Happy Before I’m 30: Anger

I used to be an angry person.
I don’t mean that I’d yell a lot or that I got physical, I mean that everything, damn near everything, was met with some level of disdain. Sarcasm was an easy tool to lean on, bitter remarks usually got a laugh, and I was quick to dismiss ridiculous ideas for the sake of seeming confident and proud. I don’t remember when I started doing it, but I do know that it was a dominant personality trait for a lot of middle school. It was who I was, but I truly had no idea. I thought I was just being funny.
In my high school, there were three Jamies. We all ran in the same social circle, so usually we just went by last names, but parents are lucky if they remember their kid’s friends at all, let alone a last name, so one day my friend Sharon let me know that her dad referred to me as “Angry Jamie.” When I first heard this it was kind of like being slapped in the face.
Angry Jamie. Not Jamie who was quick with a joke, or Jamie that played a lot of video games, Angry Jamie. That was how I was seen by one person, but it felt like this was the face I was giving the world. I was mean, to my friends, to my teachers, the only imprint that I had left on the world was that I was sometimes kind of a dick.
It was the first time I would reevaluate my life. I asked myself “If I got hit by a car tomorrow, would anyone even care?” and I honestly don’t think people would have at the time. Maybe my parents, and my friends would show up at the funeral, but I don’t think, in the grand scheme, people would have remembered me as having a great impact in their lives. My legacy would’ve been a hole in my family and a full page ad in the back of the yearbook using a picture where I was giving double finger guns.
I tried to change myself. I tried to be more compassionate, I tried to be more accepting of others. I started pretending I was dumber than I was so that when people said something ridiculous, I could talk it out with them and help them reach a better conclusion so it seems like we got there together as a team. Honestly, people started to like me more. People appreciated that I wasn’t rude or dismissive, that I cared when I didn’t have to, that I was a friend in their time of need. Most importantly, I started to like myself more. Maybe my anger was a way of acting out, a way of taking out my frustrations with myself on others, but for a while there I was happy with who I was.
Nowadays I’m probably a combination of the two. I would do absolutely anything for a friend in a time of need, even if we haven’t talked in awhile or we had bad blood between us, and I still pretend to be dumber than I am because, for some reason I do not understand, people are more quick to like a dumb guy, but those who become my friends tend to figure out the truth pretty quickly. I still have my sarcasm and my dismissiveness, but it usually only shows up when I’m talking to friends, people who know I don’t mean anything by it, and if they’re offended by something I say I make sure to apologize right away. It is hard to make me get truly angry, and I am thankful for that.
So it is with a bitter heart that I admit I am angry all the time these days.
I was betrayed. I was lied to. People have taken advantage of me in a time when I was my most sensitive and broke me as a person. I have spent the last month trying to rebuild myself out of the rubble, trying to find a semblance of who I used to be, and it is frustrating with how much of that appears to be anger.
The worst part of it all is that I’m mostly angry at myself. Angry for being fooled, for being tricked. Angry for trusting someone at face value, for telling my paranoia that it had no idea what it was talking about.
Angry for letting myself get hurt this much.
But there is a silver lining. Every day, more of the rubble is salvageable. Every day I can bury that anger deeper and deeper. It’ll never go away, it’ll never stop, but it can be hidden, it can be changed, it can be used to support the person I am going to be when all is said and done. It is a part of who I am, but I refuse to let it be what controls me forever.
Angry Jamie is dead, buried, but I can still learn a lot from that angry anime-obsessed misanthrope, so I’m glad he existed.
I love almost all of you, but one of you can go to hell.