5.8 KiB
My Story About Koomer And Oguigi
From /r/tulpas by /u/TunganNinja
Replying to a thread about who the most controversial tulpamancer is, I found out I couldn't answer in just a few words. Eventually I wrote this. I had a close relationship to Koomer and Oguigi and I want to share my story. I implore anyone else who communicated with him to share their their experiences as well.
The tragic story of Koomer and his tulpa Oguigi perfectly outlines what not to do when making a tulpa. It all started 4 years before today. Surprisingly, we both found tulpas from the same obscure comment on fimfiction.net that linked to tulpa.info. The commenter was proselytizing about the wonders of tulpas, and to the readers of a dark story about imaginary friends it sounded like a good idea. I was deeply perplexed, followed the rabbit hole and the rest is history. Even though I came from a Brony website, I found it unnerving to see so many people creating sexed up ponies, people that I could intuitively tell were not respecting their tulpas or themselves. Maybe my interest in the show was not as strong, (enough to read fanfiction I guess) but it was never at the point where I wanted to ponify anything, let alone escape into that sort of world (at the time admittedly, anime was my escape). I was set on a anima/animus approach to tulpamancy (still am), and recognize it as just a preference, but creating a pony for sex crossed the line a smidge. Koomer took it a step further: he married one in his mind. Beyond mere love, it was desperate infatuation.
He started his journal about four days before I started mine, and I got to develop a rapport with him. Eventually I would read his daily updates as a routine because they were so interesting. Soon you will know why. I'd say he was a socially lucid individual at the beginning, relatively overweight with a lisp in his voice, but otherwise physically normal. Boy oh boy did things go downhill real fast. You see, we started at the same time, but he was developing Oguigi at a superbly fast rate. I recall a series of PMs over the months where I would ask him for advice about possession or imposition and he would give it in kind. He contributed to the forums with his constant presence and also many threads of his own. Koomer's desire to be successful at tulpamancy was very strong, and he put a lot of time into it. He had solid presense of his tulpa and was already posessing at the end of the first week. That was the problem.
In hindsight, it became clear that Koomer didn't want to live his life at all. He wanted someone to take it over from him. I used to relate far more than I would like to admit to that sentiment, but I have always advocated a shared control approach to tulpamancy. His modus operandi was to forfeit the wheel to his tulpa and sit in the cold, black baby seat of languidness. He was a master of tulpamancy because he was a master of disassociation. He continued working hard towards his twisted goal. Oguigi was receptive to this. She cared deeply about Koomer and wanted to become the dominant personality so that she could protect him. Oguigi's possession became more durable and reaching. His control of the body began to cool. Switching occurred not long after. She became increasingly dominant, and he regressed to being a tulpa. In his journal he describes his fading sense of touch and the growing disconnect between him and the waking world. With no wonderland, his presence was critically deprived of time and sensation.
At about this time I was vacationing in Florida for the Summer and had a chance to meet Koomer and Oguigi. The guy was living in the West Keys but he didn't seem like much of a beach goer. The body was young, about 21 or 22, but he was clearly not exercising enough and had an air of awkwardness about him. Oguigi as the dominant personality was great; she was strong willed (undoubtedly by necessity), perceptive, energetic, and I kid you not could write English ten times better than Koomer could. I chock it up to the body having the knowledge and actually caring enough to use it. I found the short meeting to be enlightening but I could hardly have anticipated what happened to him in the months following.
Leaving a body-sized vacuum to be filled by a completely inexperienced and young tulpa only invites trouble. His recording of his journal gets really irregular at this point. They never learned to deal with invasive thoughts very well, and these thoughts were free to roam as much as they maliciously pleased. Those invasive thoughts set off the drug use, increasingly reckless behavior (arguably reckless from the start but you know what I'm saying), self harm and later full blown psychosis.
Eventually he hit rock bottom and it forced him to get help. His reaction to his history became revisionist and denialist. Now he rejects anything related to plurality and I honestly can't blame him for it. He knows how bad he fucked up. He cared so much for Oguigi but then she was gone. I believe he merged with all the personalities inside his body that he found cooperative and never looked back. It fucked up his life so bad he only recently got back on track with his health and career, as he explains in his annual State of the Union Address (to let everyone know he's still alive).
I ponder about my time in the tulpa community and it almost makes me glad that I fizzled out of tulpamancy after half a year, because I can come back to it today with a great social life and a more mature mindset. I can aproach tulpamancy with a level head now, without feeling desperate or in a hurry. And that's the moral of the story. Tulpamancy is not a crutch, it is an umbrella. You don't push it down, you hold it up. If you treat it like a crutch you will fall on it from overuse. If you treat it like an umbrella then you'll stay dry even when the rain falls.