When I get angry, I get quiet. I get tense, and my face generally becomes set in a blank wall. This is usually because the cause of my anger is something minor, and other factors have set it to rubbing me the wrong way. A glance or lack of a word can irritate me, and I need a while to simmer down, so I turn inward and seek solitude so as to work out my thought processes and untangle the pall of negative emotion.
I strive to maintain a placid exterior, but I also find it very frustrating. When someone hurts my friends I want to lash out, to show the person who has hurt them that what they did was wrong. But I always hold myself back, clench my fists until my knuckles go white, hammer at brickwork until feelings fade.
This is because I also try to be logical, or at least rational, in emotion. A contradiction, yes, but true. It would be pointless to strike someone, because violence brings violence, and to do so in a club for example would only mean being thrown out, perhaps for good. Not to mention the issue of whether or not my friend's hurt is worthy of physical retribution, whether it is a bump on the road or something much larger.
Extremes of emotion rarely take hold of me. Ecstatic joy, yes, from tiredness or music or drink and good friends. Love of one sort, deep and enduring, I hold for those who have shared themselves with me, their time and trust. I try not to wallow in any bouts of melancholy I experience these days, although there is a certain self-indulgent sweetness to it. Of uncontrolled anger, I know not a whit these days. It is suppressed, reined in, rationalised, neutered.
I do not lack passion entirely, but it is so held in check, fenced in by my own fears, worries, learned behaviours and so forth, that I wonder if anyone sees it.
Sometimes I feel like a eunuch, socially limited by my behaviours to something like a sofa or potted plant, albeit an animated one. I have seemingly no sense of a sexual self, or at least that is how I perceive the perceptions others have of me. It's a ludicrous image, me having sex, unreal in my mind and all too abstracted. But that statement probably says more of my own fears and issues than it reveals about the opinions of my friends.
These days, I know myself to be a Good Man, a Gentle Man. I have many positive characteristics, and I even feel these days that I am at the least average in my looks and form. But I still get frustrated by things, by my mutable perceptions and experience of others' actions, by the course of events or by my own state. Particularly the lack of intellectual stimulus I often feel, the lack of real challenge, growth, potential. I have a lot of potential, but I don't yet know where to really direct it.
I get so tired, and so I get waspish, and my whole character is dragged down until I just want to shut everything away and sleep.
Times like those, the times of anger, impatience, annoyance and when I feel slighted, are when I just want to turn my brain off. I expect too much from my brain, too much logic from emotion.
I'm not as bad as some, but still I hide too much. Because it's irrational, and I can't quite explain why such small things can so affect me. Maybe it's because I attach so much importance to minor distinctions, to details, or because I have read widely and seen meaning in words and actions change between contexts. I am very confused, sometimes. An enigma unto myself.
I don't know the solution to these little flashes of irritation, that themselves irritate and confound me, but I hope to continue to slowly curb them, reduce them, alter them. Sometimes I take five paces forward and one back, sometimes it is the other way around.
I think I strive for the ideal, toward my own perception of Man that is based on unrealistic assumptions and fantastical observations. But still I press on, and I don't know wther that is good or bad, or both, or neither.
I do not want to be a Grey Man. I have my interests, and passions and a soul and a heart and a mind, and all are in constant motion. Waiting for something. But I need to act, although on what I know not.
I do not want to be a grey man.
I strive to maintain a placid exterior, but I also find it very frustrating. When someone hurts my friends I want to lash out, to show the person who has hurt them that what they did was wrong. But I always hold myself back, clench my fists until my knuckles go white, hammer at brickwork until feelings fade.
This is because I also try to be logical, or at least rational, in emotion. A contradiction, yes, but true. It would be pointless to strike someone, because violence brings violence, and to do so in a club for example would only mean being thrown out, perhaps for good. Not to mention the issue of whether or not my friend's hurt is worthy of physical retribution, whether it is a bump on the road or something much larger.
Extremes of emotion rarely take hold of me. Ecstatic joy, yes, from tiredness or music or drink and good friends. Love of one sort, deep and enduring, I hold for those who have shared themselves with me, their time and trust. I try not to wallow in any bouts of melancholy I experience these days, although there is a certain self-indulgent sweetness to it. Of uncontrolled anger, I know not a whit these days. It is suppressed, reined in, rationalised, neutered.
I do not lack passion entirely, but it is so held in check, fenced in by my own fears, worries, learned behaviours and so forth, that I wonder if anyone sees it.
Sometimes I feel like a eunuch, socially limited by my behaviours to something like a sofa or potted plant, albeit an animated one. I have seemingly no sense of a sexual self, or at least that is how I perceive the perceptions others have of me. It's a ludicrous image, me having sex, unreal in my mind and all too abstracted. But that statement probably says more of my own fears and issues than it reveals about the opinions of my friends.
These days, I know myself to be a Good Man, a Gentle Man. I have many positive characteristics, and I even feel these days that I am at the least average in my looks and form. But I still get frustrated by things, by my mutable perceptions and experience of others' actions, by the course of events or by my own state. Particularly the lack of intellectual stimulus I often feel, the lack of real challenge, growth, potential. I have a lot of potential, but I don't yet know where to really direct it.
I get so tired, and so I get waspish, and my whole character is dragged down until I just want to shut everything away and sleep.
Times like those, the times of anger, impatience, annoyance and when I feel slighted, are when I just want to turn my brain off. I expect too much from my brain, too much logic from emotion.
I'm not as bad as some, but still I hide too much. Because it's irrational, and I can't quite explain why such small things can so affect me. Maybe it's because I attach so much importance to minor distinctions, to details, or because I have read widely and seen meaning in words and actions change between contexts. I am very confused, sometimes. An enigma unto myself.
I don't know the solution to these little flashes of irritation, that themselves irritate and confound me, but I hope to continue to slowly curb them, reduce them, alter them. Sometimes I take five paces forward and one back, sometimes it is the other way around.
I think I strive for the ideal, toward my own perception of Man that is based on unrealistic assumptions and fantastical observations. But still I press on, and I don't know wther that is good or bad, or both, or neither.
I do not want to be a Grey Man. I have my interests, and passions and a soul and a heart and a mind, and all are in constant motion. Waiting for something. But I need to act, although on what I know not.
I do not want to be a grey man.