My Lost Toddlerhood

 When I graduated from City Polytechnic with an upper‑second degree, my paintings carried me over the finish line. My dissertation nearly sank me, but I left with a degree and the hope of a future. Instead, I returned home, signed on the dole, and became housebound. The cottage was ablaze with rows, Dad was unwell again, and months of painting for a local exhibition left me exhausted and blocked. Something inside me snapped. The catalyst was a slighting remark over my life plans, but the real cause had been building for years. That night, when I went to bed, I shivered. I shivered and shivered. I pulled the covers over myself and felt my personality disintegrate. I fell into a black chasm. The black‑blame surged like a vortex, dragging me back to childhood: intrusive thoughts, terror of the dark, the feeling of being swallowed by something nameless. I spurned the characters of my stories that had lived inside me for years, how real they seemed, more so than people in my life. My no...

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...