June 16 - Up The Wolves

The thing about pain is that sometimes its temporary absence feels blissful. It's how a lot of people I've known with addiction issues have explained it to me. Just not being in pain.

Up The Wolves is not without pain, it's a song about emotional and physical neglect and abandonment, but it has some moments of such perfect promised relief that listening to it feels like being washed in joy. Joy, and of course anger. For every "There's gonna come a day when you feel better" there's a "I'm gonna bribe the officials".

I'm lucky enough not to have been in a situation where people wouldn't have believed me if I'd told them the truth. Even when I was being bullied, the people who didn't do enough knew it was happening. They might have insisted (as part of a just world fallacy) that I'd done something to provoke or deserve it, but they weren't saying that the things I experienced didn't happen. But I've felt the anger. I have a misplaced (or correctly placed in a misplaced world) sense of justice. I get angry beyond my ability to express it when people who should have been believed aren't.

But I'm also aware that the wolf isn't coming home. We have to be the wolf.