The next emotion in this mini-series is anger. From my experience, this doesn’t necessarily just mean outbursts of visible rage but also the anger that we can feel towards ourselves which makes us become overly self-critical. Those who know me will think that I don’t relate much to the first statement so I don’t have a lot of wisdom to share on that! However, watching clips of the film again, I realised that I relate to Anger more than I think through the rash and often irrational decisions that he often made without looking at the overall picture.

What I have experienced more of in my life is being too self-critical particularly in the last few months when my physical and mental health has been very up and down. I often get annoyed with myself when I think I’m making my health worse like forgetting what make things better and doing things that I shouldn’t have done through simple things like making bad diet choices to bigger things like pushing myself too hard or not handling a problem well. This stress that I put myself under often makes the situation worse and doesn’t allow to make the best decisions.

This self-criticism has affected how I interact with others from time to time as well as I sometimes let myself believe that other people are going to be as critical of me as I am of myself which has often made me isolate myself and be more anxious. Fortunately, this is a habit that I have been beginning to break the more time I spend with people and remembering the idea that I talked about in Making the Use of the Other Animals that the mistakes that we make can help us learn what to do in the future to make positive changes. I have found that this reassuring side of me is something that has come from years of training my brain to turn situations around and knowing where to seek support. These points of adopting healthy habits and living in community are things that I am planning on expanding on in later posts.

Thank you for taking the time to read this post and I hope you found it useful and as always, feel free to get in touch with me if you have any questions/feedback, I always love to hear it. Next time, I will be talking about fear and giraffeness so stay tuned for that.

Until next time

Kathryn