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Home / Thoughts / Other's Thoughts / Gordo's Thoughts / Gordo’s humble beginnings

Gordo’s humble beginnings

Written by Gordo on Wednesday, June 25, 2008

This is a bit long-winded, but hopefully it’s easy to read and rich in content, so bear with me here… :)

There are some out there who say that people with Body Integrity Identity Disorder often have some early interaction with people with disabilities, which eventually leads to "acquiring" BIID. Some may have relatives or friends with disabilities, or have constant contact with people with disabilities. It is very possible that this contact may manifest itself in someone’s early childhood memories and eventually morph into BIID.

Well, that certainly wasn’t the case for me.

Obviously, I don’t have a lot of memories from my childhood from age 0 to 3, but from what my parents have told me, I’ve been known to be a stubborn learner at times. While it took me a long time to learn to speak coherently (probably because I was a shy toddler), there was one thing they told me that interested me — they once mentioned that it took me a while to go from crawling to walking. Looking at it now, I wonder whether it is me not knowing how to walk or not wanting to learn.

It is often a mystery how I came to be a person with BIID. Back then, I had no relatives with physical disabilities, nor did I have friends with physical disabilities. (I eventually found out that I have a mentally challenged cousin, but I’ve never met her.) My first encounter with a person with a disability was brief, at best.

My toddlerhood was spent in Hong Kong, where seeing people with disabilities was rare (at the time). I think there was still a "shame" factor surrounding disabilities, but it might also be practical too, since Hong Kong is such a densely-populated place; anyone who has ever been there can relate to that, since the streets are always crowded and bustling.

With that said, my first encounter with a person with a disability was effected by this hustle-and-bustle life over there. I was at a mall near a place called Taikoo with my parents when I saw someone in a wheelchair. I was intrigued, because I had never seen a wheelchair before. I asked my mom what it was, and she told me. I then asked her why that person is sitting in one, and her answer was short and simple, "Because he’s lame and can’t walk." (Cantonese, the language spoken in Hong Kong, tends to use a lot of slang and non-PC terms.) I looked back, and he was gone, disappearing into the heavy crowd of people.

It would be years before I would have another encounter with a person with a disability. I moved to the Vancouver area of Canada (where I still reside today) before first grade, where I had a classmate with something that appeared to be cerebral palsy; I never found out if that was it, but he wore AFOs for walking and had many of the symptoms that I now recognize. We didn’t talk that much, since I was still a kid learning English at the time, but I remember wanting to be him. As a kid, I obviously didn’t know too much, but I knew that he had something I wanted.

There was a long void between that and my next encounter with someone with a disability — almost 8 years, in fact. That accounts for the rest of my elementary school life. However, it was what happened during that time when signs of my BIID really started to surface.

In my bedroom, I had a night-light. Not because I was scared of the dark, but because my parents were worried that I’d crash into something in pitch black if I had to get up in the middle of the night. (We still have night-lights in the hallways today, for this reason.) And, as a kid, I had a weird interest in building things, using material like cardboard or Lego. And late at night, when I didn’t feel like sleeping, I would sometimes take the cardboard, use scissors and cut out circles, and then attach them to a plastic chair. I would sit in the chair, and pretend I was in a wheelchair made of cardboard.

I knew already that this behavior was unusual, so I would disassemble it before going back to bed. As well, my Lego table had detachable legs, so I would sometimes use them as crutches for a while when nobody was around or when everyone was asleep. The most remarkable thing about all of this is I rarely saw people in wheelchairs or crutches at the time, let alone have contact with such a person.

That phase was around my grade three year. In my grade five year, something happened that really sent shockwaves. We were on a class field trip to a swimming pool, and some of the kids were fooling around in the boys’ changeroom afterwards. There was a pool wheelchair there, and some kids were taking turns fooling around with it. My interest was tickled, so I eventually took my turn on the chair.

When I sat down on it, I felt… something. It wasn’t a feeling of being whole, but something just felt "right" for a second or two. It was frightening; so frightening that I immediately jumped out of the chair, and went to get dried off and dressed as quickly as possible. (Good timing too, because a teacher walked in a few minutes later; the kids caught fooling around with the wheelchair were barred from attending the next two field trips to the pool as punishment.)

From that point on, I had sort of an identity crisis. I was confused but also interested to determine what happened there in the changeroom. I tried out some different things. One thing that I eventually tried for a while was the ABDL stuff. At first, slotting myself as a fetishist was a bit of a disturbing relief (since it can be explained easily), but then I realized that "fetish" means something sexual. And I was NOT getting a sexual arousal off this. In fact, I noticed that whenever I would wear a diaper, I would pretend that I can’t move my legs either. I didn’t fit into any of the categories of that community at all. So the search continued.

In high school, I volunteered at the school library. During my tenure there, on quiet days when all the students had left and I was the only volunteer present, I found myself spending time in the section about disabilities, and found myself curiously but cautiously flipping through books’ sections about various disabilities. All of this was done somewhat unconsciously; I didn’t plan for it to happen, but when it did, it scared me.

So I decided to try to get this "out of my system." I took on another volunteer role at the school, serving as a peer helper in the class for special needs students. The students there often have physical or mental disabilities, or sometimes both.

Some of the students there are the best people I’ve ever met, and I’m not exaggerating; I’m still friends with some of them to this day, and so many of them have developed into great individuals. While volunteering there gave me a more rounded understanding of disabilities, it didn’t do what I wanted it to do, which is get rid of my BIID desires; I still wanted to have a physical disability.

I also tried to "work it" out of my system by going on ultra-long bike rides, going as much as 30 kilometers each day. That didn’t accomplish anything but build up my calf muscles, which worked to my advantage in PE class, when I defeated the school jock in wrestling mainly due to leg strength. But my leg strength seemed wrong, no matter how much it benefited me (and made me the school’s "hero of the day" for winning that wrestling match). There was no real joy or pride.

For the first two years of my post-secondary education, I tried to live life as normally as possible. However, "normal" is very loosely used here. My parents left the house to me twice during that time while they were out of town. And that led to even more.

The first time they left, I rented a clanky old hospital wheelchair (similar to this clunker). I had planned to wheel for a while, trying again to "get it out of my system." Unfortunately, it snowed badly (one of the three days of snow we get here each year) and by the time it melted, it was time to return the chair. I mostly wheeled around the house as a result, getting a first-hand experience of how utterly INACCESSIBLE my house was. It was also the first time my dog has seen me in a wheelchair, and he had to learn to get out of the way quickly whenever I was using it.

The second time they left, I rented an Invacare Patriot chair, in a second attempt to get rid of the BIID desires. The weather was crappy this time too, but I still got some wheeling in. The BIID desires didn’t get better or worse; it stayed more or less the same.

It was then that frustration was setting in. The internet was my friend, so I went there for answers. I found many things, like various philias and fetishes. I remembered seeing Transabled.org before, but a search for "BIID" only found amputee wannabe sites, so I dismissed it. However, I found the site again and this time, I read it more thoroughly. After I was done reading many of the posts, I came to a realization and thought to myself, "I am 75% sure this is me." Today, I’m closer to 85-90% certain.

At the same time, I was hit by the wheeling bug, which pops up occasionally. But this time, it was especially strong. I felt like if I didn’t wheel, I’d go insane (which is ironic in a way). So with some of the money I saved up from working small gigs in the local film industry, I bought my first wheelchair from eBay. I made my first real wheeling trips, one of them in nearby Victoria on Vancouver Island. I still had hope that the BIID desires would exit my system after I find out how crappy accessibility is around these parts.

Yes, I found out that it’s a hassle being in a wheelchair in an inaccessible world, but at the same time, being in a wheelchair felt right, despite all the inconveniences and the hassle of wheeling. It was a necessary evil for something most people take for granted — the feeling of belonging in one’s own body. Some places were inaccessible, but I didn’t care because I felt like myself for once, wheeling down the street, in and out of places.

Since then, I’ve gone on smaller wheeling ventures (most recently in a place called Abbotsford) and despite some mishaps and small embarrassments, it was very comforting to feel at ease with my own body. However, without being a genuine paraplegic, something was missing, and will probably always be missing. But unless I hurt myself, this is the closest I can get to feeling whole.

I’ve seen a psychologist before, courtesy of a system my post-secondary school has in place for students. I’ve told him about most of this, and he seems to feel that I’m not delusional. He didn’t overtly say this, but he did seem to hint that perhaps wheeling full-time is the best option, as an alternative to more drastic measures like trying to create a spinal cord injury. When I feel, I feel more at ease with myself and generally feel like I have more potential; maximizing confidence and potential is almost never a bad thing.

The major stumbling block remains with my family. As natives of Hong Kong, they subscribe to the mentality that seems to prevail over there, which is "strive to be the norm/be normal." From what I can tell, disability rights movement over there hasn’t even come close to what we have here in North America and other Western countries. Even my father has yet to accept the gay community as legit; he sees that community as a danger to society’s norms. The look of disgust on his face every time gay rights are mentioned on the news is unmistakable.

With this said, only one personal friend (as opposed to online friend) knows about my BIID, and that is only because she is transgendered and can relate to BIID in a way. If my parents were more accepting, I’d probably tell them and be wheeling full-time, with their acceptance. But until then, the relationship between me and the members of my family will probably remain short of honest. I’m not sure which hurts the most — not knowing if I can ever be honest with my family about this, or not knowing if I’ll ever come close to living as a paraplegic (either through "pretending" or for real).

BIID isn’t painful physically, but emotionally, it is torture. There is no search for sympathy. I’m not in it so people can "help the handicapped guy" (for wheeling, I actually prefer to do things myself rather than have people help me). I just want to be comfortable in my own body, and feel like ME instead of a "me with the ability to walk."

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Tags: BIID, BIID and Culture, Body Integrity Identity Disorder, Childhood, Disability, Family, Memories, Pretending, Wheelchair