It Was Nothing More Than Once Upon A Time

A wise man (that would be Chuck Palahniuk, who knows a thing or two about visceral storytelling) said, 

"Your past is just a story. And once you realize this it has no power over you."

Chuck Palahniuk may remember me from such 'Stan'-style letters that ran, 'I'm a really really big fan of yours', 'I want to be a writer TOO' and 'How do you do what you do?' 

I have his delicately typed, 'Chill the fuck out, hunny' responses still saved in their envelopes. Maybe I'll frame them. 

He does makes an excellent point. So many times past memories, triggers, fears, anxieties feel like real and present danger. They make fingers go totally numb, chests cramp, bowls unleash, heads explode with pain, arms shake, voices stutter and language and sometimes actions unfold into some confusion of fighting something that is no longer happening. 

Though memories can leave great imprints, leave keloids on the heart, they are no more real than a Netflix box set or a really long novel. A detailed tangled story. Your story, but a story. And stories live only in the mind.

But those feelings. Oh, those feelings are fried gold. If a traumatic/weird/hysterically dark past can be separated from present-day living, then we have that thing some writers bitch that they cannot find. 

Plot. 

Plot is story. Plot is narrative. Plot is the tale of a person or people navigating life. Plot is someone's past formulating a future. Plot runs a book, a TV show, a film, a play, a poem.

I cannot claim that I do not get sudden shooting pains through my jawbones or numb fingertips when I get caught in the past. I can't claim I don't think something terrible is about to happen. And then I see I am stood still at a bus stop, waiting to go to work. There is a lone teenager with exploding acne sloped against the lamppost, half-awake for college. A man wearing ADDICTED sweatpants idles past me and lets their elderly dog shit on the grass verge. Life is just life as it should be.

Then I know I can gather up those scraps of past that have screeched through my head like serial killers on Spice and twist them up into fiction like horrible origami.

I think this is my way of saying today was a difficult 'aspie' day. But I went to work, hid my hand-flapping, only had mild outbursts and right now I'm in front of the laptop, favouring fiction over planning my wedding. I have fourteen months until I'm wed. I've been waiting my whole life to turn hours of cramped typing into more than something that just makes me want to sleep through my day job.

Ctrl + N. 

Now. Begin tying.