My Struggle: Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgård

out. Dad was no longer around, and my fear of his rage had been transferred onto others: I was twenty years old and scared stiff of other people being angry with me. It never went away. When I left everything behind and moved to Stockholm at thirty-three, the fear was still inside me. Linda, whom I met soon after, was temperamental and often unreasonable in her outbursts, and yet I allowed myself to be intimidated completely, even the slightest raising of her voice was enough to fill me with anxiety, and the only thing I could think about would be to make it go away. Even as a forty-year-old, sitting on the balcony on a morning in August 2009, I was scared of someone being angry with me. Whenever I gave anyone reason to be, I became so terrified and despairing and so full of anguish, I never knew how I would ever get over it. 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.