When I was a child, I learned that being passive was the only effective counterattack to violent anger. My sister would punch me, and kick me, hit me with things, suffocate me under a pillow, scream at me and hold my head underwater while we were swimming. The only thing that ended these sessions of good sibling ‘fun’ was acting like I didn’t care.
I foiled her by reacting to violence with peace, to anger with calm, to yelling with quiet.
It was so effective that she showed me off to her school friends by asking me to stand still while she hit me and they all watched. I obliged. it was so much easier to stand there on the sidewalk outside the school living inside my head, than to react and get hit again.
The school friends all laughed, of course, but I’m not convinced a couple of them didn’t look at me like they found my sister’s behaviour a little concerning.
And that is exactly where I still go when confronted: though I’ve expanded the menu somewhat, offering a la carte servings when my feelings are being hurt.
‘Just go into your head,’ I tell myself, ‘just stand here and think for a moment, and it will all go away.’
The last time I did that was a year ago today when someone I thought cared a lot about me said something that made me feel cheap, unimportant and hurt beyond measure. And doing that to myself yet again finally made me realise I am not going to do it any more.
After four decades I am realising none of ‘it’ has gone ‘away’. All those times I forced myself inward, I forced those feelings inward too. They didn’t go out into the world and disperse with the evening breeze, they piled inside me on top of one another, stomping the preceding ones down until they sit there in hardened shapes that shift and groan like tectonic plates.
1000 days 