When Redemption Comes Down Like A Hammer
On the day I stopped being so damn angry all the time.
I know a Buddhist monk who begins some of his stories like this:
“I’m going to tell you something that happened to me, but first I want you to know that I don’t believe in any of it.”
Like my friend, I have a true story to tell, but I’ve never been sure what to do with the mystical bits. At the very least, it’s a story about letting go. Beyond that…I don’t know that it matters, since it has a happy ending.
It was about a year after my third husband’s affair and a few months after our subsequent divorce. I had been carrying around a lot of anger for a long, long time. I was angry about the divorce and still angry about the affair, but there were so many other things.
Anger (directed at my parents) about my childhood.
Anger (directed at myself) about all the lousy choices I had made pretty much from the moment I was old enough to make any choices.
Anger (directed generally at everyone and everything) that life was so…damn…hard, and nothing about it had turned out like I’d hoped. I’d spent my life in a sort of low seethe that sometimes boiled up into more-or-less quiet rages; moods that a friend once described as “creepy”. Sometimes…
