How do you quantify anger? When you’re really upset how do you express it? Why do we let other people have complete control over our moods? I am no expert in this field. I do many things that most people would probably call “warning signs” or be “very concerned about,” but it’s not like I’m not aware of them. I know full well how I should react — yet I can’t. I know full well what I shouldn’t do — yet I still do. Our bodies and our minds develop their own way of coping with the harshness of living in society. I’m fully aware of the ways that I choose to cope with things, but those are my choices. My choices don’t choose me; I choose my choices. What I am not allowed to choose is the manner and magnitude of the endless onslaught of shit that I am forced to deal with.
The one core factor I’ve learned I must live with everyday but I haven’t learned how to live with is control — control of my life. I was not made by who ever or whatever made us to not be in control of myself. Lacking even the smallest ability to have some control over my life over the past 6 years has slowly whittled away my personality. Every time that I am confronted with some ridiculous situation, some meaningless asshole or basically anything negative in my life that I am absolutely powerless to avoid, another piece of myself is stripped away and I find myself further and further down the rabbit hole.
While I have not been amazed at my ability to confront or deal with my burdens and obstacles of the past 6 years, I have been amazed at my ability to continue on functioning as a stable person. The one defense I have found that allows me to continue living without descending into the non-functioning rung of society is a highly tuned nearly surgical ability to selectively wipe things from my memory. Whenever life decides to completely shit on me, which is more often than not, I black it out. It may sound hyperbolic and like I am making it up, but I assure you, I do not remember. For example, the 9 weeks of Hell in 2004 that I had to endure called Army Basic Training is a complete blur. I can honestly tell you that I barely remember any details and I could not piece together a full day if my life depended on it. The subconscious entities in my mind decided to save myself from myself and completely remove these memories. One of the most traumatic periods of my life, and I feel like the few memories I have were pulled from a movie I watched once and that there is no way they came from real life experiences.
So that is what I do — forget. Even when I get immediately angry at some situation that blindsides me in life, my initial reaction is to do something else and forget it. Watch a movie, go to sleep even drink so that it doesn’t matter anymore. The demonization of drinking in moderation is far greater in expression than it is in reality. You cry, you yell, you do whatever you do when you have a problem; I have a glass of wine, or a few, and forget that I was angry at anything. Is it really that wrong? Forgetting things that bother you is not an easy task. It takes time and effort. Several weeks, or several months, down the road it no longer matters, but when something happens right now, something that makes you so angry you get physically sick and it infects your mind and your daily life that you can physically feel your emotions, you need a little artificial boost. I come home have a glass of wine, put on a movie that is inversely representative of my current mood and I self medicate myself into submission. A glass or two of wine later, I am laughing at the comedy I am watching or I’m smiling at the love story glowing on screen. I enjoy the pseudo-reality adn then I go to sleep. Wake up the next day and continue on with my life. Problem solved.
The common conservative reaction to that may be negative, but while they may choose to cry and moan over problems, I prefer to purge and reset. There are few people who I know have been through as many things that I have been and that I truly respect and listen to when they contradict what I say or tell me it’s not that bad. Few people I said. As most of you who may be reading think to yourself that I don’t have it that bad or that I don’t deal with things in a healthy way, I have but one thing to say: Get over yourself. I wouldn’t say there are more than one or two people who know all the things that have happened to me in the past 6 years, and this applies to everyone not just me. And I can confidently say there is no one that has felt everything that i have felt as I have felt it for the past 6 years. Yet we pass judgment and act like we are better capable of dealing with problems than another person. Even if said person knew everything in vivid detail as if read from a report on what all has happened to me in my life that person would still not feel it as I felt it. They didn’t live in those situations. Just because I’ve read a book or watched a movie about a person who has cancer doesn’t mean that I truly know what it is like to have cancer. We forget sometimes, and by sometimes I mean nearly all of the time, that we know nothing unless we experience it ourselves. Don’t dare tell someone how to live their life or how to cope with their burdens unless you have in fact been through the exact same situation — lest make a complete ass of yourself and lose all credibility.
Few things make angrier than when someone tells me, “you know it’s really not that bad.” Everyone reacts to things differently. Everyone feels things differently. The thing that happened to you in passing 3 days ago that you can barely remember and you couldn’t care less about could be the pivotal point of change and power on another person’s life. Why do we forget this? I’m sure everyone at some point while they were a child yelled over tear filled eyes to one of their parents, “You don’t know how I feel!” Yet we grow up and we convince ourselves we do know how everyone feels. If we really knew how everyone felt and how they would react then we wouldn’t do the things we do to other people — or would we still? If we knew how people felt and why they do the things we do it would be logical, and extremely optimistic considering human nature, to assume that we would never do something to someone that will hurt them. But we don’t know how other people feel. We don’t know the extent to which we hurt them whenever we do even realize that we hurt them in the first place. You can’t quantify a person’s emotions — you don’t feel as they do.
How do you even quantify your own emotions when there’s no standard of measurement except yourself to compare it to? We don’t know how anyone feels. We don’t even know how we feel ourselves. We are all trying to discover our way to deal with the world and the meaningless bullshit that it throws into our path. Why do we put unneeded stress on others when we are already receiving our own dose of stress from the rest of the world? The sado-masochistic tendencies of man are enough to write the final chapter of our doomed experiment at civilized society itself. When we feel pressure or pain, we do not learn a single lesson and we later inflict those same burdens on another person. Why don’t we think about what we do to others? Why do we think so much on how to better ourselves when we should be thinking on how to make others better? If everyone made an effort to lighten the load for someone else, then those effects would eventually become a factor in our own lives. Treat others as you wish to be treated is not some lofty religion based ideal. It’s logic. It’s Science. If we treat others how we wish to be treated, and everyone adopts this policy, we will then be treated in such a manner in return. Unfortunately the inverse of this policy is the standard occurrence and yet is still just as logical. Do not treat others as you wish to be treated and they will certainly not treat you how you wish to be treated in return.
Why do we allow this to happen? Why do we let others control our lives and the way we treat others? We can’t even control how we treat others; much less control how and when others treat us poorly and our reaction to that. Even if you are successful in treating others well in spite of how you are treated, the benefit of this way of life is only seen as a group effort. The cycle of anger, the cycle of hate, the cycle of bullshit, whatever you want to call it, is everyone’s fault. You may be able to pull yourself out of the cycle but unless that other person does the same thing, you will keep getting hit with negativity and stress, except now you are the only one taking it and you’re not giving it back. Our instinct is to want to give it back immediately — an eye for an eye — but this is the crux of the dilemma that is the struggle of our existence. To keep from fighting others we must learn to fight ourselves — in any way we can.
You can deal with your problems however you want, you can unjustly treat me like shit without considering what it does to me and you can attempt to make me hate my life all you want. I’ll be here. I’ll be here with a bottle of wine and a trained indifference. Do whatever the fuck you want; I’ll still be here tomorrow.
