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How long does it take for you to get mad?

I have a friend who recently had a road rage incident. He just blew his stack and almost got into a physical altercation on the side of the road. There was no pause or contemplation of whether being that mad was worth it. He just lost it. The cops showed up and broke things up. But it made me think about how long my fuse is.

I would say my anger can come in just a few seconds. I can get to that emotion almost immediately—if my emotions were on a shelf, anger would be front and center.

I wish that weren’t the case. But I will say that the longer I have been sober, the more that anger has been pushed a little farther back. That’s progress. And I would also say that rage is far out of reach for me—I might get a little spicy without much effort, but it’s gotten pretty difficult for me to be in a rage. Mild irritation is more available than I would like, but I will take that over wanting to throttle people in a millisecond. So that’s a good thing, and something I will continue to work on.

I heard somebody say recently at a meeting that he tries to make anger expensive and kindness cheap. He says he wants warmth to come easily, and resentment to be hard to buy. He admitted that it’s often the other way around—resentment is available for a penny, and kindness is much harder to buy. He said he wants to not have easy access to anger, and instead have love and tolerance constantly jingling in his pocket as loose change.

Man, I find myself as the opposite on a lot of days, and having constant mild frustration is itself quite frustrating. I keep asking myself, Why can’t I just naturally be all smiles? Why do I need to put in hours of work every day to be the version of me that I like? God, let me roll out of bed as a bundle of positive energy!

The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that I need to accept that kindness isn’t available at the Dollar Store for me. I have to earn it, and that’s ok. Like so many other things about alcoholism, I need to just accept that I have a disease that requires daily treatment. When I had cancer last year, I didn’t like going to chemotherapy… but I never tried to get out of it. I had to do it. End of story. There was no choice.

So that means in my little metaphor of kindness being cheap and anger being harder to buy, that simply means I need to invest some money in up front to reduce the cost, then cash it in for inexpensive love and kindness.

This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:

Three signs you might be an alcoholic:

--1: The convenience store clerk asks why you have grass on your back.

--2: You keep the dry-wall repair guy on retainer.

--3: You believe that you’re receiving the equivalent of a college education watching Court TV.

(Credit: AA Grapevine, October 2001, Tom L. from Orlando, Florida)

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