Anger feels like power. What the body needs is to hate.
If you knew me in real life and were to ask me, not that this is a question regularly asked, I probably would not describe myself as a kind, maybe even a good, person. People who know me would be shocked by this. My kind, wise old father, so forgiving a man I nicknamed him Buddha, always assured me that I’m a loving person. My nephews love me as an indulgent aunt who avoids telling on them whenever possible. My niece, an adult now, credits my time helping to raise her as part of why she’s as capable and well-adjusted as she is.
My sisters adore and are protective of me, their sometimes-childlike sibling, and would be the firsts to argue that I’m one of the most sympathetic people they’ve ever known. I don’t hesitate, despite my social anxiety, to hold a door for a senior citizen or reassure a child who bumps into me on the street. I brightly greet neighbors and ask to pet and coo at their dogs. I could go on.
So, why, considering all I’ve said above, do I not think I’m wholly a good person?
In part…YouTube. Let me explain.
I was raised by a narcissistic, addict mother who was forever waging war against my gentle, weak father. I grew up in a battleground that, according to one of my therapists, left me with PTSD. And growing up, whenever my mother was acting sane and nice (read: medicated), my sisters and I learned that the only way to prolong the peace, delay a return to chaos, was to repress, to not show any emotion that she might deem negative toward her. Depression is rage spread thin, they say, and by age 11, I was deeply, clinically depressed.
The rage has to go somewhere, and as it grows, as it filled me up, it had to find a way to be released, even bit by bit, even at targets that didn’t deserve my fury, that were not the things that made me this way.
But I coped with my circumstances by being the perfect child, desperate to please every authority figure. I excelled in the schools that attending added to my anxiety and eventual agoraphobia, I never earned a single detention or even a scolding, I was grounded a total of once in my entire life. I began getting my poetry published around age ten in a desperate bid to feel that I had my mother’s love and approval. It was never enough. The storm raged on into my adulthood. Only in the last few years have I felt finally free, mostly, from the wrong my father did, from my mother’s curse.
The storm inside persists even now. And now, to maintain my outward appearance of pleasance, my anger gets vented via…YouTube comments. Specifically, one of my favorite categories of YouTube videos, the kind where a narrator reads Reddit posts and comments. These stories I supposedly listen to to help me understand how other people work, how they relate to one another, though I mostly feel confusion in response to them. Like, when people fight, do one or both of them actually get their friends and relatives to call and harass the other person over it? Is that really a thing?
Anyway…
Sometimes my comments on these videos are snarky, or expressing shock or sympathy, or occasionally cheering an OP (original poster) on. But that last category is the rarest, because – and here’s the problem – so many of these OPs tell a tale of being terribly wronged, betrayed by a loved one, cheated on, disowned. And all too many of them react to these actions in a way I don’t approve of. They do little or nothing to retaliate, in order to be the bigger person, or claim they hate confrontation, or just feel too defeated to fight back.
And I can’t help it, I often leave a comment – on the compilation video, where the OP will almost certainly never see it – harshly judging the poster, calling them a doormat, saying I have no sympathy for them. It’s not entirely true, I have sympathy for everyone deep down in my heart, but I don’t know, these situations make me so ANGRY.
I think I understand it, at least to an extent. As I said, I grew up unable, out of self-preservation, to fight back when I wanted to. I’m projecting my hatred of my own helplessness (weakness) on total strangers. With such vitriol that, though I don’t go back to check responses, I know I’ve gotten at least a few replies to my comments of things like ‘Wow. Are you okay?’
Good question. Yes and no, I suppose. Is anyone ever okay again after they’ve not been? I try to think of this commenting I do as a sort of therapy, a way of venting aggression that won’t hurt anyone else. But sometimes it makes me hate myself, and realize I still hate myself, that I’m still caught in my mother’s curse. Sometimes I feel that I’m just like her. And I think that scares me more than anything.
My Longing Shall Gather 