23.

Not knowing what to do with a truly huge amount of anger can have some pretty negative effects on someone’s personality. Following the loss of my friend I was a lot of things, but what I hid behind and fueled was my anger. I denied that I was angry, insisted that I was torn up, sad, and missed him, but I was not angry. After all I had been taught from a young age that god only took people when it was there time, and that he had a plan for everything, so being mad at God was only foolish, and if I couldn’t be mad at him who could I be mad at?

This was the question that occupied the primary processing time on my conscious mind for the next few years. I tried to be angry at the doctors, but I couldn’t maintain that because they were nameless and faceless, and besides I truly believed they had done everything in their power to heal him so the fire I was trying to light under them refused to kindle. I tried to turn it on my fast dwindling number of friends as I purposely drove them away, but I knew it was me leaving them not the other way around. So I ended up turning on myself.

Hating yourself is a complex business. You have to find new reasons and new things to hate in order to keep the rage going, and when you use that rage to hide from the depression that’s on the other side of it you have to keep going. I wont get into too much of what went through my mind, much if it truly absurd but I think an example may be useful. It started with a constant beat up session about how fake of a person I was, how I was play acting at being a good little Christian boy, how I was dressing the part of one of the cool kids when I was just an outcast (self imposed), and why couldn’t I just be the piece of crap I really was? This led to me changing everything about the way I dressed and interacted with people around me, hiding several of my habits, telling lies to friends about things that didn’t matter, only talking to perfect strangers about things that really bothered me (yes I was that person for a time). I would change myself completely for a time, then get fed up with how fake and stupid I was, how much of a lie I was living, how ugly and horrible I was becoming, and change everything again.

During this time I starting getting picked on and beat up by several of the juniors at the school, which gave me a pretty good place to seat my rage for awhile. I would be all smiles and jokes whenever anyone talked to me and when I was alone I would be angry, burying it a little deeper every time, forcing the smiles and jokes to the surface, getting more and more ridiculous in with groups of people, making sure I was the class clown. Everybody knew me and like me, but I would never hang out with any of them after the bell rang. I can remember starring at myself in the mirror for nearly an hour at a time my face set in hate and murmuring all the reasons I didn’t deserve to live.

Eventually I worked up the nerve to talk about the anger I had with a few people older than myself, and inevitably they would tell me I was actually angry with God. I refused this for the longest time. My pastor told me I was wrestling with God, digging my heals in and refusing to listen and understand (I have this problem with many authority figures lower on totem than God). Slowly it wore me down until I did a test run on aiming all the pent up fury towards him. When I did I found it flaring white hot, I didn’t understand why he would do such a thing to him, me his family all our friends, it wasn’t right, or just, or fair, and didn’t seem like an act from a loving God. I don’t know if you would call what I did prayer, it most consisted of me screaming at God while I was driving around when no one could hear me. It took a long time but eventually the anger started to cool and I started making strides to understand that I would never really know why he was taken.

When that anger started to fade it let the flood gates open on a whole host of emotions that had been completely ignored for years. All the sadness I never dealt with was back like it was the week after we lost him. I got very depressed. I think this is when the comfort eating really began. I had been sneaking (so I thought) off to fast food joints and to get soda for a long time, but things got truly out of control when I started getting a little relief from eating, or having a coke or three. For awhile it was no problem, but as I got older and less active I think the results became obvious.

I think whats so hard to this day about that entire scenario is that I still have to deal with all the ghosts of that time. My temper is still one of my main problems, depressions is something itching at the back of my head right next to anxiety and a huge lack of confidence, my faith has taken a hit that on darker days I am not sure I can recover from. However, as I’ve been exercising control over one very specific part of my, namely my weight, I believe it’s time to start working on the rest of these problems, not simply because each one could drag me back down into weight gain, but because of the person I want to become, the man I have to be for my wife and child.