Phosphorous

Blazing rage

Author’s note: I had some whimsy lined up for this week, but then I read Eleanor Jones’s piece Shaping Our Rage. It hit me like a hammerblow, prompting quiet self-reflection (my least favourite kind) like I hadn’t experienced in months. I couldn’t shake it, so dropped what I was doing and wrote this instead. Massive thanks to Elly for graciously letting me use her piece for my own jumping off point.

If you’re here for the laughs then next week’s piece is a doozy, I promise.

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Phosphorous is a mineral that is essential for human life. Not to get bogged down in science that my double award B grade GCSE can’t support, but it is the second most abundant mineral in the human body after calcium. It is also highly flammable. Red phosphorous is a groovy guy, used in matches and fire retardants. White phosphorous is a volatile bastard that has been used to maim and kill since the 19th century.

I am white phosphorous.

When I started writing about my thoughts and feelings, I referenced anger in relation to other things. But I’ve never written about anger in isolation before. It’s been a long time since I addressed my issues with anger management, mainly because I’m a lot better at managing my anger now than I have been at any other time in my life. I know that it’s almost certainly down to one of the many acronyms (RSD, ED, JS, ODD¹) associated with the big daddy acronym, ADHD. The dopamine starved monkey on my back.

I know now that my brain ain’t wired like most of yours; the neat packet of spaghetti has been cooked up into a saucy jumble. It took diagnosis, therapy and over forty years of fuck ups to get to this point, but better late than never, right?

Photo by Ganesh Partheeban on Unsplash

That doesn’t mean the anger isn’t there anymore. Only a fucking idiot would think I was ‘cured’ in any real sense of the word. Realisation and acceptance just mean that I have a couple of new tricks up my sleeve, tricks that allow me to slip a leash on the dog before it runs off and does something stupid.

If I don’t deploy those tricks in the first couple of seconds, I go off. And I go off outwards.

I often wish that I could internalise things, even though I know that would be ultimately be more harmful to me in the long run. Alas, that’s a gift/curse that I am not blessed with. When I go off it is sent outwards. So, of course, it’s not me who feels it - it’s everyone caught up in the blast radius.

The volatility of white phosphorous comes from the fact that it is pyrophoric, meaning it is liable to spontaneous ignition when exposed to air.

Self-deprecation has been a reliable crutch for my entire life, and it’s no different when it comes to getting riled up. I often liken my anger to when a fireworks display is accidentally triggered early and all at once; it’s chaotic, expensive and destructive but hey, at least no one got hurt, right?

Maybe when I do that, I’m minimising things. Because I don’t want to front up to the truth: at my very worst I can be unpredictable and destructive. I am not a cute fucking Catherine wheel.

When my anger gets out, when I throw it out, it is impossible to harness or direct. It is everywhere. It is blinding, toxic and all consuming. Like white phosphorous, it burns hard and hot. It sticks to skin and clothing; making it difficult to brush off. It cannot be easily extinguished, even reigniting hours after initial spark.

And it scars. It scars all the way to the fucking bone.

The trigger point for me seeking help, and all the revelations that followed, was something so trivial that I’m almost ashamed to talk about it now. The Muse and I had come home from a fun night out and, in trying to squeeze into a space that wasn’t there, someone had parked perpendicular to everybody else, at a right angle to the pavement.

The audacity of it, the sheer stupidity of it, was so galling that I went off. In that moment I was incandescent. I was white phosphorous, burning at over 800°C.

Sounds ridiculous, right? But right there and then I was unreachable. The Muse went to bed, it was either that or a barney at 1am.

I stood alone in my darkened kitchen. I wanted to break something. I wanted to hurt somebody. I wanted a drink. I wanted to vandalise and to disfigure. I wanted to regress. I embraced all of that shit. I wallowed in it. It felt great.

Like the horrible fucks who use white phosphorous on innocent civilians, right in that moment I wanted destruction. After all those years of sending it out into the world, this was a friendly fire incident. I turned my rage upon myself.

I burned for an epoch that night.

Photo by Mohamed Nohassi on Unsplash

I actually felt anger. Not as an emotion, as a physical sensation. It was in me, on me, searing me.

It would have been so easy to lean into it, to embrace all that heat and smoke, to be incandescent forever. Part of me really wanted that, wanted to burn forever.

Some other part of me, the part of me that felt those deep scars, won the battle. I did not crack the bourbon, go out into the balmy night, and put a brick through a car windscreen. I flicked the kettle on, picked up a pen, and wrote down the harsh realities.

Talk about a sliding doors moment.

All the times nature’s most unstable element had ignited. The arguments, the road rage, petty little retributions, all those trashed relationships and missed opportunities. Injustice, rejection, emotional dysregulation. What’s wrong with me? Why don’t I fucking fit? And why do I revel in it?

I had been burning for years. Extinguished fires reigniting. Toxic white phosphorous sticking to everything. Scarred and scarring.

Scorched earth.

You can’t extinguish a white phosphorous fire with water. You need to pack it under mud or sand, starve it of fuel, literally choke the air out of it. For my whole life up until that point, I had been using the wrong tools. And yeah sure, I didn’t know I was using the wrong tools, but we all know the famous line about the definition of insanity, don’t we?

Two years on from that night, I have things under control more than I ever have before. You may not be able to extinguish white phosphorous with water, but if you store that prick under water then it will not be exposed to air and can never ignite.

So that’s what I do. I visualise calm, still water. A millpond over my emotions. A silent pool.

I have to do this because the rage hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s still right where it’s always been. I’ve had to accept that I am extremely volatile. I am white phosphorus.

The other day I had to be talked down from berating a vertical queue in my local. Vertical queues are everywhere in boozers, and everyone in them is ridiculous. It’s a pub, not a fucking post office - stand at the bar like normal people. I would’ve felt great after that little flashover, but I would’ve pissed all over those strangers’ days for no good reason.

Harnessed properly, anger may even be useful to me at some point. Aimed in the right direction, it could be a force for good. I’m not a fan of the old adage about ADHD superpowers, but maybe righteous fury is mine? Burning brightly in the face of injustice. Like Bruce Banner tells Captain America: “That’s my secret, Cap. I’m always angry.”

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Thanks for reading. Don’t let all the I’m a total pussycat really, so please show some love on your way out. Restack the piece to help people find it, or leave a comment if anything landed with you. Or just bang the like button before you go, even that will help the algos find me. If you buy me a pint I’ll love you forever. Cheers, hope to see you again soon.

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1. Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria, Emotional Dysregulation, Justice Sensitivity, Oppositional Defiance Disorder. The Four Horsemen of the Shitocalypse.