My Portrait in the Closet

My temper crawled out and spent the entire day with me. It’s a mean one, wearing a sheepskin of civility. The entire day spent with silent carping criticism, resentments, “if-only-that-person-were-better.” It has to stop for purely practical purposes.

• it shrinks my peripheral vision
• it raises my blood pressure
• it ruins my digestion
• it destroys my perception
• it limits my ability to see solution
• it puts me miles away from happiness.

Those virulent flare ups that cast havoc around me are nothing more, and nothing less than habitual behavior learned from the behavior of the people around me, who sincerely believed that blame, criticism and bad temper where effective methods of controlling their life. It doesn’t work for me at this point in my life.

Since the last post, it’s wading waist deep in mud up to my hips. Slog, slog, slog, each day until arriving exhausted to sundown and early retirement to bed.

I’m a horse saddled with resentment, criticism, and smoldering anger (senior moment: it took me 30 seconds to remember that word ‘smoldering.’) From the time I was twelve, my personality has rested on a bed of banked embers, that flare at the slightest provocation. Today, I destroyed a snake plant that had the temerity to fall out of its pot.

My heart’s desire (for today at least) is living the rest of my days feeling happy and serene. I am one of the lucky ones who found it easy to stop smoking: I just stopped lighting up. Why not be one of the lucky ones who drop the habit of anger the same way: just don’t light up.