I wrote a character that people like better than they like me.
Sheena is a Punk Rocker
I wrote a character that, so far, people like better than they like me. Not based on anyone in real life. A woman of perfect fiction. More likable than I am.
It shouldn’t surprise me, I suppose. I mean, we all practice the subtle art of self-editing anyway. We share information about ourselves only after a stringent policy of selecting things that inform the mythology we’ve spent our lives weaving for ourselves, and we clamp down hard on the potential media streams that threaten to overturn that mythology by revealing about ourselves things that don’t fit into the tapestry. So that when the threads have all finished meandering their way across the face of the wall-hanging of our life, what we have left to show the world supports an image of ourselves that could be many things — it could even, at a stretch, be true — but what it could never even pretend to be is a whole picture.
So we all employ a practice of editing ourselves in order to show the world the best version of ourselves. It’s a practice now common to the species. Like glamping or defining ourselves by needlessly complicated coffee-inspired beverages. In the great interstellar dating profile for the human race, it will say, “Likes to express themselves by taunting nature with a simulation of the way of life that was necessary for peoples they ‘evolved from’ with the cunning use of genocide. Hobbies include the application of chaos mapping via the global research project known colloquially as ‘Starsmucks.’ Definitely a believer in the saying, ‘put your best foot forward,’ expressed with its second, usually edited out clause, ‘and hide your worst foot, because nobody wants to see that shit.’”
That would be on the human race’s dating profile if it were left up to me.
Which is probably why I’ve never had any luck with online dating. Just a gamble, but I expect the grand scheme of things I can trace the roots of that particular creeping vine growing through my personal history.
It should not surprise me at all that Poppy Swicker, a fictional character that no one has ever met, attracts more admirers in real life than I ever have. Because not only does she represent an expression of the careful design and filtering that defines the face of the social media generation, she is also not encumbered with the usual suspicions inherent to the “real” — so called — people you sometimes meet. That is to say, the inescapable niggling thought that they aren’t who they claim to be. Real people often aren’t, I’ve noticed. Real people often turn out to be someone else entirely.
It doesn’t bother me. I know maybe it should. Maybe I should think to myself that all that’s good and wholesome about me, a man made entirely of flaws and hopes and worries who’s life, as dull as it might be, would be an endless well of material for a melodrama on STARS. One of those ones that you’re not sure if it’s supposed to be ironic or not.
And I’m not even interesting. Imagine if I were, you know, some kind of fascinating character.
Everyone is fascinating. That’s the real truth here. Everyone is imbued with the dignity and depth of experience that makes them fitting objects of the fascination of somebody somewhere. Dull people. Interesting people. All people are creatures of such vast complexity that they are the fitting study of the lifetime of somebody.
I might be in a position to feel somewhat diminished to think that this character — this construct — of mine has more friends than I have, and that those friends are real people in the real world who I have met, who have met me, and who have passed over me in favor of Poppy Swicker.
Who has the time, though? Really. Who has the time to be envious of anyone. I barely have the time to be envious of real people — people I know I can actually sabotage, if I wanted to. If you’re going to be envious, at least spend your energy from it constructively on plans for just balancing of the social scales. It’s time consuming enough to seethe with envy for people I know. I just don’t have the time to feel too slagged about Poppy Swicker stealing my friends.
She can have them, I say. They can go out and have their kicks. Stay up all night drinking. Wake up to a hangover and a session of wondering what they did the night before. Let them do it, I say. They need to spend their youth somewhere. I’ll encourage it. Every friend that Poppy Swicker makes means one less person I need to faff about trying to find a birthday present for. That’s my theory.
