This is a portion of an email that i sent to a dear friend of mine who was trying to understand what it is like to be in limbo land.

i think there will be lots of people out there that might can relate to this.

The context of the conversation between myself and my friend is: he was encouraging me to "move on with life" and to try not to be so focused on getting an answer for what may well be the unexplainable.

he included this quote in with his email. the quote is from the college roomie who was totally blind. His roomie used to say "everyone has a disability, mine just happens to be total blindness."


I agree with him, b/c nothing motivates me more than to be able to fill in the blank and move on! My friend is married and has a son. This is my neuropsychologist friend of mine and his last name is McDaniel.


"....Being able to say "Hey we all have challenges and mine just happens
to be __________" is all i really want out of this!
Thats it! nothing more nothing less. I'm already at
that point but yet i continue to struggle to fill in
the blank.

Think of it this way, this will be a weird analogy but
try to make this connnection. ok you and you wife had
a baby. cute little baby boy or girl which ever. But
you both fought over the the naming so much that when
i came time to write a name on the birth certificate
the first and middle name was LEFT BLANK!!!

so on the
official birth certificate the only name for that
child is McDaniel. Wow that tells us a whole lot
about the gender and personality and everything of the
child. So identifiable as THAT child that when the time came for the
SSN to be issued there was no name on the card and no
SSN for that matter b/c that name is not uniquely
identifiable.

Then the child grows up and still you
and your wife are fighting over the name. the child
is called IT or boy/girl (as the case may be) and gets
teased in school b/c it is the child with no name (IT
is different from the other kids and has a physical
impairment on top of it all, and the others kids feed
off of that child's suffering).

So at age 18 this
child separtes from you and your wife and has had
enough of being called IT and Boy/girl. So IT goes on
a quest to find the perfect name and get it LEAGALLY
CHANGED. Only one little problem. A SSN was never
issued for IT (don't ask me how IT got though school
w/o the SSN but he/she did) and therefore there is no
record of ITs birth or life to legally change!

Now you can see IT and you can touch IT and you can
hear IT but IT does not have a name and you think IT
is going to rest till IT stops not having a name all
of his/her own?????

THAT is where I am. I am the person with something
inside me called IT and this disease or what have you
is the nameless void that is just as real as I am yet
IT does not have a name.

You see that is where me and
your college roomie differ. HE had a name for his
challenge, yet I do not have a name. I have IT, and I'm trying to keep IT from having me! I hope
this analogy helps you understand why I am so fixated
on getting a NAME for this thing.

It is PART of me, but it is NOT who i am!!!

I don't like being defined as this thing any more than
the child IT likes being called IT. I want to be
defined for WHO I AM, NOT what challenges that i have.


Yet with out knowing the name it is the blind man
trying to describe an elephant. how does he do it.
he can feel it, he can touch it, he can sit on top of
it, he can even smell it and hear it. but will he
ever be able to describe that elephant again if he is
not given a standard name for this weird creature???"

That is my world right now, that is my reality.

Can anyone else out there related to this?

Bobcat