I'm going to tell you a story.
It's a story about a boy and what happened to him.
You may not like it.
Imagine a boy, growing up isolated from society; isolated from mainstream culture; and isolated from other people. Alone and experiencing a reality different from those around him, bad things happen to him when he's still growing up. He has no support network, no friends, no functional family. There is nowhere safe.
The boy has no idea what he should do. He lacks the tools to understand what's going on. His reality is rejected. And he has no-one to help him figure it out.
Something happens to the boy and he doesn't develop the kind of identity that we all usually have. He doesn't grow up in the same way the rest of us do.
Instead, over the coming years he builds a fake identity from fiction and fear to help him survive in the world around him... inside a concept of reality that makes no sense to him.
The boy doesn't have access to television or movies or popular culture, and the role models in his reality are extremely limited and inappropriate. But from the books he reads and loves, he weaves together a story. He takes snippets from characters who wouldn't be afraid of the things that terrify him - combines them with aspects of characters who please everyone around them and are loved and respected (or feared) by all - and builds an identity from this. He creates an imaginary person who would never struggle the way he does, who would never be in pain the way he is, and would never be afraid the way he always is.
The boy's fake identity is constructed over years and years. First, a superstructure of survival skills is created because by now the boy's mental health issues have become significant. Then his artificial identity is carefully laid over the superstructure like aircraft fabric. Finally, a story is created that takes elements of the boy's history and combines them with the fabrications required to explain the new identity and like an engine firing up, it brings the whole monstrous construct to life.
Decades go by, and while the boy has become very good at driving, managing and directing his massive "battle suit" - there are problems. The suit is 50 years old now, but the boy inside it is still just a boy. The challenges the suit was built for (survival, protection, domination, etc) are not the challenges he faces (relationships, declining health, age issues, deaths in the family, etc). The suit has been repaired and adjusted and modified so many times it's failing frequently... and most of all the stories that power the engine have become constrained and flawed and internally inconsistent and problematic.
And the boy has been successful.
Everyone thinks the suit is a man.
Everyone believes that the boy is actually the person he created - the identity he constructed.
And now he's trapped in the suit.
And the suit is breaking down.
But he's just a boy.
I like this a lot. It fits me pretty well too, except my battle suit never functioned properly!
Meursault
Quote from: meursault on November 22, 2016, 03:32:43 PM
I like this a lot. It fits me pretty well too, except my battle suit never functioned properly!
Thanks!
I've been working on trying to use fictionalization to explain some of the differences in experienced reality.
And yeah... I'm not sure mine ever really did either.