ribble's Imaginary Arbiter

I have a very rich and varied internal life. One symptom of this is that I often find myself in need of someone in my head that I can talk to. This isn't anything like, say, Boris, who is an imaginary friend in the classic sense of the term. Nor is it anything like, say, schizophrenia. It's just that as long as I'm talking to myself in my own mind, I need to have another character in there who can serve as a sounding board, a neutral observer. Call it an arbiter.

I make no effort to decide what form this individual will take; they simply appear. It's like the cube game.

The first, way back when I was a kid, was an alien. An imaginary alien doesn't understand a lot about the world, so I spent a lot of time explaining things to him. He was a perfect sounding board for a kid because so much of being a kid is making sense of the environment around you. By explaining things to someone who didn't have anything to go on, I got to feel like I knew more than I did and to understand the things I explained more clearly for myself.


Eventually I outgrew the alien (although I could still draw him from memory if you asked me). Maybe I needed to be judged, maybe I just wanted to feel like a bright, talented, charming kid with a good future, but from somewhere around 10 or 12 I found my arbitrers were interviewers for entrance to high school and college. I explained my actions to them, told them why I did certain things, tried to get them to understand who I was as a person. This lasted even after I got in to College. Perhaps that was the central question of that time in my life: who am I? How can I explain this to myself in a way I can understand?

I don't remember an arbiter during College, maybe because there was always someone around to talk to, but at some point towards the end of school I found that the person I was talking things over with in my own mind was a psychologist. My central question is not one of self-discovery at this point, but of how to solve my problems in a way that will allow me to live a full and happy life.

I am talking about this now because this afternoon, for the first time, I caught myself imagining that I was explaining something to my own son.


I know how this happened. I have a new baby brother, now seven months old, and on a recent trip to visit my family I found I was able to appreciate him as an adult. This is a big deal - the first baby in my direct family I've been able to relate to not as a child but as a grown-up.

Now, I can't imagine this is universal, but babies are addictive. My baby brother is constantly learning, discovering new abilities, and watching me. Me! Very cool. Plus I'm relatively certain my baby brother is some kind of crazy super genius, Travolta-style.

There's a deeper issue here, though, and it's much more significant. Each of these shifts in an arbitar has accompanied a shift from one stage of development to another, a change in what I consider the most important question in my life.

I have been thinking a lot about starting a family, but I don't want anyone to learn the wrong lesson, here. I am not considering marriage and a baby (not anytime soon, anyway), but I am looking at myself as the head of a household, the decision maker in a family.

Now, it so happens that at the moment the only permanent member of my family is me, but already this simple shift in reference points is changing how I live my life. There's a big difference between the dorm room where I live temporarily and the home where I could live along with my family. There's also a difference between the job the head of a family has and the job I have coming out of college. I actually bought a carpet based on a judgement that it would be a comfortable place for me or my future offspring to lie on while reading some comics.

In school, I don't think I even considered buying a carpet.