Would I have to carry the inflatable Spider-Man around with me at home, or only when in public?

Both. You must carry it around at all times.

—‘FAQ for Entering an Agreement to be Paid $5000 Per Month for Life to Carry Around an 8-foot Inflatable Spider-Man at All Times’ by Dan Carney

As a kid – like many other kids – I didn’t learn what to do when I was angry or how to talk to someone who was angry. People who were angry exploded suddenly and then went quiet. Or they would wreck something, cut something or someone down. Or they would just be silent, with something huge and unfathomable pressing out from behind their eyes. When I started getting bad mood swings as a teenager I was at a loss for what to do with anger. What was it for? Sadness was easy. You could write it, play it. Even numbness was something you could work with. Numbness could be used like a kind of hovercraft, letting you float through the day. But anger gave you nowhere to go. It was like a nut allergy or crooked teeth or all the new daffodils in someone’s garden with their heads pulled off.

I remember reading The BFG and thinking that Quentin Blake’s illustrations of the bad dreams – dark and quivering inside glass jars – looked like my anger.

Anger felt like carrying something very unwieldy around for no good reason other than you had entered into a contract that required it. Like in this FAQ by Dan Carney about entering an agreement whereby you will be paid $5000 per month for life in exchange for carrying around an 8-foot inflatable Spider-Man at all times. (‘Would I be able to carry the Spider-Man around in a specially designed rucksack?’ ‘No. You will carry the Spider-Man underarm at all times, like you would a surfboard.’) Anger didn’t just feel unwieldy, it felt undignified. Look at Huey Morgan, the Fun Lovin’ Criminals frontman, smashing his mug to smithereens in an episode of Never Mind the Buzzcocks and then saying mildly, ‘You’re not upsetting me, it’s fine.’ It’s like he’s been possessed by a geyser.

As a teenager if I was very angry and I did try to speak, I would start shouting or screaming and then I would embarrass myself. I once had too much to drink at a party. A friend and I were standing by the pie cart, eating chips, in a deserted main street of our town at midnight when she made fun of me about something – or I thought she had – and I lost control. I really lost control. I was like Huey Morgan but instead of throwing a mug I threw hot chips. I heard myself screaming, but more than that I felt the anger, white hot and ferocious. It felt like the anger was tearing strips off me, like a hawk tearing roadkill off a road. Then I ran. At school the next week, mortified, I told my friend I couldn’t remember any of it. ‘I was just drunk,’ I said. This was when people would regularly drink to the point of black-out, so I hoped it wasn’t too much of a stretch. I wanted to keep that night buried.

I didn’t know who or what this anger was for. If I felt around it really carefully, I could find predictable things stuck to its sides like barnacles, like self-loathing, boredom, self-consciousness, physical discomfort, maybe a feeling of not being heard but also an inability to say what I meant. But all of it was wildly out of proportion to any real-world situation, which made the anger even uglier and potentially more damaging if I ever tried to voice it, so when I felt it building I drew back into myself and waited.

I am struggling again with anger. One of the things you encounter when you taper off an SSRI medication, which I am doing, is anger. The other set of symptoms I’ve become most familiar with are the ‘brain zap’ sort, as described in Harvard Health: ‘a feeling that resembles an electric shock to your head—or a sensation that some people describe as “brain shivers”.’ A shivering brain. It sounds like like something off Ren and Stimpy. Discontinuing this drug feels a bit like being homesick. I keep thinking back to my warm, lumpen, medicated state as if it’s home and wondering what I’m doing out here with my head being zapped like an idiot and why I haven’t just gone back inside like a sensible person would. I remind myself about the side effects of the medication, like violent nightmares that left me reeling and night sweats that left me drenched and the sense of my emotions being somehow muffled, like drums stuffed with pillows. I remind myself that this is just my brain figuring out how to manage its serotonin for itself. But it doesn’t help to know. In the moment of anger, all reasonable thinking is vaporised. It is shameful to have an anger that exists in a vacuum and is sparked by trivial things, when there is so much to be justifiably angry about in the world right now. My anger is like a kind of nonsense blimp bumbling along, impractical and uncool and piloted by an old man with heartburn who’s refusing to take his antacids today.

I recently hurt my hand punching a wall because I was upset at all the noise from my upstairs neighbour. On my bike I screamed at a truck driver who’d revved as they passed me. I found myself emailing a vegetable grower because the carrots I’d bought were slimy. ‘SLIMY CARROTS’ I typed into the subject line, stabbing each key. I sat in the gym and typed a furious email to an electronics company because my sports headphones kept falling out of my ears. ‘THESE EAR BUDS ARE NOT SWEAT RESISTANT AS ADVERTISED’ I typed, still sweating. These are stupid, privileged things to be angry about. They are things that have become snagged on something bigger that I don’t know how to control, other than forcing myself to wear boxing gloves, which might lead to the wrong outcome. And none of those reactions have acted as an adequate pressure valve for the anger, and they’ve almost definitely made things worse (except for my carrot complaint, which led to the happy outcome of being sent a big bag of potatoes, carrots, and onions). One afternoon last week, I was trying to work at home and there was a lot of yelling and thumping upstairs from my neighbour. After trying to ignore it for a while, I felt something flame up inside me. In a split second I knew I was going to go up and complain about it – something I had never done before. I didn’t truly want to do it and I imagined several people telling me it wasn’t a good idea but there’s something about irrational anger that freezes you inside a moment of great, clear-cut intention, as if you are taking back control of the world and are going to right everything that is wrong with it. I thumped up the steps and knocked on my neighbour’s door, pacing to and fro like a gif until she opened the door. And behind her there were four tiny toddlers running around happily and immediately my anger curdled and I was mumbling, ‘I’m so sorry to ask but . . . the noise . . . it’s very noisy . . .’ My neighbour said, ‘I’m sorry. But there’s nothing I can do.’ They were just little kids. I felt like I’d turned into a literal troll under a bridge.

My anger will likely get worse before it subsides, as I still have a way to go. The best I can hope for is that in a few months’ time I will be struggling to surface from a hearty pile of veg. I will eat my way out like Groundskeeper Willie eating his way out of the creamed corn explosion and this will solve two problems: my veg surfeit and my bad temper.

I hope I come back to myself. I hope if the anger comes too I will get better at turning to face it.