I'll Be of Your Service!

 When you were a child, did you have an imaginary friend? Someone completely fictitious that you had created in your mind to keep you company? Kids are extremely creative and they have a wild imagination, and imaginary friends are one manifestation of that creativity. It is all part of the play of pretend, which used to be my favorite kind of play.

Typically, imaginary friends are characters the child has created for themself to play with when they're alone. They are a placeholder of an actual friend, and even though the child can become very "close" with their imaginary friend, they are usually able to realize that the friend is not real, that it's just the product of their own imagination. 

Sometimes, though, that imaginary friend can become one of the only "people" the child can confine to, can rely on for comfort and safety and just company. That's when the line between fiction and reality gets a bit muddled. 

When I was still in university studying literary studies and linguistics, I was extremely fascinated by the way fiction and reality correlate with each other in literature. So much so, in fact, that I ended up writing one of the biggest papers of my studies on that very topic. As a literature nerd, literary theory has always intrigued me, and I tend to focus on things that might not seem that exciting to others when it comes to fiction. The way in which reality blends into fictitious media is one of those special interests; how each of them affects the other, how they coexist in both this reality as well as the countless of fictitious realities of literature. 

When looked at from this perspective, the imaginary friend of your childhood is one example of fiction and reality coexisting in the same space at the same time. They are both real and made up at the same time, and from there on, you can even ponder the possibilities of philosophy theories such as ontology (the study of being and existing; what existing even means and what does it mean to exist).

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I guess you could have called her my imaginary friend, though I didn't really see her in that way. In any case, she served the role of a friend for me for many years in my childhood, someone who I could trust that would protect me, whatever might have happened. She wasn't completely made up by me, either, as she existed in a fictitious world created by another artist, one whose works made me fall in love with illustration as an art form. But the conceptualization of her was by me – it was a construction of her character created and realized by the Kid, and she lived in her mind for a long time. 

Sometimes I found myself picturing myself in her shoes or the other way around. I liked to pretend I was her, or that she was me, and we lived together like that in my mind. We were inseparable, completely conjoined by the hip – or, more like the brain, I guess. 

She was my saving grace, my guardian angel, my protector. Someone who I knew would never leave me or abandon me, who would always come for my rescue, whatever my Friends did to me. She was my first love, too. 

reflection.

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Now, as an adult, I finally understand what all of that was about. I was forced to live in a constant state of dissociation by the daily abuse I was facing, my brain just couldn't take it all in. So it did the only thing it was able to do at the time: my brain disconnected ME from the situation, and instead latched onto a character I had become obsessed with and had fallen madly in love with, and used her as a shield and means of protecting me as much as possible. Because I was living life through a fictional character due to the severe dissociation, I wasn't really there a lot of the times, which also explains the chronic amnesia of forgetting traumatic events. 

I remember looking at myself in the mirror a lot of the times, picturing myself as this character. I adopted a lot of her mannerisms, even stole some of her fashion for myself. I wanted to do everything I could to be at least a bit like her, because she was everything I ever wanted and everything I never was.

There have been times when I have thought that I never would have made it out alive of my childhood without her protection. And I don't say that kind of stuff lightly. She saved my life, multiple times. And she didn't even have to be real to be able to do that.

Because the reality has been torturous for me all my life.

For the Earth's future,

ichigonya

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CHAPTER 6: DISCONNECT – END