Crazy Uncle Mike

How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it. ~ Marcus Aurelius

This week I was called in for jury duty, it turned out to be a week long experience. The trial covered a difficult case which included an accusation of violence by a husband against a wife. The topic was tough, the Fourth of July was coming up and so it was really difficult to seat a jury. We went through four full days of jury selection. They seated twenty-two, release eleven, re-seated a new eleven, released five more so that in all total nearly fifty people were called to be able to seat a full jury of twelve jurors and four alternates. I was the last person called and a question that you have to answer is can you be objective in this case? It was a hard decision but I answered that I had concerns about my ability to do that. I’m generally a person who can be objective, who can compartmentalize their emotions and deal with the logic at hand. I’ve had to become this way, I was a very angry and emotional child, for reasons that will become obvious as you read.

I’ve always been an emotionally dangerous person, I’m pretty empathic, I seem to have the ability to sense people’s fears and where they are most easily hurt. When I was very young this was a problem, paired with my raging curiosity I was a dangerous child. You see, sensing where people’s soft spots were, and being curious, I often asked questions that really hurt people. It was not unusual for me to ask an overweight person why they were fat, or someone in a bad marriage why their husband wasn’t with them. It was uncanny how I could always find that chink in someone’s armor. As a younger man, it also allowed me to hurt people, when I was hurt and angry my responses were often brutal assaults on someone’s soft spots. I particular remember a girlfriend who really hurt me and I absolutely crushed her, we didn’t speak again for thirty years. One of the reasons I have been so vicious when I’m hurt is because I’m far more sensitive than people realize. This means I feel the pain deeply and never, ever forget when I’ve been hurt. And I believe all of this goes back to my early childhood.

My parents should have never been together. They are co-dependent people who deeply love each other, and purposefully both constantly hurt each other as well as can never be away from each other. When they are together it’s a complete tempest and I lived through the worst of it. I grew up in a household where for the first ten years of my life, I far too frequently existed with a knot in my stomach. I listened to screaming matches, crashing dishes, slammed doors and one night, right outside my room my father violently slamming his fist into a wall an inch from my mother’s head. That there was verbal and emotional abuse is beyond a doubt, that there was physical abuse is highly likely. That all of it caused me to live in constant fear and anxiety for most of my childhood, simply is my reality and past trauma.

So as I was in the jury box being questioned, my response to the judge was that I was not sure I could be objective in a case where I was going to hear testimony about a man abusing his wife. I believe in our justice system’s core concepts, including that a man is presumed innocent until proved guilty and I didn’t want to be unfair to a defendant due to my own experience. So I relayed this and was excused from the jury for cause.

What I wasn’t expecting was the emotional reaction all of this would bring up. I’ve worked really hard to get over the anger I held as a child and as a younger man. I worked through this for years, my anger made me violent when I was younger, it lead me to alcoholism and drug addiction in my twenties and clinical levels of depression in my twenties and thirties. It’s been over two decades since anything triggered the feelings and emotions I had during that time. Having to answer that question about my bias in the court brought it all screaming back, albeit briefly.

Whenever I’m in that head space, it’s always the image of that bullseye shaped dent in the wall plaster that I see in my head. I never had a door on my bedroom growing up and laying in my bed I looked directly out on that god forsaken dent. I don’t know why, but it was never repaired. It appeared when I was about seven. My parents, were insanely married for seven years, divorced for seven and then remarried again for seven before they divorced again. Which meant my father was gone when I was seven and returned when i was fourteen. That dent remained until I left that house at eighteen, a constant reminder of the madness I was living with.

The work I’ve done over the years has paid dividends, the shock of the jury experience hit me hard for the day. And since then I’ve turned introspective about it and tonight’s writing will hopefully burn out the last of the energy around this. For so many years, this is the time of thing then would have lead to me getting loaded, if I said that it didn’t cross my mind in the last two days I’d be lying. But that’s long since stopped being my coping mechanism, now I write, I walk and I eat good food. And I wonder if the image of that fucking bullseye hole in the wall will ever leave me alone.