Angry Arani…recognising if you have an anger problem and doing fuck all about it

So it came to my attention recently [and when I say “recently”, I mean that I’ve known about this my entire life but could never be bothered actually doing anything about it…much like most personal development I’m encouraged to undertake, it’s all shit I already know and if I could be bothered changing it would mean that I’d be this super awesome person and that’s just unfair on the rest of the population, so instead I stay as I am, warts and all…] anyway it turns out that I might have a tiny, weeny, little problem with what some people might call ‘anger issues’.  [“Oh what?” I hear you say….yep as hard as it is to believe, I’ve been told that I possibly am a “bit too quick to resort to anger” as a first response…well this is what the sales assistant told me after I went off at her for rearranging the clothes on the rack that I had just been looking at…C’MON! Does she think that I’m some sort of beast, incapable of looking at an item, contemplating it (then looking at the price tag and thinking “hell no”) then neatly placing it back on the rack in the exact same position? It’s insulting and she knew it!….]

Now in an awesome world, Jack Nicholson would come bursting through my door to bait me into raising my temper, I’d then make some overacted monologue including over-strewn facial expressions because I get so angry which then results in me falling into a body of water of some sort and/or possibly some animal or child biting me on the ass, then Jack would teach me a valuable lesson about anger management, then we’d all have dinner at Hooters [let’s face it…as much as you may tell all your friends you hate Adam Sandler movies, you wish your life was an Adam-Sandler-Movie-(pre Spanglish of course)].

However in the real world, there’s no Jack Nicholson and all I have to manage my anger is my greater to desire to comply [or at least seem to be complying] with social norms.

You see, internally, for the slightest slight against me or anyone in “ma crew” I get so riled up that sometimes I feel that there’s an extra-Earth magnetic field that operates around me just trying to hold me back and stop me from “bringing the thunder”. However, even though I might feel like an erupting volcano, externally I exude calmness – mostly because social norms dictate that I should keep my inner-Hulk to myself and instead I opt for rolling my eyes or mumbling obscenities under my breath….you know because that will REALLY show them…pfft so not fun!

Put another way….

How I see myself:

How I actually look:

[that was just the best exercise in Google Image Searching history – getting to search “cute pug puppies”….eeeeeee! So cute!!!!]

However, whilst I am purporting to be this internally angry but externally saintly person, I should point out that there have been a few [and when I say “few” I mean “many”] occasions where my inner angry self has miraculously found its voice. Such instances have included:

• When a big, burly guy at a pub bumped into me accidentally causing my drink to spill. I then managed to instinctively channel my inner ‘big, burly guy’ and shove the guy back and told him to “watch where the fuck he was going”. He then turned around and was so large that he didn’t see me…but he did see my lovely husband who was standing nearby and thought that he was the one who shoved him [to be fair, the fault was not all mine, as I just assumed that much like my WWE wrestling heroes, we were playing tag team and I had just tagged out for a ‘break’];
• A restaurant once told me that they didn’t have any spoons for me to eat my takeaway soup with, so I “apparently” “threw” the hot soup back at them…I say ‘apparently’ because I kinda blacked out with rage once I found out I had soup but no spoon; and
• Netball/any competitive sport. What I lack in skill I make up for in obnoxious behaviour. My netball exploits have included being sent off on about eight occasions for “playing netball like an AFL match” and I may or may not have once dislocated another girl’s shoulder because I was ‘going for the ball’ but the umpire said I hip and shouldered her… Once in a community netball match, played by local members of the Sri Lankan community in Melbourne, I managed to get so angry that I told the entire crowd of 120 close friends of my parents to go “fuck themselves” then double birded them….I was 14.

But when you really examine these instances, they aren’t that cool. I just come off looking like a freak [and in the case of the 14 year old me swearing at the entire community, possibly the reason why I was never invited to play with my fellow Sri Lankan-Australian young people]. I feel like a Mike Tyson stuck in a somewhat typical female frame…which does not convey how angry I feel.

But is it so wrong that ultimately, all I wish for is world peace and the opportunity to tell someone to “get outta ma grill mother fucker” really loudly? [yes I would like to momentarily misappropriate African American culture because I believe this culture has  the best comebacks to deal with the situations in which I find myself getting angry]. For once, I just want someone to look at me, cop an Arctic Death Stare, then see the size of my guns and back away….HOW AWESOME WOULD THAT BE??? I don’t want to be huge, I just want to have a relative presence that even huge guys would be like “woah, ok man you’re cool, you’re cool…here’s my ice-cream”. Just once.