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Home / Thoughts / Other's Thoughts / Mary's thoughts / Fantasies and pretending

Fantasies and pretending

Written by Mary on Saturday, June 14, 2008

It started when I was a kid, maybe as early as when I was around 7 years old. I had a very lively fantasy, so I made up stories about everything. But there were a kind of stories, fantasies, that came to my mind, from a deep inner feeling. If I had seen a person with a disability on TV, in a book or in real life, I couldn’t help but thinking about that person and that disability. I started trying imagine how life would be living with that disability.

I really wanted to feel it, physically and mentally. I could think about it for hours, just trying to get in the mood of living in that different body. I made up stories about my life in that body, in that situation. How I was born and raised, how I went to school and participated in different activities in my own way, how I had to struggle with all kinds of things according to my condition.

I tried to let my body become as similar to the disabled body I’d seen. If the legs were deformed I imagined my own legs to look deformed. I put my arms or legs in my clothes to feel and look amputated. I didn’t move my body, trying to make it “heavy” or sometimes spastic, to feel paralysed

.

I think there were three kinds of disabilities I pretended to have.

• It was paralysed, from a spinal cord injury, celebral pares or a muscular disease. Always in both legs and often also partly in the arms.
• And it was amputee, and that was always both legs, and sometimes also one och both arms as well.
• And finally it was birth defects, quite similar to amputee, when the legs and/or the arms were deformed and often useless.

Of course I read all I could find about those conditions. If I found out about a new one I had to make up new fantasies about that.

I can still remember several characters I made up. I created their life from birth, with families, interests, education and so on.

And I haven’t been able to stop. I still make up fantasies where I’m the person I need to be, I’m just like myself the way I think about everything, but my body is affected by one of those disabilties. I can spend hours thinking about it, while I’m sitting in a chair feeling my body is paralysed or deformed.

During these times I long so much to really BE that person, I want to get in to that body to feel it from the inside, I want my limbs to be paralysed, short and look different.

I also long for a wheelchair. I’m trying to imagine the one I’m sitting in, but I would really want to sit there, for real. I can’t describe the feeling I have thinking about having a wheelchair to use. When I let that feeling out I just want to cry and scream.

I don’t know if all those fantasies and feelings makes me a person with BIID, but more and more I think so.

I’ve been alone with my thoughts all my life, so in one way I would be reliefed finding a name and context for this part of my life.

Tags: Amputation, BIID, Body Integrity Identity Disorder, Childhood, Disability, Fantasies, Paralysed, Stories, Wheelchair

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