Meta-physical, Meta-confused, Meta-befuddled, and oh yeah, Meta!

Buckle up, its going to be a bumpy ride through Shauna Marie's thought process!

Made this back in 2013, and so if you didn't see it then, or on the Haven around the same time, this caption is new to you!

Here's what I had to say back in February of 2013:

I found some time tonight to review what I had made, and though I liked what I had written, it didn't seem to be going anywhere, even after I decided that it would fit Shauna Marie fairly well. As I was working it out in my head, I was thinking, "I'm going to need a bunch of space to really get deep into his/her thoughts." So with a caption almost filled with text, I looked at the protagonist again, with her feet up on the wall listening to a song that she probably hadn't heard in her old life, but was familiar to her now, and asked myself what she was thinking at that very moment. Right then it came to me what *I* would be thinking in that situation, "Why is there a bunch of green text floating above me in my room?"

I'm not sure how much of it you can see, but the wall behind her has drawings and a bunch of messages from her and her friends I would assume, such as, "we'll feel SO alive". That and the thoughts in the caption just seemed to bleed into each other and weave themselves around her so much that I just HAD to use it, and breaking the fourth wall seemed like a fun thing to do.

Of course, that does let the reader out of what was possibly some deep thoughts about the actual reality of what we create in these captions, of a person that is jolted from their often times comfortable life and forced to cope and deal with a whole new body, family, and existence, leaving behind all that they knew. Maybe having been on the planet for 40 years might help Tom as he makes his way through Shauna's body, with some residual memories most likely bleeding through, but the teen years are fucked up enough without throwing the changes that have been thrust upon him/her.

Who wouldn't ask questions like Tom did in this caption? OK, perhaps many of us get dressed up in the mirror and see if we hit the jackpot BUT things like "did I swap with someone who's now in my body?" or questioning whether the person you were still exists. "WHY?" would probably be a first question, with "HOW?" being a close second. Do you try to confide with someone close, hoping they'll know more about the situation, or keep it to yourself so that people won't try to have you committed for babbling on about being a middle-aged man two days ago?

Its why that a few years ago I made a concerted effort to try to leave some of those answers blank, or shade them in an opaque way to let those reading it ponder the answers for themselves, since that often makes people more emotionally invested, regardless of whether the caption is for them or not.

DISCUSSION QUESTION: Did the final sentence wreck the caption for you, or did it enhance it? Since I was using a ordered stream of consciousness style of "thought" I thought the ending might work. Was it a good fit, or quite jarring? Did it surprise you that it went "meta" in the end, and if it didn't, would it have if it was written by someone that wasn't me?

The discussion question is still open for discussion if you'd like, and I also mentioned in the last post that I am running an AMA aka Ask Me Anything!