Yesterday, I felt like White Lava.
At first, I mistook this boiling, volcanic feeling for the familiar, snarly, vengeful Red Lava rage that has created so many fascinating-yet-catastrophic footnotes in my personal history. What’s the difference between rage and anger? Anger occupies you brain. Rage consumes as it burns you and everything around you alive. I’m used to that feeling. It’s followed me all my life and, at times, has even served as a comforting friend . The pattern is as follows (perhaps some of you can relate): 1. someone does something that triggers me. 2. I see red. 3. A honed fire ball settles right in my belly and the longer it gestates, the more limbs and teeth it grows. 4. (Option A). If unreleased, a passive-aggressive (but mostly aggressive) hole burns right through the ground I stand on and everyone falls through. 5.(Option B) If released (as is more usual), a sharp and unrelenting targeting of the perceived offending party takes place. My jaw unhinges as demons issue forth, vomiting streams of acid that eat through relationships, jobs, projects, cars, electronic equipment, various kinds of junk-food, and me. This blows all on its own, mind you. But add to it the residual after effects of the necessary damage control (that obviously falls to me) and it straight up sucks. Remember Dave Chapelle's “When Keepin’ it Real Goes Wrong.”? Yeah...it's kind of like that. Fortunately, I haven’t made federal prison…yet.
Red lava is largely motivated by personal issues, paranoia, unfounded fears and a constant underlying desire to rip things into bloody red chunks. Red Lava is monochromatic; A myopic blend of egotistical proportions. It assumes that the offending party in any given situation is someone other than myself. It also assumes that any person perceived as an offending party is made up only of things that piss me (and obviously if me, then everyone else) off, and that they’re not dynamic, thinking, feeling , sentient beings who are just as complicated as I am. This eliminates any motivation for compassion, kindness and patience, thusly erasing any reflections on the wisdom of not speaking or thinking ill of others (gossip). How convenient. Except not...because it actually just sucks. I loathe this version of myself.
It’s not that I’m hooked on drama. I actually despise drama. It’s boring, particularly if it doesn’t involve me. It’s just that I’m so bloodthirsty that I seem to cause drama. Someone will say something and my brain glitches, interpreting sixteen different meanings. If It's a Red day, all sixteen of them register as insults. This then sprawls out of my head and into my consensual reality, where it plants explosive devices and booby-traps all over my world. I could seriously start a fight with my own reflection (come to think of it, I have. I caught myself looking at myself the wrong way while flossing. I punched the mirror and then there were so many pieces of mirror that it was like I multiplied and was mocking myself several times over. It was a mess.) Even when I’m genuinely happy, underneath it all is a readiness to shred flesh at a moment’s notice. (Humorously insane sidebar: At one point, I found myself legitimately worried that I was a reincarnation of Henry the VIII ).
It’s not that I’m hooked on drama. I actually despise drama. It’s boring, particularly if it doesn’t involve me. It’s just that I’m so bloodthirsty that I seem to cause drama. Someone will say something and my brain glitches, interpreting sixteen different meanings. If It's a Red day, all sixteen of them register as insults. This then sprawls out of my head and into my consensual reality, where it plants explosive devices and booby-traps all over my world. I could seriously start a fight with my own reflection (come to think of it, I have. I caught myself looking at myself the wrong way while flossing. I punched the mirror and then there were so many pieces of mirror that it was like I multiplied and was mocking myself several times over. It was a mess.) Even when I’m genuinely happy, underneath it all is a readiness to shred flesh at a moment’s notice. (Humorously insane sidebar: At one point, I found myself legitimately worried that I was a reincarnation of Henry the VIII ).
The crux of this little intro (and yes, were I writing an academic paper, this would have been at the beginning, but it’s a blog, so deal with it) is this: I’m sick to death of Red-Lava. I’m sick of the egoist enslavement that I never escape when the tide hits, because when it hits I’m physically and emotionally crippled. My body boils and my brain turns into such a chaotic cesspool of violence and destruction that I can’t see around or over it to clarity. Remember in Peter Pan, where they say that fairies only have room for one emotion at a time? Yeah… it's like that. I fall into a dark pit for days or weeks on end, accomplishing nothing but an overdramatic parody of myself ; listening to Nick Cave, smoking clove cigarettes and drinking tons of espresso. I know, right!? So lame. So the urgency to emancipate that vehement ire exactly when it arrives is sort a borderline, emergency health issue. In other words, If don't let the fire out it burns me from the inside. Also, yes, It feels damn good to sear someone in the heat of the moment. But the thing is, once I come back down from the bone-fire-ish high of sacrificially slaughtering and devouring their soul in a ritual frenzy of crazy… I…um… kind of miss them. Then no amount of barfing up the chunks and trying to paste them back together will ever fully mend the situation. Sadly, this has happened so many times in my life i'm pretty desensitized. Or rather, because I had relegated this interesting little personality quirk of mine to "something i have to deal with for the rest of my life because i have no idea how to fix it", I have a default system in place that shuts down any emotions and feelings of regret or pain around the aftermath of this pattern, therefore allowing me to sleep soundly. That is, I had them in place, until yesterday.
After so many years of dealing with this freeze-dried horseshit, I have finally put my finger on the pulse of something within myself. Most people, it seems, start from scratch, so when they get angry at something, they're just angry. Most people can also be pushed to rage. However, for me, I start from the place most people end up...because, Like the Hulk (geek alert), I’m pretty much always angry. This means I have an inadvertently constant stream of running negativity that poisons everything I do, accidentally ruining things I my life. Remember in Ghost-Buster’s II, how Vigo the Carpathian set a river of slime running under an unsuspecting city? The rage is the slime. I am by turns the city and Vigo, although as far as I know, I have no Carpathian roots, but I’ll make some research calls and save that for a different blog. I know I’m not the only one that has this kind of anger management issue, but, for my part, my higher self is over this constant plotline of CAT SMASH. (Subplot: AND THEN CAT POINT AND LAUGH UNTIL RED HAZE CLEARS AND THEN CAT CRY WHEN SITTING IN AFTERMATH OF CAT CRAY). That’s me. Cat-the –Possibly-but-Probably-Definitely- not-Carpathian-Destroyer. (Or CTPBPDNCD for short. ) Not that I haven’t been working hard for the past four-and-a-half years or so to dismantle this crap. I have. However, stuff keeps misfiring, which means I clearly haven't been looking at something that I need to be looking at. Well, I think I found it. I'm always, always pissed off. I had someone say to me “you would be able to accomplish a vast amount if you didn’t have this rage clinging to you” To which I replied “but I’m over my rage” to which she replied “HA! No. No you’re not.” It really pissed me off. Behold her entertainingly correct assessment.
So, meanwhile, a page and half later and that’s enough of Red Lava. Despite all the above ranting, this blog entry is not meant to be a narcissistic “woe-is-me” bare-all about the origin of my personal turbulence. Who gives a crap? I already know where it comes from. No, this is not about dissecting the Red Lava… It’s about dismantling and dismissing it. Why? Because I simply don't have the time or space for it anymore in my life. I have shit to do, and this is getting in the goddamn way on a pretty continuous basis. Hopefully my process will be helpful to other people who might be in the rage closet. What I really want to do now is figure out where I go from here. ( Incidentally, when I began this entry I had planned on launching into some sort of sanctimonious speech about how we should all be putting light out into the world. It’s absolutely true that we should be glowing in our highest possible selves. However seeing as I just succumbed to my rage yet again both yesterday and this morning, I am clearly NOT in mine. I realize that I can’t give that speech until my own stuff is clear.) What I need is a complete overhaul. An extreme re-calibration.
(Enter White Lava: stage everywhere. )
I hit a different kind of critical mass yesterday and the rage is still so intense that it actually spans the color spectrum of an entire lifetime (or at least my life thus far) of bad choices, disappointments, misdirection, missed opportunities and inactions on my part . What happens when rage-colors all blend together? Well, first a rainbow of feeling and then:
White, finger-licken’ Lava.
What I’ve deemed “White Lava” differs vastly from the Red. It burns so hot it crystallizes. White lava is what happens when Spirit teams up with your own divine light and no longer allows you to block your own true self. It sees straight through lies and bullshit. It forces you to look at the truth of what is going on in your own life. It snatches the reigns that you won’t willingly give up, uses them to smack you into submission and crumbles and combusts all useless trash in its path. Remember that scene at the end of the Dark Crystal when the Skeksis and the Mystics merge back into one and the crystal is healed and the dark shell falls off the castle and turns into white marble and the land that was barren is healed and lush and thriving…yeah. Like that. (Not that all my trash is gone, it' not. It's in progress.)
Now I’m the target of my own rage…and I’m furious. ( You can tell how furious because I used both italics AND bold lettering, which for some reason you can't see in this blog post. Also, I have no idea why the first line and the last paragraph are highlighted and I can't fix it. :-/ ) Seriously though, I’m livid. With myself. Not in the ‘burning-down-the-school-gymnasium’ kind of way, but in a really calm, quiet, intensely focused way. A way that has me reflecting on the fact that I am completely dissatisfied with my whole life. Which is the obvious source of the Red, but what do I expect? We get back what we put out, and threefold. If I’m always angry, even if it's accidental, then…well, there we have it. So what in the blue, succulent Smurf am I going to do about it? Well, I’ll start with a self-effacing rant:
What the have I been doing with my life? Working jobs that suck just to survive when my options are virtually boundless? And then complaining?! I’m keeping toxic people in my life, toxic foods, toxic habits, (TOXIC TOXIC TOXIC) And then I have the audacity to complain that I’m not feeling well, that I’m upset with the dynamics of a relationship, that I’m unhappy with my blah blah blah blah blah. I’m talking my best friends’ ears off about crap that nobody has control over but me! I mean really??? Exactly who do I owe my current struggles to? Me. That’s who. I can blame my past, my parents, trauma, Santa Claus, relationships, boredom, the weather, lack of job satisfaction, the rude nose-picker in front of me at the grocery store, “Born again” Christians (well…I might still blame them, just because it’s funny), money issues, dislike of my house, the color of my toenail polish or a bad hair day. In the end, I am the boss of me. We are all the bosses of ourselves. Any crap that is accumulating in my life is only accumulating because I let it in and then let it stay. It’s a direct reflection of my sense of self-worth and self esteem and I hold myself hostage to toxic , delusional fears and situations. Awesome.
Rant over.
Surprisingly, I feel relieved. I was waiting for me to get my head out of my ass, but sometimes it just has to happen when it does. I’m not sure where to go from here, because I’m still at a point where smoke is billowing out of my ears and nostrils. I do know this though; I am able to see through and around this rage. It's not crippling, it's giving me strength, and what I see is that my heart is a bold, brilliant, sea-deep , galaxy-high , prismatic adventure of blinding light, yet I’ve been living as though the landfill of my brain were my true home. Remember that scene in the Labyrinth, where the trash lady has a dome of trash built over her like a turtle shell? Yeah…like that.
So in the meantime, I am asking myself these questions (and feel free to play along if you can relate to any of this):
-Am I brave enough to actually look back and the bullshit map I’ve been following and clearly see how my own actions and choices have lead me up to this disappointing situation I now find myself in, and then forgive myself and move on without another thought?
- Am I willing to drop all baggage and cut ties to all the poisonous tendrils that wind their way around my essence, keeping me from the life I want?
- Do I love myself? How much do I love myself? Am I willing to sacrifice the comfort of what I know for the brilliance of what I could achieve?
- Am I willing to cut all ties with toxic people (and who are they?) from my life?
- Am I ready to eliminate all toxic habits, patterns and thoughts (what are they?) from my life?
- Am I brave enough to raise my standards and expectations and keep them high, expecting fulfillment instead of disappointment?
I’ve always thought of myself as brave, but remember in the Never Ending Story? The test of the Second Oracle was to stare into the mirror of truth and see if you're able to withstand the sight of your true inner reflection...yeah...kind of like that. My true, inner reflection is pretty goddamned bad ass...just not in the way that my outer reflection has been expressing. My true reflection is a queen... and i'm done playing maidservant.
Yes, indeedy. White, righteous, take-no-prisoners, turning- all- bullshit- to- creosote, Lava. I’m going to sit with this for a couple of days. I’m going to let the white heat clear my sight and my mind. I'm going to let it turn to ash all things that are no longer useable on my life path. I feel like a streak of indigo lighting. The building of this storm has been in tension-ville for so long that I’m not even attempting to control the dripping sparks of untamed honey crackling and sliding through every pore of my skin ; electrifying all layers of my being. Why would I want to? What has come over me is pure ferocity of epic, goddess like proportions. It feels like I’m giving birth to myself. Not the cool, Cirque Du Soleil kind of way, but the messy, slimy, screaming and kicking, smacked-butt and hungry kind of way. Which is much better, I guess. I feel as though I were seeing myself through the eyes of a mother that is driving her drug addicted child to rehab. Speaking of which, I’m very obviously not yet recovered from my rage addiction. My personal rehab for myself is not fully constructed or planned, I’m just trying to be open and listen for guidance. I don't need or want coddling or sympathy around this... it makes me feel like the whole point of expressing and sharing this process through writing has been missed. What I need are witnesses to keep my ass in line. And for those of you in my life who do that already, I love you for it. You are part of the reason I've gotten this far. I have many true and wonderful friends in my life, and that is a gift of which few can boast. I know I will not fail in this mission, though it might take me a minute to draw up a new map. I’m not sure what I’m going to do next, I just know:
Today I felt like White Lava…and it was a hell of a lot better than Red.
AM I BRAVE ENOUGH?? HELL YES.
Maybe.
Stay tuned.
