Anger

I roar down the barren desert interstate at 85 miles per hour. My windows are down, and I’m playing Swedish death metal over the stereo at full volume. It’s Christmas day. I’m screaming my lungs out.

A month earlier, my mom had walked into the RV I was living in, and handed me her eviction notice. Telling me how shameful and toxic I am. That I need to leave. We barely speak for the next month, but on Christmas morning I send her a warm text, wishing her a merry holiday. There’s an emoji heart at the end. For three hours, she does not respond. She’s over in the main house, maybe 200 feet away. With each passing hour, I feel a pressure building in my chest. Around noon, I get a message back. “Merry Christmas.” There are flames growing in me. I want to scream. I want to walk over to the house and let her have it. Tell her that she’s a petulant fucking child, a vindictive and wrathful bitch. Instead I hop into my car, throw on the heaviest music I can think of, and zoom off towards interstate 10, zooming northward towards Phoenix at a speed that is ill-advised. The anger that’s been simmering and bubbling in me for weeks, months, years is starting to come out. Finally. I scream and scream all of the obscenities and raw hurts I’ve shoved down and kept secret, that I’ve directed inwards, that never felt remotely safe to let out into the world. By the time I return to the RV two hours later, I have no voice left. My throat hurts for a week after. But I feel ever so slightly lighter.

Four months earlier, The Girl and I had just broken off our relationship. I’d flown out to Alexandria to visit her one last time, and we’d spent two beautiful weeks together, which made the decision to split feel all the more confusing. When I arrive back home in Tucson, I fall into a deep depression, barely able to leave the house. I start eating, binging, numbing. Anything in the house I can get my hands on, I gobble down with compulsive, grief-laden urgency. I eat my mom’s stash of brownies and potato chips. I go to the store before she returns from her trip, trying to replace what I’ve eaten, but the store doesn’t have the right flavor of low-fat oven-baked chips, which truthfully taste like cardboard. So I get the closest substitute I can find.

When my mom gets home, she’s initially happy to see me. But when she discovers the counterfeit chips, she marches into the RV where I’m working away on my laptop, and starts screaming. She screams that I’m ungrateful, that I don’t respect her, that I’ve fucked up. I try to explain the state I’m in, the depression, but she won’t hear it. She doesn’t care. She tells me to go to the store and fix what I’ve done, right fucking now. Unable to breath, I hop into my car and head to a different grocery store. I consider never coming home. I wish I were dead.

I get the chips and come home, and she’s started piling all of my belongings by the door. I want you out of my house right now, she says. She’s fuming. Ready to blow. It occurs to me, just for an instant, how ridiculous this situation is, how overblown a reaction this is to… chips. I smirk and smile a bit, and this just makes her even madder. She screams that she’s allowed to be angry. That I need to get the fuck out of her house. I do as I’m told. I move all my shit into the RV, and don’t emerge for days, overcome by feelings of shame, smallness, and self-loathing. Three days later she walks into the RV and says, “stop hiding.” Snap out of it already. What’s wrong with you.

I’m so wary of painting my mother as some kind of monster in this series. For years, we’ve been great friends. When I was doing well, and self-sufficient, our relationship felt like it was stable and deepening. But when my life started crumbling, thrown into utter confusion because of a startup job that drove me crazy, a love affair that broke me wide open, and a seeming inability to pull myself together through an act of heroic self-will, that’s when things started to slip.

I believe my mom prays at the altar of independence, at being self-made and self-reliant. She’s a “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” believer, through and through. And I suspect that seeing me struggle so desperately, seemingly incapable of getting it together, filled her with shame, made her feel like a failure as a mother. And I further suspect that my increasing rejection of her worldview pissed her off. Self-will and independence made her, and that’s the medicine she was desperate to shove down my throat as I was struggling. But after a lifetime of trying to dominate myself and force my problems out of existence, I couldn’t do it any longer. I dove headfirst into 12-step recovery, into a full throated admission that I am powerless, that my life is unmanageable, and that only a power greater than myself could restore me to sanity. She was adamant that I take up arms at the same moment I had decided to surrender.

As for how this all ties to my theme of commitment, what comes to mind is that I often treat that hurt, scared little boy inside me with the same exasperated disdain that I’ve experienced from my mom. Why can’t you just snap out of it? Why can’t you just be better already? Just fucking decide to exercise control over yourself. I come by that strategy honestly, what can I say. But my decade plus of experience here tells me that it’s a surefire recipe for broken commitments. For spells of feverish activity in pursuit of perfection, hoping to break free from my circumstances through sheer force of will, followed by debilitating seasons of depression and shame. Heroic willpower does not work for me. Full stop. And directing my anger inward at that hurt little boy only deepens the grooves of distrust and acting out.

I’ve had a few rough days over the last week. Days where I’ve wanted nothing more than to eat and hide and disappear. There’s a loud fear in the back of my mind that I’m slipping back into compulsion and dysfunction. That I need to clamp down. But I notice myself with slightly more capacity for kindness, gentleness, compassion towards the hurt within. It’s not instinctive yet, but the muscle is growing, and the relationship is slowly mending as trust is rebuilt. Onwards.