For generations before I was born my family was filled with the voices. While in my mother’s womb those voices no doubt surrounded and permeated like some sort of twisted lullaby.

Throughout my childhood and teen years I was engulfed in them – these voices of anger and sadness. They came from every direction, loud and soft, screaming like a hurricane or gently whispering like a breeze. They were the water I swam in. How could they not have affected me? How could I not have developed certain coping mechanisms both healthy and unhealthy to deal with them?

This was my world for as far back as I can remember. A world of wailing and screaming; a world of punching fists, hammers to heads, black eyes, bruised faces and blood. I learned to crawl into myself. I learned how to become cold. I learned how to build a switch within my mind and use it to turn off my emotions when the world became too overwhelming.

What a terrible symphony of anger and sadness complete with arias, overtures, whole movements and more. There were heroes and villains. There were heroes who became villains and heroes who were never heroes at all…just wolves in sheep’s clothing, lurking.

It was like living in a gentle acid bath that slowly etched itself into your skin. Over time the etching became scarring and the scarring became an involuntary shield off of which things like trust and hope would bounce like bullets off of Superman.

That’s the thing about growing up in that kind of environment, it changes you in ways you don’t realize until much later when you are trying to figure out things like broken relationships and poor friendships. You begin to realize that you stopped trusting people as a defense mechanism because the people you were taught to trust hurt you over and over again.

I especially learned not to trust men…to see them all as monsters or monsters-in-waiting (as if I was not a man myself). I never feared men…I hated them and came to view them all with suspicion. The male capacity to hurt, to steal innocence and the things you loved, to stomp and crush, to devour people whole to satiate a never ending appetite was a caricature I built in my mind. Part of my defenses. If you don’t trust them you cannot get close to them. If you don’t get close to them they cannot hurt you.

Men were the enemies who would hurt my mum. I remember once when a guy confronted me and called my mum a slut. He was much larger than me. I grew cold and I smashed him in the face with my fists. I remember standing there and watching the blood gush from a surely broken nose. Then I calmly left. I walked away analyzing the moment as if I were 1,000 meters up looking down on it. The switch had flipped. I felt nothing. I’ve never told anyone that story before.

I fought a lot when I was younger. I threw a lot of fists to heads and faces (breaking my left hand once in the process). It never helped.

This is what those voices can do. They change a person. They scar a person.

I am thankful that in the midst of all this dissonance there was the still small voice of my mum’s love. It was like the small note of a flute in an orchestral movement. In Debussy’s Prélude à  l’aprés-midi d’un Faune the flute opens and leads the way…all the other instruments follow and are bound to its power. It is gentle and soft but it is prfoundly strong – this is love.

In the often chaotic world of anger and sadness mum’s love would meander in and soften the hard edges around me leading me to safer places. Since then my children have been this kind of love for me. Since then Megan has been this kind of love for me…softly cutting through the scars and anger and the sadness with a clarity only love can provide and act on. Sometimes I feel as though I can still hear mum’s love far away, echoing off the walls of my mind.

I continue to work to rise above and beyond the voices of anger and sadness that still echo in my head. It can be hard. I still struggle with trust. I struggle with fears of abandonment. I avoid conflict like the plague and can be overly morose.

To this day, if I am not careful, people can use these same voices to manipulate me. Anger causes me to run or to lash out in hurtful ways. Sadness causes me to fold up or draws me in to a place where I am malleable and without will.

I am substantially better than I once was. I have grown. I am not who I once was but the echoes of those voices still come to me in the night or when I am alone too long with myself. They are like ghosts that seek to come back after repeated exorcisms.

No matter. Despite those voices I have built a life. I will continue to work against them until they are all but silenced. This is my trajectory, even if I stumble (or am pushed) off the occasional cliff.