2. I was at this point completely unraveled from what was and was not true about my own life, and what I believed about myself and my past could change from moment to moment. This did not engender what you would exactly call a spirit of trust, which is something very important when you are working on a project of that magnitude.
This is because I was continuing to split further. The mess the Priestess had made of me and the alters she had started were still developing, but now Elijah, not me, was the default. Each of those, again, was a completely separate entitity with their own past, and my mouth, face, voice, and eyes could give you ten different backstories in ten days and every single time be able to pass a fleet of lie detectors that it was the truth.
3. Aware that I had lost everyone in my previous life - whether that was as Amy OR Elijah - I hung a crazed amount of importance on BitofEarth, the people in it, and them all continuing to like me at all costs. Especially Orangeblossom, whom I had fallen in love with by then. In order to try and maintain this, I took on ridiculously more than I could handle. If someone wanted it, I promised it. If I could find a way to do it - lie, cheat, hook, or crook - I did it, or if I couldn’t, I came up with an excuse that made it not my fault. I delegated my hugely overloaded plate to others, but when they weren’t happy with the work, or if something went wrong, I took it back onto myself rather than confront them or drive them, even if I already had more than I could handle. I considered the success of Orangeblossom’s and everyone else’s whims at BitofEarth to be the stuff of life or dearth, and had completely lost all perspective. And if you’re fighting for your life, not a convention or organization, you’ll do anything, say anything, promise anything, and prop yourself up on a house of cards hoping you can find glue before the wind blows.
Well, as everyone knows, the wind blew big time and I didn’t have any glue. Seeing the sure destruction of TentMoot and the exposure of the lies I had told to try and pull it off, I tried to kill myself. I am actually very thankful for this, as the mandatory rest in the mental hospital was my first step towards re-connecting with reality.
The alter committed suicide. Or rather, the alter attempted suicide with my body and succeeded in terms of destroying himself as a consciousness. I was left holding the bag, blinking back into existence after over a year, deluged with sudden memories that I’d had no part in and which more or less boiled down to "Wow I’m in Deep Shit."
After the fall of BitofEarth, I tried a home-based business selling credit-card readers with a guy who I’d met at the mental home, but he WAS a scam artist, and I was soon standing on the sidewalk in San Dimas with Diamond, Orangeblossom, an eviction notice, and not a red cent to my name. Begging at gas stations for money and gas to get us there, we made it into Hollywood , where we crashed on a friend’s couch for a few days until we could scrape together the money taking pictures as costumed characters on the Boulevard to get a cheap motel room. We lived hand to mouth that way for all of 2004 and the first half of 2005, trying to repair our lives. The maelstrom that destroyed BitofEarth, horrifying and painful as it was, was, in the end, I believe, the work of God. It also destroyed the 'duplicate Elijah’ and I had to start over looking myself hard in the face. It was about this time that we separated from Diamond, who had begun having fits of temper where she would bite and attack us and herself, as well as stealing alcohol. We have heard several stories about her going through quite the litany of roommates with several different horror stories of lies and dozens of identities on her part, but I don’t trust gossip, and it’s not my business anyway. I haven’t seen her in over 3 years, and I hope that she is well and has gotten the help she so clearly needed. Terribly afraid at being pinned as a con artist when I hadn’t stolen from anyone, and seized with panic attacks at the thought of being made to live as Amy Player, a girl, I tried to adopt a new identity so that I could sort myself out while still living as a male. No movie stars this time, no big deal, just a drifting 'actor, writer, jack-of-all-trades’ with a mysterious past he wouldn’t talk about. I got a lot of therapy, found out about transgender, saved up money, got an apartment, and started looking at building up a long-term life again.
This is all again true, but there are some major omissions which were left out to try and protect Abbey. During this time, there was an entire litany of alters. The more stress I was under, the more I split, and this time, they were almost all male and all inter-related with each other one way or another. It had nothing to do with the Daydverse. It is not any kind of precedent to the Daydverse. Abbey’s just assuming, and has frankly never even read it (especially since she calls it my grand "slash epic” when the only gay couple are the very minor characters of Stephen and Derek) After Cherie left, I couldn’t handle it any more.
I was stranded in this huge mess I hadn’t made with this woman who was incredibly needy, clingy, and demanding and whom I frankly couldn’t stand, but whom I had to pander to desperately because she was all I had in the world. She wanted, I gave. I even wrote a screenplay for her and signed over the rights so she could register it in her name with the writer’s guild and managed to get her pitched to Dreamworks, but then she got bored with it and changed her mind. I had nowhere near anything approaching enough self-esteem or even energy to fight back against that she had also learned to ask for the alters and they’d come. I don’t really know her well, but in memory, she revels in being loved and petted and most of all Special. She must at all times be Special. She’s also the most malleable person I’ve ever seen, and I don’t mean that she was “easy to control." Actually, she was incredibly difficult because she was very much a love/believe the one you’re with. This week she’s conservative, now she’s liberal, this week she’s vegetarian, now she wants to raise chickens, we redecorate the apartment fifty times, she wants to be a director no screenwriter no novelist no actress no tv producer…you can see it again now. On her blog, it’s vividly apparent as she realigns herself to the crowd, as long as they call her Special.
I estimate that from 2003-2007 I probably spent a collective month in my own head. Each time the infodumps of catchup memory were huge. I’d get debilitating let-me-die migranes for a day or two. And then I’d know just how much had happened, how many promises and changes and plans had been made without me, and I’d be utterly unable to cope with even knowing where to begin to handle it. So I’d just lie there until, before too long, Abbey would get frustrated with me and ask for one of the others and I’d be gone again.
Next thing I knew, I was back in Virginia. In an apartment, working three jobs, and Abbey had gone with her mother but was still sending me letters saying she loved me and if "we both got our acts together” she’d be coming back. So I posted an apology to try and start the process of rebuilding the mess I’d been left in, figuring that maybe trying to calm down the angry people was a good place to start. I had no idea that she was on any kind of vacation or anything of the sort. I didn’t know where she was other than “with her mother." I worked, I went to counseling, I got a name for (what I was willing to tell him) of what was wrong with me. I started the transition process. I dutifully wrote updates to Abbey weekly and sent her Christmas and birthday presents and received little tokens in return. I didn’t actually have any feelings for her myself, but she was part of the package I’d inherited, and I had very strong feelings for the idea of having a real, stable, relatively sane life. No, things weren’t good. Thanks to Jeanine and the alters, I was a laughingstock and pariah in my old circles, and the whole FtM transition was hell and a half (I found out halfway through that I had a heart condition that almost disqualified me and gave me a prognosis of less than five years, though that later proved to be a mis-reading of the MRI), but I put my head down and shoulder to the proverbial grindstone and told myself that soon I’d just be any other man with a girlfriend who loved him and we could move away from the shame.
Then out of the blue I get a call. It’s her. I give my latest update and ask when she’s coming. She says never. She says she’s with someone else. I ask if we can be friends. She says no. I ask about the bird. She says it’s dead and that if I ever contact her again she’ll have the police on me and she hangs up. I stood there for ten minutes with the phone in my hand, then went into my apartment and sat there. I didn’t go to work. I was in shock. Six weeks later I got evicted, losing my deposit because the electricity had been off for weeks and the fridge was a mire of maggots. I weighed less than 100lbs. I moved into my car. I drove down to the library. I answered an ad for a telemarketing job. I realized I’d have to interview. I started sobbing. I blacked out.
Fourteen months later I’m standing in a room I don’t know with a cat I don’t know, and there’s another, massive infodump. This time, there’s been only one alter. He’s been using my new legal name, Andrew Blake, but he has, like the others, his own fully realized backstory. And oh, God, he’s completely unlike the others. If I’d been able to actually have a life, he’s who I only wish I could have been. He’s smart, funny, strong, and unlike so many of the others who have run roughshod over my life before, he’s so, so kind. He's gotten me into an apartment with a guy named Mark that I’d been friends with when we were very young, he's holding two jobs, has put my mother in her place (he thinks he’s my brother and has just forcefully insisted that he "won’t discuss Amy, I’m your son and you deal with me or not. No Amy, no [SISTER’S NAME REDACTED]”) and reconnected with Papa and my Dad as a SON. I'm actually digging out of the 25K of debt Abbey left me in, and he’s gotten into HP fandom but not in the old way. He’s been writing, drawing, and it’s amazing work that has attracted REAL friends and a REAL social life and he’s been helping people beyond my wildest dreams. He knows nothing about me, and I’m terrified he’ll find out. He’s a wonderful, wonderful man, and he doesn’t deserve me and my mess. But at least some of my demons have followed him - HE’S gotten infodump from people he’s based the Daydverse on, though nothing else.
I don’t know what brought me back, but in that space, I evaluated things and decided that I was a lost cause. No, that’s not self-pity. I never really had a chance. 28 years in, and I’ve lived maybe 10 of them, and pretty much everything since 1995 has been just nightmarish desperate paddling against other people’s mess. Never really a chance to become anything, no real personality or asperations beyond “Oh God please no more what now." And here is this man, this GOOD man, making good things out of the rubble of my life and he has a circle of friends who love him, whom he loves, and who depend on him. So I gave him my life. Sydney Carton: It is a far far better thing and all that. I had learned during the 2003-2007 span that I could plant triggers - nothing complicated - like post-hypnotic suggestions that would cause me to be yanked back. Very similar to the "If I say chicken fricassee, you’ll wake up,” stuff of movies. He’s aware of the wank and it doesn’t really bother him because hey, it’s all about his sister and he’s got a thick skin, good sense of humor, strong sense of perspective, and a lot of self-esteem. But if it gets really serious about my past vs what he knows as his, it triggers chicken fricassee, I deal with it, and he just has a blank space. And he’s resourceful and has good friends and works around them. As far as he knows, he just has occasional blackouts, possibly from the multiple concussions (which my body DOES carry).
He has no idea of all this, really. And I don’t want him to. He’s the man you’re friends with, but I’m the one trying to shield him from the mess I made before he came along. It’s why I never respond publicly to the wank, why I never say anything about it anywhere other than email boxes where I can delete the correspondence as it’s read and he never has to know. Please, take him as he is. Take me for whatever you want to. Hate me, throw me to the wolves, whatever, but please know that I’m not going to see him destroyed by this. If you do choose the wolves, I’ll find a way to make it look like someone else sent the email. I’ll spin whatever I have to spin, and he’ll believe it, because hey, he KNOWS his own past and life, and he has no reason to doubt them. He’s a good, good person, whether he’s a manifestation, spirit, ghost, alter, other, dissociation, or whatever else. It doesn’t matter. I’ve decided to let him live. Please do the same.
I’ll be waiting for your reply and then this whole thing is getting deleted from the email. I’ve tried to be comprehensive, but it’s a lot, and like I said, I don’t carry on about it in public.
Regards Legally, Andrew Blake, but not Thanfiction
Andrew Blake's emails to Carlanime/ATF's commentary on his Amy Player fauxpology, part 2
2. I was at this point completely unraveled from what was and was not true about my own life, and what I believed about myself and my past could change from moment to moment. This did not engender what you would exactly call a spirit of trust, which is something very important when you are working on a project of that magnitude.
This is because I was continuing to split further. The mess the Priestess had made of me and the alters she had started were still developing, but now Elijah, not me, was the default. Each of those, again, was a completely separate entitity with their own past, and my mouth, face, voice, and eyes could give you ten different backstories in ten days and every single time be able to pass a fleet of lie detectors that it was the truth.
3. Aware that I had lost everyone in my previous life - whether that was as Amy OR Elijah - I hung a crazed amount of importance on BitofEarth, the people in it, and them all continuing to like me at all costs. Especially Orangeblossom, whom I had fallen in love with by then. In order to try and maintain this, I took on ridiculously more than I could handle. If someone wanted it, I promised it. If I could find a way to do it - lie, cheat, hook, or crook - I did it, or if I couldn’t, I came up with an excuse that made it not my fault. I delegated my hugely overloaded plate to others, but when they weren’t happy with the work, or if something went wrong, I took it back onto myself rather than confront them or drive them, even if I already had more than I could handle. I considered the success of Orangeblossom’s and everyone else’s whims at BitofEarth to be the stuff of life or dearth, and had completely lost all perspective. And if you’re fighting for your life, not a convention or organization, you’ll do anything, say anything, promise anything, and prop yourself up on a house of cards hoping you can find glue before the wind blows.
Well, as everyone knows, the wind blew big time and I didn’t have any glue. Seeing the sure destruction of TentMoot and the exposure of the lies I had told to try and pull it off, I tried to kill myself. I am actually very thankful for this, as the mandatory rest in the mental hospital was my first step towards re-connecting with reality.
The alter committed suicide. Or rather, the alter attempted suicide with my body and succeeded in terms of destroying himself as a consciousness. I was left holding the bag, blinking back into existence after over a year, deluged with sudden memories that I’d had no part in and which more or less boiled down to "Wow I’m in Deep Shit."
After the fall of BitofEarth, I tried a home-based business selling credit-card readers with a guy who I’d met at the mental home, but he WAS a scam artist, and I was soon standing on the sidewalk in San Dimas with Diamond, Orangeblossom, an eviction notice, and not a red cent to my name. Begging at gas stations for money and gas to get us there, we made it into Hollywood , where we crashed on a friend’s couch for a few days until we could scrape together the money taking pictures as costumed characters on the Boulevard to get a cheap motel room.
We lived hand to mouth that way for all of 2004 and the first half of 2005, trying to repair our lives. The maelstrom that destroyed BitofEarth, horrifying and painful as it was, was, in the end, I believe, the work of God. It also destroyed the 'duplicate Elijah’ and I had to start over looking myself hard in the face. It was about this time that we separated from Diamond, who had begun having fits of temper where she would bite and attack us and herself, as well as stealing alcohol. We have heard several stories about her going through quite the litany of roommates with several different horror stories of lies and dozens of identities on her part, but I don’t trust gossip, and it’s not my business anyway. I haven’t seen her in over 3 years, and I hope that she is well and has gotten the help she so clearly needed.
Terribly afraid at being pinned as a con artist when I hadn’t stolen from anyone, and seized with panic attacks at the thought of being made to live as Amy Player, a girl, I tried to adopt a new identity so that I could sort myself out while still living as a male. No movie stars this time, no big deal, just a drifting 'actor, writer, jack-of-all-trades’ with a mysterious past he wouldn’t talk about. I got a lot of therapy, found out about transgender, saved up money, got an apartment, and started looking at building up a long-term life again.
This is all again true, but there are some major omissions which were left out to try and protect Abbey. During this time, there was an entire litany of alters. The more stress I was under, the more I split, and this time, they were almost all male and all inter-related with each other one way or another. It had nothing to do with the Daydverse. It is not any kind of precedent to the Daydverse. Abbey’s just assuming, and has frankly never even read it (especially since she calls it my grand "slash epic” when the only gay couple are the very minor characters of Stephen and Derek) After Cherie left, I couldn’t handle it any more.
I was stranded in this huge mess I hadn’t made with this woman who was incredibly needy, clingy, and demanding and whom I frankly couldn’t stand, but whom I had to pander to desperately because she was all I had in the world. She wanted, I gave. I even wrote a screenplay for her and signed over the rights so she could register it in her name with the writer’s guild and managed to get her pitched to Dreamworks, but then she got bored with it and changed her mind. I had nowhere near anything approaching enough self-esteem or even energy to fight back against that she had also learned to ask for the alters and they’d come. I don’t really know her well, but in memory, she revels in being loved and petted and most of all Special. She must at all times be Special. She’s also the most malleable person I’ve ever seen, and I don’t mean that she was “easy to control." Actually, she was incredibly difficult because she was very much a love/believe the one you’re with. This week she’s conservative, now she’s liberal, this week she’s vegetarian, now she wants to raise chickens, we redecorate the apartment fifty times, she wants to be a director no screenwriter no novelist no actress no tv producer…you can see it again now. On her blog, it’s vividly apparent as she realigns herself to the crowd, as long as they call her Special.
I estimate that from 2003-2007 I probably spent a collective month in my own head. Each time the infodumps of catchup memory were huge. I’d get debilitating let-me-die migranes for a day or two. And then I’d know just how much had happened, how many promises and changes and plans had been made without me, and I’d be utterly unable to cope with even knowing where to begin to handle it. So I’d just lie there until, before too long, Abbey would get frustrated with me and ask for one of the others and I’d be gone again.
Next thing I knew, I was back in Virginia. In an apartment, working three jobs, and Abbey had gone with her mother but was still sending me letters saying she loved me and if "we both got our acts together” she’d be coming back. So I posted an apology to try and start the process of rebuilding the mess I’d been left in, figuring that maybe trying to calm down the angry people was a good place to start. I had no idea that she was on any kind of vacation or anything of the sort. I didn’t know where she was other than “with her mother." I worked, I went to counseling, I got a name for (what I was willing to tell him) of what was wrong with me. I started the transition process. I dutifully wrote updates to Abbey weekly and sent her Christmas and birthday presents and received little tokens in return. I didn’t actually have any feelings for her myself, but she was part of the package I’d inherited, and I had very strong feelings for the idea of having a real, stable, relatively sane life. No, things weren’t good. Thanks to Jeanine and the alters, I was a laughingstock and pariah in my old circles, and the whole FtM transition was hell and a half (I found out halfway through that I had a heart condition that almost disqualified me and gave me a prognosis of less than five years, though that later proved to be a mis-reading of the MRI), but I put my head down and shoulder to the proverbial grindstone and told myself that soon I’d just be any other man with a girlfriend who loved him and we could move away from the shame.
Then out of the blue I get a call. It’s her. I give my latest update and ask when she’s coming. She says never. She says she’s with someone else. I ask if we can be friends. She says no. I ask about the bird. She says it’s dead and that if I ever contact her again she’ll have the police on me and she hangs up. I stood there for ten minutes with the phone in my hand, then went into my apartment and sat there. I didn’t go to work. I was in shock. Six weeks later I got evicted, losing my deposit because the electricity had been off for weeks and the fridge was a mire of maggots. I weighed less than 100lbs. I moved into my car. I drove down to the library. I answered an ad for a telemarketing job. I realized I’d have to interview. I started sobbing. I blacked out.
Fourteen months later I’m standing in a room I don’t know with a cat I don’t know, and there’s another, massive infodump. This time, there’s been only one alter. He’s been using my new legal name, Andrew Blake, but he has, like the others, his own fully realized backstory. And oh, God, he’s completely unlike the others. If I’d been able to actually have a life, he’s who I only wish I could have been. He’s smart, funny, strong, and unlike so many of the others who have run roughshod over my life before, he’s so, so kind. He's gotten me into an apartment with a guy named Mark that I’d been friends with when we were very young, he's holding two jobs, has put my mother in her place (he thinks he’s my brother and has just forcefully insisted that he "won’t discuss Amy, I’m your son and you deal with me or not. No Amy, no [SISTER’S NAME REDACTED]”) and reconnected with Papa and my Dad as a SON. I'm actually digging out of the 25K of debt Abbey left me in, and he’s gotten into HP fandom but not in the old way. He’s been writing, drawing, and it’s amazing work that has attracted REAL friends and a REAL social life and he’s been helping people beyond my wildest dreams. He knows nothing about me, and I’m terrified he’ll find out. He’s a wonderful, wonderful man, and he doesn’t deserve me and my mess. But at least some of my demons have followed him - HE’S gotten infodump from people he’s based the Daydverse on, though nothing else.
I don’t know what brought me back, but in that space, I evaluated things and decided that I was a lost cause. No, that’s not self-pity. I never really had a chance. 28 years in, and I’ve lived maybe 10 of them, and pretty much everything since 1995 has been just nightmarish desperate paddling against other people’s mess. Never really a chance to become anything, no real personality or asperations beyond “Oh God please no more what now." And here is this man, this GOOD man, making good things out of the rubble of my life and he has a circle of friends who love him, whom he loves, and who depend on him. So I gave him my life. Sydney Carton: It is a far far better thing and all that.
I had learned during the 2003-2007 span that I could plant triggers - nothing complicated - like post-hypnotic suggestions that would cause me to be yanked back. Very similar to the "If I say chicken fricassee, you’ll wake up,” stuff of movies. He’s aware of the wank and it doesn’t really bother him because hey, it’s all about his sister and he’s got a thick skin, good sense of humor, strong sense of perspective, and a lot of self-esteem. But if it gets really serious about my past vs what he knows as his, it triggers chicken fricassee, I deal with it, and he just has a blank space. And he’s resourceful and has good friends and works around them. As far as he knows, he just has occasional blackouts, possibly from the multiple concussions (which my body DOES carry).
He has no idea of all this, really. And I don’t want him to. He’s the man you’re friends with, but I’m the one trying to shield him from the mess I made before he came along. It’s why I never respond publicly to the wank, why I never say anything about it anywhere other than email boxes where I can delete the correspondence as it’s read and he never has to know. Please, take him as he is. Take me for whatever you want to. Hate me, throw me to the wolves, whatever, but please know that I’m not going to see him destroyed by this. If you do choose the wolves, I’ll find a way to make it look like someone else sent the email. I’ll spin whatever I have to spin, and he’ll believe it, because hey, he KNOWS his own past and life, and he has no reason to doubt them. He’s a good, good person, whether he’s a manifestation, spirit, ghost, alter, other, dissociation, or whatever else. It doesn’t matter. I’ve decided to let him live. Please do the same.
I’ll be waiting for your reply and then this whole thing is getting deleted from the email. I’ve tried to be comprehensive, but it’s a lot, and like I said, I don’t carry on about it in public.
Regards
Legally, Andrew Blake, but not Thanfiction