Misdirection

I've always been short-tempered especially in certain situations. These special situations are always where I'm being criticized, attacked for something I've done or said, or when I'm working on something and can't seem to get it accomplished in a manner that doesn't make me feel adequate. 

Feeling helpless and/or inadequate is a real trigger. I feel suddenly overwhelmed and furious and sometimes will break things in my frustration. 

But most of the time I feel quite in control and can be pretty full of myself if not careful. In thinking about this the other day I began to wonder if maybe my bravado and pride if you will, is not just masking my insecurity. And I do have a lot of that if I'm honest with myself. I've been such an ass most of my life due to feeling like I'm less than most other men I meet. 

In High School is where I first began to sense this. I was not athletic in the more common sense. I liked math and science instead of football and basketball. I was drafted into my freshmen football team due to the size of the male population in my school. I was humiliated in front of the whole school and just dropped out. I've always felt other boys seem to have some secret "book of rules" that I just didn't get. Growing up that way and failing at my first marriage didn't help. 

So I think maybe I've been lying to myself a little, pretending to be so together and feeling betrayed when put in situations that I'm at loss to navigate thus exposing once again my true inadequacies. At this stage of my life, I know intellectually that all men are broken and failures in some area or another. But that doesn't help how I feel and feelings are difficult to shake. 

One thing that has helped me is a group of men that I'm allowed to be perfectly honest with about my true self. This has been huge in helping me deal with this attempt at misdirection I've tried to accomplish my whole life. God bless me I may turn out to be a fairly decent human being probably just before I die.

Just my thoughts