For a long time I thought that all the little characters in my head were story characters. I thought that I just had a good imagination. I would be a good writer someday.
It was true that I had a good imagination. I still do. But there was a problem with the stories. I couldn't write them. I would get stuck at a certain point, and it was more than just writer's block. I couldn't imagine the story going any further.
I was very young when I first started writing stories. I often used my dollhouse as a trial ground for the stories. I'd act them out with some of my millions (ok, not really millions) of dolls and then write out the story on paper. But many times I would sit and reenact the same scenes all day, day after day. Things never progressed.
Why did I do this? Why couldn't I move on? I never understood until now. I was too close to the scenarios. They mirrored my own life too much, and there was never any resolution to problem scenarios in my own life or flow from one scenario to the next. It's like trying to get to know a person just by looking at a bunch of still pictures. Twelve-year-old Whitney never learned to speak or communicate because whatever she held of my feelings were somehow forbidden to be communicated. Sixteen-year-old Amber never grew up because the part of my life that she represented was not connected to the next part of my life.
I am fairly convinced that a big part of this problem involves part-to-whole relationships. There are very few things that I understand in terms of the whole. In my reading, I have discovered time and time again that blind children understand things mainly in terms of relating to the parts rather than the whole. In pondering over this, I have realized that I am no exception to this. What makes a cat a cat? Most people can look at a cat and recognize that it is a cat immediately. What gives it away for me is the ears.
My understanding of myself apparently follows the same pattern. I have no concept of the whole me. In fact, in my mind it is not even possible for there to be a whole me. There is only who I am at this moment, and who I am at this moment may be very different from who I was half an hour ago for various reasons. I'm with different people, in a different place, doing an activity that requires different skills, etc. This does not bother me much. It is normal for me, and now that I know what it is and there are certain places where it is safe for me to process my thoughts this way, I am mostly content to accept that this is the way I am.
What does bother me is the fact that it is considered abnormal. For most of my life, I have been acutely aware of the fact that in some ways and circumstances, I am expected to conform to the norm. However, what that norm is is very confusing to me. I find that I have a very difficult time understanding what the norm actually is as opposed to what someone's opinion is. I tend to take sighted people's word for things because they are sighted and have knowledge of things which I do not. However, I've discovered that sighted people's opinions about what looks nice, what is socially appropriate, etc., varies greatly.
To further complicate this, those sighted people whose opinions I depend so heavily on have varying expectations about whether I can achieve certain things and the appropriateness of expecting me to conform to certain norms. A child builds the beginnings of self-esteem on the opinions of others. When those opinions often clash or when the child begins to venture out on her own, believing what she thought to be accurate perceptions of herself, and is met by very intense negative attitudes, holding onto the self- confidence which had been gained previously is very difficult. It hinders her ability to form her own mature and independent concept of self.
How does all of this relate to story and dissociation? Authors write about what they know. They use their imaginations to expand and modify situations from their own lives or which they have observed. That is how story is created. There isn't a reason in the world that I can't write a story with Amber as a character. In fact, I have done it. It is very therapeutic. But when I get stuck on scenes, it lets me know that what I am dealing with may be a memory or a difficult concept or issue, and I am finding that many of the characters I created for my stories are split off parts of myself.
For a long time, the people in my mind never changed. I believe that this was because my perceptions of myself did not change. When I began to experience changes in my understanding and acceptance of myself, I discovered that some of the characters moved on with their lives. I was able to craft scenarios for my stories which were not entirely biographical but which helped to give voice to what I had learned from that part of myself.