I apologize if the formatting is wonky, I’m posting from a cell phone.

I don’t even know where to start, so here’s the story of “me”

I never got the chance to be “normal” because I had a stroke at 8 months old, the doctors just said it’s something that happens sometimes and didn’t really know why. The stroke impacted my left side so my left leg and arm are shorter, my left hand smaller and weaker, I can’t completely straighten my leg or arm, I walk with a limp and I have very poor dexterity in my hand and am very limited with what I can do with it.

When I was a kid I used to have to go to these clinics a couple of times a year, it was pretty much to monitor kids with disabilities as they grew up, there would be dozens of kids attending these, all with far more severe problems than me. I dreaded going to these. I couldn’t bare to see the other kids that were so messed up, it made me feel so sad for them and at the same time made me feel so guilty for feeling the way I did about myself because I was way better off than them. But at the same time, as a young kid all I really understood is that I was in the same group as they were, so maybe I was more fucked up than I thought. It made me feel like I was anything but normal, it made me feel like such a freak, I used to go after and stuff my face in a pillow so my parents wouldn’t know and cry my eyes out. 

The older I got, especially into my teenage years, the more self conscious I became because of all of this and I started to become depressed and develop social anxiety. And those things obviously aren’t good as you enter the age where you start wanting to get a girlfriend.

I did always have friends, and an amazing family. I was always very close with my parents (especially my dad) and brother and I still have some really close friends today but I never felt like I fit in and I always felt so different and like nobody ever truly understood me and I still do today. 

By the time I got to high school I was so worried about how others perceived me I wanted to do something that would boost my self esteem, so I did the only thing I could, get good grades. I thought that if I got good grades and made something of myself people would accept and respect me. So throughout high school I studied hard and graduated with the fourth highest average in my high school (I know this because my guidance counsellor accidentally left a list of students, organized by highest to lowest overall averages and saw that I was fourth on the list). 

In my last year of high school I ended up getting a girlfriend but it was a toxic relationship. It was the first time I started getting any sexual experience and lost my virginity but for the last several moths of our relationship she shut me out entirely and wouldn’t so much as even kiss me, not that it’s uncommon to have terrible first relationships lol but I felt completely rejected and like no girl would ever want me because my disability.

In grade 12, I had to decide what to do after high school like everyone else, I was good at math and loved chemistry so I decided I would do chemical engineering (it didn’t hurt that a bunch of my friends also wanted to do engineering). Where I went to university, you have to do a general year of engineering and then apply to get into the different types (mechanical, civil, chemical, etc.) so it’s a 5 year program. After you do get into one of the disciplines, the semesters rotate one in school then a work term. 

My first year was horrible, I couldn’t handle the stress of school moving away from home and I failed some courses. Obviously, this made me feel terrible and academics, the one thing that gave me confidence before was now a source of insecurity because now I felt stupid. 

During Christmas break of my first year, I had to have surgery on my Achilles’ tendon to help me walk a bit more normal. The surgery involved severing my Achilles’ tendon in three places and then stretching my foot up and putting it in a cast. Anyone who has had an Achilles’ tendon injury knows that healing takes a long time so I was in a cast for a few months and then had to do months of physical therapy. But because of my symptoms from having had a stroke, I couldn’t use crutches so I was in a wheel chair for half of my first year of university. Being 18 and being in a new environment, meeting new people and being in classes with 200+ people this made me feel even more different and like people saw me as even more of a freak, this was horrible for my mental health and I couldn’t do anything anyway so while my friends were having fun and meeting girls I was sitting in my room playing Fallout 4 with all of my spare time so I became increasingly isolated and my social anxiety got progressively worse. 

I ended up getting back into engineering my second year and by my third year I got into chemical like I had planned, and by the time I got into chemical I learned how to navigate university and the course load and did well in school again but I couldn’t stand it. I hated the material and I hated my asshole profs that didn’t know how to teach and blamed it all on the students. But I kept telling myself I gotta stick it out to get a couple semesters of chemical and a couple work terms under my belt to decide for sure. After I got that, I still hated it but didn’t know what else to do so I kept going at least for the mean time)

Then my dad, who I always considered my best friend, and as the person who understood me the most got sick. I watched as he deteriorated over six months from a healthy, active guy to skin and bones riddled with cancer. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in January of 2019 while I was in a school semester for that winter. He moved to the city where my mom, brother and I were living in a house (even though my parents were divorced) and started chemo. 

Chemo went terribly for him, even session was met with infections and internal bleeding and one week before my 22nd birthday in June, 2019 the doctors gave him 6-8 months to live. 

I spent the spring and summer working 40 hours a week, doing a couple courses on top of that because I had to in order to do in the school semester in the fall of 2019 and taking care of my dying best friend, bringing him to appointments, to the grocery store, cooking and cleaning for him, etc.

I was really just going through the motions and had no idea how to handle any of it and constantly felt so sad. Sad for my father that was dying but also sad for the loss I was about to experience, the grieving had already started. 

He died 6 weeks after the prognosis of 6-8 months, nobody was expecting it to be that quick. I held his hand as he took his last breath at 3:19am on Friday, August 2nd, 2019. My world was destroyed, my dad and best friend was gone and I was more alone than ever before.

Throughout all of this, my best friend (I’ll call her A) was by my side the entire time. She had recently gone through a break up and we were there for each other throughout the summer and she was there for me in the weeks after my dad died. We became increasingly close throughout the summer and after my dad died I started sleeping at her house multiple times a week because I didn’t want to alone. I developed feelings for her and we ended up sleeping together one morning after I had stayed at her house. We decided to not tell anyone and spent the couple of weeks going about everything normally. Until, her ex boyfriend came back from out of province and she told him within two hours of him being home while at a party where we all were. 

It turns out she only slept with me to get back at him, and then when she succeeded at that she cut me out of her life. I felt betrayed, rejected and stupid and the fact that she was the one person I felt like I could open up to, the first person I slept with in over four years and only the second person I had ever slept with had done that to me. It really made me feel even more like no woman would ever actually want me and now 3 weeks after losing my father, I lost my best friend as well. 

A week after this, it was time to go back to school but I wasn’t ready at all, and the semester I was entering is notorious in my engineering school for being the toughest one. I forgot to mention, as soon as my dad died, I developed intense insomnia immediately. I went from being able to sleep 8 hours a night with little problem to being lucky if I got 3. I couldn’t concentrate in school, I was there pretty much 9-5 Monday to Friday and then had to do all the studying that came along with it after. I was exhausted all the time and all I could think about was how much I wanted to drop out of university and kill myself and I almost failed out that semester.

Nobody understood what I was going through, no one had a stroke at 8 months old or watched their dad died because we were only in our mid 20s and all of that on top of hating my program was awful.

I ended up just scraping by that semester and then felt like I should stick it out since I only had two semesters left. 

I graduated in May of 2021 and got a job as an engineer but even that wasn’t what it was promised to be. I was always told that I would be able to get a good paying job right out of university and that was the only thing that kept me going in the program so I could graduate and stop bring a financial leech on my retired mom and afford a life for myself. But is that the case? No. I have a job making almost $30,000 less than the average salary of someone in the exact same position in my province did in 2012. And all the jobs that pay better want 5+ years experience. I still can’t afford to live on my own, my mom has no money because she’s supporting me, I’m still a fucking loser that has no confidence to talk to girls and now on top of that I have a receding hairline at 24 when not a single person in my family has ever gone bald. Even my dad going through chemo at 66 years old had a full head of hair.

I have no confidence, I know in my future I’m going to age terribly, my hip, knee and back are all going to be so fucked up by the time I’m 50 because of my stroke symptoms, I already have pain. And what do I have to look forward to? A life of increasing isolation as my family dies and my friends move on with their lives and have families of their own. I’ll probably die of cancer in my 60s alone and disabled like my dad before me and his dad before him. I don’t want to die, but I think about suicide a lot. I’ve gone to therapy and I’m doing it now too but it never really helps much, I’m just a lost cause.

I know this is really long so if you made it this far, thank you for reading my sob story.