It’s hard to explain what makes me tick, especially when circumstances change and the same phrase can put me into a tizzy one day, and not mean a damn thing the next.
I’m an oddball, I know this.
But there are just certain things I don’t cope well with and being told what to do ranks at the very, very, very top.
Y’see, my dad’s a bit of a dickhead. I love him to death, but the man has issues. And for as long as I can remember, his way of communicating was to just boss people around. If you could’ve heard some of the shit he said to my mother, your head would spin.
Of course, it doesn’t just stop there because there were two other members of the family in the house as well. My dad is a retired U.S. Soldier. For twenty years of his life, he worked in such a structured environment that he really didn’t learn any different.
Everything - and I mean everything - depended on rank.
Naturally, he brought this attitude home with him. He was the male, he was the oldest, he was therefore King of his Throne and nobody ever should go against that.
Except, nobody else in the family was in the military. It took me a damn decade to figure out what the hell “at ease” meant and why on earth he would constantly say it to us.
His alcohol infused tirades were always the worst, as you can surely imagine.
So, while I realize that other people aren’t really trying to do what my dad did, there are just certain things that trigger an involuntary rage in me that starts in the pit of my stomach and reaches every crevice of my body within seconds.
I heat up like a blow torch.
I’m working towards calming myself. I’m loads better than I was in the past… but like I said, certain things still trigger it.
I can’t handle being told what I need to do. I just can’t. It immediately filters into, “who the hell does this person think they are and why the hell do they think they can talk to me like that?!”
It can be over the most trivial of things and I’ll still blow it out of proportion.
It’s a part of me I don’t much care for, but a part of me that I fear is here to stay. There are so many different ways to communicate and telling someone outright what they ought to be doing just doesn’t sit well.
Don’t even get me started on being called names. If it’s obviously in jest, I can usually handle it. But again, certain words are totally stricken from being acceptable.
And yes, it’s because my dad sucked at communicating what he really wanted to say and always resorted to name calling instead - to the detriment of my impressionable mind.
Being that I work where I work, I now know that young brains develop entirely differently from adult brains. As adults, we’re much more able to filter things out and compartmentalize things, but as children it’s a whole different ballgame.
I was no different and these days I’m working towards letting things of the past go. They do nothing but hinder the future.














