#script crisis

why is nick saying he basically never claimed those were official scripts or that he wasn't "selling" them

“script crisis”

“sock crisis”

“blue and yellow crisis”

wtf is this week in byler nation 😭 at the end of it I’ll probably have to actually make a timeline cause god the chaos is nonstop and I don’t think I’ll ever forget about it. byler crisis week for real.

They’re not going to just randomly confirm blue and yellow being related to Mike and Will if they really want to keep reciprocated byler under the wraps until s5 because that would just be spoiling the entire thing.

If they actually confirmed blue and yellow, it would’ve been really nice yes and we would’ve been on cloud nine for sure. However, like I said, it’s unlikely they’d spoil anything relating to reciprocated/endgame byler until s5 airs and we see it ourselves because if they really are setting it up as a surprise/plot twist for the GA - them saying anything now would be ridiculous and pointless.

Earlier today I saw a post on a blog I follow reporting that the poster was approaching a birthday corresponding to the age of a parent’s death, and they were a bit unnerved by it.

I am freaking out a bit.

This coming Friday is my birthday, I will be 47. I am freaking out because that’s the age my dad was when he died and he didn’t have an incurable degenerative disease like I do.

I was 11 when he died (actually on December 27th) and my youngest is 10 right now. I am truly terrified of leaving my children without me. I have been the ONLY constant in their lives as my dad was long gone and my mum died when they were very young. Their father skipped off with his secretary and although he sees them, he is very unreliable (plus I know they would never want to live with him). My brother, despite having a good heart is also not very reliable.

So yeah I am freaking out.

The response:

I’ve been exactly where you are, and just want to tell you: You can and will get through this. What you’re experiencing is a recognized phenomenon: and here as in so many other areas, knowledge is power.

It’s hard to say conclusively that this “personal deadline” concept started to come to the attention of mental health professionals with the advent of the Transactional Analysis school of psychiatry / psychology, but certainly the first place I can find it mentioned in the literature is in the writing of Eric Berne, father of the TA school of thought.

What you’re experiencing can be described, in TA jargon, as a variety of “script crisis”. Transactional analysis looks at a lot of human behavior through the lens of story – meaning the stories our parents tell us about the world and who we’re going to / supposed to be. Our parents’ lives and deaths are, as you might expect, part of some of those stories, which in various forms, and with or without changes, get incorporated into our “life scripts”.

Leaving aside all the many possibilities that this situation can entail, sometimes people get saddled – implicitly or explicitly – with actual injunctions not to outlive their parents’ death-ages. Sometimes it’s not an injunction proper so much as a slowly internalized feeling that “wouldn’t that just be the way it would happen/turn out”.

So, to cases. In my case the year in question was my 55th, as that’s how old my mom was when she died (I was 16). She died of long-undiagnosed diabetes and complications after what seemed (to a teenager) an interminable illness, though it was actually only a year or so.

Having experienced this, there came at last a time when I realized I needed to seriously work through all the ramifications of this event; and so along came 2000-2001, and the writing of The Wizard’s Dilemma. During the draft work on the book I did my working-through in considerable detail, and afterwards thought, Okay, that’s that dealt with, then.

Yeah, well, the more fool I. As the decade crept on I started feeling uneasy. Gradually I realized that I was coming up on the Big Double Nickel, and the thought started creeping in: What if…? What if…! And this was even though I knew about script crisis, and how mere knowledge of it can routinely defang it. And this was also despite the fact that I was in good health, and (since I’m adopted) shared with my adoptive mom, as far as I know, none of the genetic issues that might have predisposed me to abruptly falling over secondary to an issue of psychic scheduling that was hardly written anywhere in stone.

Here’s where my own life script, to a certain extent, came to my aid. As any professional familiar with TA is likely to do sooner or later, I’d spent a good while on and off teasing mine apart to see what made it work. (But then this is what screenwriters do all day anyhow…) My script is, at its roots, strongly combative in nature: the very first thing I can clearly remember myself saying was a three-year-old’s version of “Fuck you.” So I started to make it my business to say, every morning when I got up, “Fuck this noise: Mom’s story is not mine (”For one thing, mine’s way better written,” one of the snarkier of my ego states would routinely remark) and I’m not going anywhere.”

And so my 55th year went by and it was pretty uncomfortable, on and off, especially when I remembered the “deadline”. But when I did, I would tell it “to its face” that it wasn’t going to get me. My knowledge of its source gave me the power in the equation, not it. I was “the youngest fairy godmother” in my own story, with power, if not to actually see the Bad Fairy off entirely, at least to mitigate the effects of the “curse” to a number of bouts of moderate-to-severe anxiety and some minor stress-related illnesses.

And eventually year 55 became year 56, and I was still here. And (rationally / irrationally) much relieved.

…So here’s the message. This is not an unknown thing you’re going through: it’s not just you. And there is rationality behind its seeming irrationality. Humans are creatures deeply in love with structure and pattern identification, and this phenomenon is just another aspect of that. What you need to know right now is that this pattern, though you’ve identified it and are upset by it, does not automatically or necessarily have power to affect you as you fear it might. Knowledge, here, is the weapon against the fear.

As the day approaches, spit in the fear’s eye and concentrate on the things that matter. Soon enough you will find yourself on the other side and still breathing, and feel that you’re safely so. And when that happens (or sooner if you like), PM me and we’ll raise a glass in each other’s direction and knock it back, and then get on with life.