 OK. So he didn’t have a lot to start with. Born in Burnie and raised between Launceston, Queenstown and Hobart. His big city experiences are pretty thin on the ground.
I have met a lot of people who grew up in small towns who had strong, distinctive personalities. Kade (not his real name) is not one of them. Kade isn’t a real person at all. Because he’s about six different people I know.
I wouldn’t have noticed it if I was new to his life. But we have known each other both in person and online for years now. And watching his social networking profiles developing over the last few years, I can see a startling pattern. He is stealing other people’s lives.
His first boyfriend was a physics professor. Kade now lists “Quantum Mechanics” as one of his passions. Kade has never been to university and I doubt he’s ever read a single page of a book on the required reading list of the UTAS Physics Department.
His second boyfriend was an adviser to the Liberal Party. Kade now lists political science as an interest. I know for a fact that he hasn’t voted in the last three general elections.
A guy he was “sorta seeing” online and eventually in person was Portuguese and a mad-keen soccer supporter. Kade’s relationship with this guy consisted of two nights in a hotel in Cairns. Yet he owns three Chinese-made T-shirts that say “Portugal” on them and peppers his Facebook profile with status updates extolling the virtues of another victory for Portugal football. Needless to say, he’s never been to Portugal.
He was obsessed with a rather well-built guy who lived in Western Australia for a while. The guy liked him enough, but fell short of an in-person meeting stating, “I am really into smooth guys with gym-built bodies”. Kade hit the gym madly for about six months, bragging about all the different protein powders and power bars he had consumed in a weekly blog he set up about the experience. And he shaved off his body hair, despite having very little to begin with.
When it comes to his taste in movies, Kade now lists the following as his favourites: What The Bleep Do We Know, Zeitgeist, Big Fish and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Now wait a second: that’s my list of favourite movies. They are movies I introduced him to. All four of them.
Kade, like a few young Tasmanian men I know, is not a real person. He is a patchwork quilt of other people’s passions and experiences. In what has often been called “Cannibal Compulsion”, he has seen something that, to him, seems exotic and interesting and made it his own. He has cannibalised the best bits of the people he’s met and turned their stories into his story.
It’s a very clever move designed to make his own story more interesting. But the fact that he grew up the way he did, with an interesting family and friends on a commune on our island’s north, makes for far better telling. His own real story is infinitely more interesting to me than the personality traits he has tacked on for effect. But I suppose I can’t even tell now if any of Kade’s history is really his story at all.
Friends and partners don’t last long in Kade’s life. They are usually relationships he has had “interstate” or experiences he has had “in Sydney”. Conveniently, there is no one in his life who has been around long enough to verify the stories.
He’s no longer in Tasmania and is unlikely to ever read this post. But a part of me hopes that Kade will find this and recognise himself in it. Because I think he’s a great guy without the special effects.
 |
Show/Hide comments
Show/Hide comment form
