Well, I don't usually daylog (of course as someone with 4 writeups under his belt, I'm not sure 'usual' is really meaningful here) but I have had the most unbelievably weird day today.
Got up this morning around 10am, slightly hungover from a late night. I had expected a pretty normal, boring kind of day - bit of work, messing around on the internet, just see how things turn out. Got an early morning tomorrow, don't want to do anything intensive. So, I turn on my laptop, spend a couple of pretty nondescript hours reading stuff on paper and online. I'm just starting to think about lunch, maybe get some pasta together or something. Just a quick check of my emails...
Oh shit, there's one from my dad and it looks serious. The first few words in the preview are about something he should have told me a long time ago. My first, horrified thought is that someone's died - a friend or relative I wasn't in frequent contact with - and my dad heard the news before me and didn't tell me for some reason. I'd just sent someone an email about a family friend who'd been in a serious car accident, so the fear of someone dying was very fresh in my mind. The news wasn't bad, though, just unsettling.
I grew up in a relatively ordinary nuclear-type family with two younger siblings. I think I'm a classic oldest son in most ways - a strong record of academic achievement, good at working out solutions and taking the lead if I have to, and not bad at talking to total strangers in social situations. I suppose the flipside of all that is I'm not really very good with all that emotional stuff. People see me as someone who's excessively rational and scientifically minded, while I myself often feel pretty depressed without really knowing why, and find it hard to be uninhibited. Guess it's a pretty cliched situation, but that doesn't make it any less true.
So I didn't really know how to react when I learned that I had three half-brothers I previously knew nothing of.
I did swear a lot ("fucking THREE?!") which can't have earned me great popularity in this thin-walled student flat.
I remembered seeing a distant aunt or cousin a few months back, and my confusion as she asked after siblings I didn't know. It's a big family, I had thought at the time, she probably just confused me with someone else, but I was slightly suspicious for a while nonetheless - I knew I was the product of an affair and that my dad had left his first wife for my mother. None of my tentative enquiries to other relatives had yielded anything, though, so I'd forgotten about it. I mean, it's not exactly something you'd assume, is it? Well, that's that little mystery solved.
It was only after I'd told my flatmate of this strange bolt from the blue that it all hit me. I remember shaking uncontrollably, the coffee mug in my hand rattling against the desk, as I tried to compose an email in response. They sure don't cover this shit in the etiquette handbooks...
I wasn't angry in the slightest about him not telling me before, and without going too deeply into the personal details, I don't think his conduct was especially bad given certain mitigating circumstances. I'm 20. I have no idea of the sort of decisions involved, so it's hardly my place to judge. At any rate, what would be the point? I am still shaken up though - feels really surreal, like I'm in an Iain Banks novel. (Still, at least it's something like The Crow Road rather than, say, Complicity...) I've been shivering all afternoon, trying to distract myself with TV and the internet. The reason for all this coming out now is that I'll be meeting said half-brothers soon, at a memorial service. So, awkwardness will be very much the order of the day.
I need to get to bed, really, but I feel so very awake.