monkey nonsense

i have a pretty bad temper. i think what makes it worse is the fact that i usually keep everything to myself. ever since i was little, i’ve done this. i remember exploding a lot in early elementary school and being sent to the counselor. (stone mill elementary school grads- who remembers mrs. forrest, her dolphin puppet and her lunch bunch?!) thought lots of why i am the way i am…. perhaps it was the way i was raised (my family doesn’t seem to share emotion a lot). my sister doesn’t seem to have this problem, or perhaps she does but since she’s just always been more even tempered than i to begin with, it’s just harder to tell? i actually think going to the counselor in elementary school screwed me over more than it helped. on one hand, i got better at hiding my frustration and temper (so i could get out of “lunch bunch” bah!)… but on the other hand, the problem always was that i had no good way of letting out my frustration/temper. learning to hide my frustration and temper better only made it worse… just stored up my frustration/anger for a huger explosion to come later.

i can’t tell whether things have gotten better or worse now. i don’t explode as much and in fact, have a few strategies now to help:

• the meh! strategy – sometimes i stay unusually calm. this doesn’t go over too well… like at work, i think my manager kind of freaked out that i was so calm about nothing working after weeks of trying. i’m not sure what triggers the meh-ness… but all of a sudden, i’ll just shut down.
• the babblebabblebabble strategy – i actually try to let out my frustration/anger. however, this usually results in 1. bombarding a friend with a bunch of incoherent IMs… sometimes the friend isn’t even there or 2. composing an incoherent entry on xanga/blog. i think this strategy (out of the ones i use) is the closest to healthy. oddly, it’s the one that i use the least because it seems to help the least. i think because i make almost no sense when i try, no one really understands what the heck i’m talking about.
• the eating strategy – i eat a lot. this has got to be the least healthiest. one time chubacca was trying to listen to me and apparently, i was too busy stuffing my mouth (i wasn’t even aware of it!) that she couldn’t understand anything i was trying to say. that’s when i first figured out i eat when stressed. for awhile at work, i was eating 2 lunches AND snacking throughout the day. that was no good.
• the drumming strategy – newly renamed strategy. i bought the taiko drum master game for ps2. dude, that game is so therapeutic, it’s awesome!! similar ideas would be to rip paper (which i used to do when i was a kid), jump around like a maniac, play tennis, or do some other “destructive” thing

the reason i suddenly thought of all this? ’cause none of these strategies are working right now. >:O grrr, any suggestions?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 2nd, 2005 at 5:27 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.