Fury by Koren Zailckas Page B

“it was evident that he avoided—or concealed—any haste or excitement.”
    A perfectionist by any other name (“anal-retentive,” “compulsive personality”) smells just as bat-shit insane. I relate horrifyingly well to a perfectionist’s MO. In recent years I too have taken on an appearance that is “unrelaxed, tense, joyless, and grim.” I’ve come to value “self-discipline, prudence, and loyalty.” I prefer to do things myself instead of relying on other people. And I’m also stuck in a “repetitive life pattern” chock-full of wanton abandons like “methodical, meticulous work.”
    I get deeply depressed when I read about the way shrinks link repressed joy and closeted anger.
    In the words of psychologist Theodore Millon, “the grim and cheerless demeanor of compulsives is often quite striking”; “they have an air of austerity and serious-mindedness”; and “their social behavior is polite and formal.”
    And according to Reich, the perfectionist is “usually even-tempered, lukewarm in his displays of both love and hate.” How much of myself I see in those damning words. Not too long earlier, a friend had pointed out how dead I sounded whenever I called her from my parents’ house; my voice was so absent of inflection it could have passed for the dial tone.
    I’m so terrified to lend a voice to my anger, I begin to wonder if I’ve been holding back my affection too. Virginia Satir gave special attention to the ways families display both rage and affection. She saw them as two variations of the same theme. The same families that viewed anger as dangerous often had difficultly expressing affection too. Satir found children who grew up in families that expressed little affection also tended to behave angrily toward each other.
    I start to wonder if I’d loved the Lark demonstratively. Had my eyes ever twinkled behind my poker face? Had I ever unknitted my troubled shoulders long enough to let my head melt against his shoulder? Even before what the Lark had called that “final, fateful night,” anxieties had begun to express themselves in the corners of my mouth. My posture had taken on a quality that was guarded and withdrawn. I’d spent most of July treating the Lark with fussy polite-ness. From the moment I’d set foot in Brighton, I’d been afraid to contradict him, lest he see me as flawed. Our meals together had turned awkward and courtly in those final weeks together. I remember one meal in particular, where we’d done little more than clear our throats and smooth the linen napkins in our laps. Our stilted conversations might’ve easily been mistaken for small talk had it not been for the hot surge of expectation moving under them.
    In the writing of psychiatrist Claudio Naranjo, specifically in an article called “Anger and Perfectionism,” I come across the sentence: “It would be a mistake, however, to conceive of [the perfectionist] as a violent character—for it is on the contrary an overcontrolled and overcivilized interpersonal style.” In a nutshell, I think. The same instinct that has my writing in a deep freeze is just as surely sabotaging my life. It’s no coincidence that I am a writer. (This as opposed to a performer, a dancer, a singer.) Writing is an art form one can torture, “polish” to death, before it’s ever exposed to the withering light of critique. In recent years, I’d brought that same stultifying attention to my character. Maybe it was no coincidence that the Lark and I had spent so much of our relationship connecting through letters.
    I resolve to connect with my inner fool, to risk embarrassment, inadequacy, and imperfection. To that end, I send the Lark a text message even though I haven’t heard from him in weeks. Something like: I’ve been thinking . . . when it comes to you and me, the