Anger!

I've been feeling rather angry lately. It seems I wake up angry, spend my day angry, and go to bed angry too. All through the day, my consciousness seems to be white-washed with a thin sheen of steady anger. I know, I know...it doesn't sound like me at all. I'm usually so good-natured, so full of pleasantness. But the truth is that my sunny exterior is all a sham. Like, I try really hard to appear like a nice guy, so that people will like me. I know that in reality it doesn't seem to work all that well, and I still come off as a stodgy, bitter, curmudgeon, but the effort actually does help a little bit towards making me someone who actually is a little bit nice, kind of in the same way that pretending to laugh will eventually make you laugh for real, or pretending to love someone can often blossom into real, albeit highly dyfunctional, love.

But no more! Trying to psyche myself into becoming a nice person is becoming much too great of an effort. Struggling all day long to moderate my inner dialogue so that it is slightly more charitable towards those around me takes a surprising amount of energy and patience, and tensing my naturally-scowled lips into something resembling a smile is starting to give me cramps and headaches. It's not worth it. I seemed to think at some point that being a nicer person would gain me more friends, which would equal more opportunities to have attention paid to me, and to have my fragile-yet-huge ego to be stroked (and I guess also offer me the residual pleasure of stepping outside of my self and tasting the limitless possibilities of ways to express being human through getting to know someone on an intimate level and coming to see the world through their perspective, through really that experience is not the main point at all). Unfortunately, it hasn't seemed to work that way. Being nice hasn't really gotten me anywhere. I have more-or-less the same number of friends as when I was not such a nice guy. It doesn't seem to work the way I thought it would. Being nice does not equal being loved.

So I've decided to give it up. I'm not getting the results I want, so the amount of energy that I'm putting into the project is no longer being wisely used. From now on I'm not going to stop myself from feeling my natural feelings of anger and hatred for my fellow man. No longer will I be an internal apoligist for the foibles and short-comings of others. If I think something that someone does sucks, I'm going to accept that I think that, and not try to hold back the small, steady trickle of anger that accompanies that thought.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to start consciously being more angry. I'm simply not going to stop the anger that I already have, that seems to just be naturally a part of my personality. And I'm not going to pretend that I'm not angry either. The whole point of my new outlook on life is that I'll be investing my energy in things that are more important to me, like work and school, instead of wasting it all on being nice. And hey, if I spontaneously just start feeling nice and charitable at any given time, I'm going to accept that too.