my enemies, my self

Some news: I’m in the latest issue of The Hopkins Review! It’s a bit of speculative fiction called “Forever,” and it’s alongside some really juicy stories and poems and interviews. You can subscribe or buy the issue here.

The other day I was talking to a friend about nemeses. That’s the plural for nemesis, FYI. I had to look it up. You’d think I’d already know that one, given my historic plurality of nemeses. I have been known to have up to 3 or 4 in rotation—a primary one most likely to stoke my ire, with a couple minor characters in the background, ready to step up if the primary nemesis fails to be a worthy opponent.

This is not my best trait. In my twenties I was too proud of it. In my early thirties, too ashamed. Now, I’m just trying to look at it face on.

Having a nemesis is an occupation that draws upon some of my most deep-seated qualities. (“Qualities” being a neutral term here — it’s not always clear which are strengths and which are weaknesses). I’m pretty much always willing to be the person who says something directly, especially to a powerful person (and the times I’ve failed to do this stay with me for a long time). I keep detailed inventories. I have a strong sense of justice and a competitive spirit. Most of all, I have a constitution that treats righteous rage like jet fuel, a concentrated source of dopamine and energy that can get a lot done, but also obscure a lot of facts.

In high school and my early twenties, I considered it a duty to take responsibility for hating my friends’ bad boyfriends. I did not let a single person forget a single bad thing these men had done. I kept tabs on them. I stayed alert for opportunities to put them in their place. I entered flame wars (online and IRL) with zero prompting. This, I assured myself, was justice. It was a service I was glad to provide for the women in my life who were less willing or able to state men’s wrongdoing directly or go on the attack. That was, after all, my job: feminist guard dog with hyperfocus and unflagging memory.

I don’t regret defending my friends, or telling men about the harm they’d done. But looking back I now recognize a certain unrestrained rage to my behavior that maybe I didn’t totally understand — that I certainly wasn’t always in control of. Rage isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But it might have sometimes made me confused about who the enemy was, exactly. I don’t think I always fully knew where that rage came from inside me.

Plus, it reminds me a little too much of someone else. I’ve written before about how my father made enemies with pretty much anyone. I see his domination playbook in some of my tendencies. The way he’d go from 0 to 100, fixated on crushing someone.

I expressed these concerns to a therapist once, describing the men I’d made my enemies over the years, and she said, “Do you ever feel this same way about women?” “No,” I answered in a rush. “Of course not.” Feeling this way about men was righteous, I told myself. Feeling that way about women was misogyny.

But of course that wasn’t true. People across the gender spectrum have wronged me, and I’ve been swift to hold a grudge against plenty of them. Humans will human. Just because misogyny operated differently in some of these situations didn’t mean they didn’t happen. My internal insistence on the distinction seemed less about gender theory and more about convincing myself that I could use my father’s tools to dismantle his house — that I could wield the same obsessive anger and rage toward different ends, making it just rather than oppressive.

Does it work like that? Isn’t this precisely what Audre Lorde told us doesn’t work? Or what Harvey Dent was talking about in The Dark Knight?!

And yet, hasn’t some version of this served me, and even others? Hasn’t this rage eclipsed any fear I might have had confronting officials about encampment clearings? Hasn’t this pettiness kept me researching long enough to figure out a weak spot in an opposing NIMBY group? Isn’t it the reason I’m the first person a girlfriend calls when a boyfriend wrongs her? The reason people thank me for saying something in a meeting no one else would say? Or is that me retrofitting a political purpose over something that came from a different place?

Politically, I do find myself wishing more progressives would call an enemy an enemy. White supremacists follow an ideology that does, indeed, want to exploit and kill people, and you should not waste your time thinking about how to “convince” those people to change their minds. You should fight them. You should probably even get mad about it.

I don’t believe it’s realistic or even possible to strive for a rageless existence — not for me, anyway. But I do want to understand it. I do want to be honest.

For instance, there’s a side of my own anger I think it took me some time to see. I think there’s something explosive and dangerous about white women’s rage, especially when it’s modeled after our white fathers’ — that we wield to the peril of our communities when we don’t understand it. (Or, as someone said on the internet once, you can’t ‘let me speak to the manager’ your way to racial justice.)

Harriet Lerner talks about women who, in not understanding their anger, wield it in ways that look like conflict but are actually maintaining the status quo. The classic example here would be a woman who yells at her misogynistic husband/father/brother but in doing so cements their old patterns — rather than, say, actually refusing to go along with the way things are. The woman might feel like she has “vented” her anger, but she’s done so in a way that doesn’t actually confront the cause, because she fears what will be uprooted if she does.

When I engage in a months-long battle with a minor nemesis — that guy at work who used to continually slap me on the shoulder when greeting me, etc. etc. — what real anger am I side-stepping? What status quo am I maintaining?

In other words, what am I actually mad about? And what am I scared to uproot?

When I was in my early twenties and running youth programs in Boston for the first time, my boss and mentor also happened to be extremely serious about (and expert in) capoeira. He taught me many, many things that I still live by to this day, and one of the things I still think about was how slow he was to introduce other people to any kind of martial arts. If people are introduced too quickly, he explained once, then they mistakenly think they’re “learning to fight.” When actually, it’s about learning to not fight.

He was, I think, the first adult I’d ever met who seemed both incredibly powerful — I didn’t doubt he could win in a fight, and imagined that he was essentially Ethan Hunt — and incredibly gentle. Almost like the two things were related. Almost like you could be a warrior without being destructive. Almost like you could be fierce without being angry.

It’s possible, maybe, that the urge towards a nemesis — the itch towards a fight — can delude me into thinking that things are more either/or than they really are. That it might even make me less equipped to fight for what I believe in.

Realistically, I’ll probably always be angry. I’ll probably always feel that little pull to petty battles. I don’t expect to uproot that part of me anytime soon. [Insert Hulk/Bruce Banner joke here] But I do hope to understand it for what it is, how it can be a part of resisting injustice but also a part of distracting me from it. How my real self, and the real issue, is often somewhere underneath it.