I achieved self-love by accepting it from invisible people.
As a writer, I view fictional characters as so much more than words on a page or pixels on a screen. They are more than paragraphs of description and lines of dialogue in books, and more than actors wearing costumes in film and television. To me, characters are real people.
They are voices that reach across the multiverse so that they can be heard here.
I was a shy child, constantly jumping from dreamscape-to-dreamscape. Reality was not easy to stay grounded in, because I wished to live inside a web of paracosms, befriending characters of my creation. Sometimes, I’d allow characters beyond my imagination entry, opening the gates for fictional folks from every beloved book, film, and television show.
I was happily lost. I let the world be a hazy blur, and attuned my vision to see through the veil between realities. When my body was physically present, my mind was miles away.
Sadly, children who prefer fictional friends to real ones don’t typically perform well in the social department. More often than not, I felt like an alien amongst my classmates. So few understood my warped concept of reality, and even fewer could connect with the invisible realms. I spent a great deal of time on my own. I had a handful of friends, and would occasionally enjoy visits with family, but on most days, it was just me and my portals across the cosmos.
This served me well in childhood, as it kept me blind to the isolated feeling I experienced alongside many of my fellow humans. Adolescence was an entirely different story. At the start of my teenage years, I was to start over in a suburban school district where most of the students had known each other since kindergarten. Prior to this, I lived in a city. One of the biggest advantages to growing up in an urban environment is the constant influx of new people. At any point, I felt I could reinvent myself. I had the freedom to grow and change with the waves of incoming students, all of them eager to forge fresh bonds. Even though I preferred my imagination, the invitation to step out of it was offered at the start of every academic year.
In the suburbs, this was not the case. I was one new girl amidst a sea of kids who had been raised together. Their friendships had been developed over years of community gatherings and shared classes. To make matters more challenging, I was just coming to terms with the realities of neurodiversity in a neurotypical world, and introversion in a place built for extroverts. In the face of these troubles, exploration became escapism.
I mingled with fictional characters because I loved them, but also because they were all I had. For quite some time, I could only garner a sense of belonging from a family of franchises. Despite how isolating it sounds, this coping mechanism kept me blissfully unaware of how lonely I’d become in the physical world. The mind is a powerful thing. In fact, it is the filter through which we experience every facet of human existence. The bonds I had with these fictional beings felt anything but fictional. They were filtered through my brain like long-distance friendships, complete with complexity, drama, love, anger and so much more.
I may have been lonely, but I was far from alone.
Fictional characters also have a knack for making introductions. Serving as natural ice-breakers, they bridge the gaps between their friends in the physical world. They assisted me in finding people on this plane with shared interests, and that is how some of the most meaningful (and visible) relationships I have came to form. Though I was lost in a sea of cliques and pre-established synergy throughout high school, my affinity for different fictional realms led me straight into the lives of likeminded, open-hearted cosmic adventurers. It felt as though they’d manipulated the currents with incorporeal hands and caused purposeful collisions.
Most, if not all, of my friends on Earth were introduced to me by friends from other worlds.
However, the third — and perhaps the most important — thing my fictional relationships have ever done for me has very little to do with connection and companionship. This act of incorporeal love came at a time in my life when I was at the height of a mental health crisis. My self worth had dwindled to an all time low, and I became a shadowy husk of my happier, healthier former self. The years in which I could still see sunshine and silver linings felt like memories from a past incarnation. Photographs taken of me in middle school, high school, and college felt like ancient stills in a dusty textbook.
I’d lost sight of my value in this world, and with it, the will to exist.
My fictional friends watched from the sidelines, helpless to intervene as I ceased engaging with them. I couldn’t watch their films, read their novels, or even annotate my own multiversal expeditions. I felt numb and undeserving. Craving only darkness and silence, I slipped into a Dark Night of the Soul that lasted far too long.
Then came the voices.
They weren’t the musings of an insecure, self-destructive mind, nor were they twisted whispers intent on inspiring a new cycle of corrosion. These were kind words laced with love I never thought I’d allow to manifest in my subconscious again. It was like emotional inception. I’d never have believed my own voice. I’d have sensed it was being dishonest, repeating things like:
“You Are Worthy.”
“You Are Beautiful.”
“You Are Enough.”
However, in my desperate state, I accepted this praise from the characters who’d been walking alongside me since I was a child. As I said, it worked a bit like inception. Despite manifesting in the deep, masculine tones from heartthrobs of my adolescence, these thoughts were mine. When they called me beautiful, I called myself beautiful. When they dubbed me worthy, I dubbed myself worthy.
When they told me I had every reason to keep fighting for a brighter future, I told myself I wanted to see it.
The shy, quiet folks with their noses jammed in books are often criticized for being distant and detached. The enthusiastic fandom-lovers who wear their happiest smiles while decked out in cosplay are ridiculed for their resistance against reality. Even writers find themselves subject to questions about why they enjoy the creation of new worlds and the curation of fictional friendships so much. I wish more understood how sacred these practices can be.
They permit exploration through escapism, internal connection, external community, and self love in a clever disguise. They are a limitless supply of hope, healing, and home. Without characters, those who originated in my mind and those introduced to me by other creators, I’m not certain I would’ve clawed my way up through the darkness.
To say I am grateful would be a tremendous understatement.
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