Just Call Me Frank: Our Endeavour at Being Frank: March 2011

Thursday, March 31, 2011

Relationships, Frank...and Love

Please note: all links provided are internal links for reference purposes - we are not trying to sell anything

Split
Acrylic on Canvas Board
2003
(c) Frank Ly

Walking to work this morning, which was actually Monday morning, we discussed what we might write about next, there being so much.

We almost started to cry when we realized we've only written brief stories that have gotten us to the age of 23, and there are 9 more years of stories to share, and other stories that we can share from Ours, and The Other Girls life, that would be more titillating to you; like our first girlfriend and how that went wrong; a spontaneous trip across statelines in the middle of the night to meet with a man we were infatuated with, a much older man we had taken to our senior prom, a friendship that ended up breaking our heart by his revelation of lies he had been telling us about himself; boys we lived with that turned out to be a bad idea. These are just dating and relationship stories of course. There are family stories, and stories about just us, too.

We look back on our life, and that of The Other Girl, sitting here at the desk, which is actually our tall dining room table, littered with paints, brushes, papers, additional art supplies, and odds and ends; we begin to realize how We, and The Other Girl, have been mistreated by not just family members, but by friends, lovers, boyfriends, and some girlfriends. Not that we haven't done some mistreating of our own. We are certainly human, and therefore fallible.

We've always been the caregiver, maybe it was because we had to play mom at such a young age. We are always the one to do the persuing, the one who tries to create opportunities if only to be seen with potential value. It's possible that in doing this we simply opened ourself up to people who prey on the weak, and those with a giving and loving nature; only to satisfy their own needs, rather than equating a balance or compromise. We are very open about our feelings when we have them, maybe we are too open and pushy with out affections. We doubt that, even though it gets us nowhere.

We remember on National Womens Day we Tweeted something like, "men should love the women in thier life, all the women, because don't you think they deserve it"?

Somehow we never felt like we deserved it, because we have always had to fight so hard to grasp it, from parents, from friends, from everyone; and if we deserved it then wouldn't we get it? On the rare occasions where a man freely gave their love to us we destroyed it because we knew, and The Other Girl knew, that we had this secret, and if they were to find out then they wouldn't love us anymore. Better to cut the cord first and prevent more pain and rejection. Standby/The Villain was a good example of what happened when we tried to reveal our self, only to find out he liked having sex with me, but only loved The Other Girl and Bitch. I am too mean for his liking, which was fine because he was not my type. More about that another time.

We really don't know what love looks like, we've written that somewhere here before, stating that the only kind of love we understand and recognize is our love for others, and that for our self (though some days we struggle with that love), but since our love doesn't look like any we have seen, we really don't know how to recognize it, particularly romantic love.

We were asked by a follower, who no longer talks to us because we refused to send him pictures of our face, and reciprocate his #TwitterFeelings for us, a series of questions in an e-mail. Some of them were questions regarding our relationships with men, some of them are general. Some have been removed because they were self serving questions.

We decided we would share this e-mail "interview". Why not? It's not like we keep anything about our self a secret anymore; besides our eyes, our birth name and place of residence - which are all irrelevant if you think about it. Plus we like being asked questions.

An Interview with Frank:(there is a language barrier here - English not being this mans first language, his words/questions have been left intact)

When you feel edgy, if you are left alone by someone who realizes you are stressed, do you get a talk between both Bitch and Frank about that person?

We talk about people while they are standing in front of us; as a matter of fact we do it a lot. Sometimes it's nice things, and it makes us laugh; sometimes not so nice things - and that makes us laugh too; but yes, we have dialog about people who disappoint us.

Does it happens that bitch might like someone and Frank not, and the other way? What do you do in both cases?

Yes, that has happened. When it had been all three of us it happened a lot more because The Other Girl had different tastes in men. Particularly the last few months before I stopped letting her date. She had terrible taste, like TDF. I have a very particular taste in men: intellegant, interesting, funny, opinionated (but not the point of overbearing), men who think; Bitch likes them to have a sweet or sensitive side, because she doesn't like to be hurt, and likes to cuddle more than I do.

If you had relationships how did boys dealed with the fact that you have double personality?

The Other Girl tended to date stupid men. And until this year she had never discussed us at all because she was afraid of what might happen, and she did not know what to say. When we were younger we really didn't date - we were not allowed. We fell in love with Forrest, but he was never our boyfriend.

Men we have lived with who were perceptive probably wouldn't be surprised to find out this information now; but many men don't tend to be perceptive, in our opinion.

Has I can see you can have more then two personalities. Do you just decide how many you want? (we were not sure what this question was in the entirety)

No. They just are. We really don't know how to answer that. It's just the two of us now, though we are aware of a male influenced voice that began to notice over a month ago now; he is not around much and only makes me yell and be scared because he is very negative and angry. We don't think he is a personality though, we don't know what he is. We don't know if this is considered "normal", but it is something we have discussed with Fabulous Person.

I have two friends who have squizofrenia and they both made a pill cure and now they live fine. Can't you do the same?

We have come to realize what we have may not be schizophrenia; it has been suggested it is Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) - though we have never been diagnosed with that and we know very little about it. We have only been diagnosed with social anxiety, manic depression (bipolar) and schizophrenia. I am against prescription medication, The Other Girl has taken a lot in the past, but it tends to make me weak or gone. The idea of prescription medication makes Bitch scared because now that we no longer have The Other Girl she knows she cannot make it on her own; she has been on medication more than I have; I am also scared of losing her.

So, I can see you plan things toghether. What happens when you both don't agree?

Sometimes the plans get canceled, this last year we would make up excuses that would appear valid; sometimes we force our self to go. It's easier when we don't leave the house, if one of us wants to leave it causes symptoms of anxiety in our body; in addition to the anxiety we already are prone to.

What is sex life when you have doble personality?

That's a question better left to men who have been in our life. We like sex, sometimes a lot, but we are also not into being premiscious. We have a story about this topic coming up soon actually; one about Special Boyfriend and our sex drive. Right now we really don't feel comfortable discussing it.

Am I cutier then your ex?

HA!
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Please note: There have been many developments with the Us/We from the time of this post, such is the nature of writing therapy. We have started working on mapping therapy and have uncovered several personalities, which, for us, make a lot of sense - and that's how mapping works,
For more information please read the posts to the left in the 'OUR LIFE WITH DISSOCIATIVE IDENTITY DISORDER - OUR JOURNEY'

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Short Entries 4: When Anxiety Takes Over

When anxiety is so high we don't feel comfortable anywhere
A constantly updated entry...

11:07am
Really. Really. Do we have to put up with this? Can't we just crawl into a fucking hole and die. Too bad that wouldn't be #winning

11:08am
Does this desk have to this fucking sticky? Do you have to ask where everything is? Open your fucking eyes. Why can't you fucking look around you and figure shit out? Why do we have to have all the answers.

11:17am
Great. Crying at work doesn't help shit. The girl gives good hugs. Wish we knew what to do to stop this. We didn't even drink that last cup of coffee...switched to water. Too bad we are stuck at this fucking desk; we need more water. We can't even get it for our self.

11:21am
When we cry in this position, with our head on our knees, our tears feel and smell like chlorine being snorted up our nose. Which makes us think of drowning, Which is one of the worst ways we think we could die. Even though we love water. Being afraid of dying doesn't make us scared to go into it. We aren't really scared of it, maybe it's because we've been so close to it. There are worse things than dying.

11:23am
It would be nice to take medication for all these problems, but it wouldn't be. We are afraid of losing one of us if we do that again. If we lose each other again we will want to die.

11:14am
We know some of you think this is "masturbatory", putting this out for everyone to see. It's not, it's masochistic. Being the most unappealing person in the world and letting the world see it. But this is what it feels like. You don't know what this feels like. Unless you do. And if you do we want the world to know what these things feel like.

11:42am
This "assistant" is not going to be assisting with this current issue. Fucking get her out of here. Or at least shut her god damn mouth. We liked her yesterday not so much today.

11:50am
Fabulous People to the rescue with a little visit. They are one(s) of the few we can count on to help calm the storm - there are only four - if even briefly. Superhero Storm Chasers.

11:53am
If this woman opens her mouth again we are going to run home and get our stapler and fucking staple it shut. Not that we would. But we think about it. Seriously think about it. Her voice hurts our head, like someone hammering at the caving walls of our brain.

11:56am
Three people in this room plus us is too many; even though this room is large.

Eden Burning

Mixed Media

2003
(c) Frank Ly

12:03pm

Suckfest

12:06pm

We don't care what you think of us. You think we're nutz. We don't care. You know why? You haven't had to live the terrible life we've had to, or the one The Other Girl had to; or the one we are going to have to. Especially now. We hate you for that. Some of you have had terrible things happen, we don't hate you. Even though you might lash out at us, we can take lashings from you because we understand. It's those of you who have been blessed with mediocre fucking lives full of potential who have been born with silver spoons in your mouths. We'd like to shove the silver spoon up your ass. That's who we hate. We are allowed to. Just like you are allowed to hate us. Or not care. We can handle people not caring. The only people who we want to care are the people who know they should.

"Anger is a human emotion just as valid as love; complacency is a response as valid as conscientiousness. The expression of these is human." ~ Frank Ly

12:15pm
We'd like to say that we are sorry for what we say, but we're not. We are being honest. Honesty is the only was we can survive now. It may not make things easier, but things have never been easy anyway.

"The truth brings with it a great measure of absolution, always.” ~ R.D. Laing

12:20pm
You are fucking stupid. Walk away from our desk. Stupid. Dumb. We don't care. Go away. You always try to scam us or get a better deal. You are getting a great deal already.

12:32pm
We can never tell if its going to end. Like a gulf washing over us we are suddenly vibrating and warm and the noise subsides. But all it takes is another wrong voice to set it off. We feel helpless and ashamed. That doesn't do any good for us. We desperately want to have a drink, if only because maybe we can pass out after. We only got four hours of sleep last night, and three hours the night before. Two more days until the weekend. Maybe we can get some sleep then. Maybe we won't be overcome with an attack this weekend. Maybe we will actually be able to leave the apartment and not get upset at the people around us who move to slow, and look at us with dumb blank faces, and stare because they can see into our eyes and they know something is wrong but they can't figure out what because pretty girls are supposed to be happy. Because pretty girls don't have problems. Because all the world is concerned with is what is on the outside, nobody really cares what is on the inside anymore. Unless what is on the inside is a threat to their existence or belief system, but then they will fear, instead of try to understand. And hate instead of love.

12:55pm
We know that person is checking on us. We see you every time you come here. Even if we weren't "watching", just knowing you come back makes our anxiety and paranoia worse. You dislike us. You don't know us. You should leave us alone. We get notification every time you come here, from the same link that you used to berate us. We see every time you are here. You have no right to visit us after the things you have said. You are one of them, who fears us because you don't know us and you think you know everything. You don't know the things we have seen in peoples eyes, in the eyes of people you know, the eyes of people you don't know. You make our life worse. Stop reading. We even know you look at our Facebook page every time you visit, we know what links you click on our page. We are watching YOU...we only care about watching YOU.

1:08pm
We want to go home but we can't. We are prideful and that is the only reason we manage to keep any job we have ever had; even though many time they don't last long. We, and The Other Girl, haven't had a job this long in twelve years - since high school. We haven't even been here a year yet. If we lose this job we will die, but we are already dying, even though we are trying to heal. It is hard. We think some people must assume it is easy. That life is easy just because we don't have to deal with things where we live like they do in Japan, or in Africa. Those people suffer. People next door to you suffer. What makes thier suffering any more relevant than the person living across the street, or sitting next to you, or living with you? It doesn't. You just don't understand.

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

When Anxiety Attacks

Please note: all links provided are internal links for reference purposes - we are not trying to sell anything.

Like many days of the week where we have a writing topic in play, we end up switching gears to address things that are vexing to us, if only to clear out the space for concerns and topics of other natures; like more stories about our life to help us heal, and interests such as hopes and fears, relationships, therapy, art, entertainment, social media, opinions, reading and writing, food, music, life, and endless ranges of interests that encompass our mind, and daily life.

Writing makes us feel good, we find comfort in written words; playing with them, rearranging them, using them to convey our feelings, emotions and thoughts; it's really one of the reasons we like Twitter so much, and why we write everyday.

On Tuesdays we have one-and-a-half to two hour deep tissue massage therapy session to address the pain that riddles our body from our car accident. Today was our third session.

The first two sessions were wonderful, and really helped take away much of the pain that had accumulated over the years, and some of the new pain. Pain The Other Girl covered up the last two years by smoking copious amounts of marijuana, a habit we kicked just under two months ago. Within days of cessation the pain began to seep in, and within a couple of weeks it felt like we'd been hit by a bulldozer, which when coupled with our mental illnesses, and all the havoc that that issue has created recently with former friends and lovers, just about killed us.

The pain was making us near crippled, so badly so, that practical strangers could could see the anguish, not flash, but radiate, from our face and body. We could barely make the short walk home, and we didn't want to live anymore. A sufferer of chronic pain that we encounter each week suggested we might have Fibromyalgia, which makes sense because it's chronic pain and we harbor most of the symptoms. Wonderful.

The first two sessions of these past two weeks have done wonders for taking the edge off of the pain, providing almost complete relief for a 20 minute period following each tremendously painful massage. If you've never had a deep tissue massage, then you might not understand how painful they can be. It has taken the crippled feeling out of our life, but the pain still ebbs and flows, rising to it's peak by the end of the day on some days.

Todays session left us very uncomfortable because of an anxiety attack, however, and this was disheartening.

About three-quarters of the way through our massage, we felt the creep of anxiety. It started around the edges of our brain and can only be described as a feeling like the walls of our cranium are caving inward. Darkness falls. The feeling causes our heartbeat to rise, or breath to become short, and our head to fill with swirling static, not unlike a lethargic tornado. We actually don't know if this is what anxiety is, we only know that this is how we describe that uncomfortable feeling that makes us fight back tears of fear when we become scared of the combinations of these events taking place within our body. Sometimes you can see it in our eyes. We have very expressive eyes.

We lay there on the massage table, with this near stranger attempting to remove the pain from our body, while causing great pain at the same time. We are suddenly uncomfortable and want him to leave. He tries to talk to us when we are not screaming "mother of god" or cursing under our breath; or yelling "fuck off" at on of our cat who is making distractions and increasing the swirl in our head. This causes the massage therapist to laugh. He doesn't understand. Did we mention he comes to our home to provide this service? It's the best.

On normal days we are chatty, sometimes we fade in and out of consciousness, on the edges of our mind we see #hashtags and in-vision Facebook messages from the man we love, that we know we will never receive. It's almost like a dream state; a state hard achieved these days when we can barely get more than 4 hours of sleep, but for the weekends, when we can pull a solid 6 from somewhere, magically. Insomnia. Time doesn't exists. But it did today.

We are no stranger to anxiety, and The Other Girl suffered from it long before we did. Behtany recalls their first anxiety attack, at 18 years of age, while attending a street festival with a boyfriend, TOGs first love, prior to meeting The Ex Husband. She remembers experiencing feelings in their head which made them angry; that made them want to scream at and shove people in the crowd.

These days most of our anxiety comes from going to work and dealing with the public; and sometimes being out in public in general. It doesn't always happen. Lately it happens more because we are afraid of the people from our Home, who might verbally attack us in public, who may have found this blog already and put the pieces together connecting us to it; because they don't understand who we are, or what has happened to us now, and they don't believe we are ill - they only know that The Other Girl has disappeared, and they think we are her.

This anxiety attack tonight made us very sad, we hope it doesn't continue. We felt we needed to write about it because we know some of our readers experience these feelings, and it's nice to find out you are not alone. For everyone else, even if you can't grasp from these words how it might feel to have an anxiety attack, a storm ready to cascade over you; it can help you understand that the person who lashed out at you today, might just be trying to weather the storm they see on the horizon with their minds eye; and it's really not you that they are mad at; but sometimes it is.

Written by "Stabby" (he will not give us his name yet)

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More info on Fibromyalgia: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0001463/

Monday, March 28, 2011

Our Bleeding Heart And @NickSilly To Our Rescue.

We had a partial entry ready for today, ironically it's about how men have mistreated us, and The Other Girl, over the years; we don't know if we have the strength to finish it properly tonight, our broken heart is bleeding profusely after a mostly wonderful, magical, afternoon with the man that we love, that we only have a few short weeks left with. Our FNA.

We got one of our #TeamAwesome members (follow our list if you aren't already - these are crazy cool people), @nickysilly to make us a cooking video. He may not know what he's talking about (p.s. a boiled egg is not actually boiled...we'll talk about that in another post) but he's cute, and sweet...and you should buy stuff on Amazon.com using this link:-> http://www.amazon.com/?linkCode=shr&camp=213733&creative=393193&tag=nicksicmo-20 and support him, because he's tops in our books; and he should be tops in yours too.

Thanks Nicky, for helping us out on a day when we needed it <3; we are forever grateful we can count on you once and awhile:)

OTHER NICKY VIDEOS ->: http://www.twitvid.com/videos/NickSilly

Things you can read about who WE are...and WHY we are...to catch up if need be....

All In a Days Work

Birds of A Feather, on Twitter, CAN Flock Together

Please Don't Let Us Be Misunderstood

All We Have Is Hope

Religion, You Say? We Have A View On That

Franks/Our 100 Pound Weight Loss Story

Collision: The Other Girls/Our Terrible Car Accident

The First Boy We Liked, That Liked Us Back

What Become Of The Broken Hearted

To read stories of our life:
Addressing The Issue of Frank: The Origins, History and LIfe Story of Frank, from "Just Call Me Frank: One Womans Endeavour At Being Frank" (also contains our artwork and photography)

We'll see you on Twitter.

Sunday, March 27, 2011

Evil of Three: A Painting

We finally finished the painting that we'd been working on for weeks. Weeks, partially because we were out of canvas and waiting for an order so we could stretch some more, but also because our desire for finishing it waned; and knowing our self we could not move onto the next without finish this one, or we'd never complete it. We hate things unfinished.

The only thing that get's a second chance with us these days, and causes us to persevere, is something we see potential in. That was not this painting.

Not every piece has to come with a statement, like our most recent Saviour painting ; a masterpiece, in our opinion that will be hard to top, if only because it leapt from our fingertips inspired by passionate love, and the initial jolt of mental pain and secrets onto canvas, that had been harboring in our body for a lifetime.

We are using painting (and writing) as a therapeutic outlet; our second attempt at this, because last time all was lost. We've been through countless traditional therapy sessions over and over through the years; that doesn't work for everyone, it didn't for us. We think it's possible that therapy didn't work because the damage was so deep, so secret, so confusing, that we were never able to put into words what we needed to, to be able to understand or be understood. We can attempt now, and so we are, and we will; no matter the cost. We have half a lifetime left to live, theoretically, and we want it to be different, to be better. To be us.

Evil of Three

18 x 24

Acrylic on Canvas

To read the concentrated stories of our life; our therapeutic attempt at honesty and healing on the journey to being us, please refer to:
Addressing The Issue of Frank: The Origins, History and LIfe Story of Frank, from "Just Call Me Frank: One Womans Endeavour At Being Frank" (this also contains artwork from our last attempt at healing, roughly 7 years ago, in addition to photography from the last few years, taken by The Other Girl, one that used to be part of us)

Read our other popular posts, because sometimes we need to write about other things...

All In a Days Work

Birds of A Feather, on Twitter, CAN Flock Together

Please Don't Let Us Be Misunderstood

All We Have Is Hope

Religion, You Say? We Have A View On That

Franks/Our 100 Pound Weight Loss Story

Collision: The Other Girls/Our Terrible Car Accident

The First Boy We Liked, That Liked Us Back

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Art Therapy Resources on the Web:*In addition if you Google "Art Therapy Blogs" you can churn up all sorts of interesting information*

Because we love Twitter, here are some suggestions:
@arttherapynews @arttherapy @arttxalliance

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International Expressive Arts Therapy Association - http://www.ieata.org/
Art Therapy Credentials Board - http://www.atcb.org/

Saturday, March 26, 2011

The Emergence of Frank: Frank's Failure

We had finally fled The Ex Husband, leaving him in Chicago, and moved back to The Midwest to live with The Mother. The Other Girl figured she must have told her about the diagnoses we had received in the Northwest, and the experiences we had as a married woman, however, we have not asked The Mother; at this point it is irrelevant.

We tried to stay there, with The Mother in The Midwest, but it was difficult to find employment; turned out “housewife” on a resume didn’t scream “employable”. There were other difficulties, like trying to be happy living with someone who had hurt us so many times and was as hurt and damaged as we were; someone who we never had a good relationship with; someone we had hoped could provide us help by this point in her life, but she couldn't.

In those days I may have been there for The Other Girl, to assist in getting her away from The Ex Husband, but I just wasn’t strong enough to help her heal then. We were weakened by her sharing the stories of her marriage, and reliving our own painful past together, and not being able to understand any of it yet.

This is the story of how Frank, how I, failed The Other Girl.

I thought I had control of the situation, having been brought back into The Other Girls life again…we were going to try to heal.

Bananarama, a friend from high school that The Other Girl used to talk to on the phone with a lot while she was suffering through the unhappiness of a terrible marriage in The Northwest, and her diagnosed mental illnesses, was living in The Mountain States. After a couple of months back in The Midwest, after leaving The Ex Husband, we high-tailed it out of town to try to rebuild our life with this female friend we had known for years.

Bananarama was a gal pal from high school; we had had a very big crush on her all throughout school and even after, when we would take trips to The Big City to visit her – memories for other stories. What we felt for her in high school may have bordered on love, these feelings for her. We love her now, to this day, even though she is likely the person who had alerted The Father to our current situation. We love her in a different way now, in the way you love, and respect, a person that has been through their own personal hell over the years, has come back on the other side bruised and broken and still battles against the hell that life likes to provide the unfortunate.

It didn’t take us long after getting to The Mountain State to fall in with an interesting group of people. We lived with a Tattoo Artist, a Body Piercer and Bananarama; and her young son who was there only half the time. When we weren’t looking for work and unable to find it, we hung out at the tattoo parlour where our roommates worked with other tattoo artists. Our days were spent with these people, our nights at their homes drinking, spending time with their children, having fun; weekends attending tattoo conventions. They became a family to us very quickly.

The combination of all Us, and these new people, was a turbulent experience. The Tattoo Artist was dating Bananrama, but detecting our infatuation for her became very angry, untrusting and defensive. It didn’t help that he was an abusive asshole either. We were very protective of her, as we are with people who are special to us, who are broken in some way, like us.

Body Piercer turned out to be a kindred spirit of sorts, at first. In the couple months of association we became a team of chaos, driving to nearby cities and creating adventures for ourselves; both of us suffering from Manic Depression, something she had been knowingly living with for years; she had also come from a history of abuse at the hands of Adults and had also lost people she had cared about at a very young age, to unusual unexplainable tragedy.

The Other Girl started dating a lot, meeting men online, inviting them over. She started learning about Wicca, dyed her hair black and wore clothes to match. She got a few tattoos.

Bananaramas allegiance to Tattoo Artist, her abusive boyfriend, and his hatred for Us, hammered a wedge between Her, Us and Body Piercer. After only a couple months, it was time for us to flee, and leave behind Bananarama.

Us, and Body Piercer, packed up our belongings, Our dog, and her cat; with our Ford Bronco II and her car, we headed Southeast, driving for couple days on no sleep, to Florida. Body Piercer had family there in the panhandle and so we thought it would be fun to start a life there, in the sunshine, away from all the brown of high dessert.

It wasn’t more than a week and a half before we realized that we weren’t going to be able to stay there, in Florida, for a variety of reasons. So we packed up everything again, and headed back to The Mountain States.

Unemployed and living off of a credit card all this time; we, along Body Piercer, rented a renovated pool house attached to what had once been a motel, but had been turned into housing for drug dealers, prostitutes and low-income people. We would get a visit weekly from women asking to use our phone, or to ask if we had tampons to spare, or loose change. We remember the police being outside our bedroom window on several occasions, in the alley, to monitor the hookers next to the KFC, which was across the alley from our bedroom.

The Body Piercer was dating Drug Dealer, even though she was married to Stationed Military Husband. We smoked quite a bit of pot in those days, the access to it so readily available. One night we smoked opium, another night we smoked something we can only imagine was laced with a peculiar substance because we lay in bed that night, and every sound jumped out at us, everything was loud, we couldn’t sleep.

After a couple jobs like selling vacuum cleaners door to door; a job based whose income was based on commission of a machine hard to sell. The experience of this is the most valuable thing we could have gleaned from it, having made no money for months, but being forced to pretend we were personable and develop some communication skills.

All of us were unhappy living in that little pool house, so one day we decided to skip out in the middle of the night. We got caught, the details of which, for this story are not important. We moved into a trailer park after that, Us and Body Piercer; who was still unemployed all this time and liked to overspend. We used to loan her (and before that Bananarama) money from our credit card, each time with her promise being paid back, each time with the realization she hadn’t given us money from the last time; but she was The Other Girls friend, I couldn’t control her and stood by while she began to realize that you could buy friendships with gifts, money, favours. She thought this was the way it worked. Eventually the debt collectors began to call.

We ended up getting a better job than stocking the shelves of a porn store and soliciting vacuums door-to-door. We became, once again, a security guard, like we had been before we were married in The Northwest. It was fun work, we enjoyed it. We didn’t have to work with people too much in the beginning and it gave us time to talk to each other. Then they transferred us to The Airport, in the wake of 9-11, right before the TSA took over. We were a security guard at the gate, flagging people and their belongings, searching for imaginary things that the government was trying to convince people we could find.

We, and Body Piercer, started a blog about being Bipolar, and being Two Bipolar Girls living life together. We had fun with that blog in the short period we were working together on it, she auctioned Us off for a date one day, in a chat room when we were working to promote our writing. We would stay up late hours, drinking pots of coffee and going online in chat rooms together, to pick at people, and call them sheep.

Gradually they increased our hours at work, being short staffed, and we were working long hours seven days a week. It happened gradually, the things we didn’t understand. We began hearing The Other Girls name, whispers from nowhere. Then one day we saw giant fuzzy spiders, and they began to multiply; things began to jump around at the corners of our eyes, we saw more things that weren’t there. We heard more than just our name being whispered. These things increased, our anxiety was raised. We got scared.

Luckily we had held onto our wedding ring, an expensive piece of jewellery. We walked out on our job one day, hocked that ring and locked our self, with our dog, in our bedroom of the trailer house. We avoided our roommate, only coming out at night while she was sleeping, or when she left the house.

We spent a lot of time on the computer, in chat rooms; it was how we spent most of our time. The irony is not lost on us.

We ended up meeting a nice young man, who eventually became Special Boyfriend; he got us to leave the house and meet him. He was quirky, and sweet, and different, and smart; he was attempting to study English but had yet to register for classes. He was also equally as ill as we were.

About a month after we had locked our self away in our room, Body Piercer, our only friend, having been abandoned by Bananarama after we moved to Florida with BP, approached us.

“You have to move out. You not leaving your bedroom is making me uncomfortable”

We called The Mother, we talked to Special Boyfriend; we packed up all our belongings and slept in our Ford Bronco II a couple nights, with Our dog, before taking Special Boyfriend back to The Midwest with us to, again, live with The Mother; where he would teach us a lot about life, people and love.

This was a year after we had left The Ex Husband in Chicago, and had tried to start a new life. When we got to the The Midwest we filed for bankruptcy to the tune of $30,000. We went to a State Department that offered counselling services to the low income and it was here we told them what had happened in The Mountain States, the spiders, the voices. It was here, in The Midwest, that we got the diagnoses of Schizophrenia, and became once again a test subject for prescription antipsychotic drugs.

We talked to Fabulous People about our past recently, we share with them before we share with others; and as the words tumbled out of our mouth we saw the patterns of our past. The Sheep had turned to Sheeple; the Bedroom we locked our self in has become our Apartment, our Fortress. The chat rooms… Twitter.

Now that we see and understand our life in a complete way this time around, and have gotten rid of The Other Girl, and are stronger, we can share the stories that continued to shape us; the stories that have made us who we are now, 9 years after our final diagnoses; 6 years after we got separated, unwillingly; to more recently, the last year and a half, trying to hide who we really were because The Other Girl never wanted to leave this place called Home, and never wanted to suffer the rejection of friends

Friday, March 25, 2011

What Becomes of the Broken Hearted

We're broken hearted. We did it to our self; a precautionary action.

We accidentally fell head-over-heels in love, all while trying to heal our self of our mental and physical pain with writing and art, and trying to take care of our self properly; an endeavour once cut short by a terrible car accident, increasing the need for more physical care. All in an attempt to rip out the ugly festering beast inside, and fill up some of the empty spaces with a little sunshine, and bind the cracks with staples of strength and perseverance so that we could honestly love our self again, instead of pretending it was true. We look forward to some day moving on to the next chapter of our life with just a little less anger, because we realize it will never be completely gone. A move to a chapter of our life that one day we hope to be able to revealed to all, in an effort to share some sunshine, some hope, if only we can grasp it; with any luck. Luck. Meh.

He was an important part of the last few months of our life, and was a bit of inspiration in helping us find our way. He was more important than anyone will ever know, and in a way that nobody will ever respect. One day we will write the story of him, and us.

In the face of realizing we will never be enough for him, proof with words he's both written and said, and actions he has expressed; the impact of which he was absolutely unaware of. We wrote the letter that we hoped never to get from him. Preemptive. We must protect our self.

We knew we couldn't keep him, but he just kept getting more FaNtAstic; and then we wanted to keep him just a little more each time we saw him, each time we fell more in love with him.

We're going to miss his face, his voice...the everything that he didn't comprehend that he was to us. The everything we know he is, and could be, for himself. We knew the destiny of the situation, even as we stepped into it, it's an age old story; we thought we were strong enough. We are not.

Our dreams have always been broken by the sledgehammer of life, you need merely read through some of our significant posts, and our other blog, to get that understanding. At least heartbreak is something everyone can empathize with; even if they can't understand the rest of what we have been through.

Now. To that bottle of Scotch, more writing, painting....and tears; and angry and/or pathetic Tweets...must never forget that. Viva la weekend.