One Angry Girl

I know what it’s like when I get like this.

Angry. Frustrated. It doesn’t take a genius. Self-awareness isn’t a superpower—it just takes a little paying attention. And once you start paying attention to what you’re like, you can’t *stop* paying attention what you’re like. The thing about awareness is, once you got it, you got it. You know?

A little distinction here. It’s no surprise to anyone that I get pissed, because hey, if I had never been pissed, my SuperHero identity never would have been revealed. Great Big Girl would never have been born without the injustices that demanded her creation. So sure, I get filled with the Righteous Indignation or Touched with The Fire, and everybody’s seen that. And really, when The Fire is on me, I mainly get one of two reactions. Either the witnesses think, “Hey, the girl is right—that is unjust”, or they laugh. Because I feel The Fire with my whole body, and I can’t hide it, and I “Grrrrr!” and I shake my angry fist, and I open my throat and push the air up from the bottom of my lungs for the dramatic, emphatic, “That. Is. So. Wrong. I could. Fall. Down.” Yeah, I know. It’s not an act, though—it’s totally sincere. But people tend to think it’s funny.

Anger, though—that’s another proverbial kettle of fish. When I’m angry at the world, or at you…it’s not pretty. And when I like you, I hardly ever get angry at you. In fact, there are a whole bunch of people I have never once been angry or frustrated with. But it does happen sometimes, and when it does….ugh. I won’t take it out on you. I won’t be mean. And chances are that I’ll try to reign it in as best I can and disguise its presence, because I know what it’s like. But sometimes I’ll let you know—because let’s face it, sometimes you need to know what you’ve done to make me angry—but no matter how calm, how rational, how let’s-problem-solve-for-a-second I am, I know that the angry energy is leaking out of me in silent, inky waves, and it’s thick and dark and palpable. It permeates the room and looks as dangerous as a bed of razor blades. I know that’s what it’s like. I’m aware of that. It’s a force of nature, my anger, and no matter how hard my logic and my manners try to keep it under control, the anger still seeps through my skin like a vapor and floats over toward you.

I know. And I hate it.

The thing is, I’ve always been interested in the things that people consider their “faults”. For me, those are the things that make a person unique, interesting, and beautifully human. They just reveal the person to be…a person. You know, sensitive, vulnerable, fragile in spots. And that’s amazing to me. That is so fucking gorgeous. Because “perfection” is boring. “Perfection” is armor. But someone revealing what they think is a fault….that’s wonderfully brave. Feeling the fear and exposing a weakness anyway for the sake of connection? I don’t know that I can think of anything more beautiful than that kind of courage, you know?

Like I think about this boy I fell in love with during my senior year in college. I had just turned 21, and we both knew something was happening, but neither of us really said anything. Steven and I edited a literary journal together—it’s how we met, and how we ended up spending lots of time together. And he was so fascinating to me. He was a brilliant poet and a musician, and articulate and kind and respectful and quietly funny and kind of reserved, in that Iowa Reserve way. He was kind of posh, too—in that Iowa posh kind of way, where the rules are that you don’t flaunt your posh-ness. But he could play the violin, the viola, and the classical guitar.

And we moved from working together to hanging out all the time. I’d throw parties, and he’d find ways to be the last person to leave. At night, he’d walk me back to my all-girls dorm like a gentleman, and we’d stand outside the doors and talk for hours because neither of us wanted to leave, sometimes the talk skirting around what was happening but never coming out and saying it. But hanging around him, I constantly felt like I was trying to tuck my blue collar back underneath my shirt, thinking why me, you know? Steven was perfect, so why would he want to be with me, you know? This scrappy, loud, opinionated girl, still a class-war punk rocker at heart…a girl who knew how to walk down a city street and identify the hookers, the dealers, the fixers, and the gang bangers. A girl who stayed out all night, shoved her way down front at raucous concerts, laughed too much and too loudly in inappropriate situations, a girl so thoroughly flawed and strange…what would someone so refined, so cultured, so perfect want with her? With me, I mean. It made me suspicious.

Until one day, we were editing the final draft of one of our journals, sitting quite close and sharing the same computer. Sitting that close to him gave me butterflies so intense I wanted to giggle and vomit at the same time. (Yep, that's exactly what it was like.) As the slower reader, I was the one doing the scrolling through the document. We were working on a poem, and he abruptly ordered, “Wait—go back a couple of lines,” and then caught himself. And he actually blushed with embarrassment as he said, “I’m sorry—I’m a total backseat driver at the computer. It’s really bad.” I offered to let him drive at the computer, and he said, “No, no…I need to learn to stop doing it. It’s an awful habit.” And something started to kindle in my brain….and as we continued, he had us review the spelling of certain words a number of times—“Wait, wait …is that word spelled right?”—and I’d have to assure him that yes, yes it was. And this happened quite a bit in the process until he confessed, “I just need to check a lot—I’ve always been a really bad speller.” And then something in my head burst out like a sparkler—Oh my god, I love him. I love him I love him I love him. (In that way that you love someone when you’re 21, you know.) Finally, he had faults. Which weren’t really faults at all, but he thought they were. He was a regular person. Like me.

And after that, I noticed quite a few of Steven’s “imperfections”: a good deal of his Iowa Reserve was made up of pure, unadulterated shyness; he didn’t know a lick of contemporary music; all pop culture references were lost on him; he made huge decisions to please his family, rather than himself; he had a pretty big fear of emotional vulnerability… all of these things pegged him as my complete opposite, and instead of finding these things annoying or frustrating or problematic, each new chink in his armor just revealed a more and more fascinating person. Each quality he found weak or embarrassing, I found to be something that made him interesting and strange and lovely. They were the things that made him him, which were then, by default, beautiful. Completely, absolutely beautiful.

I only ever had one little flash of wishing he was different. As the year neared its end, Steven and I talked a lot about moving to Iowa City—he was going to law school there, and I had applied to the Ph.D. program in English, and of course, it never occurred to me that I wouldn’t get in. I remember the day I got my rejection letter from the English program there. I remember sitting next to Steven on the edge of the bed in a friend’s dorm room, the news hanging heavy in between us. He conspicuously did not look at me while he insisted, “You should move to Iowa City, anyway.” We looked at each other silently for a long time after he said that, but the Iowa Reserve, you know, kept him from saying more. And I needed more. Not much more, but more.

So I figured I needed to take matters into my own hands. We went to the last big party of the year after the final literary journals came out. It was May, and it was raining, and the hosts had lit fires in the fireplaces. Around 3am, the party started to break up, and I went to warm myself up by one of the fireplaces before heading out into the rain again. Steven came over and stood next to me, looking at the fire and not saying anything. We stood there silently for a while, the air so full and charged, and still looking at the fire, I took a deep breath and said, “You know, sometimes I get the feeling that there’s something you want to say to me, but you’re keeping yourself from saying it.” I saw him nod “yes” out of my peripheral vision before he admitted, “Yeah…yeah, maybe.” And he stood there next to me, clearly struggling with taking the leap. So I tried to make it easier for him, saying, “Well, you know, if you ever want to say it, it’s okay…” And I saw him drop his head a little and bite his lip before almost-whispering, “Yeah, yeah…maybe…” And he walked me home afterwards, and we stood outside my dorm for a long, long time, barely saying anything but neither of us wanting to say goodnight. And he was on the verge of saying something, of saying it, the whole time, and I waited, hoping he’d realize that it’s okay, that it’s not such a big risk after all, that it wouldn’t make him that vulnerable...but no. It would have been too out of character.

He moved to Iowa City, and I—either too smart or too scared to move there without something more concrete—moved to Ohio.

And strangely, I still think about Steven every now and then when I get angry, when the black mood hits me that (I think) makes me completely unfit to be around people. Because no one wants to put up with that—that intensity, that unpleasantness. And I think about how I felt about Steven’s weaknesses, even the one that kept him from moving us forward, and I still love them. Just like the weaknesses of all the other people I care about—I love them for all their beautiful, human fragility. And I wonder if I’ll ever encounter that same thing during those moments when the ugly anger is simmering inside me…if I’ll ever meet people who will see that anger, recognize it for what it is, and embrace it anyway.

Because even SuperHeroes have demons, right? They get angry. Look at Batman. That's one moody bastard right there. So shouldn’t anger be an acceptable emotion? A natural emotion? Or is it okay for men, because when they get full-on pissed, they become that dark, brooding, bad boy archetype that people find so enticing. But women…are the only acceptable women all Earth and no Fire?

And it makes me think that maybe the kind of SuperHero we become is the kind of hero we ourselves are in dire need of. You know—if we cannot save ourselves, at least we could save someone else from the same fate. Maybe that’s what makes this job so important: you have to make a choice. Either you can sit around and wait for someone to swoop in and save the day, or you can go out and save it for someone else. As tempting as the first option is, it’s not really a choice, is it?