anger – hannah ananas

Old crap

(Forgive the language, please a it just seemed quite appropriately used here.)

There’s a lot of junk that comes with getting old. I don’t merely mean old-er. I mean old. There are lots of little hassles and troubles involved with getting older, with aging as a whole. But getting old has a uniquely stressful aspect: As the body and mind age, they often tend to revert towards babyhood, and adults are not prepared to take care of a 90-year-old toddler who not only can make others believe he is competent and allowed to be out alone, but can get out alone the moment a back is turned or a corner is rounded.

At some point, when ZK was still on my childhood, I was talking with my dad about the idea of grown kids wiping their parents’ butts as the parents grew too old to do it themselves. I asked him if he expected us to wipe his butt one day. He, quite seriously, said he absolutely did not expect it. I was surprised. He said he expected us to hire someone else to do it. I was even more shocked. You wouldn’t want your own family to care for you? And his answer was a firm, confident, and clear, ‘No.’

I didn’t understand it back then, not really. He had said something about hatred or resentment, but it didn’t make sense to me. After seeing the struggle with someone in my own family lately, and now having to deal with it firsthand myself, I understand what my dad had meant. He didn’t want us to resent him int he final years of his life. He wanted us to be able to love him and be happy with him in those years. Yes, it is very loving to care physically for someone, but it isn’t always happy or easy doing that. There can be a massive buildup of very negative memories in that relationship right at the very end of the old person’s life, leaving the younger person grateful of the death and, necessarily, then feeling horrible for being relieved and glad for it.

It is hard dealing with an old, sick person. Getting almost no sleep in order to help with constant bathroom wake-ups throughout the night, cleaning up bodily filth that ended up all over clothes and the floor and almost none in the toilet, forcing down medicines or vitamins or healthy foods or water just to help heal an illness or relieve the pains, changing a diaper on a fully grown person who resists it, despite having just walked around half-naked in public and not knowing it… that and so much more is very hard to handle. What’s harder is handling it all and not, in some way, resenting the person for whom one is doing it all. It’s so hard not to take it personally, especially when that person yells at you for who knows what…

So, I get it. I wouldn’t want my kids to have their final memories of and with me be ones of near-constant frustration and anger and heartbreak. Having and unrelated person come in to take care of the old person goes much further than one might think, for all members of the family. I never would have thought that before doing it myself, seeing it happen myself, twice now. And I am all the more grateful for the people in this world who do choose to take up that role in society. Those caretakers make more than a little difference. They don’t just do the grunt work or the dirty work of the situation. They can truly heal the situation. They completely transform what likely would have happened without them, and all the relationships involved for the better.

Thank you, all you who take care of the old people for their families. You help more than you could know.

Thank you, God, for these people.

Post-a-day 2023

Ouch

Pieces of him in pieces of me. Pieces of him where they shouldn’t be.

That’s from the book After You by Jojo Moyes. The character is speaking of the rust-colored blood staining the edges around her fingernails, the cracks on her fingers. It is not her own blood, but the blood of the man she has come to love more dearly than she ever knew she could love another again in her life. He has been shot twice while attempting to save a person’s life. The gang members who had caused the injury he was attempting to remedy did not want him to succeed, and so had shot him.

…

This is all too real for me. People argue and complain about privilege. And it makes me sick. Why must we as a society constantly ignore the fact that education kind of is everything? We see it evidenced over and over again in society that a certain degree of poor education produces a significantly increased output of life-threatening, of disrespectful, and of dangerous behavior. And as a cycle that runs on a generational repeat.

There is no “us” and “them” in life, not really. We make that whole concept up. There are people and there are people and there are people – before all else, we are people. And yes, there are loads of other species out there, but they aren’t the ones running around hurting people each and every day. People are. In fact, it also happens to be people who run around hurting those other species on this planet, too. In a way, people kind of suck.

But that’s when we are at our worst. With proper education, which includes a certain level of true love, we get to be the best versions of ourselves. And those are the versions who heal the world.

But, sometimes, they’re the ones who just get shot by the worst versions who never learned to understand that there is no “us” and “them”, and who never learned honest love, who never learned how to function beyond their fears and their ego-centric view on life*. If we learn minimal emotional states, we live in minimal emotional states. If we learn only one, negative point of view, we live in that single negative point of view. If we are only ever taught struggle and stress and that the world is out to get us, then we will live our entire lives believing to our very cores that there is no other way in life…

*I don’t say that meanly. It’s a genuine psychological thing, where a person is not able to view the world but from one, ego-centric angle, due to a lack of emotional and psychological development… due to high stress throughout childhood and poor education.

Post-a-day 2020

Struggle for love

Some miserable stuff went down today, where one party was absolutely irresponsible regarding its actions and how they affected those immediately involved in the situation, and that party also acted from an irrational and ego-centered place of anger and misplaced hurt.

Naturally, I was the party who found itself utterly unable to breathe normally, was gasping for breath through tears and a fully red and wet face, and who almost actually puked several times from the intense crying… it was very rough and very rough.

But why I share about this is because of one part of one party’s exchange with me…

She said, “I wish you could un-hear all of it.”

I asked her, “Is that what you recommend? That I un-hear it, if I can?”

“Yes.”

And something about that idea was beautiful to me…

What’s more, now, hours later, I’m doing rather well, allowing my psyche – is that who handles these things? – to release the words from my memory, and free me from their harsh, un-loving attack that hit so hard and hurt so much at the time of their issue.

It is, basically, the opposite of going over a past conversation in my head continuously, analyzing it over and over again… I, instead, allow myself to let it go, and to focus on the love I received from the party who wished me the ability to un-hear such mean reaction… I have been able to embrace the love of the scenario, and to release the rest…

Just as my tears and intense sobs released something powerful of their own – my eyes are actually still tingling, though they have been dry for hours – and my body relaxed at the rubbing of my back and the cool water in my mouth and throat, so my mind has been allowing the bad to release itself slowly but surely, and the love to take hold and envelope the mind.

Anyway… please, remember to love, okay? A threat of any kind can go much further for the person receiving it than we might ever imagine… please, be kind and act with love… eve if that only means that you pause before responding, so that you do not shoot out fear or anger as the immediate response, but you can respond with composure instead… and, therefore and ultimately, with love.

Sending love to you all tonight especially. 😉 May you love yourself truly, such that you are able to learn to love the world around you, no matter who is there in it.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can totally make me cry hard core for a while… whatever the case, though, be is sticks or stones or threats or poems, I shall heal, and I will continue to love myself, and, thereby, the world, too. 😉

Post-a-day 2020

When we are down

‘Why couldn’t you just let me be happy?’ I believe that is the question she asks her friend Betty, who has recently been incredibly harsh, before walking off, leaving Betty sitting speechless and alone on the steps (“Mona Lisa Smile”). At the time, Betty was in a marriage she had just begun – with incredibly high hopes and expectations – , but that was falling to extreme pieces. Her husband clearly did not love her, and was rather uninterested in her in general, but she didn’t know what to do. All she could do was continue her school work, and unintentionally let out her suppressed panic in the form of nastiness toward her friends.

As I thought more and more tonight about this little scenario that is within the film “Mona Lisa Smile”, I began to relate it directly to my own life. Betty couldn’t let her friend Connie be happy, because Betty was so miserable. How could she help herself against being bitter and angry that Connie’s love life was blooming, when her own – one she had until very recently believed to be perfect – was falling apart? It made perfect sense to me. And so I wondered where I have done that in my own life (or at least wanted to do it).

Talking with a friend the other night, she was sharing how much she had loved her Japan job. It made me want to be angry, because I was miserable in my job in Japan. What does one have to do with the other?! I found myself asking… myself. So what if she enjoyed her job? That’s a wonderful thing! And yet the desire persisted every so gently, to the point where I still have to let it go over and over again (though it is much easier than it was at first). This is the same as Betty Warren’s problem, really. I was unhappy, so it was almost wrong of someone else to be happy in that comparable situation. (I’m not saying this as fact, of course, but as the feeling behind it all for myself.)

When I have been making not-very-much money in recent years, I grow annoyed at the former classmates who are buying their wonderful, large houses. Not having a significant other (or anything similar, beyond a (married) best friend across the ocean), I sometimes feel sick when I see yet another engagement announced on Facebook by people in my age group. And the list goes on for all sorts of things… wonderful pets, trips to beautiful or cool places, exercise…

While my initial responses were similar to pure anger and jealousy (as if their getting a house or getting married has any deprivation effects on my life), upon seeing or hearing about the various happy events in other people’s lives, they have developed to a calmed state of slight discomfort and longing instead. (It just felt wrong to be angry at such things, so I made a genuine effort to look at what was behind it all for me, and to manage a healthy response for myself, as well as for the people who are celebrating – I don’t want to be sending them angry vibes, ya know?) 😛 But that changes nothing from the Betty Warren within me – it still takes an effort to allow others to be happy in a situation in which I am not happy. Granted, my responses are much improved and I do not shed bitterness and nasty comments the way she did. However, the discomfort still remains for the situations.

I don’t know what I wanted to say about this all – I think I just wanted to say that. That I can relate very easily to poor Betty Warren and her inability to let her friend be happy in an area of life where she, herself, was so unhappy (despite what likely was a genuine love for her friend and desire for her friend to be happy in life). We do that in our own lives quite often, it feels. From the greatest to the smallest of things, when we are unhappy with a specific aspect of our own lives, we struggle to see others be happy in that same aspect of their lives. I don’t want to give out a solution to this behavior – I just want us to notice that we have it, really. Simply noticing it, bringing awareness to it, makes more of a difference than we could imagine, anyway. Betty seemed utterly shocked when Connie accused her with the question. To that point, even if she had realized what she was doing, it is likely that she was unable to admit it to herself…

Yeah… I want to look even more into the smallest nooks and crannies of my life to see where else I have been in this rut-based hatred/anger in the past. I want to let all of that go. And I want to be free of it all for the future, and to be able to wish others well with ease, no matter my own current situation.

Post-a-day 2018

…holding out for a (anger) management position…

“The thing about giving yourself a pep talk is that secretly you know it’s all bullshit.”
That’s a quote from a Sophie Kinsella book (Remember Me?, I think). Today has kind of been a day where I got to live it. Though, since I already knew this, any effort to give myself a pep talk was dropped almost before I started. It’s not that I actually think life as I know or want it is coming to an end – indeed, the good stuff has only just begun. But knowing that has almost no effect on the feelings of total misery and hopelessness that arise when I hit places like my current one. Sure, I accept then, thank the feelings for sharing, and then move on to what’s next, but they really do suck when they’re busy hanging around.

I have been experiencing another one of these odd feelings of waiting lately. It is as though there is a set amount of time I must go before I find a job again, and then, after that time period, everything will fall into place perfectly, and the waiting will have been totally worth the misery.

However, when I get these feelings, I always have to take a first step, be proactive somehow, in order for things to fall into place. As I see myself growing more angry and on-edge each day, I find it more and more difficult to do anything productive, anything that could help with that first step. I even have some plans for that step, yet here I lie, miserable and without having taken any action for them today. I guess I would have to give up the idea that this isn’t where I want to be right now, living at my mom’s. I moved out years ago, intentionally, and had no intentions of returning for residency. Not for desire to be independent or anything of the sort, but because I don’t want to live the lifestyle of this house… at all. Nor do I want to be treated like a kid again, as my mother does automatically most of the time whenever I am here. Any time she has visited me in my own home, or anywhere else when I’ve not been living with her, she has treated me differently. Sure, she’s always still a mom, and fussed at me for this or that. However, it is not like how a parent talks to a child, how it is now.

Anyway, I have some things to get started with doing. I want to live elsewhere, and yet here I am – this is what is available to me currently. I want a good job that I love, and here am I, without employment. So, little by little, I guess I have some steps to take, including figuring out what they are. I know I’ll be all right, I really do. It has just been mentally rough lately, and I so want to be finished with this near-constant anger, annoyance, and sense of hopelessness. Guess it’s well about time I chat with Jude, hmm? (I’ll start there, and see what I can brainstorm in that mental conversation.)
P.S. Bonus points to you, if you know what movie helped to inspire the title of this post. It’s a family favorite of ours. My cat even watched it with me after I first got him. And he really did watch it. It was kind of weird that he did, really, but also totally cute.

Post-a-day 2017