the mother of my rage
As I've come to get to know my "inner child" over the past several years I have begun to experience a kind of rage at my mother for her inability to care for me properly. It's not like I will ever express this to my parents, I think. I don't intend to any time soon, at least. The adult version of me extends understanding to them. The adult version of me resigns to thinking: it is what it is. It's not like telling them they fucked up will correct that injustice. Rather, what will correct that injustice is the adult version of me raising my inner child in all the ways that I perceive my parents to have been unable to.
Nonetheless, a rage exists in my body. I'm not sure if it belongs to my adult self, who wants to get angry at my parents on behalf of my child self. Or if it is my child self, a younger part of me who is finally unfettering his pain and grief.
This week, I had a very vivid dream. It felt so real that I couldn't discern upon waking if it had actually happened, and was just a memory, or if it was just a dream as it actually was. I can't now remember much of it, except for one image, which is of me, adult Ben, screaming at my mother. I kept on saying 왜 그랬어... 왜 그랬어 (Why did you do that... why did you that...) in a blood-curdling tone. It's such a vivid image because I am never that loud in real life. I've never wailed like that. The way in which I scream-moaned what I was saying reminded me of the wailing that occurs only at a funeral. Another reason why this is such a vivid image is that I was speaking Korean, which has never happened in any of my dreams before.
Sometimes, when the rage comes, it doesn't announce itself. It comes in a hot flash, like a flambe. It feels like a jolt of electricity going from my asshole all the way to my ears. It happens so fast that I don't know where it went, sometimes. It comes and goes before I even have a chance to greet it. And then I wish it would have stayed, because I want to get to know it better.
I think it makes sense that it comes and goes so quickly, just leaving a singed trace of its momentary presence on my awareness. This is because the primary survival strategy I've used throughout my life to meet my basic human need for relationships has been to ignore my anger. I am a highly experienced people-pleaser who learned how to act as if he never got angry, probably first somewhere in my teenage years, and kept doing that for so long that he actually convinced himself that he simply didn't get angry, like ever.
Of course, I still got angry. It was just that I would not identify it as being angry. Instead, I just acted out in glancing ways that confused others, uncharacteristic behaviors that neither me nor others around me could attribute to me being angry.
Now, I know many people of all different brain types probably choose to ignore their anger in certain moments. For me, the fear that expressing anger would result in something bad happening got ingrained in me starting so young, like I suspect maybe even during a pre-verbal stage of my infancy. Maybe my parents neglected, hit, or yelled at me when I expressed anger through my cries. Then, later on, it only got more reinforced because it happened to also be an effective strategy for forming relationships in my adolescence and young adulthood as well.
It's really bizarre to realize now that "never getting angry" was not an innate dimension of my temperament.
On one hand, I feel embarrassed and sad for the versions of me that proudly wear the "agreeable, likeable person" label, unaware that it isn't something to be proud of if you are just holding back your true feelings of discontent.
On the other hand, I feel a great sense of relief. I get to be someone who gets angry now, because I don't need to be anything or anyone I don't want to be, or that isn't the real me. I think if I were to look at my actual temperament, like, the real one that lies under all the personality-modding that I did so I could have friends, I am actually quite an angry person. In that, I experience anger a great deal, and I have ever since I was a little child.
And maybe that makes sense, given the fact that my parents were shitty parents, and therefore little Ben was appropriately responding with fury to the injustice of his care-taking environment, and in basically the EXACT same way, Ben the adult is incubating a perpetual ember of rage that, for me, feels existentially like it HAS to exist in my body, sneaking stokes of the feeling that this-shit-is-not-okay, this shit is royally fucked, I want to scream at the top of my lungs in Korean like I'm at a funeral and somebody died, because basically, somebody did, people died, they are dying around the world and on our doorsteps, and the pain is undeserved, senseless, tragic.
To realize that I get angry, to see my anger for the mirror that it is, is a returning to myself.
Though I taught myself how to suppress my anger for survival, nobody taught me to feel angry.
Therefore, I wonder if it must be one of the truest parts of me. It's the truest thing about me. And, it's a part of me that is the source of my life force.
Because isn't the rage that I felt when I hold in my heart, the fact that this country committed genocides in Korea, the same as the rage that I felt as a little queer boy in Orange County who realized that something, though incomprehensible, was terribly fucked up and there was nothing I could do about it?
Isn't the rage just the single source from me that shows us where we need to fight? So isn't it the truest thing about me? I think it's the truest thing about me.