Continuing in the Series of The Creation of The Novel Hypersexual:
Soon after I decided that fiction was the proper route for Hypersexual, and while considering the many different ways in which I would be able to utilize that format, I was unexpectedly reminded of and fascinated by how, as a child, adolescent, preteen and teen I had been led into the labyrinth psychological realms where self-fiction is pushed to the forefront of a young individuals self identification processes as a way to make sense of what is happening to themselves.
This memory of my psychologically twisted youth had always been an especially odd, powerful, and intriguing part of my history.
But why was I trying to look at these seemingly totally disparate kinds of fiction (personal and literary) as if they might be somehow connected?
Basically, the effort at filling-in missing pieces of personal information isn’t at all uncommon. And it is highly probable that all humans do it, to some extent. However, sometimes this phenomenon is considerably accelerated due to having especially important or immediately pertinent information about one’s own life missing. And perhaps most of all when the missing information is from a so-called traumatic and presumably life defining event.
In some cases the pressurized internal question “What made me who I am, that all this can be happening to me?” can become an obsession, and a question that must be answered – in whatever way – even if fictionally.
And once that question has been answered, in whatever way, often it must be acted upon, as a way of self affirmation, even if it is a decidedly defensive, or outrageous, or otherwise problematic affirmation.
In this way, self mythology as an act of self creation is personal fiction straining to become the truth. And sure enough, as I’d discovered as a preteen and teenager, sometimes that fiction can become the truth.
And all of this is well acknowledged in the fields of psychology and psychiatry, and is included and processed (to whatever degree) in many counseling techniques. Which can be helpful (for those who obtain meaningful help).
But even then, that isn’t where it always ends.
Take, for instance, a still young individual who has already lived through several years of these self-fiction and self creation processes, and has also become extremely aware of them – and who is then given a hefty but still partial dose of the actual information they had been forced to make up – only to discover that their own guesses had been in some cases amazingly intuitive, and in other cases had fallen way short of the sexual depravity of the reality that had been revealed.
And soon after (within a couple of years), to then realize that there was no way of knowing if the “real information” that had been communicated was, in fact, true.
What kind of twist in the wrinkle of personal fiction do you suppose that kind of experience of “reality” might cause? Especially after years and (formative) years of powerful self creation based mostly on errant (unknowable, unreliable) information?
RIGHT?!
There is no way of knowing where that kind of cognitive vortex might propel a young mind!
One possibility, that is not often popularly discussed, is the development of a peculiar kind of strident empowerment: A young mind that sees a larger framed vision of truth, which includes in its perspective a full appreciation of the immense power of personal fictional creation and the freedom of not having to be fixed within any supposed truth.
In other words, a young mind that functions just as actively and confidently from a self fictionalizing position as it does from any of it’s actual reality foundations. Utilizing both, to whatever maximum effect is possible, wherever possible.
And I don’t mean sneakily lying, or worriedly hiding, or secretly apologetic. And I’m not talking about an intention based on aggression, at all. I mean straightforwardly and boldly self creating with an awareness that the relative truth of any of it has little or no meaning – because there is no reliable “truth” to measure any of it against. There is only forward moving self creation, and whatever empowerment it can afford.
At the very least, we can say that a formative life experience like that holds the potential for vastly widening a young persons perspective as relates to how they see themselves and what they may be able to make of themselves – especially in places like the midnight covered plains of hyperactive public sexual contact and self directed prostitution.
This is what I poetically call the horizon point of personal fiction. And it is where a substantial part of my personality and self – my sexual self – lived from the age of eleven or twelve until around the age of twenty eight. And it is one of the immensely powerful personal issues I’ve waited all this time to talk about.
Following this pulling stream of thought, as writing leads me to do, I realized that the reasons I was so captivated by thinking about both my personal fiction and literary fiction together was that with the novel Hypersexual I was intuitively intending (in part) to use fiction writing in a similar way that I had used personal fiction – which is to create a means of relating as penetrating as possible truths. And of relating experiences inclusive of the way that I, and so many others, have experienced our early life partial-truths, fragmented histories, and developing identities.
In fact I realized then that, in a sense, this was where my novel had to begin – because this is where my own self awareness began. This is where my own self identification as a hypersexual person began. In the land between truth and fiction.
Transgressive fiction, a deliberately twisted branch of literary fiction that I learned about during the creation of this novel, is distinctly defined by and valued for purposely using unflinching and intrepid boundary and convention breaking fiction as a way to reveal the especially difficult and often turned-away-from human truths.
No wonder I’d found myself so closely considering these stirring questions, about these seemingly disparate kinds of fiction – they’re not disparate at all – they flow right together.
They flow right together into the rushing storylines of Hypersexual.
