The high price of living

Its not you, its me.

Its an old one, an excuse often juggled as a weak attempt to end an awkward relationship. Its not necessarily a lie, its just a convenient box in which you can drop something that's too hot to handle, and when you don't want the other to get hurt. But it never really works, since that everybody knows the trick, so its just a pantomime played by rote.

Exit stage left.

When you go through a radical transformation, nothing is quite as easy to implement, regardless on how obvious they are. That particular trait is particularly harsh for those who are witness to the transformation. It is an awkward time, where routine gets a swift kick in the ass, amplified by the general anxieties and stress of high-speed normal life, or what passed for it anyways. For those witnesses, who have their own burdens to bear, it is distressing to endure the shock waves as the character role they were used to, and relied on, suddenly reveal that a friend or a loved one is not as bedrock stable as he or she used to be.

When in the embrace of chaos, you depend on those granite anchors to provide a reliable counterpoint to your own confusion. When those counterpoint go through their own storms of change, chaos reflects on chaos like fun house mirrors reflecting each other with no stability or direction; its a hurricane inside a maelstrom inside a black hole wrapped in eleven-dimension quantum geometry. A perfect storm of the id.

When the change is seen as obvious and necessary by the protagonist, it can become antagonizing when your anchors cant reflect that change. The lack of response causes the super-ego to rebel, consider one's allies as potential enemies and declares them traitors; after all, what are friends but validation for the grandeur and genius of the self.

Except that people are not telepaths (well, most people aren't), they cant automatically know what's going on, they cant see reality through you filter, no matter how obvious it appears to you. And when people lose their anchors, when the persons they rely on for stability appears to go bunker and frothy at the mouth, most people stay away from the rabid dog... which cause the super-ego to claim "See! I told you they were traitors!"... causing more rebellion, causing more distance... you get the idea.

I cannot claim to fully understand what others are going through. I can claim to be something of a selfish bastard, and that's no admission or guilt. I don't buy into the whole guilt trip thing, whether mine or other, expect nothing such from anyone, and would, in fact, throw it back at you. I look to the future; I read the past, sometimes through the wrong lens, sometimes the wrong past, but I strive to learn and change. I deal with the present as it happens, just like I handle people as they are.

I bear the scars of my changes. My friends have been enduring the tremors, not knowing what the expect, or how to handle it. I do not blame them for staying well and away; in their situation I'd have probably done the same. My feelings remain deep down the same as before. My posse remains my posse, for the same reasons as before. I have made a mess of things and I have but one thing to ask:

Where's the broom so I can pick things up and clean up.

And what's your poison darling?

Okay, two questions. Deal with it.