I have one summer memory I always come back to, whenever June rolls in.

It was 2007. (God, that was 16 years ago.) I went with some friends down to Myrtle Beach in South Carolina. It was a pretty impromptu trip, but we planned to stay for a few days, see a few sights, try to pull ourselves together just after graduating high school. I remember it partly because it was the first time I really felt like an adult, striking out with just myself and other people my age on a trip of our own.

The other reason I remember it is a walk on the beach I took with one of those friends one night.

I’m never going to forget the sight of the sea at night, even if I never make it back to a coast. It’s abyssal — this huge, endless dark, so dim and deep I couldn’t even make out the shapes of waves on the surface. I remember staring out at it and feeling incredibly small. I found that to be a comfort, really, especially in the burgeoning days of what would become a severe self-image issue (and a weight issue, but that’s a topic for another time.) My friend and I sat down in the sand, let the wind whip around us, and talked for a while.

It was one of those weighty conversations you have with someone on the tail end of a chapter in your life — a look back at high school, where we’d just come from, and the world ahead, where we were going, whether we wanted to or not. I don’t remember how we ended up on the topic of one another’s demeanor; I think she asked me how I saw myself and I said I was nervous (and I did not know how nervous — not yet familiar with the unending quake of irrational terror that would beset me in my twenties) but relatively happy otherwise.

She seemed surprised. She told me I was the angriest person she’d ever met.

I felt shocked. I didn’t consider myself an angry person — I didn’t yell at people, outside of a few choice conversations in all capital letters on gaming forums that meant next to nothing anyway. I didn’t hit anyone, except in self-defense when things went too far south to manage. I just tried to get through it. I told her I didn’t understand.

She said I was angry all the time, and didn’t even know it.

Angry at what? I asked. I felt almost like I needed to prove her wrong. Angry couldn’t be me, I said. Angry was my father, the way you’d tell someone to call you by your first name. I’m not angry, I said. What do you think I’m so mad about?

Everything, she said. Mad at God. Mad at your family. But more than anything, she said, you are constantly, always, purely and totally furious with yourself. You’re the first person you blame for anything. You never see yourself as good enough. And I think no matter how good you do or how far you get, you won’t see yourself as good enough, and I worry about that.

(Even as I’m writing this, I’ve told myself it’s performative, and dramatic, and shallow, and just on the wrong side of some woe-is-me thinkpiece pretending to be something deep. But it’s therapeutic, so my brain can shut up and take its proverbial AND tangible medicines.)

I was quiet for a long while, and I said maybe she’s right, and maybe I’ve got some thinking to do, and maybe we should talk about something else while we were 500 miles from home and at the beach on vacation. She laughed a bit and said that was okay.

I still think about that conversation a lot. I think I’m still the angriest person I know. Certainly for a long time that bled through into my online presence — every other post was a completely ineffectual rant about people whose minds I was never going to change doing things I couldn’t stop them from doing. I had the requisite militant atheist phase nearly every post-Fundamentalist Baptist kid goes through after they make their escape. (“Thank God I don’t have to go to church,” was the running refrain.) To a lot of folks, I probably seem mad all the time about everything.

But if I’m being honest — totally, wholly, completely straightforward with you — I’m still angriest at myself. I’m furious with myself for what I’ve allowed to happen to my body. I’m furious that I didn’t build a better career that required fewer visits to my friends’ inboxes with long-winded pleas that never needed to be more than “Can I have some help” because I have, against all reason, built a network of people who trust and love me. There’s been a few nights that came very close to being what I think is popularly being described as “grippy sock vacations,” because I constantly find myself viciously mad that I let myself become the person that I am.

But that’s the thing about illness, isn’t it? It’s a filter, laid over every input headed my way. It’s a lens in a funhouse mirror, distorting me until I resemble something I hate. It distorts every good thing I do into some kind of mistake and every kind word from a friend into pity, or undue kindness, or some cloaked attempt at getting me to go away. The important word here is “distort,” because all of those things are patently untrue.

I do good work, even if it’s mostly from my desk at home. I make good things, even if it’s mostly words and the occasional tabletop session. While I’m sure I’m not everyone’s favorite cup of tea, and I’m sure I’ve irritated more than a few people, the only person really *angry* with me is me, and I shouldn’t be. I’m going to try very hard not to be.

Hi, I’m Chez. You can call me Chez, not angry. Angry was my father, and these days he goes by James, I hear.