The other day, Emily made me swear that I wouldn’t kill Tad.
I told her I couldn’t make that promise. Her response? “Of course you can. You’re the freaking author.”
Which put me in mind of the ABC series Once Upon a Time. I was like, “Remember how Henry couldn’t use his Author powers to write just any story? It had to be the true story or it would totally eff things up?”
She was grumpy. Yes, she remembered.
In a post from The Guardian, a survey of 181 writers finds that a majority of writers hear their characters’ voices in their heads and 61% believe their characters can act independently.
Does this mean we’re all crazy? Does it mean that I am, since I told Em I can’t possibly promise her I’m not going to kill off the boy she loves? What about the very fact that I’m talking to a fictional character?
During my mental health journey to become a healthier person, I embarked on a hunt to find and name and nurture my parts. In Internal Family Systems Therapy, the model holds that just as in a flesh-and-blood family wherein individuals act on their own interests and have separate needs, all the while seeking the ultimate good of the entire family, so too there are individual parts inside the mind that have their own desires and needs but that ultimately want good outcomes for the whole person.
My therapist calls these parts pixels. If you’ve seen the movie Inside Out, you might understand this concept a little better. (If you haven’t seen it, you should. It’s so good!! Both I and my partner cried, and he’s a grown-ass man lol.)
But just as in a real family, the family system in your head can get out of balance. Individuals can become polarized against one another. The warrior part might hate and belittle the scared child part. One can only imagine the havoc such internal animosity can wreak. What is needed is nurturance and ultimately alignment and integration for these disparate parts, not dissolution.
Is it a type of DID, you might ask? Dissociative Identity Disorder, not so long ago called Multiple Personality Disorder?
Perhaps so. Perhaps DID occurs when the parts become so polarized and misaligned that they neither work for the good of the whole nor even recognize that they are part of a whole. Certainly a symptom of PTSD (which I have in spades) is dissociation and the fragmentation of the self at the time of trauma…
And I do notice that Emily’s own journey looks a lot like someone who’s internal parts are at war. Is Rangers of the Rift, then, a sort of exploration of PTSD?
But I’m just a writer, not a psychologist.
What I know is that the stories I write reveal themselves to me in their own time. Nothing can be forced. It isn’t up to me to decide which characters will love or betray or succeed or die.
So…so I promise Emily this: “I will tell your story truly. And I’ll do everything I can to help you and the people you love survive.”
I feel a twinge of guilt. Have I lied to my fictional charge? Am I as bad as Garrett, keeping secrets, playing God with her life?
But then the real world—bills and dinner and client work, a torn wrist tendon, a friend dealing with a mental health crisis, Mother’s Day, new masks, an asthma attack—comes crashing down.
I’m doing my best, Emily.
And YOU—my readers—are helping make that story not just one that lives upstairs in my own head, but a reality.
So thank you. I really appreciate your help.
Episode 5 (Advanced Review Copy) is now available as a free download from BookSprout. Hit the link at the top of this page to get it until May 29, 2020.
Talk with you again soon.
Stay safe and sane and happy,
~River
P.S. I’m taking this free Yale course on The Science of Well-Being. It’s interesting. Check it out.