i am what i hate

The Shadow Knows

I'm beginning to see myself as others see me, and I'm seeing aspects of myself that I've denied for years. I can be petty, moody, vindictive, stubborn, and narrow-minded; I can be a real jackass. Yet I merrily scorn other people for exhibiting these very same traits.

I am what I hate. When I encounter bags of garbage wrapped in flesh, I recognize their putrid stench much like a dog sniffing his own behind. Their flaws are my flaws, their sins my sins. I merely magnify their shortcomings to deny my own.

For years I have struggled to find the right way to express anger. I have always linked being assertive with being aggressive. Being assertive felt like being a bully or a spoiled child--it made me feel ashamed. So I became a pleaser and a compromiser instead, wanting everyone to be happy always and to like me always.

So how does a pleaser express anger then? For me, there are two ways: passive-aggressive comments, and full-blown fits of rage. The passive-aggressive crap doesn't worry me that much. I'm learning to recognize when I'm about to start some serious trash-talking, and I'm trying to keep it to a minimum (if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all--does that make Marcel Marceau the angriest man alive? but I digress).

However, the occasional rage-fueled shitstorm is still a problem. I joke that I have anger-induced Tourette's Syndrome. When I'm furious, I cannot control my mouth, and every other word is MFer (something I never realized until it was pointed out to me by bemused friends). A few years ago these fits went beyond mega-cursing straight into kicking trashcans over and physically shaking with rage. At my worst, I picked up someone's chair and crashed it down onto a nearby desk. Scary.

I haven't kicked a trashcan in quite a while--yay for me. But I still get to the point now and then where I'm so angry that I feel ill. So how do I get beyond this irrational behavior? I decided to embrace the random last week and visited an interactive I Ching website. The question I asked was "how can I avoid stress at work?" The answer was "Fellowship."

Now I have never been good at sharing my negative feelings with others. I preferred to keep it all bottled up inside rather than burden others (again, the pleaser). But the flip side is that I'm a great listener. People seem to feel very comfortable with me and thus tell me very personal things, even if we've only known each other for a few minutes. I'm the proverbial shoulder to cry on, and that's fine--I haven't rusted yet.

So if listening to others' problems doesn't bother me, shouldn't it follow that listening to my problems won't bother them? If I'm happy to help an angry friend talk his feelings out, that happiness will be reciprocal, right? Right--yet stubborn, bull-headed me never really saw it that way, instead preferring to build walls around my anger, alienating those who care for me.

This isn't going to be easy. I recently told a friend that I would sooner drop my pants in public than talk about myself, and I wasn't kidding. The naked body holds little terror for me--the naked soul is another matter entirely.

I am what I hate. But I am also what I love, and that may just make the difference.