There’s a new campaign out promoting tourism to Iceland. It invites you to record your lockdown scream and have it played over a speaker in a remote part of the country.
I think this is an excellent idea. The article also points out that scream therapy was big in the 70s, something I didn’t know. I am a firm believer in screaming to vent pent-up rage, and I do it every now and then. The best place to do it is in your car where nobody can hear you.
I did it on Tuesday while driving to a meeting. My phone rang and I answered it on my car’s hands-free kit, and there was a familiar voice: my homeless friend. He sounded his old, upbeat self. Polite, cheerful: a couple of the reasons I always thought he had so much potential. He asked for money, of course, and I asked what had happened to the money I sent earlier that morning, for shoes (I’ve seen his shoes, they’re shot) and he sounded confused, and I realised that of course, I’d been had. Someone who knows my name and his, and has access to my number, passed himself off as my friend. (If you’ve read my previous piece and wondering why I haven’t stuck to my vow to cut him off, please don’t call me and lecture me. We had an intensely cold weekend, the pills I gave him had expired and weren’t effective as it turned out, and he keeps finding me no matter how many numbers I block.)
In that moment, I yelled, killed the call, and screamed and screamed and screamed. Because I am a schmuck, the wannabe nice person who isn’t really, who always ends up getting screwed over, who keeps my thoughts to myself to keep the peace and stews in silence until there’s a catalyst and then I lose it.
The last time I lost it was also in my car, on the way to work in early March, when a group of taxi passengers were dropped off on the highway and strolled obliviously across the Woodmead Drive onramp just as I was accelerating down it to join traffic traveling at 100kmh. I hooted at them, just missed them, and then spent the rest of the drive to Fourways alternately screaming and sobbing.
On the rest of the drive to my meeting, my attention was diverted from my being a pathetic schmuck to the fact that my eyes were packing up yet again. Every now and then, I’ll experience intense stinging, as though someone has squirted lemon juice in my eyes. Sometimes the trigger is bright light, sometimes it’s stress. It’s not fun driving when you can barely see and you’re breathless with pain. I’m not sure how I made it to my destination in one piece.
I arrived at my meeting, presented the strategy from behind my visor without anyone noticing that my voice was somewhat hoarse. By the time the presentation was over, my eyes had recovered, and the drive home was uneventful except for some arsehole in a small car who drove up my backside (while I was traveling at the speed limit and he was on his phone), then tried to overtake dangerously before I moved into the emergency lane and eventually came to a dead halt in the middle of a busy road and put on his hazards as though that made it all ok. It gave me tremendous pleasure to hoot at him as I drove past. I used some choice words that he couldn’t possibly hear, but the urge to scream had faded, and I was grateful for that.
We scream, pick ourselves up, we dust ourselves off, and we carry on.
discomombulated 