Careful man... reading this is enough to make my stomach do a little roll. It's PTSD shock from years ago maybe?
I started playing guitar in '68, when I was 8. My mom thought I should learn an instrument and picked out the classical guitar. I learned from an old Spanish lady, she taught me to read. I'd learn a piece during a lesson, and had to play it at full speed when I came back for my next. It wasn't long before I had my first recital, weirdly, I was quite good even though I don't remember if I liked playing or not.
Parents divorced in '69 or so, we got sent off to a boarding school because Mom had a nervous breakdown, three boys...
While I was there, playing hide and seek running through the buildings, I was climbing though an open window and some jack@ss slammed it down on my fingers with great force, severing the tip of my left finger at the knuckle, it was dangling by the skin underneath... It got put back together, and I had a pin sticking out of my finger for a while, then they pulled that out. My left finger is 1/2" shorter than the right, and I can't bend that knuckle,
I never played guitar again.
When I was 16 I bought a Yamaha FG-75 from a buddy who needed money to go to Alaska, the pipeline days.
I've aways played with three fingers, didn't know what I was doing anyway, and later when I played rock, it didn't really matter.
But I always knew I couldn't play a whole bunch of chords, and that I was not a good all around guitar payer, nothing could lose me faster than a country jam.
I couldn't play basic chords, still struggle with it everyday, and I can't switch, I can't play left handed, even though I'm left handed...
I never knew how much that day changed my life, and it dawns on me more and more as time goes on, just how much.
I got back into acoustic, then really tried to learn guitar all over again, fingerpick, but again and again come back to the realization that I have to live with this handicap, when it turns out that the guitar is the most important thing in my life and has been for a long time.
Django is always mentioned if anyone finds out I play mostly with three fingers, but my real hero is Tony Iommi who went through a massive struggle losing two fingers in a metal shop accident, his last day on the job. He refused to go rightie, although he could have, but at his shop foreman's urging and having tricked into listening to a Django record only to be told that Django hand had been totally disfigured in a fire, gave him the inspiration to go on. And so he fashioned finger tips and because of this disability, he ended being one of the most iconic players in Rock. Long story short, he needed light strings to keep the fingertips from coming off, and there were none at the time, so he used banjo strings for the trebles, but even that wasn't enough, so he tuned down, and down and down to three semitones eventually and launched a new sound, Heavy Metal.
Careful with your digits out there.
