#like he perpetually feels unloved and unwanted on such subconscious level

[psalmsofpsychosis]

and tonight in Gotham TV news: Local 11 Years Old Fuckwit Tells His Loyal Butler That He's Not Afraid Of The New Kid Snatcher In Town Because "why would he come after me? there's noone to take me from," More At 8

[genuinelyscottish]

Change

Change is my arch nemesis. The fluctuation of schedule, the disintegration of routine, the lack of order evokes a literal feeling of sickness in the pit of my gut. Although I’ve always supposed this change-phobia is intrinsically linked with the mentality of rigidity which was drilled into me in the earliest of my childhood memories, recent events have taught me that perhaps change is not the multi-headed demon I so feared. Within three months, the very core of my fundamental beliefs about life, the universe and everything in it (a reference I would not have made in October!) have shattered and scattered across my corner of the planet.The presumptions I had made about how my life was going to go, what makes me happy and how I as a human being exist have become like dust swirling in the abyss - directionless, but perpetually in motion. These integral parts of my character are rapidly being reassembled as the choices I am making, the actions I am taking, and the words I am saying become finite and irreversible. Not that irreversibility is negative - in fact I would argue that stability and safety in the knowledge that my choices are definitive is what anchors me to them, and to the security they bring. And this ‘new me’ who finds herself being constructed as each day, each conversation unfolds? I think calling her ‘new’ would be entirely false. What is actually happening is a necessary growing up, a maturing which is essential to my progression as an individual towards my end goal (which, coincidentally remains steadfast amongst these most tumultuous of changes). 

My advancement as an individual has been so exponential these past three months, it is difficult to articulate without losing something. Without pandering to the English student in me too much, I’ve grouped my personality changes into three key areas which I think have been the most affected. 

1. The Fog

Ah, the fog. My good old friend, the destroyer of relationships; crux of my self-sabotaging need to overthink; drain on both my and those around me’s social energy. I’ve been grappling with you for almost an entire miserable decade, and only now as no longer being a teenager looms all the nearer have I finally began to dissect and dissolve you. You are an unwanted by-product of a broken brain, but it is my broken brain, and there is limitless beauty in brokenness. This swirling, all-encompassing, depressive grey is erasable, and recent changes have enabled me to take third-person-esque look at you and tell you that no more do you rule my life. You are not the winning party, or even a close second. My beautiful broken brain has entered a state of self-awareness where I can look at you, identify your source, and wipe it out. You do not define me any more. 

2. Social Energy

Aligning itself perfectly with this realisation of the fog’s origins, it has become apparent to me that social energy is the catalyst to the majority of problems in my mentality. They say the average person speaks around 16,000 words per day, and past-me was eager to not just meet, but exceed this target. Silence is uncomfortable, or so I’d taught myself. If someone is silent with you, they must despise you - you just aren’t entertaining, or funny, or interesting enough to merit conversation with. Whilst these thoughts occasionally rear their ugly heads when I can sense the quiet seeping in and the fog rattling in her cage, reassurance and the knowledge that no, I am an interesting person, and the people who are in my life are there because they want to be and because they think that what I have to say holds value allows me to solidify the imprisonment of the negative thoughts and embrace the silence. 

When twenty three out of twenty four hours (allowing for a collective hour of bathroom/snacking breaks) are spent in the company of another person, there is inevitably going to be that moment when conversation runs a little short. That is healthy, and that is normal. I am writing this here partly as a message to anyone who stumbles across this blog, but also as a reminder to myself in the future that constant mindless conversation is not necessarily more desirable than one forty minute debate about something both parties feel educated and invested in. Accumulating knowledge about areas of common interest is a key way to ensure that conversation remains refreshing and interesting, and living a life outside the time spent together is perhaps the main way to ensure that the reunions are all the more memorable because they are rich in conversation and excitement. But, the main takeaway is that silence is not the enemy, and reiterating this to yourself will help keep the fog at bay. 

3. Love

On a completely different topic, perhaps the core strand of my personality which has found itself being fairly violently plucked after almost two decades of minor flicks is my capacity to love and to be loved. I thought I had found this love in another after he allowed me to dream and fantasise and plan, but I was naive and did not understand (or want to understand, really) that nothing would ever come of my obsession. I mistook an imagined fantasy for love, and now I’ve found the real thing, I laugh at what I thought I wanted. Some of the obsessive behaviours still haunted this the purest form of love at the beginning, but when it became apparent that living in the past and stalking social media religiously was in actuality doing nothing but detracting from the utter joy and bliss of the present, I learnt very efficiently that history is confined to the past. We experience the range of human emotions, from pure ecstacy to the deepest of sorrow at some point in life, and these experiences shape who we become. Without our stories, we don’t exist, but knowing someone’s story, and obsessing over things you had no part in and cannot do anything to change are two very different things. 

Being truly in love for the first time in my life has expanded my capacity to feel - to feel misery, to feel worry, but also to feel utter and exuberant joy and complete contentment in the presence of another. Love has been redefined - it is not striving for his affections by obscuring who you are, rather allowing yourself to enter the levels of complete acceptance of your body, your mannerism and your personality that are only usually felt when you return to your family home. Home, also, is a funny concept which I have found the definition of to be uprooted. The place I once called home has become a writhing pit of infernal reptiles, insistent that my happiness can only come from a church-approved source. Instead, we have built ourselves a home out of IKEA and Asda, a corner by the harbour where we watch the boats ebb and flow whilst we sit sipping coffee and whisper our forevers. He is my forever, and whilst I was concerned that I was allowing my stupid over-romantic heart to fall irrevocably again before it imploded because maybe I’m just unlovable, each day I am learning new ways to love him, and the intensity of the overwhelming joy I feel when I remember that he is mine, and I am his, is unlike any other feeling in this world. 

Hearing his story, learning his past and what built him into the bundle of humour, energy and cynicism he is today feels like remembering something I’d once known. Watching his quiet habits, the things he subconsciously allows his muscle memory to do evokes the strangest of reactions in me - my heart throbs with such an intensity I struggle to not place a hand on my ribcage to ensure it doesn’t physically burst out. Knowing that he is comfortable enough with me to let all his walls down, as he has so effectively demolished mine, our souls can connect at the purest of levels, intertwining in perfect harmony. Our love is the love of music, of poetry, not necessarily overly cliche because our beautiful broken brains would not cope with constant sap, but is instead humour-filled, fuelled by incessant teasing and intellectual challenging. What a relief to have found my perfect partner in this disjointed disaster we call existence! Holding his hand, curled against his chest, head filled with images of our wedding, our curly-haired babies, our life spent chasing each other round our forever home with the cats trying desperately not to be trodden on and our retirement where I finally learn to knit and he fiddles with old computer parts, insistent that ‘one day I’ll revive this old thing, just you wait!”, I am assured in myself that this is the real deal. We are end-game, the couple people are jealous of because our connection is not forced or reliant on proving ourselves, but instead natural and as effortless as breathing. I truly believe that destiny pushed us together, at the most inconvenient time in the most unlikely of settings to allow us to discover that through the (already fairly copious) trials the world will throw at us, we are anchored to each other and secure in our love, and together we’ll be from now into eternity. 

Anyway, I’m aware that this post is ridiculously long and now exploding with unbearable levels of romance, but this past three months has released my potential, my identity and my sense of self from the prescribed outline enforced by my upbringing, and that certainly warrants a fairly substantive post. 

With any luck, I’ll keep updating this with more frequency, I’ve missed the satisfaction which comes from brain-dumping onto an obscure corner of the internet. 

‘Til next time,

The golden child.