I don't think Thomas J. Wingate ever hit me. He didn't have to because I was terrified of him almost all the time, and lived in fear of pissing him off. 

More than that—I lived in fear of anything pissing him off, not just me. Because his squelched rage and violence didn't have to erupt onto me in order for me to feel them. I felt the eruption itself, whether it was onto some motherfucker at work or some motherfucker behind the wheel of a car or some motherfucker in a suit siphoning money and power from the people. 

That constant, enduring fear shaped me. I grew so familiar with the chilly throb of repressed rage that I learned how to mimic it exactly, and to this day I can fill a room with it on command to let everybody know exactly how I feel. 

I live in fear of confrontation—partly out of fear of losing them, partly out of fear that I'll get into one and completely lose my shit, in animalistic ways I don't want to imagine—yet am almost constantly enmeshed in imaginary ones. 

Motherfuckers everywhere. Literary authority figures telling me I suck and should give up writing forever. Assholes at the hockey rink or soccer field shoving me and giving me an excuse to let my repressed rage loose. The situation doesn't matter. The fear of violence exploding, whether physical or emotional, is my deepest primordial sensation. 

Everything I am 

is built 

on its ruins.