My father once said he wished he could hit me. Osteoporosis has saved me from that.

I have told my father about his yelling, before I left home. He wouldn't listen and just told me that I should stay with my family because everyone else would abandon me like everyone else in my life had. He hasn't changed in 11 years. His family is terrified of him, even his wife. It is interesting to note that once I left, everyone else soon followed.

To this day, my sister can not sit in a car when there is yelling going on. That was his favorite place to yell, in the car or in the van.

I do not have the skills required to tell this man to fluff off and it may take years to obtain them. I must keep myself safe because even yelling, this man can intimidate me and he knows it. I have no real reason to want to go home, just so I can put up with more yelling over a condition that I neither asked for and that I can not cure.

These people have no understanding of mental illness whatsoever, no compassion for it, hence I can not explain my reasons for doing things. (My parents want me to get more help and I don't want to spend my life living with nurses.) They have very little faith in my abilities and are convinced that I am one breath away from a nursing home. Granted that I desperately need help, but I am doing the best that I can.

The ironic part about their lack of compassion is that my mother has depression, as does a brother, sister and uncle. So I am no worse off than the rest of them are and I am not the family disgrace that they paint me. I'd like to know what my mother tells her shrink about me. Probably that I am the sole cause of the family woes because I did not do this, this and this when I was seven years old, or because I moved away. I am so sick of taking the blame for everything in that family.

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