That moment you hang up and your split personality reveals itself!
So, upon writing this, I noticed that the bulk of it contained a vivid, endless array of punctuated profanities and some enlightening sequenced string of words that describes an encounter with a person on the other side of a phone call. I’m sure you’ve witnessed an exclamatory moment fresh off the receiver which sounds oddly like this, “What a $%^& head!”, “I don’t give a @#$% about your *&^% life story, just give me the $%^&ing number!” and so on and so forth. Hence, a re-write was necessary.
It got me thinking about why we get so angry, especially with people we know nothing about or have no intention of knowing. What ignites this dark cumbersome emotion? I’ve understood it’s because of an endless scope of small reasons like, not being understood, not getting the thing we want, having someone or something attack our beliefs, maybe someone spoke about you behind your back or maybe you were called a derogatory term. It can also be because of big reasons, maybe losing everything you’ve worked hard for, being wrongly convicted for someone else’s crime or perhaps you’ve been on the receiving end of a lie; maybe you are Truman, ever think about that?
In any case, I gather anger stems from a central point as it shares a commonality of being hurt. I’m talking about an emotional hurt, the ego copped a coat hanger to the throat and now it must re-establish itself. A physical hurt not so much, for example you can stub your toe, but I don’t think anger usually ensues, it’d be a throbbing pain and then making note not to walk around with the lights off. A stub of the toe however may be the tipping point of an absolute outrage, that one grain of rice that pushed the basket over the edge in to the free-flowing abyss of rage.
Back to the phones and one’s sense of being hurt, I will paint a scenario. The person on the line is refusing to pay an overdue bill as you are calling in a reminder. They’re getting heated and giving all sorts of reasons as to why they won’t pay. Your blood starts to boil because you’ve followed the procedure they’ve agreed to in the first place. Your sense of structure is being hurt. You insist there have been many reminders and opportunities to pay but they deny everything and call you useless. Your sense of pride has been hurt and now your reputation is being hurt as well. You start to become short and sharp and deliver an ultimatum. They threaten to take the issue to a person of superiority and now your position is at risk of being hurt. Your position which is your income which supplements your way of life, now it’s your life that’s in the firing line. This is what’s going through your subconscious mind which has been trained this way from birth, even though there are so many ways this story can play out based on our thought process and the way we react.
We’ve been trained to live in fear and expect the worst and become defensive of our expectations. Who knows, maybe the person on the other end of the line has reached that critical point already and can not afford to pay because they lost their position, they too were ruled by fear and the emotion of anger. So, the perpetual loop continues, each of us fuelling our own deep seeded fears of being hurt to maintain everyone else’s perception of the self and how you think you want to be seen by others.
** Trying to understand stuff