One of the ways I've processed my anger since childhood is through satirical rhyming verse. This is the sort of passive-aggressive, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog coping mechanism I learned growing up with my family. Where sharing your feelings would get you in trouble for inadvertently offending a parent or for "being too sensitive," mocking whoever upset me didn't seem to have a downside back then. Not even my parents wanted to lash out just to be accused of "not being able to take a joke."
I remember turning in a poem in elementary school about going out to dinner with my family. Each stanza featured a different dish my mother sent back for its unexpected imperfections. As I recall, she was more regal in my version, but also less embarrassing. I drew a picture of her cheeseburger and chocolate malt "with dots in it," as she'd complained repeatedly to the waiter, to accompany the poem. I got an A on the assignment, as per usual, and it even hung on display for my school's poetry month, to my mother's relatively quiet embarrassment.
In high school I penned a series of mocking poems about a character named Fattie. Sometimes Fattie was my mother; sometimes she was a classmate. They were vague enough in terms of detail that the people I wrote them about could never seem to identify themselves. I encouraged them to read the poems and then, when they laughed at my depictions of them, I fed off their reactions in a Palpatine-esque fashion. One particularly difficult classmate who had bullied me from before I knew who she was started collecting my poems to make into a Fattie Anthology, never knowing the first one she'd read had been about her.
A December or two ago I started writing a Christmas song about my dad. It includes lines like "My asshole dad, my psycho brother / I wonder how long till you kill each other," and ends with "Merry Christmas / I won't care when you die." It's cheerful and up tempo. I never finished it.
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