Musings in the Dark: Rage, the Flexible Bullet

3/17/2011

Rage, the Flexible Bullet


I’ve had the fortune (or misfortune; depending on the way you swing) to know some people who are so twisted with anger that they are barely visible to the rest of the world.  The genesis of the rage finds its way constantly into conversations; while the details are a bit sketchy, I’m able to grasp how and why these people became so mad.

I know what true rage means.
Anger in small doses is excellent; it clears your mind, focuses your thoughts and is a wonderful motivator.  But just like a car engine that has to cool after being driven, anger must be allowed to dissipate.  It will naturally if left to its own devices.  It takes work to stay mad.  You have to constantly remind yourself of the people that did you wrong or the situations that you were deliberately or inadvertently put in that caused the break.  You’re always revving the car and making it run hot.  What ends up happening is that you eventually burn out the engine.  The brain and the mind are no different.  For people who are constantly, consistently mad, I imagine that they wake up thinking about ways to assign blame to others just to keep the emotions high.  They may even put themselves into situations so that their pain isn’t allowed to end.

I love astronomy, so forgive the metaphors.  But they’re relevant. The energy an angry person uses is equivalent to fusion in the core of a supergiant star.  It burns and burns until the star goes supernova, and then there is nothing left but a tiny black cinder.  This is equal, IMHO, to the soul or the heart of a person who has stayed mad for years and never allowed the hate to die.  They’ve allowed the rage to consume them and it spews forth in vituperative rants that are caused by the slightest perceived insult.  They go off at the drop of a hat and lose their focus of the initial conversation; what typically results is some bastardized version of what went wrong in their lives.

Most people don’t want to be around this.  Everyone hurts or has been hurt in some form or fashion; some deeper and more extensive than others.  I am in no way disregarding their pain or making light of their situation.  I’m speaking of people who don’t know any other way to be but upset.  A person can’t go on forever manufacturing ways to perpetuate their rage.  It will consume them, burn them out and make them a shell of their former selves.  It isolates them because no one wants to be around a person who is pissed off every minute of every day.  It’s futile because the kind of stress that prolonged anger puts on a person can make her/him physically and mentally ill.  Regardless as to what someone thinks is owed to them, the fact of the matter is that the situation may never get resolved to her/his liking.  And the truth is that s/he may never know about it.

Stephen King once described madness as a flexible bullet.  The projectile is fired into the world to hurt others, but it eventually rebounds and kills the person who shot it off in the first place.  The same can be said of prolonged rage.  Individuals who are always angry throw darts—verbal and physical, metaphorically speaking—to hurt those around them, but they eventually are destroyed by the emotional barbs they shoot off.   Some think a change of scenery (or, gasp! a man) will make everything better, but no matter where you go, there you are.  

To a person who is so consumed by rage, please get some help.  Seek out counseling and work those issues out with someone who can be objective about your situation.  A lot of people want to belittle the mental health profession and discount the fact that there are millions and millions of people who truly need psychological help.  If you are so warped by past hurts that you can barely see life passing you by, call your insurance provider and get them to refer you to an in-network therapist.  Get some help and get yourself together.  The people who love you will put up with you, but only for so long, and only until the bullets you fire hurt or kill them.

If you think I have absolutely no idea of what I’m talking about and I’m just regurgitating some bullshit I read from somewhere else or heard from another person, then you could not be more wrong.  Game recognizes game, or in this case, takes one to know one.  

1 comment:

  1. Excellent, excellent post and one I will be sharing. Life is too short to stay locked up with anger. Your life withers and for what purpose? What has that served? How has that benefited you and to be sure, holding on to bitterness and anger forever will not "teach" anyone the lesson you think it will.

    Amaya was right, process your anger and move on. If you can't get past your anger then seek help. You have better things to do than to stay rooted in past.

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