Exceedingly productive journal entry today. Perception => reality. He and I lived two different marriages. Mine was rich and healthy, gave room for growth and change. His was whatever it was. Both are fictions we created.

A lot of my cognitive dissonance is in realizing HOW different they really were.

I’d expect the fictions we had created to differ a little, like the book vs the movie - the basic plot is the same, though one edited for pace. The characters are mostly the same except some particular casting is wonky.

This was two entirely different plots. Different characters. Different arcs.

Mine was rich with exploration and discovery, loving and supportive and seeking meaning. Mine was a book series with a poetry offshoot, a handful of side-story novellas, maybe even some fanfic(?).

His was a CSI style formulaic TV procedural with no depth, no growth, no change. Characters are the same in season 1 as they are in season 8. Some episodes are interesting or entertaining, but overall they blend together. He said it - he was looking for a peak. (season finale!)

It’s not my fault or a reflection of me that I got cast in a boring tv show. And while an actor whose skills far outweigh a shitty procedural can chew the scenery for a while, eventually they get a movie role.

And a tv-procedural level actor might get a film role, but odds are high that their scene would get edited out.

Let alone a flat character my life. Eventually while editing I would realize that they didn’t really contribute anything to the plot. They didn’t grow and change. They weren’t particularly sympathetic to a reader. Killing them off would be a waste of word count.

Just have to delete their dumb sub plot entirely. They were just there to give the protagonist a safe place to talk about stuff, and she has soooo many more interesting characters to do that with than this guy, who are far more 3-dimensional.

Yep. INFJs really do door-slam. I am deleting a useless character from my story.