Dealing with anger?

This post was written over the course of two weeks.

As I have mentioned in previous posts, trying to deal with the anger is the one emotion that I really struggle with and today, I’m angry; really angry.

Last night I found out that a former work colleague who I have always had a great deal of time and respect for is basically dying. She has been given weeks to live.  Jill is a really close friend of hers and is in absolute pieces about it all. She is completely devastated.  It’s the first main member of the “work crew” from those days (more than 20 years) to be leaving us. The lady concerned has always been so full of life, so vivacious, so funny and a big part of a lot of people’s lives, especially Jill’s.  Now, don’t get me wrong, if she didn’t like you, you knew about it but I always got on incredibly well with her and had plenty of laughs with her along the way.

What I’m angry about is the unfairness of it all. She only started feeling unwell towards the end of last year and in a matter of weeks, she has been told that she has a very rare and aggressive cancer that has spread and it’s terminal.  She is no age at all and is such a good person.  The primary cancer is bowel cancer, of which she had absolutely no symptoms (which is incredibly scary), and it has spread to her liver and her lungs.

This coupled with finding out earlier in the week that another work colleague from a different firm, died at the weekend, in his 30s in what appears at the moment to be somewhat mysterious circumstances.

Unfortunately, it has triggered not only anger about these two new events but also reignited my anger about losing Grandma last year.

As I am right in the middle of being angry, I wanted to try to get my feelings down on paper to share them. I am trying to do everything I know to alleviate the anger.  I started with the deep breathing exercises from my Mindfulness training.  No go today.  All I can do is think about my two former colleagues and Grandma.

Okay, let’s go for distraction.  What can I do?  Well, I do need to do the housework but where I’m angry, and also sad, I have absolutely no motivation to clean the kitchen floor or vacuum the living room, let alone get the ironing board out and tackle ironing mountain.  I’m tetchy.  I want to eat,  I want to self-harm.  I also feel that if I spoke to anyone, I would just scream and shout at them and that’s not fair on them.

Loud music. Loud, thumping, rock guitar music.  I’ll try that.

I start with “This Girl Gets Around” by Sammy Hagar.  I get through the first verse and the chorus and I’m skipping onto the next track as it’s not hitting the spot.  As my iPod is on shuffle, I have no idea what is coming next. “Breathe Easy” by Blue (don’t judge me for liking the odd boy band). Mmm.  It’s a sloppy love song but I listen to the whole lot with tears welling up but no outburst of crying.  I text Jill to see how she’s doing today and if she got any sleep last night.

Next up is Whitesnake’s “You’re Gonna Break My Heart Again”.  Whilst being a guitar shredding rock classic, it’s still a sloppy love song, so that gets skipped pretty quickly! And straight onto another one “The Extra Mile” by FM.  I would stick with this one but it’s all about getting through the hard times in a couple. Nope. That’s not happening.

There follows a whole section of songs that I skip.  I’m starting to think that I need to just get into the iPod and choose one and then “No one is to blame” by Howard Jones pops up.  Not very rock, no guitar shredding and definitely not one I could potentially dance around the house to.  However, it seems to be the perfect song.  No one is to blame for what has happened over the past few days. No one is to blame for my Grandma’s death.  I guess as human beings, we always want to be able to pass on our feelings onto someone or something that we can blame as it gives us a focus.  When you don’t have a focus or a target for those feelings, what do you do with them?  That’s when someone with BPD and/or Bipolar normally gets into a lot of trouble.  Jill has replied. She’s not doing very well. She said she had a good cry last night and cried a bit again this morning.

As I’ve mentioned previously, it’s times like these when I feel what I call “tetchy”. I want to eat, self-harm, I’m restless and I don’t know what to do with myself.  I’m sticking with the music approach so that I don’t self-harm.  I’ve still got some Christmas chocolate to make my way through so I have a back-up plan there.

Then, a whole series of songs start coming on that really underline how I’m feeling. Please feel free to google the full lyrics to these songs but I’ll give you snippets and how they relate. “Under the Sun” by Dare.  Absolutely spot on.  The first line of the song is “Nothing lasts forever, especially the things you always wanted to”. No explanation required. The first line of the chorus is “Under the Sun. Where can we run”?  All I want to do is run away from this anger, this feeling on my chest of being crushed under the weight of the anger, the pain.  The weight of the anger actually feels like a physical pain.

Then, “Sweet Home Alabama” by Lynrd Skynrd. Yes, that will do.  I find it a happy song. There is a smidge of dancing in my chair and touch of singing along, all the while desperately trying to dissipate my anger. It helps, albeit incredibly briefly.

“Renegade” by Daughtry is next. Total guitar shredding from start to finish. “Can’t wait another minute, I’m right here ready to run”.  That’s so true.  I want to run away so badly. I want to run away from how I feel now, my life, everything and everyone.  But, the logical side of me knows that you can’t really outrun this sort of pain or anger.  It wouldn’t matter where in the world I was, I would still feel the same.  Would anyone really notice if I disappeared?  I have thought about getting in the car and just going but I also know that my concentration is in no fit state to be getting behind the wheel of a car.

And then the one appears that makes the difference. “The Thing About Love” by Matt Terry. Lyrics within this song include “Just when you think you’re in control, it pulls you in and then lets you go”.  This has triggered streams and streams of tears and they’re not silent tears either.  It’s the guttural crying when you’re really releasing pain.  I can’t type any more, I have to go.

Two weeks later……..

It is with great sadness that I have to tell you that my work chum passed away at the end of last week. It had only been two weeks since we had found out and only three weeks since she had been told it was terminal.  It was that quick.  I don’t think we had the chance to really get our heads wrapped around it, let alone come to terms with it.

I have been reading back through what I had written when I was angry. I cried for about three hours after I stopped typing.  It just wouldn’t stop.  Many times I tried to catch my breath and tried to get myself together but it didn’t work.  My whole body was shaking with it.  Many times, I just cried out.  I just had to let the tears come and let them fall. They did.  I was completely exhausted at the end of it.  I tucked myself into bed and stayed under the duvet for around 12 hours.

Unfortunately, over the course of the next 24/36 hours, I also had a couple of “episodes” of vomiting and feeling faint and sweating.  The episodes didn’t last long enough for me to call for an ambulance but, added on to feeling of utter emotional exhaustion, it was a really long weekend.  The good news is I didn’t self-harm but I also didn’t speak to anyone or leave the house. I reverted to my usual course of action.  I retreated into my shell, into my house (into bed) and, as far as anyone was concerned who texted, I was just tired and having a “bad run” with the BPD.

I have been checking in on Jill daily since we got the news and Jill managed to get to see our work chum before she was moved to a hospice and before she deteriorated drastically.  Jill told me the other day that she had passed. She said that she’d had a cry but she did know it was coming and I think that she’s just grateful that she got to see our chum and tell her how much she was loved before it was too late.  I had a little cry on the phone to Mum when I spoke to her on Friday night.  Jill and I went out on Saturday to get some fresh air and distraction and I wanted to make sure that she was okay.

I’m just sad now.  Sad for everything and everyone.  I will, of course, be going to the funeral to pay my own respects and to support Jill.  For now, it’s back to distraction techniques, deep breathing, eating everything in my path and listening to good music.  I don’t know if crying for hours and retreating to my bed can be deemed as “dealing with the anger”.  The best I could do was, in the words of Shotgun Messiah, “Ride The Storm”.  Sometimes, that just has to do.