talking to myself
Apr. 8th, 2006 01:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
flamingswordOther people are even more of a chore today than I am, and that's rare. So instead of talking to other people (who aren't icky and foul-tempered), I'm going to talk to myself about all the things I've been saving up.
I was reminded by a book discussion recently that I used to design cities and architecture in my head to put myself to sleep. I had insomnia through most of junior high and the first half of high school, and the only way to clear out the doubt and rage and badly concealed fingernail grip on reality was to do something impersonal and beautiful. The mathematical precision of design is soothing to a mind with too many emotions. All of the demands of the body can be sublimated into something purely mental, into which nothing can intrude. And beauty is it's own sort of therapy.
I made lots of houses, landscapes, a few continents, some towers, several temples, a city where the curb-stones of streets are paved with light, one where the buildings were designed to sing different notes depending on what quarter the wind was coming from. I had places with names full of artsy pretense, and things grimy or sensible, and places weathered and comfortable. I had a world in my head that was empty of all people. And then one of the houses started changing when I wasn't looking. The first person I learned to relate to in my head was a house. He was a very sweet person but stubborn and sly in a way that I was not, then. Three cheers for the House at Dragonswild. He's a great place. Someday I'll have to map him out somehow that makes sense.
While this was going on, I was trying and failing to make contact with people, and then there was Jillian. And she made me her friend. I didn't have wilpower to resist the magnetism her mania afforded her. She was intense, and she took all the sullen intensity that I didn't dare show and flew it like a flag. And I rallied around her like an army of mutants, and we read X-men comics and watched lots of video-taped music videos and sewed our own clothes, badly, by hand. She was the first person I knew who had cable. MTV was still cool to me then, and I will never recall the time we made our own En Vogue music video without crying with laughter in my head. We had three years together as good friends, and then mom and I moved away, moved in with her next dominoe in the falling row of men who don't share anything but their disappointment. Jillian and I wound up in different high schools, living on different sides of town, and with no way to see each other. And in high school I was lost like glasses in the dark. With no Jill. And still crazy.
Around then I met two creatures who are equally responsible for the shape of my high school experience: Rachel, who we will call Oblivion- her proper title, and Tina who owns up to no title more poetic than the Bitch of my Heart. I wanted Tina to stick around, and I wanted Oblivion to stop hurting herself. I wanted to be able to help them, and that was a big step for me: letting myself want things for other people. (I can't explain depersonalization, and I won't try to, but if you've been there then you get it, and you are kin to me.) So one day I followed Tina and her brother home from school, and over three hours of us sparring with each other and making each other comfortable and uncomfortable and watching cartoons (yes, I watched cartoons in high school. shut up), they wound up existing as people in my head. It took Jillian two months to seem like a person to me, to have her own internal containment, to not be a thing painted on the backdrop of the world. I was getting used to people and this time it took two charismatic cynics only a few days of casual acquaintanceship and three hours of no-punches-pulled interaction to make them real. I've made houses for them, too, and most of the people I knew then. I made places in my imagination for them to stay, so if they ever came to visit the insides of my head they'd have a place suited just to them, and know they were welcome there.
High school happened. Oblivion ran away from home, I couldn't find her, but I knew she was okay. Tina got jealous that I had friends she didn't like and she tried to make me choose her over them. I didn't know how badly I could react to that until I was put in that situation, but it was odd to have a sudden abrupt disconnect from someone. (I've forgiven her since then, but she does like to play the bitch. It's a moniker she's come by honestly.) And I had in the meantime grown into the kind of person who had friends and enemies, and could be either cruel or kind to strangers, and it was a choice. I hadn't had one of those before, I just had decisions made somewhere in the subconscious that happened as much to me as they did to the people I was doing them to, and I couldn't explain it at all. But once you run up a baseline for your behaviour, you can see where the deviations are, and then you can dowse the underlying causes. And I reclaimed myself, just like that - like dumpster diving for beads from a broken necklace.
And then at some point in my first year of college I decided that it was a shame to have a world with no people, so I started making up whole cultures of people to go along with my shiny world. Most of the cultures were permissive and technologically or magically utopian, some were subsistence-level agrarian, and some weren't human. Why I decided to make a race of just-barely-sentient neolithic cat creatures, I don't know. I can only question my own motives for so long before I give up on trying to apply logic more complicated than "because I want to". And now people are all real to me, whether they want to be or not. I wan't them to be real. Because if they can't help being real, then I'm real, too.
You know you don't have to read this stuff, right? That you're real to me either way, and that nothing is expected of you? I've not got parts cut out for you to play, and I don't know what you want until you say so. You exist independently of the world and of me. You're you, and that gives me permission to be me. It's nice.
I was reminded by a book discussion recently that I used to design cities and architecture in my head to put myself to sleep. I had insomnia through most of junior high and the first half of high school, and the only way to clear out the doubt and rage and badly concealed fingernail grip on reality was to do something impersonal and beautiful. The mathematical precision of design is soothing to a mind with too many emotions. All of the demands of the body can be sublimated into something purely mental, into which nothing can intrude. And beauty is it's own sort of therapy.
I made lots of houses, landscapes, a few continents, some towers, several temples, a city where the curb-stones of streets are paved with light, one where the buildings were designed to sing different notes depending on what quarter the wind was coming from. I had places with names full of artsy pretense, and things grimy or sensible, and places weathered and comfortable. I had a world in my head that was empty of all people. And then one of the houses started changing when I wasn't looking. The first person I learned to relate to in my head was a house. He was a very sweet person but stubborn and sly in a way that I was not, then. Three cheers for the House at Dragonswild. He's a great place. Someday I'll have to map him out somehow that makes sense.
While this was going on, I was trying and failing to make contact with people, and then there was Jillian. And she made me her friend. I didn't have wilpower to resist the magnetism her mania afforded her. She was intense, and she took all the sullen intensity that I didn't dare show and flew it like a flag. And I rallied around her like an army of mutants, and we read X-men comics and watched lots of video-taped music videos and sewed our own clothes, badly, by hand. She was the first person I knew who had cable. MTV was still cool to me then, and I will never recall the time we made our own En Vogue music video without crying with laughter in my head. We had three years together as good friends, and then mom and I moved away, moved in with her next dominoe in the falling row of men who don't share anything but their disappointment. Jillian and I wound up in different high schools, living on different sides of town, and with no way to see each other. And in high school I was lost like glasses in the dark. With no Jill. And still crazy.
Around then I met two creatures who are equally responsible for the shape of my high school experience: Rachel, who we will call Oblivion- her proper title, and Tina who owns up to no title more poetic than the Bitch of my Heart. I wanted Tina to stick around, and I wanted Oblivion to stop hurting herself. I wanted to be able to help them, and that was a big step for me: letting myself want things for other people. (I can't explain depersonalization, and I won't try to, but if you've been there then you get it, and you are kin to me.) So one day I followed Tina and her brother home from school, and over three hours of us sparring with each other and making each other comfortable and uncomfortable and watching cartoons (yes, I watched cartoons in high school. shut up), they wound up existing as people in my head. It took Jillian two months to seem like a person to me, to have her own internal containment, to not be a thing painted on the backdrop of the world. I was getting used to people and this time it took two charismatic cynics only a few days of casual acquaintanceship and three hours of no-punches-pulled interaction to make them real. I've made houses for them, too, and most of the people I knew then. I made places in my imagination for them to stay, so if they ever came to visit the insides of my head they'd have a place suited just to them, and know they were welcome there.
High school happened. Oblivion ran away from home, I couldn't find her, but I knew she was okay. Tina got jealous that I had friends she didn't like and she tried to make me choose her over them. I didn't know how badly I could react to that until I was put in that situation, but it was odd to have a sudden abrupt disconnect from someone. (I've forgiven her since then, but she does like to play the bitch. It's a moniker she's come by honestly.) And I had in the meantime grown into the kind of person who had friends and enemies, and could be either cruel or kind to strangers, and it was a choice. I hadn't had one of those before, I just had decisions made somewhere in the subconscious that happened as much to me as they did to the people I was doing them to, and I couldn't explain it at all. But once you run up a baseline for your behaviour, you can see where the deviations are, and then you can dowse the underlying causes. And I reclaimed myself, just like that - like dumpster diving for beads from a broken necklace.
And then at some point in my first year of college I decided that it was a shame to have a world with no people, so I started making up whole cultures of people to go along with my shiny world. Most of the cultures were permissive and technologically or magically utopian, some were subsistence-level agrarian, and some weren't human. Why I decided to make a race of just-barely-sentient neolithic cat creatures, I don't know. I can only question my own motives for so long before I give up on trying to apply logic more complicated than "because I want to". And now people are all real to me, whether they want to be or not. I wan't them to be real. Because if they can't help being real, then I'm real, too.
You know you don't have to read this stuff, right? That you're real to me either way, and that nothing is expected of you? I've not got parts cut out for you to play, and I don't know what you want until you say so. You exist independently of the world and of me. You're you, and that gives me permission to be me. It's nice.