a history.
Author: Gwen
When I wrote up my thoughts on Nicole Kornher-Stace’s mulberry down!! story, I said that it helped me connect with something I’d lost, and that I hoped to unbury what else I might have left behind. I think I have a better idea now of what “what else” might be. It’s quite a bit more than I had suspected, yet it also explains the sheer strength of the resonance I felt to that story.
My writing tends to accumulate parentheses, commas, and semicolons; in this piece I make no apologies for it, as it is reflective of my thought processes, which is really what this story is about.
I’m not sure precisely where this story starts, but my earliest memory has been established to be at just shy of two years of age. I was talking very early.
From the beginning, I was a very imaginative child. Countless hours spent daydreaming, tromping through bushes and flower beds in the real world alongside and intermingled with adventures taking place entirely in realms constructed of fantasy. At night, vivid dreams with an expansive persistent dream landscape full of wonder, mystery, adventure, and danger (a landscape which now persists well into adulthood, changing over time as I change, and as different stories need to be told). Unfortunately, the nightmares were correspondingly vivid and terrifying, which is how I inadvertently started picking up the basics of lucid dreaming as a four year old.
The neighbors had few children, and the few similarly aged peers we happened to encounter in those early years tended to at best avoid and at worst harass the kid who looked like a boy but who did not quite act like one (yes, this is a trans story, but it is not a story about being trans). I was lonely, and wanted a friend or a sibling. I eventually received one, when I was just shy of four. However, they had severe medical needs from birth requiring frequent hospitalization, and were furthermore nonverbal for several years thereafter. It was no fault of their own and I in no way blame them, but the effect of this was that rather than gaining a playmate, I instead lost most of the time and attention of my caretakers (though my parents were very loving in the times they were there for me).
As one might expect, and is understood as common and “normal” among young children, I soon developed an imaginary friend with whom to share my adventures and daydreams. I projected him onto my own reflection. At that time, though I understood it was me on a literal level, I did not particularly identify with my own reflection, yet it was readily available almost everywhere, in bathroom mirrors and spoons and puddles and so on. So, it was perhaps a bit odd but in context unsurprising that my reflection became my imaginary friend, and my playmate and companion for daily activities.
I talked to him constantly, and spent hours upon hours every day visualizing him with me with as much mental acuity as a young child can muster. He was often blurrier than I wanted in my mind’s eye, but fortunately my reflection was always available as a reference to refine the image further. We had conversations about life and played make-believe.
Like many children, I often had a particular idea about how make-believe sessions were supposed to go. Probably not fully thought out in advance, but with an intuition and strongly held belief for what the proper narrative and rules of the game should be at the time. Often my friend would play out these games as I wanted, though sometimes I would get frustrated when my own ability to visualize motion and events didn’t measure up to what I wanted to see. And as most children do, I often vented my frustrations on whoever was closest, which was of course my imaginary friend.
As time went on, my friend often became less cooperative. He wouldn’t do what I asked; he’d do things deliberately to annoy me, he’d do things I didn’t expect. Arguing with him became common, and I started reflexively blaming him for daily problems and difficulties. I faulted him if I suddenly lost my balance or felt stomach pain. My parents recall me regularly spending hours screaming at him in the bathroom. They became concerned.
They eventually impressed upon me the importance of developing real friends and growing out of imaginary ones. I was school aged then, and though it took until the second grade for them to find me a school where I was able to make some friends rather than just hiding or being bullied, I did in fact make a small circle of friends who existed corporeally. I spent the school days and occasional playdates playing make believe them (we genuinely believed we could do magic together for a few years there, and it wasn’t until around age eleven that I had identified that my memories of flying were probably all just very vivid dreams), and also by then I had started reading fantasy novels with an insatiable appetite, finishing them nearly as quickly as my parents could get them for me (I was frequently told that books were expensive that that money does not grow on trees at this time, but they also believed reading was healthy for a developing mind, and we found plenty of material at the library when I was not clamoring for the latest book in a specific series).
I still daydreamed in all the in-between moments; my imaginary friend would run along the road beside us as I looked out the car window, we’d talk as I walked down a sidewalk, and of course despite an increasing number of distractions I still had plenty of time to myself playing make-believe. I did start to get tired of my friend’s rebellions or attempts to provoke me, but instead of arguing I learned to simply stop that imaginative session and direct my mind elsewhere. I added more actors to my fantasies, such as small animals or magical creatures who I did not often talk to. And eventually my friend faded as I no longer thought about him.
As a young teen at the advent of puberty, I turned to creative writing to explore my sexuality and gender. Which is a pretty way of saying that I wrote a lot of really atrocious smut that I kept hidden with great paranoia. I did this for a few years, often with recurring characters. Meanwhile my mental state was deteriorating the further I got into puberty (as is of course often the case for closeted trans folks). This continued until one of them abruptly broke the fourth wall to inform me that she wasn’t comfortable with the scene she was being written into. A conversation which was quickly joined by other characters who, while somewhat annoyed initially, were also sympathetic, and suddenly I seemed to be having an unplanned intervention where my own characters asked me if I was okay and were working together to address my obvious mental health problems.
This was jarring, and also made me feel exceptionally guilty (an emotion that dominated the severe depression I had in my mid teens); I felt gross for using my characters for my own sexual fantasies. I stopped writing those stories almost completely, and I especially avoided writing stories with recurring characters, out of that guilt.
I abandoned much of my internal experience for the next decade, as a mode of survival. I told myself this was part of growing up, but it did a lot of harm — for one thing, I stayed in the closet until my late 20s. But that’s not the only thing that was lost. When I previously wrote on mulberry down!!, I said I didn’t have the experience of having a persistent dream personality who I’d lost contact with. Yet I found it powerfully compelling anyway, for reasons I didn’t understand at the time, but you probably do if you’ve been reading between the lines.
If you are at all familiar with the subject of tulpamancy, you probably have a guess of what this story was about, and you’re probably right. If you aren’t familiar with it, and the experiences I have listed have thus far resonated with you, you may want to look it up.
There’s a common theme in Alix Harrow’s stories which I find deeply appealing: What is lost, can be found again.
We’ve found it to be true.
Note: Please do not take this to be a comprehensive record of our experience with plurality. It is instead an abridged description focusing on a couple narrow aspects of it which we found interesting to describe. It entirely omits, as one example, our experience with traumagenic median facets.