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I have always hated mirrors.

And there are so many different flavors of hatred beneath that superficial sentence. Such a bland statement fails to explain how even a fleeting glimpse can alter reality for me. It’s hard to explain how reflections of one reality can make another reality more difficult for me.


Sometimes mirrors act as bludgeons, leaving me battered and bloody.
Sometimes mirrors are traps that eat time and memory leaving behind only odd emptiness.
And sometimes a glance at a mirror is a tumble and a gap and a gasp and I pull away as someone different.

Sometimes a mirror is a switch and sometimes it’s a gate and reality before and after are not the same.  I am not the same.

Sometimes an accidental glance is a push and I’m through and, again, just trying to figure out who I am and where I am and most of all what are the rules, what is the goal, and what is the punishment waiting.


I have always feared mirrors.

Mirrors show me a reality - but rarely the one I’m experiencing at that moment.
Mirrors show me just how different I really am.

I like the way you write.

Thank you!
I appreciate the kind words.

I can probably best explain the contours and shapes, the topology of my differences; of my issues; of who I really am and how I don't fit into the neat box of Normal by telling you a story.

That's probably not a shock, coming from me.

In any event, this is not your normal story. This is a story I tell myself. This is a story I created. This is the story of the reality I wish was mine.

I use this story when things are not okay for me. At 3am when all I can think about is that the odds of me getting to sunrise are low so what does that say about my future and hearing my pulse pounding in my ears and my left eye starts twitching... this is the story I tell myself to make things better.

From this story you can see everything about me. No details are coincidental no words are accidental. Each layer is another truth.




One day I am walking, holding the stuffed pig I sleep with - a security piglet - and I close my eyes and open the door and step through it and things shift/slide. When I open my eyes I am in a large, open loft-like space.

Needless to say, it's not what was supposed to on the other side of the door. And the stuffed piglet wasn't supposed to be able to talk.

But that's what's going on.

The piglet explains that this is a pocket universe, independent and discrete and attached like a soap bubble to our universe at only one spot - a joining that only I can traverse.

My pocket universe consists of just three rooms. There is a large main room that is rectangular and open and elevated on both ends. One end is the entry from the door and the other is a sleeping loft. The middle of the space is open and contains a sofa, a small table and chair, a broken in leather club chair and a large commercial style kitchen. The walls are entirely covered with filled bookshelves with the exception of the kitchen and around a TV screen and stereo. Two doors lead from this main space into other rooms. First, there is a big bathroom with a soaking tub and a sauna. The second door leads into a very large and brightly lit workshop with workbenches, equipment and electronics of various sorts ranging from a bandsaw to screen printing materials to a photo studio.

The piglet explains that I can take objects back and forth - but I'm the only living creature that can cross. In addition, time works differently in my pocket universe. First of all, the passing of time doesn't age me while within my universe. Secondly, time passes dramatically more quickly. An hour of time outside is 24 hours of time in my little pocket universe.


And that is the story.
To be fair, it's more a setting than a story and more of a confession than a setting and perhaps even more a cry for help and acceptance than anything else because I know it's just a fantasy and an indulgence and all these stories are just a way of abstracting myself and it's stopping me from seeing that things are not black and white and there could be a kind of safety here - in this reality.


So perhaps in the end this is the story.

I've learned to see the signs. Sometimes I like to flatter myself and imagine I'm a Polynesian Navigator in my own way, bringing myself safely through hostile and life threatening situations on a tiny home-made vessel using only the signs and portents from what I can perceive of the reality all around. When I wake up suddenly in the dark and from her earth-deep breathing know it's that 3am 4am time when it's all darkest and a flush crawls across my skin like someone opening a convection oven right behind me... I know what it means.

And sensing what's coming I gather my thoughts and the small stuffed pig that is my totem and my grounding and my safety and drop down down into my mind and slide sideways through the door that opens and

"Now what should we do until it's morning," asks the small pink stuffed pig as he hops from my hand to the hat-stand and I feel my shoulders drop as I look around at the books and know this is my place, my space, my safety.

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.

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.