STEALING A PERSONA TO COVER AN EMPTY IDENTITY

As a writer, you expect audiences to read your work, reflect on it, and perhaps find a piece of themselves within the pages. What you do not expect is for individuals to steal your fictional worlds, slip into them like costumes, and attempt to drag you into a chaotic, manufactured reality. For years, I have witnessed a bizarre and exhausting phenomenon: people taking my fiction—specifically my book *"Waiting Eyes on the Road"* and * Without *—attempting to play out its characters in real life, weaponizing my own creativity against me.

They constantly switch back and forth between two entirely different identities: one moment acting as a struggling, marginalized immigrant or a poor individual, and the next moment pretending to be an original, established Canadian or rich person. This fluid, chaotic shape-shifting—using my book's themes as a playground—is the ultimate sign of having no real identity. They don't know who they are, so they look to my text to tell them who to be today.

This behavior raises critical questions about copyright, human psychology, and the desperate lengths to which some will go to escape their own reality.

The first, most practical question is logistical: how do individuals who have never legally purchased my books become so intimately aware of their contents? In the digital age, copyright infringement and unauthorized sharing run rampant. Whether through public previews, digital scraping, or illicit private sharing, these groups bypass legal boundaries to access my work without authorization.

But the deeper question is not how they read it—it is why they are so utterly obsessed with it. Why are my fiction books so important to them that they are willing to completely abandon their own lives to play-act inside mine?

The answer lies in a profound crisis of identity.

As the old adage goes, a person who truly knows who they are has no desire to pretend to be someone else. Someone secure in their own skin never tries to force themselves into the role of a book hero, nor do they desperately pretend to be a "suffering character" to garner unearned sympathy.

When people lack a genuine sense of self, they "rent" identities from fiction. They desperately want to be fiction because being real is too painful. They have built a reality full of mistakes, deception, or a lack of personal achievement. They believe that if they play a character convincingly enough, the world will forget who they actually are. They use a stolen script because real life requires accountability, and a fictional script allows them to control the narrative. By casting themselves as the victim or the protagonist, they try to force the author into the role of the villain—be it an abusive mother-in-law, an ex-husband, or a bitter ex-lover.

This desperate need for control doesn't stop at the plotlines of a book; it spills over into an obsession with my real-world finances. For years, I have noticed these same groups hyper-focusing on and criticizing my financial status. They alternate rapidly between two extremes: either insisting that I am poor, or claiming that I am incredibly wealthy, and then shifting their behavior to fight against whichever imaginary version of me they’ve created.

They walk around me constantly demanding that I shouldn't have done this or that, projecting their own financial anxieties onto my life. They claim my actions are "signs of being rich," while simultaneously demanding jobs and money from me. In an attempt to suppress my reality, they threaten me, saying, *"Don't say you have money," "Don't say you can afford this,"* or *"Don't say you can do this or that,"* simply because they cannot do it themselves.

Another group assumes that anything I say or do is directly related to my book characters. Regardless of the fact that these are works of fiction, they use these stolen characters as reality, questioning my every step as if I somehow became a criminal just by writing those books. They invent wild theories about my life—imagining that maybe I am an addict, a politician, or extremely wealthy, or that I escaped from my family or be this or that.

One fact that amuses me most is that even businesses are involved in this play-act. Their communication completely changes, shifting as if they have known me from the past, have some mysterious connection to higher powers, or are even spies from other countries. This wild fiction-playing has been spinning completely out of hand for years.

It is utterly ridiculous to witness. They are terrified of my writing, terrified of my independence, and terrified of the truth. Because they cannot elevate themselves, they try to pull me down, using my own words as weapons to police my budget, my lifestyle, and my success. Some individuals crossing the line control my finances by interference in my daily life preventing I close my deals or travel or even step out of my proprty constantly looking for my books characters in my life .

The tragedy of their behavior is that it is a trap of their own design. You cannot build a stable life on stolen text, borrowed identities, and financial envy. They think covering the truth with lies and playing a character can make others feel sorry for them or force me into submission.

But reality cannot be erased by theatrical roles. The harder they try to manipulate the narrative through lies, intellectual property theft, cheating, and fighting against the author, the deeper they drown in the false dirt they have created for themselves.

As a writer, my identity is secure, and the worlds I create belong to me. They can try to play dress-up in my characters' clothes , but at the end of the day, they are still the ones wandering around in the dark, desperately looking for a costume to wear.