Boy, have I ever tapped into my anger.
My therapist would be so proud. Can’t wait to tell him Friday.
At present, all I have to do is think about the sort of bullshit advice I have gotten in my life and this great torrent of world-destroying rage wells up in me and all I want to do is vomit my rage into the face of everyone who ever failed me or neglected me or downright abused me when I couldn’t fight back. All while screaming “Fuck you! Fuck YOU! FUUUUCK YOUUUUUUU! ” like a demented homeless person and setting something on fire.
So…. there’s that.
It’s put me in a very punk rock state of mind. I want to scream defiance into the void and force the world to see me and to reckon with me. I want to write angry manifestos decrying all the fucking evils of the world and spraypaint unsettling mottos designed to burn people out of their comfort zones on every piece of public advertising in the world.
Banksy is a poser.
It makes me want to hijack all the communications satellites in the world and make them broadcast my disturbed thought to every TV, tablet, radio, smartphone, and Bluetooth device in the world so that the fire in my soul can be focused by my mind into a laser beam of pure hate that burns all the sickness and corruption out of this world in one glorious cleansing burst.
Give me five minutes to tell the world how there is not and never has been democracy on earth and how leadership is a myth , nobody is actually in charge, and society is an emergent property not authored by individuals, and how we are all just puffed up monkeys putting on airs, and how so much of our angst and pain comes from vast unmet spiritual needs no amount of money can solve, and then let me sit back and watch as my words set the world on fire.
My words, and the power of my contempt.
But why am I so damned angry? What am I so damned angry about?
Everything, really. All my unexpressed rage and pain. All the suffering in silence I have done because nobody takes me seriously, least of all myself. All the alienation I have endured because I was too timid to explore my world. All the harrowing hate I have suppressed because it didn’t fit the sunshiny version of myself that I projected because I thought it was the only way anyone could ever love me.
And for that matter, the only way I could love myself.
And because it let me project a fantasy world without rage or hate or pain or cruelty or insensitivity. And all I had to do was find one person I could make believe in that world and I could move in and live there too.
Well the rent is due, the garbage needs taking out, and oh, there is the small matter that not living in the real world kills you over time.
Guess I better go pay my oxygen bill.
More after the break.
More about my anger, I am afraid.
Something that came out near the end of my talk with Ross bears mentioning. When he was starting to get apprehensive about all the anger I was expressing (as was I), I said something like “I am just trying to express how I feel without worrying about whether it is ‘right’ or not” and even at the time, I thought “Hang on to that, it seems important. “
Because the thing is, a lot of how I feel bears little to no relationship to what is true. That’s easy to explain : the emotion comes first. Then we explain it.
And so emotions are not limited by our ability to justify them. We feel how we feel whether or not we can point to something in the real world as the cause.
And so I have a lot of anger, pain, disgust, disdain, and so on that has no rationale. Maybe I can point to some real world event as the cause, but probably not. It’s probably been so long that the question is irrelevant anyway.
And some of it is simply the accumulation of the stresses and pains of ordinary life that find no outlet most of the time and so they build up.
The key point I am trying to make here is that I do not need to justify myself all the time. I think that I have been locked in a straitjacket of logic and reason and justification for far too long a time and it has blinded me to my own emotions and my own needs and led to my current unhappy state.
There is so much of me that I ignore because it doesn’t fit my false color picture of myself. And when I say ignore, I mean subtract from my conscious reality entirely.
In other words, I deny it.
I think I need to start constructing a much richer, fuller, more complete image of myself that encompasses all that I am, warts and all.
Until I create that new image, I will remain alienated from my true self and not be able to even begin to truly deal with my problems, let alone overcome them.
Growing up is like the German measles : the older you are when it happens, the worse it’s going to be. And I want to grow up. I need to grow up. I need to become a real person and not just this displaced and misplaced overgrown wunderkind who has no place in the world because he is a creature out of time.
I am capable of miracles and wonders galore but none of that matters if I remain too much of a child, afraid of the world, to do it for real.
So I need to grow up fast. Transcend the limitations of my poor self-portrait and draw a new version of myself.
Back to the drawing board!
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.