Normally, I was brought up to cherish self control as a virtue befitting, especially for women, who are expected to be mellow (""You must be subservient before your husband 'thingy'"). I was taught not to go overboard in expressing an emotion as powerful as anger, no matter the level of provocation, but with time, I have come across people with different temperaments and annoying behaviours but, I have always prided myself as one who never blew her top in a hurry.
But I do know that there are times when I can run out of patience and loose my cool.
For mistreatments, unfairness, injustice, I can be very strongly indignant.
Like I said earlier, I can tolerate people's behaviour up to a point but on this particular occasion, I was pushed too far, to the brink of a precipice, and the one doing the pushing was my Landlady!
In the compound where I stay, we pay for electricity and water, on a monthly basis. When the electricity from the national grid fails, her generator is to be made available to us, so that water would continuously flow, at least that was part of the obligations she signed up for, when she was leasing out the apartment to me/us.
The generator got bad severally but she wouldn't fix; we the tenants pooled resources and repaired it ourselves, everytime. Surely that should elicit some humane response on her part, but no. Instead she continuously increased the electricity and water rate, arrogantly reminding us that we should be grateful she let water out once a week, water that was never enough.
The last straw was when she travelled for two whole weeks, taking the keys to the generator house with her. She would not answer our phone calls while we sweated and begged for a few buckets of water from one house to another, from one street to the other.
"This inconsiderate behaviour was not what I bargained for, I'm being grossly inconvenienced here", I muttered to myself as I struggled to balance a bucket of water on my headpad.
It was stressful, it was frustrating, and by the time I got her on the phone, all my patience that had been bottled up over time, exploded into tiny smithereens, I gave her a piece of my mind, I told her exactly how heartless she was, and how she would definitely get a visit from karma, on a day least expected.
I mean she contravened all the laws of our contract, blatantly refusing to play by the rules.
And you see? I did not regret one bit all I said to her, because she needed someone to put her in her proper place. Her evils were just too many, so I did the job!
Rather than talking of the need to address the situation, she said words to the effect of, "Don't even think about renewing your rent contract; you have been a bad influence on the other tenants."
Well, If standing for what is right makes me a bad influence, so be it.
My rent expires in three months and I have started house-hunting, hopefully I get a better one where the Landlord/Landlady doesn't behave as one spawned by the devil himself.
In conclusion, I would say that I feel anger as a normal reaction to the action of provocation, but we must learn to control it before it gets the better of us. In the heat of the moment, people have carried out regrettable actions that can't be undone. So we must watch it!
Whenever I have felt anger rising, I have learnt to walk away from the source if I can or try to control my emotions somehow if I can't, it's not easy I must confess but the fear of saying or doing something I might later regret keeps me in check.
But in the case of my Landlady, I have no regrets whatsoever because I didn't act from a place of spontaneity rather it was an outlet for me to speak out against the many injustices she had meted out to her tenants.
This is my response to this prompt
I am @edith-4angelseu and thank you for stopping by my neifhbourhood.