My Apartment Is (Still) Killing Me

By the spring of 2018 I had been living in motels since the summer of 2016 when my neurological symptoms and general dysfunction made living with my then-partner and stepkids no longer possible. it was a terrible decision, one we had talked about many times, and one i certainly did not want to happen as it did, suddenly and traumatically for everyone. if i could take back many days of my life i would take back that one. we all felt the need for me to leave. i couldn't be a worthwhile parent or partner. i was a burden to them as i have been a burden to every family i have been a part of because i am not and never have been a functional person in the way that you must be to earn life in our society. because i am this disabled, this injured, my life is worth less than nothing in our society. i am a negative drain. i know this and so i dread interacting with other people because if they despise me it is a drag and if they like me it means they are just going to be inevitably disappointed when they find out i am not really a person like them. i have been waiting to die for years.

when i moved in here i thought it was the answer to homelessness. the truth is that homelessness is better. every day i live here i get badly hurt. i live in the only first-floor apartment in a 1930's art deco movie theatre in central pennsylvania. this sounds like it would be a good time but it is not. i live with substantial spinal defects/injuries dating from birth and then subsequent damage. on the best days i live with a great deal of chronic pain. driving is a nightmare. walking in open space with a lot of car door slams is also horrifying. my body absorbs all significant shocks as central nervous system damage. it just used to be that i would get a migraine or experience a potentially terrifying meltdown after a sufficiently strong trigger. they are active injuries to me, ones that i don't really get better from.
in this building, i am on the same floor as several businesses, who send/receive inventory, update/remodel etc all day long. all of us are above a block-long hollow basement accessible by large steel storm doors in the front of the building as part of the sidewalk. when these doors are opened or shut it sends a tremendous shockwave through the building. if i am sitting in my office chair or going to the bathroom the shock is translated directly along my spine and into my skull.

what exactly is wrong with my spine and skull i have been trying to determine for the longest time and i have recently been totally shut out of access to medical care here in central pa so i can't get appropriate mri imaging done but that is a story for another time.

what i think is wrong with my spine/neck/skull/brain is this:

i was born at least 3 months prematurely in 1974 with substantial congenital birth defects the most glaring of which were orthopedic (bilateral hip dislocation, club foot, spinal curvature) but it soon became apparent also involved neurological defects. my baseline functionality in life was never good, not really managing home life or school, to the point where coercive institutionalization was utilized on multiple, extended occasions. by the time i was in my mid-twenties i was able to work at a library for a decade. eventually i got too sick to work and i had to go back on disability. i had made plans to go be with one of my dear exes and help her in the aftermath of a terrifying separation to her abusive husband with then-small children. right after we agreed to this, i received a complex whiplash/tbi injury at an eyehategod show of all places. i had had concussions and whiplash in the past. this one was different. i spent six months unable to get out of bed, in permanent migraine and suicidal anger. i moved to be with my ex and the kids anyway, knowing i wasn't up to the task.

within a month of my moving to be with them, i fell on the ice between the car and the curb, twisting my already twisted body on top of itself throwing my spine/neck/hips/legs into a disarray they have never recovered from nine years later. i would experience at least one more serious concussion in 2012. my body and brain's ability to absorb shock and vibration decreased to almost nothing, where it is today. i know that the bones and soft tissue in my neck and skull are now intertwined with my spine if not my brainstem. i have come to believe that the kind of very dangerous headbanging i was doing in the 2000's as a relief from dysphoria was only possible and therefore the damage i received from it was possible because i fit a lot of the symptoms of ehlers-danlos syndrome in addition to the many other issues i might have. there also seems to be a pretty high correlate of transness/asd with ehlers-danlos so although i am not a doctor this is my best working hypothesis.

The shocks and impacts from all of the businesses and my landlord going in and out would probably be unremarkable if annoying to someone who isn't me. i mean, there have been days when the table i was sitting at JUMPED because the doors were slammed so hard and i have hit myself in the face with a fork or a vaporizer more than once and i know that even a non-disabled person would get hurt that way but the daily spinal injuries which feel like someone coming up behind you when you are on the toilet and hitting you in the back of the head with a 2x4 repeatedly have taken their toll on me.

sometimes, in my own home, i have to hang onto the doorframe as my body shakes with spasticity as if in a high wind, or i vocalize involuntarily grunts and howls because my body cannot form speech. things have gotten much worse in the past year and a half and they wouldn't have if i hadn't been living here. not like this. i am filled with rage and sorrow knowing this. i live behind the mirror of severe, chronic environmentally triggered pain and injury. i have told everyone in my life about this for a year and a half and nothing changes. i am too disabled to get myself out of this situation. every day i think about killing myself. i no longer have the strength in my arms to hold a knife to guarantee much progress. i am tired of being a negative net value. i am tired of living in horrifying chronic injury that would otherwise be easily avoidable. every night i pray for death in my sleep. so far it hasn't come. i never thought this would be my life. i wonder if i was someone who really was important or who had been good enough to others like who would i have to be for this to register as an emergency, as a moral wrong. because it is me and i don't matter, i who have always been a problem, for me to get hurt so bad every day i fantasize about violent death as an anesthetic to the violent injury i experience on a daily basis, if i was a dog or a cat people would want to fix this but because i made a bad consumer choice from desperation, i can enter and then somehow never leave a living hell driving me into early dementia and death. if i was someone whose work mattered, who had been good and kind enough, maybe this wouldn't happen to them but i am not that person. i am whatever this is. i have been telling my landlord for a year and a half that this is happening. he shrug emoji's me and then gets counter-mad.

i am tired of writing like this. i am even more tired of living like this. if i had enough money i would find out how to pay someone enough money to murder me efficiently and make sure i was dead.

i write this because i don't know what else to do. i do this instead of self-harm.

i used to be able to write about different things. if you go back and read when i was writing in the weekly motels i was a better writer, a more diverse writer. i had a better vocabulary, i fashioned far more elegant sentences. i have lost all of that because of where i chose to live. as a writer, this is intolerable. i hate the person i have been reduced to. i hate the person i seem like at work. i have been permanently reduced in capacity because of this desperate consumer choice. that which is proud in me screams for a grand end. i will probably just slip away unnoticed into dementia in my fifties which is for me a fate worse than death. if i can get out of here into stable housing sufficient for a disabled person i have a chance to avoid dementia but that window is closing. this matters to me but i feel it must only matter to me. i will be someone else's problem downriver though and i will be a less big problem if i can avoid the worst neurological outcomes now. does anyone care about this besides me? i feel like my family has written me off years ago and so don't take my complaints seriously. tonight will be another night i pray for death. i hope someone who will finally do something about this is listening.