The Angry Young Man…
My favorite musician in the whole world, even more so than Pink Floyd, is Billy Joel. I have been a fan of Billy’s music since elementary school and love all of his songs, even obscure ones that only the most ardent fan knows. Having seen Billy in concert countless times, there is a song which is a concert staple and crowd favorite, “Prelude, the Angry Young Man.” Ironically this song never achieved much radio play.
“ There’s a place in the world for the angry young man
With his working class ties and his radical plans
He refuses to bend he refuses to crawl
And he’s always at home with his back to the wall
And he’s proud of his scars and the battles he’s lost
And struggles and bleeds as he hangs on his cross
And likes to be known as the angry young man
Give a moment or two to the angry young man
With his foot in his mouth and his heart in his hand
He’s been stabbed in the back he’s been misunderstood
It’s a comfort to know his intentions are good
And he sits in his room with a lock on the door
With his maps and his medals laid out on the floor
And he likes to be known as the angry young man…
And he’ll go to the grave as an angry old man…”
I cite some of the song lyrics here because growing up, I was the angry young man. From infancy I had a volatile and mercurial temper with absolutely zero filter, and I carried the weight of a world of anger with me every where I went. At the time I needed this temper for protection. Growing up was a constant battle and struggle with my adopted mom. Almost daily I was fighting with her and in trouble with her. She expected me to be cute and loving like a cocker spaniel. She would quote Ephesians 6:1 to me ad nauseum. My dad tried to keep the peace between the two of us but his idea of keeping the peace was trying to get me to act like an adult in dealing with mom. The two of them expected me to handle her emotional instability and ridiculous demands that I be her ideal of perfect, with poise, composure and understanding. Thus I learned to let my temper explode when I needed to protect myself out of fear from her or when I could no longer carry the weight of her hurricane like strife. To make matters worse, she was very manic/depressive in how she treated me. One minute she loved me more than anything in the world and would tell me that the day they adopted me was the greatest day of their lives, the next minute she was literally yelling “I hate you, you G!D damned bastard!” at me. As if that was not enough, she loved to complain about me to anyone who would listen, especially those who otherwise had a positive view of me. Not only was she starting wars with me, but she was also back stabbing me to make sure that everyone she knew had the same view of me that she had. I didn’t learn to forgive people until much later in life because I was never forgiven by my parents for whatever in her twisted mind I did wrong. The onion started building very early and very quickly. By the time I was in junior high I would regularly tell my mom to “go burn in hell.” The emotional pain that I experienced during childhood was hell. What made it even worse was my dad constantly telling me to stop being sensitive toward things and to grow a thicker skin, as well as his insistence that I needed to learn to “kiss ass” in order to get ahead in life. Something that I adamantly refused to do. My favorite song was “My Life”, also by Billy Joel, with it’s refrain of “Go ahead with your own life, leave me alone.” As Pink Floyd describes so eloquently in the song “Mother” on “The Wall”, not only did mama help build the wall, but she was the primary reason for it being built in the first place.
By the time I was done with college I was angry, temperamental, and jaded with life. I was no fun to be around for the majority of the world and only let a select handful of people get any where near close to me for fear of being back stabbed. I sought out countless counselors looking for how to heal from the anger and temper with little success. By this time in my life the anger and temper no longer served me in my daily life. They were only useful when I would have an unfortunate encounter with mom or someone else who would set off my volatile temper. Like a bad virus that just won’t go away, however, she would rear her ugly head into my life and attack me from time to time so it was difficult for me to heal the onion when new layers were being added to it. To this day she still does this. On Valentines Day this year I got a letter from her saying she wants to talk about “the pain that I have caused her family.” Yeah, that is not happening.
It was not until shortly before he was made an Orthodox Bishop that Fr. John A and I were discussing my temper and my desire to heal from it. Fr John had spent countless hours counselling me and knew well how much pain the remnants of the temper and anger caused me. He explained to me that I was addicted to the adrenaline fire of the temper and while it served to protect me as a child, it was no longer useful to me. Fr. John told me that adrenaline can be more addicting than heroin and loved me enough to look me in the eye and say “Michael, you are a junkie.” He asked me if I truly wanted to heal and told me that it would require a summer of very hard work controlling my emotions manually every time I felt even the slightest rise in my blood pressure. That summer I worked my tail off to make sure that my temper did not fire once, in an effort to break the addiction to adrenaline. By the end of that summer we had had great success with the process, although it took a few more years of work to fully get the temper under control. As I have alluded to before, this was the beginning of the onion peeling. I thank God daily for being given a second chance at a life full of happiness, creativity and joy, free of anger and an evil temper. I am now in full recovery from being “The Angry Young Man.” The silver lining in this is I won’t “go to the grave as an angry old man.”
