nervous system
There is a line I love from a song I love: “the things that I don’t know could fill a million fucking houses.” The line applies to me well. I become transfixed on specific topics, like the successes of community violence intervention programs and the daily outfit selection of an influencer whose content I actually enjoy (see @linmick on Instagram).
One area I know most intimately: my father’s moods, oscillating between charisma and impatience, kindness and resentment, attentiveness and outrage. I can predict his movements while he’s angry, from the living room to his bedroom behind a locked door, or worse, to the bar whose name I don’t know, upon the flame of his anger reaching its fuse.
My nervous system has become a map, a user’s how-to guide for dealing with him at his worst. The wisest part of me, deep inside me and buried beside my intestines, knows when his anger is rising before my mind catches on. My abdomen tenses up and my eyes dart from room to room, trying to determine where he is and who the anger is directed towards. I become silent in my movements and go shelter out of his view.
As a child, I had several hiding spots I would retreat to when he got into his most intense moods. This skill helped me to be the last one standing in nearly every game of hide-and-seek with my friends. I still have the instinct embedded into me, and I think it might be why I run into a locked room or towards the closest fast food restaurant that serves fried chicken whenever I get too drunk. I run away from the present company and towards isolation, where I feel safest, insulated from the moods of others.
Navigating communication with him at his most angry is a talent I am still mastering. I know to never respond with reciprocal anger, never question him, and appear as docile as possible. The goal for me is always the same: pull the anger out of him and restore the man I know and love as my dad back to his true self. The other goal is self-preservation (re: hiding spots).
This person I love most in the world, my dad, is also the person who taught me that anger is a cruel and all-consuming emotion because of the ways he displays it. Being raised by him has inalterably tarnished my perception of this emotion we are all meant to feel. I grew up equating anger with fear, and I haven’t been able to unlearn the association. When I try to feel anger, it immediately melts into its softer counterpart, sadness. Given my genetics and familial links, I can’t risk what the raw expression of anger would look like coming from my body. Would I say horrible things I can never take back? Would I run away from the source of my anger and come back home to find that my partner has left me in response to me leaving them? The worst outcome I can imagine is, Would I cause a young Amy-like human to refute any feeling they identify as anger due to their fear of my delivery of it?
It is complicated to know this part of my dad and still fear his loss more than I fear anything else in this life. He was the angry parent and also the nurturing one. The one who has made me feel more loved and accepted than anyone else. The one who has sacrificed his own dreams for the sake of supporting me in mine. Still, I wish he would listen to me and go to fucking therapy. It does not feel fair that I have sat in hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of talk therapy examining his anger, and yet he has never spent one hour doing the same. I’m so tired of knowing his anger so deeply, of coming home and immediately asking my mother or my sister what kind of mood he is in. I want us both to have a healthier relationship with the mental state english speakers label as “anger.”
