Competition

I don't enjoy being put into competitive positions. It's not that I'm a competitive person - it's that I'm too competitive, and I'm too angry. And not just the yelling, crying, rage quitting kind of angry, but the violent kind of angry. It sounds weird and almost kind of disturbing, but I can feel it in my muscles when they scream for me to strike out, and to fight. I want desperately to get into a fight - it's not enough just to punch, but to be punched as well. I can't accurately describe it, but it's like a pulling my muscles that can't possibly be ignored.

When I get mad, that second part that wants to be hit back goes away, draining into the need to punch. When I get mad, I want to destroy whatever - or whoever - it is that's making me angry. It took me years to be able to control that urge and to stifle it down when it comes up. But the thing that brings it out of me more than anything else is playing video games - and, unfortunately, some of my favorite games and the ones that are most popular among my friends. Fighting games, like Super Smash Brothers, or party games, like Monopoly. To say I want to flip tables is to seriously understate the feeling.

A younger me would have quite literally walked up behind my friend's head while we were playing and violently punch them in the back of the head. Even before I started training in martial arts, I was stronger and faster than most of my friends, so even if they tried to fight back, as much as I hate to say it, I was usually the winner. I honestly don't know how I managed to have friends at the time in the first place, and I especially don't know how some of those friends continue to hang out with me today.

In sports it's not quite as bad, mostly because that anger can be focused into the game itself. When I played lacrosse, getting angry meant that I played a better defense, that I threw the ball harder and faster, and I became a lot more aggressive in my attempts to gain control of the ball. All of which are the exact kinds of things you want in a lacrosse player - especially a middie.

But games... Getting angry just makes you play dumb, and play sloppy. You hit the buttons harder, which means you're hitting them slower, so you usually don't get the hits in that you want, which only serves to make you angrier. And that, of course, leads to worse gameplay, which makes you angrier, ad infinitum.

So I have to take breaks from playing. Do things like, I dunno... write about how angry I get while playing games with my friends.