The Box
A Short Story Processing Childhood Trauma
Hello, dear readers. I haven't forgotten about you. You're not lost in my wordless ether. I just haven't had the creative energy, the words, to write anything to share here in quite some time. Thank you for being patient with me. I hope you enjoy today's read.
Here's a rough draft of something I typed out on my phone whilst sitting in a chair outside this morning with a big, mustard yellow blanket and my 80 pound dog on my lap.
The last time I saw his face was his inmate photo. The last time I heard his voice was when he told me the last audible words he's ever spoken to me: “Fuck you.” That was immediately before he hung up on me, the line between us hanging, for a slick, timeless moment, in the thin prison air I couldn't feel through the phone.
Our paths, from the outside, look entirely opposite. As if we walked away from our respective childhoods, both giving it double middle fingers as we carved out lives for ourselves on either side of a spectrum, fucked on both ends.
It's just that the fucked up end where I landed wasn't easily spotted from the outside. Because I spent my teenage years and adult life hiding my pain. Pretending. Hunkering down into myself, or maybe, more precisely, digging deep pits within myself to shove the especially ugly parts.
Simultaneously, my brother was expressing each and every hurt as bruises on someone else's body. And as invisible threats as painful as the physical hits themselves.
He acted out the trauma onto others. I acted out the trauma onto myself.
But it wasn't always this way, for me at least. For a few years during my younger childhood, violent outbursts weren't uncommon. The hole in my brother's bedroom door was from the tennis racket I'd slammed into it with everything I had. The neighborhood kids had learned from my brother the great entertainment in tormenting me just to see me snap. One afternoon, with my inline skates on, I'd pushed an especially mean kid down and stood on his abdomen for long enough to make sure he knew I wasn't playing around. Another time, while my brother and a few kids were skateboarding in the front yard, practicing their best rail slides on their homemade metal pipe stand, simultaneously doing or saying enough cruel things to me until I couldn't handle it anymore, I'd picked up the rail and swung it around like a maniac with a sword, creating a 360 degree bubble within which I was no longer a victim: I was the brave knight defending her humanness. These acts of violence had become the only way I knew how to communicate my urgent need for them to stop. Because me begging them to stop, telling them with my words, was never enough. I would cry and plead and they'd all just laugh right in front of my face as if my pain didn't cost even a single cent. But when I had the upper hand, when the crazy in me, the fighter in me, surfaced, they'd run. Sure they'd laugh at me later and do it all again another day, but at least, for some small moment, I'd be free.
Because really it wasn't the neighborhood bullies that got to me. The bullies in my own home were who carved me into the skeleton of a girl who could only muster violence as a way to get any attention at all. The bullies in my home who modeled that very violence. But then, of course, I was punished for that too. Because angry little girls aren't pretty or good or easy. And that's all my mother wanted. She wanted a shiny little object that she could present to the world to say, "Hey, I made this, look at me, aren't I great?" Because that's exactly how narcissists operate, even and especially with their children. Pawns in their ever-evolving game of manipulation to feel as good as possible about themselves. And when those kids laughed at my pain, all I felt was my pain when my own mother laughed in my face while I so desperately cried out for her to understand me. To see me. But all she and my brother had ever taught me was that I'm only seen when I'm angry. And that's not being seen at all.
I was nothing if I couldn't fit inside of the box she'd crafted for me. And there was no way in hell I was staying in that box, breathing through the folds like a rat on its way to its predator. So, I spent the proceeding decade clawing my way out, until one day, she kicked the box sideways and I set myself free.
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