The Many Adventure of Lisa January: General Rage Reflexivity Reaction
Dear Readers,
After my incident at the salad bar, the head of dining services contacted my mother and told her I should get checked out for anger disorders. So, immediately my mom called me and said, “Lisa, you need to go to a psychiatrist.”
“No!”
“Yes.”
“You can’t make me!”
“Wanna bet?”
Never threaten my mother. She called Campus Security and Supervisional (real word?) Services and bribed them to come and take me from my room, kicking and screaming, to the psycho-office. She said that if I told them that ‘I had a laser beam gun that I could zap them into oblivion with if they came towards me,’ that I was full of shit and not to take me seriously. (Which sucks ‘cause that is exactly what I said and they all laughed at me which made me feel embarrassed and stupid. Thanks a lot, Mom).
At the office, Dr. Stern had me look at Rorschach inkblot tests to evaluate my anger.
“What do you see in this one?”
Dr. Stern scratches his beard, squints at me and tries again.
“And in this one?”
It is starting to get hard for me to contain myself. I know I probably do get angrier than most, but I can’t show them that! If I show them the slightest bit of rage, they will lock me up forever and ever like a fucking leper! I’ll be an outcast! A pariah! Must. Maintain. Composure.
Dr. Stern chuckles to himself, squints again and then, smirkingly says
“What about this one?”
GAAHH!! Oh shit. Now he’s gone and done it. How the fuck did he know?! I HATE UNICORNS?! HAAAAAAAAAATTTTTTTTEEEEEEEEEEEEE THEM!!!!!!! Those smug little bitch horses with fuckin’ sticks on their heads like they think they’re the shit! They are like reindeer that have been castrated on their heads but the castrator got too bored and left 1 dumb horn up there. And they prance around like life is so fuckin’ flowery and I just want to take chain saw and saw off their weak, dumb, shiny, stupid, mutated antler horn!!! RAGGGEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I’m panting like a horse, sweating like a pig, screaming like a banshee, biting like a wolf and angry like a fucking 19 year old girl with a rage problem. FEEL MY WRATH UNICORN BITCH!
After I have completely demolished the picture of the unicorn, which I am pretty sure my mom told him I hated so that they could set me up (I AM A VICTIM AND I HATE EVERYONE! Oh, and thanks again, Mom, for sharing literally everything about me to everyone. Suuuuperrrrr cool of you.), I started to realize what I’d done. The jig is up. I am doomed. I will now be labeled as weird and doctors will perform experiments on me like a lab rat.
Dr. Stern speaks: “It appears you have General Rage Reflexivity Reaction, or GRRR.”
Well that is ironic. You mean I have “GRRR!!!!!!!!”? Like the sound a lion makes? EVEN MY DISORDER IS ANGRY AND AGGRESSIVE!! HOW CAN I EXPECT TO FIX MY ANGER IF EVEN MY ANGER IS ANGRY?!
Dr. Stern: “To fix this problem, we generally prescribe some sort of drug, but I fear with your extreme case, that may not be enough. So, I would like to propose a different method. What do you think?”
I mean, am I even allowed to say no? I hate that. When adults ask you questions even though you have no choice in the matter but they ask you out of courtesy, pretending you are a real person but actually you are still totally in the limbo between child hood and seniority so they want to meet you half way by deluding you into thinking you have free will, but actually, you don’t. So I just say: “Sure.”
This sounds dumb. But okay Mr. Doctor Man, I accept your challenge. I’ll make a stupid fucking list of pretty, nice, fluffy things and I’ll quit my mofuckin rage like it ain’t no thang. You’ll see.
BACK IN MY DORM ROOM:
Okay, here I go. Imma make the best list of happies ever. Good bye Rage, hello normal-people feelings!
I could only get to 8 before I started to get frustrated. Frustration is like the sister-in-law of Rage. So before I knew it, I was pulling on my hair, screaming, crying, biting, anything to express my deepest Rage. It’s not that I don’t have 10 things that make me happy. I have a KA-JILLION things that make me happy! I just couldn’t think of them all and I got discouraged… Anyway, I called Dr. Stern screaming:
“I CAN’T THINK OF 2 MORE HAPPIES AND I FAILED YOUR ASSIGNMENT AND I AM ADDICTED TO RAGE!”
Dr. Stern assured me that this process of controlling rage will take a while and that I need to be patient. He says it’s okay that I only have 8 happies for the moment, I can always add more later. This made me happy! So I wrote it on a post-it and stuck it to the list:
There is hope yet! Mom says she is proud of me for trying to work through this. She says that I am very brave to confront such a scary thing. Dr. Stern says that as long as I keep thinking of happy things and adding them to my list, I will start to feel less rage. He also told me to try and draw my rage so that I can talk to it out loud and tell it that ‘I am in control now and Rage’s turn running Lisa’s life is over!’
I decided to draw Rage as an upside-down chocolate ice cream cone because when this happens I feel Rage…a lot. And I always imagine the ice cream cone looking up at me being like, “How dare you drop me you ungrateful twerp! Now you have no ice cream, have wasted $2.50, and I will melt to death! Are you happy now?!” And then I get even angrier that my ice cream cone is yelling at me. It’s bad news.
Dr. Stern also says I need to stop using the F word so much because it fuels my hatred. I told him it was my favorite word and to say I’d even try to do that would be a complete and total lie.
In the end, knowledge is power. Now that I know I have GRRR, I can take my steps to keeping it under control. I will never be cured of GRRR. It is something I will struggle with my entire life. But I can learn to live with it and not flip the fuck out in the dining hall anymore, or at least as often… I’m not making any promises…
Until next time, if you have any happies to add to my list, let me know! I still have 1 more to go!
Love,
Lisa January
spy, you're hilarious. this was the fucking shit.
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