Barney: "...there is a little thing in corporate America I call The chain of Screaming"

“If you don't believe in ghosts, you've never been to a family reunion.”

I saw this one episode of How I met Your Mother, where Barney explains to Marshall about a “Chain of screaming”. In the Chain of Screaming, one person screams at another and that person screams at another and another and the whole cycle goes on. Well, in my family’s chain of screaming, I’m as low as I can get. I’m probably the plankton.

Nobody’s family is perfect. Mine definitely isn’t. I don’t think that a perfect family exists. I guess you can have something close to perfect but perfection ends up remaining as an urban myth. Perfection doesn’t exist and even if you think it does, there is always something lurking in the background ready to jump you if you get too comfortable.

I have a family as dysfunctional as anyone else’s. We have our own skeletons in the closet and like any other slightly abnormal family, we try to hide it. This is probably why I’m feeling hesitant as I write this post. A part of me feels like I’m hanging my dirty laundry in the public and nobody needs to know my business. But then I think about this friend I have. Lets call her Em. She had this wonderful blog where she posted everything about herself, the good the bad, the ugly. And I remember her telling me how wonderful it felt to just write it all down. How it was “therapeutic”. She’s a part of the reason of why I started my own blog. I remember reading her writing and feeling inspired. And though at times I feel that I have a strange, strange relationship with her, I’m never going to deny the fact that somewhere down the line, she became a part of my life. And I’d be sorry if she’s not around.

Coming back, today I had a huge argument with my parents. I don’t know whose fault it was, but it just made me really sad. I have a complicated family where we don’t always “communicate” with each other and everyday, you can hear someone screaming in the background. It’s somehow become the soundtrack of our lives. I have a mom who feels unappreciated with a flair for drama, a dad who feels unacknowledged with a temper and an overly emotional sister. We’re your regular family. And me? I just feel like no one “understands me” But that’s probably “my teenage fable…or some psychology term” that will go away in sometime. But sometimes it gets to me. At times the urge to run is too strong, too demanding. So demanding that I feel numb, a bit broken inside. At times I can never seem to do any right. And it ALWAYS leaves me feeling conflicted about who I am, and how I should feel and what the fuck I should do. I don’t think I can talk about this to my friends anymore. It’s not their burden to bear.

I guess, it’s not that big of a deal and I can handle it. I just miss all the old things that we used to do when my “parents weren’t the enemy” (Ha ha, I get the drama from my mom.) I remember going to the museums every Saturday with my dad or watching James Bond movies with mom and dad every Sunday. We don’t do that anymore. We’ve lost all our little traditions. And I guess when you lose out on those, there becomes very little that you can hold on to.