I’ve wanted to reflect on some events both recent and not so recent that I have gone through…. with this, I’m hoping that anybody else going through similar emotions can read what I’ve felt and not feel alone. I’m also hoping that some people I’ve hurt or pushed away in the past can understand where I came from and where I’m trying to go.

To put this in the simplest terms – I have anger issues. If you’ve been around me long enough, you’ll know that I’m not always the easiest person to get along with. I’m quick to react, highly emotional, and very defensive. I inherited my Nana’s vicious tongue and unfortunately it’s probably done more damage than good. I didn’t have an easy upbringing, on top of an even more challenging teenage and young adult life. Let me explain.

My mom had me when she was young – around 16/17. She wasn’t ready to bring another life into this world yet alone raise it, so I started off at a disadvantage from the get go. I was born prematurely (6 month baby) which led to some health complications (severe asthma and allergies) that my mother didn’t know what to do with. She was a straight A student only a few years prior, but now was consumed with drugs and alcohol that led to dropping out of school. On top of that, I to this day can’t tell you a single fact about my father – nothing. Fast forward to two years of age, and my ‘parents’ were no longer in the picture so my Nana ended up taking me in.

Growing up, we were extremely poor. My Nana ended up quitting her job as a Nurse so that she could raise me full time which meant that she only had a small government cheque coming in once a month. While she did her best for what we had, it was tough growing up in Stonehaven which is a fairly affluent neighbourhood other than the subsidized apartment that we lived in. I was constantly made fun of due to being poor, which made my Nana come into the school to defend me, which caused the kids to make fun of me even more because I couldn’t defend myself. It was a vicious circle. I also was angry about not having parents while everybody else around me had ‘normal’ families. I felt alone, and had a lot of time to dwell in my room that made my feelings even worse. I was also very sheltered and was almost never allowed to leave the house as my Nana didn’t want me going down the same path as my mother, so that didn’t help in the positive department either.

I was also abused by my Nana. While she taught me respect and showed me a lot of love, she was also very old school and scorn herself due growing up with abusive parents and being abused by her husband the entire marriage. She took a lot of her frustrations and anger out on me, which in turn made me angry and frustrated, and I’d take this out on others around me. While the physical abuse died down as I got older, her verbal abuse got even worse and was eventually unbearable. I ended up moving out when I was 16 to try and better my life, but the damage had been done.

I then moved into Brett’s families house and rented their basement. I was 16. This was an incredibly difficult year for me as I was paying rent and working 35 hours per week at Zellers to pay my bills but still find the time to study and maintain a 89 average to get into Laurier. I also didn’t know how to function in a family setting as I had never really experienced it before, and was frustrated with myself for this. Overall, I was an incredibly angry Tyrell given that I was forced to grow up while my peers were still being irresponsible teenagers. Life just didn’t seem fair and because of that, I thought that if I’m angry and having a ‘bad life’ that I should bring others down around me too. This mentality has stuck with me throughout the years.

This shitty behaviour continued into my young adult years, through multiple unnecessary arguments during University with my friend group, to making life difficult for my Newmarket family to the point where I was forced to move out and couch surf before I could occupy my place in Waterloo. I wasn’t speaking to my Nana either, which upset me even more because I still did love her but just didn’t know how to have her in my life at the time. I was over $26,000 in debt due to my BBA, unemployed for 5 months after school, and wasn’t feeling like the family I had adopted wanted me anymore. I wasn’t getting any help or speaking about how I was feeling which meant that I was bottling a lot of this anger throughout the years. I was basically the mega quake that California is waiting to get hit by, with shockwaves and tremors being sent out frequently before the big one. Unfortunately, the big one hit a few times with many many shockwaves before and after.

Fast forward to 23 – the year prior had been one of my happiest to date. Work was going well, I was making a ton of new friends in Toronto, and I started dating someone I thought was the love of my life. For the first time ever, I felt on top of the world and truly happy. Unfortunately, my tone and behaviour over the years has remained very defensive and condescending when I’m not trying to be. Even though I was an exceptional worker and caring lover, these negative traits ended up costing me a promotion, the job itself, and my girlfriend.

The first incident that started the domino effect was yelling at my coworker Sarah in front of the entire company. Sarah had been my boss when I was first hired, but moved into a sales role and we worked alongside each other eventually. I let my anger out on her one day and yelled that she should stop micro managing me because she hasn’t been my boss ever since she got demoted. It was one of the worst things I’ve ever said to someone as it disrespected her as a person and the career she had worked so hard to get at that point. This not only created a ton of tension in the company, but was the initial event that led me to being passed up for the Team Lead promotion and within 6 months, leaving the only career I had known due to not being able to move forward from it. This caused me to be even angrier, at first towards the company, but then to myself for when I realized how bad I had messed up.

I proceeded to take a lot of this anger out on Katriina, yelling at her and just being a horrible person to be around. I wasn’t happy with myself and I let that toxicity spread into our relationship… she eventually broke up with me and moved out as a result. Again, this intensified my anger even more and sent me into a very deep depression for at least a few months. I lashed out on my friends, threw fits, and would pick fights in public as a way to ‘get back’ at life. It didn’t help that I had two friends pass away within this same time frame, causing me to be sad about losing them that then turned into anger. Again, I was bottling my emotions instead of trying to better them because life was hard and I didn’t like the hands I kept getting dealt.

Fast forward to the last year or so of my life. On paper, things look incredible. I moved to Los Angeles, work at an exciting fashion company, and met an amazing girl Jess who I cared for enough to finally let in after 4 years of putting up a guard because I was afraid of being hurt. Unfortunately, social media is great at masking that not everything is all peachy.

My Nana passed away a year ago, and I really guilted myself for not seeing her over the holidays when I had a chance because it was just too hard to see her in her condition. It felt like a selfish move, and never allowed me to get the closure I needed in my relationship with her. This guilt led to anger, combined with more anger about how hard the transition to LA was. I wasn’t making friends as easily as I thought I would, I wasn’t meeting any potential girlfriends due to the savage nature of the LA social scene, and I also felt like I was missing my friends lives back home that were going on without me. This led to an incident I previously wrote about last June that almost cost me my life in LA and everything I’ve been working towards over the last 28 years. It was time to grow up.

Over the last year, I’ve done a lot of soul searching and continue to do so. I’ve learned that bottling your anger is a recipe for disaster, and that you should deal with problems as they arise no matter how hard the conversation might be. People may not like you in that moment, but they’ll sure appreciate it later.

On top of that, it’s important to actually listen to someone’s POV and not just pretend while you wait to speak your rebuttal. You may gain some insight into why they acted or responded in a certain way, which will help both of you get to a solution much quicker. I’ve gone into too many arguments not caring about the other persons perspective and just wanting to state my opinion and expecting them to admit I’m right. I’m not always right. That’s been an important lesson to realize, because it also led me to realize that I am not always going to get my own way which is OK – I don’t always deserve it.

Breathe before responding. This has also been a simple yet effective technique to avoiding arguments and saying something that I may regret later. It’s fine to be fuelled by emotions, but unfortunately this leads to some pretty brash comments that can hurt somebody even if the intention wasn’t there to do so. Those two to three seconds can allow you to clear some of that aggression and return back to reality.

Don’t instigate. I’ve been known in the past to shit disturb and look for reasons to argue with somebody because of my own motives. This never leads to anything positive and creates more issues than it’s worth. I don’t quite fully know how to explain why I would instigate, but I know the results were not ideal.

Finally, life isn’t always going to go your way, and that’s OK. Roll with the punches and make the best of your situation. I’m in no way saying that you aren’t allowed to have bad days. Nobody can expect someone to be ‘on’ every single day of their life, that’s just unrealistic. Just make sure to remember that after your bad days, you keep moving forward. However tough the situation is at the moment, you’ll get through it. It doesn’t always feel that way, especially in the middle of a bad situation, but it’s true and it’s important to remember that.

I’m not going to claim to be perfect now either… partially why I’m writing out the above is to also remind myself as I still tend to revert back to my condescending and negative ways in hard situations. It shouldn’t take energy to be a good person, or to react positively in tough situations, but I find it exhausts me. All I want to do is yell, throw out insults, and have my own way no matter if I’m in the wrong. I still find myself doing this at work with my peers, and did it to Jess while she was visiting me in LA a few weeks ago. Nobody deserves to be yelled at, talked down to, or insulted because of my own problems. I don’t want to push away and lose the people that I have in my life, and because of that…

I’m working on it. For the first time ever, I’ve finally accepted what is holding me back from being the person that my Nana would be proud of, and who I genuinely want to be for myself. I don’t want to be an angry individual who guards himself from the world anytime life gets tough. Life is always going to be tough, but we really need to make the best of it while we’re here.

I do apologize to anybody over the years who has felt the wrath of Nayquan. I am hoping that if anybody has felt the way that I do, or is going through similar emotions, just know that you aren’t alone. It’s incredibly tough, but not totally unfixable either. All these ‘tips’ I wrote above are easy to read and much harder to actually do. This is something that I’m probably going to be working on for the rest of my life… and that’s ok too.