Everything I talk about turns into a rant or story about how abusive and shitty my ex-husband was. Especially lately, I can’t take two steps without remembering the way he walked, and getting angry about it.
The other day, I was wondering how long it takes to recover from a hard blow. I wanted to say to myself, well, look how resilient you are, it’s hardly been two years out of an abusive relationship, which was an immediate segue from an abusive childhood, and look how great you’re doing. Well, you know. Yes and no. I am pretty resilient, but when I’m feeling strong, I don’t think about resiliency, I don’t think about strength, I just think about how good my life is and how happy I am. And when I’m feeling bitter and angry, resiliency becomes this big fat FUG tattooed on my forehead.
I didn’t ask to have a bad life that I could recover from and be a “strong” person. I get upset and chip-on-my-shoulder when people call me strong or honest or whatever the fuck the new survivor word is. I didn’t ask for those qualities. I didn’t want them. It’s like complimenting somebody covered in burn scars. These are not things I asked for or like. Sometimes I am okay, sometimes I am proud that I am still alive, but often I am just upset that I am marked, different, apart. Strength, to me, isn’t a sign of my health. It’s a sign of the fact that I have been sick. I wouldn’t be strong if I hadn’t been abused. So sometimes I hate my strength, hate having it identified, pointed out, hate feeling it and knowing it’s there. I wish I could be weak. I would be weak if I hadn’t had to learn how to have a shell. And if I could be weak, I could break.
I don’t know how many people can understand this — I know Badger does, we talked about it — but god I am so jealous of people who can break down. I once had a boss who told me about going on a vacation, and calling home from a pay phone in a diner only to have his father tell him his brother had unexpectedly died. He described going into this blind rage, where he punched the pay phone until it came out of the wall, and cried for hours, unable to stand up. I know he was telling me all this in a vulnerable way, talking about something horrible that had happened to him, but I kept thinking how awesome it was. I wanted to ask him, what were you thinking when you punched the phone? Did you know that wasn’t an okay thing to do but did it anyway? Did you not care? Did you not even think about that? Oh, man, how did you not think about that? What does that feel like? I could never do that. I could never will myself to become that unconscious of everything around me that I could even raise my voice.
Badger and I talked about the concept of breaking down, how we envy other people for being able to do it, and also disdain them. Because the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and the people who can’t cope get the help and attention while the people who don’t ruffle get nothing, because they’re fine, right? Not breaking is its own kind of meltdown, just quieter and nicer and easier to ignore, both for others and the ones doing the breaking.
Recovery is really such a lifelong process. Sometimes that feels okay. Sometimes I look at that and think how lucky I am, and I get excited for how much change is inherent in my life, how many things I get to experience from a perspective of gratitude and hunger that makes the simplest things beautiful. And sometimes I just want to lay down and cry in frustration. I don’t want to get over and integrate and cope and fucking whatever just so I can get to the far deeper layer of hurt underneath and do it again and again and again. Forever. It’s like beating final boss only to meet final final boss. LIFE IS A SHITTY GAME DESIGN.
A friend of mine who has just been through a bad break-up recently told me about running into his ex and her new boyfriend, and the unexpected rage and violent impulses that came up. Intellectually, I understand that, with the benefit of a psychology major and words like “hostility out”, I understand that. But internally, emotionally, that is the most alien concept to me. Just recently I bought Grasshopper on the Road, one of my favorite childhood books that I didn’t discover till high school. There were so many stories in there that gave me that same feeling, like I was looking at some creature beyond mortal comprehension. Why does Grasshopper feel like change is good? Why is he happy for no reason? Why is he traveling? Reading that book now, I marvel at how I couldn’t understand these concepts so basic they’re for children’s eyes. But now, with the benefit of a few years of learning how to enjoy my own quirks and desires, I can understand why Grasshopper does what he does, goes where he goes, wants what he does. And I feel very sorry for the younger version of me who found it so confounding.
I wonder if I’m going through the same process with anger, and hate, and violence. It looks so strange and alien to me now, I can’t understand how those things operate, why a person would become so angry as to be violent. And yet, every few hours lately I think of something Mr. Flint once said or did and become so full of something that I can’t concentrate. I tried explaining to my bear what’s been wrong with me lately, I feel like I’m flailing and have no purpose and I’m not doing what I’m supposed to be doing and oh god existential quarterlife. But maybe that’s not it. Maybe I know exactly what I need to be doing, and I just don’t have a name for it, a concept that I understand. There is a scene in The Eye (original version, I have no loin-lust for Jessica Alba) where a blind girl is given sight and asked to identify a stapler. She can’t identify it until she’s touched it, of course. Just seeing a thing doesn’t make any sense yet. She can only identify objects through the few sensory tools she’s had. Maybe I have been feeling intense anger and hatred and have only been able to identify it as something wrong with me, because self-deprecation is the tool I’m best at using.
Lately I’ve been feeling full of energy and apathy and antagonism. Nothing’s good enough. Everything’s upsetting. There is no fix. There is nothing to do to make me feel better. With what I know about myself and my life, I assumed that I feel like I need to be going back to school or learning a new skill or cleaning the whole house or being productive somehow. Maybe what I’m actually feeling is intense anger and hatred, and what I need is to punch Mr. Flint in the face, punch Gregory in his weepy vagina, hide pieces of Polar’s husband under the carpet, call the police on all the rat-bastards who I know have shit in their house and deserve to go away for it.
In some ways, I’ve been so frustrated that I keep thinking of Mr. Flint, of all those boys we knew, of all the wrongs done to me. I am 24 and I want to be done being angry and I want to be done being sad and I want to be done being hurt. Ha ha ha ha, my mind says, nobody is ever done with those things. I think I’ve been fighting this new layer of hurt, and the resulting new degree of anger that isn’t just an intellectual exercise. I don’t even know how to express anger. I was trying to imagine this yesterday, what if something really horrible happened, something that would upset me beyond belief. All I could imagine doing was finding some banal task and working really hard on it, and if anybody asked if I was okay, I imagined saying blank-faced that I was very upset right now but thanks for asking and I’ll be okay later.
That makes me feel somewhat better. All those years with Mr. Flint, when I worked myself to the bone, if I can look back and see that was the energy that anger and hatred gave me, I feel less like a doormat. Not that I wasn’t doormatting up the place, but it helps to know those feelings were there, I do have them. It’s not that I have to learn how to be angry, that those feelings have been somehow beaten out of me. I just have to learn to recognize it, direct it, feel it. All the good and normal and healthy stuff is there, it’s just coming out through this absurd Goldberg device of my internal psychology. Anger triggers the lever that moves the bowling ball that knocks over the glass that turns on the light switch that activates the fan that makes me want to vacuum REALLY HARD and bake six cakes and write five blog entries and consider moving to the East Coast to get three masters and a job overseas.
Of course, I have no fucking idea how to bypass all that. Like, what, do I scream? Do I, um, do I say grr? I mean, that’s funny, but seriously, that is about the level of processing I have with this particular emotion. Babies are better at this than I am. I almost don’t feel like any expression of anger is appropriate. The worst I feel like I can do is go lay down in the other room for a while and stare at the ceiling until it’s time to make dinner. THAT’S HOW PISSED I AM GUYS. I really don’t have any faith that I can even make it beyond this intellectual realization of, oh, I am angry. How quaint. How gauche. I suppose now I will have to clench my fists or something, like a peasant child. Do people still punch pillows? Or is the new fashion to write poetry? I suppose I’ll read a book called The Time for Anger is Now and I will learn their new trademarked system involving notecards and possibly a timer. Anger is the new health!
Sarcasm is the new vulnerability!
Blogging is the new emotional avoidance!
Cookie is the new solution!
