Someone Else is Me

Dear Me, Dear You,

I have arrived at the beginning of the end of something negative. Perhaps that’s an odd way of expressing positivity, but if there's one thing that the past few years have taught me, it is that the old, normal way of doing everything should no longer serve as the basis for future plans.

That is an edited extract from an old piece I wrote for a New Years 2020/21 challenge here on Vocal.

The challenge was all about looking ahead - New Year Resolution-style. I hardly need to say that most of my wish-list projection did not come to pass and I have concluded that asking the Universe to ‘manifest’ what you want or need is just magical thinking. The Universe, for its part, always answers, “I’m sorry, who are you?”

What an excellent question. For the last few years, I've often been somebody else.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls and everybody in between, let me introduce you to my alter-ego: Cake.

Cake is the pixel persona I wear to DJ in a virtual world. Cake the DJ is doing alright. Young, fresh and full of boundless energy and enthusiasm, Cake the DJ entertains respectable-sized groups of other pixel people a few times a week. Cake the DJ collects tips in game currency for live mixing and mashing tunes together in a sometimes seamless flow for two hours on end at a time. Cake the DJ has started to collect followers and fans in a virtual world.

She started as a character in a fiction project about alternate realities. Having created the character, I went one step further for research purposes and made Cake a pixel perfect being, fleshed out with personality, ambition and drive.

She is not is a 59 year old bearded man. That is: she is not me. But I am her. I’m not even very sure where I begin and she ends. In-world it’s me in a different skin and an opposite mode - of first-person hopefulness rather than third-person doom. Always a contradiction, she is the nub of party personality detached from one of the least social people I know, me. Not that I am some kind of interactional gold standard: I know almost nobody, so I am also one of the most gregarious people I know.

I think that she is clearly an attempt to outsource those bits of my personality that are extrovert in an environment that feels safe. Whenever I mix and mingle in real life, I come away from the event ashamed, as if I wasn’t my proper self. It is almost as if I wasn’t being social, but was just performing as ‘Ian the relaxed guy’. I really don’t like ‘Ian the relaxed guy’; I see him from a third-person perspective - not an out of body experience, but an inner one; dark, visceral, blood and guts, part spleen, part bone, part artery, part marrow.

The self critique is relentless.

Those are the two sides of me, one half farmed out to a digital realm where it performs its limited duties to entertain and feel the comfort of success unconditionally. Certain that stripped back to a technical, creative skill, it can perform well, garner praise and be relatively at ease with it all.

The other part - ‘corporeal me’ - is what should be all of me and will, I hope, begin to reassemble soon. It only needs more confidence, more self-esteem in meatspace, to view the world not from a cleaved personality but as a single identity.

As writers, we take these positions and perspectives from spaces other than our own and, if we are very lucky, the characters start to write themselves. It’s a risk that we sometimes shave off parts of our own psyche and let it run free in fictional worlds. Anna Sewell wrote Black Beauty in the first person or, rather, first equine. Was anyone bothered that Anna was pretending to be a horse? Of course not. But Anna, as far as anyone knows, didn’t regard social settings without fresh hay and a sugar lump as threatening to her self-esteem.

Identity often only becomes a subject of conversation when it is separated from the self. For my part it is my ability to maintain a fiction that seems more truthful to that which I sometimes refer to as my daemon or spirit animal. In terms of outlook and ‘can-do’ attitude, Cake is the embodiment of former and what I hope will become future me. Meanwhile, my internal visceral self wants absolutely no pretence, no drama, no embellishment or performance. The one who writes this, however, is sufficiently self-aware to see how these polarised extremes are tearing me apart.