Crohn's disease really fucking sucks. I know that I'm actually lucky-- it doesn't really act up unless I travel. But it fucking acts up EVERY TIME I travel. I feel like I age 20 years and am disabled.
It's really bad this time. This whole weekend I've been in pain. I have not been able to eat like usual. I tried eating an apple for breakfast the other day and felt so sick as I was eating it that I couldn't finish it. And at the same time I feel bloated and nasty. Plus, usually I'm a really fast walker, but I've had to walk real slow, doubled over from my back and stomach hurting at the same time.
It takes a lot of effort to go on as normal. It would be easier if everyone knew about it. That way, they wouldn't think I'm boring or disinterested in what's going on every time I take a seat when everyone else is standing.
And yet, that's a really personal thing to be telling people. It was hard enough telling them that I'm on probation (but that was necessary because I didn't want them to get me in trouble). I just told Kyle though. He and I walked back to the hostel from the UND alumni party together, and we got to talking and it turns out we have a lot in common. I told him because I felt like I should tell someone.
He understands what it's like. He is deaf in one ear, so he has a similar problem: people think he hates them because he doesn't respond when they try to talk to him sometimes, but really it's because he doesn't hear them talking to him.
It makes me wonder though, if I've ever misjudged someone for a disability that I never knew that they had. If you know that the person has a disability, it's easier not to misjudge. But it's still not 100% foolproof. For instance, Ben has Asperger's syndrome. I don't really know much about Asperger's, other than it's a form of social anxiety/awkwardness. But I wonder if some of the things Ben did that had bothered me were a result of his Asperger's. Since I don't know much about it, it's hard for me to say whether it was just his disability that made him act that way or if he was actually being a chauvinistic dick like I thought.
Maybe that's what happened with Ray, and also with Joanna and Kelsey. They all ended up not liking me because they thought I made mountains out of molehills. To them, maybe it seemed that way. But to me, I was angry with them because they did not respect me. I do not tolerate disrespect from anyone. (Well, ok. I guess I tolerate it from my family. But I can't just never talk to my family again.) But friends and boyfriends are different. I will not tolerate any disrespect from friends or boyfriends. That is the bare bones of what happened in the Ray situation and in the Joanna/Kelsey situation. In both situations, I felt like they were not treating me like an equal. I felt like they felt I was inferior to them or something and that I was not their equal. In fact, that is also what Mara just did.
I like to think that I'm a fairly tolerant person. It actually takes a lot for me to become really angry with someone. I might get annoyed here and there, but a lot of the time the annoyance is so minor that I don't bother bringing it up with the person. The whole "picking your battles" thing at work. But then for some reason, people are surprised when I actually get really angry about something and then they abandon ship. And one of the things that makes me really angry-- so angry that I will end a friendship or relationship-- is when someone does not treat me like their equal.
How hard is it to treat someone like your equal? Why is it so easy for people to think that someone else is inferior to them? Especially best friends or boyfriends?
This is another thing that I just do not understand. It bothers me that people who claim to really care about me end up mistreating me and thinking I'm inferior to them in some way.
And then, the fact that they don't even admit that they did anything wrong, is seriously questionable. Ray refuses to acknowledge that I was actually the one to break up with him. He was being a dick and not treating me like an equal, so I was given no choice. And yet every time he talked about "breaking up with me" and I corrected him, he would get all shirty and argue with me that I'm not allowed to claim breakup rights because it was a stupid thing to break up with him for.
Um, actually, it wasn't. If he thought I was going to let him make me wait a full day for him to break up with me, he was fucking wrong. I even told him that I needed the conversation to be sooner because of all the anxiety it would have caused me to postpone it. And yet he refused to come to my apartment after work, when he was the one who had tried to break up with me the second before I went into work, and yet I'm somehow the unreasonable one for asking him to walk home afterward. It's not even like he wasn't capable of walking the distance, seeing as how he said he was going to make the walk the very next day with his friend. It's just that he didn't care enough about me to do it. He didn't care at all that he was making me miserable and causing me great anxiety. He didn't even care that it was a shitty thing for him to do to try to break up with me right outside the door to my work.
He was not treating me like an equal, so I had had enough. It's that simple. If you want to stay in my life, then you had better treat me like your equal.
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