Other
people – those who don't know me very well or say they are trying
to, they'd like to get to know me – will distort me. Create their
own versions of me, to suit their needs or what they want me to be.
Where
memory fails, they rely on their notes or imagination. And dream up a
fictional persona, with which I'm meant to agree: Yes, that's me.
It
has my name, it has my features. The same eye and hair colour, the
same date of birth. The likeness can't be disputed. The thoughts, the
statements they've attributed to this person can.
I
do not know her; I have never known her. Never, not as she's mirrored
back to me.
The
mirror held up is a circus mirror. The looker, looking at me through
it, has a distorted eye.
The
mirror is cracked from side to side: a crooked line across, a crooked
line from the top to the bottom.
The
looker has a story and I've been fitted to it, in it. Me to it, not
it to me. Because had it been it to me I wouldn't fit. The story
would have had to be changed. But as the story offers no alternative
beginnings, middles and endings, I have to be changed.
You
can't do to a real person what you can in a story. It's unethical.
Especially if that story is based on life and the living of it.
Especially if it becomes so contorted the person no longer recognises
their own image when they look in a mirror. If what they see instead
is nothing. As no version of them exists. There's a blankness; they
have been wiped out. Cancelled. Deleted.
Their
Truth obliterated.
The
truth given to the fictional persona a lie, that they couldn't, they
wouldn't live. Yet nobody would believe otherwise.
Their
mind, their knowingness of self taken from them, almost destroyed but
not quite. Although they feel powerless in the face of it. The mind,
the knowingness the last to go.
Already
the slippage has begun....
For
they cannot talk of themselves as 'me' or 'I' any longer. They are
'it'. A thing with a mind and body that's not their own. If they do
use 'I' or 'me' it's because they imagine someone else is saying it.
There is a narrator: someone who speaks of them through them.
Me
is now She. Behavioural traits belong to Her. The place the me
inhabited grows smaller, the size of a point of a needle. She fills
the heart.
She
is now the Captain of the ship. Me is a lowly member of the crew. The
parrot that sits on her shoulder and nibbles at her ear, and doesn't
try to escape because there's nowhere to go. Me may not be in charge
but this is Home.
The
ship is nothing like it used to be, is nothing like it used to look.
A sentence has been handed down and it's for life. The fictionalised
truth on record now, and referred to regularly. Brought up in
discussions or the mind's filing cabinet opened up and checked
against. Everybody does it, everybody that must be engaged with: from
friends and family to civil servants. That is their Truth. That Truth
was authorised, weighed and judged to be right, therefore it must be
right.
Me
lost. It was too hard to fight Truth versus Truth. Me resigned the
self to that Fate. The fate mapped out: the path to a 'normal' self.
To a self that was acceptable. That didn't know anything. That had no
enthusiastic interest in anything. To enthuse was wrong. To have
likes and dislikes was wrong also. To be invested in anything was too
irregular. To know Self was too unusual. Self had to be shut up,
locked away, hidden from view. Or be so tortured with mind games and
by questioning tones that Self agreed to the coup: She was the only
hope, She was for the best. Anything to be left alone.
Else
the old Self would be banished. Vanquished. Laid on a pyre in their
old ship, set aflame and pushed out to sea. Given the funeral of a
Viking: go down in flames.
Me
didn't trust that She would furnish that honourable death; all the
world is a prison now.
Picture credit: The Funeral of a Viking, 1893, Frank Dicksee (source: WikiArt).
This post was written in 2019.
