Unhealthy Anger Management

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I’ve always found it hard to accept that I hold on to anger and resentment. Typically, it hangs on until I can aim it at myself, with only minor outbursts here or erratic behavior there to indicate I’m out of sorts. Mostly I shut down when I try to process it, for reasons I don’t fully understand.

I can say that it’s messed with my work output. I can’t function normally when I’m like this. The last few months have been struggles for me to just get through a day without acting against myself in a permanent manner. People around me are easy to hide from, since they don’t really interact with me unless they want something. It really hurts knowing that if I was missing from their lives, the only reason it would impact them is because of how it might inconvenience them.

Here’s the part where people tell me that loved ones care no matter what. That’s a common trope in fiction, something we tell people too young or stupid to know better. The reality is that caring takes effort and time and all sorts of ugly, hard things with no guarantee of even a hope of return on investment. On some level I’ve always known this, and I think that might be why I resort to suicidal thinking to feel better about any of my problems.

Introspection has brought me to my keyboard, and an old habit that I thought I might have broken. Just recently I was pretty brutally honest with a couple people, and I got the same response I always got – shock that I’d opened my mouth. Normally I’m the person trying to make everyone else feel better. They don’t appreciate I do it now out of a sense of self-preservation, to mitigate the harm they can inflict without thinking.

And blowing up does nothing except start a cycle of me punishing myself for being honest and hurting feelings that I know full well will survive regardless of whatever the fuck I did. The worst I do is rip the band-aid off, and I treat myself like a monster for it. I mean, I am a monster, but only in that sickening, horrific way a person can be who would point a weapon at himself if he could just find one reliable enough.

For whatever reason, I can’t be okay with whatever happens. Somehow people who allegedly care about me will get revenge for slights real but mostly imagined. Perception is key, and I’m going to get gaslighted into oblivion it feels like. Thoughts of ending my life are the only way I can cut through that haze to maintain clarity. What does it say when my sense of self-preservation lies in my sense of self-ruination?

I woke up this morning wanting to get so much work done, and now I’m trying my hardest to not delete everything ever. Going to such extremes is something I recognize is unhealthy. And I still do it anyways.