Alone in my car.
The stereo on shuffle.
Heavy rain on winding roads.
A day that would change my future,
and, strangely, change my past.
Trigger warning: This post discusses child abuse, parental violence, and forgiveness.
Years ago, I was sharing an office with someone, and we had this habit of taking turns playing our playlists. One day, one of her songs stopped me in my tracks. Not because of the lyrics (I didn’t focus on them) but because of the voice and the music. It was “Fistful of Love” by ANOHNI (then still performing as Antony and the Johnsons).
I’m one of those people who survive life more easily if I can occasionally immerse myself in dramatic, melancholic music. This song ticked all the boxes. Still, I’ll admit: I never really paid attention to the words. Being a non-native English speaker made it easy to treat voices as just another instrument.
Fast forward to a couple of days ago. I was driving home from the Crazy Permission Lab – an experience that had already been quite transformative in itself. My music shuffle kicked in and suddenly there it was again. “Fistful of Love.”
This time it hooked me. I listened again. And again. Volume up. Then I pressed “repeat one.” I must have played it fourty times in a row (☑︎ autistic tendencies). Slowly, the lyrics started revealing themselves.
At first, it sounded like a song about an abusive romantic relationship. Or perhaps even a voluntary D/s dynamic. Back home I did some digging: ANOHNI herself once described the song as a kind of puzzle she wrote in her early twenties, one she still doesn’t fully understand herself.
And so I listened. Twenty more times at home.
Wow. What if this isn’t about lovers at all? What if it’s about a parent and a child?
And suddenly the pieces fell into place. The song became my story.
“I feel your fist and I know it’s out of love / and I accept and I collect upon my body / the memories of your devotion.”
That’s child logic right there. I don’t like it. I feel it’s not okay. But this is my parent. So I guess this is what life is.
“I tell you I love you, and I always will”
It’s a cage. It’s a survival mechanism.
As a child you can’t not love your parent — even when they hurt you. Especially when they hurt you.
I have good reasons to believe I experienced s. abuse as a very young child. Only secondary evidence, but it’s a shadow that has always been there. Listening to this song, it became clear: this could be about my father and me.
My father started suffering from dementia a few years before passing away. When he was still lucid enough to say meaningful things, lying in a hospital bed, he once told me: “You have a lot to forgive me.”
I guess it was his way of asking for forgiveness.
I answered, simply: “I know. And I do.” It was a thing you say in those moments. But the truth is, I really meant it. I did forgive him. And that changed my life far more than it changed his.
Later, another realisation crept in.
What if his s. violence – his fistful of love – was actually his deeply handicapped way of expressing his love for me?
That thought sent cold shivers down my spine. Because if that was true, it meant he suffered at least as much as I did. Maybe even more. He didn’t know any other way of showing his feelings. He had no options. And if that’s true, then what is there to forgive?
He simply did what he could. As we all do. Always.
Fast forward to today. I’m in the shower, binge-listening yet again. Suddenly, I focus on the spoken-word intro of the song.
WTF – isn’t that the voice of Lou Reed? My lifelong music hero.
I hear well the words:
“I was lying in my bed last night / staring at a ceiling full of stars / when it suddenly hit me / I just have to let you know how I feel.”
And then it strikes me:
This is the father’s inner voice.
These are his thoughts in those still, terrifying moments before engaging in his acts of destructive love.
Still in the shower, I feel my stomach turn. My whole body starts hurting. I hurl. I realise I am not only feeling my own pain anymore. I am feeling his.
“And I know that you can’t tell me.”
And that’s what this song became for me: not just a piece of melancholic music, but a dialogue between two wounded people: one trying to express love through destruction, the other trying to make sense of it.
This song gave me a way to hold both truths at once: that what happened to me was wrong and that my father, in his own broken way, might have been trying to love me.
And somehow, allowing both of those truths to coexist is one of the most healing things I’ve ever done.
Compassion – real, raw compassion – doesn’t excuse the harm, and it doesn’t erase the scars. But it can bring release and healing. It can transform the story you tell yourself about what happened.
If I can look at my father and see not just the one who hurt me, but also the frightened, limited man who didn’t know how to love any better, then something softens in me. Something unclenches.
Maybe that’s what peace really is. And maybe, if we learned how to hold this kind of compassion more often (for ourselves, and even for those who broke us), the world might slowly become a little less twisted.
It amazes me how life sometimes delivers things exactly when you’re ready for them. Like that day, driving through the rain in France, when a song I thought I knew finally told me the truth.
If you’ve never heard Fistful of Love, it’s worth experiencing before or after reading this. You can find it here on YouTube.
I wrote this poem today:
I close my eyes.
and see you standing in my doorway.
This time,
I don't try to hide.
This time,
we hug.
Two equals. Two wounded souls.
A shared history,
shared tears.
The pain that once sloshed and flooded between us.
releases its grip.
It transforms,
still part of me,
but now solid enough to hold,
to place gently on a shelf.
Like a blown-out candle.
Klaas, 2025The photo with this post was made by myself. In Berlin, 2016