“Ghosts from the past should remain in the past.”
~Vampire Hunter Dee
For quite some time, it was entirely possible to believe that the people who were trying to make me unreal believed that they could do so. I mean, drive me to death? Some people probably knew me so poorly they believed that. Drive me to go underground? Oh, I considered it, for a bitter time.
Incompetent enemies are strange. Attempting to simply deny, in every way, that someone was real, or that anything that person did was real, seldom works out well. This is as true for artists as it is for monstrous dictators. Monstrous dictators, if ignored, come back.
Artists, if you attempt to unperson them, will just unperson you right back.
Sometimes, I’m asked if I have compassion for the people who lied about me. My answer is that I don’t think most of them lied: I think they’ve absolutely chosen to live in a world where they’d rather believe in bad things that didn’t happen, rather than being happy.
People sometimes ask me if I’m going to get my revenge, if I’m going to do something worse to my opponents than what they do to themselves.
They’re ghosts from the past, sticking around, tormenting themselves with what they want the world to have been, rather than dealing with what it is.
This can’t last long. You can paint over cracked and peeling plaster, but no amount of paint will fix the way you took down a few load-bearing pillars with a sledgehammer.
Some people think I’m their worst enemy. I just want to reassure them:
“As long as YOU’RE around, no-one will ever be a worse enemy to you than you are.”
Somehow, this seldom cheers them up.
