Anger/aversion response
Jan. 3rd, 2009 03:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
theatreofsinOnce when I was a child several of my friends turned on me. Given that I was in middle school at the time, a time when all children are universally horrible to each other in one way or another, this was to be expected, but as I was not well-acquainted with this truism of child development and/or the American public school system, I developed an entire mythology around the injustice.
Here's the thing about children: they're not innocent. They have a natural curiosity about life and nature, and the more taboo a subject is, the more they might be interested in it. Sex, violence, death, sadism, children are in no way immune to any of this. As for myself, appetite whetted on classics (have you actually read Shakespeare? sex and violence all over) and fantasy, spent long hours envisioning how I'd kill them if I ever had the power of a despot at my hands. I can remember long, delicious ponderings devoted to how the tips of my fingers would first strain into, then break through, the skin of their throats. I wanted that sort of visceral, absolute victory, that shared moment of physical intimacy, that power over another living thing that had wronged me.
Naturally, I never acted on it. On the whole I'm a surprisingly nonviolent person. I've only been in one fight, and during it I sat down, put my arms up to shield my face, and didn't make a noise. I didn't regard that as weakness. It was another kind of strength and, on reflection, a different mode of control. But that moment, that element I craved, the malicious and unreasoning force against a vital spot, didn't disappear from my mind. They just came at me from a different direction or two.
Because at the one hand, that's what I perceived myself as suffering. And as much as it was a refuge then, it's endured as something I fear now.
People having power over me, or having power to hurt me when I have no means of fighting back, terrify me – not in any form of screaming dismay, but in a way that makes me feel as though my own stomach has turned against me. An element of my life or self becomes foreign territory, leaning toward the enemy, and I'm caught in its grip without a last recourse. It's the moment right before the fingers touch the throat, when you can see it coming and can't get out. It's the point at which you know any screams will choke before they make it to your mouth.
And it would be nice – really, it would – if I knew of a strategy to fix that. But I don't. So my reaction thus far is usually to curl up into a tight burnt weed of anger and snarling hate, imagining some fantastical vengeance, which even to my mind is another display of defeat. If sitting and taking blows without acknowledging weakness or pain is a mode of control, this is a mode of submission – and to those people I least want to submit to.
But I am a quiet person. An internalized person. And resorting to hate is easy. And so long as it is the quiet, internalized hatred, with no expression or evidence, at what point will I ever be compelled to change it?
Here's the thing about children: they're not innocent. They have a natural curiosity about life and nature, and the more taboo a subject is, the more they might be interested in it. Sex, violence, death, sadism, children are in no way immune to any of this. As for myself, appetite whetted on classics (have you actually read Shakespeare? sex and violence all over) and fantasy, spent long hours envisioning how I'd kill them if I ever had the power of a despot at my hands. I can remember long, delicious ponderings devoted to how the tips of my fingers would first strain into, then break through, the skin of their throats. I wanted that sort of visceral, absolute victory, that shared moment of physical intimacy, that power over another living thing that had wronged me.
Naturally, I never acted on it. On the whole I'm a surprisingly nonviolent person. I've only been in one fight, and during it I sat down, put my arms up to shield my face, and didn't make a noise. I didn't regard that as weakness. It was another kind of strength and, on reflection, a different mode of control. But that moment, that element I craved, the malicious and unreasoning force against a vital spot, didn't disappear from my mind. They just came at me from a different direction or two.
Because at the one hand, that's what I perceived myself as suffering. And as much as it was a refuge then, it's endured as something I fear now.
People having power over me, or having power to hurt me when I have no means of fighting back, terrify me – not in any form of screaming dismay, but in a way that makes me feel as though my own stomach has turned against me. An element of my life or self becomes foreign territory, leaning toward the enemy, and I'm caught in its grip without a last recourse. It's the moment right before the fingers touch the throat, when you can see it coming and can't get out. It's the point at which you know any screams will choke before they make it to your mouth.
And it would be nice – really, it would – if I knew of a strategy to fix that. But I don't. So my reaction thus far is usually to curl up into a tight burnt weed of anger and snarling hate, imagining some fantastical vengeance, which even to my mind is another display of defeat. If sitting and taking blows without acknowledging weakness or pain is a mode of control, this is a mode of submission – and to those people I least want to submit to.
But I am a quiet person. An internalized person. And resorting to hate is easy. And so long as it is the quiet, internalized hatred, with no expression or evidence, at what point will I ever be compelled to change it?