[Miscellany]

I think a lot about Geppetto.

I suppose it depends on the incarnation Pinocchio you subscribe to, but I'm a Disney girl and in the version I know best Geppetto desperately wishes for a son of his own. I think a lot about how Geppetto creates for himself the best he can with what he has.  He's no magician. He didn't know that Pinocchio would ever come to life. He didn't build a toy and know it would be his son.  He was lonely, the townspeople rejected him and so he built a marionette puppet to talk to because talking to a pile of wood was all he had previously.  After Pinocchio was built Geppetto is still talking to wood, but at least it looks vaguely human.  He did what he could with what he had. He was lucky that a guardian angel was listening to his prayers of wanting a companion.  That's the Disney bit I love.

I think a lot about people with the old Multiple Personality Disorder.  It's now referred to as Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID).  This is interesting to me - the idea of creating a personality in order to dissociate from the status quo.  If you think of the brain as your Geppetto.  The brain creates what it needs out of what it has.  It's not ideal but it's a solution.  The brain isn't magic and can't magic up solutions to help heal every shitty situation but it does the best with what it has and sometimes that manifests in creating a Pinocchio of sorts, that is  - a new personality to deal with to talk to, to help endure the hardship.

I sometimes wish I had DID and I also sometimes wish I had magic too.  But I don't have either of these things.  Regardless, I'm still a Geppetto.  My Geppetto brain has ways of helping me that are not ideal.  Not ideal at all.  They are often harmful to myself if I have to be completely honest.  But I do the best with what I have to work with and I create worlds in lots of different ways in order to survive.  If there was a guardian angel and this was Disney those worlds would be real and I could float away into them happily ever after but my life is not Disney.  My Pinocchio is very much a pile of wood fashioned into eyes, legs, fingers, toes and vaguely resembles something alive and breathing and real but isn't at all.  I know that it isn't real.  I haven't lost touch with reality one little bit.

Still, my Geppetto brain helps me to endure.

posted by M at 1:27 am 0 comments