Imaginary Friends

When I was little, about 6, I started to make people up.
I would invent imaginary friends and mold them to perfection.
Since I lived in a huge house with many rooms, my mind created a building where divorced mothers lived with their kids. Each room was a different apartment. I remember the names and the faces I created for all of them. And each had a different family history.
Then one fine day I realized how boring they were - - these perfect little ghosts that would attend to all my needs, anytime, anywhere. So I started to fight with each and every one.
But they wouldn't respond to me, and I had to let them go.
They all disappeared, one by one, by the time I was 9.

- - - -

Psychologists say it's perfectly normal for kids age between 3 and 12 to make up imaginary friends. Almost everyone I know had their or theirs at some point. Most of the time they fill an empty space where we can't fit real people, for some reason or another.

And then there's my parallel with a keyword: "perfection": it proves how we have a natural tendency to mold people the way we want - probably as early as we become social beings. We keep creating imaginary people, but only now they are real. We project our wantings, our desires and our notion of the perfect company (friend or lover) in that person, as if we have an inherent code of acceptance (and rejection).

The funny thing is, just as a kid and the boring ghosts: we rapidly lose the enchantment for a specific person that attends to all of our needs, desires and wantings. The perfect person with no flaws is a pain in the ass! It's as predictable as knowing what your imaginary friend will say to you when you talk. Take submissive people, for instance - they suffer more because they strive to be the perfection that they can't be (nobody can), disappointing first and foremost themselves by trying to act down or differently than what they really are. Most perceive the too submissive as uninteresting people, with no uniqueness, no soul.

I can also point out the other kind, the person who is so strict in their own set of selfish rules of acceptance and rejection, that nobody can ever fit to them - - they perceive a small flaw in the other and that's enough to discard.

- She's not what I expected, so I will make her disappear.

- She is too perfect, I am bored, so I will make her disappear.

That's why most relationships are condemned from the start. We all need to grow up...even though this is so part of our nature.

(Rambling again, em inglês...adoro treinar meu inglês aqui.)