I was about to turn 21 when I met inspiration.

The night we met, he asked me what I did.
I said I was a student.
He asked me, no, what did I really do.
I told him I was a writer, which was the first time I’d introduced myself as such or comprehended that I was anything of the sort.

I spent a few months lusting after him, but after that initial buzz wore off, I realized that more than I wanted to DO him, I desperately wanted to BE him.

He was creative. He was a loose canon. He was stylish and smart and friendly and funny. He knew lots of things about a community I wanted to immerse myself in. He had great taste in music, was a super dancer, sent fantastic care packages filled with stickers and mix tapes, and had a background not unlike mine (or at least, more like mine than your average 20something product of the suburbs). He had a name like mine, and liked to talk big ideas like I did.

Two years ago, I had the opportunity to reunite with this famous icon of my past. The inspirer. The prophet. The idol. Sure, we’d chatted now and again, but I hadn’t seen his face since 1996, and I wanted to hold his gaze and tell him clearly how much he meant to me; what a pivotal role he’d played in my most earth shattering era of personal growth and transformation.

(Do you see where this is going? I’ve never been much for the subtle set-up.)

Our reunion was an absolute disappointment of the most cataclysmic sort. Not only did nothing click between us, but I looked around to find my hallowed hall of personal worship was totally tacky and garish. Suddenly, the charming behaviors were transparent. The intelligence was reduced to bong hit philosophizing. Where once the sun rays of benevolence had shown, I found a slightly deflated priest in the pulpit, and it was disappointing.

What else could it be, really? Who could possibly live up to someone’s personal mythology?

“You played such an important role in my life!” I said through the swirl of cocktail lighting, figuring that at the very least it would be flattering, and if nothing else, he did always like to be flattered.

“Did you want to split a pill?” he asked in response, shouting over the music.

Needless to say, the illusion was shattered. The crumpled Christ was quietly taken off the cross in my head and put away in a corner of the basement while I reassessed.

How could I have been so deluded and confused to think that THIS person was so inspirational? He hadn’t really changed all that much, although he’d gotten a degree, and a career, and was successful and still chipper. He was still a charmer, just not charming to me. His knowledge about the community I had spent several years immersed in suddenly didn’t seem quite so impressive. Hell: I knew more about my corner of it than he did.

After much licking of my personal development wounds (which would those be? The herniated misconceptions? The blistered ego? The yeast infected disillusionment?), reading of old journals, and thinking over of it all, I realized that I’d committed a psychological misstep that even a first year college student could identify:

I had projected.

I happened to meet this inspirational person at a pivotal point in my life. I was changing quickly, drastically, and I had a hazy subconscious picture of where I wanted to go…a fuzzy, poorly focused image that came snapping into view when I met this man who happened to be somewhat in alignment with what I’d envisioned for myself.

Then, everything that was happening in me, I decided was thanks to him. Nothing that exciting could actually be IN me. It had to be attributed to someone else. HIM!

What a brutally unfair thing! Nothing sucks worse than watching someone else get all the credit for your hard work, and my internal middle manager must have just been seething with resentment. “I put in the overtime, I map out the project management schedule, and then this dumb-ass comes in and takes all the credit! God damn it. I’m calling human resources.”

Middle manager, O’ Heidi of my psyche, I give you now a promotion. Good job. You rocked. Sorry I gave that dumb-ass all credit. (In retrospect, of course, the poor object of my projection wasn’t a dumb-ass at all: just someone who happened to get caught in the crossfire of my social/psychological personal development. Jeez. Not his fault.)

Recently, I’ve found myself on the OTHER side of the projector. An ex-boyfriend is getting married this summer, and Andreas and I have been invited to attend. I’m quite honored to get to go…the ex and I have managed to stay in decent touch over the almost 10 years since we broke up, and I’ve almost forgiven both of us for how awful we were together.

But the funny thing is that my ex has recreated a history in which we were a happy, blissful, fantastic couple. A revisionist memoir in which he never threw me out of his house over scrambled eggs, or stood shaking a spatula from his balcony screaming, “And bitch, don’t ever come back!” His collection of sepia-toned mental snapshots don’t include the dozens of times he hissed at me to stop “acting so weird” in front of his friends, or each occasion when we decided to break up, only to reunite in pathetic, co-dependent celebrations of being weak-willed horny 19 year olds without enough courage to meet anyone else. He recently — wistfully — called me his “artistic writer ex-girlfriend,” … quite a change considering that the my quirky artsy side always seemed to bother him when we were dating.

Do I resent him any of these rosy memory lapses? Not one bit. I tried correcting him a couple times (”…how can you not remember the eggs?”), but I stopped after deciding that we all need certain people to play a part in our lives. We assign them into the roles that need filling. I had an opening for “rave messiah” in 1996. My ex has an opening for “free-spirited former partner who symbolizes youth and by-gone-days.” We all take our places, and wait for the curtain to rise.