The day the rage came, was also the afternoon of my daughter’s seventh birthday.

It had started attacking me earlier on, during a phone call of someone, who wished to gaslight me, insult me, control me, generally subject me to the psychological equivalent of pushing my face into the mud while sitting on my back. Hard to get out of, when one is used to the mud and oh boy, was I. At this point I had known him for fifteen years and had been subjected to his abuse for the same amount of time.

Today had not been worse than the many occasions beforehand and was not extraordinary but for the simple fact that I, after all this time, suddenly allowed myself to feel my rage.

It started to curse through my body, like a wave, like a current, like an explosion that repeats itself indefinitely. I squashed down the impulse to bury it deep inside myself so it would be silent, only eroding my body and mind from the inside out, as I had done since I was a little girl.

Or, of course, to use it as fuel, as my mother had told me one afternoon, when I had been mind-blowingly angry. What about I do not recall anymore, but the way she dismissed my rage and tried to force, to coerce me to tame it down into something useful, something acceptable feels as present as ever. I remember the urge to get even angrier, the shame and the knife of cutting myself to make others happy.

Back then I didn´t know that I would feel the knife many times in the future, that it would make me smaller, physically, and beautiful too, get me through law school and give me astonishing amounts of migraines for several decades.
Back then all of this lay in the foggy mists of a future not yet quite determined. I say not quite, because some of its parts would have been clear already had someone had the courtesy and foresight to look.

This hypothetical person, because no one in my family possessed either, would have seen a life already formed by the constraints of a conservative catholic small town upbringing and what it would do to a child that was queer, creative, non-neurotypical, depressed and deeply out of place. The sexism had already started to gnaw on the edges of what I was and the constant fighting for the mere right of existing fully threw its shadows before itself, as we say in German.

Yet, I was barely older than my daughter now, when I had been taught that anger must be another thing and that it hurts when one has to make it so.
Now, thirty years later it´s become a reflex and the knife lies in my hand like an old friend.
I´m a woman now, with all the baggage that brings. I have left the small town and Austria too, left the world I grew up in without looking back, yet, have taken it´s constraints with me. Can take the girl out of the small town, but not the small town out of the girl, eh?
And here I am, picking at the scars and the many cuts inside myself, not to smoothen them out, but to understand.

I remember myself, red-hot-golden glowing ember, not concerned with diplomacy, but magnificent in my anger. Larger than life and burning from the inside out. Walking through fire, yet emerging unharmed.

Sometimes I want to say a little prayer to the child, that hadn´t yet learned of the knife –
Guide me, throw me, explode through my skin and make me burn.
It´s not the serenity prayer, but it´s something.