Sent: Tuesday, November 15, 2011 7:48 AM Subject: The Other Side of the Story
First of all, before I begin anything, understand that this is being sent under the most extreme confidentiality. I have talked to you fairly extensively since the Brittany’s eulogy debacle, and I believe you’re trustworthy and a decent person. You’ve also not published or gossiped about my diagnosis, nor caused wank on my Facebook, which gives me further incentive to trust you. However, not to be too harsh, but if one word of this pops up on one of the wank sites, I’ll know where it’s from and I actually will honest to God sue you for invasion of privacy. Now that that unpleasant business is out of the way, it’s only fair for you to know the other side of this whole sordid mess. As you know , the official on paper diagnosis of what’s wrong with me: Severe Gender Disphoria leading to Dissociative Identity Disorder possibly comorbid with Borderline Personality Disorder on select aspects. I assume you’ve looked that up by now. However, I have to give that with the caveat that the psychologist who gave that diagnosis didn’t have the full story either. I withheld things because I’m afraid of anything from just being mocked and not believed all the way to being locked up. If I’m lucky, it would be in a mental institution. If I’m not, it would be to be studied somewhere. The reality is that I don’t know what’s actually wrong with me, though I have theories, and I can tell you about it, even if I can’t categorize it. Whether you believe me or not is wholly up to you.
There is more than one of me.
My life has never been ‘right.' I didn’t have a name for it for the longest time. When I was a child, I just knew that things were very confusing. It wasn’t about gender identity for me, because gender role was never a big deal in my house: my father was the gentle, artistic one who loved show tunes and rescued baby animals and ran rescue while my mother was the hardass welder and unquestionably ran the household. I did, however know that nothing ever seemed right or real, and that I often had gaps in my memories where people said - and it was obvious I had - done things I didn’t remember. I was obsessed from literally toddlerhood with acting and pretending to be someone else, and those were the only times I felt at all ok. When I was just “being myself,” I always felt like I was trapped in something horrible. I was desperately lonely, but I didn’t want friends, because friends wanted to relate to me in ways that just made me feel worse. I wound up in several very abusive friendships before the age of ten, just because it actually felt more right to have a 'friend’ who treated me like the dirt I felt like than one who was being nice to something that felt so wrong. [SISTER’S NAME REDACTED], on the other hand, was perfect, and I was gradually more and more simply the “bad” one, even exorcised several times because everyone knew something was very, very off, and in my mother’s religious circle, that meant demons. I tried to be “good” and be what “a girl is supposed to be”, but I was frankly horrible at it, and lying then more than when everyone else said I was lying. And yet I wasn’t a “tomboy”, either. No football and worms and GI Joes…I was my father’s gentle, artistic, idealistic, caretaking, son who didn’t even know how to explain that. I retreated more and more deeply into fantasy, going to extreme lengths to become the youngest character interpreter in the history of Colonial Williamsburg and getting every hour I was allowed by law, because it gave me 20-30 hours a week of being someone who was ok with themselves.
When I was about 12, horrible physical things started happening. That would be, if you want to be blunt about it, when what most people would call my sanity finally utterly broke. Imagine the most grotesque Eldrich abomination, body-horror type monstrosity you can. Now imagine that it’s eating your body. Slowly, painfully, unstoppably. Now imagine that everyone around you is insisting that it’s normal and a good thing and that everything you do think about yourself or think is right or wrong is called a lie or worse. And that you’re socially isolated, rurally homeschooled, in a hardcore right wing 700 Club/Irish Catholic environment with a sister who is the embodiment of everything that you’re supposed to be but aren’t. I really can’t say I’m surprised that something drastic happened.
I started having more and more blank spaces. I’d lose huge chunks of time, and find evidence of what I’d done in the mean time. What was even more horribly surreal, these blank chunks apparently belonged to a different person. Or rather, two or three of them. I had utterly no consciousness when it was happening; same as if I’d been knocked out, no control over my actions, and no control over what happened during them, but afterwards, I would remember…but as if I’d been watching rather than doing it. Two of them used my name, but seemed to have completely different memories and versions of my life, different likes and dislikes, different habits and talents, while the third was the character I’d been playing at Colonial Williamsburg. My time at work was no longer mine, but everyone was suddenly utterly floored by my incredibly realistic performance. No other child actor was coming nearly as close to seeming like an entirely realized person! And NEVER breaking character! What was even more eerie; these alter egoes didn’t seem to have any knowledge of me, nor awareness that they were anything other than full and complete human beings who had lived entire lives.
To this day, I don’t know what they are. It’s the thing that scares and fascinates me the most, and that I can’t quite be honest with psychiatrists about. They don’t fit the rules for DiD alternate personalities. They’re not only too fully realized; their self-contained histories are too complete, and contain information I couldn’t possibly have. They have skills I don’t have; some even speak languages I don’t.
I isolated myself more and more socially. Now there was starting to be more pressure on gender roles, and the older I got, the less people treated me with a child’s androgyny. Boys started coming on to me. I started working a second job. I was working 50-60 hours a week when we got the computer and the internet. I dove into it with all the desperate hysteria of the lonely who are incapable of socializing normally. It never occurred to me to present as a boy online. I still didn’t know what I was other than wrongwrongwrongwrongcrazywrongcrazy. I was doing everything I could to hide the alters. I was afraid they might be demons, or that they’d be treated as demons, but I also knew I absolutely could not cope with my own life. Yes, some of them took parts I had once desperately loved, but they also made it possible just to function by taking the parts I couldn’t bear, even as hiding them was making my life less and less functional and I was getting in more and more trouble for the things they did and the “lies” they told. You can’t exactly say “I wasn’t me, and it was true to them!” [excerpt from a prior posted explanation went here; I’ve cut it for length] This is almost true. Except that it was almost never me online. Two of the by-then-three alters - the two I’ve already told you about other than the CW one - were the ones who got into the online stuff. They weren’t even aware of each other. They sent each other emails and worked together online on stories. It wasn’t a hoax or sockpuppets; it was the most surreal thing to be caught in the middle of, and I had no control over it at all. I simply had to dance faster and faster when it WAS me to try and get out of the hot water they kept putting me in.
By the time I got sent off to college - at not quite 17, never previously schooled, away from home for the first time, living in Newport News with a cousin who hated me and constantly derided me as crazy and weird - I was almost never in my own head. I was very seriously contemplating suicide. I was no longer working Colonial Williamsburg. That one went away. A new one showed up, and I hated her tremendously. I wanted to kill her, and I hated the situations she got me into. It’s the one you hear about a lot from CNU - the little asskissing theatre queen who almost married me off and (I can’t believe I’m actually admitting this) did what I honestly feel is rape me several times with several different men and a couple of girls. I call it rape because I DID NOT CONSENT to my body being used that way and had no control over it or ability to say no. But how the fuck do you ever explain to anyone that technically, you raped yourself? Or was it me? Again, I don’t know. They’ve never fit what dissociations are supposed to be. And I couldn’t scream for help; instead I just had to do everything possible to pretend that I was only me, at the same time that I was still gagging with internal horror over what me was. It was like even when I was in my own head I was trapped in my body. I don’t know if I’m making sense. If I’m conveying the kind of nightmare it was.
Then I met someone who for the first time offered me some kind of explanation, some kind of anything that made even the vaguest sense, and I pounced on it like water in the motherfucking desert. [another excerpt went here] Again, strip away that I’m trying to hide the alters here, and you’ve got the brutally honest truth. Under her “careful guidance” over a half dozen others appeared, and I was relegated to the nosebleed seats in my own head. Sometimes it was as much as a month before I’d be there.
During this time, they got involved with Abbey. I say they, because I honestly didn’t know about it for the better part of three months, and by then things were well underway. It was the alter from CNU and one of the Priestess’ servants who got to know her and started doing things with her while I was just using my very little time to attempt to bullshit to my parents why I was failing out of school. Next thing I knew I’d been transferred to Georgetown in Washington DC. I had no say in that. A lot of my most prized possessions got discarded by alters to whom they meant nothing when I moved. Abbey had been flown out to see me, and they’d had sex with her “for Beltaine." I’d hit a new low: a married woman. I stopped even trying to hold on and just let them take me.
June of 2002, I went to meet Orangeblossom in person in Oregon . It was a deeply profound experience, getting to "channel freely’ with someone else in person, and there it wound up taking a still-further turn into the bizarre. Focusing on trying to 'reach’ Frodo, I found myself 'bringing’ Elijah Wood by accident. Though even I was reluctant at first to believe it could be possible to have channeled a living human being, my doubts were shattered when things I had "channeled” were proven to be true in the DVD release and in interviews that hadn’t occurred yet.
I give a pseudobabble bullshit excuse for how I could have known those things (I’m good at trying to smooth over the impossible in my life) but the fact of the matter is that they were things I couldn’t have known. Again with the I have no idea what actually is going on. Are they ghosts? Mirrors of consciousness from another plane of reality? Some kind of time loop or alternate? Jungian collective unconsciousness creations? No fucking clue.
As I try to tactfully explain, this was the first one who had openly been male. And as horrible as it was - because to him and his as I’ve mentioned before full personality and previous memories, he’d been yanked from his life and thrown into this mess - it was at the same time wonderful in a way I couldn’t possibly describe to be able to look over memories and actions and have them feel somehow more right even as they were so so wrong. I let go. I let the alter have me because at least he was a he.
I believed heart and soul that I was channeling the spirit of Elijah Wood. I have tried to explain this away as just “role playing that got out of hand” before, or as “poking the tinhats”, but that’s just excuse-making to try and hide how phenomenally fucked up I was.
Being Elijah gave me the ability to be a boy, and I clung to it with a fervor I didn’t know I was capable of, nor was willing to admit to. I believed that something had clearly gone wrong with the Paladin powers, because “Amy” was less and less willing to return (given the option, I was loathe to be a lesbian girl again) and Elijah was slowly splitting off a second consciousness from himself and taking over my body. This is about as far from reality as it ever got, and lasted through all of 2003. Yes, I thought I was the split-off duplicate channeled soul of Elijah Wood the entire time I was planning and attempting to execute Project Elanor and all the other BitofEarth events. Yes, that is crazy. Yes, that is fucked up. No, I don’t think that absolves me. As Elijah, I tried to deal with the 'terrible situation’ of being split off from myself and trapped in a girl’s body (the closest I had yet come to confronting being transgender, as the only other exposure I had to the concept was MsAllegro, who sets off every NO alarm in ANYONE’S book) as best I could, even taking some people 'into my confidence’ to 'tell them the truth.' I also got BitofEarth into HUGE trouble from a fire triangle of three different major problems, all of which I am owning up to freely. 1: I was relying on a lot of “knowledge” which I wasn’t aware I was making up. This was primarily about the movie industry, publicity, and my “friends” on the cast and crew. Again, using the profiling principle, I was right enough of the time that I got an amazingly long way before it began crumbling around my ears, but in the end, the house (or the real world) always wins.
Actually, I was right on everything that pre-dated the "split,“ but as the gap between that and the present got wider, there was more and more information I had that was no longer accurate.
Andrew Blake's emails to Carlanime/ATF's commentary on his Amy Player fauxpology, part 1
Subject: The Other Side of the Story
First of all, before I begin anything, understand that this is being sent under the most extreme confidentiality. I have talked to you fairly extensively since the Brittany’s eulogy debacle, and I believe you’re trustworthy and a decent person. You’ve also not published or gossiped about my diagnosis, nor caused wank on my Facebook, which gives me further incentive to trust you. However, not to be too harsh, but if one word of this pops up on one of the wank sites, I’ll know where it’s from and I actually will honest to God sue you for invasion of privacy. Now that that unpleasant business is out of the way, it’s only fair for you to know the other side of this whole sordid mess.
As you know , the official on paper diagnosis of what’s wrong with me: Severe Gender Disphoria leading to Dissociative Identity Disorder possibly comorbid with Borderline Personality Disorder on select aspects. I assume you’ve looked that up by now. However, I have to give that with the caveat that the psychologist who gave that diagnosis didn’t have the full story either. I withheld things because I’m afraid of anything from just being mocked and not believed all the way to being locked up. If I’m lucky, it would be in a mental institution. If I’m not, it would be to be studied somewhere. The reality is that I don’t know what’s actually wrong with me, though I have theories, and I can tell you about it, even if I can’t categorize it. Whether you believe me or not is wholly up to you.
There is more than one of me.
My life has never been ‘right.' I didn’t have a name for it for the longest time. When I was a child, I just knew that things were very confusing. It wasn’t about gender identity for me, because gender role was never a big deal in my house: my father was the gentle, artistic one who loved show tunes and rescued baby animals and ran rescue while my mother was the hardass welder and unquestionably ran the household. I did, however know that nothing ever seemed right or real, and that I often had gaps in my memories where people said - and it was obvious I had - done things I didn’t remember. I was obsessed from literally toddlerhood with acting and pretending to be someone else, and those were the only times I felt at all ok. When I was just “being myself,” I always felt like I was trapped in something horrible. I was desperately lonely, but I didn’t want friends, because friends wanted to relate to me in ways that just made me feel worse. I wound up in several very abusive friendships before the age of ten, just because it actually felt more right to have a 'friend’ who treated me like the dirt I felt like than one who was being nice to something that felt so wrong. [SISTER’S NAME REDACTED], on the other hand, was perfect, and I was gradually more and more simply the “bad” one, even exorcised several times because everyone knew something was very, very off, and in my mother’s religious circle, that meant demons. I tried to be “good” and be what “a girl is supposed to be”, but I was frankly horrible at it, and lying then more than when everyone else said I was lying. And yet I wasn’t a “tomboy”, either. No football and worms and GI Joes…I was my father’s gentle, artistic, idealistic, caretaking, son who didn’t even know how to explain that. I retreated more and more deeply into fantasy, going to extreme lengths to become the youngest character interpreter in the history of Colonial Williamsburg and getting every hour I was allowed by law, because it gave me 20-30 hours a week of being someone who was ok with themselves.
When I was about 12, horrible physical things started happening. That would be, if you want to be blunt about it, when what most people would call my sanity finally utterly broke. Imagine the most grotesque Eldrich abomination, body-horror type monstrosity you can. Now imagine that it’s eating your body. Slowly, painfully, unstoppably. Now imagine that everyone around you is insisting that it’s normal and a good thing and that everything you do think about yourself or think is right or wrong is called a lie or worse. And that you’re socially isolated, rurally homeschooled, in a hardcore right wing 700 Club/Irish Catholic environment with a sister who is the embodiment of everything that you’re supposed to be but aren’t. I really can’t say I’m surprised that something drastic happened.
I started having more and more blank spaces. I’d lose huge chunks of time, and find evidence of what I’d done in the mean time. What was even more horribly surreal, these blank chunks apparently belonged to a different person. Or rather, two or three of them. I had utterly no consciousness when it was happening; same as if I’d been knocked out, no control over my actions, and no control over what happened during them, but afterwards, I would remember…but as if I’d been watching rather than doing it. Two of them used my name, but seemed to have completely different memories and versions of my life, different likes and dislikes, different habits and talents, while the third was the character I’d been playing at Colonial Williamsburg. My time at work was no longer mine, but everyone was suddenly utterly floored by my incredibly realistic performance. No other child actor was coming nearly as close to seeming like an entirely realized person! And NEVER breaking character! What was even more eerie; these alter egoes didn’t seem to have any knowledge of me, nor awareness that they were anything other than full and complete human beings who had lived entire lives.
To this day, I don’t know what they are. It’s the thing that scares and fascinates me the most, and that I can’t quite be honest with psychiatrists about. They don’t fit the rules for DiD alternate personalities. They’re not only too fully realized; their self-contained histories are too complete, and contain information I couldn’t possibly have. They have skills I don’t have; some even speak languages I don’t.
I isolated myself more and more socially. Now there was starting to be more pressure on gender roles, and the older I got, the less people treated me with a child’s androgyny. Boys started coming on to me. I started working a second job. I was working 50-60 hours a week when we got the computer and the internet. I dove into it with all the desperate hysteria of the lonely who are incapable of socializing normally. It never occurred to me to present as a boy online. I still didn’t know what I was other than wrongwrongwrongwrongcrazywrongcrazy. I was doing everything I could to hide the alters. I was afraid they might be demons, or that they’d be treated as demons, but I also knew I absolutely could not cope with my own life. Yes, some of them took parts I had once desperately loved, but they also made it possible just to function by taking the parts I couldn’t bear, even as hiding them was making my life less and less functional and I was getting in more and more trouble for the things they did and the “lies” they told. You can’t exactly say “I wasn’t me, and it was true to them!”
[excerpt from a prior posted explanation went here; I’ve cut it for length]
This is almost true. Except that it was almost never me online. Two of the by-then-three alters - the two I’ve already told you about other than the CW one - were the ones who got into the online stuff. They weren’t even aware of each other. They sent each other emails and worked together online on stories. It wasn’t a hoax or sockpuppets; it was the most surreal thing to be caught in the middle of, and I had no control over it at all. I simply had to dance faster and faster when it WAS me to try and get out of the hot water they kept putting me in.
By the time I got sent off to college - at not quite 17, never previously schooled, away from home for the first time, living in Newport News with a cousin who hated me and constantly derided me as crazy and weird - I was almost never in my own head. I was very seriously contemplating suicide. I was no longer working Colonial Williamsburg. That one went away. A new one showed up, and I hated her tremendously. I wanted to kill her, and I hated the situations she got me into. It’s the one you hear about a lot from CNU - the little asskissing theatre queen who almost married me off and (I can’t believe I’m actually admitting this) did what I honestly feel is rape me several times with several different men and a couple of girls. I call it rape because I DID NOT CONSENT to my body being used that way and had no control over it or ability to say no. But how the fuck do you ever explain to anyone that technically, you raped yourself? Or was it me? Again, I don’t know. They’ve never fit what dissociations are supposed to be. And I couldn’t scream for help; instead I just had to do everything possible to pretend that I was only me, at the same time that I was still gagging with internal horror over what me was. It was like even when I was in my own head I was trapped in my body. I don’t know if I’m making sense. If I’m conveying the kind of nightmare it was.
Then I met someone who for the first time offered me some kind of explanation, some kind of anything that made even the vaguest sense, and I pounced on it like water in the motherfucking desert.
[another excerpt went here]
Again, strip away that I’m trying to hide the alters here, and you’ve got the brutally honest truth. Under her “careful guidance” over a half dozen others appeared, and I was relegated to the nosebleed seats in my own head. Sometimes it was as much as a month before I’d be there.
During this time, they got involved with Abbey. I say they, because I honestly didn’t know about it for the better part of three months, and by then things were well underway. It was the alter from CNU and one of the Priestess’ servants who got to know her and started doing things with her while I was just using my very little time to attempt to bullshit to my parents why I was failing out of school. Next thing I knew I’d been transferred to Georgetown in Washington DC. I had no say in that. A lot of my most prized possessions got discarded by alters to whom they meant nothing when I moved. Abbey had been flown out to see me, and they’d had sex with her “for Beltaine." I’d hit a new low: a married woman. I stopped even trying to hold on and just let them take me.
June of 2002, I went to meet Orangeblossom in person in Oregon . It was a deeply profound experience, getting to "channel freely’ with someone else in person, and there it wound up taking a still-further turn into the bizarre. Focusing on trying to 'reach’ Frodo, I found myself 'bringing’ Elijah Wood by accident.
Though even I was reluctant at first to believe it could be possible to have channeled a living human being, my doubts were shattered when things I had "channeled” were proven to be true in the DVD release and in interviews that hadn’t occurred yet.
I give a pseudobabble bullshit excuse for how I could have known those things (I’m good at trying to smooth over the impossible in my life) but the fact of the matter is that they were things I couldn’t have known. Again with the I have no idea what actually is going on. Are they ghosts? Mirrors of consciousness from another plane of reality? Some kind of time loop or alternate? Jungian collective unconsciousness creations? No fucking clue.
As I try to tactfully explain, this was the first one who had openly been male. And as horrible as it was - because to him and his as I’ve mentioned before full personality and previous memories, he’d been yanked from his life and thrown into this mess - it was at the same time wonderful in a way I couldn’t possibly describe to be able to look over memories and actions and have them feel somehow more right even as they were so so wrong. I let go. I let the alter have me because at least he was a he.
I believed heart and soul that I was channeling the spirit of Elijah Wood. I have tried to explain this away as just “role playing that got out of hand” before, or as “poking the tinhats”, but that’s just excuse-making to try and hide how phenomenally fucked up I was.
Being Elijah gave me the ability to be a boy, and I clung to it with a fervor I didn’t know I was capable of, nor was willing to admit to. I believed that something had clearly gone wrong with the Paladin powers, because “Amy” was less and less willing to return (given the option, I was loathe to be a lesbian girl again) and Elijah was slowly splitting off a second consciousness from himself and taking over my body. This is about as far from reality as it ever got, and lasted through all of 2003. Yes, I thought I was the split-off duplicate channeled soul of Elijah Wood the entire time I was planning and attempting to execute Project Elanor and all the other BitofEarth events.
Yes, that is crazy.
Yes, that is fucked up.
No, I don’t think that absolves me.
As Elijah, I tried to deal with the 'terrible situation’ of being split off from myself and trapped in a girl’s body (the closest I had yet come to confronting being transgender, as the only other exposure I had to the concept was MsAllegro, who sets off every NO alarm in ANYONE’S book) as best I could, even taking some people 'into my confidence’ to 'tell them the truth.'
I also got BitofEarth into HUGE trouble from a fire triangle of three different major problems, all of which I am owning up to freely.
1: I was relying on a lot of “knowledge” which I wasn’t aware I was making up. This was primarily about the movie industry, publicity, and my “friends” on the cast and crew. Again, using the profiling principle, I was right enough of the time that I got an amazingly long way before it began crumbling around my ears, but in the end, the house (or the real world) always wins.
Actually, I was right on everything that pre-dated the "split,“ but as the gap between that and the present got wider, there was more and more information I had that was no longer accurate.