My aforementioned friend, JDS, has this theory that women carry around a purse full of ammunition that they can pull out and use at any time, usually without warning. Not literal ammunition, of course; emotional ammunition. The things people have done or not done to them, said or forgotten to say to them. Past slights or hurts, major and minor: they all go into the ammunition purse. And you never know when you’re going to walk into an ambush, and have all that ammo rain down on your head.
I didn’t think I was that kind of woman, until I brought up an opinion JDS had expressed about eight months ago, and asked him whether he still felt the same way. What he felt was ambushed. He no longer had an opinion about the matter in question, and thought I was baiting him into asking himself why he would have expressed such an opinion in the first place. (Yes, I’m being deliberately vague here. The topic of the opinion doesn’t matter. It’s the dynamic of the interaction that I want to explore.)
I am having a lot of trouble with my past these days. I have nightmares that I know are tied to my past; I have less terrifying dreams in which I’m arguing with my father or trying to get back to the university I too sick to attend. I know that things I learned in my childhood and teen years are informing and influencing the way I react to things now. I feel anger, fear, and anxiety in situations that don’t call for them.
My psychiatrist would like me to bury my past, to stop thinking about it. Just move forward from here, he says. I don’t feel like I know how to do this. Right or wrong, I feel like the way for me to move forward is to understand what has propelled me to this point. The down side to this feeling is that I have a really big purse, and it’s packed with a hell of a lot of ammunition. I think part of this experiment is about disarmament: taking out each piece of ammunition in a controlled situation, learning what I can from it, and destroying it so that it can no longer be used against me or the people I care about.
This doesn’t mean that I’m going to tell you about every single piece of ammunition that I pull out of the metaphorical purse. I think that would be counter-productive. What I want is to learn more about the way I react and interact, what causes my knees to jerk the way they do in certain situations.
After all, in the words of a child I heard on the radio this morning, “you need to know who you are to become who you want to be”.
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