It’s funny how it’s all too easy for me to get angry sometimes. Or maybe it’s not.
read more ↓I’m in St. Maarten right now. Sandra is crashed out on the bed, rejuvenating from an afternoon of mountain biking and swimming in the Caribbean sea, and I’m getting some work done… and some things – more than one – are not going my way. Not that everything has to go my way, but some things should. And these things are not.
It’s a nice feeling to expect that they will, and I prefer that feeling a whole hell of a lot more than what I felt this afternoon. I was trying not to rage – after all, the things that aren’t going my way aren’t really the fault of the people I have to talk to about it – but it was hard. Granted it’s a lot better than the way it’s been in the past – my flash lasted a mere 10 to 15 minutes rather than a half hour, an hour, a day, week or month. But what was interesting about today was taking an observer’s point of view on my actions. Today I could feel the bile rising up in my throat, my fingers hitting the keyboard on my laptop a little bit harder, my voice becoming more shrill as I made comments at my monitor as if the e-mails I were sending back and forth were actual conversations. And as I heard the words fly out of my mouth, dripping with bitter sarcasm and sprinkled with a touch of venom, I didn’t like how they sounded. I didn’t like how they felt. And I wanted the bile to disappear, as it wasn’t the least bit tasty.
Understand that I’m not beating myself up, nor am I naive enough to think that people should never get angry. Obviously there are times that warrant it, and it’s a healthy reaction. On top of that, not moving that emotion out of you just winds up making it eat you alive – a far less appealing option versus expelling it and getting it out. But it goes back to that thing I keep realizing – things like that just affect me. And I don’t like the effect it has on me.
Before I left on the cruise I told my hypnotherapist that I wanted to stop living with drama. And he said, “So stop!” It kind of kicked me in the stomach. He asked me what I wanted life to be like, and I told him I wanted it to be like that moment in Puerto Rico where I ran out onto the beach in the middle of the night, stripped down to nothing and jumped in the ocean. And he said, “That was a choice, though. Don’t you get it? You chose to do that – you chose to make your life that way at that moment.” And he was right.
But it sucks. It sucks that in the small amount of time that I was online this afternoon that four things smacked me in the face in a not nice way all at once, and it sucks that I had to feel the way I did, and it sucks, and it sucks, and it sucks.
The other funny thing is for some reason my cell phone is scrambled with the satellite signal it gets from the boat, and it’s listing today’s date as my birthday. So Sandra and I decided that today would be my mock birthday. In celebration we ordered room service for breakfast and ate it on our balcony in the port at St. Maarten before we took off for our shore excursion, and I’d decided that for a change I was going to live life moment by moment as an experiment to see if it was something worth doing every day. I had noticed that while I was relatively lax but still kind of stringent about planning our time, Sandra wasn’t… and seemed way more laid back, so I decided was going to stop obsessing about what to do tomorrow, tonight, in the next hour to see what it felt like.
Sandra had an incredibly observant comment earlier in the morning about how my obsessive planning was likely a by product of my childhood need of making people like me, because you’re always planning ways to do things that will facilitate that kind of acceptance. That was another kick in the gut – she nailed it on the head. I already plan a good deal of my professional life because of that… did I really need to do that with my private life too?
Although this is a work trip that I’m on, I do have to write about things as if I were on vacation. So we did our room service and I followed that up with laying on the bed and watching TV, then taking my time to get ready, then going on the mountain biking tour, and spending a good deal of time swimming about in the water. And my brain wasn’t wandering and I was fully present in the moment for the first time in a long time. It wasn’t until I got back to our state room and checked in with the real world that I had my fit.
So what’s the lesson? The lesson is… I don’t know. There’s a few of them, I guess. Live in the now, man. That old chestnut of “you can’t control what happens to you, but you can control how you react to it.” And naturally there’s the classic, “everything happens for a reason.” And I suppose I could sit here and spout off a million more clichés that we’ve all heard before, but in this moment, I don’t feel like it. In this moment, I feel like answering a friend’s e-mail. And that’s it. And I don’t know what I’ll feel like doing in the next moment, but I do know that I don’t want to spend too much time over analyzing my angry reaction beyond what it was.
I tend to suck myself into a trap of being in this never-ending pursuit for peace – I’m always on the hunt for something to fix… which starts another vicious circle. Which becomes a new way to abuse myself and beat myself up when nobody else will, because it’s something I’m used to in my past. Which, quite frankly, is bullshit. I don’t want to be perfect. Perfect is boring. And who’s perfect, anyway?
Maybe realizing all this is my mock birthday gift.
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