ABOUT ME

    Thank you for joining me today. If you could all gather around, the tour is about to begin. Please, follow me down the hallway to my right and down the stairs. At the bottom of the staircase and to the left is the rabbit hole we will be going down. Please feel free to let go, let your hands and feet flop and fall where they may and try to hold onto your bootstraps…

 

A Relatively Brief Explanation of My Schizophrenic 20s.

    I grew up in the suburbs of Denver, Colorado. I had friends, a 3.8GPA in high school and a family that loved and supported me, or so I thought. For some reason though, this oppressive depression followed me wherever I went. I couldn’t understand why I was so depressed as I felt that I had everything I needed to be happy healthy and productive. I started seeing a therapist and then a psychiatrist for this depression, eventually taking anti-depressants to combat this oppressive darkness. Nothing seemed to improve the situation. Lets fast forward now to my last year in college. I was working full time as a personal banker and going to school full time. The people I worked with were very close friends of mine that made up a large part of my social circle. When I was 21, I started hearing these people talk about me behind my back. This always happened when I couldn’t see these people, but I could “hear” them. They would say the most horrible things about me, and how much they hated me, and how they wished I was dead and what they wanted to do to hurt me if they could. I dealt with this for months before I couldn’t take it anymore and I quit my job at the bank. This was the first time I began experiencing full on schizophrenic symptoms outside of the depression, however, at this point I had no idea what was happening. This marked the beginning of a roughly decade long journey through hell. Over the course of my 20s, I experienced intense auditory and visual “hallucinations” that forced me away from everyone and led me down a dark hole of self hatred, shame and guilt and drugs. I learned that the love I received from my entire social circle was in fact conditional, and that I was only going to get support from my friends and family if I was to see a psychiatrist and accept their explanations for what I was experiencing and take the meds they prescribed me. Lord did I try to do this, though, always ending in failure because in the eyes of western medicine, everything I was experiencing was merely a figment of my broken mind and ultimately did not exist outside of me. For many, many years, I struggled to accept that what I was experiencing was indeed a figment of my broken brain because the experiences I was having were clearly coming from somewhere beyond the limits of my being. I was in and out of almost every psych ward in the Denver metro area and landed myself in jail on a few occasions as a result of my schizophrenic symptoms and my drug use. Ultimately, I attempted suicide three separate times, the first two being intentional overdoses both on the anti-psychotics I was being prescribed as well as the street drugs I had become addicted to. The last time, I tried to jump off the eight story parking garage at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, ironically enough. I don’t know where they came from to this day, but the police pulled me off that ledge (quite literally) and stuck me right back in the hospital under a judges court order. The reason for these three suicide attempts were all the same. I could not accept the fact that what I was experiencing was a figment of my diseased brain, as western medicine suggests. I also could not accept that if I were to acknowledge that something else was happening to me, and that the answers western medicine was providing me with were wrong, it meant that every single person in my life would turn their back on me and leave me alone and without resources. I felt trapped. On one side was the impossible task of forcing myself to believe I was broken and having to suppress and ignore the experiences I was having that proved to me that what I was experiencing was coming from beyond me. On the other side, if I embraced the idea that something beyond me was happening I would be left without any resources or support. Both options meant I was left struggling to live in a world where my voice was worthless and always falling on deaf ears. I felt like there was no way to make any move in any direction that would benefit me. To the vast majority of others, carrying a mental health diagnosis makes one less than human I discovered, at least in the way people treated me. I remember being handcuffed and taken to a hospital because I was experiencing an intense episode of crippling depression and felt like I had no options. I felt like a criminal for being schizophrenic. I wonder what other health issues require someone to be handcuffed and put in the back of a squad car? After dealing with this for about eight years and picking up a felony conviction, I was presented with the opportunity to leave Colorado and head to the northeastern coast of the United States. I ended up in New York City after a brief five month stint in rural Maine with my ex-boyfriend. Suddenly, I was no longer surrounded by my family and friends and it was almost as if I was being given the space I needed to step out on my own. I was in New York for about two years before I mustered up the courage to stop trying to do what everyone else wanted me to do and to start seeking answers outside of the realm of western medicine. By (not so random) chance I ended up meeting a healer on the Upper West Side and in our first meeting, she was able to provide me with information about some very dark things that happened to me when I was a very little tyke. These things were something that I had never spoken to anyone about, and somehow, this woman knew about them in detail and from that point on, I began to pursue answers in the world of non-western philosophy and medicine and elsewhere outside of the realm of western medicine. 

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A Comment on Healing Myself

    Over the next seven years I spent all of my time learning about indigenous and other non-western medicines and philosophies, multi-dimensional beings, spirits and entities. I learned about universal consciousness, energetic science and medicine, the interconnectedness of everything and what that all meant in regards to me, a schizophrenic gay addict with HIV living in New York City. Over time, I began to understand that the path of the schizophrenic is no different than that of the psychic, or medium, or sensitive. I came to understand that they are one in the same. A schizophrenic is someone who is naturally very open and sensitive to the universal energies that surround them, energies that the vast majority of the population are mostly unaware of. I was (and still am) obsessed with understanding my schizophrenic affliction, which is what has fueled my desire to start investigating the paranormal. I spent four years studying the practice of energy healing, eventually becoming a reiki master and worked on myself to heal the traumas, wounds and parasitic attachments I was dealing with. I began to find relief from the intense ocean of darkness I was constantly surrounded by. Over the course of seven years, I learned how to exorcise the parasitic multi-dimensional entities that had attached themselves to me that fed on the negative energy created by their manipulation and torture. I learned how to protect my energetic body from the toxic energies that exist in the world and people around me. I also learned how to open energetic channels to the much higher vibrational entities who have the desire to help me. Over time, I was finally able to break out of my debilitating sickness and now I had the chance to build a life for myself that could bring me happiness, health and productivity. I even spent many months on the road, traveling the country both investigating various paranormal hotspots as well as learning and understanding humanity and the true nature of reality. I decided to start a healing business, as I figured since I understood how to heal myself, I could help people in similar situations with their own healing journeys. I spent five years trying to get that business off the ground before it became clear to me that I was supposed to be making art. The way I will help others heal is through helping others understand what the true nature of of reality is through the language of art.

 

How Does Art Fit into the Picture?

    To take a step back for a moment, let me explain why this was my conclusion. I should briefly mention that my father started his adult life as a cop, but after a rather intimate encounter with three bullets and a dark dive into the world of undercover, he retired and pursued a life as a professional fine artist, although his creativity was a common occurrence in his daily life prior to his career change. I started my career as an artist my sophomore year of high school. It happened somewhat by “chance,” although, I admit now, everything happens for a reason as there are no coincidences. I decided to take a class on interior design, but on the first day of class, we were given an 80 page packet on the history of the couch, and it was then that I realized that this was not for me. I went to do a class change, as was common on the first days of each semester, and it turned out that the only option that was available to be was the class “An Introduction to Photography.” Over the next three years of my time in high school, I spent a great deal of time in art classes, learning how to draw, paint, make jewelry and other three dimensional art, although my main focus was film photography. At this point, in the early 2000s, film photography was still the standard in the fine art world. After my time at Chatfield Senior High, I enrolled myself at The University of Colorado at Denver and decided to work towards my Bachelor of Fine Arts, with an emphasis in photography. I feel blessed to have had that opportunity as UCD had an exceptional photography department with incredible professors who taught me how to think like a professional fine artist and the facilities were second to none. It wasn’t until my last year in college that my schizophrenic “symptoms” started becoming debilitating and I was in my last semester working on my senior thesis art show when I was forced to drop out and handle my illness, which was overwhelming every single aspect of my life. I was on the honor roll the final three years I attended UCD and ended up on the Dean’s List the last three semesters I was enrolled in school. Dropping out was one of the more difficult situations I dealt with. Many things happened after that over the next couple of years and at some point, my life seemed to balance out somewhat and I decided to go back to school, although this time I wanted to learn about graphic design I ended up enrolling at The Art Institute of Colorado for a BA in graphic design. I felt like what I would learn about graphic design would benefit my artistic process more than a BFA photography diploma. Again, I was able to make it to my final year in that program before my illness had become to debilitating and again, I was forced to drop out. All in all, I spent about seven years in art school. I spent so much time learning how to be a professional fine artist that now, it seems silly why I would be anything else. I suppose my motivation to start a healing business came from this idea about what I was “supposed to do” by a capitalistic societies standards. I thought I am “supposed” to have a product or service that I can sell to others. This was the only way (I thought) that I could support myself. Prior to the healing business, I spent two and a half years trying to sell posters to tourists about New York (that I made) with no avail there either. Let me also mention a brief moment in my past that also brought me back to being a professional artist. The last time I was involuntarily committed to a psych ward, it was during one of the darkest periods of my life. I had just spent six years in the legal system, in and out of jail and on probation which all ended with 17 days in 23 hour lockdown at Denver County Jail and a felony conviction. I had no hope or faith that anything would ever improve. One cold Winter night, after dinner had been served and there wasn’t much happening on the ward, I was sitting in the commons area coloring in one of the many coloring books available to ward residents. A nursing student, working as an intern in the psych ward came and sat at my table with me. I can still see her face and her energy which was made up of the most glorious golden light. I have since come to understand that she was meant to be in the healing industry with an aura like that. She started a conversation with me, attempting to know and understand me better. She asked me what my plans were for when I was able to leave the hospital, and I told her “I am going to move to New York City and become an artist.” My love of New York started after my first visit to the city in 2003. However, at the time, I didn’t believe I had a single chance in hell of ever making it to New York. At the time, I was pretty convinced I would die on the streets, alone in some back alley of Denver. Since then, so much has happened and after seven and a half years of doing what I thought would generate enough resources to support myself, I found that I was still struggling to figure out self-sustainability.

 

The Interconnectedness of Frank’s Experiences

    It has now become clearer to me that when I was making art for others, I was not tapping into my passion, and when I was trying to operate a healing business, I was still not tapping into my passion. Over the eight years I have been in recovery, both from schizophrenia and addition, it became clear to me that the only thing stronger than these afflictions is my passion. I have come to understand that my passions are art, and understanding what schizophrenia is. During the darkest times of my life, when I was homeless and had nothing to live for, and no direction, the way I continued to motivate myself to wake up everyday was to keep making art with the various apps on my phone. I made this art for me and no one else and it gave my meager and painful existence some tiny iota of meaning, and it kept me going. Now, fast forwarding many years, I have come to understand that art is my healing tool. Art is nothing more than a language to explain ideas, thoughts, emotions, experiences, etc. etc. etc. The language of art is the one I know best and therefore it seems most logical to me to use this language to help others heal in the ways that I have, so that we may all feel the brilliant warming light of wisdom and peace on our cute lil’ human faces. Understanding the paranormal influences in all of our collective lives will change everything about how humanity functions, how humanity relates to one another and how we attend to our individual and collective health. It is my goal to change the world for the better for us all, as I firmly believe that humanity is one living entity, and that we are all pieces of this entity, just as the human body is made up of trillions of cells. When one of us heals and becomes stronger, the rest of us in turn become stronger and better off. We are ALL in this together, and the better we understand the paranormal and energetic worlds, the better off we will ALL be in return.

 

    This concludes the guided tour. If you continue down this hallway, you will find double doors that will lead to the cafeteria. There are many tasty options to suit your lunchtime needs and once you have had your fill you’re welcome to continue with wherever your day may lead you. Thank you kindly for taking the time to take this tour down my rabbit hole. Feel free to reach out to me with any questions, comments or concerns about this tour and anything else that might be on your mind. Cheers!