The Fever
(A typical interaction between Me and the Universe)
Universe: Teaching moment or torture?
Me: Umm….torture, please!
Universe: Ok, here’s a teaching moment.
Me: (……..)
The other day I was in a traffic situation in which someone did something super selfish and shitty, I honked and they flipped me off. Whatever. This kind of thing happens to me every now and then, as to everyone, and the way it usually goes is that I then mutter some barbed sarcastic comment, glare in their direction disapprovingly for a couple seconds and then drive away, taking a deep breath and letting the whole thing go as my nervous system slowly regulates. But much to my surprise, that is not what happened this time. See, I thought I had honked the honk that just means “LAAAAAAME!” which is what I usually make my horn say, but instead, I unconsciously honked the honk that means “YOU ARE A PATHETIC TOXIC-MASCULINE BULLY LIKE ALL OF THE ONES THAT HAVE PUSHED ME AROUND SINCE THE NINETEEN SEVENTIES AND I HATE YOU WITH THE FIRE OF A THOUSAND SUNS AND SHALL RISK MY OWN EXTINCTION TO DELIVER YOUR KARMIC JUSTICE” (oops). Oh, and then he flipped me off……
Out of nowhere, I felt suddenly feverish and flooded with a white hot poison in my veins that made me want to Hulk-Smash this guy. I felt my hand reach for the door handle, as if I was going to exit my car and confront him. (Sidebar: Have you seen me? This pot-bellied grey-beard with toothpick arms and two hearing aids? Yeah, this is not what you would call an ass-kicking…..apparatus). But I was so possessed by this habanero rage that I don’t know what I would have done had the traffic not resumed flowing and guided my car forward. I revved up the engine of my sensible, non-descript mid-sized sedan (great gas mileage, by the way) to get level with him and I pointed (?) in his direction. The guy just kept flipping me off and gesturing like “Come at me bro” so I reflexively moved my hand to the window to reciprocate the avian digit-extension but it turned out that my window was just cracked a little bit and could only accommodate a partial finger so it likely appeared that I was just angrily tossing some crumbs out my window, and then that feeling of ineffectiveness REALLY pissed me off and in that moment, my rage-intoxication, my heart rate and blood-cortisol content all spiked and I saw myself just about to commit some unknown but certain act of physical aggression.
But this crumb-bird debacle might have actually saved me because, out of nowhere, some overseeing, wise and aware part of me leapt forward to say “BEHOLD, THIS IS NOT YOU, YOU ARE NOT A BIRD-FLIPPING PERSON!” and I awoke from this momentary demonic possession, turned back to the steering wheel and coasted to the next intersection, past where he had turned to get on the highway (hopefully to Hell, but this is not my point). I somehow managed to guide the car home and park it safely, my hands and my breath trembling. I sat still until I could operate my arms and legs again, and got out of the car to go inside. And then the next bomb dropped on me: Shame.
I have operated for quite some time now within a narrative that I am a steady, civil and pro-peaceful resolution-type evolved male who seeks to recognize the humanity of every person and thus doesn't “do” problematic anger. It would be, like, off-brand for me. But in the processing that occurred over the next couple of hours after this incident, It dawned on me that even with this narrative:
I absolutely DO have anger, a LOT of it.
I feel immense shame about feeling this anger because I have an unexamined core belief that I’m not allowed to have it, therefore my having it is a failure of character.
I absolutely do dehumanize people, depending on the context.
It’s not an exaggeration to report that I came really close to impulsively doing something that might have ruined my life and maybe someone else’s- but I didn’t, and I am so grateful for that wise part of me that took over (Since I’ve already referred to that angry part as “The Hulk”, I’m calling this part of me “Thor”. Thematic consistency is fun.) I’m realizing that so much of what I alternately have call “depression”, “anxiety”, “shame” or “despair”...it all comes from a deep seated undercurrent of anger about injustice and and from watching cruelty become increasingly normalized in the post-2020 civic culture. But… I REALLY don’t want to be a log on that fire. I truly want to be the force of peace that I want to see in the world. Mostly.
I once heard the profound feminist author bell hooks speak at a book reading, and she told this story about how, as she gravitated toward Buddhist practice in her later years, she had the opportunity to meet Thich Nhat Hanh, the equally profound Vietnamese Buddhist monk. She asked him “What should I do with all this anger?” to which he replied “Oh, miss hooks, do not get rid of your anger, for it is good compost for your garden.”
From here, I can not yet see exactly how to do this, or what a garden fertilized with anger will grow, but it appears that the Academic Board of Trustees that runs Earth School has given me a new assignment. I’m pretty sure it starts, like everything, with radical acceptance, which is the Earth School version of just showing up and putting your name at the top of your paper. I DO indeed have anger, a LOT of it, and I’ve got my work cut out for me in learning what to do with it, because I have spent a long time denying that I have it. One does not tend to set a plate for a guest they do not believe is coming to dinner. But this fool done showed up at my door anyhow, and he is hungry.
My peers in the helping professions and psychotherapy biz will recognize the term Unconditional Positive Regard, which is what we pledge to practice after our primary commandment, Do No Harm. Practicing UPR means that we commit to accepting the inherent goodness and potential for growth in every human we serve, no matter what they have done or what traits they exhibit or what our own personal preferences or beliefs may be. As you may already suspect, 100% compliance with this imperative is unachievable, and as such, it is a direction, not a destination, that we move toward as best we can with every interaction.
As you also might suspect, unless one is some uniquely irredeemable asshole, the more one practices this in one’s professional life, the more this ethos becomes globalized in one’s worldview outside of the therapy relationship and we generally try to apply it to everyone, everywhere in our life. So it’s easy to assume that this switch is always toggled to the right in one’s general settings and that this renders one’s life a stress-free cruise down the boulevard of human relationships. However, as illustrated in the aforementioned example, this setting is far from default, and thus requires ongoing monitoring.
This can be…irksome. Because this means, if I’m to be true to this guiding value, I have to flexibly allow space in my head and heart for compassion for this bird-flipping jack-hole and his human story, how he came to behave like a BFJH in that moment and what human vulnerabilities we might share. It is important to note that there are two BFJH’s in my account of the traffic altercation, one of which is presently composing this essay (well, the BF was kind of a fail but the JH likely still applies). So since I do not know BFJH #1’s name or story or location and will likely not encounter him again, I can only wish him freedom from suffering and focus my attention on compassionately unpacking the story of BFJH#2 (What has two thumbs…ok, you know who I mean) .
Though I cannot mentally trace and recall the exact circumstances: who I was with, what time of year it was, what I was wearing, what I was doing that day before or after, I do distinctly remember that I saw the movie Footloose in a second-run theater in the year of our lord 1984 for the admission price of ONE DOLLAR. This used to be a thing- Second Run theaters once served the function that streaming platforms do today, in that after a movie had been released in premium theaters and given plenty of time to garner first views, it then moved on to the second run movie house, where no-money-havin, too-young-for-legal-employment pre-teens like myself could finally see the thing everybody was talking about or laughing about, or in this particular case, dancing about.
This movie was straight up FIRE at the time, and it still is, once you get past the numerous ways in which, like other films of the 80’s, it has not aged well, due to the glaring lack of diversity, the sexist and homophobic tropes and the fact that all of the high-schoolers are clearly played by grown-ass adults with wrinkled foreheads and the lightly-weathered skin of having been of legal drinking age for a while. Speaking of fire, what I understood as a twelve-year-old watching this movie was that I was being told that Kevin Bacon’s character, Ren McCormick, has an angst-fire in him that HAS TO COME OUT. This fire can only be released by dancing, acrobatically, maniacally… in (seemingly never locked?) industrial warehouses, outside of drive-in burger joints and ultimately, the halls and gymnasium of the town’s modest high school. This boy has a FEVER, and the only prescription is more boogie-woogie.
When the buttoned-up, curmudgeonly elder population of his small midwestern town are finally, reluctantly persuaded to allow this public display of rhythmic and kinetic intensity, that boogie-woogie busts out of its container like an expired can of Pilsbury biscuits. John Lithgow plays the Reverend Shaw Moore, minister of the town’s only church, having recently lost a son, who died in a tragic car accident while driving home from a big dance. So the minister makes the classic, anti-scientific correlation equals causation mistake and proceeds to rain down a scorching oratory on the sinful dangers and pure devilry these boogie-biscuits will surely unleash if the town doesn’t keep these dance-crazed youth under control.
I remember seeing Lithgow on screen in that original viewing and seething with resentful scorn, hating his scowling, middle-aged guts, this despicable youth-hating tyrant masquerading as God’s advocate, grrrrr! Even at that age, the core of my ethos was taking shape and the gospels of acceptance, love and liberation were the lens through which I was evaluating which side I wanted to be on. Conversely, I was forming a staunch disdain for the punishing judgment of religious orthodoxy and paternal hierarchy, and this movie fed right into this emerging schema that would largely influence my worldview, for better or worse, for the next…..oh…..four decades.
I recently rewatched the movie with my wife and some great friends (all GenX-ers, well over 40) and was blindsided by a disorienting experience- in this viewing, I saw Lithgow as the relatable protagonist, as if the movie, was now about him, and he had the most interesting character arc in the film. This time, from this age, my anger transmuted, and somehow I did not seethe, I did not want to Moonwalk in his face, or do The Worm on his dining room table as he prepared his sermons. No, this time…..I saw a man suffering in grief, trying to make sense of his son’s preventable death and the uncertainty inherent in this life, the weight of regrets carried, the desperation for security that can fuel our most misguided impulses to control. Though I still objected to the injustice of his control strategy itself, I now understood how it got there…. I saw vulnerability. I saw love impeded by fear. I recognized in him what I have since experienced in myself.
So who am I to the world now, and what do I do when confronted with injustice? Do I bust through the doors of the school gymnasium and engulf it with my hot shoes of dance-fire, as a younger me would have? Or do I embrace the much more difficult, unsexy path of empathizing with the minister’s particular strain of fever, modeling for him the love and acceptance that his pain and longing disallows him from showing, despite the harm his behavior inflicts?
The humanizing of the other is one of the most profound effects that a work of art can elicit. It is also terribly, woefully, ANNOYINGLY inconvenient. HOW DARE YOU, Footloose, make me care about and empathize with this guy and what he represents, for whom the hatred of has been the foundation of my whole self-concept for the last 40 years? This is part of the disequilibrium of being a therapist, too. Committing to the practice of unconditional positive regard is to develop a kindness and understanding toward people whose thoughts and behaviors trigger all the judgmental impulses our culture conditions us to hold, especially the ones we dislike in ourselves.
Generation X, a label I mostly embraced out of a camaraderie for others of my historical context, has been largely culturally defined by what it rejects, existing primarily in opposition to. So the expanded capacity for nuance and the flexibility that has come with age and experience, that is demanded by a professional calling in service of human healing has put me at odds with the oppositional instinct of my generational imperative, making me curious and understanding toward people in a way that feels like both the absolute right and mature thing in one sense and totally frickin’ laaaaame in another. The human mind favors binaries, because it has very little tolerance for uncertainty. Universe: Uncertainty or misery? Us (in unison): Misery please! And so we suffer, because binaries are a human psychological construct, not a natural one, and nature just keeps on naturing. Incidentally, this line-straddling is also why I do not know how to dress myself at 51 years of age, and my style might be described as Unfrozen Caveman Skater.
Recognizing myself in Lithgow’s aging, grieving character (and not the obvious young, handsome rebel-protagonist) was confusing. I mean, wait...aren’t I the sneering, sweaty, pop-locking Flashdancer bringing down The Man with my gyrating Levis? There’s a Ren Mac up in here somewhere, groggy, blurry and slower moving, but still mildly feverish (so like, not the 103° of bygone days but maybe more like 98.9°?) He can’t stop The Body Rock, but he does take far more frequent breaks.
And yet, age and experience have unexpectedly nurtured my inner Reverend Shaw, who mourns, aches, pines, tries his best to keep his town from falling into ruin. He can’t unsee the yellowing, stiffening paper of his sacred texts and ideals seeming to fade into cultural unpopularity, he reluctantly yields to the unknown of this non-youth phase of personhood. The day-to-day experience of reconciling these two parts of me is sometimes precarious, exhausting, it is this unsettled state that puts the “mid” in mid-life. Ahh, I see….this is the underlying tension. Both live here, each knows he can’t live without the other, and somehow this big blue marble keeps turning, the fever rises and the fever falls.