It’s fascinating to me that children can be raised in the same household but experience things so differently…. Call it nature or nurture, it doesn’t matter, the outcomes show it’s somewhere in between, at least in my family.
In my experience of childhood, anger was the only emotion that was allowed. It was the only emotion that was modeled to me. So like the good little oldest girl I was, I took that emotion and made it my identity. I built those walls so high that then when I was coined “bossy” “abrasive” or a “bitch”, you saw me tilt my chin up high in the air, but didn’t see me sobbing in the bathroom stall later.
My sister, only four years my younger - every ligament, every joint, every bone that makes up herself is sweeter than a summer peach. Anger was a poison to her, IS to her.
And here we are in adulthood, trying to unweave the steel braids of our experiences from our younger years, reared under the same roof but worlds apart of scripts to present each other.
My anger is its own disease, but served as a motivator of what was okay and what wasn’t. Anger allowed me to learn the full sentence of “no.”
Anger to her was a cancer, surging through her body, multiplying to kill all of her before her body could express it.
Anger is not a disease when we are able to express it. Anger is a cancer when we stifle it.
How can her body withstand that?
It's gorgeous and I'm crying.