Beginning. Middle. End. Three things which define a story.
At 4am one should really be asleep, but after a solid 2-3 days of work and all the related stress that comes with academics, it can be justified to reward someone with a chance to flex their body clock's muscles. Or, in short, to not care about their lectures tomorrow afternoon and hope they don't miss breakfast. 09:30am is a cruel deadline for food.
Rewind. Within the last 48 hours I was struck with the realisation that I was actually angry. There's a point I should make here - I don't really have the time of day to be angry. 2008 was the year I was taught patience, the hard way. Hard being the key word here. When you learn a "skill" like patience under testing conditions, are you actually undermining the foundation of what you're learning or enhancing it with real life experience? I would have said the latter, and I reckon I still would do now. But I will still cast doubt on this.
Angry? Why? Teenage angst striking again in these, my final 6 weeks of being a teenager? Hardly. Not to scoff the idea of random bouts of emotional flux, but that is something I like to believe I have grown out of. No, this anger was genuine, if unexpected.
Seriously, why then? I can be sure that the reason was slow burning and part of a chain effect. I learnt patience via burying my troubles at the time and never addressing them again. While I said to one poor best friend that she "could never understand" and so was useless to talk to because she "couldn't ever provide sympathy" or see my viewpoint, I probably should have not been so dismissive (or rude). I would preach one thing and contradict it myself. My advice of always talking to a friend when in need fell on my own deaf ears. This is the beginning of the story.
Bottled up experiences with no release valve therefore have a horrid tendency to reappear now and then. A simple trigger is all that is needed. This trigger was a card with a mouse on it. The mouse has no relevance.
The card is from one person I could possibly pin all blame on. I won't because no single person is solely responsible and you yourself can never be absent from blame. You're involved the moment you react, regardless if you wanted to or not. The card sends greetings, well wishes and an invitation. An invite to have a family Christmas dinner. This is the trigger of the story.
Family is a word I hold both dear and distant. My family is, and always will be, my priority in life. I've always loved my family, I still do, and one day I will love my own. But take it with a pinch of sodium chloride. There are some experiences in the world which stretch even that very tight bond and I fear mine has stretched too far, like a jumper stretched beyond repair. And having never directly addressed every issue in the chain of events, the damage may be done for many years or decades.
The blanket and support of a family was cut from me, somewhat faster and cruder than the average teenager experiences by simply growing up and moving onwards. The blanket itself now lies in torn chunks and that makes it rather hard to have Christmas dinner. This is the middle of the story.
Last year I sought a new blanket and found it with a friend or two. And what good blankets they were. This year I don't know what to do. A false proposal of a "family" made from the original blanket but which remains incomplete is pitted against a real family, albeit not my own but a damn fine replacement. I'm leaning towards the latter, but subtle guilt trips are the trigger. They spark the chain.
What's in this chain? Near enough anything that has happened in the past 3 years, or even 6 years. A spiral of illogical thinking cascades the situation. First being angry over a guilt trip triggers a memory of why things are how they are. Anger results as you realise how this actually has altered the way you act for years now. Then you notice the effects of your actions which you wish you could change, and could have, had this chain of events not started. Triggers cause memories, which cause anger and regret.
Regret that many things could have been different in the past 2 years had I acted differently. But you can't act differently when things in the background are controlling you at the time in ways you don't realise. And as everything is bottled up, no problems are addressed and solved. With nothing solved, triggers in the future remind you of these unsolved problems. The chain continues. The story ends.
Every story has a moral at the end of it. Mine is simple - don't leave a problem unsolved. Talk about it, because suppressed things come back to bite you and can easily result from an indirect trigger. The drama that can follow can almost form a story. My story? It begins with me ignoring problems, so that one trigger reminds me of one problem, cascading to another problem and another in a chain. In the end, it's all a bit out of control. Seriously kids, don't bottle shit up.
Who knew one Christmas invite could incite such irritation?
Bah, humbug.
Average Ken x
