(TRIGGER Warning: The Following Letter Personifies My Left Arm So That I Can Express To It My Feelings About The Self-Mutilating Cutting I Forced It To Endure Through My Adolescence.)
Hey. How’s it going. Are you mad at me? I’m sorry. I haven’t been kind to you. I know that I’ve hurt you over and over and over again. And yet you are always with me. And yet you have never left my side. I abuse you and you remain. You remind me of myself. For better or worse we endure it. In a way we are brothers. I marked you. I created you to to share my pained experience of a life I found wretched. You are strong. You were the outlet for my darkness. You bore the brunt of my sadness.
In certain times you taught me how to feel alive. In others you would simply remind me that I was numb. I know I started it. I was the first one to attack. You didn’t do anything wrong. You didn’t do anything to me at all. And I cut you. My parents told me that when I was a toddler, I would randomly punch my best friend in the arm. Without provocation. They didn’t understand why I did it. They didn’t have an easy time getting me to stop. So it seems I’ve always borne a penchant for inflicting my suffering upon the world. Upon others.
Then myself. In the lower realms of darkness, the transcendence of assault to the act of self-harm is celebrated as progress. It is a decision to protect the innocent and unafflicted from undeserved and unjust harm. It is a first step in the direction of containment, manipulation, and mastery of self. It is the bare beginnings of the epic hero’s alchemical voyage to achieve self-actualization.
In the paradoxical pursuit of both analgesia and anguish, what have I done to you? Without your permission I’ve volunteered you as my sacrifice. I’ve prostrated you forth as my payment for entry. I’ve willingly condemned you to indefinite torture for the sake of glory, barren of even the minutest fragment of intention to ever balance the equation or return the favor.
The sacrificer exchanges what is not his for what he has not earned. The sacrifice exchanges his own future for the benefit of another. As compensation for his altruism, the sacrifice receives only the promise of imminent brutality. This is not an equivalent exchange.
In my story, I am the hero. In your story, I am the villain. You are correct. I am the predator that endangers you. I am the sinner who cast the first stone. Yet as I accept and acknowledge the karmic debt I’ve incurred as retribution for my unprovoked assault on an innocent, I notice that you are innocent no longer.
Through violence, I’ve corrupted you.
You did not choose to turn the other cheek. You sought vengeance. You chose to embrace the darkness, not conquer it and transmute it. You were always threatening to expose me, always threatening to give me away. You would scream out for attention in the gym class locker room. Desperate to be noticed.
I would silence you with my t-shirt. I didn’t receive attention. Why should I have let you? You were as invisible as I was. We weren’t noticed. What a complex relationship we share. I know I abused you, but I loved you as well. To my surprise and confusion, my indulgence in cruelty does not diminish my capacity for affection. I simultaneously wear the titles of hero and villain and see no contradiction.
Still, the heinous acts I joyfully commit, drunk on the ecstatic intensity of savagery, diminish my righteousness. Yes, I corrupted you. Yes, I destroyed your innocence. Yes, I tainted your purity. I drew blood. Your blood. I turned you into my kind. You became my progeny. My bastard child. I was your dictator. I was your ruler. I was your master. You were subject to my will and my will alone. As I was subject to my mother’s.
You see, you must understand. As the Character V says in the movie V for Vendetta, “What was done to me created me. And what was done to me was monstrous.” My mother created a monster. Unintentionally.
Does she deserve my hatred for failing to overcome her own trauma? For not being able to contain the agony within her? For passing it along to me as it was passed along to her?Is she not merely the monster my grandfather created? How far backwards do the fingers point? Is anyone responsible for anything?
Regardless, I’ve inherited rage. The rage of countless generations. The rage she passed on to me. The rage I passed on to you. The abuse. The unrelenting abuse. The fury. The passion. The hatred. As I apologize to you, I am resisting the urge to cast the blame upon her. We’ve seen the forest for the trees. Hurt people, hurt people. Each villain is a victim. Each victim, each villain, bears the inherent right as a sibling of carnage to pass the blame along. I blame my mother. She blames her father. Then he too is granted the privilege to pass the blame along under the infinitely cyclic laws of this sadistic machine. Nonsense. Transparently, the path of blame leads only further into the madness. Blame itself is the flaw. Blame itself is the mistake. Blame itself is to be blamed. It is not righteous for the victim to blame the abuser. It is not righteous to demand punishment as retribution. It is not righteous to look backwards in anger at all.
Punishment is not justice.
Healing is.
Could this virulent substitution be the root of all evil?
Could it be that simple?
Perhaps the entire world could be redeemed with the simple exchange of punishment for healing.
Clarity.
The path of fault is the path of destruction. The path of corruption. The path of abuse. The path of evil. The path of rage. The rage that consumes my ancestors. The rage I’ve inherited as a familial right of passage. As it’s vessel, I hear its irresistibly enchanting offer incessantly repeating. Allow me to consume you whole and along with your conscience I will consume your pain. Allow me to control you. Allow me to devour you. Allow me to procreate. In exchange, I will allow the inebriating, hypnotic ecstasy of fury to envelop you into the darkness of its impenetrable cocoon. In exchange for your submission, I will purge your mind with the inundation of madness. Rage. Dominating every crevice of your existence as you sink into the calming euphoria that emerges as your pain and suffering leave your body along with the rest of you. All that remains is rage. Unbridled rage.
You are no longer in control. The rage suffocates you. Helpless, you drown in its vile nectar of anger and bliss. It blinds you from the gruesome sight of the monster that’s now taken the wheel. You don’t recognize him but he’s you. He’s the embodiment of your suppressed emotional trauma. He is your shadow. He is rage. Where does this rage came from? How long it has been in our family? Irrelevant. It matters only that it ends with me.
This merciless cycle of inherited generational trauma will shatter against the force of my will. I will swallow the pain. I will accept it. As I observe what I have done to you, I realize what has been done to me. I understand. The pain and the power. The destroyer and the destroyed. They’re two sides of the same coin. Yin and Yang. In each, a piece of the other can be seen. They are inextricably bound.
What else can I say to you? You know why I cut. You remember. You were there. You wouldn’t dare try to tell me otherwise. I know you haven’t repressed the times I would dig my knife deep into you because a woman’s rejection dug deep into me. Creep. I know you haven’t forgotten the times I butchered your skin because my mother butchered my self esteem. Screaming. You’re a monster without a Christian bone in your body. I know you haven’t misplaced the memories of when I’d tear through your flesh because the tremors of my parents’ caustic separation were still tearing through my adolescent existence.
You are my cathartic release for the festering anguish suppressed within our skin. Of course you remember. You do not have the option to forget. You wear each memory for all the world to see. You are the living witness to my sins. You weather each and every laceration at my behest. You are not asked for permission. You are not asked for consent. Why would you deserve that when I didn’t? No one ever asked for my permission. No one ever asked for my consent.
We are objects of affliction to be used and abused. I see the time I cut the deepest. I see the time I used you as an ashtray. I see the tick-tac-toe board. You are my unwilling journal. I’m sorry. I’m sorry that I did to you what was done to me. I know these words alone would never be enough to heal you. I say them not expecting forgiveness but rather as an introduction to the acts of redemption to follow.
Without action, we do not address the root of the problem. We do not prevent it from happening again.
Without action, apologetic words are a hollow formality, masquerading under the guise of what people self-righteously brand, “politeness.”
Everything is backwards.
Everything is an illusion.
Regardless, I say the words. Regardless, my apologies are contained within my actions.
Take solace.
The cycle ends here by the declaration of my indomitable will. I will not hurt you again. I will not hurt another. I will not pass the rage onto my children. They will not have the option to pass it onto theirs. I release it here and now. I write it. I draw it. I sing it. I sweat it. I express it. I do not suppress it. I will not contain it. I will not carry it. I will not pass it along.
My dear best friend, I thank you for always supporting me. I thank you for serving as my mirror. I thank you for enduring my worst. So that I could see myself. So that I could see the beast with my own eyes. So that I could groom him into a king. For all you have done for me, I thank you with all of my heart. I promise to exemplify the type of person we so desperately wished was there to help us when we were all alone in the darkness. I promise to pay it forward.