Clarity in Brief

T'was a snot-filled weekend. I have to hand it to my mum and brother who clearly clocked my red, puffy eyes, the piles of tissue next to my pillow and my general state of despair and yet, chose to ignore the elephant in the room. But that's my family for you. You'd literally have to fall into pieces in front of them before they confront any subject headlong. Sometimes I wish they weren't such dogged pacifists.

And so I have decided that as part of moving on, I will chronicle, chronicle, chronicle this experience. As I grow older, I tend to compartmentalize my life into categories. The general sections look something like this:

1. Negative past
Subsection A: Things I don't want to remember
Subsection B: Things I don't want to remember but do anyway

2. Positive past
Subsection A: Things I should remember
Subsection B: Things I should remember but fail to do so

3. All encompassing present
Subsection A: Current fucked-upness
Subsection B: Current good stuff
Subsection C: What if, If only, Oh crap, Hmm...

4. The future
Subsection A: Plans that may or may not materialize
Subsection B: The bleeding unknown

Of course there are situations which don't belong neither here nor there. Sometimes they overlap or maybe they start out in one compartment and then shift into another after some time. For example, my current experiences fall into the Category 3, Subsection A but with time, I hope it moves into Category 2, Subsection A instead of Category 1, Subsection A or B (both equally bad in this case).

I know it all sounds very complicated and that you probably think I am a certifiable nutcase but I do this with good reason. I have, for a good part of my life always kept a journal of my life events. I started blogging ten years ago and my first blog was one very long angst-ridden piece of prolonged whining. Prior to blogging and during the intermittent periods where I was absent from the blogosphere, I went back to traditional journalling. I still have the journal I kept from my early 20s and when I read some of the entries I penned back then, I don't know whether to laugh, cry or be to utterly horrified. Sometimes reading those past entries is gut-wrenching. Episodes that your sub-conscious filed away under the 'best forgotten' section suddenly grab you by your neck and you re-live the entire episode in your head and run the gamut of emotions that you felt back then, only in a slightly muted fashion.

But the positive is this - no matter how difficult or painful or complex that period of my life may have been, I can safely say that I survived it, got past it, learned from it and went on to have other experiences. This is why I want to chronicle my life. Personally, it is very important for me to look back and know where I came from so that I can not repeatedly make the same mistakes and then repeatedly club myself over the head for doing so. That doesn't make everything smooth sailing because I am after all human and idiotic and compelled to fall headlong into the every hole that comes my way at every given opportunity. So the head bashing is kinda inevitable.

Alas, given the current situation, my brain is still grappling with the reality of my decision at 2am on Saturday morning. The full impact hasn't quite hit me yet. Despite bawling my eyes out and blowing my nose so much that it has started to peel (eww...), my brain and my heart seem to be bewildered and cannot reconcile what was said that night(morning?) with the consequences of those statements that were exchanged.

So pardon me if I suddenly start blogging like a possessed creature. I just need to let this out so I can find myself all over again.