February 4, 2010 : Angry, me? Nahhhhh....

Bonjour!

I am tired today, was in my acting workshop exploring anger until late last night. Anger is tiring.

Many traditions tell us that anger is illusion. If so, great! Because I don't seem to support it very well. Every cell of my body is aching, and that's just from the practice of anger on the stage, not from the true living of it in Real Life.

I used to be very, very good at anger. I mastered in it, or so I thought, but it mastered me. I was so angry that I didn't even realize how angry I was. My anger was driving the car, and the car was all over the road. Which made me even angrier.

I was seriously pissed off. The world had done me wrong, wrong, wrong, and I didn't care who knew or felt my wrath. Mostly I hid it pretty well. I only left clues: some cool distance, a cutting word jabbed or a not-so-careless word dropped, and radio silence were my weapons of choice. I honed the craft to perfection, or so I thought... but in fact my anger was honing me. Anger did its job so well I never saw its attack, identifying with it so completely that I never felt its barbs, its cuts, slices, its hacks. But it WAS hacking, trying to get to the very root of me.

To be angry is like swallowing poison and waiting for the other person to die. Someone said that, maybe Buddha, I wiki'd it and ten different people were credited for it, so I will find out and get back to you. Until then, there is the point. And it is true. Those who "did me wrong" were going on with their lives completely or mostly unaware of my seething, bubbling anger that I had been carefully tending and cultivating all those years. The tending of that particular garden sucked up so much of my energy, I was creating nothing but darkness. And that darkness got under my skin, flowed into my bloodstream and took over my "me", until it tried to overthrow my soul.

That is where it made its mistake. That shit was just not gonna happen. Call it chance, call it luck, coincidence, divine intervention, call it late for dinner, call it whatever you want, but something in me woke up.

I woke up. And I was not gonna take it anymore. Once I could see how that uninvited bastard Anger (oops! am I slipping? ;-), er, how that negatively-charged energy called anger, had crept into bed with me (or I with it), I had tools.

Oh, yeah, I got tools! They are not easy to handle, but they are really effective. So I got to work.

Forgiveness is the main tool, of course... not a tool that is easy to handle, though. I guess it could be easy for some, but I chose the hard way. I chose to wrestle with it live instead of setting up and THEN plugging it in. No surprise there.

What WAS a surprise was that the biggest hardest forgiveness was to pardon myself. Ever listen to the interior dialogue? How we talk to ourselves? When I started to listen to what I was saying to myself, the running commentary some angry part of me was making on my life, I was absolutely shocked. I would say things to myself that I would never say even to my worst enemy! Rotten things like, It's too late, you missed the boat! Might as well give up now, you'll never succeed! Could you BE more clumsy? Just who do you think you are? Go ahead and eat that hero sandwich, it doesn't matter, you've lost the figure anyway, the bloom is off the rose, etc etc etc.) Just recounting some of that old interior crap commentary makes me uncomfortable. And then it makes me laugh.

Because I took over the steering wheel after that. Now I'm driving the car (with a little help from my friends, maybe). Oh, sure, sometimes the backseat driver (the part of me that does that running commentary never actually leaves the car, apparently) has a comment to make here and there but mostly I don't fall into the trap of believing it. Mostly I laugh, and say, okay, whatever. But I am going to go ahead and live this life anyway.

And I won't be swallowing any poison today.