“My mental illness is definitely my biggest challenge in my life. I am bi-polar, but I also have multiple personality disorder. So there is more than one of me living up in my head, and it makes it a bit difficult. It is like living in an apartment complex. So most people are like a house, I am more like an apartment building, and I have multiple tenants in my head. With multiple personality disorder there is an exaggerated version of how a singular personality brain works. You know how under different circumstances, you might feel slightly different, you behave slightly different? Well my brain changes that to literally, ‘I will become a different person.’ From the traumas I have experienced in my life, my brain now has these other people that live in the same body.
“My traumas happened when I was young… my mother tried to kill me when I was three years old. I remember a distinct before and after: before that day, I was fine, but after that day a distinct voice emerged, it was the birth of the voice. The traumas continued after that. I realized I had something wrong with me when I was 12 years old, and I woke up, and there were cuts all over my arms. It was like watching a scary movie that you cannot control. Your body is doing things you do not want it to do, it says things you do not want it to say. They can have aggressive takeovers, but I have learned to curb that, and to help them to cohabitant better.
“What I experienced growing up was primarily with my mother. She lives in New York with her new husband, but I do not talk to her. When I was growing up, she tried to kill me at various points. She contributed to the isolation I was feeling as a little girl growing up, and had me afraid of the world, and poisoned the world for me. She took me out of public school and would teach me in a closet for 12 hours a day, and just ridiculous things like that. Even to this day, she thought she was doing the best she could. But why did she take me out of society if she thought what she was doing was so good for me? Why did she do this to me? My mom was very mentally ill as well.
(POTJS Note: At this point, my interviewee stopped talking, slammed her eyelids shut, and I could see her eyes rolling around behind her eyelids, while at the same time fluttering open and closed. At this point it stopped, and she apologized, “one of the voices wanted to come out, but I stopped them, and told them to go away.”)
“The biggest challenge for me is making friends. It is very hard to make the emotional effort to make a friend in another individual. I am in a good place now, though. I don’t have money to get the therapy I need. So I researched everything on my own on the subject to learn how to help myself. I was eventually officially diagnosed, but I do not have insurance, and not enough for therapy. Unfortunately insurance is not free.
“My girlfriend helps me. She knows the voices, she talks to them, she has dinner with them. They go on, and they go off. Sometimes they go on together, and it is not good. But she embraces them.
“Going forward I am going to pursue movies and writing novels. I want to teach the younger generation not to be hateful, to not be hurtful. I am hoping Hollywood will pick up one of my books I write. I also want to be a personal trainer, and help people that way. My main focus my whole life has been to help as many people as I can. If I could get millions or even billions of dollars, that would be the best way I could help people. If I have one dollar and you need it, I would give it to you. If I had a million, I would do the same.”
~ Point Pleasant
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