Sometimes I feel overcome with absolute rage over things that happened 50 years, even 60 years ago. It isn’t always at night when the lights are out and I’m lying in bed with just my thoughts. Some incident way in the past came pop up in the middle of the day and around friends. Maybe it’s a stray comment from someone that sparks the bad memory. It doesn’t make it any difference: I’m mad as hell.
Whatever it is, the anger does not have anything to do with my wife Janet; well, sometimes it does but most of the time it’s not.
I calm down by reminding myself that I’m tired and probably have a lingering headache or stuffy sinus cavities. Dwelling on past slights will just make the headache worse. I try to divert myself to some happy projects. Sometimes I think about a new story I want to write. There are a lot of festivals and fun times coming up in the spring and I have to come up with some new stories to tell folks. I don’t want them to get bored.
Sometimes those old wounds end up as a pretty good story. I’ve gotten a lot of satisfaction making mean people seem ridiculous in a story. And I don’t have to worry about them getting even. Most of them are dead anyway, and the living ones feel they are too important to bother with an old man’s silly stories. Getting a little snarky on paper makes me feel better.
A good analyst could make the point that I am using misdirected anger at other people to deflect my actual indignation that my wife suffered through months of damned chemical therapy, had her hopes raised that the breast cancer was all gone, then endured even worse pain and mental anguish with brain cancer. I was the one with the REM (rapid eye movement) sleep disorder which will eventually kill me through stroke or heart attack. I was supposed to go first. She had worked so hard to take care of me. And what was her reward? Damn cancer.
Now is a good time to get mad at those kids who ruined my recesses in elementary school. I think I’d rather be mad at them right now than at cancer.