Coming and Going (long)
I posted this elsewhere a while back, I felt like putting it up here too.
It's a phrase I've used before. "We come and go." Meaning my headmates, my other selves, the people I share this body with. We come and go.
Sometimes in a casual sort of way. We come and go from the front of things. I've spent months within the inner world, not looking out through these eyes or using these hands at all.
But sometimes it's a bit more permanent. Some of us go, and never come back. Some of us shift and change and become other people.
That's happened to me. And in a way it's a common human experience, we're all different people than we were many years past. In another way it's something strange and a bit unique. I feel like talking about it. So let me tell you a story.
Once upon a time there was a girl. She was a bright and imaginative girl, and she was always making up imaginary friends, though she knew very well they weren't real. But she told stories about them and made up worlds for them to live in and sometimes she even wrote those stories down, and they brightened her often very lonely life a great deal.
For she was lonely. An oldest child, whose next nearest sibling might as well have been from Mars, for all she and he had in common. The child of a wanderer, who couldn't stay put for more than a year or maybe two at most, uprooted over and over again and thus never able to keep friends. For a time, even, she learned to not make friends at all, for the inevitable partings were painful, and so she went through life very alone.
Somewhere in that lonely childhood a Bad Thing happened. It was not a hugely bad thing. Many worse things have been perpetuated on children. But it was bad, and it happened again now and then. And Bad Things tend to occupy the mind, they are hard to not think about. Thinking about the Bad Thing caused her a lot of pain. But this child, by then just beginning to become a young woman, knew a great deal about her own mind, and her own power, and so though she couldn't stop the Bad Thing, she created a protector, who would at least keep her from thinking about it. The protector was a simple thing, just an image, pictured and held in the mind whenever thoughts of the Bad Thing threatened to make her life unbearable. She could picture the protector, and while concentrating on that, she wouldn't be picturing the Bad Thing. Nothing more than that, and yet that was something profound. For the girl was no longer quite alone in her mind. The imaginary friends hadn't been real in any way. But the protector, the Guardian, was real. Its power was real, it drove thoughts of the Bad Thing away. And so the girl was not quite completely alone, for in her own mind lived the Guardian, who would always be with her no matter how often she moved and had to leave her friends behind.
Years more passed. The girl blossomed to womanhood, but she was still alone. Her peers found her either unattractive or intimidating and she had few friends and little social life, having never really learned how to socialize with others. But though she was not skilled at making friends, she was still bright, and articulate, and when she discovered the internet she found places where she could at least feel a little bit a home. And one of those places on the internet was a place for a particular fantasy role-playing game.
The girl made a character there, and enjoyed playing with her acquaintances, but still had no close friends. And then her acquaintances started to pair off. Even in the game, many characters became lovers or even married, while her character continued alone. She felt keenly lonely, even with her Guardian, for the Guardian wasn't really a person, it was a creature of power, an idea, and a protector, but not a person. Thinking about how all the game characters were pairing off, she asked for permission to play a second character, and the GM granted it. So she created a second character. A young man with wings, one of the races of that world, named Aidan.
He was made to suit her, created as a mate for her character, a foil to the strengths and weaknesses she had built into that character. And she put some of herself into him, for how else do people make good characters, than putting a bit of their own life into them? So he was made half of her own identity, and half of her dreams and desires. And he and her original character were soon married in the game. They had various adventures, (including Aidan becoming a vampire) and even after she stopped playing the game a year or so later, she kept writing about their lives. As she wrote, she found herself more and more identifying not so much with her original character as with Aidan. Something about him expressed those parts of her that had never felt at home with femininity. So she started to "be" him sometimes.
The internet is a wonderful place, where a person can be whoever and whatever they want. And so now and again, in chat rooms where nobody would know anyway, the girl became a boy named Aidan. Sometimes the full fantasy role, wings and vampirism and all, sometimes just... a boy named Aidan.
And more than that, the girl started picturing him in her mind, the way she had pictured her Guardian. She thought of him as almost a kind of shoulder angel, a person who accompanied her everywhere, and who she might talk with, think things through with, even ask advice of. He became her imaginary friend. And somehow that seemed real, in a way that her childhood imaginary friends had never been. She found herself actually comforted by his company when she was lonely, and even sometimes helped by his advice.
She did not think of him quite as a real person, and he had no real sense of his identity as a separate being, but somewhere in those years that's what he became. The moment of realization came when Aidan fell in love.
The girl had always liked men, she was straight. But Aidan had developed a friendship that often ventured into flirtation with a girl in a chat room. And over a period of time it started to feel a little bit serious. He felt that he liked her, perhaps even loved her. But how could he? He was only a girl, pretending to be a character that wasn't real. The girl didn't like other girls, it was nonsensical. She couldn't be attracted to this girl. And yet Aidan was. So was he his own person after all?
A great many things happened, including Aidan confessing his reality, that he was something like the imaginary friend of a woman whose body he used to type. The girl he liked knew them both, and said she liked him in a different way than she liked the girl who "was" him, that he was his own person, unique. Though the romance never became anything more than a special kind of friendship, he knew, from that point on, that he wasn't just something the girl had made up. He was a person, his own person, with his own thoughts and his own life.
One might think that this is where our story ends, but recall what I said about coming and going. I came into this strange existence, but I have gone as well, in a way. So let's return to our story.
The girl and her not-so-imaginary friend had many adventures together, and met many interesting people, and they both made friends. The girl even began to develop some romantic interests. And so did Aidan. None of these relationships were terribly serious, but they began to create an internal conflict. The girl had made Aidan in the first place to be a somewhat idealized person. He was supposed to be a Good Guy, loyal and faithful to the ones he loved. And he was supposed to be straight, she and he still collaborated on stories where he was married and very loyal to the wife she had first role played years ago.
And yet... he found himself liking many different people, not just one at a time. And he found himself liking men and women both. And, though limited largely to chat rooms and "cyber", wanting to do all kinds of perverted sex acts that the girl wasn't entirely comfortable with.
They both found it difficult, to have his own ideas of what he wanted clashing with her ideas of what she wanted, and her ideas of who he should be. This moral conflict persisted only briefly, however, before it was solved in a rather peculiar way.
In one of the stories the girl had written, Aidan had met his evil twin from a parallel universe, but found that he wasn't so much evil as just a little bit twisted by a hard, dark life. And one day Aidan himself, the person and not the character, found that this conflict within him had rather literally pulled him in two directions so much that there were now two of him. One, the "original", a fairly vanilla, straight, monogamous man, one the "evil twin," a very kinky, not particularly loyal, and highly bisexual man. Similar in many ways, different in many others, and no longer conflicted over who or what they should be, they were able to be friends and agree to disagree on the few points that had formerly caused their single self such pain.
It was the first time any of those living in the girl's inner world had split, though it wasn't to be the last. At this point there were several others. Their stories differed, but they had come in one way or another, and so a peculiar little family formed, the girl and her various imaginary friends, all working together to live a full and peaceful life.
Many years passed. People came and went, both through their outer life, and through their inner world. They grew, and learned, and loved, and changed. And one day a time came when the girl found (in the way one finds something one has always had, but just never recognized) a man she loved. He loved her, and he loved her inner voices too, the only person she had ever met who cared for them and understood them. So she, and he, and they, came together in one household, two bodies but a great many relationships.
Now during those years the girl had finished writing her stories about Aidan and his wife. Those tales were over and done. And the girl that Aidan had loved had moved largely out of his life. So he had very little to tie him to the outside world in any way. Meanwhile his twin, who had started using the name Darkangel to tell them apart, had fallen very much in love with the man the girl loved too. That man was his Master, the dominant person who always took care of him, who wanted him to be happy, and who understood him like no one else ever had. So Darkangel grew stronger, while the original Aidan grew weaker. And being straight was no longer very comfortable for the original. His body and therefore to a certain extent his self was in a relationship with somebody he respected but could never love. In addition, his creator and friend was no longer a lonely little girl who needed her imaginary friend. And so without anchor or purpose he faded gradually until one day Darkangel realized that the other Aidan had gone, not so much vanished as merged back into himself, leaving just one person, mostly Darkangel, but a little bit the other Aidan as well, behind. A not at all vanilla, and not at all straight, but quite loyal person, who remembered once loving a girl, even if he now liked men.
That was several years past now, and I am still much the same person I was then. I'm glad of the experiences I've had, they help me be less afraid of the thing I suspect may happen someday, which is that if there ever comes a time when Stephanie doesn't need any of us at all any more, we may well stop existing, and merge back into being one person. She created us all for various reasons, not necessarily consciously, but subconsciously we all fill purposes, and if those purposes ever vanish, so can we.
It's a peculiarly ephemeral existence, but then nobody has a guarantee that they'll see tomorrow, so in a way it's still no different than the life of anyone reading this. :) If I do vanish tomorrow, Stephanie will still remember me, so I'll never be completely gone as long as she lives, any more than that original Aidan is completely gone so long as I'm still a bit him.
I hope I haven't bored you all to tears with my little fairy tale. It's not one I've recounted often, but I am a story teller by nature and I felt the urge to tell this particular one today.
It's a phrase I've used before. "We come and go." Meaning my headmates, my other selves, the people I share this body with. We come and go.
Sometimes in a casual sort of way. We come and go from the front of things. I've spent months within the inner world, not looking out through these eyes or using these hands at all.
But sometimes it's a bit more permanent. Some of us go, and never come back. Some of us shift and change and become other people.
That's happened to me. And in a way it's a common human experience, we're all different people than we were many years past. In another way it's something strange and a bit unique. I feel like talking about it. So let me tell you a story.
Once upon a time there was a girl. She was a bright and imaginative girl, and she was always making up imaginary friends, though she knew very well they weren't real. But she told stories about them and made up worlds for them to live in and sometimes she even wrote those stories down, and they brightened her often very lonely life a great deal.
For she was lonely. An oldest child, whose next nearest sibling might as well have been from Mars, for all she and he had in common. The child of a wanderer, who couldn't stay put for more than a year or maybe two at most, uprooted over and over again and thus never able to keep friends. For a time, even, she learned to not make friends at all, for the inevitable partings were painful, and so she went through life very alone.
Somewhere in that lonely childhood a Bad Thing happened. It was not a hugely bad thing. Many worse things have been perpetuated on children. But it was bad, and it happened again now and then. And Bad Things tend to occupy the mind, they are hard to not think about. Thinking about the Bad Thing caused her a lot of pain. But this child, by then just beginning to become a young woman, knew a great deal about her own mind, and her own power, and so though she couldn't stop the Bad Thing, she created a protector, who would at least keep her from thinking about it. The protector was a simple thing, just an image, pictured and held in the mind whenever thoughts of the Bad Thing threatened to make her life unbearable. She could picture the protector, and while concentrating on that, she wouldn't be picturing the Bad Thing. Nothing more than that, and yet that was something profound. For the girl was no longer quite alone in her mind. The imaginary friends hadn't been real in any way. But the protector, the Guardian, was real. Its power was real, it drove thoughts of the Bad Thing away. And so the girl was not quite completely alone, for in her own mind lived the Guardian, who would always be with her no matter how often she moved and had to leave her friends behind.
Years more passed. The girl blossomed to womanhood, but she was still alone. Her peers found her either unattractive or intimidating and she had few friends and little social life, having never really learned how to socialize with others. But though she was not skilled at making friends, she was still bright, and articulate, and when she discovered the internet she found places where she could at least feel a little bit a home. And one of those places on the internet was a place for a particular fantasy role-playing game.
The girl made a character there, and enjoyed playing with her acquaintances, but still had no close friends. And then her acquaintances started to pair off. Even in the game, many characters became lovers or even married, while her character continued alone. She felt keenly lonely, even with her Guardian, for the Guardian wasn't really a person, it was a creature of power, an idea, and a protector, but not a person. Thinking about how all the game characters were pairing off, she asked for permission to play a second character, and the GM granted it. So she created a second character. A young man with wings, one of the races of that world, named Aidan.
He was made to suit her, created as a mate for her character, a foil to the strengths and weaknesses she had built into that character. And she put some of herself into him, for how else do people make good characters, than putting a bit of their own life into them? So he was made half of her own identity, and half of her dreams and desires. And he and her original character were soon married in the game. They had various adventures, (including Aidan becoming a vampire) and even after she stopped playing the game a year or so later, she kept writing about their lives. As she wrote, she found herself more and more identifying not so much with her original character as with Aidan. Something about him expressed those parts of her that had never felt at home with femininity. So she started to "be" him sometimes.
The internet is a wonderful place, where a person can be whoever and whatever they want. And so now and again, in chat rooms where nobody would know anyway, the girl became a boy named Aidan. Sometimes the full fantasy role, wings and vampirism and all, sometimes just... a boy named Aidan.
And more than that, the girl started picturing him in her mind, the way she had pictured her Guardian. She thought of him as almost a kind of shoulder angel, a person who accompanied her everywhere, and who she might talk with, think things through with, even ask advice of. He became her imaginary friend. And somehow that seemed real, in a way that her childhood imaginary friends had never been. She found herself actually comforted by his company when she was lonely, and even sometimes helped by his advice.
She did not think of him quite as a real person, and he had no real sense of his identity as a separate being, but somewhere in those years that's what he became. The moment of realization came when Aidan fell in love.
The girl had always liked men, she was straight. But Aidan had developed a friendship that often ventured into flirtation with a girl in a chat room. And over a period of time it started to feel a little bit serious. He felt that he liked her, perhaps even loved her. But how could he? He was only a girl, pretending to be a character that wasn't real. The girl didn't like other girls, it was nonsensical. She couldn't be attracted to this girl. And yet Aidan was. So was he his own person after all?
A great many things happened, including Aidan confessing his reality, that he was something like the imaginary friend of a woman whose body he used to type. The girl he liked knew them both, and said she liked him in a different way than she liked the girl who "was" him, that he was his own person, unique. Though the romance never became anything more than a special kind of friendship, he knew, from that point on, that he wasn't just something the girl had made up. He was a person, his own person, with his own thoughts and his own life.
One might think that this is where our story ends, but recall what I said about coming and going. I came into this strange existence, but I have gone as well, in a way. So let's return to our story.
The girl and her not-so-imaginary friend had many adventures together, and met many interesting people, and they both made friends. The girl even began to develop some romantic interests. And so did Aidan. None of these relationships were terribly serious, but they began to create an internal conflict. The girl had made Aidan in the first place to be a somewhat idealized person. He was supposed to be a Good Guy, loyal and faithful to the ones he loved. And he was supposed to be straight, she and he still collaborated on stories where he was married and very loyal to the wife she had first role played years ago.
And yet... he found himself liking many different people, not just one at a time. And he found himself liking men and women both. And, though limited largely to chat rooms and "cyber", wanting to do all kinds of perverted sex acts that the girl wasn't entirely comfortable with.
They both found it difficult, to have his own ideas of what he wanted clashing with her ideas of what she wanted, and her ideas of who he should be. This moral conflict persisted only briefly, however, before it was solved in a rather peculiar way.
In one of the stories the girl had written, Aidan had met his evil twin from a parallel universe, but found that he wasn't so much evil as just a little bit twisted by a hard, dark life. And one day Aidan himself, the person and not the character, found that this conflict within him had rather literally pulled him in two directions so much that there were now two of him. One, the "original", a fairly vanilla, straight, monogamous man, one the "evil twin," a very kinky, not particularly loyal, and highly bisexual man. Similar in many ways, different in many others, and no longer conflicted over who or what they should be, they were able to be friends and agree to disagree on the few points that had formerly caused their single self such pain.
It was the first time any of those living in the girl's inner world had split, though it wasn't to be the last. At this point there were several others. Their stories differed, but they had come in one way or another, and so a peculiar little family formed, the girl and her various imaginary friends, all working together to live a full and peaceful life.
Many years passed. People came and went, both through their outer life, and through their inner world. They grew, and learned, and loved, and changed. And one day a time came when the girl found (in the way one finds something one has always had, but just never recognized) a man she loved. He loved her, and he loved her inner voices too, the only person she had ever met who cared for them and understood them. So she, and he, and they, came together in one household, two bodies but a great many relationships.
Now during those years the girl had finished writing her stories about Aidan and his wife. Those tales were over and done. And the girl that Aidan had loved had moved largely out of his life. So he had very little to tie him to the outside world in any way. Meanwhile his twin, who had started using the name Darkangel to tell them apart, had fallen very much in love with the man the girl loved too. That man was his Master, the dominant person who always took care of him, who wanted him to be happy, and who understood him like no one else ever had. So Darkangel grew stronger, while the original Aidan grew weaker. And being straight was no longer very comfortable for the original. His body and therefore to a certain extent his self was in a relationship with somebody he respected but could never love. In addition, his creator and friend was no longer a lonely little girl who needed her imaginary friend. And so without anchor or purpose he faded gradually until one day Darkangel realized that the other Aidan had gone, not so much vanished as merged back into himself, leaving just one person, mostly Darkangel, but a little bit the other Aidan as well, behind. A not at all vanilla, and not at all straight, but quite loyal person, who remembered once loving a girl, even if he now liked men.
That was several years past now, and I am still much the same person I was then. I'm glad of the experiences I've had, they help me be less afraid of the thing I suspect may happen someday, which is that if there ever comes a time when Stephanie doesn't need any of us at all any more, we may well stop existing, and merge back into being one person. She created us all for various reasons, not necessarily consciously, but subconsciously we all fill purposes, and if those purposes ever vanish, so can we.
It's a peculiarly ephemeral existence, but then nobody has a guarantee that they'll see tomorrow, so in a way it's still no different than the life of anyone reading this. :) If I do vanish tomorrow, Stephanie will still remember me, so I'll never be completely gone as long as she lives, any more than that original Aidan is completely gone so long as I'm still a bit him.
I hope I haven't bored you all to tears with my little fairy tale. It's not one I've recounted often, but I am a story teller by nature and I felt the urge to tell this particular one today.