Archives for category: anger

Where’s the Power Button?

March 31, 2018 //

Greatest troubleshooting step of all time; have you tried shutting it off, and turning it back on? Pretty good generic advice, even where relationships and people go. Sometimes it only tells you more about what isn’t working, but sometimes it’s a handy quick fix by itself.

Moments of great stress and turmoil? Anger? Chaos? Shut that shit down. Come back later. Get some rest. Set it aside, really just walk away from it. (Maybe permanently, yes that’s a thing people can do – even you.) Chronic lasting sorrow? Hard if the sorrow is over a real, deeply painful, recent or lasting circumstance, I know, but still possible. (Sometimes much harder if the sorrow “isn’t real” at all, that’s sort of a known thing about mental illness.) Walk in the sun. Find someone to laugh with, something to laugh about. Read a book about something altogether different. Hell, take a walk with that sorrow in mind, and really let your thoughts run free for a while. Or take a nap.

I’m not saying “turning it off” is easy. It’s not. It’s hard. Still doable. Still a choice to make. Still verbs involved – that you can choose to do. This is real and achievable. Are you mired in some bleak or horrible bullshit, right now? Shut it down. Walk away. Change your perspective. Go elsewhere. Hang with other friends. Choices. …And if you, instead, continue to endure, and suffer, and flail, and struggle, and fight, and stew, and seethe, and rail against life? That’s a choice, too.

You get to decide. You get to take action. This is your journey. You gotta walk your own hard mile – but you are also your own cartographer. The map may not be the world – but it is yours to make.

I sip my coffee before the trip down to see my Traveling Partner and friends for the day. Possibly just a day trip. I carefully consider what I’m bringing, mindful that there is limited space, and it’s a very short visit. I consider limited resources and individual needs. My mind lights briefly on a distant madwoman, a former friend, an X, and shake my head with sorrow and disappointment. I may have lost thousands of dollars of original art in the storm of her chaos and delusional rage, but she has no power over me unless I give that to her; I choose not to, and turn my thoughts back to the day ahead of me. My day. My experience. My life. My choices.

It’s still an every day, circumstance-by-circumstance, moment-to-moment choice for me to “walk on”, to “let this one go”, or to shut down drama by declining to participate in madness. There are still verbs involved. My results still vary – but the quality of my life improves greatly when I do. “You have no power over me” reverberates in my thoughts. I smile. Finish my coffee. There is great power in new beginnings. That power is mine. 🙂

I begin again.

Tags be the change, begin again, bitches be trippin', boundaries matters, breathe, choose wisely, done with you, emotional self sufficiency, experience, get the help you need, good self-care, hurt and angry, I am my own cartographer, I'm done here thanks, listening deeply, love, love and lovers, MBSR, mindfulness, mindfulness matters, my home my rules my way, OPD, perspective, practicing the practices, ptsd, relationships, sufficiency, taking care of me, TBI, The Big 5, the map is not the world, there are verbs involved, walk on, walking my own path, what matters most?, you don't call my shots, you have no power over me, your madness is not my issue

Categories anger, Anxiety, Art, art and the artist, Brain Injury, Free Will, Frustration, grief, Logic & Reason, Love, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Moments, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Sleepless Nights, Spring, The Big 5, War and News of War, women, Words

Soap-Bubbles, Expectations, and Assumptions

March 30, 2018 //

You know what soap-bubbles, expectations, and assumptions have in common? The amount of substance they’ve got. lol Test your assumptions – be really brutal about investigating what supports your opinions. If you’re wrong, you most likely would benefit from knowing that. Those expectations? They aren’t real at all. Just made up shit in our thinking that we wander around with as if we have some reason to … crap, how do I not use either “expect” or “assume” right there. We gotta knock that shit off.

Ask. Clarify. Observe. Question. Test. Check. Double-check. I’m not talking about deep-seated insecurities being re-verified constantly. Not even a little. Kind of the opposite. I think I’m trying to describe the balance a secure being must find between their contentment and their future, using choices – choices ideally made based on an understanding of the world, and their own life, such that the outcome is as desired, mostly, generally speaking. It’s very hard to do that when we let ourselves live in a soap-bubble.

One more soap-bubble pops as I move through life. Shit got real, and not in a pretty way. My Traveling Partner is safe. Our friends are safe. The bullshit and drama that went down probably cost us all a lot more than we’d have been willing to let go of. Many thousands of dollars were burned up (metaphorically) in a savage display of uncontrolled fury and mental illness. Fucking hell. There is profound risk in giving people “second chances”, and new beginnings don’t always turn out better than old bullshit. Sometimes we have to look at the balance sheet and admit that we can’t afford to give that person more chances; it is too costly, emotionally, or financially. In this case? All the things. It was a poor choice to put any eggs in that badly woven damaged basket.

Once more for the folks in the back; no amount of your anger justifies destroying other people’s property, robbing them of their sense of safety or security in their homes, acting out against them in violence, or saying some of the vile shit human primates are capable of saying when they are enraged. It’s not okay. Do better. You are making choices.

Does this experience, that may have actually cost me 10s of thousands of dollars in destroyed or damaged art work (of my own) cause me to reconsider being willing to love, to trust, or to begin again? No. It just reminds me that assuming positive intent is not an assurance of actual positive intent, in fact. It reminds me to test my assumptions, to avoid implicit expectations, and to be willing to walk on when things don’t work out, with no looking back. My good heart gives second chances. I hadn’t previously given an ex, an actual ex, a “second chance”, before. I am unlikely to do that again. But the terrible behavior of others is no reason to compromise my own good nature, or be dissuaded from being the woman I most want to be. I decide who I become. Those choices are mine. There are verbs involved.

I left the office yesterday trembling with stress, triggered, and on the edge of tears, in a hurry to get safely home so that I could compulsively check for reassuring communications from loved ones, and check in with others that they were okay, too. I needed that for me. What’s new and beautiful and makes this experience, after-the-fact, pretty powerfully positive; I bounced back. After a few quiet minutes meditating in the car before I began my commute, I was emotionally safe to drive, calm, and “okay”. By the end of the evening, I was able to sleep. I woke rested, and the day ahead, for all obvious purposes, appears to be a fairly ordinary one. (Although, to be fair, yesterday got off to a great start…)

I wish my Traveling Partner and my distant loved ones well from afar, finish my coffee, and get ready to begin again.

Tags be the change, begin again, breathe, choose wisely, definitely an ex, done with you, emotional self sufficiency, experience, fuck that shit, mindfulness matters, my home my rules my way, OPD, ptsd, relationships, taking care of me, TBI, The Big 5, there are verbs involved, walk on, what matters most?

Categories anger, Anxiety, Brain Injury, Free Will, Frustration, grief, Logic & Reason, Love, Mindfulness, Moments, more than a little bit of bitching, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Spring, The Big 5, War and News of War, women

Hate Isn’t a Good Look for You

March 27, 2018 //

Don’t hate. I mean it. What a huge start down the path of being the person you most want to be (probably). Just don’t fucking hate people. Don’t say hateful things. Don’t undertake hateful actions. Don’t enable hate. Don’t support hate. Don’t become the embodiment of hate through your words or commerce. Fuck. How god damned hard is that, really??

I’m rather angry this morning at the horrible way some obviously grown adults have been treating the Parkland survivors… over the choice to protest what those survivors see as the pivotal issue in the attack on their school. Let’s get past the rather obvious fact that we live in a country that says it values freedom of speech – if that were really the case, we’d all shut the fuck up and listen once in a while. (When was the last time you politely and earnestly listened to the entire monologue of an associate’s views without interrupting to object or counter them, and did so without a rebuttal?) What I’m most angry about is that, even in that freedom of speech context, there are actual grown ass adults attacking recently traumatized young people – because they are offended by the opinions being expressed (that are subjective, personal, and informed by recent violence)! What the fuck? When did we become monsters?

I just don’t have anything nice to say to someone who thinks their right to fondle a firearm takes a priority over comforting the victims of violence. That’s some clueless douche-baggery right there. That “right to bear arms”? Not a bigger deal that the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Get some fucking perspective.

I take a deep breath. Pull up out of the slime of the depths of the internet. I finish my coffee quickly, still awash in anger – and there it is. The secret sauce of a great many of our most horrible human moments; our anger. I pause quietly and look at my own. It’s often these moments of disappointment with humanity generally, in which I come face-to-face with the things I am still working on myself. Anger is definitely one of those. Few things fuel shitty behavior and vile invective like impotent frustrated rage.

Another deep breath. Anger has a certain intoxicating visceral feel that surges like a drug through my bloodstream. People “high” on anger lose sight of what matters most to them. People suffering from acute anger poisoning aren’t just capable of killing – they become, also, quite capable of feeling righteous and justified in doing so. “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” isn’t something a person reacting to anger still gives a crap about – at least not anyone else’s, and sometimes not even their own. That’s something to contemplate. Is your anger worth killing for? If you think so, how do you reconcile that with that other human being’s right to live their life?

It’s hard to even think about anger without becoming, at some point, angry. Weird. Well, frankly, I have issues. lol You know that; you’re reading this. I’m working on them, though, and even my relationship with anger gets thoroughly scrutinized. I can’t say I have what I consider a healthy relationship with anger – my own or anyone else’s. The experience of extreme anger or rage expressed by other people is highly likely to trigger my PTSD – not helpful, I promise you that. My own anger? I’m not “better than” anyone else; it’s capable of driving some really shitty behavior that I am not content to permit from myself. So. I put in the time and study and practice required to better myself, in some small measure, day-by-day, moment-by-moment, provocation-by-provocation – even on the internet. There are verbs involved. Right now, there’s also a book involved. It’s on my reading list.

Frankly, deep-diving emotion and working to develop and improve emotional intelligence, have seemed to be quite critical on this journey – but it is complicated work, and requires a great deal of practice. Worthwhile. Maybe even the entire purpose of existing as a human being is somehow tangled up in becoming emotionally intelligent, learning to balance emotion and reason, and learning to treat others truly well. I don’t know. I rarely ask the question “what is the meaning of life”. lol Not my question. Doesn’t need my answer.

I do need to begin again. 🙂

Tags anger management, be the change, be the human being you most want to be, being and becoming, choose wisely, don't hate, emotional intelligence, emotional self sufficiency, manage your anger, perspective, practicing the practices, ptsd, relationships, seriously don't hate, The Big 5, there are verbs involved, walking my own path, what matters most?, your rage is not in charge here

Categories anger, Brain Injury, Free Will, Frustration, grief, Mindfulness, Moments, more than a little bit of bitching, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Spring, Summer, The Big 5, War and News of War, women, Words

Seriously? You Could Do Better

March 16, 2018 //

Couldn’t we all do better? A bit? Give that some thought. Are you really the person you most want to be? Every day?

I am feeling frustrated with humanity, generally, and it pivots on competing memes, the willful stupidity of human beings defending pet ideologies, and the unavoidable truth that every damned one of us has some pretty fucking hateful moments, and lugs around some pretty vile baggage. I’m mostly quite done with every damned body pointing at the other guy with criticism about hate, seemingly unaware that they, themselves, have some similarly hateful moments.

Fuck, people, look in the god damned mirror.

I’m not making this point unaware that I am, myself, quite human. On the contrary, I am frustrated and puzzled by some basic confounds in my own thinking. I am concerned about implicit biases I am likely wandering around with, that may inform my decision-making in a fairly stupid way. I worry that things I think I “know” are not well-grounded in fact, to the point that I am regularly seeking proof that I am wrong. (Because, frankly, finding out I am wrong is the only shot at correcting poor quality reasoning – I don’t give fuck-all for being right, and it isn’t helpful to “know” that I am, when it comes up.)

What’s specifically giving me metaphysical indigestion this morning is the head-on conflict between posts/memes/commentary suggesting that “gun control is not the answer – be kind to lonely kids!” is The One True Way, and the other batch retorting “don’t suggest anyone else is responsible for violence except the sociopaths committing it – you could be encouraging vulnerable kids to become entangled with sociopaths!” because setting good boundaries is The One True Way. Fucking hell – are we all really that stupid? Is it not 100% entirely obvious that this is a false dichotomy? That the jigsaw puzzle of American violence is a tad more nuanced than that? Fuck your overly simplistic idiocy. So done with that kind of simple-minded horse-shit.

It matters how we treat people. It matters what we accept, as a culture, with regard to how people treat each other. It matters when we frame the discussion in terms of the value of one group of lives or another, or the worth of one individual or another. It matters how we talk about – and how we prosecute – violence. Yes, when we let domestic violence crimes go unnoticed, undiscussed, and unprosecuted, we build a culture in which some children grow up thinking their anger (an emotion, nothing more) has more value than the actual lives of others. We created that scenario as a culture, as a society. We deepen it when we devalue women, people of color, and other vulnerable populations. When we foster rape culture, and suggest in our institutions and laws, that how women dress or behave is somehow righteous justification for another human being’s lack of self-control over their use of sexual behaviors, we defend violence over “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”. We are at fault for the culture that exists.

Does that mean we are also accountable, individually, for the individual acts of violence of other individuals? Nope. We are each responsible for our own actions… including those actions that foster a culture of violence. So. Yeah. It’s not us vs. them. It’s not as simple as a single choice between two clear options. It’s about actually fucking being aware of the consequences of our actions, and of our institutions and laws, and we are responsible for the society we create. We built this. Stop acting fucking surprised. Fucking fix it.

Fuck, I am so angry about this. Just do better, damn. How fucking hard is that?

What are you going to do to make this a better country to live in for everyone who lives in it? (Yes, including people who are incarcerated, people who are poor, people who are undocumented – have you read some of what they are put through? Every.Damned.Day. “Inhumane” doesn’t begin to describe it, and that’s really not okay.)

I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to do better. Just that. Something. Each day, today too, I am going to put my will and my actions toward being a somewhat better human being than I was yesterday. And again tomorrow. Then again the day after that. I will spend a lifetime working towards being the woman I most want to be, building the world I most want to live in. Tearing down the bullshit and baggage I learned growing up, or later on, or built myself. No excuses. I can do better.

It’s time to begin again.

Tags ACT, begin again, choose wisely, domestic violence, done with your bullshit, f bomb, gun control, it's time to clean up the mess we've made, listening deeply, MBSR, mindfulness, perspective, ptsd, relationships, shenanigans, swear words, The Art of Being, The Big 5, the map is not the world, there are verbs involved, walk on, walking my own path, we're all in this together, what matters most?, yes it's your fault too

Categories anger, Free Will, Frustration, grief, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, loneliness, Love, Mindfulness, more than a little bit of bitching, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Rape, Relationships, The Art of Being, The Big 5, War and News of War, Words

My Results Vary

March 8, 2018 //

Last night’s commute was an interesting test of my intent to continue and grow as a human being, and learn better skills for experiencing and expressing anger without doing harm, or degrading the quality of life or emotional experience of other beings. Yep. I think it can be done. I see other people doing it. So. Doable. 🙂 I figure my detestable commute is worthy territory for practice, too, because… people piss me off pretty reliably when all I want to do is drive home without bullshit. LOL

As I pulled out of the parking lot at the office, I reminded myself that the goal was to get home safely, skillfully, following traffic rules, remaining within the speed limit, and to do so without “being provoked” by the behavior of other drivers, who are definitely having their own experience. So far so good. Intentions set.

All was well a good portion of the drive, in spite of people just… yeah. Omg. Human beings are not at all at their best on their evening commute, driving in traffic at the end of the day. Everyone seems to be 100% entirely out for themselves without any regard whatsoever for the other human beings literally surrounding them. I pulled up to a stoplight along the way. I stopped. Cars behind me stopped. The empty lane the right, in this instance, in clearly marked in several locations (signage, on the pavement, a reminder literally hanging from the light pole, too) that this is “right turn only” and “traffic in right lane must turn right”. It’s a complicated intersection, but this point is made very clear. The large pick up who pulled up next to me and inched forward a bit at a time was in my periphery, but on my mind; this is a favorite spot for douchebags to attempt to get around waiting traffic for which they, themselves, are too good to endure along with the rest of us. Fuckheads. Yeah, this is a thing that pisses me off enormously. The light turned green, and I purposely, with intent, skill, and my full conscious attention, quickly accelerated to the speed limit and pulled ahead of the truck and through the intersection. Yep. He (I could see him) immediately pulled in behind me, cutting off the less aware/attentive/committed driver behind me. I drove on.

I let it go and drove on. He was still mad, and tail-gating me in his unnecessarily huge truck. Eventually, there was some distance between us, and a couple cars turned into that space. Then end of it, I figured. Nope. I stopped at a light with a left turn only signal – two lanes, the one on the right continuing, the one on the left turning left. Oh, you know where this goes, right? If you were reading along thinking “well, you’re just guessing that he was trying to get around the traffic, maybe he just didn’t see the right turn only, then saw it, and hurriedly pulled into the correct lane? That could happen… so human.” Sure, sure, only… there’s this; with no one in that left turn lane at the time I was waiting for that red light so I could continue? Yep. Who comes hauling ass up that left hand only turn lane? The big pick up. Same truck. He pulled past that line of cars, and even I caught myself thinking “well, finally, he’s turning…”. Nope. He not only didn’t turn, it wasn’t ever his intention to turn. As soon as the left turn light went green he pulled through the intersection around all the stopped traffic – it was only the left turn light that was green, and he took advantage of it. I was, admittedly, immediately enraged. Nothing much I could do about it, and I choked on my anger, struggling to both feel my feelings, and also to behave in the way I most want to do. It was fucking hard. I wanted to scream at him, and I wanted to do him real harm. For an instant, I was viscerally aware why I choose not to own a firearm.

I’m still angry about that guy’s shitty behavior, thinking about it this morning. For me, this is the sort of thing that is representative of the downhill slide of our national culture and society, generally. Entitled inconsiderate douche-baggery. Fuck that guy. Don’t be that guy.

Some distance down the road later, insisting with myself that I breathe deeply, calm myself, and stay focused on skillful safe driving, being attentive, and making “the game of life” about something other than winning at the expense of others, I’d calmed myself and moved on from all that. It was hard. Worthwhile, though, in the sense that I arrived home feeling comfortable in my own skin, not especially stressed out, and actually having already forgotten most of the stress of the commute within minutes of stopping the car. That feels pretty good. I’ll give it another go again today.

Today is a good day to begin again.

Tags be the change, begin again, being and becoming, breathe, choose wisely, don't be that guy, emotional self sufficiency, I am my own cartographer, mindfulness matters, my home my rules my way, OPD, perspective, practicing the practices, ptsd, taking care of me, TBI, The Art of Being, The Big 5, the map is not the world, there are verbs involved, walk on, walking my own path, what matters most?

Categories anger, Anxiety, Brain Injury, Free Will, Frustration, Healthy Living, Mindfulness, more than a little bit of bitching, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, The Art of Being, The Big 5

Where’s the Power Button?

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Soap-Bubbles, Expectations, and Assumptions

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Hate Isn’t a Good Look for You

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Seriously? You Could Do Better

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My Results Vary

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