Raging bull

I’m not very good with conflicts. Never have been. It doesn’t matter which side of the argument I’m on, or whether I think I’m right or wrong, I feel almost physically ill when I’m stewing in conflict soup.

My personal problem is, though, that my brain is almost too quick to cook up pretty good oneliners to strip my adversary. Even worse, my mouth is just as fast to spit them out.

Hulk is more of a man of action.

Except that one time when I literally spat a guy on his visor in a hockey game. No words needed. It’s nothing that I’m proud of now, or then. But, when the blood rushes to my head, things happen.

But, since I was brought up to be an exemplary boy, I also develop a guilty conscience on the spot. I realize that what I have said has hurt the other person, and since Mom and Dad said that thou shalt not be an idioth, I regret what I’ve said.

I remember the first time I did this. I don’t even remember what was said to me, but I do remember the hotel corridor, and what I said, and the look on her face when I said it. I called my new vacation friend, six years old, “Harald No-teeth” because she had just lost her baby teeth and had a huge gap in the front. Not even sure if I had teeth myself. Anyway, she started to cry, and I felt the knot in my stomach. I told her that it was a good thing to not have teeth because “Harald No-teeth was a fierce Viking king.”

(Semi-interesting side note: Little did I know that 25 years later I would be sitting in a Stockholm restaurant, arguing against naming a magazine “Bluetooth”, after Bluetooth technology, named after a Viking king called Harald Bluetooth).

All through life, words have been my weapon. Always having been the smallest – or, to get the facts straight, the second smallest – kid in the class, that’s all I had. It’s still all I have.

Because words have always been important to me, my way out, maybe I pay too much attention to them. I probably get offended by something that wasn’t intended to be more than a casual remark, just angry but idle chatter in an echo chamber.

I remember how shocked Wife was when she saw me spit my venom for the first time. It wasn’t aimed at her, but instead, a colleague of mine. We walked through the Stockholm Old Town and as I was relating the story of what had just happened, I then whipped myself into a rage, and told Wife how angry I was at the lady “who tucks her [bleeping] breasts under her [bleeping] belt!”

I would like to say that the comment felt as absurd then as it did now, and that we just laughed. But I don’t think we did. Of course, the thing Wife does so well is to calm me down so we kept on walking to our coffee shop and talked.

Last night I got an email that made my blood boil. I hit reply, and I started typing.

Because nobody calls me stupid. Fat, yes. Shorty? Old, but fine. Finnish? Well, fact, and there’s nothing I can do about it. Immigrant? Whatever. But stupid? I don’t think so.

I typed and typed. And just before hitting “send”, I read my email. And I got a guilty conscience. So, you guy, you don’t even know who you are, but if you did, you should consider yourself lucky because I edited my email a little. And then some more. I saw both sides of the coin, I started to sympathize with the sender, and I let the email sit in the drafts folder overnight. In the morning, even after Wife said it was OK to send it, I still edited it into a more sophisticated version that met the argument head on, without getting nasty.

Maybe I’m growing up.

1 thought on “Raging bull

  1. Well done.
    I am even worse than you at conflicts and even more eager to see the other person’s side of it, so I have learnt a lot from you. A lot of the times when I get angry and keep it in, I think "what would Risto have said?" and try to spit _some_ venom, at least.

    However, I don’t think that day will ever come, when I spit on someone’s visor. For more than one reason. :)

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