Frankie
By Patricia Lefave
I was 58 and a bit when I died.
I was living in a hell hole of a place where the landlord acted like they were doing me a big favour by letting me live when no one else would have me. I lived in an institution most of my life before this but that was before the powers that be decided these places should be run 'like a business.' I was not very profitable as ‘a business.’
I got sick and confused when I was still a child and I never really developed into a real adult after that. Oh I tried, but people saw me as 'different' and they treated me different too. I could never object to anything I was told I had to be, or do, or say; I could never question anything anyone else said...not because I did not want to, or did not think of a reason to do so, but because they all told me I could not and that I had to listen to them as I had no insight into my own illness. I think I accepted that because I was so young when they started telling me that, that I didn't have any good arguments to give anyone, as I had never learned anything. Maybe if I had been older when it first happened I could have got better but I don't think anyone would even have noticed if I did anyway. My world was about following orders which is how they defined when I was 'good.'
I realized this only after I was dead.
There is nothing like dying to clear all the cobwebs and programming out of your head. I kind of think when the brain dies and the constant influence and other control is gone, the soul lives. You might say we “die and learn” ha ha. If I was alive and said that, there would probably be an intervention called as it would be heard in psychiatric terms. Or someone would ‘correct’ my metaphor for me.
Psychiatrists have lousy senses of humour.
I think that is because they live in their own imaginary little world. I used to ask this woman here who is channelling me if she wanted to be my girlfriend. That sounds childlike to me now but I was always so happy when anyone was really nice to me.
I had a lousy life on earth. I can say that now because no team of ACT workers will come after me, but had I said that then, I would have been 'corrected' for it and likely told I should be grateful for having such a great family. I think I was driven into a psychosis the first time when I was about 5 or 6 years old. I didn't really know what it was then, just that it was really scary and I never slept. Both my parents were alcoholics. They really scared me a lot. I was not allowed to talk about it. They told me that what went on inside those four walls STAYED inside those four walls. I never knew the difference between what was private and what was secret. I don’t think I knew there WAS a difference.
Anyway, as I said, with death comes a certain clarity of spirit. I am now a part of the living collective consciousness and the other spirits in here with me, both the living and the dead, are teaching me many things. One of the things I learned was how absolutely blind to reality most of the 'normal' really are. A female spirit told me that. I was talking about my struggle to stop getting picked on and she told me that most of the people who abuse us don't know, that we know, what they are doing! I thought that was just plain crazy. How could they not know we know? She said it was because THEY thought of us as if we were a different species and so they treated us as if that were true. When she said this, something started to click in me and for the first time I started to be able to figure out a few things I could make no sense of at all before. I remember feeling really upset about an incident on a bus.
Not long before this incident, I had been inside the hospital for another round of help in the endless lifetime series of it. I told one of my nurses that some of the bus drivers were really mean to me and I wanted them to stop, so she told me what I should do to be nice to them. She assured me that if I was nice to them, that they would be nice to me. I believed her and so I listened carefully to everything she told me so that I could change the situation. So I tried to be nice when I got on the bus.
I even remember saying once, Good morning Mr. Bus driver...It sure is a nice day today isn't it?
He just looked at me and didn't say anything. Of course now that I am no longer on earth, I know that this sounds so stilted and strange coming from a man in his fifties. But that you see is how psychiatric hospital staff talked to me, and that is what THEY defined for me as 'normal' behaviour. Of course, this did not work for a number of reasons which I understand NOW, but did not understand then. This is institutional type behaviour created under years, sometimes decades of invalidating and suppressing 'treatment.' It is like Stockholm Syndrome which happens when a captive must please his captors so that nothing worse will happen to him, and that is the mentality I learned, and what I was trained to live with. But there is nothing 'normal' about it. It is actually bizarre for a grown man to be expected to relate like that and to be told this is ‘good’ and proper.
One of my friends at the psych hospital used to say that you could not identify the 'inmates' in there apart from some of the staff without a program! That is true outside the institutions too. The belief that it is all nicely and neatly divided into sane and insane, normal and abnormal is nonsense. Yet we are told we must accept the nonsense as reality if we want to be left alone and avoid getting an even BIGGER dose of awareness reduction medication.
Anyway, shortly after my “good morning Mr. Bus driver” day, I got on another bus to go home after day of being mocked in public places; like a restaurant and at the mall. It had been a particularly horrible day, so I tried to act real nice to the bus driver who did not say a word back to me but then, he started talking about me like I was not there and two male morons on the bus with him joined in. One of them was sitting right in front of me on the seat which was sideways to me and the other was sitting directly across the aisle from me and staring into my face with an amused look on his face. Then the other one joined in by saying to the bus driver, Did you not want to say something nice to this guy Mr. Bus Driver?...The bus driver looked in the mirror at me and laughed. The other two joined in as he said to them, He won’t notice, he is just in a kind of fight with himself and has no idea what is going on anyway. The really sad part is that it is the guy sitting behind him that is winning the fight!” Then all three of them l just guffawed with laugher since there was no one else on the bus.
I just felt sick, and I decided to say something this time, kind of turned my head away because I already knew the kind of answer I would get would be to correct me. So I asked them, “Why are you doing this to me? I didn’t do anything to you.”
They all looked at me kind of grinning together and obviously really enjoying themselves and one of the morons asked the driver, Who is he talking to now?” The driver said, “He is talking to the people inside him who are annoying him...” Then they all laughed some more oblivious to my distress.
I used to believe when I was alive that they did that just to hurt me. But you know what? A lady spirit told me that they did not KNOW I was talking to them.
I didn’t believe her at first. I said to her voice, “how could they not know that?” I was sitting right there talking to them?” She said, it was because THEY were deluding themselves that you could not see, hear or understand them. That is how they give themselves permission to behave so badly and then deny it is abuse. But you were right Frankie. That was abuse and they should have been ashamed of themselves. Those of us left on earth are going to have to tell them every single detail of what they do and about what we know so we can bring them all out of the group delusion they are in and into the reality of the experience from the point of view of people like you and many, many others..
Then she said, So you see Frankie, that idea we all tend to have that we have to do something to try to save the world may not be so far off as the “normal” people like to think it is. It is just that none of us can bear that burden alone, it's too heavy, so we all have to work together to push back the force that is trying to overpower us. Together we can accomplish what none of us can do alone. Maybe it means we are ALL the spirit of Jesus and a lot of other saints and saviours together. That is, after all, what the baptism and the taking of communion is supposed to be all about isn’t it? It is supposed to represent being One in spirit. I always found it strange that Christian mental illness workers could never understand that at all. It is kind of funny really.
Anyway, after the lady spirit told me that, I started to feel a whole lot better and I think that when I am all healed from this, the kingdom of heaven is where we go after we let go of all the nonsense we were dragging around in the previous life.
I am free to say that right out loud, now that I am dead and no longer an offence to others. There is no psychiatrist or ACT team going to come to get me for my expression of ‘religiosity’ now.
I am finally free to be truly ME.
