Week Sixteen: This Just In - I'm An Asshole

You know, up until a couple of hours ago, I was so excited to write about my week today: new haircut, shindig in Denver, finally finding an apartment. But life, on occasion, happens to suck beyond the telling of it and even if I were less upset right meow, I find it doubtful that I'd be able to form my thoughts well enough to tell you about my week. Anger amplifies and focuses emotion. That's where I am right now.

It is perhaps a moderately well known fact that my heeler, Isabelle, is something of a handful, by which I mean she is aggressive, territorial, and frankly sometimes a complete dick-bag. When I adopted her a couple of years ago, I knew what I was getting myself into having been privy to her behavioral issues before. As such, I've worked with her a lot to manage some of her behavioral problems and work on getting her more socialized both with other animals and other people. To her credit, she's more or less done quite well in those couple of years. In fact, in the last several months, she's even taken to "mothering" my Aunt's small dog, Piper. Today, however, was the opposite of that growth: she attacked someone while out on a hike.

The trail we were on was quite small and I kept her on a short leash, only allowing her a few feet of slack so she could do her puppily duty and pee on all the things, smell all the things, and get her exercise in. A gentleman who was walking the opposite direction passed by and unprompted, Izzy attacked him, tearing his jacket. Obviously, I apologized profusely and offered to give him my contact information, make sure he was okay, replace the jacket. But this person wasn't having any of it--telling me that I needed to control my dog (the obvious implication that I myself am a terrible dog owner). 

Here's the thing you should know about me: when pushed, I will push back. It's not often that I back down, especially in the context of being attacked either as a person or being physically provoked. This is my dog you're talking about; my fur baby for whom I have dedicated countless hours training in an effort to curb her aggression. Understandably, this guy was pissed and was not handling it well; but then again, neither was I. It didn't help that one of my best friends who was on the hike with us kept telling me that I was making it worse by calling him out for acting like an asshole. Few things light my anger more than feeling unsupported and cornered. 

Can I say I blame him? No. I can't say that. But I was doing my best to make the situation right to no avail. 

Today has not been a good day. Perhaps if I were a better person or a better dog owner, Isabelle wouldn't have attacked that person unprovoked. Perhaps if I were a better person, I would have understood in that moment that his anger was justified and that pushing back wasn't called for or necessary. But right now, in the current headspace of anger and frustration and upset, I am none of those things. I'm not a very good person. Does it count that I'm working on it? Something tells me that the universe doesn't give a shit about your effort towards balance and goodness. Maybe people are never inherently good. 

Sorry to say, friends, that I have nothing else for this week. I'm too pissed off to focus on anything else and frankly I feel too alone to really expend any further effort talking about my #30Before30 goals. It seems kind of pointless to work on personal growth when everything sucks, everything is terrible, and nothing matters. 

Sorry.