Angry

Where the Sunbeams End: Chapter 22

A picture of me at 22, smoking a hand rolled cigarette.

Yes, her brown eyes gave me comfort, but I should have gazed into them longer. Should have stayed there until it was over, until the thoughts stopped sprinting. Oh, that furry face and wet black nose, the way her tongue curled as she smiled up at me. But then the paranoia came. Were the cops really looking for me? They must be. But it wasn’t my car, it was Judith’s. 

Years later, over sips of Jameson Irish Whiskey, I would joke with a friend that Judith had pissed me off, so I wrecked her car. 

Perhaps that wasn’t far from the truth. 

Anger has always been a difficult emotion for me to process. Mostly I just take a deep breath, maybe smoke a few cigarettes and push the emotions down, bottle them up. But there seems to be a limit to how much bottling I can handle. It just doesn’t seem to work. Bottling might be better than letting your anger flow out in yelling, screaming, or violence. But not much better. 

Eventually the anger does come out. 

Deep down in that dark place I was screaming. And now it had all spilled out through the cracks, there was no way to contain it. I hated Mom for leaving. Severing the family apart, no longer one, but just a group of individuals. I hated Mom for getting sober. Something that I couldn’t do, something I didn’t want to do, but something that nags at me.

I had quit smoking pot. I was determined to apply to that damn job at Kraft foods. I can’t even remember how or why Judith was up at the psychiatric ward. I hated her for the way she could take a couple day break and then be released. She’d been diagnosed multiple times for various disorders. Her mental illness, whatever it was, became a joke in my eyes, a call for attention. Sure, she could act crazy, but she didn’t know what it was truly like to fall off the cliff, floating in the dark depths of nothingness. She wasn’t truly psychotic, just liked to act like she was sometimes. 

It wasn’t the shards of glass in my skin or the bruising bump on my head, but the paranoia, after wrecking and abandoning the car, that pushed me to go up to the hospital. 

I didn’t need to go, I could have scrubbed the glass from my skin myself. That old nasty nurse who nonchalantly pulled my sweat pants down and took a gander at my limp dick, I could have gone without that. Was she worried I’d cut it off? And the X-rays and tests they performed, just running up the hospital bill. 

But I just needed to make sure the cops weren’t really looking for me. I explained what had happened in the accident. The hospital made a phone call. They weren’t looking for me. 

~~~

I don’t want to be angry, I want to heal. But maybe sometimes I have to unpack this anger. Empty out a bottle of the stuff and slosh around in it, let it absorb through my skin and into my being. 

I’m still angry that I’m bipolar. I know this. Yet, I’m trying to embrace the shadow self, the side that lives where the sunbeams end. If I can bring this part of myself into the light, maybe, just maybe I can feel whole. 

It’s uncomfortable though. And I’m not positive that any of these memories contain any truth, let alone wisdom or something to learn from. Sometimes it just feels like memory after memory of nothing and it's all leading up to heartbreak. 

But I'll keep going, who knows what the tide may bring. Which memory will wash up on the shore and remind me that it’s all been worth it?

How do you deal with negative emotions like anger?