I’m furious. I’m truly, genuinely apoplectic. I’m a grown man, playing squash, and I’m absolutely furious.
This is the most intensely I’ve felt anything for some time. I’ve never punched a wall (nice) but in a moment like this one, I understand how someone could. I don’t usually get it when people identify where in their body they feel an emotion, but this anger is in my stomach. It couldn’t be clearer. It rises, subsides as I convince myself that I surely don’t care, that this is just a game and that no one will remember the score by the time we’re having dinner tonight. No one cares about the result, we are only doing this to have fun. But then it rises again, more venomous than before, as soon as my brother (Ben) smashes the ball across the court into the wide open space that I am simply not in. I’m pretty shit at squash. There’s no reason I should believe I am owed a squash victory against my brother. None of it makes sense. But for some reason, I can’t handle competition with my family.
It defies all logic that I can know how little this means and still be furious. I rank myself among the sensible (most of the time), and particularly over the past few years I’ve been trying hard to actively reason my way around emotions like anxiety and guilt. I do bootleg CBT: I write down the negative emotion I feel, try to trace it back to its source and then identify any illogicalities in the route there (etc. etc., excuse my woke nonsense). They’re usually pretty glaring, and when I find one it feels a bit like pinching a spot. I squeeze it, squash it, diminish and degrade it and expose it for all its fraudulent fiction. Once done, I feel quite a lot better, at least for a bit. And the next time, it’s a bit easier to find the spot. Gradually I think I’m gaining a better grip on my mind, but who knows.
When I was a boy, I used to play hockey with my dad and my brother. My dad loved hockey; he had played for England in his youth and continued at a high level his whole life, up to and including the bit when I arrived. He was a sporty dad and, naturally, wanted his boychicks to take after the old man and get down with a bit of stick and ball. From the start, it was clear that Ben was a natural. It made sense to him. He was innately athletic and coordinated, and, being small for his age, he had a low centre of gravity which is quite handy for hockey.
The three of us would jump over the fence at the local astro turf and play together: passing it around, keep-ball, a few shots on goal, normal stuff. Nothing competitive, really. To my dad, it was a bit of fresh air and a chance to hang out with his kids. For Ben, it was an opportunity to show both me and my father how excellent he was at hockey. For me, it was a setup, a conspiracy against me, a choreographed scene where I was exposed as a complete and utter disappointment through comparison with my talented two-years-senior brother. My father, who so wanted his boys to continue his legacy, would see he has produced one competent hockey player (of whom he is deeply proud) and one total loser. This was my mental state before we’d even arrived at the pitch, and no prophecy ever fulfilled itself so quickly and with quite as much certainty. I’d miss the ball once and through sheer self-imposed humiliation I would give up. I was unavoidably bad at hockey, my dad was unavoidably disappointed, I resented both of them for it and there was no way in the world we were going to have a good time. I completely f*cked myself.
As I came into my teenage years, I stopped playing hockey altogether. I associated it with shame and inadequacy, and I hated it. I pursued football instead, a sport which neither my dad nor Ben had ever shown the slightest bit of interest in. It could be my thing, and even if I was shit at it, they’d never know. Maybe my father could yet be proud me for my sporting prowess, albeit probably through sheer ignorance. So I played for a football club outside school for six years, from the age of 9 to 15. I was team captain for most of that time out of pity for how dedicated and hopelessly useless I was. Ben had hardly played a full football match in his life, but I made the mistake of bringing him to training once and he scored from the halfway line. Every week for the next six months, I was asked whether my brother was coming back. So I quit.
This may sound like a sad story, but it isn’t. It’s about to get really good. I went off to university and decided I had grown up enough and become enough of an individual in my own right to go back to hockey, finally enjoy it for myself and have my own experience of it away from my childhood trauma. I joined the university men’s 4th XI, captained them to relegation in my second year and had a wonderful time doing so. I played three times a week and I loved it. I spent so much time with a stick and ball and it felt right, more so than football, like we had taken the long way round but we’d found each other in the end.
One afternoon while I was at home between my second and third years of uni, my brother suggested we go for a knock around. Just like old times, hey! I was ready. Ready to combine new-and-improved hockey ability with the small bits of maturity you gain between the ages of nine and twenty-two and do the name proud. A new beginning.
We arrived at the pitch, hopped over the fence and started passing a ball around. We chatted. I told them how much hockey I’d been playing. Ben started doing some tricks. My dad was laughing and clapping, fondness in his eyes. A tenderness. A pride. I smiled too. Well done, Ben. I could do this. I was a big boy. I too was proud of my brother for his hockey. He hadn’t stopped improving since he’d started, he was playing for Edinburgh and he was incredible to watch. I was good at the piano, I was studying at Oxford, I had my own stuff on the go and my own stuff to be proud of. We’d gone our separate ways, ploughed our own furrows and were now two different people. Not like the carbon copies of each other we were as children, leading identical lives. We were our own people, adults, brothers who could be proud of one another.
Dad passed me the ball. It bobbled under my stick and away. I chased after it. As I ran, I felt eyes boring through my back. I felt it rising again, in my stomach. That unmistakeable cocktail of shame and fury. It had been years since I’d felt this same feeling which I used to experience multiple times a week for more than half of my life. I was such a different person when I’d last felt it. I was a child, when I was last here – but no longer.
I engaged my brain to fight it. The hockey didn’t matter; I would be proud of myself, and Ben and Dad would be proud of me, if I could simply enjoy this. That was something I’d never been able to do. Each hockey mishap was an opportunity to demonstrate how much I’d grown as a person, how self-assured I’d become. Each cockup was chance to demonstrate that this couldn’t hurt me. I could enjoy time spent with my family without demolishing my self-worth in the process.
15 minutes later I hurled my stick at the fence, screamed obscenities at my father and brother and ran home with tears in my eyes. I was furious. In my stomach. Just like I am now.
Well actually, I suppose it’s easing off a bit now. It’s quite hard to be angry indefinitely. Anger burns fast, bright and hot. But shame, shame is apt to linger. Shame sits there, weighing you down like bowling ball in your bowels and pressed against your chest until you truly understand that the invisible hands that keep it there are your own.
So, it appears that with age comes understanding, but self-control takes practice. It isn’t something I will passively improve at. ___ can’t ___, and logic can only get you so far. We are not machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts, we cannot simply feed ourselves on facts and achieve outcomes. There’s an animal in all of us, and to train it takes years, takes discipline and maybe, just maybe, a whole lot more squash.
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