Looks like I need to clear some things up. The thing is, I feel like no matter what I say, there will be a segment of people (likely the direct objects) who just won’t believe me. I can’t let that matter, though.
Let me start with a few broad things. Anger is an mal-intented stranger. Now, I consider myself a pretty laid back guy. Most things, I take with total stride. I like to think of it like Spike Siegel’s fighting philosophy, just be like water. And that’s how I typically take everything, just like water. Occasionally, some things hit me as if I am ice block and I shatter all over the place.
Ironically, another thing about me, and I don’t think people realize this, but I have an anger problem. I for sure do. I have my entire life, but I also have this thing people call self-control. I have a lot of it. For the most part, I dominate my anger, which is why I am just laid back and usually don’t care. If you ever see me lose control of something like my competitiveness, you can see the anger control issues seep out, but other than that, you just gotta be around me long enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Regardless, anger is something I can’t stand. The thing that really gets me about it is, personally, anger usually starts out totally justified, but it always seems to erupt into some wildfire that removes any grounds for anger I had and makes me look like an ass because of it. It almost always escalates, and that just leaves huge disaster zones riddled with debris and wreckage. But that is the incendiary nature of anger.
I usually only have significant blowups 1-4 times a year.
I will not blow up without what I consider to be just cause.
Here is the thing about anger and how it works with me. Go back to my nature; for the most part laid back, like water. I let go of things and move on from them pretty well.
But.
But, like some involuntary muscle gripping onto something, there is always this 5-10% of something that seems to linger. And no matter what I do to pry it out, I just can’t scrape it off. But since we are talking about something small, and something I’ve successfully made a concerted effort to move past, I usually end up giving up and let that small percentage be, because as long as nothing aggravates it, then it will just sit dormant; almost non-existent.
The problem comes when I have flare ups, or some anger triggers, and if that fire is able to spread, then everything that has that 5-10% left that I involuntarily hold on to, then it comes back up, and because I am already mad about something else, I become mad about things that I only used to be mad about.
And that just makes everything worse.
So let’s clear some things up. You can either be smart and believe me, because it is the truth, and I am not defending myself over it again, or you can think I’m full of it, and not letting it go, to which I’ll say; get the hell over yourself– or if you’re a third party/outsider, I say, you have no grounds to judge me. I work as hard on these things, as well as personal, spiritual, and emotional improvement as much as anyone I know. I’m not an idiot.
I am over that whole thing. You either know what I am referencing, or you don’t. I am over the people. I am over the events. I am over the past. If anyone who I feel has wronged me would want to make a sincere effort to be a significant part of my life again, I, maybe foolishly, would accept that and let it be whatever it is.
But I do have a 5% that I involuntarily grip. I have a small small piece that I never think I’ll be able to let go (it is just self doubt, I’ll never stop trying).
Another thing about my character, I am very caring. I take my time warming up to people, and a large part of why is because I care and value those who I choose to let in to my personal ring like family, or something greater. To my own fault, I think that my own slow cooking screening process, I think that everyone I let into that circle values others to the same degree I do. Now, I fail at this all the time, but I lose a lot of sleep making sure I know when I fail at valuing these people more than myself, and if I have done them wrong or not, and if I ever do, I spend as much energy and care as I can spare to make things up.
Circling back, that is my 5% in this case. I’ll say it one less time. If this is how things remain, I could give a damn about any of you, or any of that at this point, I surely have no intentions of going out of my way to rebuild anything, that’d be on any of you, but what I might always care about, which means get angry about if my anger flares up, is that any of you made the decisions you made, decisions of which overtly and directly impacted me, but further and much more importantly than that, what those choices reflected about yourselves.
I learned that your values of caring for others of pennies compared to mine. I learned that one of you has sociopathic tendencies (ok, that’s a bit beyond hyperbole), or is at least a fan of saying one thing, and being the opposite in your actions. But it isn’t these things I learned or think I learned about any of you people, it is more than that, and what I am about to get into it the genuine core truth about this small piece that my subconscious won’t let go of.
Think of our brains, and how, on the most watered down, basic level of how they work. We know that different sections of the brain do different things. So say you take out whatever portion of your brain that affects your ability to communicate with verbal language and form words. You have the part that and move your tongue, mouth, and all that stuff related to vocals, and interpret language, but you just can’t form the words. You try and you try, but your thoughts only come out as random sounds from a struggling tongue. You feel this void in your brain as you are doing this, and you just are incapable of properly processing it. Flat out incapable.
That’s what my hangup is like. It isn’t any of the specifics. It isn’t the interpretations, accurate or not, of who these people actually are.. it is the fact that I thought I knew people, and it turned out that I apparently didn’t know them at all. Not in any remote vicinity to actual knowing. I presented myself as genuinely as possible, what they knew was what they would get from me, but at the end of the day, if something fires up that rage in me, as soon as it processes all these filed away episodes in my life, with this one, my brains ability to process will always falter at that on point.
I thought I knew you, and now I feel like I never really did, and for that, I might always feel cheated, or just lied to, and I will always wonder why my care was so mistreated.
That– that is what I don’t understand, and thus it is still capable of upsetting me. I just almost never think about it.
Boiling it down to this base level, I am arriving to the conclusion that I am really just mad at myself.
At some point, somewhere, I failed myself and others, and I can’t figure it out.
If anyone tells me to get over it or let it go again, I am going to smack them. (and then, of course because I will be in rage mode, that anger will later boil into me getting mad about this small percentage again)
The anger cycle.
I will end it at some point.
and now I can go back and write about what I’ve meant to for the past 2 weeks, but lacked the time.