Harnessing anger

I spend a lot of time being angry and not a lot of time showing it. When I write, or when I want to write, I get rather emotional, and the productive, healthy way to work through that is to write. I pace, I talk to myself, I yell at my computer, I act out the things that I'm describing, etc. I do it and then I can return to being a normal human being and function as if I wasn't constantly imagining spaceships flying around the room while wizards fight on the table.

But when I can't write when I want to write, I get angry. And since I spend about 60% of my waking life either at work or doing work-related things, I get angry a lot. Not in the petulant, "Baww, I is bored and so I wish I could do stories," kind of way. Rather in the "My life is ticking away while I sit here and read an email debate about the number of characters that should be allowed in a software field and holy fuck no one fucking cares and I'm dying while I sit here and my brain capacity is slowly withering from neglect and routine and AAAAAAAAAA LET ME DO SOMETHING THAT MATTERS."

You could say that stories about wizards and spaceships don't matter. My reply to that is if you can't see how a story matters more than a software field, please tell me where your soul is buried because it's DEAD and you're pissing on the dreams you had when you were a kid but are too scared and apathetic to recognize what you've lost.

Also, fuck you. You'll be fat by 30 and will surround yourself with shiny objects that you think give you self worth.

So I sit at work and seethe. Like the saying goes, I like my job just barely more than I like being homeless. I could quit, but I can see little benefit to swapping mindless tedium that I'm familiar with for mindless tedium that I have to pay attention to. All that does is overwrites a little more of my brain with nonsense, and makes me a little more tired when I come home. Maybe I'd even start to get satisfaction out of my day job, which saps the need to find it in writing, so I'll try a little less and write a little less, and before I know it I'm 40 and looking forward to painting my new deck on the 2 weeks of vacation I get a year.

Hell no. I LIKE being angry at work. Keeps me focused. I just can't SHOW it. I have to laugh at the small talk jokes, and I have to pretend to care about component version numbers. And every once in a while I put on some music and remind myself that the alternative to being angry is being complacent. Complacency is stagnation; stagnation is death.

Fuck that. Onward.