Push and Relabel, Push and Shove*

I've been telling people I love the aesthetics of empty pages and white walls. This isn't entirely accurate. I've never been fascinated by a literal empty page. But I still feel that the description applies to me. What gives?

Like a good irresponsibly estimated 70% of frequent daydreamers (I'm deliberately avoiding the term maladaptive, because reasons), I have an imaginary fantasy world that I frequent. At this point it's been going on for nearly twenty years, so there's a lot happening there. Nevertheless, in most of my daydreams in that world, I've consistently stuck with a single self-insert character. He's not really fully like me, and I also don't want to think of him as my imagined ideal self, but nevertheless he is an image of how my values and desires would manifest if I had magical powers of cosmic magnitude. So, what are his traits? A rough sketch:

• Immortality and eternal youth, and not as an epic achievement or a reward. Death and aging are simply not concerns for him.
• Slow change across millions/billions of years.
• Consistency in beliefs.
• Multiple bodies, multiple lives, mind as a distributed system spanning millions of spontaneously/need-basis spawning bodies, with guaranteed convergence into single self/mind synchronization/avoidance of value drift.
• Avoidance of permanently limiting decisions. An identity that is concrete and developed, but which doesn't feature traits that would permanently set the course of further development in one way.
• A romance arc with one other character that remains open-ended across billions of years, with associated feeling of distant but intense mutual understanding, and shared regret, left unsaid, over not being able to be together for long spans of time due to each pursuing individual goals that don't intersect. A relationship that is safe in the sense of not having to worry about losing it to competition, but unsafe in the sense of having to worry about losing it to the passage of time and the uncertain nature of the next meeting.
• Independent academic inclinations. Strong desire to share knowledge, and help people escape the boundaries of reality, even of the supernatural reality of the world. Giving away power freely, but doing so on his own terms. A disrespect of limitations.
• A fundamental drive towards kindness, behind a very thin facade of nonchalance.
• Humorous approach to the world, but not in an archetypal trickster kind of way. Being silently proud of the fact that he would feel a little hurt if people around him didn't get the joke. 
• Even after aeons of existence, a persistent belief in being human on a foundational level.

What does this tell me? Again, a rough sketch:

• I'm non-committal, but not in the traditional sense of the word. I'm willing to commit to things forever, including at the exclusion of other things, so long the option to change my mind and return to the initial state remains, even if I never take it.
• I genuinely enjoy human existence, and have a strong desire to spread my individual human existence across space and time.
• I want people to understand the world in the same way as me, and to use the same methods as I do in breaking free of the restrictions imposed upon them. I resonate with the theme of common struggle against limitations.
• I believe that my values are defined on an emotional level, and that the point of rationality is to pursue the development of the world in which those values are realized. I don't see emotions and thought as opposing forces. Rather, I see emotions as possessing independent value but no transformative force, and thought as possessing transformative force but no independent value.
• I'm a bit awkward and unbalanced, but I take pride in my faults and insecurities. 
• Above all else, I see myself as a sort of an eternal outsider, but not in a self-pitying kind of way. That makes sense to me. Between the sun and the moon, I always go with the stars. Reconciling my human drives with my longing for the distant and infinite existence has been an ongoing semi-conscious struggle for me since all the way from the age of around 3, even if it wasn't always phrased that way.

Is this a good enough explanation? For me, I guess yes, but I do have access to my own mind, so I'm a little biased. But really, do I have to care? No.

 ___

 * It must flow.