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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 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
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Andrew Blake's emails to Carlanime/ATF's commentary on his Amy Player fauxpology, part 1
(Anonymous) 2015-04-10 07:04 am (UTC)(link)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 2
(Anonymous) 2015-04-10 07:05 am (UTC)(link)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