The anger and me

So, I might have lied a little bit in my last post.

I didn’t write for a while. And it didn’t help that my back had gone wonky. Nor did it help that the new TV was a distraction. But, in the end, I think it came down to the fact that I had a couple of really bad days and wasn’t sure how to process them. Because they weren’t bad days in the sense that I sat around and felt bad about Colin (there was some of that too), but in the sense that I’m realizing ever more how hard it is going to be for me to get along with people.

Some of it was things others said to me. Some of it was things others didn’t say to me. There were actions that offended. There were insinuations that confused. There were posts on social media that simply weren’t necessary. There were some attempts by me to demand answers (my therapist says I handled that part very well, so gold star for me!). There was a lot of wondering if all of this is ever going to get easier.

Probably none of it was helped by the fact that I had the panic attack the day before I went on vacation and that the vacation more or less started off with Colin’s 6th birthday. There’s no way to pretend that didn’t leave us all in s state with jangled nerves. But it was still a bit of a pile-on.

I keep thinking of the one new Dad to the men’s group. He complained about anger issues, exhaustion and an inability to get things done around the house. It seems like we should be soul mates. And when he asked for tips on how to get his act together, I suggested breaking things into small pieces. Specifically, he wants to get something written. I told him to write a draft. He sort of blew me off. Later, as the session was ending, he told me that he didn’t mean to blow me off, but I had to understand that the thing he wants to write is complicated and it’s not something that you can just dash off.

Which is when I turned to him and pointed out that I write for a living and that’s why I told him to write a “draft,” not a “finished product” and that one sure way to never get anything written is to never sit down and pick up a damned pencil.

And I’ve thought about him a lot since that meeting, not in a good way. I find myself getting mad. I have actually found myself thinking “What right does he have to be so angry about thing? What makes him so special?” And then I pull myself together and realize he’s also lost a child, and this calms me down for a moment or two before I’m right back to “Who the hell does he think he is?”

And it’s not just him. A night or so I went to be exhausted and thought I’d just fall to sleep. Instead, my mind started dredging up grievances. The one Facebook friend who keeps posting political comments he knows annoy me. The people who haven’t reached out after Colin’s death. The ones who have, but did it in the wrong way. The people I feel who have wronged me by not being patient enough with me and my family. The people I think have wronged me by trying to pretend like this grief is theirs to share. It went on and on and I had quite a list of revenge going on before I, mercifully, fell asleep.

It’s not a way I like being. My therapist gave me something to read, regarding anger. One tip was to picture your anger as a person and then decide if you’re going to invite this person in. I don’t want to, but there’s a part of me that kind of does want to, just because I want to make someone else out there feel as bad as I do: whether you’re the person who annoys me on Facebook or the guy who won’t take writing advice from me. It’s not really a good feeling to have this anger on non-stop simmer inside me. And the other real problem I’m discovering is that, even if I vent some of it off – even if I do it productively like my therapist says I’m so good at – there’s always more waiting right behind. It’s inexhaustible, it seems.

And that’s pretty exhausting.