On fucking up

Posted on November 14, 2003 in Hope and Joy Reading

Some of my friends are in angst that they regret. (One is under terrible hardship — this person should ignore the remarks that I am making because they don’t apply to the situation.) They feel overwhelming emotion. They feel guilt because what they thought they’d overcome gets the better of them.

I’m in the same place thanks to my not minding my health. I fucked up. I ate nearly three bags of Halloween candy over the course of a weekend. It made me irritable and I lost it.

These words come from Jay Carter’s Nasty People: How to Stop Being Hurt by them without stooping to THEIR level. I pray they give my friends in pain over their emotions the same hope and the same laugh that I got from them:

…I remember having road rage because someone cut me off, and then he gave me the finger! I chased him down the road driving about two inches from his bumper and he became scared. And that fear made me happy? I didn’t care that I was a psychologist. I didn’t care that I was more than fifty years old. My prefrontal lobe was trying to get through to me as my whole life became about being two inches from his bumper. Finally my prefrontal lobe broke through with “Jay, you teach anger management!” That finally got to me and I slowed down….I could have been anybody and that guy was still going to cut him off and give him the finger. There wasn’t anything personal about it.

I return to this passage whenever I feel I irretrievably blew it. There’s value in knowing that even this excellent anger management coach screws up sometimes, that he forgives himself, and that he keeps teaching his techniques and insights to other people.