Bottles of Fury

Bottling up one’s emotions is quite a different matter than getting angry without shouting about it.

My dad sees no difference between the two.  The way he sees it, the rest of us (his family) are in the wrong–in fact, we are inferior and phony (his word)–because we do not know how to get angry, and there is no alternative to living with us but to be angry at all times.

My dad has anger issues.  He yells or laughs scornfully at the idea of anger management quite frequently these days, because he knows we all think he needs it.  But it isn’t even so much the fact that he’s angry all the time.  Even if he legitimately had cause to always be angry (it’s questionable, but I’ll at least give him that to show how generous I am being), he doesn’t handle it in a manner that is healthy for anyone, and that is the problem.  He yells.  He yells a lot and very loudly, and he slings insults and belittles the rest of us, and he brings up things that happened fifty years ago (and you think I’m exaggerating) because in his mind, everything is related, and if he’s angry about one thing then he is angry about everything.

Most of these things that he yells about–there are certain things that will always come up, but of course there are always new things, as well–are not relevant.  Not at all.  There is no reason in any of it.  And as it is impossible to argue rationally with someone who does not or cannot see reason, all we can do is stand there and take it.  He also steps on your words if you try to argue back, so really, there’s just no point.

One of his favorite things to yell about is how the rest of us–or at the very least, my mom and all her sisters–bottle up their emotions.  This, as he said the other night, is phony.  (The real, or at least initial, issue at hand was whether someone had broken into our house, or if one of Brother’s friends had started stealing from us.)

“Well, I guess I’m a phony, then,” my mom said the other night.

“Yeah,” he said, “I guess so.”

But it isn’t a matter of bottling up our emotions.  My mom was angry the other night, too, as she tried numerous times to point out to him.  But she wasn’t yelling and screaming at the rest of us about whether or not her younger sister was illegitimate.  She was trying to think and talk about the matter at hand, rationally, without verbally abusing the rest of us.

It led me to think about how, for most of my life, I’ve bottled up my emotions.  Yeah, I’m a phony.  Guilty as charged.  I don’t like to push my shit on everybody else, so if I feel like crying or complaining to someone, generally I’ll just keep it inside.  And I keep more and more of it inside and it builds until finally, I can’t keep it down anymore and I just explode.  Maybe I have a nervous breakdown, or maybe I have a seizure.  But one way or another, my body and my brain can’t contain that much stress for that long.  Serenity now, insanity later.

That’s one thing the poison has done for me, at least some of the time, when I’m trying to be stronger than it and control my own emotions as much as possible.  It makes it so I can’t hold them in, or so that I don’t care.  I retaliated that night Bob tried to boss me around, and he hasn’t done it since.  The other night, one of the side effects of my medication made me really furious and I wrote a lot of scary shit on every page of the calendar that hangs in my bedroom.  Last night, while talking to my mom about all of this stuff (except that she hasn’t yet seen my Calendar of Doom), I punched the wall a few times and am now dealing with a swollen knuckle.  I cry to anyone and everyone, and none of it makes me feel the least bit guilty.  It really feels like there are two of me.

There have been times in the past when my bottle exploded in front of others, and then I’d yell and scream, and if this was in front of my dad, he’d laugh at me, because I had just proven him right.  Or I’d be angry or upset, and I wouldn’t do anything so as not to burden anyone else, and I’d feel even worse when my dad would say that I obviously felt nothing because I wasn’t angry like he was.

What he does is wrong!  It’s so wrong and it fucking pisses me off!  But am I yelling at you?  No.  Am I telling you that your family obviously doesn’t want you around and even wants you to go to Hell?  No.  Am I telling you that you’re a woman so you can fucking deal with it yourself and see if I care?  No, I’m not doing any of that.  I’m simply angry, and I’m angry for a reason, and I think my reason is pretty clear.