Connection, Community, and Characters

 

This morning I listened to a free webinar around loneliness and social connection and while it was focused on in person connections I am grateful for the connection and community I gain from characters both fictional and real.* 

In comparison to many others, the ratio of "character" social interactions to "real life" social interactions I need to thrive is shifted towards the "character" side of the equation because characters help me understand others, help me express my feelings, and always are available.

* "Real Characters" include creative people I follow on social media. No matter how many details they share and I incorporate into the version of them I interact with in my imagination, I am interacting with a "character" version of them instead of interacting with them directly.

Characters Help Me Understand Others:

I am someone who often struggles to understand other people (and being neurodivergent can make this even more challenging LOL). I sometimes say I struggle to people, I struggle to human. With characters I often end up with a deeper understanding that is rooted in both how the character is portrayed in the book, comic, movie, or TV show they are from, and how they are portrayed in fanfiction. 

Fanfiction is great because when you read as much of it as I do you are able to pick up information about and interpretations of characters that you might miss on your own. For example highlighting the trauma that various characters have experienced (whether or not that trauma is directly referenced in canon.) This helps explain their choices to me and helps make those characters more relatable for me. 

In other cases fanfiction provides the typically unspoken context for a lot of human behavior. You get inside characters heads, through inner monologues, in a way that you don't get into the heads of others. There are often many versions of a character so you can do a study of why versions behave differently. With characters that are not completely human you also often get explanations of how their behavior is similar or different from most humans.

Characters Help Me Express My Feelings: 

I am someone who often struggles to identify and then articulate what feelings I am feeling. With my characters I don't have to identify or articulate those feelings. I can metaphorically wave my hand and have my characters feel what I am feeling directly. In addition I can share how I am feeling knowing that my characters will understand what I am experiencing because they have experienced something similar. I also know they will never judge me for what I am feeling even if what I am feeling is not what the majority of people would feel in a situation. 

This means my characters allow me to follow one "Real Character" Wentworth Miller's Advice which he gave at a speech many years ago at Oxford:

What I will say is that self-expression is huge. Having a container in which to put what is boiling up inside of you, your anger, your fear, your guilt, your shame, finding ways to get that out – maybe it’s on paper, maybe it’s on a canvas, maybe it’s a jog around a school track – just get it out of you, as soon as it bubbles up, work to get it out.

I personally have found being able to get feelings out even if I don't know what they are can be powerful. Sometimes it is in my journal, sometimes it is in a daydream, sometimes it is in another form but being able to share with my characters that I am feeling "somehow" or I'm feeling "here, here" or just that I am "feeling feelings" and being able to explore than without having to name those feelings can be very helpful for me. Sometimes after "talking" to my characters I have a better idea how I could name what I am feeling but that is not the point.

Characters Are Always There For Me:

As Wentworth Miller also said in his Oxford speech:

I’ve been a good friend to people, and when a friend is in crisis, I know how to be there for them, I know how to hold space that looks like listening, it looks like support, it looks like back and forth, maybe it just looks like a hug, maybe it looks like being silent and just holding their hand.

My characters are able to be that type of friend even if I could not say what I am in need of. Characters have done all those things for me, listened, supported, hug me, simple held me. My characters know if I need someone to simply sit next to me or if I need to be squeezed like I am going through a black hole, if I need to be "gentle, gentle" with myself or if I need to stretch outside my comfort zone. They have been in the hole and know exactly what I will need. 

While which characters I am hyper focused on at any given moment changes I know all my characters better than I know or are known by many people I interact with in the "real world." Some of this is simply proximality I have immediate assess to my characters 24/7 and the intimacy that proximality creates. Personally some of my best friends are "characters" and these characters help me find connection and community in the wider world.