The Antonym
I like to joke that my dad taught me to be a man.
He’d wake me up at dawn to take me landscaping with him, or to the construction site he was working at to help him lay rebar or install sheetrock. He taught me the honor of dirty hands and clean money. He was funny, always laughing & joking, even when he broke his back in a construction accident. He had laid in the hospital bed, cracking jokes & easing our worries.
I also remember his heartbreak & his bitterness. This man, built like an ox over decades of hard labor, stopped the truck on the side of the road one day. Not one word was said as he stepped out, walked out in front of the truck & proceeded to pace back & forth for several minutes. I had no idea what a panic attack looked like then, but I knew he was having a moment that I could not understand at the time. I looked at him worriedly, also aware of myself & not letting myself worry too much in front of him so as to not embarrass him. He held his macho masculinity firmly, my dad, having only seen him cry once as a little girl. Up until this season, when my mom began to drift & had entertained two affairs & now, the divorce, his pain escaped him the only way he knew: anger.
One day, I got so frustrated with his misdirected anger. He had caught me snaking into my room after-school, which I often did in order to avoid getting caught in the crossfire I often walked in on between my parents. In the seclusion of my room, I’d turn the music on, faded yelling in the background, & I’d look at the ceiling wanting to be anywhere but where I was. That day, he’d intercepted me, had me sit on the couch as he yelled - not directly at me - but at God, it seemed. I, being just a witness. But I’d sat through so many of these, the anger in me bubbling until it came out as a scream that matched his, “Well then divorce her already!” I could see the shock in his eyes, then an acceptance, as if my saying it was confirmation of the inevitable. “Yea”, he began again - voice slowly rising, “so she can finally go and be the whore she wants to be!”
Several weeks ago, I climbed into my truck late at night - body drained, dripping in sweat - deep in the routine I’d subjugated myself to. Out of work, hungry & angry, I’d spend hours at the gym, climbing a stairway to hell then lifting until my body couldn’t anymore, then I’d drive home with the darkness gripping at me still. I knew there was a facing I had needed to do & I had allowed myself to do it, but I could also feel the grip of it tightening around me, not wanting to let go. I could stay here forever, I thought.
The Dance of Anger is indeed one riddled with missteps. It is beautiful but it can also be luring; a never ending waltz that traps you in an endless, monotonous rhythm. Now that I’d burned the falsities that had kept me trapped in an attachment loop for far too long, I consciously weighed the options of walking away from the waltz or just live there; allowing it to make me cynical, bitter but keep me safe. The idea of the latter seeming more & more attractive each passing day.
I have my dad’s skin color, you see. I have his nose, his soft eyes that hide themselves behind a tough exterior wanting to be seen but not. &, for a few weeks, I had his anger. Having not made a choice about whether to let it consume me or not, I realized that by not choosing, I’d chosen. I recognized the frustration in my response to others, to their simple presence, as if their mere existence was a bother to my being, and it was. The only way anger keeps you safe is by isolating you, which is different from being alone. Isolation is a self-imposed prison, an exile of our choosing that, over time, becomes more difficult to undo. Either way, it was simply another form of avoidance.
You can love someone so much, it becomes a form of self-deception. You avoid reality.
You can hate someone so much, it becomes a form of self-preservation. You avoid reality.
To find myself in the teetering edges of hate, I realized that if I chose to waltz in the safety of bitterness, I would be missing the purpose of my pain. To feel anguish but not build around me another fortress, to remain open to the potential of another love, another heartbreak, that was courage. To not allow the ugliness of what heartache is to kill the beauty & softness in me, that was the real work. All this time, I thought the work was in the facing. I was wrong.
The work, it turns out, is in the allowing. The surrender. It’s the antonym of work.
So, I allow this inheritance, the vibration of THIS web - the one that carries anger like a symbol of strength - to transmute through me, & I release it.
