Patience

I think I've found one of those wonderful hints that explains how I got here (here meaning my current state of being). It relates to patience.

I used to be pretty impatient. I was a little fireball in a lot of ways as a kid, feeling free to emotionally explode about any number of meaningless situations. People who can get really angry, and do so frequently (or used to), understand that there's a satisfying element to 'freaking out'. In the short term. And when I was younger, little things were more dramatic and it was the perfect canvas to improve my freaking out.

Somewhere along the line, I started to get a lot of negative response to my abrasive behavior, and I did a U-turn. I flipped inwards and became Switzerland (neutral - or at least, it used to be). Instead of getting angry about things, I either stayed completely opinon-less, or I ignored the situation/allowed myself to be distracted. This is the source of my lack of focus, I'd wager.

Speaking of distraction:

 This is what I came up with when I searched for 'neutral'

Awesome.

Recently I've had a bit of butting heads with someone in my life, and although it added a bit of stress, it was beneficial because it helped illuminate this U-turn that I made Way-Back-When.

What I've extrapolated is that now, not only do I try to avoid angry outbursts, but I work hard to keep a situation completely placid - I'm a peacekeeper of sorts. But what it really does is allow anger to bubble up inside of me and not get released when another of my previous ilk tries to aggress themselves all over the situation (probably not a real word). It also usually doesn't solve the problem.

Worst of all, I seem opinion-less when in fact I have a lot to say.

I wrote a blog entry a little bit ago about my bubbling anger and how I was learning to control it. That was about controlling my anger when its presence was unnecessary in my body. In this instance, it was acceptable to feel anger, and it needed to be released in some fashion or another.

In speaking about my concern with said person the other day, I realized that I was stumbling over my explanation of how I was feeling because I was so infuriated inside. I was trying to be completely fair and rational, but also trying to express the frustration I was feeling. This caused an internal battle, since my anger was too irrational and my approach was too neutral.

Remember the Mr. Men?!
Nostalgia.... 

Ultimately, I got my point across and the situation was resolved. Pat on the back, release of stress, and we're back on the low-stress, happiness road. So how does patience play into this? Though it didn't stand in full confidence this time around, I'm ready for next time. 

Patience can act as an objective filter, allowing anger to emerge in a timely way so as to allow a semi-coherent request to be spoken. Anger, unchecked, can lead to accusation, but allowing it to formulate into a request for the anger-inducing situation to change is preferred. 

A person speaking with this 'checked' anger will speak in a truly powerful voice.

Some of the things I write are shocking to me. I read them and I think, "Really? No kidding. I think most other people learned this when they learned how to first engage in a conversation - when they were 3. People reading this must see it as a flowery way of stating the obvious."

"Twice the amount of a singular digit, combined with twice the amount of an additional singular digit has a sum equal to the amount of four singular digits."

Or...

2+2=4.

See the predicament? Ah, well. Perhaps I am a little late in the game and perhaps I'm working on words coming out of me more than having really intellectual thoughts to write about. Who can say. I'm sure everyone questions what emerges from them on a daily basis, though, and I won't let that deter me.

Persistence and determination - gotta make better acquaintances with those chaps. I've thought we were friends, but it was actually stubbornness in disguise.

Little Miss Stubborn