Tao, you are not odd. There was a time in my life when I considered the hospital to be safe. It was usually when I was depressed. Staying at home, even now, is getting to me big-time.

But the healthy me hates that place with a passion. There's the reasons you all know about. But it's also a constructed environment. It's deliberately built to be free from stress. There are patients and people there who understand you. I doubt I can say the same thing about where you live. (No offense.)

You belong out in the real world. While you cannot get rid of the stress completely, you can reduce it a great deal. Take it from me, the first step is to put some distance between you and your mother. Go to college in September as planned. Study your guts out. Go there with a mission in mind, to improve yourself.

Your mother may make some noise about needing you at home with her pain and all. You are at an age where you need your own life. You can still be there for your mother while living your own life away from her. This is also from experience: your mother can look after herself. If I can and she can't, then that sounds rather pathetic. I'm a paraplegic with nerve damaged feet and constant pain that requires morphine and I still manage to look after myself, even with the depression. (There are some shrinks who have "offered" to incarcerate me in a nursing home. They don't see me as capable. I am capable.) If your mother isn't, then she can either get extra help or she has more mental problems than she's letting on.

Once you are away from her, you'll learn some new truths about yourself and her, at least it was that way with me and my father. My first stint of college was good for little more than that, because I wasn't ready.

But I eventually got the idea that my father was a controlling peasant and there was enough reason for me to leave permanently. I'm much better off, even if I am living on beans and rice. No one raises their voice to me or calls me a disappointment. I can decide who comes and goes in this house for the most part. If a nurse yells at me, I can have her replaced. Life's too short to put up with that manure. I put up with it with my father, to my knowledge, my mother still puts up with it.

I don't have to put up with it any more and neither do you. Your mother has a warped view of the world and she's warping you. The sooner you get out of there, the better. Once you are out, surround yourself with people who treat you with decency and kindness. YOU DESERVE NOTHING LESS.

There is a thing more crippling than cerebral palsy: the prison of your own mind.