I take it the HBHC link in OP Edit 4 no longer exists?
Anyway, I
relate to Hanako. I know what it's like to be so lonely that playing the tile game is a respite. I did it as a child.
At school, I was bullied, teased, isolated, and harassed. Not just by students, either… by teachers, too. In 7th grade, one of my teachers picked me up by my shirt and pinned me against a wall in a fit of rage. (A lot of stuff happened that year, actually, as you'll see)
At home, I was physically and emotionally abused, to the point of psychological torture (the methods used were, in fact, explicitly banned by the Geneva Conventions, something I later learned in the military).
I could never figure out why people thought I was weird. Yeah, I get it… brain like a steel trap stands out a bit. But there were other kids like that, and they weren't treated horribly by people.
I had 4 serious head traumas before I got to high school, 1 of them was a mild TBI, but the other 3 were (by diagnostic criteria) medium TBIs. I should mention that I'm a Certified Medical Assistant (AAMA), with an AAS in the same, and I'm presently going back to school for my BAS so I can apply to a physician's assistant program at a local medical college.
My godfather died of a rare brain cancer when I was in 7th grade. This cancer was a complication of AIDS (one that is normally checked by the immune system). I was told he was HIV-positive in the summer before 6th grade.
I knew there was always something different about me. Something I could never talk about, because
nobody talks about stuff like that. Everyone thought I was a boy, but deep down, I knew otherwise. It's funny, you know? People almost never stop to question their identity where it concerns gender… and frankly, neither did I. It's just that my identity didn't match up with my outward presence. In 7th grade, I started developing breasts (which was diagnosed as gynecomastia because that wasn't "normal")… I actually had A cup boobs in middle school with no kind of medical intervention. I was 5'3" and weighed 95 pounds at the time. I didn't weigh over 100 pounds until high school. By the end of high school, I knew that the cognitive dissonance of people not seeing me for who I really was had been taking its toll. Then I joined the Air Force, which really kicked that dissonance into high gear.
I got out of the Air Force and returned to my small home town of 8,000. I decided I couldn't keep living as I was, so I transitioned. I was fired from my job under questionable circumstances. I was thrown out of the nursing school at which I was attending. I was harassed by the chief of police. I was stalked by persons unknown. After receiving several death threats, I packed what I could into my car and fled.
That was 12 years ago. Thanks to the help of a lot of friends and therapists, I have learned to cope with the world, but I still have a
lot of anxiety. I met an amazing woman in 2008; we became friends, and after I got out of a very abusive relationship, she and I became an item in 2011. In 2013, we married—which technically, was not banned by the state as a same-sex marriage because my birth certificate remains unchanged (my state requires surgery to change that last piece of identification, and I don't have a spare 20 grand laying around for that), but even so, that ban was struck down in 2014, so it was inevitable.
So while my path was very different, I very much understand Hanako. In a lot of ways, I feel like she is my archetype.
Anyway, </rant>.
