Affect

Friday, April 9, 2021

An interesting thing happened to me today. I have often in my life expressed annoyance as a flash of anger, raising my voice and complaining, often cursing. This tends to happen when I am under stress, and most often with family. It often goes away quickly, but it is felt very intensely.

This morning I finished a particularly taxing mental exercise at work, and had barely 15 minutes to feed the cats before a conference call. When I reached the kitchen I saw they had made a complete mess of some stuff that was on the counter, throwing it on the floor. I move fast to pick up the trash and start to raise my voice at them, then it happened. 

All of a sudden, mid-sentence, I find myself looking at the  performative nature of my behavior as if I were an outsider. A clear thought popped in my head: "You don't have to do this." I stopped talking and realized there was no feeling of anger anymore. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before. This wasn't being angry and then calming myself down; this was detachment, as if I had started acting a part and stopped to ask for a script rewrite. And it was all pretty much instantaneous.