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When I fuck up, it is because I am looking for a conflict, which usually means I am looking for validation.
I feel unsettled for a week, maybe two, and then I force something that is usually unfair.
I like to say I don’t know what I am doing (I was an asshole by accident, immaturely acting out). But I can feel the pressure rising for weeks, pressing me down until I pop.
The goal is to either bleed off the pressure more frequently or address the inadequacies that inflate me.
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First, you are not your emotions: your emotions change daily (if not hourly), displaced by others, though some are more persistent.
Next, repetitive actions are programmed behaviors: they are mechanically habitual, and you are compelled to enact them over long periods of time, though they can be changed (moderated) with effort.
Most of the ways you think of yourself, your "self image," are emotional or peak moments, but these are not who you are. You are not passionate or angry; you are primarily the mundane actions you never consider.
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Anger is a communication tool. (That means you could handle the situation with a different tactic.)
Anger gets results but is not an uncontrollable response: it is a choice to get what you want.
As a power dynamic, the angry person wants to get into a fight ultimately to force your submission or your irrational anger. Anger moves reason into emotion and forces the relationship into a dominance game.
If you respond with a ‘stiff upper lip’ or ‘grin and bear it’ but you are still angry, you are just controlling it, which can lead to resentment and retaliatory revenge.
The trick is to see their anger as a ploy that will convert you into adversaries. Anger is frustration and a desire to win to avoid fear or insecurity; it is a means to dominate or decimate through emotional manipulation.
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The crash of a bad day can lead to blaming others.
What happens to your empathy when you feel self-pity? Under the mask of outward anger, your heart is turned inward, reserved for yourself.
In this closed state, you are disconnected from loving others as much as you block yourself from the love and support of others.
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Take time to simply enjoy the moment. It won’t last.
Instead of becoming pessimistic, anxious, or unequal to a theoretical future please attempt to forgive yourself.
If you can defer and relax at this moment, you may enjoy it fully. You do not need to deconstruct it or make sense out of it, it will make sense out of itself.
It will become love by you being in it.
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For dignity we pursue honor, love, or power. These often take the form of conquest, simultaneous desires, and discipline.
The conundrum is to distinguish our singular “self” we become embroiled in self-defeating behaviors. The more victorious you are, the more divided you become.
And yet, this game persists, and the trick is to play it well.
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If you love to have your desires fulfilled, you will never be satiated. Humans are desiring machines, designed to want more, crave the chase, and never be fulfilled.
Your only chance to be satisfied is to re-wire your desire.
Extended to love: can you love without reciprocity? Is it possible to be fulfilled without receiving in return? If you can rewire your attachment to your own fulfillment, life can be full of love.
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Modernity collapses distinctions, where we *attempt* to be indifferent to presentation. (Our reaction to a car wreck, fancy toaster, or poster of sneakers becomes equivalent.)
Andy Warhol did this through repetition, occasionally of the banal object but also of stars such as Monroe or Elvis, flattening and spreading their effect through excess.
To expand “affect,” we inflate (blow up) and fetishize difference as sexy: we engorge a minimal distinction into profound appeal, but over time and distance, deflation inevitably leads back into commonplace.
The result of overall flattened expansion is an impersonalized “affect” (or influence) that can be widely distributed when stripped of complex particulars. In an abstracted reductive state, modern images accelerate beyond emotion or psychology into an environmental milieu: a low-grade background hum of banality to which we learn never to react.
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Without a frontier to push into or against, self-discovery is not an exploration of the new but a redefining (retromodification) of the preceding.
In mining the past (nostalgia) the unreality of exhumation offers only abstract context, leading to affectation.
Is regenerating affect non-effectual work? If so, without new frontiers, we risk assuming the labor of dilatante style is indeed substance.
