Memories and Monsters

Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Whenever I think about my first day in the Sonoran desert I go just a little bit numb. It is too much to think about most of the time, but when it bubbles to the surface and won’t go away, I take a few steps away from myself and watch it go by. This is what I remember:

I turned nine years old last month. Today is the first time I’ve been in a desert, and I have to live here now. I am standing at the open tailgate of the station wagon. I’m staring at Jumper, my sister’s pet mouse, lying on the bottom of her cage, mouth agape, teeth bared, stiff and dead. We have not even seen our new home yet. We stopped at this dusty, sun-bleached, diesel-infused rest stop to go to the bathroom and check on the pets. It is hotter than I’ve ever felt before. The heat is so much more intense than any freezing cold I’ve ever felt back home, 7,000 feet up in the Rockies. The heat rises from the asphalt in shimmery waves, making things in the distance wiggly. My father has lectured us on the long car ride, telling us all the ways that this new place is different, and there are all sorts of things we don’t know about that are dangerous. The dangers here are different than the ones we are used to, he tells us. There are scorpions, rattlesnakes, city criminals, the sun. Just before we stopped, he was telling us a story of stupid fools who thought they were going on a short hike but ended up sunburned and dead from heatstroke, lost in the desert. Now my sister and I are standing by Jumper’s cage crying inconsolably because she is dead, and it is our fault. We should have checked her water sooner, he tells us, the heat is dangerous here and if you make a mistake, you probably won’t get a second chance.

Years later, as an adult, I will figure it out: My father is a smart man. He knows nobody really learns anything just from being told, so he made sure we knew. He didn’t tell us how quickly water evaporates in this hot, arid climate — he let us find that out for ourselves, in the harshest way possible. He knew, and he withheld that information until he scolded us for not checking sooner, when it was too late. He took advantage of our lack of knowledge to make sure we would learn, viscerally, to be careful about the lethal combination of intense heat and lack of water. I will never understand why he felt compelled to blame us, but, lesson learned. Knowledge is power, and you can never be too careful.

A year or so later, when my father takes us on a field trip past the city limits, I notice different things. First, the blue, blue sky. It is a vibrantly rich, almost-glowing, cloudless expanse. It feels alive, commanding and benevolent, majestic and protective, presiding over the grainy coarseness of the red-orange desert, which is sharp and shimmery in the too-bright sun. This landscape feels prickly and hot, stark and still, at the same time that it pulses with energy, with potential. Something momentous could happen at any time, exploding out of this pristine stillness. Nothing moves on the horizon, but it could, at any moment. The potential is palpable; a tense waiting for a rattlesnake strike, or a flash flood, or a life-changing vision. It is a vaguely dangerous energy that subliminally hums. This is the nature of the desert. I have gotten to know it, and I am used to it. I yearn for its power, but I don’t know how to harness it, to make it my own; it’s better just to be careful.

My sister is not here. She doesn’t like anything but TV and going to the mall with her friends, these days. There is probably nobody for miles, other than my father, my brother Jonny, and me. We are isolated in the vastness.

I find this austere backdrop remarkable only in memory. At the time, it was just another getting-hot morning in the desert where we will spend a few hours on “target practice,” blowing up expired cans of beans or soda, when we manage to aim true. My father hands me a gun. I am used to his old .22 rifle, which is lightweight and has a recoil that is not too much for my pint-size body. This handgun, though, I’ve never seen before. I look at it, wondering how I am supposed to aim it. It doesn’t have the long barrel and reliable sights of the rifle. He probably explains it to me, or maybe he tells me it doesn’t matter because the gun’s not loaded, but I don’t remember. I don’t even remember the weight of it in my hand, wary of it, as he admonishes me not to forget that even though it’s not loaded I must treat it as if it is. I must never aim a gun at a person even if I’m damned sure it won’t fire.

I memorize rules and I always follow them; my father knows that. I am the one he doesn’t worry about, because I am too afraid of everything to ever break a rule (he told me once, when I was even younger: “You are afraid of everything.” His voice held no emotion, neither judgement nor concern. It was just an observation that he bestowed on me to tell me who I am).

He turns away, looking at what, I don’t know. There is nothing out here that you can’t see from every direction. Jonny is holding a stick — a remnant of an ocotillo skeleton — and he is staring intently at something on the ground, poking at it. He wears a red and white striped T-shirt and faded jeans. He used to be my very best friend, but he’s at that age where girls are gross, and now I am his annoying big sister instead of his friend. I miss him, and I will forever.

I know the rules, and I always follow them. I am always careful. Why is today different? I don’t know, because there’s no context to this vignette. I don’t remember what conversations, arguments, reprimands, or judgements happened on the drive here. I know only now, this moment, my actions. The glare of the sun halos the back of my father’s head, casting it as a silhouette. I squint at the brightness, my eyes raised to the corona crowning this monolith that is my father. I point the gun into the halo and squeeze the trigger.

The rule-not-breaker in me takes over at the last micro-second, and I jerk my hand slightly to the right. As I hear the blast of the gun, the recoil knocks me on my ass. I don’t know if it hurts, when my bony little butt hits the hard-baked earth. I don’t remember the physical sensation; I feel only the humiliation and overwhelming shame and powerlessness of having done something wrong. I glance over at Jonny and see that he has stopped poking at the ground and is watching me. I worry that he will tell on me, but he goes back to poking with his stick. The memory ends.

I don’t know how my father reacted. There is no doubt he heard the blast (did he hear the bullet whizz past his head, so very close? I don’t know if that is really a thing, or if they just say so on TV). I used to assume that he didn’t move, didn’t react, because there is nothing in my memory to tell me that he did. I did not yet know enough about how our brains recall things to consider the possibility that I could remember the beginning very clearly, but have no recollection of whatever came next. It is possible he transformed into Raging Dad, and I just don’t remember.

Still, I can’t let go of my suspicion that he intended to teach me a lesson, that he knew the gun was loaded, and that he expected to hear that blast. It would be perfectly in line with his character if this were his way of driving home the importance of gun safety rules. His hubris could easily make him confident that I would play with the gun, pull the trigger, but not break the rules. As sure as he is of his own infallibility, the severity of the risk if he were wrong would never occur to him. I am committed to this likelihood because of Jumper.

I am implicated in the horrific death of Jumper and I still carry the shame — shouldn’t I have figured out the rules of water, without being told? But I did not murder my father. I haven’t talked to him in forty years. I could find out if he’s still alive if I cared to know, but while I don’t hate him like I used to, I feel no love for him and I’ve got better things to do with my time. There is nothing I want to say to him. None of his three children have died of dehydration or heatstroke in the desert, and I have no doubt that he sincerely believed that setting us up to kill our beloved Jumper was the best way to teach us to be careful. I doubt he ever considered that I might have the chance to kill him one day, too.

That day, the day I almost killed him, I was immersed in shame. Intense shame, sharp, glaring, and as hot as the desert sun. I was so small. so powerless, even with a gun in my hand. I got knocked on my butt and he was unmoved, his shadow still cast across me, a towering monolith of coiled rage potential, but indifferent and unaffected, confident in the knowledge that I knew the rules, and would be afraid to break them. But he was wrong; I did break them, and I failed myself, but I’m not sure how to define my failure.

The failure, the shame, cling like static to my continued uncertainty: I don’t know whether my mistake was that I almost killed my own father, or that I didn’t follow through and do it. Was it in the wanting — the yearning for agency, and control — or the lack of follow-through, that I went astray? Once in a while, I am a bit afraid of myself, but then remember that this was the one and only time I’ve ever felt the urge to kill anyone. I am afraid of everything. My go-to is to freeze, hide, or cower, not to fight.

So why, why, did I want to kill that day? What if I had known the gun was loaded? Would I still have done what I did, or was I merely play-acting? Did I really want to hurt him, or was I sure that I couldn’t, because my Father Who Is Never Wrong told me so? I’m being evasive with myself by asking these questions. I know. I know I never broke the rules, but I did that day. I can’t deny a part of me wanted, at least for a moment, to play out the fantasy that I could have that level of destructive power over him, and it is the impulse, not the outcome, that wrote itself into my stone.

I wonder if it runs in my family. Both of my siblings have tried to kill me. My sister only tried once, when she was on a rather chaotic acid trip. She was strangling me, and I was on the verge of blacking out, with her spitting “You fucking bitch!” at me through her clenched teeth, when her boyfriend saw us and pulled her off of me. I don’t remember what I did to make her so mad. Usually, she tolerated my presence. We never talked about it. I wonder if she remembers. My brother has tried many times, but always in such an uncontrolled fit of rage that evading him was not too difficult (Perhaps “tried” is not accurate. I don’t believe he was consciously in control of himself during his frequent violent outbursts; he was not so much the entity firing a gun, as he was the bullet that was fired). One time, I had to use my body weight to hold my bedroom door shut. That was tricky, because the blades of my mother’s big-ass, and very sharp, sewing scissors were stabbing through the door (those fucking cheap-ass hollow-core doors are no help at all when you live with self-medicated ragers). I don’t remember how that one ended; I just know I managed to keep him on the other side of the door until his rage subsided. Some weeks later, I overheard him and his girlfriend entertaining themselves by making up stories about all the different ways they could kill me. So yeah, maybe this thing runs in the family. Who knows? Maybe it was just the drugs, which I never tried, because, of course, I was afraid of them. But then, that doesn’t explain me breaking the rules out in the desert.

I’ll never figure that out, and it’s all in the past, anyway. I haven’t lived with anyone violent or volatile, or abusive in any way, since my mid-20s. Therapy saved my life, I think. I’ve worked my ass off to heal, prune, and grow, and the people I choose to spend my time with these days are all supportive, loving, and empathetic. I hope that I am that, too. I certainly try to be.

And yet that feeling of failure still dogs and confuses me. While nowadays I feel no urge to kill my father, I can’t help but wonder if my life would have been better if I’d erased him from it that day.

I wonder how many readers will decide I am a monster for not condemning myself for the urge to kill my own father. How many — not knowing what it is to be ruled over by someone who is so threatening, so damaging, so oppressive by their very nature, that murder seems the only way to escape — would judge me harshly? How many would dehumanize me for not being adamantly confident that I did the right thing by choosing to continue to live under the thumb of an angry, volatile narcissist, rather than taking the only escape available?

It is an eerie, confusing place to be, wanting to abhor and condemn violence at the same time that I have an urgently visceral awareness that sometimes, for some who are desperate and wounded, killing seems like the only viable option. It is hard to admit this, knowing full well how likely it is that at least some will interpret it as an attempt to justify or excuse my own destructive impulses.

There’s no safe way to tell this story, but I need to tell it. Not because I think we should tolerate mayhem and murder, but because all of us — every, single, one of us — must be willing to acknowledge if and when we are complicit, and hold ourselves accountable.

How do I posit that privileged, powerful people expose themselves to a high likelihood that they will be pushed back, violently, because they continuously oppress others? How do I state this truth — a truth I know in my very bones — without sounding like I am saying “They had it coming to them, they deserved it?” That is not what I want to convey. This is not a moralistic judgement. It is, to me, simply an observation of cause and effect — of an inevitability that isn’t fueled by deserving or not-deserving, by guilt or innocence, but by the universal shadow side of human nature. I take no satisfaction from this reality. I am saddened by it. I grieve for all of us.

Here in the good ol’ US of A, we are socialized to believe justice requires punishment, and that hateful vengeance is a reasonable reaction against anyone we’ve judged as lacking a good excuse for the suffering they cause. And the way we, collectively, decide what is or isn’t a good excuse is based on what serves those in power, not on what serves those who have been harmed, now or in the past. All of us have been both victim and perpetrator at some time, and sometimes, there is no clear distinction between the two.

More often than not, demonizing labels are predetermined and applied to us based on who dominant culture has told us we are supposed to be. Who is allowed to cause harm and justify it, vs. who will be demonized, is preordained and it has less to do with what we do than with who we are — who our society has decided we are, and how important and valued we are in that scheme.

I wish we could meet everyone with empathy and compassion for the harm they have suffered, and for the harm they have caused, too. I do not believe it is equitable or useful to assign labels like “monster,” “savage,” or “animal,” especially to those whose violent acts are a reaction to persecution and oppression. I’m not talking about forgiving, condoning, or excusing. I am talking about finding approaches to accountability that are concerned with healing and reparation rather than punitive vengeance. There is nothing but a lack of compassion, hope, and curiosity that prevents us from holding perpetrators of violence accountable without stripping them of their dignity and humanity. We can fan the flames, or we can search for a path to redemption, repair, and healing. We have that choice.

I had a choice that day in the desert, and while neither my impulse towards violence nor my last-micro-second change of mind where conscious choices, they were intentional. I have no interest in vilifying myself for the initial impulse to lash out, or in claiming moral superiority for my change of mind. I acted out of desperation, and I am not so presumptuous as to think I know what choices I would make if I again found myself under the thumb of a predator, full of paternalistic hubris, who would not or could not understand themselves to be doing anything harmful. I don’t know why I changed my mind, and I can’t possibly know why anyone else makes the choices they do, either.

I want us to learn new ways to hold instigators of violence accountable. We must build cultural frameworks for accountability that are reparative and redemptive rather than punitive and vengeful. If we can’t do that, we will forever inflict harm that encourages victims to inflict harm in return.

I have spent my life holding myself accountable, and I have healed enough to know that my father was not a monster. He was just a powerful but broken man who was not held accountable for the harm he caused. I know why he was broken in the ways that he was, but I have no way of knowing why he stayed that way instead of finding a path to healing. He had the privilege, the resources, to support him in healing, but something stopped him. I don’t know what.

I have no idea who I would be if I had chosen differently; nor do I know who I would be, or what choice I would have made, if any of the circumstances of my life were even a small bit different than they were on that day when I aimed a gun at my father’s head and pulled the trigger. If I can’t know these things for myself, I sure as hell can’t know them about anybody else.

Not everyone has access to the resources required to do the work of healing that I have done. I am privileged in that sense, and if other people don’t do that work, I feel it is my responsibility to do my best to get curious about what their obstacles are. I sometimes feel the impulse to blame or judge (even, sometimes, about things that are none of my business), but over time, I’m getting better at ignoring that impulse and conjuring compassionate curiosity instead. Sometimes it takes a considerable effort. But it’s a labor of love.

If we, collectively, don’t make a cultural shift away from punitive justice and towards transformative justice, then we will remain complicit in the harm caused to and by injured souls who react to their suffering with violence.

I don’t want to be a monster. I want what everyone wants: to feel safe, and to be happy, witnessed, and understood. I want love, respect, acceptance, and inclusion. I want to feel like I matter as much as everyone else. I don’t have all those things I want, and I’m fairly sure most other people don't feel like they do, either. How often is a monster just a desperate soul, trying to survive, in the only way they know how?

The older I get, the more I understand the wisdom of compassionate curiosity about where the “monster’s” fury comes from. Sometimes that fury will have nothing to do with me. Sometimes I will be harmed by it through no fault of my own. And sometimes, the fury is a desperate reaction to make me notice how I contribute to the suffering that catalyzes the fury. I won’t know unless I am willing to consider the “monster’s” humanity, and acknowledge that their circumstances and motivations are likely more complex than good/bad, right/wrong, monster/victim.

I don’t want to be a monster, but maybe I am. Maybe everyone else is, too. Or maybe, none of us are. Maybe “monster” is in the eye of the beholder, and we’d all be happier and safer if we weren’t so quick to create victims out of aggressors who are likely aggressors because they are also victims. If anyone is a monster, I surely am, and that is not what I want to be.

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That was a lot. So now, here’s some calming balm for the soul: a new song from Allison Russell, who is one of my all-time favorites: