Today, I was auditioning some more kids for the new show I’m doing.
I was trying to get an eleven-year old boy to relate to me an incident that made him angry. Something that his friend irritated him about. So I could show him how he’d gotten angry a little bit at a time till he flared up and lost it.
But he misunderstood. He said, “Yah, I remember I was very angry.”
“When was that?”
“Last Sunday.”
“What happened?”
He frowned.
“I woke up and I was angry.”
“Was it something you were dreaming about that made you angry?”
He shook his head. “I just woke up and felt very angry.”
“And how did you behave the whole day?”
“I was very angry with everyone. I showed my temper the whole day.”
As I was sitting there, trying to do this audition, I thought this was very odd indeed. Why would someone be angry just like that?
Then I forgot all about it, until tonight when I was walking my dog, Rusty.
For kids, it’s simple, they’re happy, sad, angry. Their vocabulary is limited, so they can’t really express the greys of existence.
For example, anything that upsets a child would make him angry. But for adults, we could be upset, annoyed, pissed, mad and they’d all be different degrees of being upset. But it would still, ultimately, when the greys have been stripped away, be the state of being angry.
And then it occured to me that there are many times I wake up and because I have all these words for saying that I’m upset, like “I feel rotten”, “woke up on the wrong side of the bed” and so on, that I actually stopped realising that I do wake up angry.
Who knows why? Could be the result of a few horrible days in a row. Maybe subconsciously in my sleep, in my dreams I was thinking of something that annoyed me and when I woke up, I couldn’t remember what I was thinking about.
But one thing I’m sure of. It made me happy to remember I do wake up angry. I can wake up angry. Because the less I realise that I am angry about something, the more frustrated I become that I can’t realise and fully experience my feelings.