People don’t believe me when I say this, because I’m usually quite good-natured, but I get a bit violent when I’m angry. My bursts of anger are quite brief–I don’t hold grudges–but my blood pressure shoots up dramatically, and I tend to react physically (or at least to want to react physically). In other words, I turn into Little Hulk. I say “Little” because I am about five foot two or three and not very strong. That’s why people tend to think it’s funny or cute when I yell or punch a desk or jump on my sister (I did that several times when we were roommates). I agree that it makes an amusing story, but ultimately it’s not very cute or funny, and here’s why.
1. Someday, I will probably have people in my life who are smaller than I am and whom I could actually hurt–i.e., children.
2. Anger gives me a temporarily useful adrenaline rush (I packed up my entire office in about an hour this morning when I was mad about a dumb thing, which I am now over), but I’m pretty sure it has negative physiological effects in the long term. See, for example, my comment above about blood pressure. I think people can also get ulcers from being angry too much.
3. Although, as Jesus demonstrated, righteous anger is…well, righteous, 99.9% of the time my anger has no such just cause. Usually I’m angry because things aren’t going according to my selfish, carefully-constructed plan. And that kind of anger has bad spiritual and relational effects on me and everyone around me.
So, although they asked me if I wanted to replace Mark Ruffalo in the next Avengers movie, I turned down the offer in order to preserve my holistic well-being. Hey, don’t laugh; I think I’d be pretty believable. It’s all CGI anyway, right?
the Dr. Tess blog 
Amazing!
Boy, can I ever relate to this! My temper really got to be a problem for awhile, because I couldn’t hold my tongue. It was like a pressure cooker inside of me that would explode. I prayed for help with it, and God has been faithful to help me. I still get the angry feelings sometimes, but am much better able to step back and not react.
Interestingly, I was just thinking of this…the ‘righteous anger’ thing you were talking about. I think sometimes as Christians, our anger is righteous. But most of the time, looking at myself as an example, it’s just ‘self-righteous’. 🙂
Thanks for the comments! I don’t think I’ve ever gotten such a quick and enthusiastic response to a post!
At least you can recognize that it’s (usually) not the best reaction 🙂
I know how that feels. I’ve been known to punch things, particularly beds, when angry.
[…] Because I spend a large percentage of my waking time reading, watching, and interpreting stories (and some of my sleeping time dreaming stories–I had a really stressful one after going back to bed at 4:08 Wednesday morning), I tend to see my own life as a narrative, with some experiences standing out as particularly excellent story material. I’m a pretty decent storyteller, I think (actually, someone told me that last week, and I was flattered), and I have to admit that I enjoy keeping an audience entertained and feel like I’ve failed when my stories don’t have the impact I’d imagined they would. And of course, there’s always a temptation to make my stories a little bit funnier or more shocking by altering events a bit. Telling stories always involves editing–deletion, highlighting, etc.–but I try to avoid crossing the line into fabrication, not least because I find it satisfying to think that my real life (just like your life, reader) is stranger than anything I could make up. I don’t think it’s an accident that some of my favorite–and most popular–blog posts have simply been stories about stuff that happened to me, like when I almost choked on the fumes of some spicy soup I was cooking or when I got angry and went all Hulk in my office. […]