Why Childhood Emotions Still Haunt Me: A Dive into my Anger
It is a story you tell. The moment you start forming opinions, when your first words are heard, it is a story you tell. You begin your story whenever you think you began it. There is, in my mind, a moment from my childhood. I was angry at a friend of mine; he was a little older than me. I, a person of 7 years of age, would not fare well against someone who was 10 or 11. I do not remember what I was angry about, but I remember the action I took while I was fuming. We were playing in our front yards. The moment I felt wronged, I quit playing and was on my way. I had a bicycle I rode around. I did not go off cycling to ease my pain; I didn’t have the wisdom then to do so. I went away to find a rock that I could launch with my slingshot. After moments of searching, I came back with the smallest but hardest piece of stone that I could launch. Beside the gate, a few meters away from where we were playing and where my arch-enemy (at that moment) was playing, I positioned myself to shoot the best shot I could. I aimed for his head—the back of his head—I could not face him. As I took my shot, with air pumping out of my lungs as fast as it could, the rock struck him in the back. As he tried to reach over to the place where a sharp pain had just landed, I fled. I ran away on my bicycle, without thinking of what I would do when I returned home. Home was a rented flat, where the person who was just struck was a guest of the landlord’s family. I messed up big time. I rode away for an hour, at times looking back at the kids who were now searching for me all over. I am thankful that they did not complain to my folks or their folks about the matter. But the chase they gave me that day still strikes a guilty chord in me. We were children jostling about and fooling around, but the guilt I felt back then still has a place in my mind. The friends I played with back then might have forgotten what happened, but still, my mind goes there at times. Anger, I believe, is such a poisonous emotion—the hangover of which can remain years down the line. There are many such moments that I regret and wish had never happened. I cannot change what has happened, but I still wonder why there is still anger in this heart that saw the fault in such an emotion even as a child?
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