Friday, May 27, 2011

We Tell A Boy In A Pub About Us

Last night we went the local pub for a few drinks, we didn't bring our sketch book, so we just people watched.

We got offered a drink right away but we declined. The men involved in the drink offer were funny, and one the one who was interested in getting us the drink was pretty cute, tall, blond, mid-30's, professional...however he was with 6 or so other men, and we were not going to feel comfortable last night in the company of so many - though at one point we contemplated walking over and just sitting down at their table, just to see what they would do and say. 

We generally don't accept free drinks in bars and pubs - Emmie* does, but she sort of left when we went to the video store to walk around, so by the time we go to the pub we were in a different "place" (that just means we were a different we).

Sitting at the edge of the bar, drinking our glass of white wine, we simply observed the people. We were dressed in our favourite jeans, layed black top and sparly black shoes - ones similar, but much more comfortable that those horrid pink ones Emmie had made us wear about three weeks ago...the ones that made our ankles bleed, when we were hanging out in alleys with Fuck Face before the metal show.

There happened to be a lot of men/boys at the pub last night. We have never been there on a Thursday night because usually Thursdays is when Fabulous People and The Pup come over for food and conversation; but this Thursday Fabulous People were very tired, and we don't really hang out with The Pup on our own yet.

We sat and watched people and surmised what we usually do: people are strange. We laughed and laughed at the social interactions of them...we don't know why we find people so weird...the way they go about the mating rituals in bars - but if you've sat and looked at people, and thought about what you were observing, the social interaction of them...it's hilarious.


A Tweet from last night, one that earned us a Tweet of the Day (ToD) from  @TheSpaceWad
A couple other men asked if they could buy us drinks while we sat there, Tweeting and bopping our head to the music, smiling at the air. Well, smiling at all of us talking - that's usually why we smile when we are by ourselves. Sometimes it's fun for the one in control of the body (Executive/host) to listen to whoever is around observing in the head (co-consciousness) at the time, listen to them talk to each other. When it's quiet in the head...it's a lot less fun.

A boy we had been in culinary school with was at the bar too, he peered at us and then came over for a chat. He's a very attractive guy (he has tattoos!) and actually works at the restaurant across from our apartment. We knew that, we'd been there this year when Partner In Crime (an ex-girlfriend) came into town to visit us.

There was a boy near the bar, with a whole bunch of other people. We almost tweeted about the fact that his red underwear were showing but then decided not to, for some reason. Most of his friends got up to go have cigarettes and he kept glancing over at us. He asked us if we'd like to sit with him and his brother; we smiled and said no; then went about our business of smiling at thin air and looking at the people around us in a confused and/or inquisitive manor.

After his friends came back to the area they were all standing in he walked over to us and started talking. He told us he had been watching a particular man who kept circling the area, watching us, and who had offered to buy us a drink; just watching to make sure the guy wouldn't hassle us too much - apparently he had been watching us from the time we had entered the establishment.

So, we talked to him, and he asked what we were up to, what we do for a living, all the usual questions people ask when they meet in a pub The conversation was easy. We told him where we work, what we do for a living and we gave him our work phone number, which is also our cell phone number, because the field we are in is one in which he is interested.

We don't really remember right now what he had said that made us feel comfortable enough to keep talking to him; but he was funny, and when he said he has a blog, one of the answered to our "So, what kind of things do you like to do" questions, and told us the name of it, we told him that we have one too, but wouldn't tell him the name of ours, or what it was about. He was a good sport, chided us a bit, making us giggle at his attempts to guilt us into sharing, but then let it drop.

Pub Guy A, this new potential friend, is 26 years old (maybe 25?) which is a little young for all of us, but fine for some of us. he is tall, dark bushy hair, a big bushy beard...nice looking; very cute...and super charming in an odd, strange way. [P.S. Bar Guy A, if you've found us and this blog, you're super cute...your parents made cute kids;-) - and ...yeah...just that.]

He told us that while he is currently a med student, he has a philosophy degree in the study art/aesthetics - we got pretty excited, and told him we were an artist/painter, and showed him pictures of some of our paintings that we had photos of on our BlackBerry. He invited us to come to Wednesday meetings at the pub where other philosophers sit around and drink "we could pick your brain - you can tell us what we are supposed to be seeing", referring to what goes on in the mind of a painter, what they are supposed to be trying to portray, or how they want their viewers to see their work. Something like that. We told him a bit about the entry we wrote on Artist Growth and Change and told him we wished we could share the link with him. Maybe one day.

Did we mention he also plays the drums and guitar? *claps hands excitedly* 

When he asked about whether or not we were working the following day, we commented on how we don't sleep much, that we have a late start on Fridays so we'd likely get the normal amount of sleep if we decided to stay at the pub until it closed. 

He mentioned his own sleeping problems and when he began telling us the different medications he had tried, one name he dropped caught our attention because it's an anti-psychotic either we've been on it, or our ex-husband had been on it; so naturally we inquired about it. Turns out in low doses it's used as a sleep aid. 

It became clear to him that we had some knowledge about medications of the anti-psychotic genre, and so when he went to talk to someone for a bit we (us) discussed telling him about ...us.

We ordered another glass of wine, and one of us said "Oh, let's tell him about us! What can it hurt?" and because Catherine wasn't around to stop us, we did. When he came back, we took a sip of our wine...and then we told him we have multiple personality disorder. 

We were not as nervous as we thought we would be, but wine helped. We explained to him that this is why we don't have many friends right now, why we were at the bar alone, because he has asked about that earlier. We explained how that had happened a lot in our life and that this year we had decided that we would be open...no more hiding. We told him a bit about us - he asked some questions about trauma and some other basic ones. When "we" started slipping into conversation and he asked if that's how we referred to ourself and we said yes, he thought that was pretty cool. It went really smoothly; but then again, he was a little drunk.

He didn't seem too shocked over the entire thing, but the look on his face for the rest of the night was somewhere between drunken pity and admiration, maybe a little intrigued. We told him more about our blog and what we write about, and that since it's mental health awareness month we had been trying to promote the blog more, because there was so many people who didn't know about multiple personality disorder, and it was often confused with other disorders like bipolar and schizophrenia; and that there were people who had it, and other disorders, that really appreciate the writing; but we didn't tell him the name of the blog.

After we told him, the rest of the evening was even more fun, but at one point when we were talking about stuff he took our number out of his pocket and said "If you want this back, if it doesn't make you comfortable for me to have it, you could rip it up." we explained that we were going to have to get used to people knowing, and that we liked him and that meant letting him keep the number.

A drunk girl was standing at the end of the bar talking with Pub Guy A's brother and we were watching her interact with him. She was really drunk and neither Pub Guy A, or his brother, were interested; but Sam* was enjoying watching her, and the rest of us were just fascinated by her drunkenness. She noticed us watching her and with a drunken finger pointed at us and told us we were beautiful and said we have a great smile. Bar Guy A had been observing her too, and observing us watching her, he looked at us curiously, so we explained Sam.

"She's crazy." Pub Guy A said. 

"Oh, she's just drunk" we laughed, "she's so drunk. I hope that's not how we look and act when we're drunk".

He made a comment that it wasn't how we were acting now, and then mentioned her eyes being crazy, but drunk-crazy.

"Not like the crazy in your eyes, that's genuine crazy" he said, "I could see that crazy from over there" indicating where he had been standing prior to our meeting. He grinned at us, but we knew he was right. We laughed and thought: Great. 

At the end of the night, when we were enjoying our last glass of wine with him, and him his glass of beer, he looked at us as we were laughing, and commented on how happy we looked - almost like he figured we hadn't been that happy overall; which isn't entirely true. He also was teasing us about our dimples, and commenting on our tiny elephant earrings. (The guy pays attention:)

When we said goodbye to him at the bar we were pretty excited about meeting a new friend, the second person we've told in real life this week about our disorder, having told Girl Crush on Wednesday.

Shortly after we crawled into bed we got a text from him saying "bring on all 9-12 personalities", this made us laugh and so we responded with some funny emoticons.

Then he wrote "or at least two. Sleep tight! I'll search for your blog and twitter tomorrow!" We responded with "Hahahah, you can't choose, all or none! :) sleep well." and he replied: "I choose all then. Goodnight."

We thought that might be the sweetest thing we'd ever read...

This morning we were pretty cheery - we were all excited about the prospect of a new friend. We don't really know his intentions, but he is a man, and only one of us seems really excited about the whole him-being-a-boy-who-probably-maybe-date-us...we are in love with someone else, after all, even the one who is excited about having a date some time.

However, Catherine*, our paranoid one had us crying on the walk home because she is scared about having told two real life people this week about our mental disorder. She is paranoid because we have shared so much with people, she is scared that we will get hurt again, that the Fuck Face story will ruin our career. She is always so damned paranoid. Thankfully she stopped obsessing pretty quickly when we told her to shut up. Sharing a body really sucks sometimes, everybodies actions effects everyones life.

Frank's been gone for days now - why she keeps leaving us...we don't know. When The Other Girl was around she hardly ever left us; maybe it has something to do with not having the original host anymore that makes it so easy for us to switch and blend, and share so much co-consciousness. All I know is it makes Frank exhausted whenever she chooses to be around - but maybe she's just trying to leave us alone so we can work on finishing the rest of our life story up to the point where she came back again, after our car accident.

We asked Fuck Face out for drinks and food today - we are totally not supposed to do that, but I did it anyway. I love him, we love him, and he was being so nice today...and he was looking at us in that way...and being smiley and joking. He likes when we are happy just as much as we like when he is; though he also likes us when we are not smiley, or "sour", as he puts it, as long as the not smiley/sour isn't related to us being severely pissed off at him.

We told him about the boy we met, and he said "well, that's good-ish" and we don't know what he meant about the "ish" part. We asked how his evening had been and he says it was the same as it has been.

We joked with him about finally having found a drinking partner who we can have conversations with, but mostly what everyone was saying was that we don't want to have any other drinking partners...we want Fuck Face to be our drinking partner.

So, now we're thinking because this new boy might locate our blog, and read all about Fuck Face that he'll totally be put off by us...and so...we really have no idea what to expect.

We got a text from Pub Guy A when we got home from our dayand it said: "How goes the struggles today [our life name]"

We really didn't know how to take that. It seemed an odd way to say hi after drinking at the bar the night before, so we responded with something random about the weather and asked how he was doing. He said that it had been nice meeting us and we wrote back:

"You didn't have to text us today...all the stuff we told you is probably less interesting and more scary in the light of day"

His response was sweet, and gave us an indication that he probably figures he doesn't want to mess around romantically with someone like us, or worse yet, inflict some sort of additional pain by "being a guy". OR he's found this blog and figured how fucked up we really are as a system.

"Not at all." he texted, "The hand of friendship remains outstretched" and then made reference to it not being nice if he "ran away" from someone who has "a lot going on and [is] not afraid to be honest about it".

Then he asked what we would like our name to be in his phone. Which made us grin.

~Cassandra
*Refers to our alters - the others who share The Body: If you want to see our mapping in progress feel free to visit: http://wearejcmf.blogspot.com/ (it's a work in progress)

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For the month of May, Mental Health Awareness Month, we will be posting this at he bottom of each of our entries, to help provide additional information about us, and about Dissociative Identiry Disorder/Multiple Personality Disorder.

10 Things You Should Know About US That MIGHT Surprise YOU:
  1. We used to be a Baptist missionary (yeah, can you fucking believe that shit?!) [we are NOT religious]
  2. We were once married (didn’t last long) [one of our stories talks about him]
  3. We have had nearly 30 physical addresses in 30 years, mostly as an adult (nothing could contain us in the early days) [we actually own a house, but choose not to live in it]
  4. We’ve lived in 2 countries: 1 province and 6-7 different states (running much)
  5. We have lost 120 pounds since the age of 24 (100 of it when we were 24) [and it's close to 140 pounds now)
  6. We have a full time job (well, now it's 32 hours a week - but they actually let us work around the other humans!) [it get's harder everyday, and this is the longest we've ever had a single job since we were 17. We've been there almost a year]
  7. We deal with social anxiety type symptoms every day (and these days we choose not to leave home much, but for going to work) [there are about three people we feel comfortable with being in public with and sometimes we have to be out there alone]
  8. We have multiple “mental illness” diagnoses (doesn't everybody?) [p.s. all misdiagnosed]
  9. We have two beautiful cats, who piss us off every day (but they are special, because they put up with us) [though one of us hates them beyond belief]
  10. We have struggled to survive, over and over, defeating the odds thrown against us (read our stories) [seriously, how are we not dead yet?]
We've copied the stories written here that are specifically about our past (mostly abuse) and moved them to our other blog, called:
Some of our writing on this blog we like to promote (consider them highlights), these are those entries since mid-January 2011. There are bits of writing in this blog that we do not actually promote due to embarrassment over things that some have written - they are here for our own tracking - they are angry, mean, scary things. If you feel like it you can find them on your own (they are in the What We've Been Up To over on the left). Here are the highlights of what we have written so far this year:


For a complete archives to the date of March 20, 2012

Below are the archives to the time of May 27, 2011

The Mental Health Entries:
Dissociative Identity Disorder/Multiple Personality Disorder
Health:
Family:

Relationships:
Work:
Opinion:
Art/Poetry:
Humour/Random Fun:
If you have any questions for us we are very open and will answer to our best ability - this is totally the month to ask us questions. You can either ask us on Twitter, in the comment section of a blog entry here, or e-mail us at justcallmefrank2010 (at) gmail.com.

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Resources for You - facts, figures and personal stories of other people can be found on these sites:
National Institute of Mental Health: http://www.nimh.nih.gov/index.shtml
American Psychological Association: http://www.apa.org/index.aspx
Canadian Mental Health Association: http://www.cmha.ca/bins/index.asp
Mental Health Europe: http://www.mhe-sme.org/
World Psychiatric Association: http://www.wpanet.org

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