A lot of little kids have imaginary friends – constructed personalities they interact with and likely (I presume) reflect the kids’ desires, dreams, fears, and anxieties. I’m sure many highly qualified scholars have written at great length about this phenomenon, enough to fill a moderately sized library, so I’m not expanding on that.
I’ve never had imaginary friends – at least not within the above concept. If you were to ask my family, however, they might say differently. You see, there was a time when I pretended to have an imaginary friend. I affected much as a child. I saw what the expectations were for a child, and I fit my own thoughts and behaviors into that paradigm. It’s interesting to look back upon 3-, 4-, 5-year-old me and reflect on how much of what I did and said aloud to others was shaped by what I understood others expected of me. I’m rather impressed with my perceptive and analytical capability at such a young age.
Let’s use my imaginary friend as an example. I called him “Zelda 2.” Yes, that’s his name, and for any Legend of Zelda fans, yes it comes from the game Zelda 2: The Adventures of Link. And yes, he was Link. I was 3, maybe 4, cut me some slack.
The thing is, Zelda 2 wasn’t someone I talked to, not at first. Zelda 2 went on adventures in my mind. As I lay in bed trying to go to sleep, I’d imagine Zelda 2 in various situations. In many ways, he was everything I wanted to be – strong despite being small (I was a very small child), brave in the face of bullies, and able to save everyone when a threat approached (even the bullies). The stories (as upon reflection, I’ve come to understand I was, in fact, telling myself stories) weren’t exactly complex, and drew upon my life and my conflicts. Zelda 2 could handle it all (not always easily, but he always prevailed).
But I never talked to him. I wasn’t in the stories myself to be able to talk to him. It’s more accurate to say rather that I assumed the role of Zelda 2. I was he, and I experienced everything that happened through him. In some fashion, then, I didn’t so much as tell myself stories, as I immersed in these stories. I experienced them rather than told them.
At some point, though, I verbalized some amount of what was happening: what Zelda 2 said, what others said in return, and so on. Someone in my family (I don’t remember exactly who at this point) overheard and in the way of families dutifully asked who I was talking to. I wasn’t actually talking to anyone, or if I was, I was Zelda 2 talking to the bully kids at the babysitter’s house. But I was 4 (I’ll just pick an age during which I know I went to that babysitter). I had no idea how to explain what I was doing, but I knew the interaction I was in. Someone heard me talking and asked who I was talking to. That meant they expected the answer was an imaginary friend of some sort. Other kids had those. I knew what they were.
So, despite not really thinking Zelda 2 was my imaginary friend (he and I never talked – that just seemed stupid as I knew he was someone I made up…sort of), I went ahead and told my family about Zelda 2. For a while after that, I pretended he really was my imaginary friend, pretending I could see him, and pretending to talk to him. For a while, I even entertained the idea that this was how imaginary friends were supposed to work.
Zelda 2 eventually went away, not in the whole “I made real friends and I don’t need my fake one anymore” as much as the hero of the stories I told changed. I don’t remember who the new hero after Zelda 2 was, but he wasn’t a specific media character the way Link was. He was plain, ordinary on the surface, but able to deal with crazy situations. Those situations were usually some mixture of the media stories I consumed (TV, books, video games, etc) mashed up with my everyday struggles of being an elementary school kid.
Still, he was in many way everything I wished I could be but never was. He was my perfect image of myself (perhaps someday I’ll dive into the implications that my perfect image of myself was a boy when I myself was afab), and I experienced his world as though I were him. Some kids had imaginary friends. I built and rebuilt whole worlds in my mind. I immersed myself in ways no media could quite touch, and that’s the draw, to be somewhere else, someone else, facing things that don’t exist in the real world.
When I think about where my obsession with stories tracks back to, it’s here. It’s Zelda 2, Michael, Kiama, Lillia, and every other protagonist of the worlds in my mind that I’ve immersed as grown up. I still do this, even. When I need to work through something for a story, I start here. We all have our own little weirdnesses, right? This is mine.
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