Identity Crisis
Wednesday, November 20th, 2002 12:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tamaranthIdentity Crisis
I'm losing myself.
To be more accurate, other people are losing me. My father thinks there is another sister. (There isn't: there's just my half-sister and myself). On Saturday when I visited, he volunteered "She's gone to some archaeological thing, hasn't she?"
"Who?" asked my sister.
"Your sister."
"No," I said, "I'm right here."
"Not you!" he said, exasperated. "The other one."
Ah. This would be the one who he says visits him every few days (for which I'm very grateful, since I only make it down to Plymouth every month or so now - it's a long, expensive trip). Interesting that he associates that me with archaeology. When I was eight years old I was determined to be an archaeologist. Now I'm just a paid-up member of the British Archaeological Society.
"She's always been a bit like that, hasn't she?" he added. "Uncivilised."
I think he meant that other-sister should've been there to see me. I think
But it's not him in there. He was very ill last month - to the extent that my sister (the real one) was on the point of ringing me to tell me the end was near - and while he's made a good recovery, he lost a great deal of weight. This makes the physical symptoms of the Parkinson's disease - muscle spasms and compulsive gesturing - more macabre, more puppet-like. This is the husk of a man, imperfectly animated, wiring frayed so that dream and reality are inextricably interwoven. He's convinced that my mother (dead since 1986) is in the same nursing home, though "we don't speak often." One peculiar and often entertaining symptom of Parkinson's is a tendency to hallucinate - and, very specifically, to hallucinate small mammals. My father's cats are dead: but not to him.
On a lighter note (like that's hard), London Electricity wrote to me with a final bill. "You rang and told us you were moving out," they explained, when I enquired as to what the hell was going on. "I did not," I said, "because I'm not. You're wrong." "But we have a record of your calling to tell us ..."
We had a brief philosophical discussion of purpose, intention and whose bloody flat (and LEB account) it was anyway. Of course they know whose details they have as the next tenant, but they can't tell me ... Anyway, I am now another person, since there can be only one LEB account per individual. And the original me is moving out. I wonder where she's going?
Am not a real person. Or possibly am more than one real person. Universes colliding, claiming it was the other universe's fault for not signalling, etc. See, I downloaded this 'life' thing, but it doesn't seem to be compatible with what I already have running ...
I'm losing myself.
To be more accurate, other people are losing me. My father thinks there is another sister. (There isn't: there's just my half-sister and myself). On Saturday when I visited, he volunteered "She's gone to some archaeological thing, hasn't she?"
"Who?" asked my sister.
"Your sister."
"No," I said, "I'm right here."
"Not you!" he said, exasperated. "The other one."
Ah. This would be the one who he says visits him every few days (for which I'm very grateful, since I only make it down to Plymouth every month or so now - it's a long, expensive trip). Interesting that he associates that me with archaeology. When I was eight years old I was determined to be an archaeologist. Now I'm just a paid-up member of the British Archaeological Society.
"She's always been a bit like that, hasn't she?" he added. "Uncivilised."
I think he meant that other-sister should've been there to see me. I think
But it's not him in there. He was very ill last month - to the extent that my sister (the real one) was on the point of ringing me to tell me the end was near - and while he's made a good recovery, he lost a great deal of weight. This makes the physical symptoms of the Parkinson's disease - muscle spasms and compulsive gesturing - more macabre, more puppet-like. This is the husk of a man, imperfectly animated, wiring frayed so that dream and reality are inextricably interwoven. He's convinced that my mother (dead since 1986) is in the same nursing home, though "we don't speak often." One peculiar and often entertaining symptom of Parkinson's is a tendency to hallucinate - and, very specifically, to hallucinate small mammals. My father's cats are dead: but not to him.
On a lighter note (like that's hard), London Electricity wrote to me with a final bill. "You rang and told us you were moving out," they explained, when I enquired as to what the hell was going on. "I did not," I said, "because I'm not. You're wrong." "But we have a record of your calling to tell us ..."
We had a brief philosophical discussion of purpose, intention and whose bloody flat (and LEB account) it was anyway. Of course they know whose details they have as the next tenant, but they can't tell me ... Anyway, I am now another person, since there can be only one LEB account per individual. And the original me is moving out. I wonder where she's going?
Am not a real person. Or possibly am more than one real person. Universes colliding, claiming it was the other universe's fault for not signalling, etc. See, I downloaded this 'life' thing, but it doesn't seem to be compatible with what I already have running ...
