Fury by Koren Zailckas Page A

me four years . And I have little to show for it but a few ringed binders full of “research” and reading lists, a couple of usable scenes. Time is ticking on my deadline. And I can feel the people around me begin to lose faith in me. Pals, beginning to tease me, say things like: “It seems like you’re never going to finish that book of yours!” Or, “Whenever we ask you how it’s going, you always say, ‘Almost done.’ It’s always ‘almost done.’” (These comments make me hemorrhage with rage. Friends have no idea that these are the exact same phrases I punish myself with daily.) My computer’s cursor sits still and pulses, as if tapping its foot in impatience with me.
    Something has to change. I’m impatient for a revelation.
    I can’t relate to that doctor of Oriental sciences whose essay assures me the key will be revealed to me the moment I really feel “the pain and discomfort” that is “locked inside” myself, “energetically.” I want to identify it. I want to exorcise it. If only it were as simple as a snakebite, I’d eagerly bite my own arm and suck out the dark venom.
    One afternoon I finally get a hunch about what’s holding me up.
    In Virginia Satir, I read about and identify with a dysfunctional communication process called “nominalization.” It’s what happens when someone who is afraid of emotion replaces a process of being (a verb) with a static event (a noun). For instance, rather than saying, “I’m angry,” a person talks about “experiencing anger.”
    The words seem to shine a spotlight on me at my desk, where I am sitting for the umpteenth day in a row in front of an empty Word document, holding one fist to my mouth and listening to the voice in my head that cackles hack, failure, fraud in a heartless loop.
    For the first time I understand that I’m not trying to write about anger indefinite. I’m direly pissed and trying to understand my own. The time it takes me to arrive here makes a monkey of me, but the unconscious is riddled with blind spots that it doesn’t want to acknowledge.
    I sit down and try—just for my own private purposes—to write about leaving Brighton. Even if I’d ignored my anger there (“I didn’t notice”), denied it (“I’m really not mad”), or distorted it (“I’m just disappointed”), I remember quite clearly the flashes of fury I felt just beneath the surface.
    I start setting my teary exit into words, but I can’t seem to stop going back, rereading, editing, and rewriting. Weeks pass and I manage to turn a perfectly fine (if truly embarrassing) story into something so tortured it’s practically unreadable. Pull yourself together, I tell myself, as I hack the thing apart for the fourteenth time and Frankenstein it back together. Move on. Get to the rest of the story. Handle your business.
    But I can’t. The rewriting is compulsive. I drop the whole exercise and return to the safety of further reading.

    I think I can elude my own emotions by crawling into my research and dying there. But in an anger-screening questionnaire I am cruelly confronted with the reason why I can’t seem to write about my own individual anger:
    â€œTrue or false,” the question asks. “Being angry means being imperfect. Is it possible that I repress the emotion to maintain a mind-set of moral superiority?”
    True, all around, I think. A million times true.
    In psychological texts, I find the correlation between perfectionism and anger. Freud frequently acknowledged how stingy the “anal character” was with anger. And in Character Analysis , Wilhelm Reich described the rather funny case of a man he dubbed the “aristocratic character,” saying he had a “reserved countenance,” “his speech was well-phrased and balanced, soft and eloquent,” and