I’ll tell ya why! Because…um..this..DAMN MOWER. I mean, because I’m so tired. I’ve been out here for hours and I’ll never finish this job? Honestly, I’ve no clue why I’m screaming at this thing. BUT IT NEEDS TO EFFING KEEP GOING! BECAUSE IIIIII AM.
As I stalked into the house in a rage last night half way through mowing down the jungle that lives in our backyard, I found myself wondering for the first time if maybe I wasn’t just mad at the mower but at something else. I came inside and screamed that I hated that mower and that yard and that “I can’t ever win!” A year of practice now has me listening to myself in these moments and suddenly I realized what I had just said. AH. You’re in a flashback, dear. That’s what this is. No wonder you feel out of control, stupid, tired, incapable of finishing a simple job. Of course you’re screaming at an inanimate object again.
This is yet another situation where you are doing your best, driving slowly, unclogging the machine patiently, being the BEST mower operator in the goddamn world and it insists on sabotaging you still! How could it be so cruel?! How could it insist on dying even though you took such good care of it? How could it hate you so much?! How could it want you to keep mowing forever and never finish?! How could it never want you to have any free time this evening to relax?! Hell, in this flashback world, even mowers have mean, sentient minds.
For years I would become frustrated at people or inanimate objects..ok, boiling lava mad…and instead of allowing myself to ‘be angry’, I would squash it down and bottle it up since being angry was a sin. 30 years of my life, I was never angry, always wrong, always a horrible, selfish, ungrateful person in my eyes. I honestly began to believe I wasn’t angry because now I just didn’t feel anything. I had officially, finally, crammed so many emotions into my internal storage space that there was blessedly no room for more, so now I was numb. Wonderful peace. Also guilt because I didn’t feel happy to see loved ones anymore. I didn’t care what happened to anyone or to myself. I was just ‘blah’. After a few months, ‘blah’ didn’t seem like such a blessing anymore.
Suffice it to say, a year later, I’m no longer blah. But I also no longer squash my emotions. Well, most of the time I don’t. Which means that for a few months after the ‘blah’ I was just insanely angry at everything. Rage personified. I didn’t like that person either. Mostly because while I thought letting out the rage was important, it never helped fix anything, so I was obviously still not angry at the right thing. I was still raging at symptoms, not the cause. One day, the cause of this particular rage, ‘dinged’ in my head. Lightbulb. For 2 days after that I was angry at that situation from my past. I streamed it, I recorded it, I talked to myself in the back yard. The next week, I was, for the first time in a year, not numb and not angry. For a few days at least, until the next trigger happened and I had to sort out which thing I was actually angry about now, since it seemed unlikely that my pen running out of ink was deserving of such blind rage.
Fast forward to yesterday. Occurrence 372 of sudden blinding, boiling hatred..of the lawn mower. The remembrance that I’m not really a person who blames lawn mowers for unnecessary cruelty. So why was I angry this time? After I seethed for a moment, I started crying. This used to surprise me, but now it’s just normal – part of the processing of flashbacks. As the tears streamed down my face I realized what it was that I was saying out loud when I was still angry and it was “I work so hard but it’s never enough! I keep going when I’M tired and it seems endless, I just keep going. But no one else does. How is that fair?!”
Ah. Those years and decades of pushing through, getting up at dawn and being up til midnight just trying to get the dishes done, keep my brothers fed, do all my own schoolwork, help my brothers with theirs, mediate 5 arguments between my parents, take Dad his lunch, put on a friendly face when the neighbors came to visit, clean the house, keep my brothers from getting in trouble for stupid things like the fact that they didn’t sweep every corner perfectly, keep my brothers safe, keep the family going, keep the neighbors from knowing how broken we all were, keep going, keep going, keep going. Never be upset, just be a good enduring missionary kid who is always kind and loving and helpful and generous. No time to read or play outside with the other kids tonight. Get up and do it again tomorrow.
This lawn mower was trying to take me back to that time in my life. Stupid lawn mower. Poor not-the-real-cause of my rage. It’s ok, mower. I understand now. The good news is, next time I’m about to scream at the mower, I will remember this time, and why I wanted to scream at it. And instead of being angry at the mower, I’ll be angry again at the years of my life that were so endless and inescapable and depressingly exhausting. I’ll be angry at the people who should have seen and helped me. The people who should never have put me in such an impossible situation. Then, I will be angry at the cause, and eventually that will be another infected wound which begins to heal now that it’s been lanced, cleaned and bandaged lovingly.
Every time a flashback like this happens, I used to be frustrated that I was ‘still broken’. Now I’m grateful that one more instance has bubbled up to be addressed. One less anger unexpressed. One more happiness reclaimed. One more step to being the me I always was but was never free to be until now.
I will be free-er every day and so can you.