This is an open letter to the anger I can’t control on my best days. To the parasite inside my body that knaws at my skin and my bones and my muscles until it becomes me.

At times, you’re numbing and painful at the same time, and I don’t know why. I don’t know why you chose me to kill, but you did, and it hurts. Hurts more than the punches I throw, or the ridicule I receive for being so angry, because self-destruction is uncontrollable in your state. You hurt me more than anyone’s words or fists ever have. I can’t control you when I want to, nobody can, and your magnitude is overwhelming. Your power knocks me on my ass whenever it wants, and it’s always a surprise. I can’t feel you coming on, you just show up, like a bad memory, which, you coincidentally create.

You leave the faces of my loved ones in pain and anger and confusion. You aren’t me, but only I know that, and only I will ever understand that, but people start to think you are me. Those angry outbursts, over minuscule things, start to make people take a second look at who I am, or who I’m becoming. There’s no explaining the feeling you create inside my body, as I shake with anger and lash out at those I love most. Then comes the embarrassment. The embarrassment of what I did, how I acted, who I hurt, because you are not the me I want the world to see.

This letter is to the disease that nobody considers, because you’re ‘controllable’ even when you aren’t. But whoever doesn’t have you living within them, will never understand the havoc you wreak in my body. They don’t know I suppress you every chance I get, because I have more calm days than angry ones. Nobody except me and you know that, though. Every time I have a bad day, and we lock ourselves in my room, those are my calm days, where my mind over powers you and your urges. Even on my calm days, though, you’re living with me in new forms: mean, relentless, sadness.

You are the me I try so hard to hide from the world. You are the me that they talk about in movies and books, the me that couldn’t be saved no matter how hard anyone tried, because your hate is stronger than my love.

This is a letter to you.