The Unseen Beast

I’m a believer in the dual mind: that I coexist with an unseen human being that functions as an independent, freely thinking entity, and through whom I am able to reason via intrapersonal dialogue. I admit this at the risk of sounding crazy, but there is evidence for it—at least for those who have had their corpus callosum severed.

My corpus callosum has not been severed, yet I do think that there is something “overdeveloped” about mine. My imaginary friend never likes to stay quiet. She has a mind of her own and is vicious in protecting her identity, no matter the costs it has to myself and the relationships I form with others. She is not convinced that she is the person I see when I look in the mirror because she knows she isn’t a part of a single, homogeneous nervous system. Does this make me transgender? No. Not really. Gender is just performative, and I don’t believe that her being loud warrants the need to perform her to others.

In lieu of an identity that can be found reflected in a mirror, she has it in her mind that she must find herself through the lens of another person. A friend, a partner, a wife. She wants to know what her true name is and is desperate to find someone that can see her face so that she may claim their name as her own. This has pretty powerful side-effects on my behavior whenever it happens. It triggers my obsessive-compulsive tendencies and suddenly I construct fantasies and call it love.

Of course, I have known and become familiar with this habit since I was a child, and have learned how to recognize when it happens enough to reign in her leash (which I hold tight out of fear for those aforementioned “side-effects”). Someone with autism might recognize this as “masking,” but to me, it’s just a consequence of an overdeveloped corpus callosum. Nothing more complicated than that.

I love my imaginary friend because she is me, even if she doesn’t like to admit it. I keep her hidden because she is also a monster. She is hot tempered, she is opinionated, fiercely independent, stubborn, and worst of all, she is extremely intelligent. And when someone comes along, recognizes her existence, and voluntarily says to her “you can use my name if you’d like,” she will break her leash and all hell would come loose.

However, over the years, she has learned from past experiences. And her worst trait of all is that she is cunning. This last time this occurred, she didn’t break her leash right away, as she had done in the past. She knows if she did that, I would know and put a stop to it. Instead, she developed a long, carefully orchestrated plan to do so when she believed the time was right.

The problem with having a loud, fierce, and independent unseen friend is that she is very picky about who she selects as someone worthy to bear her name. Very rare do I meet someone with the right amount of emotional and logical intelligence to not only recognize her face but who can also speak with her voice with fluency. She was very keen on this last volunteer and did everything in her power to ensure her name would eventually become tatooed onto our soul. She succeeded. And now, I need to perform an amputation so that I can return to sanity.