Suffering an Unwelcome Companion.

I have an invisible but highly irritating friend, you know. He doesn’t have a name, but he looks and sounds like somebody I used to know and didn’t like very much.

He sits, or more usually stands, next to me if I’m playing a game of solitaire or free cell on the computer in between writing something, or watching a film or YouTube video accompanied by appropriate music. He interrupts me by telling me that there’s a red seven which can be transferred to that black eight over there, or maybe there’s a two at the bottom of a file and he has to tell me that I have the ace of that suit and the two belongs on it.

I know these things and tell him I know. He asks, rather mockingly, why I don’t do it then, and I tell him that I have my reasons. He asks what my reasons are, and it’s usually at that point that I lose patience with him and tell him to go away. He does so, sullenly, and then I pity him because rejection is not a nice thing to experience.

I’ve often asked myself who this highly irritating friend is and where he comes from. Is he a common psychological condition to which many people are prey, or could he be the product of another source? I favour the latter; I think he has something to do with my indoctrination by the officers of the Anglican Church to which I was in thrall as a child. I was often cautioned that God watches every one of us, constantly judging the rightness or wrongness of everything we did. It was a conviction I carried with me throughout my childhood until I began to see the branching roads of different possibilities when I was around age 12.

And maybe the analogy is not so far-fetched. Maybe the branching roads were but a plant growing in a woodland glade, and maybe the root that was the source of my conviction never died but rather developed in a different form. That’s my theory for what it’s worth.

And why am I writing this now? Because I’ve just been reading Virginia Woolf, why else? I imagine it’s the sort of thing she might have written, and maybe she did. I had to give up the book because I was falling asleep, and I discovered long ago that while reading tends to make me sleepy, writing usually has the opposite effect. And so it has, and now you know.