Spare some change?

Day 13. Big Brother is no more. And David still DOES NOT HAVE HIS HORSE.

Sigh, all in all this has been 'one of those weeks'. I'm pretty sure I mentioned in one of my previous posts that I was expecting the next fortnight or so to be tough, and if I didn't, well... I was certainly thinking it quite loudly. And yet, as I definitely did say, every single time it still manages to catch me by surprise when things turn out a bit rubbish. There's only so many times I can say that I should have learned before I just have to shut up and ACTUALLY learn it. So expect another moaning entry next week complaining how I wasn't expecting to be this tired after doing something embarrassingly trivial!

I suppose by the standards that I'm supposed to be working to, I've made yet more progress this week with more outings, but when the rest of the web is filled with joy and excitement about the steps into the world with new college terms and adventures to be had, making it for 7 instead of 6 minutes in the car to buy some crisps just feels all the more hollow by comparison. It's been a decade now in this rut, and to be honest the chipping away at it isn't good enough. Things HAVE to change. I can try building things up on this twisted scale of 'progress' towards 'normalcy' for the rest of my life, but I will ALWAYS be behind because of where I've started from and the limits to my progression.

Since I've started this blog, I've tried to move past the differences in my life to the norm, to accept and embrace the fact that I've had circumstances forced on me that have shunted my outlook sideways and make the most of it. I think it might be time to take that a step further. I'm not getting any younger.

Truth in Advertising

Firstly, the Pepsi Max “Asteroid” advert. Apparently, getting several of your mates to trick a girl into thinking that she's going to die in order to have sex with her is a perfectly normal, morally acceptable lark of a good time, and in no way creepy, profoundly wrong or bordering on rapey.

Pah, I'm just in a sulky mood because I'm so tired today. It's 'good tired' again though, that mystical state where apparently the pain doesn't hurt quite so much just because I've properly earned it through 25 seconds of activity, instead of the standard type where its unfairness makes it less worthy and hurt more. I had a fairly nice evening yesterday – we dug up our potatoes, which among other benefits meant for a tasty tea! Unfortunately, potatoes are heavy. Therefore, wrists, back, legs and shoulders are all utterly killing today, and contributing greatly to my picking holes and reading hidden meanings into innocuous things. It was nice at the time though, since my voice outside managed to attract my regular kitten friend after his daily cuddles, and his interaction with fierce, protective (lol) Lucy the dog was quite adorable, as was Lucy's attempt at playing fetch with the remnants of a shattered frisbee. Still, complain, grump, moan!

Normally it'd be better for me to phrase the following as a question, to deflect some of the potential insanity of it off of myself and see if I could see if I'm the only one who thinks this, but seeing as my audience is... rather reduced from what I'm used to, I suppose I'll have to risk seeming mental for the sake of my art. The clue is in the title – adverts.

I really don't know if its just me or if this is something that people in similar situations to me will feel too, but when I'm in the sort of mood where I'm predisposed to grump, certain 'out there', irreverent adverts seem to really get me down. I've surmised that its probably because they are deliberately attempting to catch attention by being out of the ordinary, from being an intentional tonal shift from the banality of everyday life, but with my own issues with being disconnected from 'everyday life', they just make me feel like they're an extra degree of separation away from me, that I'm missing out even more. Things like travelling home from work on a water slide/roller coaster and swapping shirts after a meeting are supposed to draw a laugh because they're taking an easily identifiable, mundane situation and adding a semi-believable or wishful twist to it, but to me, I'm not even catching the initial hook to recognise how that's NOT what happens in reality.

I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm assuming that probably if the greater London area got taken over with personalised water slides, I'd end up reading about this bizarre new trend in a BBC News article or see it humorously referenced elsewhere, see the arty, bleached out photos on other blogs highlighting how it represents society's need to embrace the inner child within. But to me, all it is is just another layer of fantasy to add to how amazing the outside world is with all its sights to see and experiences to take for granted, so mundane in and of themselves that we need to add the unbelievable to them to sell our shiny products and services.

When I was much younger and (almost) worry free (curse you, fire alarm!), day to day school life was boring, but the exciting, once a term adventures of a school trip out into the big wide world was an incredible, exciting monument to look forward to. Many of my readers though never even managed that baseline though, so might only identify with my next bit, later in my life, when even making it to school was a hardship in itself, when the school trips stopped being so wonderful and ended up just being an extra slog through something supposed to be special, that felt all the more poisoned for how draining it ended up being. Both the best and the worst times of my life were events that should have been glowing, nostalgic memories to look back on and miss, and it feels all the more isolating that things intended to be so special could become so poisoned by this invisible construct of an illness around me, to leave me separated from the rest of the world by that extra degree.

Some of the things that I've found hardest of all to deal with have been my desires to 'reclaim' what I've lost, and had to try to come to terms with the fact that the time limit on them has expired and passed me by, for practical, physical or even societal reasons, that the rest of the world expects to be firmly shut away behind me in my past. Things that have no value in and of themselves, but represent steps into the world that frankly, at my age, are no longer appropriate or possible to take any more. The memory of sneaking your first beer to many people will be a fond moment to reminisce on, the mistakes made trying to step out into the world along with it, that at 23 with a valid ID just will never apply to me. On that count, I can honestly say that I don't particularly miss it, but the fact that it's passed me by is something that I can never get back, and some of the hardest hidden things to deal with hold an equal lack of genuine, real-world weight. Despite what Zac Efron and Matthew Perry might have to say about it, I'll never be 17 again and there are certain things that I'll never get to do period, let alone do over.

In the beginning

[Pripyat, Soviet Union. 26^th April 1986]

Open on an INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX INTERIOR, as the workers are going about their daily business, when a harsh ALARM sounds. Instead of causing panic, the workers continue their conversations and slowly file outside, lining up casually while young management figures earnestly write things down on a CLIPBOARD, clearly eager to impress. It's a FIRE DRILL.

Close in on one worker in the courtyard, lagging behind. As his co-workers stream back inside, he hangs back, getting one last puff on his cigarette before heading back into the imposing building to work. The camera follows him as he nods acknowledgement to his colleagues, and he sits wearily back down at his workstation.

Glancing down at his vintage monochrome green-tinged monitor, a look of surprise comes across his face at what the readout says. He turns his head and opens his mouth to confer with a colleague, but before he can get a word out his surprised face is lit up with a blinding white FLASH OF LIGHT as we cut to-

Interior, Soviet-era tenement block. A harried looking woman sits in her chair as two SMALL CHILDREN noisily run around the cramped flat, prompting ire from their harassed mother. A photo on the threadbare dresser indicates that this is the wife and family of the previously shown worker.

The same flash of light illuminates the apartment from the small window, followed by a low, echoing boom as the porcelain figurines on the dresser shake and topple over. The children stop their game and turn fearfully to their mother, who hurries to rush OUTSIDE to get a view of what's happening.

Outside, the whole neighbourhood is bunched up outside the building, with looks of shock and disbelief on their faces. The mother raises her hands to her mouth in shock, then holds her children close to her, as the camera pulls out and swings around, across a city skyline complete with newly-constructed FERRIS WHEEL, to what they're all looking at – the enormous power plant dominating the horizon, with one whole corner of the outline missing and black smoke pouring from where reactor 4 used to be, with dazzling rainbow-coloured flashes of light seen streaking between the gaps in the clouds. The camera pulls up through the clouds, showing off some of those rainbow-coloured light flashes as we pass through, and continues to pull up above the plume, eventually pulling out to a global level where we see the entirety of the European continent, with the ominous radioactive cloud gradually completely enveloping it.

CUT TO BLACK, TITLE CARD.

***

We've reached post number 23 now, and if this were a TV show this would be around the time when we'd get an origin story episode. Of course, if this were a TV show then the critics would be raging about the episode that only lasted long enough to ask the single question about the Lady Gaga lyric, but still. While the above was happening thousands of miles away, a young couple in Scotland were expecting their first born child, no doubt fearing what kind of world they were bringing him into while the news warned of nuclear death-rain born of an accident half the world away. It would all be much easier and neater if I could point to a huge, world-shaping international incident that set my path in life before I had even so much as drawn my first breath, but beyond a punchline of “that explains a lot” for making jokes about the worst industrial accident known to mankind, it doesn't provide any answers for me.

I was a healthy, normal kid growing up in the western cultural golden age of the post-Reagan era 90s – well, as normal as you would expect anyone to be who carried the seeds of what I'd eventually become. I was scared of the fire drill at school, had a pet goldfish (called Tricoloure) and liked to build roads out of pencils for driving my toy cars around, perfectly happy and healthy – until one fateful school trip to the science museum. While I was separated from my group, I felt a soft tap from something dropping on my shoulder, before a small pinch and I was blinded with pain, from the bite of a RADIOACTIVE GENETICALLY MUTATED SPIDER! Unfortunately since this is real-life and not Hollywood or comic books, instead of developing superpowers it just made me critically ill and destroyed my immune system for life, leading to my physically weakened state while my mind grows ever stronger, fuelled to new and terrifying power levels by my hatred of the unfairness of humanity, waiting to be unleashed upon an unsuspecting world. Mwahahahahaaa!

Sadly, the truth is a lot less interesting, and a lot less suitable for adapting into the screenplay of a summer blockbuster. Up until I was 13, everything came so easily to me, problems always had a clear answer and my memory was as clear as a photo album, until... it just wasn't any more. Everything clouded over. To me, I was just worried about how hard school had suddenly become, but according to my parents it concerned them just how tired I was all the time. It could have come from a vaccination, a medication that I was on, or just a failure to shake a common cold, but while everyone else around me powered through these minuscule hurdles, I tripped, and have never caught up. I've learned to adapt and find ways to live my life outside of the regular path, along my “Scenic Route”, but I'm not sure that I'll ever have an answer as to why for some reason all of my early promise just faded away.

I feel like I should end on some sort of high, some sort of pearl of wisdom about how it's all made me stronger or that I'm a better person for having known suffering, but it wouldn't be true. I had a lot taken from me, and I still don't think that it was fair. But there's no-one to fight, nothing that I can blame for it all. There might have been mistakes and in the heat of the moment there can always be something to pour all the anger into for leading me here, but it doesn't change that it happened, and it happened to me. And no, that's not fair, and it's not ok. And it never will be.

The Way I Am

I'm still not entirely sure on what the point of this blog was, or who I'm writing it for. So far I've tried to write as though I'm explaining things to an 'outsider', to someone living a perfectly normal life and drawing attention to the ways that make me and what I'm going through different. Really though, the type of people likely to be reading this are those who are in the same or similar positions. All my friends and contacts now that I've built up over the years are people in the same situation, linked together by a shared empathy and understanding that we've all had limitations placed on us and trying to find ways to express ourselves that let us break free of our shackles.

There are a million blogs like that out there, so what do I really think I'm doing differently? I'm an identical drop of water in the endless ocean, convinced that I can be a beautiful and unique snowflake. Maybe there was no real point to this at all, just an empty void to throw my thoughts out there into, tossing them into the abyss under the delusion that my echo will answer me back and we'll strike up a meaningful conversation.

Something I've noticed though with all the other blogs like this out there is just how defined by the illness they all seem to be. I was watching an episode of House the other day where one of the characters wondered, how would you introduce me? As a doctor, as black, as a car thief? I suppose I'm in the same boat – no matter what I might strive for or try to be or achieve, its almost always going to have to include this as a caveat. If someone asks, what does your brother/son/friend do, the fact that my illness is the reason for it is always going to have to come up within the first two lines. I don't have a job, I'm not at college, because... .The fact is that its not normal and that it needs an explanation for why my 'scenic' path as I've described it is the one that I'm travelling down, always pointing out that its not by choice and that really of course I'd rather be on a different one.

So I've pointed it all out, but what for, what have I really achieved by laying it out like that? I've not come to any conclusions, just made myself look smarter by drawing attention to the fact that I've noticed it instead of working on fixing it. Its a good technique, especially for debating or arguing – set out all your points in the form of a question, that way if you're proved wrong then you were only being wise and spurring on a thoughtful debate!

In the end though, who we are boils down to the sum of our experiences, and for anyone else out there like me who's travelling down a path that they can insist they didn't choose, it still doesn't change the fact that they're sauntering their way slowly along it anyway. This path I'm on has influenced everything about me, even down to my looks - I have long hair mainly because there was a period of time where I wasn't able to get out to the barbers, so had to just let it grow. I happen to quite like the person that I've become now (and my extremely cool hair) – I'm fully aware that its not 'the same as other people', but for the moment I've convinced myself I'm that snowflake floating down from the sky, waiting to change the world when I finally land. Everyone in the world will have changed and grown as a person over the last decade of their life, if I tried to rebel against an imaginary construct of 'the illness' and discard everything that its influenced me into becoming, then I'd just end up with the mind of the 13 year old that I was, playing Pokémon and wanting to push girls into the mud.

Oh, wait a minute...