Page 55 of Black
I nodded.
“That’s an example of using anger as a fuel.”
“But that anger got me arrested.” I scoffed.
“I would say that it was your actions that got you arrested. The organizers of that rally should have made sure they had a permit to protest.”
I looked out the window and wished I could be out there instead of stuck inside this office. Bruce’s eyes followed mine and he got up to open a window.
“Let me try to break this down for you, Cia: emotions serve us as a compass. Without emotions it would be hard to navigate what is right for us and what isn’t. But we must apply a filter between our emotions and our behavior.
Gabriel and I exchanged a quick glance.
Bruce patiently explained. “I’ll give you an example. Let’s say you see Therese and Gabriel flirting.”
“Excuse me.” Gabriel cleared his throat and squirmed in his seat.
“Don’t worry, it’s just an example,” Bruce explained while I narrowed my eyes and wondered what the fucker was up to.
“Let’s pretend that you felt jealous because of the attention your daddy was giving this other woman. It would be very normal for any child to feel threatened by someone else who could potentially steal their dad away. Especially for a child who isn’t sure about her daddy’s love – wouldn’t you agree?”
“Theoretically,” I said.
“Good, so for the sake of the example we’re assuming that you’re jealous of Therese for stealing your father’s attention. What do you think your body is trying to tell you with the jealousy emotion?”
“I don’t know.”
“Of course you do. How does it feel to be jealous?”
I could answer that right off the bat, as it was a feeling I was very familiar with. “It feels horrible.”
“Yes, and we already established that the pain’s job is to hurt enough to get our attention. Maybe your body is letting you experience the pain of jealousy to remind you that what you have is important to you. Your daddy means a lot to you and you don’t want to lose him. The emotion itself is true, pure, and justified. Does that make sense?”
I nodded, because it actually did make sense.
“Now, what you do with the emotion is up to you. If you’re smart, you’ll use your insight to strengthen your bond to him by telling him how much he means to you. But often people aren’t smart when it comes to jealousy and they’ll blame and punish others for their own insecurities.
I leaned forward. “So what you’re saying is that there are no bad emotions, just bad behavior?”
“Exactly.” Bruce smiled. “You have a wonderful way of simplifying the complicated; I like that about you.”
If he was fishing for me to say I liked him back, he could fish all day – it wasn’t happening.
“So to sum it up,” he continued, “your anger with your dad is a perfectly normalemotion, but if you’re actively punishing him by making bad decisions in your life, then that is destructive behavior and the only person suffering would be yourself.”
My head felt deep-fried when we walked out of the office and to my disappointment I still had to be a girl, although Bruce told me I was now six years old.
“What do you want to do?” Gabriel asked me and the answer was obvious.
“I want to paint.”
It was a perfect escape and a place where I could quietly go over all the things Bruce had brought up.
The mad scientist might actually have a few good points. How he knew about my jealousy of Therese I would never know, but it just showed me that I was right. The guy had an eerie ability to look into my brain and read my thoughts.
It made sense that the meltdown I had yesterday would have been a natural response of a five-year-old who acknowledged that her daddy didn’t want her, and if I remembered right, I probably never cried like that at home. My mom would have flipped out on me and beat me to make me stop.
I made a sketch of the image I had in my head and transferred it with pencil strokes to a big canvas while thoughts roamed around my head.
