For once I have something of depth to write here.
Well, recently I was catching up with a loose friend I have online. I was reading her blog which I forgot to check for updates, reading the very things which taught me who she is to start with, and starting an email correspondence. The friend in which I speak is infamously known as SephirothSlave, who has an extensive article on Encyclopedia Dramatica because she has claimed for almost ten years to have a relationship with an arch angel in the astral planes whose name and likeness is Sephiroth from FFVII and Advent Children.
You are free to discover as much or as little about her, but I started remembering that it was within the exact same two weeks of August 2007 in which I started writing and developing HT as a restarted project that I stumbled upon her persona and pulled an all-nighter (which I never do) just finding out every single piece of information I possibly could. Then, I became email penpals with her. I told her upfront that I didn't/couldn't buy her beliefs but that I was willing to listen and give her respect. I had read so many hate-messages that were outrageously aggressive that I wanted to tell her she didn't deserve it.
Even though I told her I was a skeptic, I never really disclosed the fact that I mainly was in contact with her to draw out the complex web of lies with which she had deluded her existence. I found it fascinating. I found her inspirational to me as an author and was trying to find ways to allude to her through the strange, manipulated behavior that Lily would display as the story progressed.
I don't think I ever met that aim very clearly, and that's okay, but something different dawned on me this morning that is hella coincidental. See, I was thinking about how a girl could stand by a lie (to herself as well as to others) for so long, to have a blog where she shares her metaphysical and paranormal studies but also weaves in what she learns with the story she calls her "real life", a life where Sephiroth, her spirit guide, can contact her through divination at any given time, or speak to her in her head from "Heaven". Despite the entries which express this relationship as purely positive, life-changing, and life saving, she writes about having breakdowns, too. She says she sometimes can't find the point in living her physical life and prefers the comfort and substitute "family" she's found in her spirit guides on the other side. In her heart, I don't know if she even can admit to herself that these things aren't happening, but I don't think it makes her crazy. I think she's an extremely depressed and alienated person who believes she needs to embellish her life in order to get through it. I don't know when she'll get better. I don't know what it takes for someone like that to get better. But until they do, they need fantasy, and they need it in doses that damage them, but they can't stop.
It all reminded me of Erik. When she started her journaling about journeying to the astral plane, she was saying things like that she would rather be comatose than live her life. They were scary precursors to depression, as far as I could understand, precursors that I lament displaying this past year in school when I was feeling too much pressure and not enough happiness and love. She was done with everything. I guess she had tried to commit suicide several times. My sense is that, rather than an arch angel saving her from death, she was saving herself the only way she knew how - by pretending there was a mission for her to find the fictional person she felt she had fallen in love with: a mission that she could accomplish. In essence, she rebore herself into a life where her greatest fantasy (to contact a fictional character, to be with them) was true, if only because she would never, ever admit that it wasn't.
By doing so, she would survive and become occupied by the new position she took, one that would victimize her but make her special. Claiming she was a 16-year-old visiting the astral planes to be with her soul mate, an arch angel, obviously gave her some problems. Her friends were worried about her. Her family didn't recognize or understand her anymore. To this day, she is relatively estranged from them and has been almost thrown out at a family gathering because she had become too freaky a guest for her sensitive, Catholic relatives. She has lived by herself for a very long time, struggling to make ends meet, and admits that she doesn't have many friends and spends her free time alone. But she says she's not alone, and she wants what she has. She stands by the web of lies for almost ten years, because it's the only way to justify that she's lost everything. She's chosen the lies to survive, even if she loses everything else. She doesn't do it because she's a lunatic - she does it because she's pathetically at a loss, depressed, and doesn't know the meaning of her life.
And it all reminded me of what Erik has done, and why he can't lose Lily. And furthermore, why by the end of the story he will still need that web of lies, and he won't be done with her. Makes me quite sad, though, for both of them, but her especially, because she's real. She's real life and actually chooses to keep a correspondence with me.
Edit: I stand corrected on some of these points. I'll write more another time.
Well, recently I was catching up with a loose friend I have online. I was reading her blog which I forgot to check for updates, reading the very things which taught me who she is to start with, and starting an email correspondence. The friend in which I speak is infamously known as SephirothSlave, who has an extensive article on Encyclopedia Dramatica because she has claimed for almost ten years to have a relationship with an arch angel in the astral planes whose name and likeness is Sephiroth from FFVII and Advent Children.
You are free to discover as much or as little about her, but I started remembering that it was within the exact same two weeks of August 2007 in which I started writing and developing HT as a restarted project that I stumbled upon her persona and pulled an all-nighter (which I never do) just finding out every single piece of information I possibly could. Then, I became email penpals with her. I told her upfront that I didn't/couldn't buy her beliefs but that I was willing to listen and give her respect. I had read so many hate-messages that were outrageously aggressive that I wanted to tell her she didn't deserve it.
Even though I told her I was a skeptic, I never really disclosed the fact that I mainly was in contact with her to draw out the complex web of lies with which she had deluded her existence. I found it fascinating. I found her inspirational to me as an author and was trying to find ways to allude to her through the strange, manipulated behavior that Lily would display as the story progressed.
I don't think I ever met that aim very clearly, and that's okay, but something different dawned on me this morning that is hella coincidental. See, I was thinking about how a girl could stand by a lie (to herself as well as to others) for so long, to have a blog where she shares her metaphysical and paranormal studies but also weaves in what she learns with the story she calls her "real life", a life where Sephiroth, her spirit guide, can contact her through divination at any given time, or speak to her in her head from "Heaven". Despite the entries which express this relationship as purely positive, life-changing, and life saving, she writes about having breakdowns, too. She says she sometimes can't find the point in living her physical life and prefers the comfort and substitute "family" she's found in her spirit guides on the other side. In her heart, I don't know if she even can admit to herself that these things aren't happening, but I don't think it makes her crazy. I think she's an extremely depressed and alienated person who believes she needs to embellish her life in order to get through it. I don't know when she'll get better. I don't know what it takes for someone like that to get better. But until they do, they need fantasy, and they need it in doses that damage them, but they can't stop.
It all reminded me of Erik. When she started her journaling about journeying to the astral plane, she was saying things like that she would rather be comatose than live her life. They were scary precursors to depression, as far as I could understand, precursors that I lament displaying this past year in school when I was feeling too much pressure and not enough happiness and love. She was done with everything. I guess she had tried to commit suicide several times. My sense is that, rather than an arch angel saving her from death, she was saving herself the only way she knew how - by pretending there was a mission for her to find the fictional person she felt she had fallen in love with: a mission that she could accomplish. In essence, she rebore herself into a life where her greatest fantasy (to contact a fictional character, to be with them) was true, if only because she would never, ever admit that it wasn't.
By doing so, she would survive and become occupied by the new position she took, one that would victimize her but make her special. Claiming she was a 16-year-old visiting the astral planes to be with her soul mate, an arch angel, obviously gave her some problems. Her friends were worried about her. Her family didn't recognize or understand her anymore. To this day, she is relatively estranged from them and has been almost thrown out at a family gathering because she had become too freaky a guest for her sensitive, Catholic relatives. She has lived by herself for a very long time, struggling to make ends meet, and admits that she doesn't have many friends and spends her free time alone. But she says she's not alone, and she wants what she has. She stands by the web of lies for almost ten years, because it's the only way to justify that she's lost everything. She's chosen the lies to survive, even if she loses everything else. She doesn't do it because she's a lunatic - she does it because she's pathetically at a loss, depressed, and doesn't know the meaning of her life.
And it all reminded me of what Erik has done, and why he can't lose Lily. And furthermore, why by the end of the story he will still need that web of lies, and he won't be done with her. Makes me quite sad, though, for both of them, but her especially, because she's real. She's real life and actually chooses to keep a correspondence with me.
Edit: I stand corrected on some of these points. I'll write more another time.
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