Before the Hot Coals Burst to Flames

Before the Hot Coals Burst to Flames

A friend once described me as "intense" to a prospective "talking stage", warning her that communication and transparency are some of the ways to get my best. Before then, I only described myself as passionate, I didn't really think that I sit at extreme ends of several emotions. In my opinion, I wade into things wholeheartedly and lose it sometimes, and only sometimes, not every time I am triggered. But not being one to toss 'compliments' carelessly, I asked another poet-friend if he thought I was intense. His reply was that I was transparent as glass. One can see if something makes me happy, but it is also evident that I struggle to control anxiety and anger. Anger especially, he explained, makes me go mute and do weird things. I'll explain the "mute and weird things" now.

Default Me.

For a long time now, I consciously try to avoid an outburst any time I am angry because I noticed that it is one of the reasons I tend to have sour relationships with people I care about. So, the idea is to try and be calm first, then voice out my displeasure in the most respectful way possible. It works most times, at other times I just let people have it. Of course, I have never come to blows with anyone in my adult life, but on few instances I have given people a piece of my mind in a disrespectful manner, people I really shouldn't have disrespected. In most cases, however, I manage to control my ire until I'm I've think things through and found the best way to express how I feel.

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I recognise that nobody is perfect. We are not infallible, therefore, when I get angry, the first thing I do is to make excuses for the people who made me angry or rationalise why they did/said what they did/said. Sometimes I tried to ask myself if I had a hand in the build up to the provocation or if I was overthinking things. The result is that by the time I'm ready to talk to the agent of provocation, I would have become reasonably calm and more often than not, after speaking to them, we reach a satisfactory resolution.

There are times, however, where after talking to the persons who angered me, I feel hard done by. Some people are immune to reason, it doesn't matter how polite you are when when you talk to them about how you feel, they still won't see that they were wrong. I become more angry but at this point, in other to maintain equanimity, I turn to music. I plug my ears with earphones and listen to my favourite song at the moment. In the past, I'd listen to Pharell's "Happy", now I'd listen to any makossa or ariaria praise medley.