My Life Is Not A Fantasy Novel

I’ve been writing for a very long time. Much longer, in fact, than my sister Georgia. While I’m glad that I didn’t manage to get much of an audience before now as I truly wasn’t ready for it, I also get pissed that my sister has a huge platform.

The green-eyed monster sometimes comes for me when I think about her success, and I have to choose whether to indulge it or send it away. I don’t always make the right choice.

Georgia’s writing and mine are completely different, and yet sometimes we are telling the same stories even though I’m a creative nonfiction writer and she writes strictly fiction. I’m primarily an essayist, and she writes novels. The problem with Georgia’s work is that the stories she’s writing aren’t really hers at all. They are mine.

I’m not a lover of either fairytale retellings or fantasy, which are her genres, so I tend not to read her books. I’ve been estranged and have had no contact with my family for years, but what I’ve seen of Georgia’s writing and what other people say about it is that she tells the story of my childhood in her books. She has people who write detailed reviews on her books so I can get a Cliff’s Notes version of the story just by reading those.

It’s a particularly crappy thing to do in light of the fact that she goes around calling me a liar and saying that I was never abused, I am just evil and want to slander my family. My parents already went to great lengths when I was a child and teenager to make sure that I knew that Dissociative Identity Disorder didn’t exist.

My (step) father, Brent, would often pull me aside and explain to me that seeing a therapist, even as an adult, would be a terrible thing to do because therapists tend to want to convince people that they have multiple personalities so they can accuse their loving parents of abuse. I was confused but I did promise him to never see a therapist or psychiatrist.

Well, I broke that promise many years ago, and I’m glad I did. It turned out that Brent was speaking from a guilty conscience, and that he was heavily invested in my forgetting or never even knowing all of the horrible things that happened to me.

I grew up being aware of some of my alters, but I thought they were just an elaborate story that I played out in my head in order to take a break from reality. My mother, Gloria, fed this idea greatly. While it seemed like way more than a novel or really more of a movie, the people I “acted out in my head” seemed so real. That’s because they were.

As my family continued to gaslight me, Georgia started writing fairytales and fantasy that essentially told everything that ever happened to me. She of course is able to say that it’s fiction, and it is to her readers, but it’s not truly fully fictional, not to Georgia.

I’ve tried to look at it from the point of view that she’s obviously not a good enough storyteller to come up with her own ideas, but that may sound like sour grapes.

Georgia’s stories suck all on their own merit because she’s just not, in my opinion, a good writer. There is a whole cohort of people that disagree with my assessment of her writing, which is why she has her fans. I am glad she has fans.

She makes excellent money, has a big audience, and was able to quit her day job to write full-time and travel the world. As much as I sometimes get jealous and frustrated, I’m also thankful that I don’t have her life.

I’m happy with the direction my life has taken, and I’ve learned over time that it’s okay if I never have a huge audience or make tons of money from my work. My biggest hope for my writing is that those who need it will find it and that it will be something truly helpful. I want those who read and engage with my stories to know that they aren’t alone in the world.

I don’t really want to trash my sister’s work as many people enjoy it, and I’m not sharing the name she writes her books under. Writing my stories for me as fictional narratives, though, contributes to the constant gaslighting I endured growing up and even now. Georgia can shrug and tell people that it’s just a story that she made up, it’s not like these things ever happened.

Except that they did happen, and so I have decided that I’m going to tell my stories myself, in the form of nonfiction essays, and in that way, I still have the power over my stories. She can’t actually steal them from me and make them her own, because I can write them in a better way than she can. I can write them from my own experience, which she cannot do.

So while I will admit that I often do get jealous, I also realize that there is no way in hell that I want anything that she has. I don’t have to compete with her, and I get to tell the stories myself even if she’s told them in other ways because she doesn’t own the stories. I do.

Georgia has to use fantasy because she has to make sure that it seems like strictly a work of fiction to both cover up and kiss arse, but as for me, I’m free to tell the truth and not hide it in plain sight between the covers of a fantasy novel.

She might plagiarize my life, but I’m the original author, even if she used her words first. Dissociative Identity Disorder does exist, and I am the one that gets to decide how and when my stories are told.