Madly Ever After

Not the most original of openings but it’s factually correct.

This is the tale of a boy who didn’t know how to grow up and understand himself.

A journey through love loss and gender identity.

So we’ll travel back in time to a young whistful imaginative child from a middle class family who where/are BELIEVERS. You know, that religious type who believe everything that a voice of authority says, the type that cannot cope with BELIF being questioned, the type that resort to anger and violence when their frustration boils over.

It’s not a retelling of Harry Potter, although the cupboard under the stairs does feature. It’s semi autobiographical, memory is fickle and each time you recall something it gets embellished or diminished and restored as fact. To be honest I cannot tell for sure if any of these are facts as my memory of the past is so fragmented despite having near total recall of recent events.

So back to an even more fictionalised acount of my own personal fiction.

I was, to pinch from Spike Milligan, born at an early age. I’m told I sat and and watched the Apollo 11 landing but had no ability to form memories then.

Most memories from my youth exist in flashes. Memories of TV shows, Star Trek, Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet, Space 1999, Sapphire and Steel, Mash, Dr Who.

Memories of doing things with my family not so much.

Without this turning into À la recherche du temps perdu (Proust) I won’t dwell on the past and fast forward to the here and now.

So here I am, going through extensive therapy as I had to find myself and gain focus on my existence.

So let’s work time backwards rather than the normal narrative.

I found myself, it wasn’t an easy journey and I’ve still got the builders in fixing up bits but I know who I am.

This is the hard bit to talk about. Do I really want to explain this in detail or do I just want to leave it a mystery? Ah well I’m going to come straight out and say it, I’m bi, it’s a very difficult journey to get to this point. Never having had the language or proper experiences to understand who I am. If it helps the reader, not having any role model to define against is a real challenge when you have no sense of self. Context is everything. If you live as an Out of Context Problem (Iain M Banks – Excession) then no one opens up to you and you never allow the real you out for fear of harming others and yourself.

So in my light cone (Einstien, Feynman, et al) I have my present self, happily single middle aged with a cat. I have many possible futures in which I can continue to shape myself and enjoy. My past is fixed and immutable in my timeline. My memories of it are what trigger emotional flashbacks. But they’re the past, that my brain is chemically wired to process these as real isn’t it’s fault. It’s a survival mechanism which we have to live with. These bodies weren’t designed but evolved over millions of years, we still have very basic bevaviours hard wired into us.

Choosing to overrule those instincts is what makes us adults and human.

So we take a step back a year and to the completely broken me. A person lost in a bottle and desperate for connection. We won’t dwell on this and move another year back to my experience with severe emotional flashbacks. Breaking down with the slightest emotional trigger. Two of the worst lead to full blackouts losing several hours. I nearly lost two of my closest friends during this period and I lost my partner of 6 years because of this.

Although in hindsight that relationship was failing due to lack of trust.

When you have demons you get tied up with people who also have demons, sometimes they match and other times they fall into conflict. And let’s be honest, we all have demons of one size or another. Coping and dealing with them is an individual choice, I’ve found that learning to accept them as part of me and just being me is the only way it works, Think how Eddie Brock and Venom work together. If the reader doesn’t know or understand this reference then it’s no fault of mine.

So enough exposition and on with our tale.

So this demon I have to battle daily is kinda like the mirror of me. Has nothing but my own worst interests at heart and tries to ruin everything I do. I know his face and the feel of his presence but also his weaknesses and my strengths the way he knows my weaknesses and his strengths. For all intents and purposes and for want of giving the thing an name and without getting overly religious, I’ll call him Azreal from now on.

For reference Azreal is the dark archangel of death, the soul eater (oh it’s getting Harry Potter again).

Azreal plays in my dreams and my decisions and whispers sweet negative thoughts in my head. All to feed off my negative energy and leave me exhausted every day. But I have a secret I can keep from Azreal becayse it’s something he can never turn his gaze to without being shorn from existence. See within me lies a gift, given from the ancient Greeks, specifically a lady named Pandora.

She’s famous for her box (not in that way you dirty mind, a special box that held all the woes and ills that beset us but, and this is a big but (stoppit you) when all these ills were let out there remained one thing. Go on have a guess what was left. No, seriously, what happened to people learning about the classics, there’s so much wisdom there that is lost to the modern world. Anyway, I digress, what was left in the box after all escaped was one thing, Hope (no not Buffy’s sister) but HOPE!

Hope is the one thing that will always beat Azreal and there’s nothing he can do about it.

But HOPE is fragile and needs to be treated with the care you nurse a fire with. At times it will blaze and at others it will gutter and fade. Just needs a few breaths and some love to bring it back to life though.

So now I’m going to delve into Azreal’s origin story. There probably should be a trigger warning here but then if trigger warnings worked Alec Baldwin wouldn’t have accidentally killed his cinematographer (go look it up, I’m not explaining everything).

Think of Azreal as a gif ( a gif?? I think I mean gift but would make a fantastic gif). A gift from a god I don’t believe in and quite seriously how can anyone believe in that. I mean if a god created humans in their own image then that god is seriously fucked up. I mean SERIOUSLY FUCKED UP!

So let me introduce Azreal properly.

Yes this pleasant fellow lives alongside me in my head. Aren’t I lucky to have this constant companion.

Now when you are raised in a certain way you have your identity and sense of self stripped away and replaced with a  chappie like this who controls and diminishes your ability to live without providing the fuel he wants to continue.

It leaves without the boundaries you need to live in the world. The ability to say NO is almost completely taken away from you as this Azreal character feeds of the feelings of submission and pleasing that you give to others. Basically he feeds off the fear you have of not feeling wanted or appreciated.

So once he’s born in your head you’re tied together for life. Think like the Malaria parasite (Plasmodium for the uninitiated). Sometime he will remain dormant and others will flare up and tear your soul apart.

Many chemicals will keep him suppressed. For me alcohol and weed work, others resort to stronger methods, opioids, heroin is a favorite of many, gambling, sex, cocaine and crack can suppress the demon, but all these are temporary fleeting fixes that only cover up the ravenous beast who lives off your soul.

So yeah, he’s a nasty fucker who wants you to be afraid all the time and will use every trick possible to get you into that state. Even using your coping mechanisms against you. So you become afraid of running out of booze, of running out of smack, or crack, and he feeds off that. In clinical terms this is called addiction. The treatments for addiction often do little to address the underlying cause, Azreal, but focus on the physical and psychological effects but nothing to do with banishing the unbanishable demon.

Anyway enough with this feeble little soul stealer, fuck him. He takes up enough of my life without giving him more air time.

So about the boy who grew up with Azreal in his head. That boy still has the lymbic system (the emotional processing part of the brain) as a child of 10. It’s a matter of biology. When your brain is flooded with Cortisol (the primary stress hormone) it suppresses the development of Serotonin (happy hormone) receptors. This means you seek out things that give a huge hit to the limited number of happy brain receptors or find something to dull the sad brain receptors.

The positive is though, that these receptors can change. Hey if you find something non-chemical induced that makes you really happy you grow more happy receptors and the number of sad ones decrease. It can take many years or decades to achieve. Some people can get there by sheer force of will, others have to find a path, and others will get lost in the woods.

I think the boy has found the path and is making progress. There’s roots and trip hazards on the trail but the path is still clearly defined. Just need to keep the watcher in the woods (The Hobbit – Tolkien) at bay.

And don’t get me started on armor. OK, you have so here I go. For Sparta! (the famously unarmored warriors of the 300).

Hey, has anyone noticed all the cultural memes yet?

This is an aside about Darmok, the greatest episode (in my opinion) of Star Trek. A culture that speaks in metaphors. Darmok and Gelad at Tenagra. Shaka when the walls fell.

So back to armor. The mirroring system (oh Helicarrier in Avengers) in which we deflect and reflect emotions from us to stop things hurting. It’s like setting boundaries but more reflexive. If every time you faced an emotional threat you would suit up like Tony Stark and have your armor do the work. Letting yourself be vulnerable is one of the hardest things you can do in your life. But also the only way to learn. Azreal loves the armor as it allows the fear to be trapped inside and amplify. Azreal is the fear that drove Stark to create Ultron (hey Hank Pym in the comics but everyone knows the movies). Azreal drives you to fight against letting others know how you feel. Even simple things like expression of love.

So dear reader, something happened to derail my train of thought, I won’t go into detail but suffice to say this writer is pissed off at the moment.

Anyway back to the boy’s story and his constant battles with Azreal. Living with Azreal is the equivalent of making a deal with the devil (oh John Constantine we love you), you get some super powers, enhanced recall, vigilance, mental processing, the ability take on others emotional burden and use that for energy. These also come at a price; mainly your identity. You become the person Azreal wants you to be not who you actually are. In short you can be anything but you when under control of this demon. But there’s an ebb and flow, sometimes when Azreal is sated then you can be yourself, live and love and care but as soon as happiness starts to permeate then Azreal wakes to feed on that and pushes you back to the edge of they abyss (great film, slow moving but hugely enjoyable). So the boy yoyo’s between happy and sad, strong and fighting or weak and fearful. One side is Frodo battling with the burden of the One Ring, the other is Samwise all positivity and POTATOES! At this point I really hope anyone who’s bothered this far has also read or at least watched The Lord of the Rings.

Yeah basically it describes bi-polar disorder which it isn’t. The boy got misdiagnosed with this and dodged being treated for BPD, unfortunately the other side of the boy’s heart was also misdiagnosed and treated as BPD.

As this is very much a stream of consciousness tale and I still need to get back to the story…

When Azreal visits (this sounds like an Aunt Flo joke … although it could be compared to the hormone imbalance during period) then you never know what will happen. Will it be a happy day where he sits in the background just observing or will it be a day of utter misery when he feeds on your every thought and feeling.

There are ways to fight back, find things that make you happy when he wants your fear and finf things that make you sad when he’s hungry for your happiness.

Writing this really FUCKS him off as he has no control over it (oh shit have I broken a wall here? I’ve no idea what the equivalent of the 4th wall is in writing!). Mmm 4th wall, Ryan Reynolds … McAvoy or Stewart (Deadpool, go watch the film).

Sp what the boy has been doing over the years is having this ding dong to and fro battle with Azreal, neither one fully gaining the higher ground (give up Anakin, I have the higher ground) until the boy discovered Azreal’s hidden weakness of hope (one Star Wars reference deserves another, Ep 4 A New Hope. I hate myself for all these references). So for a while now Azreal has been losing consistently, probably for the longest period the boy has known. Hopefully this will build and hold like the New Republic and Azreal will never gain the upper hand as Palpatine did (enough with the Star Wars references!!!).

Any way there are days the boy feels truly alive.  (They mostly come at night, mostly)

So it’s been a while since this story was edited and the boy has been doing things in the real world mainly because Azreal is in his slumber. It’s a funny twist of life that creative skills seem to be connected to the daemons inside you.

So let’s take the boy on an adventure.

One day the boy awakes to something different, a change in the shimmer of the day. You know, when a day feels like something unexpected is going to happen. On the face of it a normal day but there’s something about it that makes you feel all about getting out and seeing things.

Well on this day the boy met an elf, not your usual run of the mill Legolas type, but all the same an elf. It was a chance meeting and the elf took an immediate liking to the boy and told him stories and mysteries and taught him some elven magic. Note reader this is not a clumsy metaphor for sex, if you want clumsy badly written sex go read 50 Shades of Grey. The elf told the boy of stories of battles and living off the land, the boy in his cloistered existence could only dream of these (Luke Skywalker reference).

So after that day the boy began to to dress like an elven warrior, with his armour and blades and bow (yes this a metaphor for emotional strength) and then started to set out and explore the real world outside the hallowed halls of his previous life.

His first encounter was with a young woman who chose to love the boy. Years passed and it turned that the young woman was possessed by her own daemon, the boy never found the true name of this beast but its appetite for destruction (Gun’s and Roses) drove the boy to the edge and nearly ended his life. The clown in the boys life jumped in at the last minute to save him and the boy grew a bit.

By this point another fae had entered the boys life, this time rather than guiding this one found a crack in his soul and became a hermit crab in there. Giving gentle nudges and pointers on being.

Leaving that town the boy moved to a new place and fell in love. Properly head over heels (in this case both literally and metaphorically if you get the writers drift). The boy had never known such happiness but again the daemons struck, this time taking his loves friend from life to punish us for being. To this day a painting by this friend is kept by the boy as a memory.

After this the boy was once again alone in the world but had grown more. Hey maybe one day I’ll be a real boy (Pinocchio).

… Cue end credits and The Boy Will Return!