“You’ve earned this,” I used to say, whenever anyone–especially someone older than me–asked me to stop looking at them that way.

I remember my childhood like that. Acidic rage bites, little morsels of intense feeling, almost all of which were anger. Even my first memory:

I am little, I am one-ish. Shadowy figures loom over me, and before them, a crinkly bright mirror that bobs and sways and tastes like smooth. I want it in my mouth. I reach trembling, uncoordinated hands forward, again and again, gripping at it’s delicious smooth crinkly mirror-ness. Whenever I finally get it to my open mouth, the shadows go “boop!” and bop it away, and then laugh, hard.

I want to kill them with my bare hands.

This is honestly my first memory. I’ve been told my grandfather, who died of cancer when I wasn’t quite two yet, used to get me balloons like that. That my mother used to boop them away. I remember it, I think, because even in my tiny baby understanding, I was the angriest I had ever been.

I crawled, toddled, and then walked through life head down, a vibrating rage monkey full of hate for anyone that–not even took something from me, but disagreed at all.

“Why do you care what I read?” I remember one girl snapping at me during ceramics class in high school.

The question didn’t stump me. “You’re just wrong.”

Twilight was not something I agreed with. Not just on levels of quality, but on an intrinsic moral level.

Looking back, I had a point there, in theory. In practice? I had no idea.

It didn’t matter to me what was ultimately just or unjust, what hill might be worth dying on. I died on every hill, again and again, and then rose like the Jesus of hate over that hill to say, “I’m right, and you know it.”

“You’ve earned this.”

A lot of my fellow drunks might think booze is what softened it.

I actually heavily judged drinkers and smokers, though.

It was really when I was 15, and my mom was diagnosed with brain cancer.

The kids at my school had learned by then of my hate, and when I faced this, being children, they reacted as any children would when the enemy is weak. I remember that same girl who read Twilight passing me in the halls, hissing, “cancer always wins!” as they all did when I passed. My dad, loving and ignorant of what I had earned, had asked the teachers to tell my class what was going on.

I’d earned this.

Except, I hadn’t.

That’s what’s gotten better with age. Me, maybe, but mostly: that little baby with the balloon, who I can now look on with love.

The kiddo who believed fiercely in every belief they claimed to have. Who fought tooth and nail for a justice they didn’t understand yet, and would eventually die a thousand small deaths watching their mother die, and then disappear into a bottle for the next decade.

My love for you is not pity honey, I swear.

It is pride. You are doing ok now, even if it doesn’t feel like it all the time. The greys in the world have found you, wee piano. Let them in.