I’m Angry.

I don’t think I’ve let myself really feel anger very often in my life.

I remember as a child, getting so angry at people I’d clench and grind my teeth until they ached. I would sit in silence imagining I was grinding that person’s bones into dust with my teeth.

Always in silence.

It wasn’t okay for me to express my anger at the offending party growing up. There was no conflict resolution in our household to manage disputes among me and my 4 older sisters. I grew up believing that they all hated me. Supported by direct interactions and reinforced with stories told to me by my mom about how they treated me when I was too young to remember.

But my mom couldn’t be my savior. In fact, she scared me the most. And my dad, well, he just didn’t talk at all so how could I talk to him?

Many times in my life I’ve had the perverse regret that everything wasn’t awful; that maybe it would have been easier to understand just how bad things really were. And it’s not lost on me how that just proves how fucked up I am from the whole situation still.

In a recent conversation with a friend, they shared how they were able to see things were fucked at a very young age and describing some of their observations growing up.

I thought, “wow that must have been a gift to be able to see it so clearly so early on,” and replied:

Further ahead than I was, I just thought everybody’s life was full of drug and alcohol abuse, violent punishments, screaming and throwing hammers, sexual abuse, and more I don’t think I really started understanding just how abnormal that is until my mid-30s to be honest

I don’t really know how to write about being angry and piece it together in a meaningful way for outsiders to understand. I’m just throwing words at the wall right now.

I had a dream last night I killed my own mom; not a typical dream, this was like the universe giving me permission to let my anger out in a safe space. To act out the anger I’d balled up inside my whole life.

In the dream: I moved back in with my mom because I was having a rough patch with the Mercury poisoning. It was only going to be for a few weeks.

The longer I stayed, the worse I became. I was losing all track of time.

Months after moving in with her I happened to remember I'd brought a kitten with me! I found where I'd left the kitten, in a cage no food or water or way to escape. I hadn't meant to leave them like that, alone and afraid, uncared and unloved.

On the floor holding this kitten, I cried for having harmed them with my mistake, and lamenting the lost time. MONTHS, gone! What happened, I was getting worse the longer I stayed here.

My mom came around dismissing the kitten, and as I tried to tell her that things were getting worse and where had the time gone she started crying. "Oh but what about me?! I'm the one who's suffering, me, IT'S ME YOU SHOULD BE CRYING ABOUT!"

And I realized it was going to be like it always was, her making every situation about herself.

I sat down next to her and told her she needed to finally apologize. Apologize for knowing I was being molested and doing nothing about it. Apologize for Sam who's sitting in prison for 200 years for the same thing he did to me.

She just looked at me coldly and said nothing. I started screaming that she owes me an apology at the very least.

And nothing still.

I end up sitting on her, choking her as hard as I can, watching her face become like dry cement.

I don't choke her to death though, she leans over coughing and trying to catch her breath for a while. She starts telling me she's done nothing wrong and says again, "you need to hurry up and get over it so we can be best friends again."

And I fucking lose it. I start stabbing her in the back while she's bent over.

I KNOW this is just a dream, because before the first strike I woke up. I was wide awake and gave a sort of knowing nod to the universe; intentionally going back in to finish it.

I was screaming until my throat broke up in rage in the dream, but in the real world I continued to be as silent as I'd always been.

I told my best friend about it in the morning. And that after that dream I had another one where I physically tore a woman’s jaw off her face with my hands.

Do you have some pent up anger about something?

I use the Marco Polo app to send video chats with her constantly. It felt the need to send me this notification yesterday:

That’s my ex-mother-in-law. Nobody in that entire family felt the need to tell me their son had a previous DV charge (that somehow didn’t show up on ANY records until he was back in court for strangling me).

And every time I had to show up in court to deal with the aftermath they’d assemble a crowd at the entry/exit point to give me coordinated, “go fuck yourself you fucking whore” looks. Yeah, they made me the villain in the story for getting strangled.

So yeah, you could say I’m fucking angry still.

The algorithms must know it too because they’ve started feeding me vigilante justice against pedophiles and groomers.

And selfishly I watch them and think where the fuck was someone like you when I was being abused in real life? Or does it only matter when an adult man sits behind a computer pretending to be a child to catch the predator on camera for views, comments, and likes?

I was molested by family members who will never be punished for it. I was groomed by a man who is now serving a 202 year prison sentence for the same, but not a single one of those years is for what he did to me.

And my mom, in real life, looked me in the face and said, “hurry up and get over it so we can be best friends again.”

Yeah, I’m angry.

Just experiencing that emotion is beyond foreign for me.

Then like an avalanche it builds to me remembering all those other times people WITNESSED me being harmed and never said anything. Not a single goddamn word. Not when I was being attacked by siblings and couldn’t breath; not when I was being hit and kicked by a friend of my mom’s while holding my mom’s hand; not when I was being taken to jail to visit with an adult man; not when I tried to commit suicide; not when I was being abused by romantic partners; not when I was being assaulted at work; not when.. the list goes on.

So what do I do with all this anger? What does a person do when there is no real justice that can heal the wound? When the end of the movie is, “and they were all miserable and ate dog shit sandwiches” instead of rosehips and rainbows?

And what’s the social acceptance of such anger? I wasn’t allowed to feel it then, but then to engage with it as an adult is also strange. But leaving it sit just rots us from the inside out.

I know I won’t sit in anger forever. And I’m beyond grateful that I’ve grown enough to not feel genuine fear of my anger. So much of my life I’ve had to keep it locked out completely because I knew, just as a matter-of-fact, that I would end up in prison for killing somebody if I let it out. That’s not melodrama, just the truth. I would hide out and isolate so much to keep control over it, and now it’s buffered enough that I feel safe exploring it.

I’m glad my dream realm is supporting me as well.

Thanks for coming along on this journey. Thank you for reading. Thank you for giving me space in your consciousness to say “this is what happened to me and it was never okay” so maybe, just maybe, one day I can feel like a whole human being.