I'm getting the impression that other people have Lives. There seems to be a significant dearth of updates on friday nights.

I'm back home now. So I can cry if I want to.

does anybody else have a house in which any available flat surface becomes a Storage Unit? now that we have some money again I swear I'm getting a cleaning lady.

I really, really, really ought to have been born rich. This sucks. I want servants and minions and lots and lots of money so I don't have to worry about it anymore, goddammit.

People who come to your diary and leave 0:00 seconds later suck.

Am I not INTERESTING enough for you people? jeeeeez.

I think I was still talking about stuff I'd never told anyone before. Not all of it is weird or scary or interesting. A lot of it is just...hard to translate into words.

Like Rudolph. This one is really hard to formulate into English in such a way that it rings true to me.

I have many clear mental pictures of the inside of my mind as a child. And I'm perfectly confident that they're not made-up pictures, because I've *always* remembered them.

Anyway. When I was around 4. I didn't have AN imaginary friend, I had 101. Exactly. I have a feeling this was influenced by 101 dalmations, because I don't see where else I would have come up with that number. The other influence was fairly obviously christmas movies, although in my little mind it all went terribly, terribly awry.

Hence, Rudolph. All 101 of them were reindeer. But I only remember that there was Rudolph and Daisy. The other 99 had names too but I can't remember any of them, and I don't know why Daisy.

I have an amazingly clear image of this large, dark, sort of nightmarish hall -- like a Great Hall, not like a HallWAY -- with all 101 reindeer in it. There was a lot of fog, I don't know why, so it was almost impossible to actually *see* any of them. There were two columns of them, one on each side of me, so I looked down sort of an aisle between the rows -- and there wasn't like one at the end or anything so I guess it must have not been equal numbers of them in each row. I believe I spent a lot of time up there talking to them.

But. The going-awry. Somehow all but Rudolph sort of faded away, and Rudolph himself mutated into what became what I called The Judge. And stopped being identified at all as a reindeer. I think the reindeer part was actually probably fairly short-lived.

The Judge manifested itself in various ways. I always remembered myself in dual positions, both as me and from an angle about 6 to 10 feet above, back, and to the right of myself, looking down at me. Most of my childhood memories still retain both points-of-view. Sometimes the Judge was just a pair of eyes, sometimes it was nothing, all the time it was a Voice.

Somehow I literally translated my insecurity into a semi-physical being.

the Judge talked to me all the time. It told me that I was stupid and crazy and dumb and ugly and unlovable. Everything I did could have been better, if it wasn't a complete fuckup.

Oddly I don't remember the specific time-of-death of the Judge. There was never a *moment* when it died. I guess it must have sort of gone away gradually. I think somewhere between 10 and 14.

By the time I was 14 my insecurity was manifesting in other, probably more destructive ways. The voice...had just become integrated (re-integrated?) into my sense of self, which really, really sucked.

I didn't manage to begin sprouting a proper sense of self really until exactly age 18, 1 month before turning 19. THAT was a moment, or rather about 2 months worth of moments. THAT was an actual turning point. And that one I've talked about before. Not here, but to enough people. If it becomes important to a story I'll re-relate it.

But the Rudolph thing. Part of me forgives myself as a child. But part of me is deeply embarrassed about it. Not because of having an imaginary friend, and not because it became the Judge.

Because it was a reindeer, named Rudolph. THAT embarrasses me.

- onehanded