We know it's getting close to the time where we have to record here, or anywhere at least, some of the events from last year...things about our network of "real life" friends, things that went on behind the closed doors of our apartment, our mind; and more things related to Fuck Face and the hand he had in our systems mutiny of The Other Girl, the personality we all recognized as our core - even though now some of us are having doubts about her being our core. Some of us are feeling, rather some of us feel, she somehow my have been the stronger personality. She was very controlling of her life, while letting people walk all over her. But that leaves us without a core...and we don't know if that's possible.
How do we know this? That we're getting close to another "purge"?
Lately, late at night, while we toss and turn trying to sleep we keep getting repeated flashbacks of certain events that took place last year about this time...it's making it hard to sleep. It's almost like each personality involved is trying to "copy" the memory for each other...pass it on, like a a computer, in the darkness of night, on a repeat cycle.
It's making it hard to sleep.
During the day time it's not much better, some days. We are getting what we will refer to as "imagery", because it's not a hallucination, necessarily. Brooke (one of the personalities in our system) is playing tricks with us. Like we've written before she used to do things last year like try to get us to throw our cellphone over the bridge we walked over everyday, knowing it would hurt us...she used to try to get us to imagine, trying to get us to do it, stepping in front of city buses on the way home from work on very bad days she was around. When we got our last job, before we were forced to leave the country in which we were living, she would tell us how funny it would be if we would stick our hand in the deep fryers at work. We have no doubt that she was the one that convinced us to swallow a load of pills with vodka, our suicide attempt around the time of our 21st birthday.
Her new thing is guns. She got sparked by something, probably we read on Twitter, gun related. So during the day, while we sit on the mattress in the bedroom where we sleep and spend most of our day working on the computer she likes to get us to imagine guns, putting the cold barrel of a handgun to our temple...and then she says wouldn't it be funny to do that...but then goes farther and she gets us to pull the trigger.
None of the imagery involves blood, it just sets on repeat. Putting the gun to our temple, fingering the trigger...oops. Oops our ass.
We have no idea where this is coming from, where any of her hate is ever coming from. She only hates us, and likes to alight herself with people she knows are capable of hurting us. She was a big fan of Fuck Face, even though many of the things he did we're because we allowed him to do it, at least at some points.
Some therapists might consider this, Brooke and her imagery, borderline schizophrenic in symptoms, we're sure; but the fact that we consider her to be part of our system, one of us...makes it not so. Despite the fact that she hates us, we love her...there is just something..."wrong"...with her. One day we may find out, when we're in a safer place to finish our mapping and find out where she fits in.
We told James about it this weekend, walking home after dinner. We try to tell him as much as we can with what goes on in our head, even if it's a couple of weeks after symptoms have started. Sometimes it's very hard to talk about...to write about...to admit. A certain amount of shame is felt by some of us, in allowing her to play with us in such away, about not being able to block her out. We also wanted to tell him, at the moment, Friday night, because we managed to articulate it, and it's his right to know, as our partner, our lover, our boyfriend, our friend.
We also told James for safety reasons. We know that target shooting is something he'd like to do when we get back to the states, and so would we. We've held handguns, shot pistols, rifles...we've made shotgun shells and had a gun training when we were younger (about the age of 12), we like guns as far as a recreational activity. We come from a family of hunters. We have a respect for firearms. Though we're not even sure we could get a temp license to shoot in a range. They don't let people with our kind of mental health background handle hand guns...(or have life insurance, or donate blood...)
This entry is not meant to scare anyone, or concern anyone (dad, mom, other family & friends) - it is meant to share with people the battles that are fought with mental health issues, and also to get it out of our mind, so that perhaps we can get some decent sleep.
A quick note on sharing.
Mental Health Month is coming up soon (in May) and we have launched a website dedicated to helping others share their stories of life with the public, a year round venture, because with understanding comes acceptance, and working towards demystifying "mental illness". Ivy wrote about it a few days ago, and we're trying to be all on board with it (not completely successful so far), so we may be mentioning it often in the next month - for more info check out what she wrote a couple of days ago: http://just-call-me-frank.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/frank-mental-health.html or just go to the website for more information: www.frankmentalhealth.org
~ Frank et al
(sorry for spelling & grammar mistakes, if there are any today)
No comments:
Post a Comment