The Six Months I Was Angry About Everything

I didn't know, while it was happening, that this is what it was. I thought I was just tired, or that the people around me had all, coincidentally, become slightly more irritating within the same few-month window. It took someone else pointing it out — carefully, the way you tell someone something they might not want to hear — for me to notice the pattern in my own reactions: the short replies, the reflex to find fault first, the exhausting effort of staying civil in situations that used to require none.

Looking back, I can more or less locate what it was about. Nothing dramatic, nothing that would explain it on its own — a slow accumulation of small unfairnesses, none large enough to justify a reaction, all of them together apparently large enough to change my baseline for half a year without my permission.

What strikes me now is how much damage a low-grade anger like that can do precisely because it never presents itself clearly enough to address. A single large explosion gets noticed, apologized for, repaired. A six-month simmer just quietly recolors everything it touches — every conversation slightly shorter than it needed to be, every benefit of the doubt withheld a little more often than usual — and nobody, including the person doing it, clocks it as a single continuous event until it's already over.

I'm not writing this because I found the lesson at the end of it. I don't think there was one, beyond the obvious fact that it eventually passed on its own, the way weather does, without asking for credit or explanation. I'm writing it because I think it's worth having on record that this happens — that a person can be quietly, chronically unlike themselves for half a year and not know it, and that the people closest to them usually know before they do.