There is a conundrum faced by anyone whose internal life does not match up with their external reality, and I've concocted this handy graphic to illustrate it. It's a scale between Real and Not Real, but the arrows between the bits are slightly misleading, as the relationship in every case is bidirectional.
Also, it's worth pointing out my belief that stock photography exists in its own special universe. It only starts to make sense when viewed in terms of speculative fiction and world-building. Moving on.
There is obviously some tension between each of the different stages, and the tension increases as the disparities increase. The easiest way to achieve contentment then, is to have everything aligned more or less with the neighbouring stages, or at the very least aligned within a threshold that is acknowledged and accepted as within parameters.
This line of thought is a slippery-slope towards self-indulgent intellectual snobbery-wallowing sympathy-onanism, so I won't dwell too much on it. If you don't know of Wobbly Headed Bob, now's the time:
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| He didn't ask to be, but he is... bigger if you click on him... |
Suffice to say, I, like many people, use fantasy as a way of escaping from reality and finding solace in a world that I've created to better suit what I know of my internal life. Replacing reality with a fresh dreamworld that matches the ebbs and flows of my inner self is the only way I've found to effectively reduce the distance across the blue dotted line in the diagram. If I had any guts, and if I had less to lose, I might try changing my external reality to bring it closer to my fantasies of submission, but it's like I say, I have no guts and I have a great deal to lose.
But what is that? That bit that says '???'. Is that the real me, or is it simply the part of me that I need to keep hidden in order to reduce the tension between my external reality and societal norms?
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| Now I'm really confused... |
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