Three years back, I created 13 alternate accounts on Discord and inserted them into my friend group over the course of a few months, pretending each of them was a new person. They have their own personality and typing / grammar distinctions, and their own fake life events and stories that I've had to keep meticulous track of. Some of them even engaged romantically with real people, though none in the present day. Nowadays the original friend group is split up, with some fake people being present in about each server that still has some kind of connection to the former group. One active group chat even has six alts and one real person. I literally have to keep this up like a puppetmaster because these pretend people have real, important connections to people I still care about. It's hard but I literally don't know how to resolve or change the situation without causing a wave of dispair and destruction in one way or another.
This reminds me of the time I accidentally fully replaced someone’s friendship with a friendship with myself.
how did this happen
Lolol, so like my husband says that I worded that weirdly and so I might have communicated the wrong Idea but like.
I went to three different high schools. In the third one I made friends with this one dude, we’ll call him Mike. He would frequently tell me stories of this legendary dude who graduated the year before, pseudonymed Eric. Apparently Eric had gotten a nickname for his beard, The Dangerous Beard, and Mike kinda fawned over him, even made a theme song for this beard. I met Eric once or twice casually with Mike, so like, he was a known face to me, I was a known face to him. Apparently, like, he was less close friends with Mike than Mike thought they were, but, y'know, it was still something.
So jump forward a couple years. We’ve all drifted apart some. Eric shows up at my workplace and like he knows my face but can’t place me, so I start singing this theme song for his beard. I thought I was just placing myself as that friend of Mike’s, but apparently his mind kinda slotted me into the memories of Mike, in place of Mike. We had some more chance get togethers that had this kinda mood over the next few months. Like half a year later I’m having a smoke break and Eric and I are chatting, and a friend of his comes by and he introduces us, and it’s clear from like the things he’s saying that, like, he is now convinced that he and I went to school together (we didn’t) and that I was good little weird lackey (I wasn’t) and that I made up all sorts of stories about the adventures of his beard and this theme song (I didn’t). I froze and didn’t know how to handle the situation, and so I just kinda went with it.
It is now over two decades from high school, and like we’re not close friends but we chat, and he supported me through my transition, I helped him through a hard break up and helped him get a business started, so like we have this real connection, but it’s rooted in this fake high school relationship that HE HAD WITH SOMEONE ELSE AND I DON’T KNOW IF HE’S REALIZED THAT AND JUST ROLLED WITH IT.
So yeah. I replaced a dude in another dude’s memories, and it’s been so long now that how do I even fix that?
ALT