Fiction

what’s fiction? lemme think of some stuff. okay, so it’s something that isn’t real, right? like, a book is either ‘fiction’, or ‘nonfiction’. a documentary is like, a nonfiction movie. so, fiction is like, a classification? is it a thing.

lemme reframe. what does making fiction look like? i bet you’re like “oh, this is an easy one, daisy! fiction is like, writing a book, right? or a fanfiction? it has fiction in the name!” okaaay! but that’s like, an object right. what’s fiction? on its own? what’s the thing, before you turn it into a book, or a fanfiction? is it just thoughts?

what if fictions is just thoughts

this can’t work, right? what if? is my grocery shopping a fiction? is everything fiction? is everything fake???

no no no chill.

let’s separate the ideas of “fiction” and “fake”. fake is a thing that isn’t real – it’s not tangible, you can’t eat it. fiction is a creation! it’s a construct – maybe a social construct, even! social constructs famously are real, in that they cause things to happen, and make people do things, and those effects are real. money is real because we have a social construct around giving people green papers, and the green papers become value.

a social construct is powerful, right? so– fiction is powerful. fiction has effects, it can do things, it can work as an agent though the collective mind of all of its believers. but… fiction? a book can’t–. no it can. heard of the bible? heard of ‘mein kampf’? fiction is powerful.

so this is a framing to suggest something: identity is fiction. “wait, what? identity?” yes. you are fiction. you, the human, the brain, the skin, the blood, are real of course. your brain is real, your second-to-second lived experience is real, you are fictional.

your identity is a framing device for your lived experience. it explains the before, and the after. “i’m daisy!” i might say. but what does that mean? i created “Daisy”, and i chose to self-prescribe it. i live as daisy as a framing device: i exist, i do things, i know what i want to do in the future. i reframe my memories, which my brain gives me access to, and think about how that would fit something i would do. i truly believe it is something that i have done, and then it becomes true. fiction is a world where believing is truth, where belief causes truth, and only believing.

let’s use this new tool to think about some things. you could say that “ego death” is when you stop believing in a fiction of yourself, and “ego rebirth” is picking up the pen and writing new fiction.

plurality. let’s think of a really basic idea of plurality, that won’t fit everyone’s lived experience, and is not really even super accurate. we could call this the traumagenic fiction of plurality. it’s perhaps a useful fiction for this understanding.

1. you are one person
2. event
3. you are multiple person

let’s think about 1. you are one person. what’s this mean? you believe in one sense of self. you have one fiction of self. one identity. 2. event. this is the “trauma”. what does a trauma do, in this case? maybe it pokes holes in this fiction, it makes you lose belief in self. perhaps this is your brain doing this, as a coping mechanism. it doesn’t matter. 3. you are multiple person. so, you start believing in a new fiction: a fiction of multiple self. multiple identites. why?

maybe this event caused something within you to reject your sense of self. out of disgust, maybe? or maybe: your framing device does not work anymore. something causes you to look at your past fiction, and not believe in it. maybe you’re torn on it, perhaps? have multiple different opposing beliefs, and the only way to reconcile this is to make multiple identities about it.

of course, this doesn’t imply that being plural is worse. perhaps, some people just are born with multiple identites. we can speculate on why: maybe singlet normativity is a powerful and driving fiction, that causes people to build a fiction that fits a single identity. maybe our brains are just more geared towards single identity (it’s certainly less work (is it? or is this societal, therefore just more fiction?))

enough speculation, i’m bored.

i guess what i’m getting at is: plurality is a fiction with a driving force. an unseen agent. there’s something driving a system to continue plurality. that’s because it’s a useful fiction: it performs something. it helps a brain do… something. maybe we can never know what this is. but does that invalidate plurality? no. because singlet identity is also fiction. it’s all fiction. keep making fiction.