291: What if your wife had 21 personalities?
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This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. The best way that I could describe it for me was if I had to literally take my fingers, dig them into my chest and rip myself wide open, take my heart out, reshape it and put it back in.

That's how difficult this process was for me to try to become someone different so that I could be the support that my family needed me to be. From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein. You are listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 291. What if your wife had 21 personalities?

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Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. National average 12-month savings of $744 by new customers surveyed who saved with Progressive between June 2022 and May 2023. Potential savings will vary. Discounts not available in all states and situations. I was born in Nashville, Tennessee, and growing up we were pretty poor. I always used to say we couldn't afford the R, so we were POE.

We were just in a very impoverished situation and having to move with a lot of different friends. And a lot of my clothes were hand-me-downs. They were from the Goodwill. We would have to, like, steal cable television from our next-door neighbors.

I remember one in particular instance where it was Christmas time and we didn't have any electricity. We didn't have any heat. So my mom had gotten these bag of nuts from someone, I don't know, a friend. And that was dinner. And we were burning our furniture in the fireplace for heat. It was a really difficult childhood. But my mom, she was a really, really good mom.

She sacrificed, she sold her blood on a regular basis, sold her jewelry, worked constantly to try to make sure that we were as happy and healthy as we could be. She had three children, I'm the youngest. I have a brother and a sister.

I never met my father. I had a conversation with him once when I was about 17. Just out of the blue, I got a phone call and he said that he wanted to connect with me and meet me before I turned 18. And that was kind of an emotional moment for me because I had never seen his face before. So I was looking forward to it, but I never heard from him again. And I just kind of moved on from that. My mom had met someone

It got to the point where he wanted to move us all from Tennessee to California. We all packed up and took the cross-country trip from Tennessee to California, and that was in '89. He eventually turned into be a very abusive person.

It started off with control and with yelling, and then it eventually turned into physical violence, so much so that my brother and sister just thought it best to just leave. And so they went into the Navy, and then I was the one that was left. So it kind of felt like I had to be there to protect her from it because he was a very abusive and controlling person.

In Tennessee, it's hard to believe, but there was literally the white side and the black side. And there was one side of the railroad tracks was the white side. The other side of the railroad track was the black side. We really didn't mix when it came to socializing. I didn't have any connection or playtime as a child with any black children. It was just children of my own race.

It wasn't something that I learned in the home. It was just something that was just environmental. It just kind of was like my schooling wasn't really around African-American kids. My friends and I just didn't interact with people of another race in California. It was a very poor environment for us. As I grew up, I had a lot of anger in regards to my stature in life. I didn't feel very confident about myself, but I didn't have any...

resentment towards my family for it. I knew that she was trying her best and she gave me the very best that she had. But it's just, as a kid, you don't know the difference. You just feel it. So I was about 16 and I was into heavy metal and I ended up joining a heavy metal band. And I felt a lot of connection with that because it was, it wasn't out there for me to get some of my anger out.

I was a pretty withdrawn kid. I really didn't have many friends. And it felt really good for me to be able to express myself that way because it seemed to help me to get some of my emotions out. Some of those feelings out that I felt were stuck inside of me at the time. But everyone in the group was a racist individual. And actually, we were also part of a gang, a WDM, White Death Mob.

That was actually in California. That was not in Tennessee. I carried that racism with me and I was able to find a group of people and an environment that was still okay for me to be that way, even here in California. I was so racist that I actually had a white power tattoo on my right ankle and my mom saw it. I was on my way to the shower and she said, is that real? And I didn't know what to say. I just kind of stared at her.

My mom was a nurse, so the next day I came home, she had a needle with some numbing solution. I don't know what was in the needle. Scalpels. And she literally cut it off of my leg. I have the scar to this day. After I graduated in '96, I was still living with my parents and I had a summer job doing construction. I was going pretty steady with the band that I was in, performing at different venues with them.

And then one day in 1997, I started studying with Jehovah's Witnesses. And my life kind of took a different direction. One day, a man named Leonard came to my door. He was an African-American man, so I was still pretty racist at the time. But my desire to learn was so strong that I said, well, I'm not going to let that be the reason. If he has something to say to me, I'm going to listen. And I'm going to see if there's anything in this that I can get out of it.

He began to come to my house on a regular basis every week, and we would have a Bible study, and we would cover different topics. And he encouraged me to write down questions, any questions that I had, and I would challenge him on those questions. And he was able to answer my questions from the Bible, and I was really impressed with that. So I began to put my guard down a little more and more as time went by, and I started attending the meetings. I sat with him and his family.

And he invited me over to cook out his house. It really felt like a friendly, warm, inviting environment. And I really needed that family feeling. And also I needed that spirituality. It helped me in my heart to become a better person at the time. And I ended up getting baptized as a Jehovah's Witness in 1998.

When I was in Tennessee, I grew up around a pretty racist environment. But when I became a witness, the person who came to my door was an African-American man. And I think that was helpful to me because eventually I was able to overcome that because I was in an all-black congregation. It felt like home. It felt like home to me.

So I was very busy in my church. I had a lot of responsibility. I became a pioneer, which is a full-time evangelizer, which meant that I spent a thousand hours in the door-to-door work, meeting people at their front doors, teaching the Bible, having Bible studies. I gave more talks at the Kingdom Hall than I can even count, to the point where I became what they call a ministerial servant, which is the equivalent of a deacon.

I was doing the microphones in the Kingdom Hall one day, and I just turned around and I saw this woman. And that was the first time that I ever saw her. And she was really pretty. But I noticed that she was looking at me too. And when I saw her, she looked away. So I was kind of flattered by that. The next time that I saw her was in field service. We were going door to door. And she had her Bible study teacher with her.

She was standing underneath a tree and I turned around to her and she turned around at me and we stared at each other and we locked eyes and we had this magical moment where we both saw something in each other's eyes that we had just connected. The next time I saw her, it was at the Kingdom Hall after a meeting. So I approached her car door as she was leaving and I asked if she would like to go out to lunch with me. And she said, yes.

We were inseparable. I spent every day talking with her over the phone or in person. She was an African-American woman, and she already had two small boys that were four years old. I felt like I was ready for that responsibility. But I was a young man. I was cocky. And the brothers in the hall even cautioned me. It's like, do you understand what you're getting yourself into? I told them, yeah, I get it. And they kind of put their hands up and said, OK, he's the big man. He got it.

And eventually she became my wife. Me and my wife were married August the 3rd, 2002. And I was living in an apartment building at the time. And so I moved her and our two boys in to that apartment with me. And I was working a warehouse job at the time, making about $15 an hour.

We had a really good connection with one another and we really wanted this to work and we really wanted a happy family home that we both never really had a chance to get, you know, a stable, calm, good family environment. And we were both looking forward to that. But because of all the things that I had experienced and the negative role models that I had been exposed to, the negative parts of my personality when we got married came out

You really don't know yourself until you get married and then those things in your personality come out. And that's exactly what it came out with me. I ended up becoming a very controlling, angry person. Those negative traits began to come out of me. And I was really surprised about that with myself because I always thought of those negative examples in my mind. And I said, I don't ever want to be that type of man. I don't want to be that ugly person or treat my family this way.

But I started to become that type of person and it really depressed me. It really made me feel horrible. But she was very supportive and she would always try to help me through it. My wife's name was Latanya. I've absorbed as much as I could about her childhood and upbringing. Her mother was a very promiscuous woman. She was very abusive. She was very manipulative. She was violent. She was sadistic.

As a little girl, she would sleep on a cot in between the stove and the refrigerator in the kitchen because her mother would have men coming in and out of the home so that the bed would be free for her to have sex with different people. So she spent her childhood sleeping on the floor or sleeping in the kitchen. It was almost like she was a pet.

Her mother would take the person in the other room and she would just have sex with them out loud and the children would hear it. It was very embarrassing at the time. My wife recalls looking for a change in the couch cushions just to be able to find some food to eat.

Because her mother wouldn't buy food, she would just eat and then come home and not have any food for her. And that was at age 14. So she decided that, well, if this is what we're going to do, then I'm going to go get a job. So she ended up getting a job at a gas station. And she was so proud of herself that she was able to do that. And then all she ever wanted to do was have her mom proud of her. So she got her first check and brought it home. And she was like, look, mom, look, I got a job and I got paid.

And she took it from her and said, good, because you need to pay where you stay. She also recalled situations where her mother would just come into the room. She would have an extension cord. She would just look at her. What did I do? What did I do? And she wouldn't tell her. And she would just start beating her and giving her massive welts all over her body and laughing while she's beating her with extension cord over and over and over and then act like it never happened.

As my wife got older, she actually ended up becoming an IRS agent at the IRS building in Oakland, California. It scared her mother because she was now a federal agent because her mother was always scamming someone.

Even to the point where there was a man that she convinced that her daughter, my wife, he was the father, and she collected money from him for his whole life until he died. He never knew that he wasn't actually the father.

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About 10 years into our marriage, she began to have these dreams.

There were these shadowy figures that would come to her and try to grab at her and they would press her down. We thought, well, maybe this is like a demon attack because it felt so real. She would even feel like she was awake at some points and it would be happening. I felt a measure of responsibility because I haven't been a very good protector of my family.

I felt like I took it personal, as if I had let God down somehow and I opened my home up to attacks. Whatever was happening, I felt a measure of responsibility and I carried a lot of guilt about that. So we would pray about it and ask God to help. If this is actually a demon attack, please protect us. If there's anything that we're in our home that's causing this to happen.

We didn't know what to make of it, but it was happening so frequently and so much and so vividly that we thought that maybe it would be a good idea for her to start to get some therapy. So we started on a therapy regimen once a week and then it eventually turned into three times a week.

It was a very hard financial load for me to bear. I was $1,400 a month all by itself. So I would have to work a lot of overtime at my job just to be able to try to make those payments and hold up the home. Because by that time, she was not capable of working because of these things that were happening to her that we really didn't understand. The way that we started understanding that was what I call a switch night. It was in the middle of the night.

She began to become very angry and cuss at me and cuss at her mother and say some of the most vilest, horrible things. I would describe it like a boiling point where she would be herself. We would have a normal conversation and then the anger would come and she would literally sound like another person when she was angry. How she wanted to tear her mother to pieces and just rip her flesh from her body.

And then she would instantly switch from that to a child crying, a literal baby crying. And I would have to try to soothe her through that. And then she would come back to herself and she would say, what just happened? I don't remember anything. And that would be like an hour's worth of a loop. And then she would start the loop over again.

She became angry and saying all these violent, horrible things towards me, towards her mother. And then she was switching to a child and then come back to herself. This went on all night long. And then at the end of the night, I looked at her and I said, I don't know if this therapy is working. And we ended up having a really good laugh at that moment because we were both realizing that something was really off. So through extensive therapy, we began to uncover different personalities and

one by one, and we were able to realize where and when these personalities came from. What was happening to her was she was switching into different parts, and she eventually got diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder, which is shortened for DID, and it happens to people who have been through massive amounts of abuse through their childhood or teenage years, and their body, as a protective mechanism, will split

and create another personality which will contain that trauma. We kind of described it as if the main trunk of a tree is who you are. And then if a major trauma would come, it would splinter off into a branch. That branch would contain the trauma, but it would also contain that person that you were at that time. And then if you had another trauma, it would create another branch and become a different personality of who you were at that time.

My wife ended up having 21 different personalities. She had a little girl. Her name was Sophie. The moment that she appeared that first night, she was crying like a little baby. She was incoherent as if she was a child and couldn't speak English. She was four years old. She was the sweetest little girl. I literally looked at her as if she was my daughter.

And I would come home and she would run and give me a hug just like a little girl and call me daddy. Sophie is always a four-year-old girl because that was the moment that her traumatic event happened. She remembers she was sitting on the toilet and she was very, very constipated. And as a result of that, she was crying really loud and crying for her mom, you know, and her mom burst into the room. And then she remembers her mother's hand going up in the air and then everything went blank.

The picture that she uses to reference Sophie, she had this journal, was a little girl with a black eye. Through time, I was able to gain her trust and her love. I know that it might be hard for other people to understand, but she was literally my daughter, my little four-year-old daughter.

I raised Sophie to the point where she became a very confident, happy little girl who no longer was afraid to speak her mind because she was very fearful of authority and very fearful of being punished. Blaze arrived when my wife was about six or seven. She was coloring on the floor. Her mother took a full glass of milk and just threw it on her.

She just looked around, and she looked at the mother, and she was just laughing with a sadistic laugh. She asked her, what happened? What did I do? Why did you do that? And she just kept laughing, and then she started sticking the big toe of her foot inside her anus and pushing her back down. And she kept crying, Mom, what did I do? Why are you doing this? And every time she would get up, she would stick her big toe back there and push her back down. Then she remembers this feeling of anger again.

welling up inside of her for the first time. She had never felt anger towards her mother. And then she went into the bathroom and she remembers looking at herself, but she didn't recognize that it was her. It was this dark figure with long black wet hair and like a shadowy face. That's when Blaze was born. Blaze was her coping mechanism to deal with the abuse from her mother. It was a way of taking back her control

Blaze lived in this space inside of my wife's mind that you could compare to like a butcher's room. There was a linoleum floor with a drain in the middle. And on the wall was all the implements that she would use murdering her mother. Blaze was a very violent-minded person.

We would have these long, deep, deep conversations about the ways that she would murder her mother, hanging her up on a meat hook, peeling her skin off, drinking her blood. So it was her body's way of fighting back, taking back that control that her mother had taken from her. Her mother was very abusive when it came to finances. She would always take her money from her.

So as a result, she had to become very, very smart when it comes to finance. The Beast handled our finances. So whenever it was time to do finances, the Beast would come out. We would have conversations about the bills and what I need to be paying and what needs to be handled. And it was very businesslike. The next part was Paisley. Paisley was a 17-year-old. Her mother was in a relationship with her stepfather at the time, and he was a pedophile.

He would try to meet up with my wife's friends secretly who were underage. One time, her mother didn't have the money for rent, so she offered her daughter up as payment. She was asleep in her bedroom, and then he came in in the middle of the night and began to sexually assault her. That was the moment that Paisley was born. His brother was a pimp.

My wife ended up being sex trafficked for a year by her stepfather and by her mother, being transported back and forth between Oakland and Vallejo. They lived next to an army base up there. They had a house. And so a lot of the army men would come there to the home where she was being prostituted out of and would come into the room where they were keeping her and would abuse her and leave. She would remember these military uniforms

She doesn't even recall how many times that she was abused that way. But Paisley was the one to absorb all of that. That was her job. She was highly sexual in the way that she communicates and the way that she moves. And that was her way of compartmentalizing that. Izzy was a 13-year-old little girl.

Izzy was born from my wife's need at the time for companionship. She really didn't have very many friends because her mother was very controlling. And so Izzy was a sweet little 13-year-old girl who just enjoys giggling and laughing and having fun. So it was more like a friend. She created her as if she was like a friend. And eventually, as my daughter grew up, she ended up being my daughter's playmate.

Which is, I know it's maybe hard for people to understand, but whenever there was playtime for my daughter, you know, they would like be singing out loud or being giggly or laughy. We come to realize that that was Izzy who was coming out. She also had a wife's part for me that she called Natalia. She created her when we got married. Someone to take on those responsibilities of cooking and cleaning that she had never had to do.

But through all the different drama that we went through, she described it as if Natalia went on strike. So she stopped cooking. She stopped cleaning. She stopped doing all the things because she was just disappointed at the direction that our relationship took. And so she went on strike. The next part's name was Amber. Amber was the recorder. My wife had a obsessive need to record everything that would happen to her.

We came to realize later the reason for her doing that was to ground herself in reality because her mother would warp reality so much. We had these bins in our garage full of notebooks. She would literally record everything about the day, about our kids, about money, about finances, about her feelings. That was Amber's job. She did it constantly.

Raven came about from the abuse that my wife suffered as a result of being one of Jehovah's Witnesses. They didn't treat my wife or my family very well. That really affected my wife because her spirituality was very important to her to keep her life in balance and to see how she was treated by them.

It really affected her deeply to the point where she created this part named Raven. And she saw her as like Captain Marvel from the Marvel movie. Literally just like her with glowing eyes, floating above the kingdom hall and protecting her from the people there. Spirituality comes from a higher place, from a godly realm, right? So Raven had to be strong like a superhero to be able to protect her from that.

The next part was country girl. That was a sexual part. Whenever the country girl would come out, she would come out talking about how the different sexual things she wanted to do to me. She would smack my butt really hard and laugh and giggle about sexual things. The decimator was a male part.

He was very sexual. He would always talk about his male parts and be grabbing them and looking at me saying that what he's going to do to me and how he's going to ram it inside of me. And we never understood where that came from. Maybe it was her way of taking control over her sexual trauma and being stronger. I don't know. But the picture that she used for the decimator was from the Hulk movie. It was just this massively huge creature with bones sticking out of its body.

The other parts that I can remember were fragments. She had one that was literally a baby, incoherent. It would just talk like a baby, and we never understood where that came from. Maybe there's some trauma from the crib. I don't know. She had a fragment that was for the freeway. Her anticipation of where she was about to be and what was about to happen to her that she would disassociate during those trips. And then she also had a part for cityscapes.

Her stepfather one time took her up to Twin Peaks in San Francisco and parked up there. And from what she recalls, she blacked out from the point that he came towards her in the vehicle. So we're just assuming that he sexually assaulted her up there. And there is more parts, but those are all the ones that I remember.

In my wife's system, she described it as like a big house. Everybody had rooms and then they had a common room. Everybody had their own space and they could come and co-mingle together in the common space.

She described it as if she was an observer, like the person that walked around was like the host. That's what she called it, the host, because it didn't have a name. It was just like a vessel. Like you put a key in an ignition and drive a vehicle. It was just a tool. So she was aware of the conversations, but she was never involved in them. So it would be like heated discussions between like

Paisley, which was the 17-year-old, and she wanted to go on a date. She wanted to go flirt. And the mom part would be like, no, that's inappropriate. You're married. And Paisley would be like, well, I'm a 17-year-old. I want to go have fun. So they would talk with one another. And sometimes she would tell me that she'd just be sitting there and they would be having conversations. Blaze was the part that was in charge of finances. She was pretty much always out. Paisley was always out. Sophie was always out.

But the only one that I never saw interact with anyone else was the decimator, which was the male part, which was pictured as like an abomination, as like a creature. That one I never saw interact with anyone other than me. A lot of times when all the others would have a heated discussions, they would send all the littles out to their rooms because it was so important to the system that the littles never knew about the arguments themselves.

All the littles like Sophie and Izzy, they didn't bottle any of the adult trauma which revolved around sex. They never knew of any of it. So anytime that those discussions came up, it was as if they went into their rooms and

The whole system was geared around protecting the littles. And primarily it was about Sophie, which was the little four-year-old. And she had like this massive amount of terror in regards to her mother. And a lot of it centered around the way that she was cared for. She really didn't bathe her right. She didn't clothe her right.

As a result, when she became a part in the system, Sophie did, the mom part that she had that she used to take care of our three children, she kind of adopted her into the fold of that. And so as a result, whenever she had something, she would try to mother her and make her feel better. And I have a letter that I found as I was going through some of our old pictures. And it's a letter from the mom part to Sophie. And it reads like this. It says, Dear Sophie,

I know that you are sad right now because you are sick and you have to go to the doctor, but I am taking you because I love you. I know that your first mama was mean and would blame you for being sick, but that's because she was mean. Little girls get sick all of the time, and nice mommies know that. They love them and they want them to feel better, so they take care of them. And if they are really sick, they take them to the doctor. That's why I'm taking you, because I love you.

You're a sweet little girl, and I love you so much. And Jehovah God loves you so much that you can't even count to a number that high. So baby, you'll be okay. You're just sick. I love you, and Jehovah and I will take care of you. Get some rest once we're back. I love you, Mom.

To me, that really just shows the close, intimate relationship that she had with her parts. They were actually real, living, breathing people with their own thoughts, their own mind. My wife's personalities really didn't pop out very much when the children were there. It was pretty straightforward whenever the kids were around. I didn't share with them what was going on with her. She didn't share with them what was going on with her. We would go to bed like 9, 10 o'clock.

We would go in the room and shut the door and there it started. It was literally an endless loop. As she began to get worse and her personalities began to come out more and more and more, she no longer was able to do the daily basics. So I took care of them. I cooked every day. I cleaned every day. I did the laundry, picked up the kids.

I've been working in San Francisco for the last 18 years as a garbage man. So I get up at three o'clock in the morning to commute over and do my job and come back. So for a good six years, I lived off of four hours of sleep. She needed her space in the bed. So I couldn't sleep in the bed either. So I slept in a chair next to the bed.

And I would just be ready at any moment for her to wake up and have something to talk about, whether it be trauma or whether it be family or whatever the situation was. Sometimes I would be sitting in the chair or trying to sleep in the chair next to her and she would wake up just out of nowhere in the middle of the night and just start cussing at me and yelling at me and accusing me of these horrible things.

When she first started switching, we were very confused and we just didn't understand what was happening at all. It seemed like something was taking over her body. It was baffling. But as she started to experience her memories more of being sex trafficked, her memories of being abused, and then the parts would come out and that specific part would speak about what happened to them.

As time went on, it went from massive amounts of confusion to understanding, then acceptance that this is lifelong. For the rest of her life, she was going to live this way, and there was nothing that we could do. A person with DID isn't a violent person. They have parts because they've been abused, and they're protecting themselves. And a lot of times, the parts that they develop are good people, but they're dealing with anger issues or stress issues.

We've come to realize through her therapy too that we all have a child part that loves to go have fun. We all have a serious side. We all have an anger side. All these different parts, we all have them, but we identify them as ourself because they're not separate from us. We don't see them as separate. We don't feel them as separate. We hear our own voice when we're talking about these things. We feel our own feelings. But a person with DID, those parts inside of themselves are separated. So their child part becomes an actual child.

Their sexual desires becomes a sexual part. Their business side of where they handle business becomes a business part. And each part had a different voice. If you weren't looking at her, you wouldn't know that it's the same person because her parts were so solid as a part of her. They were literally like family members to us. Most of my day was spent with Sophie, the four-year-old, or the Beast, the business one.

or Paisley, the 17-year-old. And then the other ones would come out according to the situation. If Blaze was angry, she would come out. For me, on my part, it took a long time, but I slowly began to gain each one of their trust and their respect. A lot of them looked at me like their dad, you know, as their protector.

I would have thoughts of not wanting to be in the situation, of course, because it was very difficult. But I knew because of her situation that she would not be able to fully care for herself. And I loved her. I would never put her in a situation where she had to deal with this alone because her parts began to rely upon me for protection, for love, for anything that they needed. So to take that away from them, I felt like it would be taking something away from them that they deserved.

But I really didn't have the luxury of slowing down and thinking about my feelings the way that I should have. I would do my job, come home, cook, clean, deal with the kids, deal with the stress, deal with the trauma, get three or four hours of sleep after dealing with her parts, switching all night long, go back and do it again. I was on this train that would not stop.

I started having massive, massive panic attacks and I didn't have anybody else to lean on either. So I just started to have to try to figure out a way of handling it on my own. I started having these massive panic attacks, but I would not share that with anyone because I didn't want to stress her out. I don't want to stress the kids out because I was trying to be the best rock that I could be.

So I would go into the garage and I would have these massive panic attacks where I would break out into a sweat. My heart would pound. My vision would get blurry. So I knew I knew I was heading towards something very bad for myself.

I knew that I was absorbing a lot and I knew that I could not afford therapy for myself. So I decided that I was going to start working on it through what my wife was going through. So she would share with me every time she had a therapy session, she would talk to me about what she learned and the different techniques that she would learn from her therapist. And so I would try to apply those to myself and work on them myself. I started to be able to handle the situations better and I started to be able to

take on the massive amounts of responsibility and the stress better. I see how important it is to not store your emotions inside of your body because if you do, it affects you to the point where you can become unrecoverable. And I felt that I was heading that way. I literally felt my body starting to fight me. So I knew that I had to change who I was to be able to sustain what I needed to be

The best way that I could describe it for me was if I had to literally take my fingers, dig them into my chest and rip myself wide open, take my heart out, reshape it and put it back in. That's how difficult this process was for me to try to become someone different so that I could be the support that my family needed me to be.

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My wife was going through therapy for a good six, seven years.

And it was going great. And she made great progress. And her parts stabilized. They developed into individual people. We accepted them that they're not going to go anywhere. And we looked at them as family members. And we cared for their emotional well-being together, looked after them. Everything was becoming more and more stable. Once our last child moved out, our two boys moved out first, and then our daughter moved out.

We were really looking forward to this because we had never in our 20 years of marriage had an opportunity to be alone with one another, to go traveling on trips or to just enjoy each other's company. So for two months, we took advantage of it. We had our bags packed constantly in the car and we would just take a car trip somewhere and get a hotel room or go here and go there. So we were really starting to enjoy our life. But then on August 2nd, 2022,

My wife was exercising in our bedroom and she threw her right arm out and she heard a noise in her neck. It was this loud buzzing noise and it never stopped from that point on. And then she also would hear her heartbeat. So because of her condition, she really needed quiet space. She really needed reflective time and

She really enjoyed her private time where she would sit there and read her Bible, watch her church programs and reflect and have quiet time. It was really important to her. These noises in her ear robbed her of that, and she was desperate for it to stop. We went to the doctor so many times, and they couldn't help us. So we started doing some research, and it needs to be taken with a grain of salt for anybody who else is experiencing the same thing. But

We had gotten the COVID booster shots. A lot of women were experiencing tinnitus as a result of the second or third booster shot. And a lot of women were also experiencing vagus nerve symptoms, which is a nerve that runs on both sides of your neck. So it was literally driving her crazy. She was not able to get sleep. Her nerves were on edge. She had no relief. She had this deep sense of panic in her eyes.

I was helping her through coping mechanisms with it and my daily massages of her body. And I included her neck with that. And then hopefully we saw in some cases from people who've had tinnitus or had vagus nerve issues as a result of the COVID booster shots, eventually between six months to a year, the symptoms went away, which seemed daunting at the time. But we were just like, okay, well, at least we have some kind of hope that maybe it's going to end.

I was asleep in a separate room because she needed her space because of her need for quiet. She came in the room and she had this look in her eyes that I had never seen before. And she had her fingers in her mouth and she was like, I did something bad. I did something bad. And I asked her, what happened, sweetheart?

She was trying to get back to her routine of writing schedules and keeping notes of everything that was happening because with this vagus nerve issue, she wasn't able to concentrate. She wasn't able to do the bills anymore. She wasn't able to pretty much have her own thoughts. So she was trying to get back to it. And so she said she gave up on it, ripped it up, and she started to burn it over a candle.

Then when she did that, she panicked and she brought it into the bathroom and put it out with some water. She told me that she had inhaled some of the smoke and it damaged her nose. And I looked and I said, sweetheart, I don't see anything. You look like you're fine. Everything looks good. But

She would not let it go. It became an obsessive thought, and it started to spread in her mind that it had damaged literally everything inside of her home. Through this candle incident, it affected her ability to think straight. She was obsessed with it. This is all she spoke about to the point where she stopped literally eating anything.

And she stopped literally drinking. And when I mean literal, I mean literal. I don't mean a little bit or anything. She completely stopped eating and she 100% completely stopped drinking fluids. And she stopped sleeping. She would pace all night long. And I tried my best to stay up with her, but I just couldn't. I couldn't take any more days off of work. She did this for 13 days straight.

And it got to the point where I had to call an ambulance to get her into the hospital because I was so concerned that she was going to die. And they were able to get some fluids in her and get some food in her. And she ate and drank and she became a little bit more of herself all of a sudden. So I was thinking that maybe this was just some kind of imbalance. And they wanted to send her to a mental facility at that point.

But I convinced them that, look, I'm seeing some positive results here. I really think that I can handle this at home. Well, once I got her home, she did it for another nine days straight. She stopped eating completely. She stopped drinking completely. And by the end of these two different sessions, these 13 days that she did it and these nine days, within a month, she lost 100 pounds.

I would make her meals and I would set them on the edge of the counter before I would go to sleep or before I would go to work. I would make sure she had water. I would make sure she would have snack bars, anything that I would try to convince her to eat. And I would come back home or I would wake up and they would still be sitting in the same place. One day I came home from work and I found her in the same position that I left her in before I went to work.

straight as an arrow. Her body was just straight and her eyes were almost like rolled up in the top of her head. It took me a good hour to break her out of it. That was the day that I realized that I wasn't going to be able to handle this by myself anymore. I brought her to the hospital. I begged them to treat her with respect and with love. They got her on some psychiatric medicines. It took a good almost three weeks for the medicines to start to take effect.

But while those three weeks were passing, she still wasn't eating. She still was losing weight. And then after that time period, the medicine started to kick in and she realized it was okay for her to start eating and okay for her to start drinking. Not a lot, but she was doing it. So I came and picked her up from the hospital and I saw the look on her eyes when she saw me and how happy she was to see me, to really believe that I wasn't abandoning her in a mental facility, that I was actually bringing her back home

That was a really touching moment for me because I wanted her to believe that I was on her side. So I got her back home. Man, she really started eating a lot. She had this thing for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and she was killing them. It brought me to tears to actually see her eating and drinking. It just brought a lot of joy to my heart that, you know, this is going to get better. This is going to get better.

But she told me that she still believed that her nose was damaged from the smoke, that the home was damaged, and that every single one of our possessions was tainted. So I worked really hard while she was gone. I was able to save up about $10,000, and I moved us.

I literally trashed every single one of our possessions. And I'm talking every article of clothes. I'm talking paintings and fine art and shoes, toothbrushes, everything that a person possesses in life. I put at the curb and we started over in a new place.

Bought new clothes about new couches about new bed so that she would be able to start fresh in an environment that her mind felt comfortable in So it was worth it to me even though it was very difficult especially at the time I was 45 and here I am now I have nothing to my name we gave up I gave up everything so things were getting better for her and she felt more comfortable but

She refused to continue the medicine once it ran out. She did not want to do any refills, and I couldn't force her to start the medicine back up. Everybody knows you can't do that. You have to come off them slowly, and you have to come off them progressively and with purpose. But she stopped them all immediately. She became very, very, very suicidal, where we would have 10- to 12-hour conversations every single day,

about the different ways that she wanted to die. And she would tell me that she literally did not want to be in her body anymore. She saw how much weight that she lost and the skin that was on her body. She hated it. She felt so ugly. She didn't understand why I was being so faithful to her at the time. She even gave me a, what you would consider a permanent hall pass where I could go sleep with any woman that I wanted to, that she would be okay with it. But I refused. I would not do that to her.

It was not her fault that she got sick. And I tried to convince her. I said, well, what is it that you need me to do to show you that I'm serious and that I'm faithful to you? And jokingly, she said, I don't know, get a neck tattoo? I jumped off the couch, went to a tattoo parlor, and got her name tattooed on my neck.

And I came back and she was like so shocked. And I was shocked that I did it. But I was at a point in my life where I was willing to sacrifice or give anything it took for her to feel better and give her what she needed. And then one day I left briefly to go get some groceries and get some stuff that we needed for the house. To honestly get her some clothes like pajamas. And I came back from the store.

And I came in the door and I called her name and no one answered. And then I went to the bathroom door and I saw at the top left of the door that my work belt was hanging outside of the door. I put my hand on the door and you know how a door sounds when there's something on it. It didn't sound hollow. It sounded solid. And I called her name and I heard nothing. I understood and I knew what that meant.

I felt it in my body and in my being that if I opened that door, I was not going to be able to come back from it. I apologized to the responding officer and I told him I couldn't open the door. I had to leave that for him because I couldn't do it. And he said, it's okay. We deal with this all the time. It's okay.

So they were able to, they pulled her out and they tried to resuscitate her, but it was too late. So she had hung herself with my work belt in the bathroom while I was gone. I was only gone an hour. I was only gone an hour. I believe as a result of the medicines that she was taking, she had no more parts. They were all gone. They literally disappeared. The only thing that was left was what we called the host, which was the empty shell, which

Didn't have a personality, didn't have desires, didn't have wants, didn't have needs, a shell. And she felt a tremendous, tremendous loss from that. She heard their voices in her mind and they would always be talking to her and coaching her and protecting her. And now it was nothing. It was complete silence. And I think that played a major part in her doing also what she did because I felt the loss too.

When she died, I lost 21 members of my family at the same time that she passed. I felt it. Sophie, Paisley, Blaze, Beast, Natalia, all of them. I felt the loss of all of them. I lost a little girl that day. She did what she did the way that she did it and left me with such turmoil to deal with after she passed with her children and how hard it was when I made those phone calls to them about what had happened. And it was a lot. So...

great range of emotions, but I'm allowing myself to feel all of them and not feel guilty for any of them because I need all of them. Since my wife's passing, there's been a lot of mixture of different emotions of a sense of relief that it's over because I was breaking down and I'm happy that I have a chance to find some happiness for myself because I

I've been alone for such a long time. I mean, just the physical touch of another human being I haven't had in such a long time. A couple weeks after my wife passed, I went and got a massage to try to relieve some of the stress in my body. I had never gotten a massage before.

And I had my face down in the massage table and they started touching me and I broke out crying. Embarrassing as that was, I couldn't help it because I was getting touch from another human being. And it felt so important to me and it felt so foreign that it just it broke me out in tears.

I'm happy that I'm able to move on and try to find a healthy relationship now. I'm dating. I met someone who's really, really, really good to me. And she's really a special person to me. And she understands it all. And she's very supportive.

And I'm hoping that it continues and it's a good, happy relationship. But I'm pursuing happiness for myself now. And I know that's what my wife would want because she told me many times that she didn't want me to stay alone. She wanted me to find someone to care for me and to love me and to give me what I needed. All the things that she knew that she couldn't provide because of her illness. Now that I'm on the other side of the situation, I feel that the most important thing for me to do is...

continue to work on living and being a balanced person. And that's what I'm striving to do. The simple pleasures of life, going to work and not feeling the pressure of having to rush and just enjoying my job. I took myself to Hawaii by myself. I got a hotel and did a tour of the island. I joined a singles group and I met a lot of good friends there.

Looking back on it, I want to be able to look at myself in the mirror and say that I did my very best. I can do that today. I'm proud of the man that I am. I'm proud of what I did. I gave up everything. I gave up my mind. I gave up my body. I gave up every worldly position I had on the face of this earth to be there for her and to give her what she needed until she passed. And I can look at myself in the mirror and say I did my very, very best today.

I still have my moments like everyone else does. I still have moments of sadness and I've had quite a few panic attacks since she died. But it's gotten better and better as time goes on. I will have them every day and then it became every week.

And then it became every month. And now I haven't had one for, I would say, probably three months now. Because when I have it, I deal with it. I talk to myself. What's going on? Why are you feeling this way? And if it's too much for me, I call someone and I let my emotions out about what I'm feeling at the moment. I don't care what it is. I am not afraid of any life situation.

situation that can be thrown at me, it does not shake me one bit because of the changes that I've had to develop inside of myself to be the man that I needed to be for my wife and for my kids and also for myself. Because I'm a person too, and I'm important too. And now that I've changed who I am, I know I deserve it.

and I want it and I need it and I'm going to pursue it to the best of my ability. Whatever I feel, I let it out. I don't hold it in anymore. Now I'm working on living out loud, enjoying my life, expressing myself, being open with my emotions because I have a tendency to go inward and become that old person that I used to be and introspective and silent and not share anything.

So to keep myself from being that person, if I have emotions, if I feel something for my friends or if I feel something about someone I love or care for, I call them and I say, I love you. I miss you. I say it. I am 100% a different person than I wasn't back then. If I'm angry, I say it in a productive way. I get it out.

I would always absorb all of that before and now I just let it out. And I think that's one of the main contributing factors that's helped me survive to this point. So I'm trying hard to live out loud.

Today's episode featured Matthew Fanning. If you'd like to reach out to him, you can email at fanning77120 at gmail.com. That's F-A-N-N-I-N-G 77120 at gmail.com. Or you can find him on Facebook as Matthew Fanning. See the show notes for a specific link to his page.

From Wondery, you're listening to This Is Actually Happening. If you love what we do, please rate and review the show. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or on the Wondery app to listen ad-free and get access to the entire back catalog. In the episode notes, you'll find some links and offers from our sponsors. By supporting them, you help us bring you our show for free. I'm your host, Witt Misseldein.

Today's episode was co-produced by me, Jason Blaylock, and Andrew Waits, with special thanks to the This Is Actually Happening team, including Ellen Westberg. The intro music features the song Illabi by Tipper. You can join the community on the This Is Actually Happening discussion group on Facebook, or follow us on Instagram at ActuallyHappening.

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Welcome to the offensive line. You guys, on this podcast, we're going to make some picks, talk some s**t, and hopefully make you some money in the process. I'm your host, Annie Agarne.

So here's how this show is going to work, okay? We're going to run through the weekly slate of NFL and college football matchups, breaking them down into very serious categories like No offense. No offense, Travis Kelsey, but you got to step up your game if Pat Mahomes is saying the Chiefs need to have more fun this year. We're also handing out a series of awards and making picks for the top storylines surrounding the world of football. Awards like the He May Have a Point Award for the wide receiver that's most justifiably bitter.

Is it Brandon Ayuk, Tee Higgins, or Devontae Adams? Plus, on Thursdays, we're doing an exclusive bonus episode on Wondery Plus, where I share my fantasy football picks ahead of Thursday night football and the weekend's matchups. Your fantasy league is as good as locked in. Follow the offensive line on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can access bonus episodes and listen ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus.