we were born in 1974, suffered our worst abuse sometime around 1980 we think (we're still uncertain about what years both my sibling Frisk and myself were subjected to "treatment" from that pediatrician in La Jolla), and remained in an intensely abusive and emotionally neglectful environment for many years afterwards. during all this time, we were profoundly dissociated, having numerous "episodes" that got swallowed up by our subconscious...and we were devouring huge amounts of reading, literature, fiction, and TV media. at Caltech (another hideously abusive place) we immersed ourselves in yet more fiction, movies, and comic books.
it seems highly likely to us that we were experiencing "splitting" events and formation of fictive introjects during all this time...but we were unaware of what exactly was going on, because our self-awareness was almost nil and we were blundering through life in a continual fog of dissociation. only occasionally do we remember getting an inkling that something rather odd was going on with us.
I remember, for example, the feeling of uncanny familiarity that greeted our youtful readings of George Orwell's "1984". it didn't help when I heard the song "'Neath the Spreading Chestnut Tree" off one of Frisk's beloved Glenn Miller recordings—in fact I think it may have been from an 8-track. (Frisk was, and is, fond of antiquated musical recording formats.) I don't know if it was this recording specifically, but it might have been: https://youtu.be/vK17PwWAjaI
anyway...I remember reading the scene where Winston Smith happens to be at the Chestnut Tree Café and sees Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford...and being haunted by the feeling of an echo for lack of a better way of putting it; I was swept with the feeling that I'd sat in that café, listening to the tinny music. there were other scenes in "1984" that gave me such impressions, but that one in particular. not until decades later, when we were far more aware of our traumas and what they'd done to us, did I realize the truth: we'd developed an introject of Winston Smith.
Smith is one of two introjects present in our system that we've recognized as forming in the distant past. the other is Joseph K. from Franz Kafka's "The Trial", and it's possible that he's originally from Frisk's headspace and not mine; but now that Frisk's existence is only a sort of virtual one (my elder sibling died in 2006 by their own hand, but introjected into the Pnictogen Wing in 2019) it's not entirely clear. after all, we'd both read "The Trial" at an early age, and we've both seen the 1962 Orson Welles film who supplied us with our most memorable visual image of Joseph K. (in our headspace, he's taken the form of Anthony Perkins's portrayal of K.)
the Pnictogen Wing contains some dozens of fictive introjects, most of them from relatively recent material: it wasn't until 2015-16 that we were starting to wake up, very slowly at first, to having an unusual nature. hence most of the fictive introjects who made their presence known are from fiction to which we were exposed from 2015 onward. but the presence of Winston Smith and Joseph K. in our headspace suggests something a bit worrying: they're introjects who would have formed decades ago, so...does that mean there's OTHER fictive persons lurking in our headspace from before 2015?
just how big is our system? how vast is our headspace really? we've picked up hints that somehow it comprises enormous territories—we've been having real difficulties with accepting this because it feels presumptuous, arrogant, even prideful to say something like "the Pnictogen Wing's headspace is contiguous with Tolkien's Middle-Earth"...even though it's very likely to be true, because of just how much time we once spent in "maladaptive daydreaming" about Middle-Earth.
are there persons lurking in the Pnictogen Wing somewhere who are causing us trouble? how can we hope to unearth them?
~Chara of Pnictogen