Poignant video, Mr. Teahan.
I opened up YouTube to start listening to my epic playlist and, hopefully, make it a smoother transition from one song to the next. What I found was a 37 minute video about childhood trauma that really hit the nail on the head for me today.
I’ve been at war with myself all day, really. To say that any day is easy is to dismiss the effort of staying alive. I have voices in my head that are either the subconscious bullshit of other human beings or they’re schizophrenia presenting in me… but the real kicker here is that they are obsessed with messing with my emotions. I’m pretty sure that actual schizophrenic manifestations don’t care about how the person feels at all. (Do they?)
As far as I’m aware, schizophrenia is really just a compilation of crap going on that makes no sense. It has no narrative. It’s not even consistent from one minute to the next. If that’s the case… and I’ll admit, I don’t feel like falling down a Google rabbit hole to find out right this second… then I cannot possibly be schizophrenic.
Nay, let me tell you what these assholes do to me. I’ve named them Ben, Lucien, and Nick. They convince me that I can hear the thoughts of random men — mostly men who work at Wegmans, I’ll admit — and then pretend to be those men and fawn over me. I’ve come to realize that this is a combination of remorse/regret and spite. They want me to make a fool of myself… an utter fucking fool. As if nearly killing me wasn’t enough, they have to continually ruin my life one step at a time.
They don’t really change, these three. They try to make me cry all the time, actually. They convince me to eat food I should never eat in the first place, such as cottage cheese while I’ve got problems with digesting dairy. This would be attempted murder if I could take them to court, but I can’t because it’s “just in my head.” That means when I take over the blank space in the backs of their minds and drive them beyond bat shit crazy, I’ll be able to get off Scott free, right? (Splendid. She taps her fingers together one by one.)
The problem is they are so good at imitating love that I get confused. I know what love sounds like and what it looks like. You do, too, most likely. I believe in you, anyway. They continuously evolve like a good psychopath does, mimicking goodness and sounding like my inner self. I’ve got a real bead on how to love these days and they think they are getting the better of me learning to sound like myself. Except they can never sustain it and then God steps in when he feels like it, to boot.
A part of me questions whether or not my psyche fractured and God is really just my higher self, my ideal self that I constructed over the past few decades. Maybe She is. She’s gender fluid, by the way, so your guess is as good as mine over whether He’s a She or maybe we should just go with Alumnus. That’s Their preference, after all.
Anyway, it’s neither here nor there, for it does not matter if I can tell you the ins and outs of who and what God is. You either believe in Them or you don’t. And neither of us actually give a shit if you do or not, as it so happens. I know, that doesn’t make any sense to you Bible thumpers out there, does it? But it does to the Islamic folks, I bet. Did you forget you worship the same God? I think you did.
The Quran (pardon my misspelling, it’s spelled with the apostrophe in two different places, so I’m just going to leave it out now) is the four books of Moses, which is the basis of the Old Testament. It’s the same God, y’all. Get over it already, I know you’re going to be all mad and stuff. We still don’t care!
Now, moving on to the real subject at hand: how three human beings came to be inside my head and harass me on a daily basis because they just can’t let go of the woman they threw away. All of them threw me in the garbage and I am not confused in the slightest: that is hatred, not love. Trust me, I’m really good at discerning love from anything else. And, I’ve decided, if it’s not love, it’s hate.
Today, they tried to project to me what some guy in the Wegmans deli might have been thinking all day today after The Incident(TM). But before that, let me tell you how they tried to keep me from taking care of myself by making me feel too shitty to shower and trying to convince me to eat milk chocolate frosting on a cake. This is a daily battle, especially since I live with people who eat dairy as if it’s of no concern of theirs that I cannot eat it. (And really, who’s blaming them? Oh, right, it’s BenjaNick. Ben and Nick. Together. They are perfect for each other; they should get married.)
Every day, they try to get me to do all the chores that use the hot water first thing after I wake up so I have to wait to shower. (I mean… have you ever taken a shower that alternates between cold as balls and molten lava every few minutes? I have. Too many times now.) Well, to be fair, it’s all the health craze to take showers like that, but I don’t need to pump my lymphatic system with blasts of heat and cold. I’m perfectly healthy most of the time thanks to cutting out all the Shit That Ails Me(TM).
That being said, I’m a bit under the weather today. Even after taking extra B vitamins. Speaking of those saboteurs, did I mention that they like to make sure I do everything but acquire the correct food for myself? I eat 80% vegetables and vegetable fats on a good day and yet lately I bring home more and more grains — something I’ve actively avoided for ages now. I bring home facsimiles for dairy products as if I actually need them (but I don’t!) I bring home shit for my parents to eat and then I find out I have one meal in the refrigerator.
I feel like I’m always going to the store to pick something up due to this stupid. I could choose to believe God is instead setting me up to walk past the deli daily, but why? I’m more than willing to go to the store daily even when I do have the refrigerator appropriately stocked and ready to serve me and my 101 allergies. And this is how a girl packs on 40 pounds, by the way: listening to assholes who try to convince her she can eat oatmeal and other grains and maybe even mac & cheese! But wait, forget that God said she’d die if she ate chocolate again; those butt heads got me to eat sugar free chocolates I bought for my mother without even considering the part where a peanut butter cup still involves CHOCOLATE.
#AttemptedMurder
Is this what being schizophrenic is like? I thought they were paranoid people were after them with like knives and garrotes, not frosted cupcakes. I don’t want to make light of the mental illness we call schizophrenia, just to be clear… I just don’t think I’ve actually got it. No, instead, I have the overactive imaginations of three losers who can’t accept defeat. And the way they choose to aggravate me day in and day out is become the voice of The Deli Man.
Okay, I admit it. I never played the G.I. Joe RPG… but now I kind of want to. I wonder how convincing of a deli man I can be. Then again, I’m sure this RPG is just as lame as every RPG: us vs. them. Why can’t it be co-op? This is my problem with gamer boyz. They have no idea how to co-op! Not unless their woman trained them to, but man is that exhausting, training idiots. Trust me, I’ve tried.
“You’re hurting me by failing to harmonize” just never really penetrates their widdle* brain. Nor does “I compromise by default; it’s your turn to compromise, bro.” It goes in one ear and out the other as they continue to stare vacantly at the screen, numb between the ears. I’m supposed to buy their innocent/stupid act, too, when I know they heard me because I saw the micro-expression they made while I was talking “at” them. Who you foolin’, bro?
* Widdle = baby talk for little.
I could have made you wait until the end of the article for an explanation on that, but the thing is that I didn’t want to wait until the end of the article. It’s stupid amounts of rude to make people scroll around like that.
Anyway… you’d think with all the role-players out there, they’d have perfect marriages. They’d have extrapolated their experience behind dice with their friends into being brave against their fire-breathing wenches. I don’t think it works that way, though, considering both my brothers seem to be kind of miserable in general. Perhaps it’s because they haven’t learnt the art of self-forgiveness. (Have you? Stick with me, I’ll teach you.)
I’ve been role-playing since I was five years old. It started out with me playing by myself, sometimes with my brother’s G.I. Joes with my Barbies… on sets made out of Legos, of course. My younger brother also played with these three things occasionally… that is, until we littered the pantry floor with our Legos and our older brother cleaned them up with the deal that he got to keep them. He built kick ass space ships out of them, so I can’t really complain. (Way to go, Tom!)
Oh, shoot. Now my brother has a name. It makes him… like… real and stuff. (I love you, Tammi! We should totes have dinner together sometime… when I’m not allergic to half of creation.)
Anyway, where were we? Oh yeah. The Deli Man. This title is accompanied by some bad ass intro music in my head, of course, because everything is epic even when it’s ordinary. It’s the only way to keep myself entertained throughout the ages. My very first character for a tabletop RPG was named Harry and he was a fighter. My idiot little brother made something-or-other… it doesn’t matter, we died within ten minutes under Tom’s tutelage.
“You meet a talking tree!” — GM
“I attack it!” — Little Bro
“Wait… I want to talk to it…” — Me.
“You’re dead.” — GM
Shortest. Game. Ever. That ever began, anyway.
I always felt bad for Tom… he had to drag the two of us to his games all the time. Free babysitting, honestly. I tried to just be quiet most of the time. It was less embarrassing that way. (For him, I hope, anyway.) With my little bro being a roll-player instead of a role-player, well, I dunno if he was an embarrassment but he could’ve been.
Tom’s like six years older than the two of us, so you know. It’s kind of a big deal to hang out with the “older kids.” I remember one of them even looked kind of like one of the Kids In The Hall. (He was pretty cute, in other words.) That didn’t last forever, of course; eventually, he stopped taking us all over there. I remember being given a 2 liter of Coca Cola every game day, which was Friday if I recall. Why is it game always takes place on Friday night? Didn’t y’all learn that’s DATE NIGHT?!
I’m autistic and I know this. Come on, guys!!!!!
Alright, alright. Enough embarrassing my fam. It’s bad enough I use purple on lavender, I know. Forgive me for being a girl. I know… pics or it’s not real! [Nope.] I’m too shy for that… go away! Besides, you’d just judge my fat ass negatively and then I’d have to hear you, too, in the back of my mind. That’s right, we’re meandering back to the topic at hand! Welcome to the Crystal Show!
You’re going to learn one thing about me: I wander in a spiral in my thoughts and when you’re done reading me, you will, too… but it’s not so bad. I promise. You’ll see very soon indeed. It’ll help you remember things better than ever before. I promise.
So it was a cold balmy February 25th, 2021 in St. Louis, Missouri when I became so blessed with me+. I was perfectly sane before this, or so I thought. I mean, I had my issues and problems, sure. I was suffering from PTSD (not the sort you get from war, at least not the kind of war fought with a gun) and other problems, like delusions of being loved. So, you know… not perfect… but only one me in my head for sure. Perhaps many voices, but all my own.
That changed at 12:30 PM when I received the third Kundalini attunement. Whoa, wait! You lost me! Hold onto your britches already. There’s this stuff out there called “reiki.” The short story is that it’s a way to heal people with the cosmic background energy abundantly all around us. Kundalini is a type of reiki, the second one I chose to learn, actually. I learned the original first, though I didn’t get my certificate of completion yet… I was trying to memorize all the little things that you learn as a reiki master so that I would be earning that certificate.
Okay, so… what the hell, Sansara? I mean, Crystal! Tell us what happened! Okay, God. I will.
It turns out that I’m a natural when it comes to reiki because I learned a tribal shamanism from my family at age seven. The primary component of working with reiki is feeling it work and I can “touch Source” as I call it any time I want to. It’s an at-will skill for me. In fact, I heal 24/7, it turns out. Everything near me. And it’s exhausting. It’s also why everyone thinks I’m magic.
The first two Kundalini attunements are to heal and align all the chakras in the body. Chakras are, simply put, energy centers, typically centered around the amygdala, the voice box, the heart, and so on. After all those are cleared out to work how they are meant to, the third Kundalini attunement is supposed to wake up the Kundalini serpent or dragon.
Something is certainly awake now.
There is something called a Kundalini Awakening. It’s a phenomenon that can happen even without the Kundalini attunements, especially if one practices Kundalini yoga. Of course, my dumb ass learns after doing this that people train their whole lives for it and I stumbled right into it, arms wide open, thinking that this is going to be great because I’m so sick that I really need more attunements and healing.
And then I wrote a million words to a man in another country, trying to propose to him because I was so sick and I needed so much help that I considered it to be husband work. So I explained all the miscommunication events I could remember and basically everything I ever thought about him. I was a fountain of positivity… and something kept egging me on.
In fact, the first statement came before the Kundalini attunement, I realize. “I don’t want you to be cold.” I was staring numbly at a desktop background I made of the man I idolized and I mistook it as his sentiment. I was so thrilled he gave even one shit about me, even if it made no sense to me that it was happening in my head. (This is NOT how schizophrenia develops, either, folks! Since when do delusions say they want you to be comfortable?)
I had so many back problems in that day… he carefully led me to the floor where we went into a pose I now know is called The Child (Balasana.) I didn’t know yoga then. (I don’t now, either, really, but I’ve been doing yoga poses enough to start looking it up.) Here I am, thinking it’s this ninny in another country taking care of me, but no. Not even close.
So who was it?
SPOILER ALERT.
It was God.
Angel-Sansara 