Dear Gypsy,
I had heard of your story before and was always disturbed by the terrorizing life your mom laid out for you. I cannot imagine being abused in the very horrifying way that you were by your mother, and I am in awe by how much you were able to endure.
After watching Hulu's The Act, I started to become more curious in your story. I started to wonder if I would ever be able to take the suffering you did with such poise, what I would do if I were in your shoes and if the love between you and your mother was really true.
The Hulu series tells your story, but it leaves me with a lot of unanswered questions - a lot of 'what-ifs' and hypotheticals.
What if Dee Dee had never gone to jail?
What if you had never been diagnosed as underweight?
What if your grandmother had never passed?
What if you never fall off that trampoline?
Would you have still been falsely 'diagnosed' with all those illnesses?
Your relationship with your mother also raised questions for me. She obviously had extremely strong, powerful feelings and emotions toward you. She and you both called it love, but is that what love really is? I cannot wrap my mind around the idea that love can drive one, a mother, nonetheless, to perform such evil and cruel crimes against another person - one's own daughter. And did you really love her? How could you love someone who treated you so brutally? She abused you, lied to you, belittled you, manipulated you, and destroyed a huge part of your existence. To Dee Dee, you were the only thing that mattered. She was obsessed and infatuated, there's no doubt about it. But is that interchangeable with love?
I wonder, too, how life post-living with your mom is like. Although you are not free to wholly experience life yourself yet, how does it feel to be liberated from the life you escaped? How is prison compared to life at home? And my last dire question is: if you could go back, would you have done everything the same? Would you and Nick have planned to murder your mother if you knew it would lead to incarceration? Was being 'Bonnie and Clyde' really the ultimate goal, or was that just Nick's way of coping?
Again, there's so much left unanswered. Your life and went you went through, and are probably still going through, leaves me shocked no matter how much time I've had to think about it. You are a victim of such horrible abuse, and I continue to be outraged by your story.
Sending love,
An Unsettled Follower Of Your Story
