Aug 25, 2004 00:59
It's so much easier to be angry at someone than to truly be loving and understanding. It kind of reminds me of tending a fire.. a small fire is like love in a way, it's romantic and keeps you warm if you tend it just right... a giant inferno is like anger, it's easy to keep going.. just keep throwing giant hunks of wood on to the fire. Anger though, is no warming fire, it's a wild blaze that is uncontrollable and demands to be fed and fed as it spreads where it pleases. It's a fire that is easy to keep burning, but it takes up all you have to keep it going.
I think anger feels like such an easy emotion because it is so simple to understand. It demands no true rationale, anger can use the fact that it exists at all to justify it's own presence. You can be angry, and then you don't have to do anything. You don't really demand any personal responsibility out of yourself when you're mad. You just plain don't care what you do, because you're not at all interesting in protecting anything but yourself. It is freedom, really.
Sadly, it is a freedom which is so easy to obtain, but so difficult to clean up later. It leaves behind a swath of unresolved issues, events in your life that were thrown carelessly into the blaze and now you have to go through and make sense of all the charred wreckage. You get to look back and try to figure out what parts of your life used to be like before they were consumed by the flame and warped into something twisted and ugly.
I have a problem with anger. When my pain gets to be so great that I just keeps piling on faster than I can deal with it, I get mad. The inferno rises and swallows up everything around me, everything good and everything bad and I just watch it smoke and smother away inside of me, content that I at least found a solution to my suffering. I try to control it so that it does not affect the people that I love, but when my pain is so closely linked to them, it's hard for me not to end up burning them too.
When it is someone hurting me and not just something, I keep lashing out at them too. I don't want to, but it the most effective method I have of stopping it. It's like part of me doesn't care that I'm hurting them, and I just let it go on and try to make things right afterwards. I wish I knew some other way, because staying mad for too long feels like I'm poisoning myself, and because I'd rather find a way to deal with it that doesn't end up causing one problem while it's attempting to solve another.