Fear and Violins
On Violence and the Human Condition
1999
Too many things are happening today; too many scary, horrifying things. My heart has been pounding in terror for nearly two weeks now.
I am terrified of everything; the terror numbs the underlying pain. What happened to Valerie at work? She was there one day and gone the next; dismissed; simply wiped off the slate. Life can be formidable that way; the utter unpredictability of it.
It’s a strange day; the air is heavy with shame; everything seems sinister and dangerous. I am so scared; feeling finally the incipient terror of my life; the terror I masked with a great deal of mental and physical effort.
Why did my mother hate me? Everything always comes back to that. But the difference now is that I see and feel everyone’s vulnerability in this life; its utter precariousness and uncertainty. None of us knows ever when the hammer will drop it; when the earth will quake beneath our feet. There is no way of knowing, ever; we are all equally at risk.
I see it everywhere; people to whom ungodly things have happened — they become institutionalized, develop brain tumors, get “repositioned“ at their jobs, or fired. Life can change on a dime, for all of us.
There is something rather new for me in these revelations, because terrifying though they are, by acknowledging the utter vulnerability of life, I feel connected to everyone else rather than superior and invulnerable.
Maybe this is a good thing, for it has been the wall of fear encircling me that has always separated me from the world and from myself. Fear has ruined my life until now.
Everything changed at the moment B’s hands slowly tightened around my neck. I couldn’t ever breathe freely after that, or have normal bodily functions, aspirations, or human contacts. Everything from that moment became a fight for my life. My body responds constantly, unknowingly, to stimuli in the environment that indicate danger to me. My every breath and every thought factor in the elements of danger.
I stay in my apartment alone, curled up on my couch, the fear pounding away. It is silent and deafening. My fear defines me and smothers me. I cannot run from it or go over or around it. It is everywhere, in the air that I breathe and the silence I move through.
Forty years after the trauma, I remain paralyzed with fear. I don’t know how those things could have happened, so many of them. I will forever be in awe of the darkness and brutality of the human spirit. We pretend to be civilized and humane and compassionate, but we are really nothing more than wild animals, ever on the verge of ripping to shreds anything that threatens our security.
It’s everywhere, I can see now. I guess it comes from our survival instinct. It is very important for me to understand now that it wasn’t only my mother and my family that was possessed of brutal instincts. It is a part of the human condition, and it happens to be a part of my human condition.
What to do with his knowledge, I am not entirely sure. I guess I need to understand that violence stems, probably always, out of fear rather than out of cruelty. So sadistic acts probably have much less to do with some kind of moral failure than they do with sheer terror.
Sherry brutalizes the people she works with out of terror; people are rude and self-centered out of terror; and my mother annihilated me out of terror. I am certainly carrying on the family tradition by unwittingly committing harmful acts against myself and many others.
It is my hope that in slicing my way through the cloud of terror that engulfs me, I will find my way to some of the other human emotions. I hope I will come upon forgiveness for myself and for those who have wronged me; find the capacity for love and intimacy with those who matter the most to me; and finally, gain the ability to uncover the actual Me.
Note: The essays I’ve been publishing on Medium were written beginning in 1990, when memories of my childhood trauma began to arise. Every day I choose one to publish. Yesterday, I planned to publish this one today.
How ironic that this essay written in 1999 is so applicable in 2024 after yesterday’s Valentine’s Day Massacre in Kansas City. We here are reeling from this horrid event. My thoughts go to the many victims.