This is a Really Real Mental Health Post.

Yesterday, Wonder Woman’s Xbox stopped working.

As she was trying to get it going I was in the kitchen washing dishes and I thought I felt tension settle across the room.  I thought I felt anger and my anxiety spiked.

Waiting for the explosion.

She calmly moved furniture to get to the cords and I stopped washing dishes afraid that the sound of the water and the dishes clanking would be annoying to her.

Waiting for the explosion.

She looked on her phone, probably for solutions, while I sat at my desk, a tense ball of nerves ready to run.  Fighting the urge to shut myself in the bedroom.  Trying to figure out how I can fix the problem when I don’t even know what the problem is.

Waiting for the explosion.

And then she realized she couldn’t fix it, and she said, calmly, “It’s broken. Sadface.”

And I’m still sitting there, a ball of nerves.  On the edge of tears because of tension that was really never there.  I’m waiting for an explosion that won’t come.

“What will it help for me to scream and yell about it?”

Well, why didn’t the rest of the people in my life realize that?

And in turn, why didn’t I realize that?

It just happened, as I’m typing up this post, my backspace key got stuck and I start yelling “No, no, no, no, no!” as more and more of the post is deleted.  I’m yelling, I’m frightened and angry and being loud about it.

Wonder Woman asks loudly from the other room “Is everything alright?”

But what did it really help for me to react that way about it?  It didn’t help me get the key unstuck quicker.  It didn’t save precious words from being deleted off the screen.

It is my natural reaction to a situation though.  It’s the reaction that was trained into me, and one I’m working very hard to train out of myself.  I get loud and angry when things go wrong and I expect the world around me to do the same.

Except loud and angry is very scary to me now.  I no longer handle it well.

I don’t think I ever did.

I don’t even handle my own anger well.

But that anxiety, expecting the explosion, the gut tightening, feeling in the pit of my stomach that it’s all about to go very very wrong, is something that I can’t quiet, yet.

But eventually I’ll learn.

I don’t have to prepare for explosions of anger that may not happen.

And I don’t have to explode when things go wrong, there is another way.

And I’ll keep learning and relearning these lessons as time goes on.

It helps to be loved by such a calm, quiet, gentle, Wonder Woman.

That makes it a little bit easier.