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Lack of patience
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Over the weekend, I ran out of patience. I'm not sure what caused it...perhaps a combination of insufficient sleep, trouble relating to a grumpy four-year-old, or something else...but for whatever reason, I bottomed out on Saturday night. Suddenly, I had *had it with everything*, and found myself in a foul mood with a nasty headache.
This is not my natural state, and it's not one I like. I'm used to having a certain ability to deal calmy and cooly with anything irritating which arises. Normally, I can keep my limbic system at bay long enough to defuse any potential explosive response to things which bug me. I've actually found that if I can hold off blowing up, I can see how the person who just annoyed me didn't mean to do so--the misunderstanding or miscommunication becomes clear, and I can deal with that, rather than going on the attack. In the vast majority of cases, conflicts are due to miscommunication and misunderstanding, rather than real meanness and malice.
On Saturday night, though, my capacity to handle things in that way suddenly bottomed out, and I became sulky, sullen, and grumpy. In such cases, my understanding and loving wife (God bless her) takes the kids and encourages me to retreat to the bathroom with the Opinion page of the Times and a novel or game manual and stay there for half an hour, to recharge my coping circuits. True to form, she came through for me on Saturday night, despite having had a not-so-easy day herself. I don't deserve this woman.
This time, though, the recharge didn't last very long. By Sunday afternoon, I was down again, and I am still today. As I said, this is not normal for me, and I don't like it. I don't like what it says about me--that underneath the assumed persona, I'm really a grumpy man who'd rather be sitting by himself on a toilet. It's why I never drink enough to get drunk--who would I be if all my inhibitions were chemically eradicated?
I only have one clue. In sixth grade, I went through a period of a few weeks when I behaved in a truly reprehensible fashion. I harrassed some of my female classmates, making some unbelievably lewd comments, in order to gain the approval of my male classmates. I was truly a jerk. Eventually, a female friend told me that I used to seem like a nice, quiet guy, but not any more. Hearing her say that altered the whole course of my life, and was a big part of what caused me to become determined never to act that way again.
I think that I fear that, if I got drunk, I'd find that under it all, I'm still a vulgar-minded, cruel sixth grader.
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