At 18. I wasn’t living at home, but had come to my parents house for something. When I arrived, there was no one home but my oldest younger brother. We had had a fairly contentious relationship for as long as I could remember, so the fact that we started squabbling was no surprise, in fact it was pretty much the keynote of our relationship. In fact, a couple of years earlier, I ended a situation by throwing a fork across the kitchen at him as he was running away, and sticking it in the back of his leg. I can still see the surprised look on his face as he looked back over his shoulder, and the way the fork vibrated up and down after it hit him. So, yeah, I had a little anger management problem, although mostly only with him.
Anyway, we were alone at my parent’s house. He had just returned from the statewide wrestling tournament, where he was the first runner-up in the heavyweight division. Being a jock was a very important part of his persona, and he was feeling very Mr. 16 Year Old I Am THE TOUGHEST GUY IN THE WORLD.
I asked him a question, and got typical snarky reply, and we started a slanging match that rather quickly escalated into pushing and slapping. We eventually ended up with him sitting on top of me on the floor, banging my head on the floor. My mom had just gotten new carpet in her living room, a short shag tha was a kind of bright paprika color—-mostly red, with the occasional orange, black and white strands. I remember looking at it and thinking, “well, if I bleed, it won’t show much on the carpet”. That was literally the last coherent thought I had. I was so angry, in such a blind rage, that I literally had no thought except that no matter what, I was going to kill him. I finally became aware of what was happening because he was crying and begging me to quit, and I had a handful of his hair that I had pulled out by the roots. The next day, I had bruises all over, in places I didn’t remember being hit.
This was actually a turning point in my life. It was the third time in my life that I had gotten so angry that I lost all semblance of being a thinking human, and I realized that I had to stop making violence an option, or I might really do something irrevocable to another human being, and that was not a person I chose to be.
If you’ve never lived in rage, which I hope you haven’t, you may never know how difficult it was to put that decision into practice. It took years— years of self talk about reasonable responses, years of meditation, years of learning that anger doesn’t need to be the default response, years of constant self vigilance. It was, of course, worth it. I have never again raised a hand in anger at anyone. And these days, the thought never even crosses my mind. But it was definitely work to get here.
Postscript: In the early 1980’s, when my brother and I were both in our thirties, my (now ex) husband and I visited my brother and his family for 2 or 3 days. As we were driving away, Bob started laughing out loud. When I asked him why, he said “I guess I never noticed before, just how much you talk with your hands.” “What?” I asked. He said, “You wave your hands around when you talk. And every time you waved your hand, your brother flinched”. I guess some memories never die.
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