anger...

I feel it just beneath the surface, like a whale swimming around in the depths of the ocean and coming up for air briefly, every so often. I am afraid of it fully surfacing. I am afraid if I let it I will end up "beached" and stuck, unable to move past it, like a whale on some deserted distant shore.

I spent so much of my childhood angry. I was a bully in elementary school, angry at the world and beating them up one by one. I was a scrawny toothpick of a kid with a ton of rage. I was kicked out of Girl Scouts for beating up the entire troop on a camp out. I was banned from the Cub Scouts Clubhouse for the same reasons. Mostly I was a hurt kid getting physically and emotionally abused far too often at home, and dying for unconditional love, and taking it out on the world.

Somewhere in my teens it got turned inward, all that anger. Somewhere I began to take it out on myself. I spent a lot of years learning how not to do that anymore. But I am still uncomfortable when anger comes up. I am a long way from taking it out on myself, and the opposite end of the world from hitting another human being, but it never seems to come out right. I still seem to direct it at others unjustly, or at myself unjustly as well. Just in milder, more subtle ways.

I hate when I yell or play the self put-down game.

I hate injustices.

I hate that this happened.

I am angry.

But mostly, I am just sad.