I screwed up at work today. Something tiny. Something minute. A simple mistake, that did not cause any issues but a few seconds of laughter in the room. I was in a new situation and unprepared. A simple mixup. Nothing bad. And yet…
The incident once again made me realize a change I have unergone. I used to be angry. Very angry. As a teenager I was permanently boiling with burning hot hatred. The aggression I felt targeted everything. School. Teachers. My Peers. Society. Mankind and the world itself. But unlike other teenagers (I assume, judging by my own observations) I never acted upon those agressions. I kind of always must have known, how pointless they were and that the way things are was as much everybodies fault as it was nobodies.
There was an incident, that somehow got stuck in my mind. When I was young, maybe twelve (plus minus three years, I really have no clue), my mom sat me down at our kitchen table to learn with me for school. That’s something my parents did not make a regular occurence with me, since they deemed me self-responsible and smart enough to do my learning by myself (which was the honorable thing to assume… and which I simply wasn’t). As I sat there and wrote, I became angry. Very angry. I wanted to yell and scream in frustration and tear down all, what forced me to perform this useless, senseless task. When I was done writing (it might have been a dictation, which would mean I was probably even younger than I thought) I told my mother, how fed up I was. She responded: “So, what would you like to do about it? And why don’t you?”.
So I got up. I yelled. I cursed. I tore the piece of paper to shreds, flinging it at her, while she just sat there and watched. And I started to feel stupid. And then I had to laugh. And she had to laugh too. The rage had gone up in smoke.
“How inspirational”, one might say. “How good to see the error of your ways at such a young age”, one might think. But there is a bit more to this story: What the rage left behind was a vast void. An overwhelming sensation of emptiness and helplesness. No amount of screaming and raging would ever fix this world, and, even worse: could ever fix me. The people I had perceived targets, the ones I had blamed, were not trying to do me harm. They did what they thought was good or, even worse, what they had to do. They were as helpless as me. And it slowly dawned upon me: Whatever felt like it was driving me insane, it wasn’t them. It was something else. Something i could not fight and could not harm.
And as I silently sat at the meeting table as the laughter died away, I could’ve gotten mad. At the people laughing. At my boss, for not preparing me for a meeting I was thrown into like into icy water. I could’ve gotten mad at plenty of things. But I simply bowed my head, bowed towards my own failure and stupidity. Which, undeniably, was the right thing to do. I had reacted without thinking, spoken without being aware. And I paid the price.
Everyone else would’ve shrugged away that awkward moment. And I kind of managed to do the same (which would not have been possible a mere years ago). But it still left this empty sensation. The same I had as a child, realizing how it was not me against them, but each and every one of us against ourselves: A fight I have been losing each and every minute, day and year. I sometimes wish I could get revive that anger, that gave me passion and purpose. But now, when I do get angry it’s cold and calculated. It it never even remotely manages to cover up the emptiness because I know: The only thing I could change is me. And that’s, what I am incapable of.
allthatswrongwithme 