“I want you to know I understand. Even though we’re enemies, you and I, I understand the fury that drives you.”
This is my favorite Cersei Lannister scene in Game of Thrones. Next is the one where she gets her revenge on Septa Unella—not for the revenge itself, but for how she explains what truly motivates the Septa—motives that Unella herself didn’t seem remotely aware of.
“Confess. It felt good — beating me, starving me… frightening me, humiliating me. You didn’t do it because you cared about my atonement. You did it because it felt good.”
Her enemies were blind to the singularity of their views. But Cersei was capable of taking in another person’s reasons and inner workings—even of those who filled her with rage. She saw people as they were because she was just as bare and honest with herself. She was willing to admit a shared humanity, and that afforded her the sharpness and quality of her gaze.
“I understand. I do things because they feel good,” she told Unella, admitting what the woman of holiness could not.
To Septa Unella, Cersei was a dirty whore. Nothing else. To Ellaria, Cersei was a member of the family that killed the love of her life. Full stop. These were simple, concluded views. But Cersei was more than just a vessel of hatred, impulses and self-righteousness. She was able to narrate Ellaria’s pain in detail. She could close her eyes and hear the sounds of Oberyn’s skull breaking, of Ellaria’s scream.
“That must be difficult for you,” she said, and she meant it. She doomed Ellaria to a lifetime of watching her daughter die and rot in a dungeon, but she didn’t actually think Ellaria was a monster. She didn’t need to.
What I loved about Game of Thrones was that you hated and rooted for the same character at various points in the story. Different characters spoke to different parts of you. I abhorred Cersei at the beginning for her absolute lack of empathy for anyone outside her family. But in the two scenes mentioned, she gave me catharsis.
As an introvert, I am naturally disposed to listening and observing—not just people, but situations, dynamics, whatever exists and is going on. I am constantly curious. I prioritize knowing and understanding what’s out there, and then worry about how I feel about it later.
My vision isn’t perfect. I have most certainly missed things—big things, even. But by stepping back and not being eager to add my own noise, I get a clearer view. I notice things that I might have missed had I been talking the whole time. I have no motives for being this way. People are born with dispositions, and this has been mine since I was a child.
The pain point that those two Game of Thrones scenes triggered in me was how in times of conflict, I often felt demonized and oversimplified. I felt like the only person who bothered to understand the other party—that seeing and consideration were rarely returned. I would have a nuanced account of what triggered the other person. But in their heads, I was just an uncaring/selfish/ignorant bitch.
It gets exhausting feeling like the only person whose default is to step back, while they have already rushed in to misinterpret and misunderstand. They have already talked a mile (behind my back), riding the first emotion that came to their heads. And they ride it hard, with the conviction of a Sparrow.
Why is it my lot to listen and consider, and yours to jump to conclusions and act on them?
Dispositions can’t be helped. I know this. But many times I have wished for people to have bothered to throw a gaze out there (as well as within).
Once Cersei establishes that she understands Ellaria, she goes on to elaborate on her own pain.
“When my daughter was taken from me, my only daughter. Well, you can’t imagine how that feels unless you’ve lost a child.”
This second part is where I must admit, I have a tendency to fall short—when it’s time to lay my own skin on the table.
Did I show myself in situations I was supposed to be a part of? Or was I like a scientist, trying my best to remove my messy subjectiveness in order to gain a pure understanding of the situation; to figure out the clean, surgical way of fixing it?
There are many occasions when this has served me well. But relationships, I am learning, are different. Being cool and collected is my honest attempt at making things right. But this has also made me look like I didn’t care, to people who cared a lot.
Did I allow myself to be seen? Did I give people chances to hear me? Did I strive to be understood? Did I show them the lines that were crossed? I listened to the ways I had cut them, but did I tell them how they had cut me?
What could I have expected if I didn’t do any of this?
My vision isn’t perfect. I have most certainly missed things—big things, even.
People have their own capacity to self-reflect and do post-mortems on relationships that fall apart. Nevertheless, I will always be responsible for the things I didn’t say. In her book, Quiet, Susan Cain gave introverts comfort, ease, and power in who they were. But the overarching call to action was this: Make sure you contribute what you are meant to contribute.
More than interpersonal damage, relegating my messy emotions as second-class information has also been detrimental to my instincts, defenses, and overall ability to stand up for myself. I dedicated so much mental space and resources to understanding other people’s subjectivity, but dismissed my own as my less intelligent parts.
During a recent trip to Dubrovnik, I was ending the day looking down at the Old Town (popularly known as King’s Landing) as the sun set. I spent each day of that vacation feeling a different Game of Thrones character run through my veins. That day, it was Cersei. In a stroke of synchronicity, I happened to scroll to an Instagram carousel about anger by psychologist Dr. Nicole LePera.
“When you come out of survival mode, you might feel angry. Anger is your body coming back to life.”
She mentioned feelings of intense rage over how you were treated and fantasies about revenge—emotions that our current polite landscape finds distasteful.
On social media, the recommended form of revenge is to live your best life. It’s a race to move on and be the first to be happy, and the participants are people who have clearly been maimed and are still dislocated in some parts. I think deep down we are all aware of this. But it can still be an uphill struggle, resisting the temptation to rush to be evolved. I thought that if I betrayed that I still felt things, that would be snatched up as evidence that: “Look, she’s still not over it. She’s not moving on like I am.” (which, by the way, are not the thoughts of a truly over it person)
Owning the visceral waves of my anger has been one of the most healing things I have done—not forcing forgiveness, not love and light, not living my ~best life. It was letting thoughts like, “Fuck. You. You piece of shit that also looks like shit,” shoot and race freely inside me. It was pettiness, the most acidic forms of poison, acknowledging what had been done to me and the resulting damage to me as a person. It was for once letting go of my obsessiveness with objectivity and standing by my subjectivity as a legitimate part of what happened.
It was that one magical step that my body had been waiting for. Immediately, I could feel the base of my spine, which had been forcibly yanked out, not only being reconstructed but reinforced—bone, muscle, flesh. I felt more solid, more embodied. I felt more conviction behind my actions and intentions. I felt like I could be sure even when I wasn’t. I felt like I could genuinely reach out and do good things, instead of being thinly inspired by the desire to prove I wasn’t the monster they said I was.
I felt whole and as deep and as infinitely dimensional as a human being ought to feel.
Anger freed me up to love my loved ones harder. I can’t explain it, but it’s almost like those two authentic energies feed each other. I once read in a book by Brene Brown that having a strong back and an open heart go hand-in-hand.
“Feeling anger is a sign of healing. You’re no longer numb. You’re ready to protect yourself,” LePera continued in her post.
There will always be a level where I really do believe that monsters are rare. I will always strive to understand where people are coming from. But understanding people doesn’t have to result in me feeling universal empathy. I’m free to not like what I understand and to state plainly that they have scorched my earth. I can say that I had thought many times of doing what I could to patch things up, but each time this was vetoed by how it was no longer possible for me to feel safe in their presence. I knew I could leave and work to make the resulting loneliness temporary. But the anxiety. Had I stayed it would have been perpetual.
I will always consider my faults and the ways that I have caused pain—because I have. There are things that I regret having done. That being said, perfection is not a prerequisite to anger. This requirement clearly doesn’t exist for other people, and I have no idea why I thought of requiring it for myself. I might wish I had taken better care of some people—and they could have taken better care of me, too. This isn’t about counting wrongs. It’s about learning to take my place in situations that include me. I thought I was being generous by removing myself to a good degree. But avoidance was the bomb.
I have no desire to revolve my life around bitterness. Even scorched earth, once it’s fully acknowledged, softens over time. I remember thinking, concluding that I had no intention of planting a rose garden over it. A few days later, I looked over and noticed a shallow but vast layer of water, soothing over my cracks. Authenticity is strange. A wormhole between opposite ends of the spectrum.
Anger has a crucial role to play, and it is no one’s domain to expect or tell us to be over it. We don’t choose the pain that comes to us. But once it is inflicted, it is ours. And the power (dare I say, the luxury) of directing this fire belongs to no one else.
Madrileña from Manila 