I've had so many downs that I need a ladder to get out of the hole that's been dug.

Being sent to a psychiatric institute for being bad, at age 7 didn't help matters either. Nor did being yelled at by a father who may have been more screwed up than I was. (But I didn't know it at the time.)

My friend, Doug, observed that I didn't have very much love for myself. He's told me to start believing that I'm a great person. I wish it were that easy.

I spent a year and a half in a psychiatric institute for "non-compliance." I've felt like a freak ever since. A freak who deserves to be yelled at.

I would never dream of calling anyone on here a freak. But I freely call myself one. Why?

Well, when your parents point fingers at you and say something's wrong with you and you refuse to fix it...when they call you a cripple every day before heading off to school....when you were stuck in storage rooms for bad behavior...when you've been told that everyone's abandoned you and everyone will abandon you...and that family members won't come near you because your disabled.

When it's your own parents telling you this, this thing tends to stick, especially when you have no one else to tell you otherwise...when no one else knows that the yelling is happening. And by the time you free yourself from this influence, if you are lucky enough to do so, the damage is already done.

If you're disabled, you may never get out. I did only because I "chose" a lifetime of poverty over a lifetime of yelling. No one should have to make that choice.

Now I am left to clean up the mess my parents helped to create. Granted, my father was a man in desperate need of help, but to my knowledge, he never chose to seek any help. He chose to keep everything a secret and take out his guilt and anger over two disabled family members on the entire family, as well as the deaths of his parents, while trying to keep my disability a secret from the family. (My sister didn't know I had CP until she was 11 and she found a letter by accident.)

Now I am left to pull my psychiatric records from my childhood and other parts of my past. My shrink wants me to write a novel based on experiences I have spent 25+ years blocking out. I fear what I may find.

If anyone is inclined to feel sorry for me (though I don't recommend it!), save it for my father, because he is more psychiatrically disabled than I will ever be and he will likely never know peace as long as he lives. And he doesn't need to suffer like that. It's not his fault that I was born the way I was. Dirt happens, it just keeps on happening in our family and it will keep on happening to me.

If anything, I blame myself for all that's happened, including what's happening now. And I wonder how much of it is payback for the psychiatric institute.

If I am so worthy of love, then why am I living on $1067 a month? Why have my hip joints disintegrated to nothing? Why am I on morphine? Come to think of it? Why do I hate myself so much? Why are people with disabilities excluded from everything?

Have we done something wrong to be punished like this?

If we are no more evil than the next man, then why are these things happening?