Anger management

I'm trying to be less angry all the time, when I start to go off the rails with depression or whatever that is often accompanied by being furious at pretty much everything, my cat for making noise when I am reading, bad drivers, politics(duh), and of course myself.

There is nothing inherently wrong with anger and I don't want anyone who reads this to think I am saying that, but my anger does not do me any good.

I suppose I should get this out of the way, no matter how mad I have been I have never even come close to assaulting my wife, in fact I don't even think I have raised my voice more than once or twice in the time I have known her. For the most part I haven't expressed my emotions with violence since I was in high school. I do punch a wall now and again when I am alone, but that is about it and also pretty rare.

That doesn't change the fact that for me it really isn't healthy to be mad, it makes me think the worst of people, I get suspicious and passive aggressive with folks who really don't deserve it, and of course it comes out in my work too, a customer once made a remark to my coworker a couple months ago along the lines of "why is that guy so pissed off?", I hadn't done anything to them, or even interacted directly with them, just had that look on my face. And as much as I hate customers and the public in general, they don't technically deserve my ire just for walking into the store.

So it's a thing I have to work on, and am, the thing is, I don't know that there is much of a way to not be angry except to just... not be angry. Which is some bullshit if you ask me, and you did, by reading this.

I mean, you can't tell a depressed person to just not be depressed and expect it to work, although you might make them angry too I suppose. But anger isn't depression and it isn't often a chronic state brought on by chemical imbalances which can be managed. It's a reaction to stimuli, be it external like someone cutting you off in traffic, or internal such as when you stew over your past failures, missed opportunities, or wrongdoing done to you. And yeah there is a lot of overlap there, anger is frequently a masking emotion covering anything from fear to sadness.

For me I think my anger ties in a lot with me wanting to be right, but more than that it is wanting the people who are wrong to know that. I wrote a couple of days ago about how I want people like the president to realize what they have done, truly realize it, and the damage they do to people. They don't, they won't, and that infuriates me.

But if I kept it to that kind of stuff it wouldn't really be a bad thing right, oh there's Logan, he's just so full of rage at the injustice of society. That's basically virtue signalling in a way that I don't approve of at all, and if was just that I wouldn't be writing this today, it is good and right to be mad at the systems we live with and to want justice, it is perhaps less good and right to demand that everyone you interact with daily acknowledge their errors and your fundamental correctness when interacting with them.

Like, I want my customers to keep their last minute orders to a minimum, that minimum being zero, so that I can get the store closed in a reasonable timeframe, but I can't actually tell them that because that would be incredibly unprofessional as well as bad for business, which means the guy who comes in five minutes before closing will never know he was wrong to do so.  Most people would, and should, just shrug and maybe scoff about it after they leave, but I dwell.

It's not only work related, those are just the easy examples, it comes up in normal conversation too, Zena has the patience of a saint when I am in a mood like that and she really shouldn't have to.

That's my problem, if I saved my anger for the big stuff then it wouldn't be notable, but I don't and the fact that I can't make everyone just see how wrong they are, and conversely how right I am, is unacceptable.

Like I said, the only way to not be angry is to just not be angry, for me it means just move on to the next thing and to restrain my reactions even if I am alone, catharsis doesn't really work, yelling at the idiot not using his turn signal only really serves to keep the angry chemicals flowing. So I am working on not doing that.

It's a process, and one I am sure I will backslide on now and again, but so far it's keeping me happier and has the practical side effect of keeping my job secure, which ain't nothing. As to my reactions to internal stimuli, well, that takes more work, because dwelling on past failures is basically my hobby, the only anger there is at myself of course, and it's harder in many ways because I know exactly how I have hurt myself and my loved ones in the past, but that too is manageable though I really am not quite sure how, but I am calling myself stupid and selfish less these days, which helps.

I have it easy comparatively though, I have never been assaulted or bullied regularly, I have never run into institutional barriers that minorities of any variety do, I have never given half my life to someone who doesn't even know what I sacrificed and probably wouldn't care anyway. I can deal with my issues like I have described, I have no idea how anyone with shit like the above manage, and I have nothing but respect for those who get through the day having endured unimaginable and ongoing injustice without exploding, I suspect my tactic of "not getting mad" doesn't quite cut it there.