On Anger

"I have a right to my anger, and I don't want anybody telling me I shouldn't be, that it's not nice to be, and that something's wrong with me because I get angry." Maxine Waters, in Brian Lanker, I Dream a World, 1989

Don't get mad, get even. If you can't get even, well, then you just get madder and the vicious cycle starts all over again.

There must be a way to effectively deal with anger, but I haven't found it yet. So I stew. And I try to make it into an amusing story figuring if I can laugh about it I won't be quite as enraged. Laughter and rage have a hard time coexisting. Still the anger lingers.

What am I angry about? Well, there's the raw deal that allows the guy who slammed into my car when he was drunk off his ass and driving a borrowed vehicle because his license was suspended (for DUI) to go about his business relatively unhurt and unaffected while my life has changes in myriad inconvenient and painful ways. He laughed, by the way. In the back of the police cruiser after they dragged him back to the scene of the accident, he laughed telling the cops that they wouldn't be able to prove he'd been driving and how he was going to refuse the blood test. I'm still a little tweaked about that, yes.

I'm angry about loss. This list of things I've lost because of this accident and this injury is so long that it actually deserves it's own entry. (I'll get back to that.) Just to cover a few of the highlights, I've lost my car, an Element which I adored, the first "nice" car I purchased for myself. It wasn't even a year old. I've lost months of work and the ability to do much of the work I was doing. I'd been teaching college English, comp classes, lit, etc., but I really can't edit now. Editing someone else's work demands a type of divided attention that I no longer possess. I've lost time and money and joy and, and, and...

I'm angry that this lingers. There are ways that this has changed me and some of them are permanent. I will forever have a hearing issue, actually a Central Auditory Processing issue. I hear perfectly, it's my brain that can't interpret what I hear. I will forever have double vision in my right eye and focusing problems. I will forever have aphasia and memory lapses. Well, not forever. I guess all those little problems will be resolved when I'm dead.

Did I mention the PTSD? Yeah, I'm mad about that one too. There are days when getting in a car makes me want to cry. I still have panic attacks in cars even if I'm not driving. Still. It's been over two years.

I'm mad that all of this happened on what was, up until the accident, a really nice day, a good day. Sometimes I think it was the last really good day I've had. Sometimes I think it will always be my last really good day.

I'm mad that I hurt. I'm mad that I'm mad. I'm mad that my tolerance is lowered...significantly, and that makes me grouchy. I'm mad that the painkiller that works and doesn't make me a zombie or an addict also chemically castrates my sense of humor.

I'm mad that I haven't had a day when something - pain, fear, legal bullshit, doctor's appointments, insurance red tape, hasn't reminded me of this stupid injury.

I'm mad and I don't know how to stop it. There's no good answer, no resolution. "Getting over it" just seems like giving up. I try. I do. I try to focus on the positive and what I have that's good but somehow that bad stuff always creeps in to spoil it. Perhaps I'm afraid to be happy. It's silly but part of me thinks all this happened because I WAS happy that day. It's almost as thought the universe suddenly became aware of my happiness and it was just too much or I didn't deserve it and so, BAM! it decided to knock that happiness right out of me. Mission accomplished.

It's all very Greek mythology. The little know Greek god, Taxidevo, God of Travel, saw that I was driving and happy and envied my happiness. In a fit of rage he hurled a speeding truck at me, destroying my joy and cursing me to spend the rest of my days as a half deaf, double sighted, meniscus-less husk of my former self. Well that will teach me to flaunt my happiness. Really, he could have just as easily turned me into a "SLOW" sign and rooted me to the spot. It would have been basically the same thing.

So what do I do with all this anger? I haven't found the answer yet. I try to "process" it. From what I can tell that means letting it out in a controlled manner, but like the Lernean Hydra (I'm on a Greek mythology kick tonight) it keeps coming back. Cut off a head and two grow in it's place. Even Hercules buried the final immortal head. Maybe that means that in the end, I'll just have to bury this anger as well. At the moment it seems infinite. "There's always more where that came from," is the whisper that echos from the bottomless pit of my rage just when I think I've exhausted it all.

Someday, maybe I can shut that voice up for good. Until then, I'm mad as hell and I'm sorry if I yell at you. (Unless you deserve it, of course.)