Character ages and real ages

[Rose]

Hi everyone. I think this was covered once before but I can't seem to find the original post. Something that bothers me and is always lurking in the back of my mind is my character's ages vs their real ages.

My conundrum is: when the 'me' character was created I was 12 and he was apparently 45. Now, I am 28 and he should be 60, but he can't be. To start with, I had his whole life and childhood planned out, and I had a horrible time at school so most of his school life was basically a mirror of mine to help me deal with it. In hindsight, I was replacing my actual school years with his until I could handle it. Once I did (I went and spoke to one of my school teachers and basically worked through it all...then like a miracle I no longer could DD about it) I could then change him to be 40 and wipe out a heap of the "bad" years of his childhood.

I kept doing this thing of wiping out parts of his life that had become irrelevant and winding his age back, but all the auxiliary characters that are still around 15 years later, including his main friends, have grown older. I am on the slow MDD recovery path so his age and childhood isn't very important anymore, but sometimes I feel like I'm in a time warp. One day me and my alter ego will be the same age and I worry that when I get to my 40s I will keep growing older but he will not. Of course, I like to think I will be a normal person when I'm 40 and he won't be around anymore, but realistically I don't think that'll be the case.

Just wondering about how others deal with ages, especially those with long running DDs?

[OhMyMagenta]

For my longstanding DD characters, they age with me. Not much changes physically, but I know they have aged.

[Kay M]

The people in my main world age at the same rate I do. I started daydreaming about them four years ago. The character who was pregnant at the beginning now has a four year old. Other characters have been pregnant and had babies (I keep a list with those ticker things you see on parenting forums, to keep track of how old all the youngest characters are).

I have never had a daydream that lasted this long before, all the others only lasted a year at most, so the idea of them aging didn't come into it.

[Zolik]

I created my main character about 27 years ago (when I was around age 8) and he has stayed a similar age ever since, although his age isn't always consistent. Some days he's 35, some days he's 36, then he can go back to being 34 etc. But he was 27 when I created him and should be 54 by now, but he has been around 35 for at least 10-15 years now, with occasional jumps back or forward a couple of years. It's like I've been making up this story in my head, with countless alternative endings.

Side characters stay more or less the same age. They're practically all in their twenties and thirties.

[Alex]

Yeah, I've got a 12+ year I just "wipe" whatever history I later find to be incorrect and "rewrite" it in my mind. The first time I remember setting an age for my character, I chose for her to be born in '90 so five years older than me so she was 17-18 at the time. I later changed it to '92 to keep her at college-age, and she became my age when I went to college. I'm curious if when I'm past my prime I'll do the idealized age thing again like when I was a child, but make her younger instead, or if I'll just keep her the same age as me. 

Ages don't change by day though, my daydreams run in real time. So as the character's birthday comes and goes they age. As for other characters, some have static ages, some also age in real time. Kinda depends on what their role is, like close family and friends tend to age in real time. 

[Rose]

Thanks for the replies. I guess I feel a bit like Zolik, with the countless alternative endings.

[Vesta Harford]

My daydreams always centered around high school students who are 15 to 18 years old. Now that I'm nearly finished with high school, I feel like Peter Pan for sticking with my high-school-setting daydreams. When I was in middle school, the characters in my high school DD's seemed like awesome older brothers and sisters, but now they seem like babies! It's crazy and makes me sad.

I also replaced my horrible school years with my fake DD's, the characters' lives mirrored mine too, and I fear being a 40 year old woman fantasizing about high school students.

It's like being in a rekationship with a vampire. You age but they don't!

[Julie]

Your story is a bit similar to mine. I've also started daydreaming when I was 12 and he was 45. At some point I changed his age to 35, and he's stayed the same for years. Now I'm 26. In my DD, sometimes I'm 16, sometimes 26. He's supposed to always be older and wiser, so I sometimes think about what will happen when I get in my thirties... I also don't think he'll ever disappear, and I'm not even sure I'd want it.

[Rose]

Julie...that is so similar to me.