MY ANGER AND PAIN MANIFESTO
There will always be someone who suffers more deeply, more righteously, more rigorously, more appropriately with higher levels of pain, with higher levels of accomplishment achievement than me like the amputee running a super marathon across the Sahara desert. Good for you. Good for God!
Me how do I tell you about my puny sorrows, and even those have been commandeered by someone suffering more successfully than me and even yet
from jahnt siede.
You share the story about the boy who used an axe to chop up the radiator hose his dad beat him with. Pat commented on his father’s fury grown by his church and by extension, then at least, his God. I have to admit I may have been strapped half dozen times, a practise that stopped when I was 13 when we moved to Winnipeg. Only twice however did my father strap me black and blue. Both before I was sexually assaulted. Details in the essay “Getting the strap” on this website.
Always me me me-like a warm-up for choir. Then in September of 1968 my parents would not believe my pain which had started earlier, they accepted our rotund and jolly GP’s, word that nothing was wrong. Maybe I was having trouble “adjusting” to the move, the new school, was the miss diagnosis. You didn’t see doctors for adjustments, unless it was a chiropractor.
Then one simple test 2 months later, in his office and the GP knew what was wrong, confirmed by an X-ray, and that he had been wrong, that I suffered, finally enough. Suffering for me was not a team sport. Nobody believed me though I had cried out in my anger and my pain, oh wait a minute, another song.
As the pain stopped in my hip it grew in my heart and in my mind. My parents and I were through.