When we write as somebody else, in another person’s style, does that qualify us as multiple personality disorder candidates or does it just shine a light on the less prominent parts of our personality?
I like to think it’s the latter but then again I see faces in the patterns of my wooden doors. In some theories that certainly makes me borderline…
It was a fear of mine from when I was a little girl, not a boy. The thought that my mind could split in such a way without me even realizing it. It was scary as hell. Other girls feared bad hair days, loosing their boyfriends, or that the world would discover who their secret crushes were. I feared insanity in all its forms.
Maybe it’s the writer in me. The ability to just reach out and find other minds, discover their thoughts and shape them it into a story that instills a sense of purpose into a life, proof that it is not all just randomly put together, without rhyme or reason.
Writing as somebody else can be liberating at times, releasing parts of us that feel shame, dread or just doubt, allowing the story to take its course, whatever it may be.
But in the end, when I read myself under a different name, the story itself stills feels like any one of my stories. Alien to me, something that’s not full of choices I would have made, a thing filled with someone else’s reasoning. Maybe that makes me a tad crazy, to read something that my own hands have written as if ti were completely new to me, but I think that is what makes us human. The ability go outside ourselves and to understand a thing another being has done and to know their reasons for behaving so differently than we would have.
