The End (My Struggle #6)

by Karl Ove Knausgård

This fear of people being angry with me was the child’s fear, it didn’t belong in the adult world, where it was unprecedented, yet something inside me had never made that transition, never become adult and hardened in that way, so the child’s emotions lived on in the adult. The adult, which is to say I, was completely at the mercy of the child’s emotions, sometimes it hurt so much I could hardly bear it, knowing as I did that I was an adult and acutely aware that the feeling and everything to do with it was deeply shameful. What was the reason for it? If my sense of self had been strong and whole, if I’d been more assured, I would have been able to say to myself that I did this and I’m accountable for it, and if anyone has another opinion that’s their business, not mine. If they want the argument, I’m ready for an argument. But my sense of self wasn’t at all strong or whole, I wasn’t at all assured, and my self-confidence was completely built around what other people might think of me. My own thoughts and opinions didn’t matter in that respect. I was still living in the world Dad had set up for me, where everything I did basically came down to not doing anything wrong. What was wrong was not defined by any set of rules, but was instead a matter of what he at any given time decided was wrong. These circumstances I transferred to my adult life, in which they no longer existed apart from inside me. But Dad was dead, he’d been dead for eleven years. I knew all this, but knowin...