by M.A. Barrett

When I was twelve, I was obsessed with Teri Ann Linn, a very accomplished actress, singer, and surfer with numerous credits to her name like The Bold and the Beautiful and Baywatch. I was obsessed, not only with Teri’s tall, lithe, very blonde body, but with her easy-going surfer-girl naiveté. She was pure and true and angelic to me. She was what a woman should be according to my mother. She was what Cosmopolitan and Elle told me a real woman should look and act like. Plus, if she’d done the pencil test (this bullshit. Trigger warning. Boobs.), her tits would never have held a number two pencil. Not like mine did. Not my big old C-cup bazooms.

My Pop bought me a television for my room in the basement in 1988. I was in the basement because I was too in the way of my mother in the rest of the house. I was always doing too many things, like building full libraries around the house and inviting my friends over to check out books, and erecting forts and racetracks for my BMX. I had orchestrated too many breakdance groups and re-creations of Thriller, complete with graves dug up in the backyard. I was a complete and utter nuisance, so they stuffed me in the basement and locked the door every Christmas Eve. I know this sounds pretty shitty, but to me it was a magical place, that basement. I had the whole stinking, moldy thing to myself. I had my step-dad’s workshop full of hammers and nails and saws, the giant deep-freeze meat freezer, the bar/rec room next to my room and, if I didn’t mind climbing through the spiders to get to it, a bulkhead that allowed me access to the outdoors, bypassing the rest of the house and the family. Other than the time I locked myself in the deep freeze (luckily it was turned off for a cleaning at the time) and managed to get stuck in the laundry shoot that dropped to the concrete floor in the basement from the bathroom upstairs, I didn’t get into too much trouble (that they knew about) down there. When Pop bought me the television, I really had no further need to go upstairs other than to eat and occasionally use the bathroom inside.

The television was a tiny black and white thing with an am radio and antennae. The screen was about 6 inches high and wide, but it was clear. When I watched Teri’s shows on it, her light blue eyes looked like ice. Those eyes were full of promise and optimism. She laughed a lot and always looked stung when another character did something nefarious. Teri’s characters always did the right thing. When she kissed a fella, it was always closed-mouthed and demure. I would practice her technique for hours on my hand, moving my thumb and the crook of my forefinger like her lips, only the glow of my tiny television to light my way. In those moments, Teri was the older, cooler friend, the MVP of the soccer team who was teaching me how to kiss boys.

I can’t explain the obsession really, other than to say that Teri was the antithesis of me, which is to say, everything a woman should be. I was short, muscularly chunky, with thick hips and a boy’s walk. People said I had pretty eyes and a pretty face, but I’d never win Miss USA. I’d never be a surfer-girl or one of the lead actress in the number one soap opera in the country. I’d never have a soft, goose-down of blonde fur all over my body or grow taller than five feet. No boy would ever believe that he could break me in two with just a hug. I wasn’t fragile. Nor did I live in California, my dream-land at the time. I lived in the woods in New Hampshire.

If I could have told Little Me that California is actually a cesspool where people leave their souls to die and where one day, after Big Me made it all the way to the other side of the country to soak in those smoggy rays, that a Supervising Producer (Big Me’s boss) would call her a dumbass-retard in front of the whole crew, as she gets nervous and mixes up cell phone numbers on a call sheet, on a stupid salmon fishing show in the middle of bumfuck, maybe Teri Ann Linn would never have happened to me. Maybe Little Me would have been like, “Well that sounds like the shittiest place on earth and no I don’t think I’ll be pursuing employment in Hollywood. I think I’d rather be a dolphin trainer or President of the United States.” Maybe little me would have thought that Gilda Radner or Denise Huxtable was the epitome of beauty. Instead, television made Hollywood and all the folks who worked and lived there look like walking wet-dreams, even in black and white.

One day I plucked up the courage to write to my dream girl, Teri. In a short, letter, I professed my adoration for her and mailed it off to her publicist in Los Angeles. Six weeks later I got a reply. A manila envelope arrived at my rural route address with a printed return seal from Teri’s publicist’s office and inside was an 8x10 glossy, black and white headshot of Teri with her signature scrawled across the bottom. Her eyes were still gray, just as I knew them to be from my screen, her hair was huge, her shoulder pads impressive, and her teeth ultra-white. She was there in the room with me in all her perfect blonde glory.

From that moment on, everything I did was for Teri’s benefit. I moved in my life as if she were watching. While I rode the bus to school, Teri stared at me from her gilded gold frame that I’d snagged at a yard sale for .25 and she reminded me to smile at the boys as they walked by, something I’d not even thought to do until Teri eyes were on me all the time. When I stared at myself in the mirror at school and applied my mom’s stolen makeup, Teri watched on with approving eyes and I imagined she whispered, “A little more blue eye shadow. You really want your eyes to pop.” I applied more blue to the lids of my already popped blue eyes. When Carl Brown told a joke in History, I laughed louder than I had the day before because Teri was there and she was laughing too, which is what you do when cute boys say something funny. When she sat on my desk during algebra, I stared intently at the chalkboard, my pencil ready to strike my notebook with formulas, like Algebra was my favorite fucking thing in the world and like I was like, super studious, and this would totally help me get into Wellesley, so like, yeah, Algebra’s like, rad. My ponytail got higher, my bangs got bigger. I wore hoop earrings and stuffed my shoulders with pads I’d fashioned from the bra inserts that were supposed to hide my twelve-year-old nipples from the world. But fuck it. Teri had nipples and so did I! Teri watched me as I slept and ate and daydreamed of Hollywood.

We never spoke.

That’s not the relationship we had.

We very rarely made eye contact. Teri existed as a checkpoint in my world, an omnipotent being that watched me and guided me. I had to perform for her, to make myself a better person, to be a less awkward, shy person. She was a pretend life that seemed more real than the life I was living in the basement. Kids, and I’m sure some grownups, made fun of me, but I had rock solid resolve. They just didn’t understand. They were living half-lives.

Eventually, I fell for Prince and he helped me live a more spiritual, rock star-like life. No one knew that I was an incredibly skilled guitar player and lover. No one knew that purple was my power color. But Prince? Yeah. He and I knew. Then I moved on from Prince and into another actress or singer or dancer or tennis player. I had a picture on me at all times. I’d learned to keep smaller pictures stripped from magazines or the TV Guide in my pocket or in the lining of my book bag. They were always there with me, my Gods. Some I wanted to be like. Some I wanted to love or be loved by. Kate Winslet followed me around for some of my twenties when I wanted to write scripts that I thought she’d want to star in.

Then, in 2005, I started working in reality television.

I never carried a picture of any celebrity artist again. Reality television broke my skull open. I saw everything that I had been, this strange acting for a being that wasn’t there or acting for cameras that didn’t exist. The absurdity of it. The chaos. The utter unreality of it. I watched cast members performing for God-like cameras covering every angle of their lives and I hated myself. This multi-billion-dollar business was creating (I was creating) a hoard of zombies who wanted to be anything but themselves. Their audiences lived through the drama and projected the kind of acting I’d been doing most of my life. Were there any real humans left?

My reality production career was short lived. I hopped around on a few shows until the previously mentioned salmon show when Putin in a shitty mini-dress and cowboy boots decided to use me as a punching bag for her and the crew’s amusement. But hey! I’d made it all the way to California, where bleach was never in stock and eating disorders had their own pro-support groups which competed with plastic surgeon’s waiting rooms for the saddest fucking place on the planet. I lived up in the hills in Hollywood until I was let go for “incompetence” by the lady dragon, who truth be told was just nervous I’d spill the beans about the coke-running operation she’d set up in ports all over the country when she wasn’t taking it up the ass from the gold-toothed captain she’d been chasing for months. My “incompetence” left me homeless and with a reason to finally leave the golden land.

Two years later, safely nestled on the east coast, where I belong, I sat down to write a novel, Viral. I couldn’t shake the idea that there was a psychological reason we create unreality and are, at the same time, obsessed with scripted reality. I was looking for words or a diagnosis in the DSM, but couldn’t find one. Depersonalization came up a lot, but that wasn’t really it. Then I stumbled on Fiction Depersonalization Syndrome and it hit the nail on the head. The world kinda stopped for an hour or so as I read up on it.

If you are my friend or family, you’ve heard this before and I won’t be mad if you want to skip over this part or go watch a puppy video or something. I don’t shut up about it because it literally changed my life. I thought it would change everyone’s life, but it didn’t. I think, maybe, folks don’t want to understand this kinda stuff about themselves. Bliss is ignorance and all that. I hope that changes.

Simply stated, FDS is “the feeling of being detached from one’s mental processes or body; as if an observer. People often describe the experience as watching oneself as if in a movie, or a dream.” David Zweig’s site above, goes on to explain that most people experience FDS in response to “childhood trauma, or a present terrifying experience where one disassociates with oneself as a sort of defense mechanism. Depression and anxiety additionally are often listed as potential triggers.”

Yeah. All of the above for me. How about you?

I started wondering how many of us were experiencing FDS on a daily basis, for months, or maybe even years. Were we all triggered in 1992 when The Real World aired for the first time? Or was it Cops? Or Jerry Springer? When I started writing, Viral, which is about a woman who has completely lost her shit after working in reality television and goes on to try to find some good old glory by rigging a camera in the restaurant where she works, thereby capturing an after-hours rape instead, I discovered that — holy fuck — FDS is running rampant in our society. Aided by our devices being on our person at all times and the curating of our personal lives in little pictures on that little screen, we are, quite literally, ruled by our own camera gods. We are reality television and the Enquirer squished together, the cream filling in a shit-storm sandwich.

We’ve been living in this alt-reality for so many years now that we barely flinch when 80,000 of our fellow citizens tip the scale and vote in a shitty performer as our president. Their fear of “other” leads them to believe the fantasy, the fake news, the propaganda. Rather than picking an experienced, steady woman to lead us, they chose a baboon. No. That’s unfair to baboons. They chose a reality star. FDS, in the form of a pussy-grabbing, skull ’n’ bones, man-baby, just ejaculated all over our face and hair and some of the infected spunk even got on the dog. We are now living in a scripted reality, my friends. This is triple penetration. Open wide.

When I started writing my character, Scarlet, I thought she’d be a superhero, a supreme vigilante, a citizen journalist. She would be the only one out there daring to tell the truth, but that’s not who Scar is. She’s a fuck up, really. She’s so lost in the blackness and guilt of her life that she can’t see straight enough to toe the line. She’s been living in her unreality for years. She can’t always figure out how to do the right thing. Fear drives her. She’s wondering, how are we to be our truest selves in the world anymore when you have The Kardashians and the fake news and the recession and White Supremacists telling you what you should be, for God and Country?

Let’s be honest though. We are bumbling idiots with bodies full of trauma and lives full of mistakes and uncertainty. We’ve been fired. We’ve been laid-off. We lost everything during Bush’s recession. We started out as coal miners and ended up as salespeople and house-painters and snowplow drivers. We’ve re-invented ourselves hundreds of times. We must. We must always. Some of us have college degrees. A whole fuckload of us don’t. We’ve found new families and new religions with our new careers. We lost so many of the people we care about to wars for oil and natural causes. Some of us found love. Most are still searching. All this sound familiar? We’re in it together is all I’m saying. Just put down the reality show and tuck away the cameras in your brain. Look past the device, man.

It takes Scar a long time to find the reality. It took me 30 years. I hope, for the millions living in this unreality, that they find and forgive themselves. When you get there, anxiety starts to seep away and you stop giving a fuck what anyone thinks. Truth becomes stronger than the lies that pad our skewed beliefs. There’s never a doubt about what is right or wrong anymore. You don’t need brands to prove your worth or a certain style to be what is right at the moment. You don’t have to act anymore. I promise. It’s exhausting anyway. Just ask Teri Ann Linn.