Of all of the emotions we come pre-installed with as human beings, the one I loathe the most is anger (the irony of this sentence is not lost on me). Extending the software analogy a bit further, I think that when my anger.exe file was downloading, something went wrong. The connection was unstable, the files were corrupted, or perhaps I installed it into the wrong location. Whatever we’re meant to understand as the faculty of anger is not the package I received. Perhaps I just neglected to read the instruction manual, as we so often do with such things. What’s more, as critical bug fixes are meant to be installed over the course of our lives to help us better understand and contend with this beast of an emotion, I clicked skip.
This isn’t my fault, and I’m not blaming myself for it. It’s just the facts. My experience of anger, if I experience it at all, is one in which I turn it entirely against myself. I don’t get angry at other people, or at situations. Because to get angry at other people or at situations is to potentially harm said people or situations, which is what makes it an unacceptable option in my mind. I occasionally get angry at the state of the world as a whole, simply because the world as a whole largely remains unperturbed by my sense of righteousness and therefore I’m in no danger of repercussions. What I do get angry at, though, is my own existence. I feel as if, somehow, the nature of that very existence is just wrong.
The way that I do things, the habits I have, the habits I don’t have, the thing I said in 2nd grade on the playground that still makes my cheeks burn bright red with a tinge of embarrassment. All of them solicit anger. And, however misdirected that it may be, that anger inevitably turns back onto me. It is all fuel for the fire of my own insufficiencies, of which I am quite capable of convincing myself there are multitudes.
I’ve been spending a lot of time in my weekly therapy sessions trying to better understand (and more importantly, better direct) this sense of anger, and I think we finally made some headway this week. And when I say this week, I mean about 2 hours ago. So, this wound is a little fresh. Bear with me.
I have a fairly predictable cycle established in my life at this point, and for all the understanding of said cycle in the world, I have not yet quite managed to figure out the path towards disrupting it. That said, it goes something like this.
1. Get excited about a person/place/thing/hobby
2. Push myself too hard in the direction of that person/place/thing/hobby because perfection and achievement is the only meaningful thing in this world (sarcasm, in case that’s not clear)
3. Inevitably, I make a mistake or some other such occurrence occurs (as occurrences so often tend to do) which removes the shiny veneer from this thing
4. I become anxious, paranoid, and fearful. The feeling is that I will now, inevitably, be discovered as a fraud. So, I begin to back away from this thing, whatever it may be. Or, instead of simply backing away from it, I make everything to do with this thing wrong. That way, it’s simply not my fault. It’s the thing’s fault.
5. Because I backed away from a thing that I actually did truly love, I now become angry. Angry at myself for “giving up”, angry at the people around me for being witness to whatever mistake I’ve placed such hefty weight upon, angry at the thing for not being as easy as I expected it to be, just angry.
6. I use this anger to beat myself into the ground, until it eventually becomes so intolerable I decide to re-invent my life. A new job, new city, new relationship, new hobby, new anything is surely the answer to my situation. Or, at least, a sufficient enough distraction from the anger and dread.
7. Rinse, wash, repeat.
If this cycle sounds exhausting, I’ll let you in on a little secret: it is.
Where does all of this come from? I don’t rightly know the specifics of it. The whens and the whos and the hows of it. What I do know, though, is that at some point I decided that anger was an unacceptable emotion. To direct anger at others is to hurt them, and hurting others makes you a bad person, so it’s better to direct that anger towards yourself.
Contain the blast radius, so to speak.
The irony here, of course, is that directing anger at yourself is still hurting someone. It’s arguably hurting the most important person in this whole equation: you. And for each wound that I inflict upon myself with this misguided sense of protection (I am, after all, simply trying to protect those around me), I become less and less capable of being the person that I want to be. I become crippled by the entirely fictional laundry list of my own faults, and that’s not helping anybody.
At the ripe old age of 28 and 3/4s, I’m realizing that this is probably not an effective strategy to get through life with. I’m tired of starting over. I’m tired of doing the things that I think I’m supposed to do instead of the things that I actually want to do. I’m tired of robbing myself of the things that I love simply because I’m not perfect at them. I’m tired of saying yes to things as if they were a fuck yes when they are actually a profound fuck no. I’m tired of being incapable of standing up for myself and incapable of holding space for the emotion of anger as another entirely acceptable facet of the human experience.
Because, here’s the thing: I am angry.
For all of my trying to stuff it down and avoid it, it’s there. For good reason. There’s a lot that isn’t right in this world. There’s a lot that isn’t right in my own life. There’s been a lot of trauma, a lot of hardship, and a lot of suffering. For myself and for every being who has had the experience of living. There’s a lot to be angry about.
The difference now is that I’m starting to recognize that that sense of anger is okay. It’s nothing to shun. It’s not a character flaw. It’s not evidence to be used to beat myself up.
It’s just another emotion. It’s just another experience.
I can’t do anything perfectly. I can’t avoid pain in this life, and I can’t prevent other people around me from experiencing pain. I can, however, work on becoming an ally for myself. I can make decisions that are in service of the version of myself that I want to be. Not because it will please anybody else, but because it will please me. Because it will make bearing the burden of this anger and of this life just a little bit easier.
Nobody benefits from me being cruel towards myself, least of all me.
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