When I was a kid, I was sent to therapy for ‘anger management’ and was constantly scolded and punished for acting out. As a young child, I was very emotional, crying over cartoons and losing my temper over small things. I knew something was off, but this was the 1980s, and the only negative emotion a boy was allowed to show was anger. So that’s all that really came out.
I didn’t question it because I felt angry, and the adults knew better. If they said I was just angrier than the norm, then that had to be it, right?
Well, the therapist sent me to a psychiatrist who diagnosed me with high-function autism, ADD and a clinical phobia (arachnophobia that was due to both me and my brother being bitten by spiders on multiple occasions). I was prescribed medication and started taking it, and I started doing aversion therapy for the phobia. I would later learn that he had noted that I seemed to have some depression, but as this was common among autistic youths, it wasn’t communicated to me at the time, and my mother seemed to feel that treating the autism and ADD would resolve that.
I remember feeling listless and unmotivated while medicated. I had been an artist since I was a little kid, but I stopped drawing and let my paints dry up. I had been playing the piano for years and was teaching myself guitar, but both of those instruments just gathered dust. I used to love going out to shoot a .22 with my dad, but I lost all interest in that. My tree fort (which I’d built myself) was left to rot. I just didn’t really do anything except come home from school and stare at the television, and then go to bed early. Weekends were spent listlessly playing with toys, napping or staring at the television. I didn’t even have the motivation to play Nintendo, I just let my little brother play and watched him. But I didn’t feel angry about everything anymore, so I was okay with it.
It was only a few months, but my mother eventually took me off the meds. She told me how my eyes looked dead and she couldn’t stand to see me like that.
The aversion therapy was successful. I mean, the phobia was a learned response, so it makes sense that unlearning it would be fairly straightforward (I also got to hold a tarantula and a jewel spider, which was both cool and creepy). But staying with the psychiatrist had other benefit.
When I got off the meds, I had some idea of how to go about channeling the anger that returned. I got into martial arts and boxing because I could hit people with their consent. I got into angrier music and subcultures that helped dull the sharp edges (metal and goth) and, perhaps surprisingly, encouraged me to get in better touch with my feelings.
I’m not a big fan of the person I was back then, truth be told. I think I was actually a bad person. Not irredeemable, of course, and that strong sense of justice that is such a part of being a high-functioning autistic person was there. As was the guilt from my religious upbringing. But it didn’t take much to set me off, and when I did, I inevitably went too far. I remember once beating up a guy because I was told he’d done something by someone I barely knew. Turns out, he hadn’t, and his brother came to beat me up in turn. And when his brother didn’t win that fight (despite everyone, including myself, expecting him to), I spent a solid six months talking shit about both of them. Of course, that original guy hadn’t actually done what he’d been accused of. He hadn’t even known about the accusation. From his point of view, I just one day decided to beat the tar out of him for no fucking reason while calling him an asshole.
I actually never spoke to that guy or his brother after that. I have no idea what happened to them, because I can’t even remember their last name, and everyone I knew from back then is dead or long moved out of state and lost touch with me. So it seems I’ll always be the villain in that story. Nothing I can do about it. And of course, even if I ran into him tomorrow and made my apologies and we buried the hatchet, that won’t change the fact that I was the asshole.
What makes it all worse was that I had usually been the victims of the bullies, throughout elementary school and in the first year or so of middle school. The turning point came during my last year of middle school, when I was going to a different school in a different city (because my local school didn’t have a gifted program), and I made a group of equally-nerdy and socially-awkwards friends on the bus that brought all us gifted kids across the city line.
Even when I had some justification, I usually went too far. In ninth grade, I was friends with these two kids who’d known each other since elementary school, and we all had a keen interest in the Mechwarrior tabletop role-playing game. I had let one of them borrow some books, and he decided to refuse to return them. He offered excuses to my face, but I learned from another kid that he had been keeping them in his backpack, and I told him that I was going to get them back, one way or another. Well, he and his friend decided to beat me to the punch and followed me home from school with the plan to jump me (which usually means to surprise me, whoop my ass and run away, an event that had happened a few times to me already).
Remember, while I was into martial arts and boxing, I was also a huge nerd, and I hung out mainly with nerds. Neither of these two kids were fighters. That’s why it took two of them. Except even with two of them, I got the better of them pretty quickly.
To this day, I still remember the satisfaction and victory I felt as I stomped on one’s crotch as he lay on the ground. I remember the joy I took in the expression of fear his buddy (the one who’d stolen my books) wore, and the way he screamed as I chased him down, tripped him and beat him bloody. And then I went back and I kicked his friend in the head again, because he was getting up, having vomited from that stomp.
My parents had to deal with their parents, and pay for the kids’ medical expenses. I got grounded for months. At the time, I thought it was worth it. Now, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t. And to top things off, he’d had the common sense to leave those books behind. They weren’t in his backpack. I never did get them back, and no amount of explaining that to my parents would convince them to buy me new ones. Because they knew that, yeah, I’d been wronged more than once (by the theft and then by their attempt at jumping me), but I’d known by that point that I could handle myself, and instead of just defending myself, I went way too far.
And they were right, of course. I would have been justified in beating both their asses. But that’s not what I did. I potentially left one of them unable to conceive a child for the rest of his life. I broke both of their noses, and broke the first kid’s collarbone. I left them with bruises and scrapes that took weeks to heal. And I enjoyed it.
I remained a complete shitbag throughout high school and for a few years after, as I drifted between crappy jobs. I never got my diploma, but I did get a GED at my father’s insistence. I had college scholarships owing to my massive nerdiness in high school, but I let those expire, because I wanted to be done with school and I expected college to be just like high school. And of course, the dropping out and even the GED convinced me that I’d never get into a good college anyways.
The people who knew me back then thought that I was a generally nice guy, and a huge, awkward dork. But they also knew that I could snap and go after someone, sometimes for little or no discernible reason. He’s a dork and a hothead, they said. A weirdo, a creep. I tended to not keep friends for very long. It didn’t help that I looked down on anyone who would want to be my friend (a sure sign that they weren’t to be taken seriously), while at the same time harboring an intense jealousy at their ability to simply be comfortable in who they were.
Eventually, I joined the Army both because of the opportunity to prove to myself that I was the tough guy I wished I was, but also because I liked hurting people. Feeling guilty about it after the fact didn’t change the enjoyment I felt in the moment. I thought maybe the Army would give me the chance to hurt people without having to feel guilty. I finished all my training and got posted to a combat unit in August of 2001. Late August, in fact, so I hadn’t even been there two weeks when 9/11 happened.
Those next few years were honestly the worst years of my life. I was a combat MOS, so I had to fight. And while, yes, fights were satisfying and I got a thrill from the danger and adrenaline of it, the reality was so much worse than the fantasy that had carried me through all my training. The knowledge that one misstep or one moment of bad luck would be the end of your life, and that end might come in a bloody, painful, lingering manner was ever present. The sight of my friends getting injured and killed broke parts of me. For all that I’d learned a few things about managing my emotions as a kid, I was being ground down by that job, and finding it harder and harder to keep trying to be the person I wanted to be, instead of the person I was afraid I really was.
And that person, the one I was scared of, was an absolute monster. He enjoyed hurting and even killing people, and worse, he was pretty good at it. I still have the medals. But he wasn’t good at anything else (I would conveniently forget everything to do with the art or music that I used to love making so much). He was a loser, an idiot, a massive failure whose only redeeming quality was his usefulness to a hawkish president who wanted revenge for an inept attempt at his daddy’s life, and a bunch of hawkish officials who wanted another country’s oil.
Every time I went outside the wire overseas, it got harder and harder to hang on. So I chose not to re-enlist after being stop-lossed and kept in active duty for 8 years. And that turned out to be no less painful than staying in. Not only did the Big Green Weenie do everything in its power to guilt-trip one of its favorite fucktoys into re-upping, I also had to face the fact that I would be leaving my brothers who had re-enlisted to fight and possibly die in a foreign land without me.
But I was reaching a breaking point. I was going to commit a war crime or take my rifle for a ride over the rainbow bridge in my tent at night. I couldn’t see any other outcome to staying in.
So I got out, settled down and had kids. Everyone knew I was still a hot-head, though. My ex-wife only ever had a positive reaction to my temper once, when a skinhead (of the Neo-Nazi variety, who existed back then in far fewer numbers than today) made threats directed at her while we were sitting in a red light and I pulled the guy out of his car to basically mod the asphalt with his face (which took a little tenderizing beforehand, of course). Honestly, I should have gone to jail that day, but that was before half the cops on the force were intensely sympathetic to Nazi’s political views. Or else I got a good one. Rage Against The Machine was already an ‘older band’ by that point, after all.
She sure didn’t appreciate my hotheadedness the time I got out of my car and kicked a guy’s bumper off after he threatened me. Neither did the cops. I almost did get arrested for that one. Fortunately, my ex knew the cop who showed up (from her work in a hospital) and he settled for giving me a warning to watch my temper.
Throughout my life up until that point, I only had a few limits on my anger. I didn’t hit women, no matter what. Even if she hit me first. I might grab her wrists and squeeze hard enough to hurt, but I wouldn’t ever hit her. And I wouldn’t hit children, at least not the way I’d hit an adult. I might have smacked a few teenagers, but in my defense, they definitely deserved it, even in retrospect. And I never made a threat or threw hands unless the other guy had done so already. Those rules were likely my only redeeming quality, at times. Because when they didn’t hold me back, I sure as shit wouldn’t. It’s honestly a miracle that I never killed anyone.
It was becoming a dad that did the most good for me. I really had no expectations at all of ever doing so when I was younger. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be a father, I most certainly did, though I wouldn’t admit it, I just really didn’t think that my path through life would entail anything as wholesome and stable as that. Remember, I was a loser, a villain, a moron who can’t make a good choice to save his life.
So when my then-girlfriend told me she was pregnant and she reacted with shock when I asked if she planned to have an abortion, it was almost like the clouds parted and a light from heaven had shined down on me. I had been with her for almost a year, the longest relationship of my life thus far, but I still couldn’t wrap my head around the notion that she wasn’t just biding her time till someone better came along. Yet she made it clear that she wanted to have my child and build a life with me. And when the kid was born and we looked at our finances and I realized she made more money than me, we decided together that I’d be a stay-at-home-dad for a while.
The first few years with my oldest made the biggest impact on my life. It was a rough transition, because I was a rough guy. But this was an opportunity I never thought I’d get, so I threw myself into it. I curtailed my drinking, my cursing and my dark humor. I put my guns into storage and fell out of that hobby for years. I stopped disappearing on the weekends to go camp in the woods by myself.
I went back to work when the kid was two. And me and my then-wife began to have troubles, including a couple of months-long breakups. Things settled down for a long while when she got pregnant again. Well, not really. We split up right after she found out she got pregnant, and didn’t reconcile until about two months before he was born.
The problems me and my ex wife were having were dredging up a bunch of the old doubts and fears. But by the time the second kid was born, I was making more money than I had been before. More than her, in fact. So it got to be her turn to be the stay-at-home parent. And in that 1950’s dream dynamic, we found over a decade of peace and cooperation.
I had a good ten-plus years of stability, of raising kids. I had experience caring for an infant and toddler, which made it easier. I did my best to pass on good lessons to them, and in the process, I started getting a better grip on who I was. Teaching a child how to handle anger and sadness is a shockingly good way to learn it yourself as an adult. I started realizing that, maybe the problem wasn’t that I was raging against this inevitable descent into being an evil loser, but dealing with some of the same problems everyone else was dealing with, Yeah, maybe mine were worse than a lot of people’s, but that didn’t make them fundamentally different. Maybe there were things I could learn to be more at peace with myself.
My ex wife has her own problems, but they’re her problems, not mine. I’m not going to get into the he-said-she-said of it all. We eventually split up for good when my youngest was 11 and the oldest 15.
So there I was, every inch the stereotype. A middle-aged, divorced vet. But it was different this time. I no longer truly believed that I was this dark intruder, a pretender to human normalcy. So as rough as that first year alone was, I was able to handle it.
I’ve gotten back into some of my old hobbies, things I truly enjoyed, but had rejected out of fear. I take my kids camping and shooting, now, something I used to never do. And we have fun doing it. These days, a weekend in the woods isn’t a temporary reprieve from the stress of daily life, filled with enough work to leave me exhausted at the end of the day. It’s memories of smiling faces around a campfire, cooking s’mores, of curious kids learning about the plants and animals we encounter. Trips to the gun range aren’t a cathartic exercise in punching holes in paper people that takes the edge off a simmering anger whose origin I can’t nail down. They’re fun days full of self-improvement and the sound of delighted laughter as my oldest retrieves his target and finds that he shot a tight group, or as the youngest gets permission from the RSO to fan-fire the single-action revolver that he lovingly knows as ‘the Big Iron’. I’ve gotten back into making music, recording stupidly silly songs for my friends and putting my own feelings into a song that carries such a wave of relief upon playing it that I’m left wondering how I even managed to feel so bad way back when I thought I might become a professional musician one day. I’m drawing and painting again, mostly digitally, but still. And I managed to pick up an outlet I had always aspired to, but was never able to get more than a few hours into before hitting a brick wall; writing. I’m writing stories about modern-day wizards and ancient vikings and futuristic soldiers, and I’m finishing them. And when people read them, they love them.
Sounds like a happy ending, right? Well, not quite. Life isn’t exactly getting easier. The economy just keeps getting harder to get by in, and while I make quite a bit more money now than I used to (I make exactly double what I was making when my ex-wife quit her job to be a stay-at-home mom), that money doesn’t go as far as it used to. Not even close. And I’ve had other troubles, like my car getting wrecked and my insurance only ponying up about half of what it would cost to replace.
But I’ve learned to make friends again, something I had never really been good at. And I’m comfortable with who I am. And I find that I’m a lot less of an angry person than I used to be. Unless you cut me off in traffic, you insufferable douche-canoe.
So what’s the point of this, Matt? Truth is, I don’t know. Most of the non-fiction shit I write is just stream-of-consciousness. I guess the point is that, just like a lot of other guys, especially in my generation, I probably should have been treated for depression when I was younger, but I wasn’t. Boo hoo, I guess. Woe is me. Oh well, at least I’m getting better now.