Fury (12 page)

As a little girl I'd had a real, violent, almost physical fear of being left alone. My father—who sometimes preferred to leave me waiting alone in the car while he ducked into a Stop & Shop to buy kitty litter—always returned to find me crying, hyperventilating, or eyeing the parking lot (not to mention the rearview mirrors and the dashboard clock) with a face of panicked vigilance. In the rare instances when I got off the school bus and swung open the door on an empty house, I would wait trembling with my backpack on the front stoop until my mother returned from her chat with a neighbor.

In adulthood, this phobia has more than loosened its grasp. For the past four years I've lived and worked alone, shirking crowds and dreading group engagements. In my relationships prior to the Lark, I'd been detached, guarded, noncommittal, and bound to a labyrinth of self-imposed rules that meant no one got close enough to wound or reject me. I told one boyfriend he wasn't allowed to stay over more than two nights a week. I also evaded the same brave soul whenever he proposed moving in together. And the few times he dared to push the conversation even further—to marriage?—I cut him off at the kneecaps with words as cold, sharp, and precise as a samurai sword.

In the days after the Lark writes back with the bit about the “spark that hadn't become a flame,” some ghost of the old dread returns to me.

The fear hits me hardest at night, like a full-body blow, and I dread climbing into my bed. All night I lie awake and agitated. Those are the moments when the walls seem to constrict. When the floor fan makes an unbearable, pornographic slapping sound. I kick off the covers in fitful, twitching movements. But no matter how I turn, I can't shake the feeling of being queasy, severed from the world, resentful, and panicked.

Why has this fear of being alone returned?

I convince myself that it must be because I'm Larkless. I'm too anxious to ponder what my present situation could possibly mean: I feel alone in the presence of my family.

Even worse than my sudden fear of solitude is the anxiety I feel about writing.

When I wrote my first memoir, my only problem had been trying to get my stubby fingers to type fast enough to keep up with the words that dashed like ticker tape through my head. The first draft of
Smashed
had skated out of me in four months.

My objective, journalistic little anger book, on the other hand, had already taken me four
years
. And I have little to show for it but a few ringed binders full of “research” and reading lists, a couple of usable scenes. Time is ticking on my deadline. And I can feel the people around me begin to lose faith in me. Pals, beginning to tease me, say things like: “It seems like you're never going to finish that book of yours!” Or, “Whenever we ask you how it's going, you always say, ‘Almost done.' It's always ‘almost done.'” (These comments make me hemorrhage with rage. Friends have no idea that these are the exact same phrases I punish myself with daily.) My computer's cursor sits still and pulses, as if tapping its foot in impatience with me.

Something has to change. I'm impatient for a revelation.

I can't relate to that doctor of Oriental sciences whose essay assures me the key will be revealed to me the moment I really feel “the pain and discomfort” that is “locked inside” myself, “energetically.” I want to identify it. I want to exorcise it. If only it were as simple as a snakebite, I'd eagerly bite my own arm and suck out the dark venom.

One afternoon I finally get a hunch about what's holding me up.

In Virginia Satir, I read about and identify with a dysfunctional communication process called “nominalization.” It's what happens when someone who is afraid of emotion replaces a process of being (a verb) with a static event (a noun). For instance, rather than saying, “I'm angry,” a person talks about “experiencing anger.”

The words seem to shine a spotlight on me at my desk, where I am sitting for the umpteenth day in a row in front of an empty Word document, holding one fist to my mouth and listening to the voice in my head that cackles
hack, failure, fraud
in a heartless loop.

For the first time I understand that I'm not trying to write about anger indefinite. I'm direly pissed and trying to understand my own. The time it takes me to arrive here makes a monkey of me, but the unconscious is riddled with blind spots that it doesn't want to acknowledge.

I sit down and try—just for my own private purposes—to write about leaving Brighton. Even if I'd ignored my anger there (“I didn't notice”), denied it (“I'm really not mad”), or distorted it (“I'm just disappointed”), I remember quite clearly the flashes of fury I felt just beneath the surface.

I start setting my teary exit into words, but I can't seem to stop going back, rereading, editing, and rewriting. Weeks pass and I manage to turn a perfectly fine (if truly embarrassing) story into something so tortured it's practically unreadable.
Pull yourself together,
I tell myself, as I hack the thing apart for the fourteenth time and Frankenstein it back together.
Move on. Get to the rest of the story. Handle your business.

But I can't. The rewriting is compulsive. I drop the whole exercise and return to the safety of further reading.

I think I can elude my own emotions by crawling into my research and dying there. But in an anger-screening questionnaire I am cruelly confronted with the reason why I can't seem to write about my own individual anger:

“True or false,” the question asks. “Being angry means being imperfect. Is it possible that I repress the emotion to maintain a mind-set of moral superiority?”

True, all around,
I think.
A million times true.

In psychological texts, I find the correlation between perfectionism and anger. Freud frequently acknowledged how stingy the “anal character” was with anger. And in
Character Analysis
, Wilhelm Reich described the rather funny case of a man he dubbed the “aristocratic character,” saying he had a “reserved countenance,” “his speech was well-phrased and balanced, soft and eloquent,” and “it was evident that he avoided—or concealed—any haste or excitement.”

A perfectionist by any other name (“anal-retentive,” “compulsive personality”) smells just as bat-shit insane. I relate horrifyingly well to a perfectionist's MO. In recent years I too have taken on an appearance that is “unrelaxed, tense, joyless, and grim.” I've come to value “self-discipline, prudence, and loyalty.” I prefer to do things myself instead of relying on other people. And I'm also stuck in a “repetitive life pattern” chock-full of wanton abandons like “methodical, meticulous work.”

I get deeply depressed when I read about the way shrinks link repressed joy and closeted anger.

In the words of psychologist Theodore Millon, “the grim and cheerless demeanor of compulsives is often quite striking”; “they have an air of austerity and serious-mindedness”; and “their social behavior is polite and formal.”

And according to Reich, the perfectionist is “usually even-tempered, lukewarm in his displays of both love and hate.” How much of myself I see in those damning words. Not too long earlier, a friend had pointed out how dead I sounded whenever I called her from my parents' house; my voice was so absent of inflection it could have passed for the dial tone.

I'm so terrified to lend a voice to my anger, I begin to wonder if I've been holding back my affection too. Virginia Satir gave special attention to the ways families display both rage and affection. She saw them as two variations of the same theme. The same families that viewed anger as dangerous often had difficultly expressing affection too. Satir found children who grew up in families that expressed little affection also tended to behave angrily toward each other.

I start to wonder if I'd loved the Lark demonstratively. Had my eyes ever twinkled behind my poker face? Had I ever unknitted my troubled shoulders long enough to let my head melt against his shoulder? Even before what the Lark had called that “final, fateful night,” anxieties had begun to express themselves in the corners of my mouth. My posture had taken on a quality that was guarded and withdrawn. I'd spent most of July treating the Lark with fussy polite-ness. From the moment I'd set foot in Brighton, I'd been afraid to contradict him, lest he see me as flawed. Our meals together had turned awkward and courtly in those final weeks together. I remember one meal in particular, where we'd done little more than clear our throats and smooth the linen napkins in our laps. Our stilted conversations might've easily been mistaken for small talk had it not been for the hot surge of expectation moving under them.

In the writing of psychiatrist Claudio Naranjo, specifically in an article called “Anger and Perfectionism,” I come across the sentence: “It would be a mistake, however, to conceive of [the perfectionist] as a violent character—for it is on the contrary an overcontrolled and overcivilized interpersonal style.”
In a nutshell,
I think. The same instinct that has my writing in a deep freeze is just as surely sabotaging my life. It's no coincidence that I am a writer. (This as opposed to a performer, a dancer, a singer.) Writing is an art form one can torture, “polish” to death, before it's ever exposed to the withering light of critique. In recent years, I'd brought that same stultifying attention to my character. Maybe it was no coincidence that the Lark and I had spent so much of our relationship connecting through letters.

I resolve to connect with my inner fool, to risk embarrassment, inadequacy, and imperfection. To that end, I send the Lark a text message even though I haven't heard from him in weeks. Something like:
I've been thinking . . . when it comes to you and me, the revolution failed because it was ill timed and poorly communicated. But I'm beginning to think I still believe in the cause.

A few hours later, he writes back to say that he is, at that moment, playing the Reading Festival. But yes, as it happened, he would love to speak: “Why don't you give me a bell on Monday?”

I spend the rest of the weekend on a cumulus cloud. I credit Lycopodium, the fear remedy, for freeing me from my self-containment and making communication possible.
Homeopathy
, I think,
is sheer sorcery. It is out-and-out magic.

“You seem better,” my mother announces while we stretch out around a neighbor's pool. For the moment, she seems right. I find myself reclining in the same sunshine that I've been going to lengths to avoid, no tears on my cheeks, no impulse to evade my family, no wincing or teeth gritting or wringing headaches, no meanly shooing the dogs when no one is looking and letting frustration wrench me inside out. The bottom of the pool is as blue as an egg, and I lean over the side and plunge my arm in right up to my elbow. For the first time in a long time, I don't feel the urge to avoid phenomena that could move me. I take in the dragonflies brooding over the black-eyed Susans, beating their green-irised wings. I watch the light pitch on the water in jerky, golden flashes. I feel love, in a sharp pinch, when I look at my mother and see the easy beauty in her face.

In all my soul-searching, I think I've arrived at the answer to why the Lark and I had failed as a couple. I feel eager to share it with him, to make apologies, to make resolutions, to (above all) make up, move on, and resolve the whole fuck-awful mess. It's a bold move, bordering on insane given what he's said about not seeing a future with me. (Maybe the Lycopodium really has jacked up my courage.)

If only I'd read
Dark Night of the Soul
, I might have heeded the warning of St. John of the Cross and not acted quite so quickly: “There are others who are vexed with themselves when they observe their own imperfectness and display an impatience that is not humility; so impatient are they about this that they would fain be saints in a day. Many of these persons purpose to accomplish a great deal and make grand resolutions; yet, as they are not humble and have no misgivings about themselves, the more resolutions they make, the greater is their fall and the greater their annoyance, since they have not the patience to wait for that which God will give them when it pleases Him.”

The very next morning, I sit in the front yard with a fully charged phone in my lap. I'm prepared. In my quavering hands, I juggle a prepaid phone card and a few bullet points I'd sketched out when 4:00 A.M. found me a-tingle and far too excited to sleep. I'm nervous and shaking very softly as I sit with my dusty, bare feet pulled up under me.

Moments earlier, I swallowed my day's shot of Lycopodium, imagining it might make me not as brave as a lion, but as brave as I'd need to be to tame the animal out of one.