Habit Forming

Language is a conspiracy, it ties you up in lies. Language tricks you, it seduces you into a state of languorous complacency. It’s what isn’t said that is the worst of it, language then masks what should be glaring omissions and turns your world into a mush of mild confusion.

Smoking, drinking and not washing your hands after you’ve paid a visit to the loo are referred to as bad habits. What a joke!

Well, the joke is on me.

The joke has always been on me.

I’ve got all the way to thirty two years of age and only now do I get that I am literally made of habits. A thriving network of patterns and automatic responses. I have been programmed to the nth degree. I have been coded to behave in certain ways, regardless of who I am and what I may think.

Fate and destiny are cruel fictions, I’m an automaton made of meat and bone. Free will is something the over fifties get when they buy life insurance quoting a reference from a daytime TV ad.

How the hell am I supposed to unpick this mess of rituals? Rituals that imprison and crush me. My self, the real me, is buried under the weight of these bad habits. These bad habits hide in plain sight and if I ever spot one, it sits there all alone and out of context, forlorn and pathetic and seemingly of no consequence. Just a single straw. The straw that has designs on breaking my back and rendering me helpless and compliant.

I watch those around me and I can smell their despair now that my mind has broken free of some of its shackles. I am not free, but I can see. I can see the bowed heads and the incessant shuffle towards the grave. The shuffling makes the rut they traverse deeper and more permanent. Their heads stay pointed downwards towards their destination. They are wasting their lives and bringing that final destination here into this world. There’s a reason why hell is down there.

Heaven’s above!

Look up! 

Aim high!

I could proclaim this life saving advice from the rooftops and no one would listen. Instead they would merely hear, and what they heard would disturb and annoy them. 

Call the police! There’s a mad man on the roof!

I can’t do this anymore.

I have to do something about this. 

All these rituals and ceremonies that bind me to a life that isn’t a life at all. It’s barely existing. 

They did this to me. They made me this way. They didn’t have to. They could have done something about it. They could have loved me in a way that meant something. Raised me out of the rut they tread and given me a view of the horizon. 

Given me something worthwhile to aim for.

They could have at least given me a chance.

But they didn’t.

Why does no one else see it? Why does no one else bother? 

I think and I keep thinking until I get to the end of the thread. I don’t stop. Why would anyone stop? Does this make me unusual? I don’t see anyone else doing it, so I suppose it does.

I feel sad.

I feel so sad, nearly all of the time.

That’s why I have to do something.

I need to break out of this place and live!

I began to realise I was different and set apart from those around me when I followed a particular thread. I thought , I observed, I tested my theories until I got to the conclusion. I didn’t stop there. I don’t take things on face value. I tested the validity of my conclusion and I asked myself the most difficult question of all.

Why?

I have come to realise that sometimes there is no why. Or, if the answer to why is derived, it does not and will not explain itself adequately. Some things just are. They haven’t been thought out and no one means them, they don’t mean them to the point that there is no meaning at all.

Why? 

I didn’t mean it.

The rut is a place of gentle chaos. The slowly rising walls of the rut offer a protection of sorts. Protection from meaning and a way to hide from living. People feel their way along the rut and they don’t question those feelings. They never progress beyond those feelings.

I once read that using and manipulating emotions is the most effective form of control. We live in a world of high anxiety. Offence is taken, not given. Everyone is tuned into their emotions and the volume is turned way up beyond the ten on the dial. My ear drums rattle and my nose bleeds when I am around these empty echo chambers. I can no longer escape them.

What was the big conclusion that opened my eyes to the truth of my existence?

They hate me.

At first, I thought it was my siblings and only my siblings. I say at first. Throughout my life I loved them. Still do. I grew up loving them and I assumed a reciprocity to this feeling of mine. Of course, back then, love was a feeling. That love was not thoughtful and that love was not kind. Sometimes it fell that way, more by coincidence than design, but it was not intentional. Not back then. 

What I can say about that feeling of love is that it created boundaries and parameters and it modified behaviour that staved off the worst form of chaos. 

My behaviour was controlled.

Time and again my siblings turned on me. They hit me and they said hurtful things. They teamed up so they could land bigger and more hurtful blows. It was when they teamed up with Mother that it really hurt, but what hurt most of all was Father waving it through.

I tried to reason with Father, but he never once engaged with me. That is not to say that we did not talk. We talked alright, but he always avoided the ground where the actual truth lay. It were as though it were off limits, and I suppose it was, but those bad habits went around and around and in the end they weaved an alternative reality that hid the truth entirely.

In the end, I realised that Father just could not see. 

But then ignorance really is blind.

It began hurting so much that I had to resort to reason. I had amplified the hurt for too long, always asking the same question.

Is it me?

I knew this was the best question to ask. At least this way I could explore the things I could do to make it a little better. The things within my control. I had tried reasoning with my siblings. I had talked to Father. I had even attempted to help Mother see sense, but that was a battle I would always lose. She held the higher ground.

She was Mother.

I wanted her to be my mother.

You see, Mother had it bad when she was younger. Her siblings were unkind and they made her life hell. I could see the fires of that hell in her eyes when she turned on me, then I saw those exact same flames in the eyes of my sisters and brother. Just a flicker at first, but soon enough those flames were the equal of Mother’s.

I asked myself the natural question; was it me? And the obvious answer was yes, it was. They were reacting to me. It was my fault. The logic pointed to this answer. If I wasn’t there, they wouldn’t have turned on me. 

My existence was the problem.

So, I tried to change and I took a different tack. I apologised and I deferred to my family. I vowed to serve each and every member of my clan and to behave in a subservient manner. They had sought to knock me over and keep me down, so I stayed on my knees, but I fell just short of begging. I couldn’t find that within me. I looked and it just wasn’t there.

You see, I also held a flame and I would not let it go out. That was a bridge too far. I would not let go of the hope that I could be me, my belief that I had a right to be me.

I tried again and again, and one day I realised that I could keep smashing myself against the red hot light bulb over and over for decade after decade never getting to where I needed to be. No one would accept me and no one would even thank me for my efforts to make things right.

Why?

Because of those bad habits of theirs.

They didn’t see me anymore and perhaps they never did. Once I realised this, I would see the fires of hate in their eyes and I would pity them. They thought they hated me, but it wasn’t me that they hated. They didn’t even know me! I didn’t exist as far as they were concerned and so they had never bothered to get to know me. They had never listened to me. All that mattered was how they felt and they felt aggrieved. Life wasn’t fair, and I was the graven image they worshipped. I was the symbol of their hateful lives. 

It wasn’t them.

It was never them.

It was me.

They were never going to take responsibility for how they felt. They were never going to deal with it whilst they had me to blame. 

Nothing would ever change as far as they were concerned.

The truth sets you free. This truth certainly promised to. I didn’t want this though. I tried not to accept it, but I now knew and once I knew there was no way of taking it back. This knowledge changed my world and then I knew I had to change myself. I had to keep changing myself. I couldn’t leave this half done because then I’d be half undone and I reckoned that would leave me in a worse place than the rut-dwellers.

Besides, I wasn’t free. Not yet I wasn’t. I had to do something about that. I had to make like Houdini and break out of the shackles of my bad habits, customs and rituals. All of those behaviour patterns that kept me going round and round in circles. The same thing we sometimes see in a friend who’s romantic relationships fail again and again because they have a type and that type just isn’t suited to anything more than two months of tumultuous fun that crashes into a sea of tears and despondency.

The sea was where I needed to go.

I have always found being beside the sea to be peaceful. The sea grounds me. I have moments of tranquillity and joy when I visit the coast. 

There lay the key to my freedom.

Now I knew the headline of what I must do, I took my time and filled in the detail. This was a ceremony. I was planning the start of my new life. The beginning of a life of living. An escape from the flames of hate and the fires of hell. 

Where better to do this than by the sea?

In the sea.

Mother was reluctant at first. 

I told her that it was my treat and that we both needed this. She looked at me as though she had no idea what I was talking about. Her eyes were dumb and belonged in the skull of a sheep. Her face scrunched up into something like confusion, whereas I knew it was wilful ignorance. It amazed me how her eyes could be so markedly different. How she could switch off so completely and leave no lights on at all, and yet in a matter of a moment her eyes could be aflame as she tore into me and sought to destroy the demons and ghosts that she had imbued me with.

Well, it was time to exorcise the demons, help the ghosts to move on.

For once in my life, I used emotions successfully. I channelled the hurt and the pain and I opened myself up so that she could see how wounded I was. I appealed to my mother one last time as I once again became her small, helpless and dependent child. 

One last time.

It was out of season, but unseasonably warm. I had found a quaint bed and breakfast run by an old woman who probably should have retired a decade or two ago, but was either recalcitrant in becoming idle, or had insufficient funds to live her last years without working. Perhaps she convinced herself that it was both of these reasons so the work didn’t seem quite so much of a bind. She was friendly, but very obviously tired, she greeted us, showed us to our rooms and then she told us she was heading for a nap. 

I felt a deep sorrow for her, the naps delineated her days into further, smaller days. Work and sleep was the pattern of her life now. One day soon she would fail to wake up to clean a room or make a breakfast. Still, she was by the sea, and that was the best of places to be.

The sorrow I felt for the old woman was a reflection of the sorrow I experienced as I brought Mother to the place of the ceremony. This was where the Ceremony of Freedom would be conducted. There was no going back now. I don’t think there was ever a point at which I could have reversed our joint fortunes.

“Let’s go for a walk by the sea,” I said to Mother after we had put our bags in our rooms.

I had rushed Mother through this point. Urging her to put her bag on the bed and leave it there for now. I’d stood in her doorway and given her no option. The poor woman was a fish out of water. She was no longer on home territory and she did not have her brood with her. There was just the two of us and I felt the game go my way at last. I had more power here. I was in control. This was my day.

“It’s getting late,” she said to me, “can’t we go tomorrow?”

“No,” I told her, “we came all the way here for the sea and it will not be denied.”

That was a little white lie. A fib to conceal the truth of it. I would not be denied. Not now. Not now that we were here and the ceremony had begun.

Mother came reluctantly and begrudgingly, but I thought she was edging every closer to the edge of her anger. I found that I feared that eventuality and my pending fear threatened to undo me. Could I go through with this were Mother to rise up against me? Did I have the strength and the fortitude to stand my ground, let alone go through with the ceremony?

As it was, the magic of the sea won the day.

There was a moment after we’d removed our shoes so we could feel the sand betwixt our toes. A moment when we half ran and half skipped along the deserted beach and we laughed. I couldn’t remember the last time I had heard Mother laugh and it hurt my heart to witness the years roll back. I saw her laughing and I wondered at the nature of her existence, and my existence, and all of our lives. Whether we’re just winging it, holding out for a few seconds that will be forever captured as a golden memory. 

And I wondered, what if I’m wrong.

I was committed now though. I knew that, and I knew that there was only one way to discover whether I was wrong or not. That was to keep going and find out.

We keep going, that is what we do. We grind out a result come what may. Afterwards, we might consider whether it was all worthwhile. Maybe. Perhaps. Probably not.

“Here,” I said this gently, “let me take these.”

Meekly, Mother handed me her shoes. I think she knew then. I could see it in her eyes. I didn’t want to see her knowing, but I had no choice in the matter. I thought I also saw an acceptance or a recognition.

All the same, I placed her shoes neatly on the sand, beyond the line where the tide reached up the sands of the shore. I placed them just so, as a person would before they entered the sea, never to return. Then I took Mother’s hand and we entered the sea together.

There were no flames. The sea put them out and washed them away.

I couldn’t say that it was quick. Time deserted us as we left the sands and the waters cleansed us. All there was, was the ceremony.

The Ceremony of Freedom.

From the moment I was awakened to the darkness of my existence and the hate that surrounded and besieged me, I dreamt of being free. The Ceremony of Freedom was the only way I could see beyond, it was my gateway to the life I had always deserved. The Ceremony of Freedom was performed to set me free.

It was Mother who I set free, I released her from her tormented life and as she let go I took something of her into myself. 

Her gift to me. 

Her legacy.

And now I know I will never be free.

Worse still, I will entrap and ensnare those around me. 

It’s a bad habit you see.

I tried to give up, but I can’t.

The truth is, I don’t want to.