Since I’m so completely exhausted, I will share something weird about myself. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been inventing this story that I keep retelling to myself and that has accompanied me throughout my life.
Over the 3 decades that I’ve been composing it, the story has grown and become very convoluted. There is the protagonist (a very autistic, mostly non-verbal version of me who is still – and always – a literary critic) and a cast of supporting characters. There have been many twists and turns of the plot. Things that were first mentioned in the story, say, a quarter of a century ago, develop in strange new directions. Minor characters rise to prominence as their hidden relationship to the main plot line becomes revealed.
The story takes place in an invented world which I see in a very detailed way in my mind. The imaginary world has a map and everything. The characters have lived in a number of different houses over the years. I can see every single room in each of the houses in my mind, every piece of furniture inside them, every ornament on the walls.
As an actual literary critic, I can tell you that the story doesn’t have an ounce of artistic value. It’s like a Latin American soap opera. Or even worse, a really bad romance / fantasy novel. It has a huge psychoanalytic value, though. Whenever something traumatic happens to me in real life, I transfer it to the story – within the story’s magical terminology – and replay the situation there until it becomes non-threatening.
I don’t think I’ve gone to sleep even once in the last 30 years without telling to myself a new portion of the story or replaying some of the best parts from the past.
There is no particular point to this post. I just wanted to share.
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