The fight is the part people expect me to tell properly, and I’m not going to. I won’t say where it was, or when, or who else was there. Those details aren’t only mine to hand out, and they wouldn’t change what matters.
Here’s what matters. When I drank, I met every unkind word with aggression. There was a fight. It tore the ligaments in my knee.
That was where a long run ended up. I’d already lost many friends. I’d already got into a lot of trouble. It went on like that until the fight, and the injury was serious. It led to arthritis. Only now, more than eight years after the accident, have I had surgery on it.
More than eight years is a long time to carry one fight around in a joint.
The I that needed defending
Looking back, the strangest part is how sure I was. Every unkind word felt like an attack on me, and “me” felt like the most obvious thing in the world. Something had been disrespected, so something had to hit back.
But what was that something? I never sat down and decided to become a man who answers words with aggression. That I got built, a drink at a time, until it felt less like a habit and more like who I was.
I came across a video recently, from a channel called Buddha’s Wisdom, that sets Freud next to the Buddha. Its main example is a family dinner, which isn’t where my story lives. One idea from it stuck, though: that somewhere along the way we learn that this “I” needs defending. Mine needed defending all the time.
Two questions
Freud wrote in German, and the word he used was das Ich, simply “the I”. In the English Standard Edition, translated by James Strachey, it became “the ego”. For Freud this I isn’t a hidden true self. It’s the part of the mind that has to manage: the outside world on one side, conscience on another, raw wanting underneath. In 1917 he wrote that the ego is “not master in its own house”, and his later hope was to strengthen it, to help it see more of what drives it.
If I’m honest, part of me wants a “real I” to dig out, a better man under the one who drank. That’s my wish, not something Freud promised.
The Buddha came at it from another side. In the Anattalakkhaṇa Sutta (SN 22.59), one of the early discourses kept in the Pāli Canon of Theravāda Buddhism, he starts with the body. If the body were truly self, he says, it wouldn’t lead to affliction, and you could tell it: let it be like this, not like that. Then he goes through feeling, perception, mental formations and consciousness, the five aggregates, and asks of each one: is what changes and brings suffering fit to be seen as “this is mine, this I am, this is my self”? That’s anattā, not-self.
My knee is the plainest proof of that first step I’ve got. I didn’t tell the ligaments to tear. I didn’t ask for arthritis. Nobody consulted me. The knee went its own way and I had to follow.
There’s another scene the video mentions, from the Akkosa Sutta (SN 7.2), that I keep going back to. A brahmin insults the Buddha to his face. The Buddha lets him finish, then asks him a question. If you offer food to guests and they don’t accept it, whose food is it? Mine, says the brahmin. In the same way, the Buddha tells him, I don’t accept your abuse. It’s all yours.
I read that and think of every unkind word I ever took and threw straight back. I accepted all of them. Every single one.
Where I’ve got to
The drinking is behind me now, and the knee has finally had its surgery. Neither of those settles the question.
Maybe the work is to grow an I strong enough to see what’s going on before it lashes out. Maybe it’s to keep looking until I’m not sure there was ever an owner in there to defend. When a wanderer asked the Buddha straight out whether there is a self, he stayed silent. Later he explained that a yes or a no would only have led the man into a wrong view.
So I’ll stay with the question for now. When a word lands hard on you, what is it you’re so ready to protect?
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— Rafik