I’m back to talk more about anger and my difficulty in controlling it since my medical crisis. I do have to consider that some of it is purely biological. As I’ve mentioned, I’ve found out that it’s a common side effect of having as stroke. And the war I had in my brain and body the last time I was arguing with my mother felt almost physically impossible to stop. I wrote about it at length in my last post, but I want to talk more about it in this one.
When you’re a weirdo as I am (neurodivergent), it’s difficult to know what is a flaw and what is just partof my personality and does not need to be changed.
For example. When I was younger, I had a really hard time going anywhere because I felt like all my senses were being assaulted all the time. Smells, sounds, and sights that I couldn’t just mute. If someone had told me that I wasn’t being oversensitive or too fussy, but that my brain was just wired differently, that would have helped a great deal. I got scolded often by my mother when I would protest about my environment.
She told me a story about how when I was two or three and my brother was five or six and upwards, she would take us to the State Fair every year. She told me I would be crying and screaming, and I asked why she continued to do it. She said because my brother loved it, and she could not afford a babysitter.
That was my standing in the family in a nutshell. My brother was always more important than I was for several reasons. The first and biggest reason is beacuse he’s the son. Boys were much better than girls. girls were less than useless, and their only worth was to be married off to procreate. Oh, and in my case, to be my mother’s therapist. That’s it. I had no use as a person in and of myself, and I was treated accordingly.
Two. My brother was/is on the spectrum. He was never diagnosed with it (hell, it was barely acknowledged back in the eighties), but he has the classic symptoms. I was the one who clued him into the fact that he was on the spectrum, and this was a few months before I had my medical crisis. He said it changed his life, and it made so many things make sense. My only regret was that I didn’t tell him earlier because I knew decades earlier. It’s just that he displayed such stereotypical behavior for an autistic person, and he knew his son was autistic that I assumed he knew it about himself.
One of the most strenuous arguments K and I have ever (and it was really mild, but we don’t argue0 was about how talking about mental health was so much more open now than when we were younger. Neither of us was saying we should go back to the old days of not talking about it at all, but she was concerned that there was too heavy a reliance on medication. But, also, was there a need to label everything? Both she and her husband deal/have dealt with mental health issues. She pointed out that they got through it with some therapy, yes (on her part), but that was it.
In a voice that was sharp, I said that some of us didn’t make it–or were just scraping by. It’s a sore point with me because there were many people who didn’t survive. There were people who were struggling every day. I firmly believed that the more we talked about these issues and demystified them, the better.
Where we agreed was that even if you were struggling with mental health issues, you still had to interact with the world. Having mental health issues was not an excuse to treating people poorly, for example. I did understand her worry about giving too much leeway or taking too many drugs, but my mindset is that we have not talked about it enough until now, so we can go overboard in the other way for a while now.
I think the worst thing for me when I get explosively angry is that I feel sick to my stomach afterwards. My teacher explained that it was the adrelain rush that had to go somewhere. So the body was flushing it out, but felt sick as it did. In addition, I don’t like feeling out of control, which is one reason I don’t drink. The other bigger reason is because I’m allergic, but even if I weren’t, I wouldn’t drink.
I keep a tight reign on my rage because I am really good at knowing people’s weakpoints. That’s one side effect of being deeply empathetic; I know how people are feeling–sometimes better than they do. Let me tell you that people really do not like being told about themselves. I have had very negative reactions to it before, and I would prefer not to do that to people.
It makes me tired, honestly. It’s one reason I so enjoy doing my weapon forms. It’s a safe way of expressing that anger that won’t hurt anyone. Well, sometimes myself when I hit myself. I’ve cut myself, but nothing serious. And, of course, I’ve banged myself with a sword or a saber now and then. Again, no big deal. My weapons are wooden or dull steel, though. There is no danger of me hurting myself. At some point, will I get real weapons? Maybe. There really is no reason to do it other than to show off. I mean, I’m not going to ever use them in combat (except maybe the cane or the fan/s), so it’s not like I need them sharp.
I guess it could be some kind of test for myself if I wanted to see how good I would do with real weapons. But, you know,why? I am not the kind of person who flexes like that. I will never use my bladed weapons in a real fight because I would never carry them with me. I don’t want to get in trouble, and I’m not sure I could run someone through with a sword, anyway. I don’t even mean that physically.
When my brother came over to check on me after my medical crisis, he grabbed my sword for protection as he walked around. I asked what he was going to do with a dull sword if he ran into someone. He said that he would run it through an intruder, and I laughed at him. I said it was dull, and he said it was still a sword. Well, yes, but it took more than physical prowess to run someone through with a sword. The mental toughness you would need to do it–I didn’t think my brother had it.
To make it clear, I’m not saying he’s weak. I’m saying that most people could not run a dull sword through someone. But if it made him feel safer, then so be it.
I’m going to end this now and come back to it for the last time tomorrow.