I don’t know how to begin this. A couple of people know the story already. I’ve probably talked about bits of it here and there — or maybe I haven’t, I can’t remember — but I’ve never set the whole thing down. And I might not write the whole thing, because it’s a very private story. And I’ve always been afraid to tell it for fear of ridicule and of not having my feelings about the matter taken seriously, or at least compassionately. I’m telling it now because this story of the ghost, as I’ll call him, has affected my life for a long time, for good and for bad; has affected relationships and career; and has, I think, contributed heavily to troubles I’ve been having these last few years, which have in turn had negative effects, which I deeply regret, on those I love.

When did it start? Perhaps when I was very young. When it wasn’t convenient to be myself, esepcially when I felt the need for strength and power and resilience beyond my own capacity, I “became” a character in my head. At first the characters were from TV, movies, and books; then I started to invent my own, and I “became” them. They weren’t imaginary friends. I couldn’t see them, and I didn’t believe they were real. Intellectually I knew they were imaginary, but emotionally they had a certain reality that I could feel as strength and comfort and fighting spirit and other positive things. When I “became” one of them — and there only tended to be one at a time, probably changing according to my needs and wants — I sometimes acted physically (though secretly) as the character, and sometimes it was just in my head, particularly if physical action wasn’t possible. Perhaps this is all completely normal.

I will add at this point that  had a parent with a mental illness. Poor Mum. She suffered severe depression and, according to one doctor, “not classic manic depression (bipolar disorder)”, whatever that means. She didn’t experience manic highs. She did, however, experience terrible sadness and uncontrollable rage. She also had irrational anxieties, a catastrophically low sense of self worth, and an alcohol problem. She took her pain out on herself, on Dad, and on me. I don’t have any siblings, and we didn’t live close to grandparents or other relatives. I was alone with her and her demons a lot. I recall spending a fair bit of time hiding, either under a couch or up a tall lilly-pilly tree in the back yard. Nobody would have thought anything was wrong with our family. I did very well at school. I didn’t much like school, but I had friends, and doing well at my schoolwork was a guaranteed way to receive affection at home. I feel somewhat guilty even mentioning our family situation, as nothing was ever done to me that I could have especially complained about. Yes, I was hit rather a lot, but that was more normal back then. The worst thing was probably the day by day unpredictability of it — you never knew what might set Mum off. I had to walk on eggshells a lot, and of course I didn’t manage to do the eggshell walk all the time, or probably even most of the time. I recall being told that I must be a good girl, or Mum would end up in the loony bin. (When I was 18 I got sick of even trying to be a good girl, and threw a full-size bean chair at her. ) And Dad? He was the one whose needs never got met, I guessed; the one who always had to be strong and stoic and a comfort to others. I wanted to be like Dad, calm and strong and indefatigably rational, except that I wanted to be cared for, not to have to care for others.

I hope I haven’t exaggerated the situation. I’ve told it as I remember it, because I think my tendency to become these other characters was at least in part a coping mechanism. If I was being hit and yelled at for some reason I couldn’t understand — or even one I could — well, that was a bit rough. But if I was Princess Leia or Batman or whoever, then I could deal with it. (ETA: I’ve realised I haven’t talked at all about my mother’s strength, which I didn’t really appreciate at the time. Every day, for decades, she got up and fought her demons, and I mean, she fought like Conan. Some days she might have cried all day, but there was food on the table at dinner. And by no means were things bad all the time. She didn’t believe in talking down to children, so that we always had interesting conversations (or they were interesting to me, anyhow); and no doubt I had a wicked way of trying my mother’s patience. I guess what I’m trying to do here is just put in a bit of background for why my imagination might have developed its particular tendencies. But certainly no black hat for my mother. She should get flowers and a medal for valour, and Dad should get a medal for compassion.)

So that was up until the end of primary school. Then came high school, and all the usual. Things got pretty bad between Mum and me. Her anxieties became more of a problem in the teenage world. I continued to do as I’d always done — I lived in my head and pretended to be one character or another as I felt the need. This obviously didn’t help me to be any less dorky. Then, one day, in year 9 I think it was, I was in history class, reading our textbook, and came across a name: Sylvain.

I can’t remember the surname. It was just that first name, Sylvain, that — how can I put it? — crystallised or galvanised something. A character came into my head. He was archetypal (and bore in that early stage a resemblance to David Bowie) but he was also his own individual self, separate from any character I had seen or dreamed up. I didn’t know that “Sylvain” carried the meaning of woodland and perhaps a Pan-like spirit; I thought of him as silver back then, silver eyes and silver hair. He was far more real to me than any character had ever been. He had a world of his own, a complicated multi-dimensional place of which his particular corner owed something to Hunger City from Diamond Dogs (perhaps Ashamoil had a beginning in “my set is amazing, it even smells like a street…”), but which bordered an ancient, strange forest.

I can’t remember when I started to write about him. I don’t think I had any intention of writing for publication, though I honestly can’t remember. This was back before the World Wide Web (not before Usenet, but I didn’t know about Usenet), and I lived in quite a vacuum. I certainly wouldn’t have had the confidence to submit work to magazines at that time, anyway. The writing was for myself, and was not so much story as a lot of description (beginning of a habit!). He, Sylvain, changed over the next few years, taking on different physical characteristics and a handful of different names, although his personality seemed to stabilise. One name he had for a while was Dashiell, like Dashiell Hammett. (A dash then an “iel” — I couldn’t help wondering if he was playing a game with that particular name.) He continued to pick up qualities and ornamentation from things I read and saw, but remained himself, just developing as a real person would develop.

I can’t remember when he turned into Gwynn. I think he took the name when I came across the Welsh character Gwynn ap Nudd in a history class at university. Psychopomp, badass warrior, death incarnate, fairy king of Glastonbury — the character of Gwynn had gone through a lot of changes over the centuries, and perhaps that resonated with my ghost’s changes. So did the badassery and fairyness, though the latter became modernised into dandyish decadence. Anyway, as Gwynn he seemed to reach his imago form. He got the black hair and pale green eyes, hat and coat, and they stuck. I should also add that my husband was an influence; the ghost had by then taken on some of his looks and personality. However, he was still a distinct individual in my mind.

When I was about 24 or 25 I wrote The Art of Dying. I simply saw my ghost, Gwynn, in the strange nocturnal city that had been his place of residence for many years, and which had changed as he had and had also taken on echoes of other places, real and imaginary. I saw him in an opium den with two women, who came sharply to life in my mind. The story just came. I realised it was more their story than his, though he was important in the overall picture. He had somehow facilitated it, been a conduit or an opener of a door — that was what it felt like.

I did send it to a magazine (Aurealis). They published it. And then it was selected for an Australian year’s best anthology. I was gobsmacked. I was pleased. I was also frightened. At the time, I belonged to a small Hermetic lodge, and my head was full of ideas about magic(k). I wondered if I had summoned something, or, like Alexandra David-Neel, created a tulpa. I wrote another story in a similar setting, but without my ghost guy in it. Aurealis published it, too. Ok — I could write without him on board. But it hadn’t been quite such a rush, had it?

And back he came, and after a couple of false starts I got working on The Etched City. During the process of writing he seemed to become more and more present in my own plane of existence. I (believed I) could sense when he was in the room and when he wasn’t. I didn’t physically hear his voice in my ears, but I certainly heard it in my head, and that voice was indispensable to writing the book. He started to feel so closely present that I wondered if he was a ghost. And I was in love with him, as I had been for years.

The feeling of his presence got so strong, and so disturbing (because I had no proof that he was there, just this feeling, and a lot of synchronicity that seemed to happen when he was around), that I went to see a psychic. This was not the first time I had been to a psychic reader, but it was the first time I had seen this particular woman. As far as I recall, our conversation went like this. Me: “I think there’s this dead guy…” Reader: “Ok, sit down. … I’m seeing a hat and a long coat, like a Dashiell Hammett character. Better pull out that chair for him, he’s got long legs.” Then she channelled him. He was loquacious. You’ll just have to take my word for it that it sounded just like him — not exactly Gwynn per se, since the ghost in my head was more like an actor who played Gwynn. It sounded like that actor. I’m well aware of the psychology and trickery that can go into psychic readings, and I am not claiming objective truth for anything that went down on that day. All I can talk about with certainty is the effect that it had on me: I was knocked off my perch, because, based on my previous experiences with psychics, I had not expected anything, let alone anything so close to my own perceptions.

I wondered if he might be the ghost of a dandyish, flamboyant uncle who had died when I was young. But “my” ghost seemed to be more than one dead man. He was a bit of this, a bit of that, something external and something internal, old in his archetypal roots but thoroughly up to date with the world. I couldn’t classify him, and he didn’t seem interested in classification. Taxonomy, boring and useless, or worse than useless, since it gets in the way of paradigm shifts. Is light a particle or a wave, hmm?

I wrote the book. By then, I was in a state of feeling that I was flying too close to the sun. He was enormous in my life, and he was burning hot. Whatever he was. Yet I still couldn’t get properly close to him. There was a wall of glass between me and this burning, overwhelming something. If I was going to try to break that wall, I was going to have to make like Akka Mahadevi when she went after Shiva — running around India dressed in nothing but her hair, a mad poet. But I had a husband, a wonderful, mysterious man of whom my ghost was perhaps, after all, only a derivation. Perhaps the burning something wasn’t even the ghost. I wondered if I was going mad.

In this state of mind, it was hard to settle down and start writing something else. As I recall, I felt pretty freaked out most of the time. Then TEC was published, and published again, and got more attention than I had ever imagined it would. And I wondered if my ghost or whatever he was was working behind the scenes, and whether I would owe him a debt. At the same time, I was tormented with feeling “so near and yet so far” from him. And I was starting to get those “So, what about the next book?” questions, while internally I was going nuts.

I wasn’t brave enough to explain the situation, not to sensible, money-minded folk like publishers or to any of the other people I was suddenly meeting — interviewers, career-minded writers, people who had helped me, readers — I felt terribly alone with my bizarre problem.

I did the only thing I could think of doing. I talked to the ghost and said I wanted to renegotiate our relationship. I was going mad, I said. Could he please back off and let us just be friends?

He did more than back off. As soon as I made that request in my head, he was gone. Something that had been a huge, immensely important part of my life had just left. Taking with him, perhaps, everything of me that I had put into him.

Whether he was real or not, in the sense of having an independent, objective existence, the grief of losing him was certainly real. And I couldn’t tell anyone. I had to hedge and fudge and pretend, because how could I say, “I’m mourning a ghost, or an angel, or an alien, or for all I know a devil, and the last thing I want to do now is try to write another book, because not only do I need time to learn how to write something longer than a story without him, but all writing reminds me that he isn’t there?”

And on it went like that for years, and I got depressed, and my head asploded with anxieties last year, and again this year, and these last few weeks I’ve turned into a monster, screaming and crying and unfunctioning, needy and selfish. I’ve been consumed with self loathing — sorry for the cliche, but there seems no better way to put it — over my failure to become a productive writer, to make money, over my loss of joy in writing and in life, over what a lousy partner I’ve been to my husband, and over having, perhaps, turned away a guiding spirit. And sometimes it seems he is there, for a flash — a few words that come into my head — then gone. And I don’t know if it was him or not, or if he was ever there, or what I was in love with that was so near and so far. And I’ve chased him in all sorts of ways, but never found him again. I’ve since learned about animus projections, and it seems a plasuible explanation — but I don’t want, and don’t think I need, explanations. What I need is to get over the loss and rebuild whatever I’ve lost from my own psyche, and to make my important relationships whole again.

All of this came to a head yesterday, sparked by an entirely mundane piece of falling shit that fell on the wrong day. Or maybe the right day. Maybe this needed to come to a head. I do know there’s something I just can’t hold up, or pretend to hold up, anymore. Maybe this is a step out of the closet of insanity, or maybe I’m not insane at all. But I think I’ve been dishonest with myself and other people for a long time, and I’ve seen that the consequences are not good.

If you’ve read this far, my thanks and a virtual glass of cold beer, or whatever else you’d like to drink. I’m leaving comments open, but I need to say that I’m in a pretty shaken state — ashamed, chastened, and worried, but also hopeful that I’ve turned a corner. Posting all this is part of making that turn. I’m well aware that my problems are picayune compared to most of the world’s. Yet they’re still mine and I’ve got to deal with them, for my own sake and other people’s, and this overly lengthy confession is, I hope, part of that dealing. This is not so much about the loss of a creative muse, though that’s part of it, but about the loss of something — a person, or a personality — that was important to me for a long time, and remains important in its absence. It’s grief, albeit for something we don’t typically accept the need to grieve for. Whether the object of the grief was “real” or not, the feeling is real, and the consequences of that feeling have been awfully real. Having had a clear view of my own behaviour and its effect on those most dear to me, I know there can’t be any more retreat into guilt and self-hatred, or allowing myself to get caught in vicious circles, such as losing time in blaming myself for lost time. The way must be forward, into sunshine — gently-gently perhaps, but forward through the lands of the living.

Note on a related issue: Tessa has two recent posts about Elizabeth Gilbert’s talk on nurturing creativity, which focuses on the idea of internal vs external genius (post 1, post 2). Excellent reading.

Words are heavy to lift just at the present time, hence comments closed. But pictures do scud by.

ETA: one more ghost, with quick ‘n’ nasty Photoshop –

Well, here’s the hair:

The colour kind of matches my mood of general blue compounded by Bangkok-itis. I’m going back to Australia for a couple of months to soak up some rural peace.