How a Man in my Head Took Over My Inner Life

I do not hear voices. I do not hallucinate. I do not act under imagined forces. Every consultation I’ve had has confirmed the same. I am not schizophrenic, bipolar, nor suffering from a neurological condition. I am rational, grounded, independent, and capable of living a normal life.

And yet, something inside me was…wrong.

My inner world grew stronger than my outer one. It felt fuelled by another self — a person I felt ashamed to claim as my own. I told myself he was nothing but a fantasy, an imaginary character like any child might invent.

A childhood familiar.

He was a man. And he would shape decades of my life.

Birth of a Shadow Identity

The earliest version of this man was grotesque. I imagined him with acromegaly — overgrown bones, pockmarks, a bleak scowl, a stutter, learning difficulties. He lived in a dead‑end town, misunderstood and doomed. I didn’t know where these horrible notions came from. They felt objectionable, intrusive, and familiar.

My plotlines consist of tortured souls, shackled by guilt and shame.

Over time, I made him more acceptable, more human. I gave him storylines filled with guilt, shame, and exile. In my teens, I began drawing him in the margins of sketchbooks, trying to capture his features. I never got them right. His face filled page after page. Sometimes I showed them to Eve (my twin). We joked about him, teased his fate, made his misery into a farcical, twisted Mills and Boon story.

One day, I had used so much paper that I dumped the drawings in a park bin. It reflected how little value I placed on my artistic ability.

With or without the drawings, he lived inside me. He emerged effortlessly, replacing my teenage crushes with his stern glower and doomed expression. I became hooked on the plummet‑down‑a‑lift‑shaft feeling he triggered within me. Life felt dull without him.

I reasoned he must be a childhood familiar — an imaginary friend created to cope with life’s knocks. And once that logic took hold, I began building the world he lived in.

Multiplying Selves into Plural

His resilience allowed me to split him into versions. A second man emerged, then a third, then a fourth. Each had a distinct backstory, personality, and fate. I would settle on one identity for months, then move to another. Sometimes two or three versions of this ‘man’ lived in my head at once.

One day, I drew a portrait that frightened me. I named him Dean. His eyes followed you around the room. His stories became nightmares of control, need, and possession. I threw the drawing away, unsettled by his utter seediness. I couldn’t sleep that night. I never drew him again.

The others felt safer — damaged, misunderstood, but humane. In total, I created around twelve identities, versions of this man, each with intricate histories. They became as real to me as actual people. I knew their fears, their desires, their wounds. I kept them secret, though Eve sometimes shared the world with me.

My book analysing my parasitical novel, The Lessons. Click to buy.

At bedtime, their stories reeled out in front of my eyes. Vivid images flashed from the dark. I became the producer of their lives. I disliked my characters yet cared for them. I wanted to save them but saving them killed the story. Each needed torment to exist.

My Secret Identity Exposed

One day, a friend discovered my secret portrait drawings. I felt abject shame and cried afterwards. An art student asked who the man was. I lied and said he was my ‘boyfriend’. I called him John.

At City Poly, I painted face montages of several “Johns”. I called them Bernard, Luke, Leonard, and others. The paintings later went missing, but it didn’t matter. John lived inside me, and so did the identities he had split into.

I created storylines for each version. One early plot saw John bedbound after a horrific car crash, tormented by a Nurse Ratched‑like figure named Nadia. Another favourite storyline centred on Leonard, a factory workhand trapped in a shabby town, secretly in love with a woman who denied him out of shame.

There would be no story without Johns and his split off. No story at all.

Birth of My First Novel

By 1985, at nineteen, I made a momentous decision to write a novel.

Gone were my childhood mysteries. I wanted a serious book with subtext, twisted desires, and psychological depth. I wanted to rival Stephen King or Douglas Adams — naïve, this may sound now.

I kept the novel secret. My closet world moulded the manuscript. I bought the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook, a dictionary, a thesaurus, notebooks, and a heavy green typewriter with thudding keys. I guarded an hour or two each day to write. My first draft gave me migraines and neck pain, but I persisted.

The story grew around a sub‑John whom I named Aidan — a dyslexic misfit in a posh household, emotionally shackled to a graffiti‑riddled railway bridge. A female counterpart offered him escape through literacy lessons, pulling him away from a psychopath in a derelict house.

I eventually named the novel The Lessons.

The precis goes thus:

The Lessons is a story of Laura, a young English teacher who had believed her student, Aidan to be a schoolchild needing brushing-up on literacy.

But she is shocked to discover he is a dyslexic thug, forming part of a criminal ring headed by psychopath. Kurt.

Such storylines became the foundation of my writing life — and a window into the hidden self that had lived inside me for years.

Further Articles about my Writing Episodes

How my childhood trauma split my psyche in two
How my writing turned ugly in my teens

Key Articles

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