Day 77

How can you cope with something you cannot control?

When faced with frustration, let it take over. Do it the right way, with the right motive, and with a VCR.

Being asymptomatic and stress free from life's problems is such a glass cannon. While this is one of the most blissful feelings in the world, it isn't durable enough to last for more than just a couple weeks. It’s not everyday that you manage to get over moving away from a perfect life and feel accomplished about it. However, my former best friend from this period in time wanted a reprise. You would think that after being betrayed, rejecting plans, and "forgetting" to respond to messages every time that people would get the message and leave you alone. But this person didn't. After seeing a text message since the Admission phase as if nothing happened, a lot of bitter emotions came resurfaced. A knee-jerk reaction like as if you were about to puke from disgust. This was the remaining emotion I expressed during Triage. Guess I just forgot about it. While I'm glad I did for as long as possible, any message following after that just made me repulsed. So much for being asymptomatic.

I'm rarely the type to get angry but any time I got a message - hell, anytime I THOUGHT about getting a message, my mood was ruined for the rest of the day. One of my mutual friends, would notice this as well.
Talking only made things worse for me, but he understood. Jokingly, he suggested the idea of a rage room. "What the hell is a rage room?" It's exactly what it sounds like. A room to let loose any repressed anger on inanimate objects. I brushed it off so hard at first, but after the nonstop messages, I became desperate enough to consider it. Consideration became me buying a ticket to Rage Cage.

I never texted anything back. I never wanted to. I just ignored as hard as I wanted as I kept everything I wanted to say in my head. I wanted to keep things the way they were, as if his phone got smashed for months and he had no access to contact me, but as if someone can go even a day without texting nowadays. That idea though. A phone being smashed. It stuck with me whenever I thought about this.like I wanted to turn it into a live expression of how I felt. On the way to the rage room site, I had a landline telephone ready to truly express how I felt about reconnecting.

When you get to a rage room, they're pretty safe about it. They have you wear a Hazmat suit, a helmet, and eye covers. With the weight I was bearing, I was definitely going to need those. I took a minute to set the telephone down, collect every ounce of anger I had, and focus everything at the landline. Everything I was mad at, upset at, sad over, disappointed with, anything I could thing of. I swung at the telephone with a baseball bat with every amount of force I didn't know I had. In my mind, I thought I would stop and process
everything that happened. NOPE. Everything else in the room that they provided me with was nowhere near safe. Glass plates shattered as if an ambulance was going full speed on the sidewalk. I hit a laptop hard enough to fling it into the wall, and I kept swinging at a VCR over and over again. And again. And again until I tired myself out around half an hour later. I barely did any damage to that old piece of junk, there was barely a dent in it.

Once the adrenaline toned down and the realization of not being able to destroy a VCR set in, I took a seat on a standby tire and my body gave out. I got so emotional for 5 minutes that I lost my breath sometimes - it probably looked like I was getting defibrillated by the staff watching the cameras. It was everything I was repressing for so long now. Intense despair, strong anger, and acceptance of defeat were just emerging out of me. By the time I recollected myself, my arm and leg had throbbing pain. I hit myself with the bat and didn't realize, but I somehow walked it off. I ended the session there and then - beating up old devices was such a workout, the pump from a half hour session was more than any 2 hour session I spend at a gym. I may have lost the battle to a VCR probably made by Nokia, but I lost every ounce of negative being, so it was really worth it. I blocked this former friend before leaving the site. Once I walked out the rage room, he was just a memory that flatlined.