When All We Have Is Hope

We were in the shower this morning, thinking about our day; a sick day from work – we just found out we get two a month! We began contemplating what we might write about today, because some days it’s hard to follow up some of our previous posts…like the recent one about TDF (Ass Face) and our entries about Standby (The Villain). We are working on another Emergence of Frank entry to carry over to the “side-blog”…yeah, there’s another entry; this time about The Other Girls’ ex-husband.

Last week we were “approached” by an organization that asked if we would be interested in writing a blog entry for them, about a topic of our choice pertaining to mental health. We thought about it for a week, after saying they could use any portion of our blog, the already written content, as they see fit; making sure to inquire about rights of use, and other legal matters.

We made our decision this morning. We understand that this might be an opportunity to further our writing and our reach to the world in the attempt to help stamp out negative stereotypes, and show people what it’s like to live with a mental disability in society as a seemingly functional human being; even though we have other hurtles making us less than a perfect example - notably rage fueled by physical pain from a terrible car accident. We concluded that we are going to decline any offer that comes with a guideline, as theirs did; if simply because it contradicts our mission of frankness.

One of the guidelines, the only one actually, was that we were to abstain from using profanity.

Fuck that.

The whole point of our writing, and our life on Twitter, is so WE can be who WE are…we’re not going to be subjected to censorship when one of the points to our writing, in the first place, is to be able to be Us in some forum that will accept us.

Every day when we go to work, we have to struggle to keep our mask on because we know that’s what society wants of everyone; conformity. Given that, we are not about to make our anonymous-self someone we are not.

The Other Girl spent almost her entire life trying to be someone she wasn’t, just so people would like her, in the hopes that someone would love her in a way she always heard about. In doing that, she had opened herself up to abuse; mental, physical, emotional and sexual, and at the hands of many who were supposed to love her. People treated her like a door mat, and it caused her pain; pain in the face of her already existing mental anguish. It caused her to have to call on me again, even after I left her in her early young adult life – she managed about three years without me, before Bethany called for help. That’s for another day though.

So, back to the shower; we were thinking about our hopes. Not wishes. Wishes are different, and we don’t have those, because we only want the attainable for the future.

So, we came up with hopes:

1. We hope you understand us and others like us, as much as possible.
2. We hope you can accept us, even though it can be hard.
3. We hope we live until tomorrow.
4. We hope we don’t live until tomorrow.
5. We hope one day we will know life again, without so much physical pain.
6. We hope the world will not fear mental illness, someday.
7. We hope we can make a difference, somehow, in our lifetime.
8. We hope people will be kinder to themselves, to others, to the world.
9. We hope children of the future will not have to know the face of evil from family members, from friends, from strangers.
10. We hope we heal, before it’s too late.

Source: http://www.merriam-webster.com/