Pbeidy
“Rage, sing muse of the rage of Peleus’s son Achillles…” - Homer
The above opening line, the most remarkable one in the Western Canon, is an amalgamation of a scrap of memory of an audio book version I had on tape cassette in the late 90s and the Robert Fagels translation upon which that audio book was probably based, a copy of which sits upon my book shelf, propping up my intellectual credentials. The line has been echoing in my brain meats for weeks now. Partially that might be due to the fact that Nolan’s treatment of the second part of the worlds most renowned duology is currently the hottest thing in the cyberculture, generating memes, hot takes and Muskian tantrums by the metric ton.
In truth, the phrase has often returned to me over the years, not merely due to its powerful simplicity, but because I have found myself to harbor a good amount of rage at times. Most often it expresses itself in a tendency to react defensively in the face of criticism. More than one person in my life has commented on my Beratungsresistenz and I need to concede their point. The source of this reactions is.. complicated. I have been working on myself. I always was trying to be a bit better, even if I felt I had a good reason for my behavior.
Until I got sick. It is immeasurably more difficult to contain ones anger when you are constantly feeling like side of sun baked road kill. Once I was through the therapy, I physically started to recover remarkably quickly. Being allowed, nay encouraged, to indulge in the most wanton form of calorie inhalation will do wonders to lift the mood, even if the digestive results were at times unpredictable. The touchiness, though, the thin skinned reaction to unruly children, impatience with my wife, exploding at perceived slights from family members, that remained. It wasn’t a problem yet, but it could become one. My children are still young, and I live in terror that the lasting impression they have of their father is of a mercurial man who will go off at them for the slightest infraction.
Now that I have managed to physically stitch myself back together, it seems that the time has come look inside and sort this shit out. I have ample reason to, though traditional therapy hasn’t proven tremendously effective. My previous therapist effectively sent me home, as she thought I had managed to over come my medical trauma quite well. Fair, in a way. Its more the reverbations into the already existing flaws that need addressing.
So I guess I will try it with writing. Maybe spewing my trauma into my own private, unvisited corner of the internet will allow me to work out those tenacious devils of my darker nature.