About anger...

Sometimes the wild flowers climbing broken down fences in daydream meadows have to keep themselves from getting angry which isn't too hard. They want to get angry because the rights to the soil which once belonged to them, which once belonged to all, is fenced off and taken from them. The man with the money came and took their bed. In rebellion they spew out over its pickets. One of them is a crushed, tread-on dandelion that kind of reminds the woman with the abusive past of herself. It is herself. She's a very quiet, patient flower. And she's afraid of her own anger because she's afraid of hurting people even though they have abused her. And she knows anger does hurt people because the anger of others has hurt her. She had been abused in anger. But certainly her anger raids her spirit as well. It's not always healthy, especially when she doesn't even know who or what she's getting angry at. She gets angry at herself. For what? For being a kid with problems. But she always feels safer getting angry at herself even though it hurts her and makes her look useless. If she were to get angry at others that would shatter her even more. It hurts her profoundly to hurt others. Always has. She has a hyper sensitive conscience. Every itty bitty thing she's done wrong in her whole life, no matter how insignificant, stays with her. And she feels like a bad person even though she's not. All those simple mistakes from two years ago, five years ago, fifteen years ago, are so removed from her now. 

People express "how they really feel " when they're angry. It all comes out then. Or does it? Sometimes people have strong repressed feelings about others that they are afraid to share with them; that they are slobs, or pig headed, or just plain annoying. That they just mess up the place and never clean up after themselves. Or they never listen to anything anyone else says; they are always right. Or they get on your nerves with those fat jokes. But often what comes out is just a lot of shit that people think (or not think) is how they really feel because they're too upset to be rational. So when people are angry, not only do they express how they really feel, but they also say a lot of things they regret later. It was not how they really felt but merely how they felt when they were angry.

Elaine 07