The femur is thought to be the bone in the human body that can bear the most force, but the petrous bone in the skull scientifically triumphs as our densest bone. Between the brain and the skull are three additional layers: directly on the brain’s surface is the pia mater, followed by a spider-webby covering called the arachnoid, then finally the dura mater, which is attached firmly to the skull. Despite all these layers, the cross-sectional diagrams of which give proof of evolution’s desire to pad the most complex organ in the human body, there is still the perceived precarity of the brain floating inside the skull.
When I think back to how many times I’ve hit my head over the past few years, I wonder about my brain. I wonder whether, despite the buffer between it and my skull, it has been compromised in some fundamental way: shaken up or gently crushed. Then I wonder whether frustration is a forceful enough description for the emotion that floods my body after each of those bonks on the head. The frustration is mostly aimed at myself, but when that feels too limiting, at others in my immediate surrounding: my co-workers, who stacked boxes so carelessly; my business partner, who installed wall elements in a way that prioritizes aesthetics over safety; my boyfriend, whose heavy sculpture tumbled from a tall shelf to make contact with my skull. Eventually another incident swells in my memory. It’s the first of the head traumas, which stands as an outlier because it wasn’t an accident but an act of violence.
I was cycling in the western part of Berlin to pick up something for my restaurant that was urgently needed, though I no longer remember why. It was a route I was unaccustomed to taking. At one point the bicycle lane on the sidewalk abruptly ended due to construction and led me towards a makeshift lane in the street. Clearly not meant to account for cyclists, automobile traffic and parking, the street was narrow and I could only barely squeeze by a long line of cars stopped at the traffic light. Passing one car, the tip of my handlebar brushed the side mirror, not damaging it but making a noise that caught the attention of the male driver. As I continued to slowly pedal, I chose to ignore his shouting, wanting to avoid confrontation with an angry driver at all costs.
The line of cars began to move forward as the light ahead turned green. The man revved his engine and sped up ahead of me, then suddenly pulled the car over and opened his door. By that time the bicycle lane had returned to the normal safety of the sidewalk and I could watch, cycling even slower now, as the ogre of a man sauntered onto the sidewalk and stood a few meters in front of me in the middle of the bike lane. He leered, feet planted broadly, arms extended. He was waiting for me, gleaming with contempt, as I approached. My insides twisted up, everything forming a double-helix in my gut, and I tried to veer around him on the sidewalk. As I managed to swerve, pulling around him just barely, the man lashed out and hit the back of my head, open-handed, as I passed. It was strong enough for me to cry out in pain and shock. My only impulse was not to fall—keep pedalling, keep pedalling—and to somehow outrun him. Luckily, I noticed another man with a baby carriage on the sidewalk ahead near the intersection. I stopped beside him, told him in a mechanical and strangely unfamiliar voice what had just happened, and asked if he could stand there with me for a second. He looked alarmed but I realized my strategy was a good one when I saw the assailant’s car peeling through the intersection, taking a right ahead of me. I ripped my phone from my bag and clicked as many photos of his car as I could, frantically zooming in, my hands trembling.
~
I hadn’t been wearing a helmet. After that incident I began to strap one on obsessively, not necessarily out of concern for an accident but out of fear of some further physical attack. Maybe it was a little irrational but fear and logic often have a tense relationship. No further attack ensued. Instead, a year or so later, I started hitting my head, hard, in a series of stupid accidents.
There’s a metal pole sticking too far out of the wall at the restaurant. Standing up, the crown of my head slams into it. The doctor says it’s probably a mild concussion, but it feels like a diagnosis given for the sake of diagnosis. I never knew you could get a concussion from something you did to yourself, by yourself. All I know is that it takes months to function as I had before.
Each time one of these incidents happens, I feel a spike of frustration, followed by self-pity, then worry. Usually, I’m too embarrassed to tell people. There are weeks of severe or just plain weird headaches, then more worry for how it will affect my long-term health and wellbeing. This is my head, after all. I read articles about the horrible condition professional athletes playing contact sports can get from too many blows to the head. The severe, repeated injury leads to brain damage, mental illness and dementia, the worst part being there’s no way to diagnose it until a biopsy of the brain is performed after death. So, yes: fear.
My skull bonks against the corner of the shelf over the recycling bins, in the exact same place as the previous injury.
I begin to ask myself: can it be mere accident? I have always been pretty good at sports and nimble in my body. Maybe I grew too fast from a normal-sized twelve-year-old child into the gangly stature of a thirteen-year-old adult. Had my body outgrown my brain, back then? Or has my brain never truly had control of my body? Some call the situation I’m describing mindfulness, in the trendy lexicon of those who will have us believe we can control anything in our surroundings with the correct healthful habits. I try to practice a version of this: when I walk down stairs or when I do a task that involves straining my body, I pay close attention to every footstep. I remember the earth under my feet and the physical borders of interior spaces. But mindfulness will always lapse, and that moment of inattention leads to a knock on the head. It happens in a split second, as if a punishment for the lapse. How can you remain in your body every minute of the waking day?
I’m in a tight storage closet, also at work, searching for something on a lower shelf. On my way up—bam!—my forehead slams into a box that hangs over the edge of a shelf just a few centimeters too far. It’s always a matter of a few centimeters.
If physical control is elusive, I want to be able to glean some intellectual lesson from all of this. I puzzle over the definition of Freud’s theory of repetition compulsion, but it doesn’t quite ring true. Inherent in traumatic repetitions is an active attempt to master a passive, harmful situation from the past. I can’t say that any of the accidents are active, as they seem to occur completely outside of my conscious control, but maybe that’s just the point: until the driver of this unconscious force is brought to light, there will be no end to the repetition. Lingering in the crosshairs of liminality there seems to be a warning, the meaning of which I can never seem to decipher.
~
My thoughts wander back to the assault on the street. Ironically this is the one that affected me the least, physically speaking. There was no concussion and the minor headache and neck pain were gone a couple days later. One of those photos I had snapped showed the license plate of the man’s car perfectly. That day, pumped up with adrenaline, I cycled directly to the nearest police station, gave a statement and showed the on-duty officer the photo. He typed the plate number into his system and it provided a name and a phone number, which he immediately called. I was shocked at the efficiency of this. The man who had hit me apparently answered, then promptly hung up when the officer explained who he was. More than guilty, it seemed.
I left the station feeling that I had acted, that I had already secured some form of revenge. A little piece of the fear the man had foisted on me was now reflected back at him, in the knowledge that he had something coming for him in the form of the law. Gotcha.
Weeks later, a letter arrived in my mailbox inviting me to a far-flung police station where I would be asked to identify the suspect. I had no idea what to expect. Would there be a line-up, Law and Order style, all suspects surprisingly shorter than me when measured against the lines on the wall?
In reality, it was not nearly so dramatic. I sat in a room painted in an institutional two-tone with a policeman who joked around in the inscrutable way typical to old Berliners. He eventually showed me six photos, all of unattractive, slack-jawed men.
Do any of them look familiar? he asked.
I tried to beam myself back to those five seconds when the hulking man loomed in front of me on my bicycle. I recalled not so much a face as a shape. I named the two numbers that might have been him. Number two and number four.
Are you sure? the officer asked. Look closer. How about number three?
I might have detected a wink or maybe it was just inherent in his tone. It could have been number three, I answered.
Nummer drei? he asked again.
Was he trying to help me? Was it some offering of care he felt I was due? I was confused, but replied, my tone confident now: Nummer drei.
Okay, Nummer drei. He wrote something down and thanked me for my time.
~
Some months later I got an official call to appear in court against a man whose name I don’t recall but reminded me of Slobodan Milošević. I thought about my neighbor downstairs, whose name truly does rhyme with Slobodan Milošević, who everyone in the building tiptoes around, who on our first day in our new apartment threatened to call the police if we did not unpack more silently. He banged on the door with a fury so disproportionate to the offence that we were only confused by it. I thought about the man who hit me receiving the summons in the mail, and perhaps, like me, having a little trouble reading the official German. I didn’t feel sorry for him, but I had a modicum of consideration for what his psyche might be undergoing and for the shades of anger—different, but no less potent—we various foreigners in Germany had: my neighbor, the man, me and so many others who find themselves living in a country not their own. Lastly, I thought about the assailant’s wife, his children, all the other people he was sure to hit or have hit, if he found it within himself to do so to a complete stranger on the street.
The court date was still a few months in the future. I tucked the document away in my files with other scary German letters.
The court date came and went. I forgot about it entirely. I don’t even think I was in the country the day it happened. I felt vaguely guilty for not doing my civic duty of upholding justice, of honoring the court system’s efforts to hold this person accountable. I called the number on the summons letter and the Beamter who answered promised to send another date, after, of course, I paid a fee.
More months passed and I received another letter. By this time, it was over a year after the incident had happened and the whole thing made me feel exhausted. I found I didn’t want to dredge up the emotions surrounding the attack again. With the new letter from the court, I’d started to have nightmares about physical fights, about vampires and killing innocent animals. No, I didn’t want this. Better to just ignore it and move on.
So I let it slide, the charges forgotten. I told myself that at least the proceedings had scared the man. Probably they would make him think twice before messing with random women on the street. I’d gotten a shred of revenge. Hadn’t I?
~
I’m rifling in the cellar trying to find my summer shoes when a piece of wood tumbles from a high shelf. Goddammit. Now I sit at home, avoiding screens and too much activity for a few days, in an attempt to repair my aching head.
The piece of wood that is also a sculpture, half-finished, belonging to my boyfriend—whom I love more than anyone; who also keeps everything, in every imaginable corner of our storage space; and who always seems to be out of town when I hit my head—that piece of teetering wood thankfully doesn’t knock me out. But when the familiar tears of frustration fall and I call him, thousands of miles away, telling him that I hate myself and asking him what’s wrong with me and he only apologizes—feeling terrible but not necessarily at fault—does part of me also want him to assume the guilt? To feel it as much as I feel my own pity, my own worry and, more crucially, my own anger?
Once all those first reactions subside, after I’ve thrown an empty plastic jar of vitamins against a sturdy door in my kitchen as many times as it takes, the satisfaction of the thud of impact dissipating a thrumming vibration in my body, I fall asleep on his pillow and try to see the reason in all this. The reasoning I arrive at stems from the man in the bike lane. Leering, lashing out at a woman he doesn’t know because he can. Because he has always used his body, his anger, to get what he wants.
I have never been successful at using my body or my anger to get what I want. I have no goal to lash out at anyone, stranger or not, with my body. Yet I acknowledge it holds rage. It wants things, sometimes violent or vengeful things, and there must be a way for that to be okay.
What is the alchemy of anger? How does one person go from impulse to hitting another person on the head, while another goes from impulse to a further turning inwards, to frustration at herself? And yet another might assess the situation with detached curiosity, trying to puzzle out all the possible reasons for somebody else’s aggressive behavior?
I question the one-track goal of ‘channelling anger,’ as if it’s a correct and moral thing to always turn a negatively perceived emotion into something positive, or at least something productive. Sometimes it can be useful to direct rage into an effort, as there’s a great deal of potency behind that emotion, but there are other occasions when I think it must simply be expressed. Even if it’s brief, there must be a critical moment when an impulse towards anger is assumed by the body, when body and anger become a single entity. A moment of sitting with. If this morsel of grace is allowed, the body knows what has to be done for its own sake: whether anger must be ejected violently or whether a pause can be taken before deciding to place it aside, waiting for some further (productive) moment of action to be taken. I think the freedom lies in the malleable potential of the body to allow options for the anger within it: to let it sink in, be cast aside or be thrown off. People presenting as women don’t often get that freedom, for many individual reasons, but surely also because we have been conditioned to understand violence and rage as unacceptable, or at least embarrassing, qualities for the female body to assume. As I woman, I have a function beyond the typically feminized traits of caring, soothing, analyzing, worrying and repairing. I am capable of and need to express rage, anger, upset, disappointment and frustration. Without that freedom to vote for anger or against it, I can never free myself from its vise grip, its potential to harm the body.
~
Since missing the court date, the remnants of guilt are still there. They rear up every time I hit my head and feel frustrated or overwhelmed but have no idea how to express what those emotions actually shroud: rage. Likely it’s also due to the fact that the rage doesn’t only belong to me. It stems from an ocean of yet-to-be-expressed feminine anger that simmers throughout space and has accumulated over time. I understand the anger of all the other women the man has hit, screamed at or abused because I can only imagine there is more than one. I want to be angry for the others because I didn’t save them from that man when I had the chance. The correlation might sound overwrought, but the sentiment is nevertheless alive: I neglected to let him be punished when I could. Hitting my head feels like a punishment to myself, not necessarily for not showing up in court but rather for not rightfully bringing my rage to an end. Instead of expressing it, I swallowed it, said, It’s okay, it’s forgotten, I don’t want to dredge it up again.
But the anger remains there, ballooning, and one way or another must come out. Until it does, I’m afraid I will go on hurting myself and go on feeling sorry for myself, always asking why. When activated, anger bangs up against the interior boundaries of a body just as the brain jostles inside the skull in a head trauma. I’m sure that when anger isn’t allowed its due attention, it results in further harm to the self in the form of illness or neuroses. Where does that leave me and my head? I regret to say I have no simple answer to this question. I suppose the solution is something that has to be practiced: detecting the point at which anger melds with the body, trying on how it feels to let it transmute or let it fly, then gauging the reactions to the impulse internally and externally. A sort of conscious rinsing and repeating. Anger is not a rope reeling out of control, ungraspable, but one I have the power to wind around the spool, violently or calmly, at whatever speed I need.
