The Power Structures that Live in the Nervous System III
Why the same wound runs a boardroom and a bloodline
This is Part III. If you're new: Part I named the structures that live in us; Part II watched them run — the yes that means no, the four patterns underneath it. If you've been here since the beginning: you already know what Taryn swallowed. Now we find out where Jim learned to swallow it too.
Jim rolled over - the clock read 7:38 - in big red letters, last night felt like 3.
He looked in the far corner of the room, his brother rolled tight in a ball - his protector - in front of the door guarding the younger siblings from their father’s drunken tirade.
As he stumbled out of bed he realized it was his roommate, who had fallen asleep on the fall, drunk, after a night of partying.
Jim grew up fighting. Rest wasn’t in his protocol; he slept fists balled up ready to wake up swinging, which he often did.
Thanks for covering of his older brother he got out of that mansion shaped trailer park he spent his formative years.
His father who was a well-known, respected even - known for having the mdel family - showed his gratitude for his family in the pounding of fists to their chest, stomach, and back in lieu of their face.
Smile.
Aching from a night of college drinking - Jim worked, aching reminiscent of a night following that of fatherly love.
He limped over to the door and told his roommate to get in the bed - reminded of the human moat that he and his brother would form to protect their younger siblings from the overpriced whisky-scented nights, that codified the occurrence.
It was rare enough to be brushed off as just a bad night. But often enough that the siblings developed strategies of protection, primarily that of their fathers, the next day.
Smile.
The siblings, four of them, poured into a room, and Jim and his older brother took turns between staying watch and sleeping.
A senior at Harvard, Jim had become the emotional brute he wished he could have met the seething wounds of his father on those ‘bad nights’. Now, a black rock was left long after fractured ribs and skin of purple and blue fused and faded.
He wore his self-hatred like a protective armor with teeth, blades, and claws projecting outward a radius of three feet from his 5’11 medium frame.
Anybody who came in proximity could get bitten, sliced, and more likely hooked and dragged along in his toxic mirage of fun times.
Life taught him to fight, Harvard taught him to mold that fight into a strategy - kill or be killed - a normalized red ocean. The firm taught him he could fly.
None of it taught him that no amount of money, women, or prestige would fill the hole left by a father who showed his love in a platitude of well-placed fists blurred by the venom of his own self-hate with a hint of Macallan 18.
As Jim sat across from Taryn, her presence quietly intimidated him. He didn’t know it consciously just that he felt the need to dominate in her presence - more accurately, to dominate her.
Taryn, captivated by the spell of a society that craved to own her, felt the need to appease.
Both, though at vastly different levels, possessed by the same instinct - to survive.
—-
Alive in a world fueled by pain. As it plays out on the world stage - power, money, wealth - underneath a society run by wounded children.
Social clubs become the new high school cafeteria, high school cafeterias a multitude of social platitudes of wound nursing - some growing wider and deeper as the days drag on, others growing soggier and stickier, maintaining its shape and form, while others harden on top covering an abyss of infection leaking into the bloodstream with each thump of the cardiac-shaped muscle.
Nonetheless, the years pass, adulthood comes, along with it the absence of the presumed healing of time, and the ever-present running of countries, businesses, communities, and households. From the janitor to the CEO. The lawyer to the school teacher. The doting wife to the belligerent father.
Structures, games, systems that climbed and set down flags in DNA, bloodlines, left untouched, unexamined, except for those rare crisis moments - and then somehow further fortified.
Running amok in societies that reward or penalize a multitude of variations of mirrors of the same wound - different punctures, different entry points, different roads to arrival, different forms of reinforcement - yet one relying on the other.
The parasitic prey, the hosting predator.
Both with one blind goal, when stripped to its essence, to survive.