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aac8a24
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I had a bizarre rapport with this mirror and spent a lot of time gazing into the glass to see who was there. Sometimes it looked like me. At other times, I could see someone similar but different in the reflection. A few times, I caught the switch in mid-stare, my expression re-forming like melting rubber, the creases and features of my face softening or hardening until the mutation was complete. Jekyll to Hyde, or Hyde to Jekyll. I felt my inner core change at the same time. I would feel more confident or less confident; mature or childlike; freezing cold or sticky hot, a state that would drive Mum mad as I escaped to the bathroom where I would remain for two hours scrubbing my skin until it was raw. The change was triggered by different emotions: on hearing a particular piece of music; the sight of my father, the smell of his brand of aftershave. I would pick up a book with the certainty that I had not read it before and hear the words as I read them like an echo inside my head. Like Alice in the Lewis Carroll story, I slipped into the depths of the looking glass and couldn't be sure if it was me standing there or an impostor, a lookalike. I felt fully awake most of the time, but sometimes while I was awake it felt as if I were dreaming. In this dream state I didn't feel like me, the real me. I felt numb. My fingers prickled. My eyes in the mirror's reflection were glazed like the eyes of a mannequin in a shop window, my colour, my shape, but without light or focus. These changes were described by Dr Purvis as mood swings and by Mother as floods, but I knew better. All teenagers are moody when it suits them. My Switches could take place when I was alone, transforming me from a bright sixteen-year-old doing her homework into a sobbing child curled on the bed staring at the wall. The weeping fit would pass and I would drag myself back to the mirror expecting to see a child version of myself. 'Who are you?' I'd ask. I could hear the words; it sounded like me but it wasn't me. I'd watch my lips moving and say it again, 'Who are you?
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amnesia
change
child
dissociated-state
dissociation
dissociative
dissociative-identity-disorder
dream-like
dreaming
emotion
emotionals
identity
identity-alternation
identity-confusion
identity-crisis
identity-switch
impostor
incest
lookalike
memory-loss
mental-health
mirror
multiple-personality-disorder
personality-switch
sexual-abuse
split-personality
survivor
trauma
trigger
triggered
unreal
unreality
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Alice Jamieson |
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e5b9781
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Everything became quite unreal finally and it seemed as though nothing could have any consequences.
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fiesta
the-sun-also-rises
unreal
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Ernest Hemingway |
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c4ceedd
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I was deluded, and I knew it. Worse: my love for Pippa was muddied-up below the waterline with my mother, with my mother's death, with losing my mother and not being able to get her back. All that blind, infantile hunger to save and be saved, to repeat the past and make it different, had somehow attached itself, ravenously, to her. There was an instability in it, a sickness. I was seeing things that weren't there. I was only one step away from some trailer park loner stalking a girl he'd spotted in the mall. For the truth of it was: Pippa and I saw each other maybe twice a year; we e-mailed and texted, though with no great regularity; when she was in town we loaned each other books and went to the movies; we were friends; nothing more. My hopes for a relationship with her were wholly unreal, whereas my ongoing misery, and frustration, were an all-too-horrible reality. Was groundless, hopeless, unrequited obsession any way to waste the rest of my life?
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delusion
delusional
delusional-love
frustration
grief
hope
hopeless
hunger
loner
loss
misery
obsession
past
reality
relationship
save
sickness
stalking
unreal
unrequited-love
waste
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Donna Tartt |
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2bcfb40
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Work on what is real rather than worry about what is unreal.
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christian
fake
god
inspire
love
mind
thought
unreal
women
worry
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Elizabeth George |
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9f6990b
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I push against the tree and run away, stumbling, the unreal night playing with me, gravity pulling from below, behind, above, making me fall. And I run through a world that is rotating, conscious of the earth's spin, of our planet twirling as it careens through nothingness, of the stars spiraling above, of the uncertainty of everything, even ground, even sky. Mumtaz never calls out, although a thousand and one voices scream in my mind, sing, whisper, taunt me with madness.
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madness
night
nothingness
uncertainty
unreal
|
Mohsin Hamid |
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6b7d7d2
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Jesus was a penniless teacher who wandered about the dusty sun-bit country of Judea, living upon casual gifts of food; yet he is always represented clean, combed, and sleek, in spotless raiment, erect, and with something motionless about him as though he was gliding through the air. This alone has made him unreal and incredible to many people who cannot distinguish the core of the story from the ornamental and unwise additions of the unintelligently devout.
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combed
devout
gifts
jesus
judea
poor
raiment
reality
sleek
spotless
unintelligent
unreal
unwise
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H.G. Wells |
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3237a17
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Actually, he had always preferred the unreal to the real.
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unreal
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Milan Kundera |
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1386310
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You seem to think the past is unreal, a pit full of ghosts. But to me the past is in some ways the most real thing of all, and loyalty to it the most important thing of all.
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the-sea-the-sea
unreal
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Iris Murdoch |
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044e578
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The shield wall reeks of shit, and all a man wants is to be home, to be anywhere but on this field that prepares for battle, but none of us will turn and run or else we will be despised for ever. We pretend we want to be there, and when the wall at last advances, step by step, and the heart is thumping fast as a bird's wing beating, the world seems unreal.
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bird
despised
ever
field
heart
home
man
prepares
pretend
reeks
run
shield
shit
turn
unreal
wall
wing
world
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Bernard Cornwell |