They only saw the anger….

Most nights I wake up gasping. I am wheezing hard for air that is no longer left in my lungs. My eyes are wide open.

But then I see the faint strip of night light coming through the curtains from my bed. Realising where I am, I slow down my breathing.

I could still wake myself up. I am not dead. It was just a dream, I thought to myself.

It’s okay; you don’t need to think about it now. You can let it go.

I loosened my grip on it, little by little, and let myself be pulled back beneath the covers.

---

Later that day, I realised these weren’t dreams. They were real. I had lived through this same situation my entire life. The same people, the same scene, and the same feelings.

I was at a family gathering. The female relatives were in the small dining room. Some were squeezed onto the three-seater sofa, while others were perched on dining chairs pulled in from around the table.

And there was my mother.

Her voice ricocheted off the walls, spilling out of the dining room and into the hallway, reaching me from several rooms away in the living room.

My shoulders instantly tensed. She was talking to all the women sitting less than a foot away from her, yet every sentence landed as though she were trying to reach someone across a football pitch.

I walked towards the dining room. My heart was violently thudding in my ears with every step I took closer. I knew what was coming before I reached the doorway.

She’s done it again. She’s talking about me.

I stood in the doorway, feeling exposed, as though I’d walked in without any clothes on. The conversation immediately stopped. Every face turned towards me. Nobody said anything. Their stares cut right through me.

I opened my mouth to try to explain. But nothing came out. The harder I searched for the words, the further away they seemed to get.

“OII!” one woman snapped from across the room.

My spine shook.

“Did you really do that?!”

“You utter disgrace. You’re just like your father,” she carried on.

Heat rushed into my face. My chest tightened. The room started to shrink around me.

My words never made it out. Instead, something inside me snapped.

My scream came before I even realised I had opened my mouth. It ripped through the room. I don’t remember every word I shouted. I just remember the heat rushing through my body, my hands shaking, and every curse spilling out faster than I could stop it.

The room froze, eyebrows raised.

Another woman tried to cut through my shouting.

“Oi, shut up!”

I barely registered it.

“Shut up!”

Again.

My heart was pounding too loudly for anything else to get in. I couldn’t hear her.

“SHUT UP!” she roared.

I abruptly stopped and looked at her. Only when she finally caught my eye did I hear the rest.

“You need to lower your voice. The neighbours will hear you,” she hissed.

While everyone else stared at me, I looked at her through tear-filled eyes. The mother.

She’d gone quiet. The corners of her mouth curled into the smallest, satisfied smile as she leaned back into the sofa, her shoulders softening, her eyes drifting elsewhere.

She didn’t need to tell them who I was anymore.

I’d shown them. I’m the problem.

My mother had spent many years taking me apart, piece by piece, in front of other people, giving them reasons to judge me, comparing me to others, and each time, I experienced it as though I were the problem.

In that very moment, I needed someone to understand me more than anything. But by then, they had already made up their minds about me.

They only saw the anger. Not the pain behind it.