we are not easy to read.

Just one story? It’s more like my whole life’s story, so settle in.

You could describe me as a wildflower. I think that’s what I’ll call myself - Wildflower. I don’t know how to be anything but myself, although I did try for a short period of time. A few years ago, I dove head first into a barren tank only to shatter every unique fabric of my brain into the concrete. Cold, solid concrete and it’s unforgiving too but not nearly as cold and cruel as I had been to myself.

Hey, don’t forget I’m Wildflower.

Anyway, a slow and uncomfortable social suicide of some sorts, I got lost in self-sacrifice trying to attempt something I was just not used to doing - fitting in. This was only a few years ago, but I just wanted some buddies to party with and not take things too seriously. Unfortunately, they were a crummy bunch peculiar to the “frenemy” drama and sleeping around with each other for ego strokes. For once in my life, I felt like the porcelain doll in the midst of “Annabelle” and “Chucky” dolls. I never fancied that feeling nor had I ever felt ugly to begin with. All the while, I truly tended to treat people with dignity. I even lent that same courtesy to this group, but the need to prove to them that I wasn’t some prissy perfectionist with a list of criticisms became such a preoccupation that I forgot to be myself. I forgot to just be Wildflower.

Their mentality was so odd to me that I experienced some culture shock. Everyone used people’s superficial flaws to put them down. They were so concerned with their reputations too - the “bad girl” and the “bad boy.”

‘Can’t let loose for too long or else someone will find a weakness.’

‘Can’t show too much excitement and sentiment or else someone will find a weakness.’

‘Can’t show how much I want to love someone or else someone will use it against me.’

A group constantly dense with malice and greed for attention, I guess my concealment became a matter of surviving prejudiced animosity just as their concealment was a matter of surviving ridicule. And I’ve heard that some people only hate you because you possess the qualities they wish they had. I wonder if they’ve realized by now how much they made it my problem to deal with how much they actually just always hated themselves..

I’ll never let another person stomp my Light out again because living with a synthetic mask is so much more taxing. Fitting in involved faking naiveté, echoing their lingo, over-inflating myself, and suppressing my virtues. Over time, I struggled to stop feeling so humiliated by it all that it deepened a lengthy depression which would last for the next two and a half years after nearly surviving this crushed skull and broken heart on the concrete of that empty pool. I wasn’t living in my Light anymore; in darkness, I found out what it’s like to live with a fragmented sense of identity.

Who am I now? What does this mean?

Working beside people, working for bosses and working for customers became more and more of an aggravatingly senseless pressure to ‘serve with a smile’ for bastards and “sheeple.” When my last go-around as a laborer for inadequate supervisors and petty coworkers ended in a garbage fire of frustration, I decided that that would be the LAST TIME I would EVER compromise my authentic self again. When COVID hit next, I chose to surrender to that major 'question mark' of life itself - what happens next?

I chose to be alone, and I chose to live unemployed for a while. It didn’t help my depression, and when I finally got back into working, I wasn’t just melancholic anymore. Now, I was downright detached, exhausted and resentful. Once again, I became something I did not recognize, but this time, I was terrified that I’d never muster a smile from this pitch black drag.

I now work as an interior painter for a very small team led by a subcontractor. He’s laid back, generous and forgiving even though the first few months were tense between all of us as they tiptoed around someone so eerily quiet and deeply reserved. I first started to come to life the more I voiced my thoughts and opinions - sometimes, harsh or stubborn but sometimes, mellow or poetic - always unapologetic, nonetheless. Over time, they caught on to my capricious nature and learned to connect with a singing, dancing, laughing, talkative, playful, insightful person before a new day would bring someone blunt, distant, and carefree into view. It feels so good to feel like myself again, but regardless, they don’t understand how severe trauma damages someone's sensitivities and tolerance around others. And they don’t know what a Two-Spirited person is either. If they did the research, they’d only get the modernized definition heavily associated with sexuality and gendered identity.

A life story, I previously stated. We share a life together - River and I.

By our teenage years, I realized that I lived with someone who quite literally felt the phantom apparatus hanging from the hips of a woman. He even peed on poles like a boy when he was very small and later on in life, I’d watch him stare at his hands at times, how they seemed to float looking so unrecognizably alien. He had always strived for the artistic endeavors and physical activities that would release his bubbling energies. A truly vocal person as well, Lío was always so expressive. I know he names himself Wildflower, and I respect that, but he doesn’t often realize the presence of the Big Cat animal spirit in himself. Lío had always felt his own single being in this body and never knew of our coexistence until recently. However, until recently, I too didn’t quite know the full gravity of why I had always felt a strange sensation that I was never truly alone.

Our story of selfhood begins with a childhood of psychological and sexual abuse. It sucks; it’s a dreadful story but of resilience and beating the odds. I never really care to tell it but roll my eyes far back into my head any time I have to tell the tale because I’ve long since chosen to overcome the emotional and mental exploits of an obviously self-centered and bruised, childlike maniac who doesn’t deserve the time of day. My coming-out story actually begins in early adulthood with an equally tragic history of how I was eventually resuscitated from rapes that killed me.

What happens to one of us, happens to the both of us. We dealt with it differently, but I don’t know why I suddenly shut off. The first time I was raped, Lío invited a classmate over who eventually forced us on my own couch. I watched myself leave my body to search the ceilings and walls for protection before settling near the trash can farthest away from the rape, facing the corner instead. When it was over, I knew I was different. It’s not like I had some magnetic, shining personality like Lío has, but I knew I had experienced something life-changing.

The following year, I spent many days and nights wandering around my surroundings and in my own head. My head felt like empty space; I no longer had anything to say. I no longer recognized the people around me or even life itself as I did before but instead saw people and life as a series of meaningless motions. I had become less and less present until eventually accepting that I was fading away into a slow death, although death wasn’t painful aside from my gross encounter with that near-stranger.

At some point, it was official that Lío was most certainly alone even though he didn’t know it. He’d always felt like the lone soul in this vessel anyway. Only now, he didn’t have my voice of reason to keep him out of trouble and stay away from the people he didn’t need to be around. It turns out that we had been violated once again under the different circumstances that a drug would keep him unconscious while someone took advantage. The research says that most victims of drug-facilitated rapes do not become completely aware of the assault until months or even years later. That overextended length of time in obliviousness is exactly what happened to Lío in my absence.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when I’d been resurrected, but I remember the moment when I suddenly realized a slippery sense of self. I had been working at my first job in warehouse production where an older Afro-American woman targeted me for having light-colored skin. Normally, I am unbothered by the opinions of others and tend to maintain composure unlike Lío who would prefer to rip right into someone’s soul. But this time, I was completely blinded by a complex I never knew existed within the Black community. It’s common for dark-skinned folks to experience colorist discrimination, but apparently, we have yet to discuss colorist attitudes within the African-American group itself.

She was intensely manipulative, and as I rose to promotions that would have later granted me a position in management, she got more ruthless. I had to transfer to a different department because I had become so overwhelmingly anxious of the “melting pot” army she had now pitted against me. Like Lío, I was not familiar with social anxiety, but it had gotten so deeply saturated in my Spirit that I had lost my sense of a cultural identity once proud to be an Afro-Latina woman.

For the following year or so, I retreated to a confusing inner conflict of a multiethnic identity crisis. I questioned if I was supposed to identify as a White woman from then on despite the nearest relative of the sorts being a deceased grandmother who I'd barely had any memories with. I felt like a fraud and even felt like I deserved to have been cornered by those people. My general sense of self-esteem dwindled so far that I stopped feeling beautiful, struggling to love all the physical features that made me look unique. And after discovering this new scar to sexual assault, I had felt even more an object lacking any worthy substance.

Thankfully, my story changed when on a random whim one day, I created an account with a forum site called Reddit. There was something about telling people my thoughts and feelings that put me back in touch with myself. It started with angry venting until it eventually became about mental health awareness, social justice advocacy, random thoughts, and all the absurdly entertaining comments and videos that reminded me what it felt like to laugh deep from within my gut. Through this social platform, I was slowly remembering who I was as a dignified woman. I remembered that I didn’t need strangers to tell me what I was all about based on an appearance they just didn’t understand.

That separation from myself taught me what it must have been like for Lío to have become vulnerable and defenseless while I was gone. Before then, I know that we both couldn’t have ever imagined that anyone could break either of us down, but it happened.

The Indigenous Nations originally describe “two-spirited” to be a state of matter where two Beings quite literally share one body. It is believed that a Two-Spirit is destined for healing and leadership where these twin souls can venture between the worlds within themselves just as well as the realities surrounding them. Although moving in a progressive direction, it seems the majority in this United States country isn’t ready to accept a non-binary system as well as a spectrum of sexualities; therefore, I’m not sure what to expect from people who are either unaware of or only know the altered interpretation of Two-Spirit.

However, I have decided that should the day come where someone once again mocks or alienates us for being different than what's expected, I will have already been too entertained by this comedy that, to a degree and special purpose, we are all performing for the sake of self-preservation, performing still for the sake of settling those nerves at the thought anyone could get the chance to rip the masks from our faces, performing even more for the sake of protecting our energies from the parasites that need the misery of others in order to live.

They don't know they’ve always had front-row seats to this live action production of The Remarkably Real Two-headed Fish. What they would eventually know will never change who we were the moment before anyway. Not easy to read, not easy to understand but damn entertaining to watch the main character shine.