Weird Kid

When I was a kid, I wanted to have some sort of debilitating disease, like polio, so I could wear leg braces and have those arm-cuff crutches.  I drew pictures of myself in a little memo book, the kind small enough for a pocket and with a plastic spiral on top.  I drew myself wearing a numbered jersey, a thing I never owned, legs strapped into braces, arms locked into crutches, and smiling hugely.  What did my therapist think of that when I confessed to it?  She thought it was because I wanted to be pitied and coddled.  I stopped seeing that therapist because that analysis was so very wrong.  I didn't have any psychological training, I was the one who cracked up at work, I was the one who drew myself as a cripple when in reality I was physically normal, and even I could psychoanalyze my childhood daydreams.  I wanted to have a debilitating disease not so I could be pitied, but so I could overcome that disease.  I wanted to be heroic.