Anger Management

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

So they say.

I should know. My mother has a temper like the legendary furies of myth. So does my aunt. So does my sister. I suspect all the women in my family do, except that strange little hybrid youngest sister of mine, and even so, I dare say it’s lurking there somewhere.

My mother’s anger was fearsome. Perhaps to a child every mother is fearsome, but I remember running to the bathroom, locking it and refusing to come out until my father was home. My friends from my youth never wanted to cross my mother. Her temper used to be on a short leash, and beware the unfortunate soul that was on the receiving end.

I remember vowing I never wanted to get that angry.

I know it’s within me.

Anger and violence can be inherited. Scientifically. Genetically.

I can get so angry that I literally see red. I feel the blood rush to my head, and in the heat of the moment, I do not trust myself with a lot of things. There are very primal urges. In my angriest moments it takes a lot to restrain myself from punching someone, or kicking something. I remember kicking a hole in my parents’ bedroom door. I remember strangling someone I loved to the point of asphyxiation, just because I was that angry. I remember punching the bathroom door wide open. It was a crazy sense of physical release.

That is my sin, my vice, my downfall. Sins don’t come any deadlier than this one.

The sudden vehemence can be sudden and unexpected, it can rise and ebb like tides beyond my control. Even now I struggle to keep my anger in check, it is like a monster within that rears its head given the chance.

I suppress it slowly and deliberately over the years. Numbing the cold steel of anger. I know the feeling of it coming over me, the feeling of that anger clouding my judgement, and I do not wish it to dictate my life.

I have learnt to channel my anger through the physical. So I run and jump and exhaust myself. When it comes it is not something I can explain to anyone, it is something that I must wait out.

Sometimes I cannot even speak.

It takes that much control for me to reign myself. God help me.