Folie à Deux

My baby sister and I are close. The closest, really. The sister bond is a unique one anyhow. But when you fortify that bond with childhood trauma you survived together nothing can break it. In fact, I often tell people that my bond with Brittany is more like a mother/daughter bond because I was the one who kept us alive several times in life when we may have died otherwise.

My parents divorced when I was 9 and Brit was 5. The details are murky there so I will only tell you what I saw. My dad is great but he was a firefighter for 30 years and if you know anything about those hours, you know that he was gone for 24 hours every two days. So that put me babysitting her for 24 hours at a time when we were pretty tiny. I can still, after 25 years, remember the phone number to his station and his pager number. Weird, the memories we collect. Now that I have a son I know he must have been a nervous wreck for most of our young lives.

My mother was different. She was burned in a housefire with her siblings the year after her mother died when she was 11. Pretty badly burned, they were in the children's hospital in Birmingham for various lengths but one of her little brothers was burned over 60% of his body. She was also the oldest and the one most responsible for keeping her four siblings alive. She had done so much parenting by the time she had me when she was 20 there is no way she could have had the normal first time parent excitement that other people get. I mention her past because it has taken me a very long time to go back and understand how she turned out this way and I don't want you to hate her when you read this either. I always knew how much she loved me. My dad was much harder to read but mom wears everything on her face and she'd sooner die than end a phone call without saying "i love you" to us.

As nurturing as she was though she fought serious demons. She survived a brutal rape before I was born (along with the aforementioned traumas) and anyone that meets her can tell that she is a victim. She never grew out of it. Guilt is her weapon because she isn't healed. She always did disappearing acts when she would go on drug binges leaving us in the care of whoever was around. And we never told our dad because we loved her sooooo much and that would be the end of seeing her. One summer when we were staying with her in California (dad's in Alabama) she left us on top of a mountain in a house with few neighbors and no electricity for two whole weeks. We survived on oranges and avocados we stole from the surrounding groves. But this story isn't about her. I just need you to know how strong and close our relationship was. We were working with about 1/4th of a parent.

Brittany was a shining star. Where I started smoking pot and doing terribly in college, she was getting straight A's and training to become a paramedic as soon as she turned 18-which she did. I got pregnant in college and decided to have an abortion and cried for two years then dropped out. Meanwhile, Brittany looks like a supermodel and is graduating at the top of her class. She does the sorority thing while I do the experimental drug thing. My excuse is that writers must torture themselves in order to have stuff to write about, she would laugh and hug me and tell me that I was the most perfect sissy she could dream up. She was even still having to help me after I had my son. Imagine being 27 and having to ask your baby sister for help with the electric bill or rent. She never said no or told me I wasn't trying hard enough. She was my backup. The best Aunt B she could muster. Like I said though, she is beaaaaautiful. Turns out being beautiful might be just as difficult as being ugly but for different reasons. You have to have impeccable, immobile taste in people in order to avoid becoming meat for some hot loser. Your standards must just have to be through the roof in order to avoid it because I swear, once she moved here to be closer to me and my little family, she dated every sexy loser in Tulsa.

Her one big downfall in life was that her temper was volatile- so many of them didn't stick around. The ones who did seemed to always be bad guys in search of something they could take from her. Then she met Jackson. Now... I don't know if he was an actual sociopath or just absolutely believed his own delusions. I'll never know. But here's what happened. They became obsessed with each other. Almost intertwined as one big, tangled mess. They were always together, he moved right into her apartment (which was directly across the courtyard from mine) and when his kids would visit Brit would treat them just like she did my boy. She seemed really happy. But it all happened sooooo fast, which wasn’t super unusual- we are a passionate bunch. But after a month or so she was a whole different person.

She quit stopping at my apt (that she had to pass to get to hers) to see my kid or anything. She and my guy both worked as caterers and my best friend was their boss. Brittany stopped showing up for work after she wrecked one of the catering vehicles. The most out of character thing she could have done in all of this. I mean she drove an ambulance for YEARS until the compassion fatigue overwhelmed her so I know she was an awesome driver who never missed a shift in her life. Even super hungover after sorority parties she would get up and go. Super hard worker- she never missed a bill. So that's when I knew something was wrong. She had been steadily losing weight which was easier to notice since her visits were infrequent so I accused her of doing drugs- I was sure that's what was going on. She denied it but she knew I knew. That's when she stopped coming around at all.

I would watch from my living room window, feeling super powerless to stop them from fighting outside in the middle of the night so I would just call the police, hoping a jail stay might shake her awake. But all three times I called the police to our apartments they would just calmly put them both back into her apartment and leave. LEAVE! Sounds about white.

This went on all summer until one day I noticed he wasn't around anymore. His car was never there and every time I saw her she was alone and doing something weird. For example, her two inside cats that she loves dearly were about 9 years old at the time and she kept putting them outside. I would notice them just sitting on the porch in the hot waiting for her to let them in but she wouldn't so I went out and got them and brought them to my place. She never even noticed they were gone. I kept hoping she would call me to help lead a search party for them, they are her kids! But she didn't. Then one day soon after I got the cats they called me from our neighborhood Family Video because they know us both really well. We were their best customers, hands down. Anyhow, she had RAN there with no pants or shoes on and went in behind the counter to "hide from them." So the store called me and I called the police. Luckily they could tell she was having some kind of psychotic break so they took her for a psych eval instead of to jail.

They kept her the required amount of time and then let her go. She refused to come stay with me or my mom (who had recently moved to Stillwater) and wanted to go back home. So I would check on her but she wouldn't talk to me much. All she did say was that Jackson's family was mafia and they were going to get her so I should just tell her I love her now and other terrifying things in that vein. Of course, that seemed like the mania talking. Something was obviously going on with her head because she was taking apart appliances in her house looking for cameras. In fact, she confessed that was the reason she was throwing the cats outside because they had been “micro-chipped” and were spying on her. So I increased my watch over her. I didn't know what was true, only that something terrible was going on.

Then one day in September (she met him in June) I was walking down my stairs to go to work and I looked over and noticed her door was cracked open. Now, given her state of paranoia I knew she wouldn't leave it unlocked let alone open. So I ran over there and found her very nearly dead in her bath tub. She had slit her arms up both sides, hit herself in the head with a hammer, and drank half of a bottle of Pine-Sol. She was still semi conscious so my mister and I carried her to the car and I rushed her to the closest hospital.

On the car ride she woke up and started coughing black shit all over the car. She thought she was dying and she might have been so she admitted to having started doing meth with him when they first met. The problem was that for the last two weeks she had been doing psychedelics because she couldn't find any meth. Mushrooms and acid all day long for two whole weeks!

I had failed her. I was right there across the courtyard and she was dying for weeks While I was in that waiting room trying to figure out what to call and say to my parents, I was thinking about my favorite play. The play that changed my life. Stopped me from cutting myself or even mentioning suicide again when I was young and sad. I hope you're familiar with it because it's a masterpiece... "Night, Mother." That play is about a woman who has been living with a long term illness and has decided to take her life at the end of the night. She doesn't want her mother to be surprised or to miss an opportunity to tell her something or hug her etc so she tells her mom (whom she'd been living with most of her life) in the first few minutes of the play what her plan is. It's so emotional. It shows the trauma in action and I never ever wanted to do that to any of my family members. The thought of that play has been like an anti-depressant for me. I could never leave them all here like that. Anyhow, stuck in the thought of that play I didn't make any calls. I just tried to make plans. Because I just knew that the first step is that she has to survive, which she did though I'm 100% sure she didn't want to.

Since that time she has never been alone. For a while she was in and out of the mental hospital. She was (and is now 4 years later) convinced that during one of the last times she saw Jackson that he had put a micro chip in her body. She would spend all her time either trying to convince on of us to do surgery on her, or several times, she just attempted it herself. Every time my mom would catch her cutting herself open in attempts to find this thing she would call them to come take her back for another eval.

It must have been like that for a few months before she finally stopped trying to get it out herself. She did talk doctors into giving her MRI's and they never found anything but she would always know exactly why they didn't. Just making up reasons to suit her mania on the fly. It's very clear she does nothing but think of what could go wrong all the time to just have all these "answers" ready to go when you approach her with any logic. She says that the only reason she stopped trying to get it out herself is because last time she was inpatient "they" did awful things to her. She believes they are in a control room here in Tulsa but, due to the chip, can see and hear and control her every move and thought. She tells me they stopped her heart once, and made her eyes roll into the back of her head, that she has to stash a cup of urine behind the toilet and wait three days to drink it, and even that they made her jump up as high as she could and land on her tailbone in attempt to break it. She says they are saving up the feelings of all these pains she has and “at the end” they will kill her with what she calls “all the pain.” I hear her talk about that and I think of every asylum film I have ever watched. I always wondered why they would do these things to themselves and now, because of her, I guess I understand. Yet that’s not the right word at all.

She is convinced they could kill her in an instant, that they control her body and everything she does with it. After she came out of the institution she would write letters constantly about what happened to her. She would hide some (in case she died) and would send others to the FBI. Finally my dad convinced an agent to talk with Brittany about the micro-chipping phenomena (which is a shared delirium all around the world TBH-it's crazy to look into) but even that didn't help a bit. She did stop writing to them but she has never, for an instant, believed anything other than what she thinks happened. No matter how hard I have tried to convince her that no one matters as much as she thinks she does to these people or that the micro-chipping thing is totally felt up- she won't buy it.

She lives with my mother now. Mom lost the relationship she was in because of Brittany's needs. She can take care of herself and a lot of who she is is still in there. But she never gets a moment away from "them." She won't let my son (or anyone) get undressed in front of her because she doesn't want "them" to see. She has gained over 100 lbs since this all started saying that they are trying to make her eventual death look like natural causes so that they won't be found out. They want her to look ugly so she'll always be alone, and they just have this insane grudge against her. She is always telling us how much she loves life and wants to live but it's always followed by "so you know that if I die, it was THEM." Her gallbladder was overrun by the weight gain and she recently had to have surgery to take it out. You know how they say "no aspirin" before surgery because it thins your blood? Well she told me after her surgery "see sissy, if I wanted to die all I would have had to do was to take some aspirin the night before but I didn't so you can see that I love life and if I die it's because THEY killed me."

Now I think about "Night, Mother" every day of my life. I wonder how long she can live with these “people” that constantly talk to her in her head saying such indescribable things to her. I wonder how long anyone can live on the amount of medicine she is prescribed every day. A literal handful of over 20 pills three times a day. She already has secondary issues from the medicines like Tardic Disconesia which make her move constantly and another terrifying mental tick that makes her NEED to fall asleep with food in her mouth. So she has to fall asleep in the living room where my mom can see her and dig the food out of her mouth so she sleeps without choking.

They have officially diagnosed her with schizophrenia because she does check many of those boxes. However, very recently they have begun to spin a different yarn. Schizophrenia can definitely be brought on during high points of mental stress but after digging much deeper and hearing the story of what happened from me instead of her the psychologists have started to look at a very rare from of dual mental illness called "folie a deux" or "madness for two."

This happens when two people are at vulnerable points (or drug induced points) and then start believing the same thing which definitely isn't true and could only happen in a vacuum. These people often have the feel like they are being tracked in some way and leave all their loved ones and belongings behind on some trek to get away from whatever the thing is or to draw the thing away from their other loved ones. In this case, we know Jackson is the reason she believes all this. What we don't know is whether he believed it too or was just trying to control her. I tend to believe he believed it because he didn't stick around to use the control he had won. He seemed to wander off on his own terror trek. "Folie imposs'e" is the most common form of this shared mania in which one more dominant party instills the belief in the less dominant party and I tend to think that's what happened here. She was very scared of him and "them" before I found her in the bathtub. I don't think I will ever get my sissy back. I don't actively think it anyway because my heart would be broken everyday. Now it only breaks when she dreams of having kids or getting married but is sure no one would want her. I worry about the terribly violent things that some people do when they are taking the medicines she is taking. People have killed their whole families in an angry rage after just a jew days of some of these drugs. I worry if she will ever say "Night, Mother" and race my mom to her bedroom and lock the door only for my mother to hear that gunshot that takes her life.

Worry is her life. Now, worry is our life.