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Blog > Thoughts > Other's Thoughts > Chloe's Thoughts > My Birthday

My Birthday

Written by Chloe on Friday, April 24, 2009

Birthdays have had a special significance for me ever since I was ten years old. That’s when OCD kicked in. BIID became linked with my birthday last year. I hadn’t seen it coming.

I’ll briefly address the OCD stuff first. At ten I started the system of using my age, and factors thereof, as the source of numbers for OCD behaviors. Every birthday is exciting because I get to use a new set of numbers. I addressed the problem of prime numbers when I was thirteen. I had been obsessed with a particular four sided geometric figure, whose longest side is thirteen. I used this figure to generate a set of numbers, less than thirteen, to use whenever my age is a prime number. I needed numbers less than thirteen because, just as one example, a lot of stoves don’t have settings that go as high as thirteen. So that would prohibit me from cooking whenever my age is a prime number. The real weirdos among you will have already figured out that the system breaks down when I get to be 169 years of age. At that point the entire fabric of the universe will crumble and the world will vanish. Ummm… Yeah… Okay.

Last Year

Now the BIID stuff: On the day of my birthday last year I had told only one person "in real life" about my BIID. That was my partner. In addition I was exchanging e-mails with Michael First; and also with a woman having a very similar issue, who I had met online but not through transabled.org, which I had yet to discover.

I celebrate birthdays in different ways. Sometimes I have a really big party with lots of friends. Sometimes I just have a quiet time with my partner. Sometimes I have a small dinner party with select friends. My partner asked me what I wanted to do last year. I said that I wanted to invite over the husband-wife psychotherapist couple who run the intersex support group I have been going to for years. So that’s what we did.

My partner wanted to play a psychological party game. She said that everybody had to disclose their deepest fantasy for what they would like their life to be like, or have been like. I didn’t know she was going to do this ahead of time. I was a bit stunned to be put on the spot like that. Later, she told me it hadn’t crossed her mind what I might say. She had done it in order to bring up her own issues. My partner went first. I went last.

You may have already guessed what I said. I explained that I wanted my legs to have been paralysed when I was a little girl, and live the rest of my life like that. The psychotherapists looked at me, probably not knowing if I was serious. After all, it’s not what most people would expect as an answer to this question. I elaborated some more on my BIID, and got it all out despite being pretty nervous about it.

I could see the cogs turning in the psychotherapists’ brains as they bent their minds around this. Neither of them had heard of BIID before.

I told them about my leg braces, which I used at home on weekends, but which only my partner had seen. I told them I’d like to use the leg braces in public, but I would be too embarrassed and self-conscious for that. Everybody was supportive and said there was nothing to be embarrassed or ashamed about.

That birthday changed my life. I’d started to come out of the closet.

Six weeks later I came out to the whole intersex support group, with my partner beside me holding my hand as I waded through the nervousness and tears.

A week after that I ventured out in public wearing leg braces for the first time.

This Year

My birthday this year is a good one because, excluding my age itself, I now have twice the number of OCD numbers to choose from compared with last year. So, for example, I could have a selection from twice the number of menu items at a restaurant compared with before.

I told my partner that I wanted to do the same as last year for my birthday this year: have the psychotherapist couple over for dinner. They arrived in the late afternoon and stayed until midnight. The four of us always have a fabulous time together.

The psychotherapists both commented that I look more and more beautiful every time they see me. Well, it was my birthday; but it sparked an interesting discussion about the mechanism whereby a wheelchair is able to change what you look like.

After the wonderfully prepared cod dish my partner had cooked, we sipped on wine and found we had a consensus to revisit the topic of our fantasies from a year ago. It would be in three parts: to restate briefly what we had said last year; to address how we had progressed in making our fantasies reality; and to talk about our current fantasy.

My partner went first. We are all highly interactive, so these were not monologues. At some point while my partner was talking, one of the psychotherapists interjected with some insight about one of the things she tries to impart to her clients: "Embrace what you despise about yourself". That really struck a chord with me because it seemed exactly what I had done over the course of the last year.

I went next. Before I began, one of the psychotherapists reminded me how I had started off last year. I had forgotten. He had not. I had said "I’m terrified about telling you what my fantasy is". Wow! What a difference a year makes. Telling sixty people about my BIID over the course of the last year has made it seem like a normal topic of conversation.

Everybody was already familiar with what I’ve been doing to bridge the gap between fantasy and reality. The psychotherapists had noticed the parking permit in my car on their way in. They have been accustomed to seeing me in a wheelchair for many months.

My current fantasy has nothing to do with what could have been, should have been. It is all about dispensing with fantasy altogether; making this real; acquiring paraplegia.

I’m abbreviating a great deal. The whole party game took about three hours. The discussion about my BIID was at least an hour. I invited everyone to express their complete feelings about my BIID. It is a good thing to understand what those dear to us go through. It is good to acknowledge their feelings.

Tags: BIID, Leg Braces, OCD, Paralysed, Paraplegia, Psychotherapist, Wheelchair

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