I started this and I want to keep it somehow

I became the master of the poker face when I was six years old.

My father liked to scream a lot when he felt that I was being argumentative and—according to him—I spent most of my childhood in violent opposition to whatever he wanted. He also labored under the misapprehension that I didn’t understand him and he knew exactly what I thought when I thought it. And in addition to all of this, he was never wrong. So when he started screaming about how I was lazy and ungrateful, I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t say anything, lest I make it worse. And any facial expression that betrayed my anger and intense misery only got me severely beaten. So instead of saying anything or doing anything or even looking like anything, I didn’t. I trained myself to hold a blank mask. It was a defense mechanism I learned early in life.

Emotions were dangerous things in my childhood. Father’s anger was explosive and unpredictable. My mother’s anger was emotionally scarring. And my anger simmered on the surface, invisible to everyone around me, but always there. I spent most of my days mad at everything and everyone, including myself, but my poker face was so good that no one ever knew.

Reading people’s body language was also something I learned early in my childhood. It was necessary to gauge my father’s fits of rage, or my mother’s coldness. I could always tell when something was going on or when something was about to happen because I could read it on their faces or in their voices and then I could brace myself or manage to escape it altogether.

My brother didn’t fare quite as well. He never really developed his defense skills past the poker face and his was still inferior to mine. Father always knew that Freddy hated him and later at night when I was tending Freddy's wounds, we could hear Dad rant and rave about how disrespectful Freddy was.

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I wrote this a couple of hours ago. It was actually longer than this excerpt here, but I wanted to erase the document so I can start something else. But I really liked the first paragraphs, so I'm going to keep it here until I can decide what to do with it.

Ciao!