Everything I've found on anger management is slated toward people who go off on other people, whether physically or verbally. I don't do that--mine is all directed internally. I want to scream at people and pick fights, but I don't. It all just turns in on myself and makes me feel worthless and hopeless and suicidal. If I had a foolproof way of ending it, I would. But I don't want to risk screwing it up and being "saved," only to be abandoned again as soon as they decide I'm "okay."

I don't want to get rid of all the anger, either. It's the only thing that's kept me alive this long--it's a way of marking that a lot of terrible things happened to me, but the fact that they happened doesn't mean they're okay or I deserved it. For a long, long time, I thought I never felt anger. Nothing beyond mild frustration on occasion. But I was slowly killing myself with my self-harm and eating disorder, and if that's not the personification of rage turned inward, I don't know what is. I really believe that finally being able to get angry at the people and events that had driven me to believe I needed to annihilate myself was what saved me. I could finally see that what they'd done to me wasn't okay, and I could turn around and say, "No, it's you I'm angry at, not myself." I could choose to stop destroying myself because I finally understood.

But now it's different. Now it's not me destroying myself, and I can't choose to change what's happening to me. The decisions and circumstances are, for the most part, out of my hands. So I can recognize that it's unfair and wrong, I can see that I don't deserve to have my needs go unmet...but I can't change it. So all I'm left with is rage and the familiar desire to destroy myself. Only this time I don't want to do it piecemeal; I just want to get it over with and be done. I just can't live like this. No one can really live like this.