as inherently worth( )less, and i am proud of and happy for those that can speak about their experiences and find silver linings. however, for me, there are none, and sometimes, the perspectives of just how much this shit fucking sucks need to be shared. i was already made strong by the emotional and mental onslaughts i weathered in early childhood; i didn’t need this bullshit. it took away dreams. it relegated me to a lifetime of having to deal with the accursed american medical system, even before i accepted my identity. it isolated me, and then forced me to find comfort in isolation when it got worse. it infected every waking moment with inseverable, incurable corporeal torture; and to this day, others don’t believe it exists.

again, they insinuate that if i just tried harder or listened to their asinine fucking suggestions, i would be better. it compounded an already existing anger problem and turned it into a fury, a violent burning rage which i wish i could pathologize or characterize as some “dr. jekyll” identity secondary to or separate from myself; but it is me, nonetheless. every time someone tells me to “get better soon,” i feel like rending their head from their shoulders with my bare hands, because i can’t. there is no cure for this. at the rate our capitalist hellscape of a society is going, there won’t be one anytime soon, especially not as long as some fucking soulless corporate ghoul can still profit from my suffering.

i cannot be a father in any genetic sense. no child deserves the curse of my genes. so many of my relatives’ problems manifest in me; there is no denying i am theirs. my guilt is already a horrific monster now; it would grow to unfathomable proportions and eat me alive should i pass on any of my mental and physical health issues to a child. i don’t think i would leave the child, but my mind would leave the realm of normality; i would lose my soul if i had to watch the child suffer as i had. that, in some sense, would be my fault, and i couldn’t accept that. i would die inside, but remain living to support the child, but no child deserves a miserable husk of a person for a parent.

in general, i am also just no longer compatible with other human beings. i have grown resentful (even though that feels like too small of a word to encapsulate the feeling) of human apathy, and of the human hunger for cruelty. nothing has exemplified this more than witnessing a genocide, livestreamed and televised on all platforms, with survivors of this genocide having to beg on social media to be able to afford the little aid that this tyrant-state is allowing in, with survivors of this genocide being corralled into cages and gunned down, and with supporters of this genocide cheering it all on. and these hateful warmongers, these detestable creatures devoid of heart and soul, make memes out of the slaughter of babies. they make jokes out of the intentional, precise sniping of children, and the degradation, displacement, and torture of an entire population. they set up chairs on hills to watch over and laugh at other human beings being bombed. this world is rotten, evil. how could i want to bring more life into this machine of death? and i am sick, and i cannot do a goddamned thing about it which eats at my soul and aggravates me in such a way, like ticks dug in all over one’s body, like an unending painful disease, such that i am no longer patient; but at least for this thing, for this hellish and terrifying phenomenon of human apathy, i can at least say it is the world’s fault.

in all of this, it feels insurmountably difficult to find a meaning to life. when mine is marred by such pain, and when others see no difficulty in taking human life away and shitting on it, how could i entrust this world with a life i would create? i could not be a father even if i wanted to. i would be too paranoid; this world has never been sane or safe. my child would always be stuck inside the house, like me. you know, there was a time when i wasn’t so afraid and angry; but those were the days of childhood naïveté, of not really understanding how the world works, and those days are long gone now. even that propped-up goal i had of going to law school was naïve; before i understood that the world’s systems are working exactly as designed, i had the misguided belief that things could be reformed from within, and that the system was even worth reforming. but no system responsible for as much death as this one deserves or is even capable of reform, and i am still going to law school, shambling one corpse-like foot in front of the other, one day at a time, in a corpse-like system full of other corpses- dead inside but being forced to toil lest they end up decaying on the streets- that’s devoid of empathy and dedicated to producing more corpses. that is the fault of us all. 

i know not what we should do about it, either. those who still have some hope and optimism for humanity as a species are the ones you should ask; not a curmudgeon embittered and made distrustful by humanity’s bitterness. those who still have the capability to look ahead, idealize, and conceptualize are the ones you should ask; not a person being confined to the present moment by pain, who thinks he should’ve died five years (and counting) ago. i am no longer the type to think that barbarism can be reformed or changed in any peaceful way, but what good would i be to the cause if i could not run? fight? does writing about it in this way even do anything when there are thousands, or even millions, of others also writing? i always end up with more questions than answers, but they are not even good questions to ask. it’s the brain fog setting in, you know; i get a little distracted, a little off-topic, my attention briefly interrupted by that sharp stab of pain when i moved my knee just now. where was i? i could not be a father if there was even a sliver of a chance that i could ever forget my own child’s name. i could not be a father while i am sick because god forbid my child was taken from me by the machine or its acting agents, and my bones were too brittle to fight the assailant and rescue my child, such that something then happened to them, i would not be able to continue my life in any sort of sane manner because then, at that point, i would know that it was surely my fault