WHEN THE DARKNESS COMES

One Man’s Journey Through the Rabbit Hole

Chapter 16

Anger Is Easier

There are occasions when I have decided that the only sensible response to a game of football is to go to bed at half-time. This is not because I have suddenly become tired, nor because the result has become so predictable that there is nothing left worth watching. It is because I have reached the point where I can no longer tolerate the crap being served up in front of me, usually by a professional referee who has somehow managed to miss something that I, sitting several metres from a television screen with absolutely no qualifications in refereeing whatsoever, can see perfectly clearly.

There is, of course, an obvious weakness in this argument because I am a supporter, which means objectivity may have packed up and left the room some time before the offending decision was made. Fifty-fifty calls have a remarkable tendency to become ninety-ten calls when the ninety happens to favour the team whose colours you are wearing, and the bounce of an oval-shaped football has never shown much respect for justice. I understand all of that, and I am capable of making allowances for it right up until the commentators start questioning the decision as well.

That changes everything, at least in my head, because once supposedly independent observers start replaying the incident and wondering how the referee could possibly have arrived at the decision he did, I have corroborating evidence. This is no longer Jeff the supporter behaving irrationally in his lounge room; this is Jeff the accountant presenting independent expert testimony to support the proposition that the bloke with the whistle has stuffed it up.

My voice tends to rise accordingly. I have a mate with whom I vent during games, and he is quite happy to participate, either supporting my prosecution or appearing for the defence depending upon which side of the fence he happens to occupy at the time. There is something almost reassuring about having another grown man available to conduct a detailed examination of a decision made by somebody who cannot hear either of us and whose decision will remain completely unaffected by the quality of our submissions.

Robyn has a much simpler approach and will tell me, “You can’t do anything about it. There’s no point getting angry.” This is one of those irritating statements that has the considerable disadvantage of being entirely correct, because there is absolutely nothing I can do about it. The referee cannot hear me, the commentators are unlikely to ring for my opinion, the governing body has not established a special hotline through which retired accountants at Smiths Lake can overturn decisions, and the game will continue regardless of the volume at which I explain the error.

Knowing all of that doesn’t necessarily make me less angry. Eventually there are nights when I decide I have had enough, and although the television is still showing the game and there is another half to play, I go to bed because I simply cannot handle any more of it. Tomorrow morning I will probably deal quite calmly with a client whose problem is considerably more important than whether somebody was offside, held down too long or awarded a penalty that should never have been awarded, but tonight the football has exhausted my tolerance for humanity.

That contradiction has probably been around much longer than I recognised it, particularly because I have spent most of my professional life wearing a fairly durable veneer. Accountants are not supposed to explode at clients because the client has asked the same question for the fourth time, failed to provide something requested three months ago or arrived two days before a deadline carrying twelve months of financial history in a shopping bag. They are certainly not supposed to tell the client that the answer should have been obvious if only he had devoted thirty seconds to thinking about it, however tempting that conclusion might occasionally have been.

Banks Consultancy eventually formalised that restraint into one of the Four Pillars on which we said the practice operated: We will speak in your language. It sounds simple enough when written on a page, but there was considerably more behind it than avoiding accounting jargon. If I explained something to a client and the client didn’t understand it, my first response could not be irritation at the client’s failure to understand; I had to find another way of explaining it. If that didn’t work, I found another one, because the obligation imposed by the pillar was on us rather than them.

That could occasionally require a considerable amount of internal discipline. I might believe I had explained something perfectly clearly, perhaps more than once, and Logical Jeff could be sitting there wondering which particular part of a relatively straightforward proposition was proving so bloody difficult. None of that altered the rule. If the client was still looking at me blankly, then whatever language I had been speaking clearly wasn’t theirs, and “We will speak in your language” did not contain an exemption allowing me to become angry because I had run out of patience.

The Four Pillars were never decorative statements at Banks Consultancy. They were not something we put on a wall, quoted when convenient and quietly ignored when the client sitting opposite us was making adherence difficult. They were not up for negotiation at a Banks Consultancy level, which meant they were certainly not available for renegotiation simply because I was having a bad day.

In some ways that first pillar became another layer of the veneer. Whatever might have been happening inside my head, the client was entitled to deal with the accountant he had engaged rather than whatever version of Jeff happened to be struggling beneath the surface that afternoon. The client might be frustrating me, the paperwork might be appalling and I might have explained the same concept four different ways, but none of those things gave me permission to make my frustration the client’s problem.

There was also a useful piece of humility buried inside the pillar because accountants can become very impressed with their own knowledge. We spend years learning a language filled with deductions, distributions, franking credits, capital allowances, Division 7A, CGT events and enough acronyms to conduct an entire conversation without troubling the English language at all. A client was not stupid because he didn’t speak that language, any more than I was stupid because I couldn’t walk onto his building site and immediately do whatever he had spent twenty years learning to do.

So you deal with clients because that is what you are supposed to do, and hopefully it is what you are being paid to do. Professionalism involves rather more than being pleasant only when everybody else is behaving professionally as well, and at Banks Consultancy there was an additional standard I had helped impose upon myself. If necessary, I put another coat of veneer on the persona, found another way of explaining the problem and kept going.

Mine became pretty tough over the years, and that toughness was not entirely accidental. Anger might have been occurring underneath it, sometimes with justification and sometimes considerably out of proportion to whatever had caused it, but the first pillar created a boundary it was not supposed to cross. We will speak in your language meant that my inability to control my frustration could never become the client’s obligation to endure it.

I had grown up with another model of anger, and some of what I had seen involved violence. There are parts of that experience that have remained sufficiently alive for me to have nightmares about standing up to my father long after the boy who originally had to deal with him became a grown man with children of his own. I knew what uncontrolled anger could look like because I had not learned about it from a book.

At some stage, when my own children were young, I did stand up to him. I told him that if he ever laid a hand on my children, he would never see them again, and there was no negotiation hidden inside the statement or accounting footnote qualifying what I meant. I could endure the pain inflicted on me, because by then that belonged to my own history, but I was never going to stand by and watch it inflicted upon somebody else, particularly my children and particularly my boys.

Years later, Banks Consultancy would operate according to its Four Pillars, and anybody who worked with me knew that they were not suggestions to be applied when convenient. They were absolutes. We could argue about procedures, change systems, reconsider strategies and alter almost anything else if a better way presented itself, but the pillars represented the lines beyond which we did not go. Once we had said We will speak in your language, We will reduce your tax legally, We will encourage you to compliance and We will act like your silent partner, there was no invisible qualification underneath saying unless it becomes difficult.

Perhaps that tendency to establish non-negotiable lines existed in me long before I ever gave the Four Pillars their names. What I said to my father was another absolute, although considerably more important than anything that would later appear in a business philosophy. There would be no second offence, no discussion afterwards about whether he had really meant it, no consideration of the circumstances and no family meeting to determine an appropriate response. If he laid a hand on one of my children, he would cease to have access to them.

That was the line, and lines of that kind have always mattered enormously to me. Once something has found its way into the category of right or wrong, rather than preference or opinion, I find compromise considerably more difficult. At Banks Consultancy that characteristic could become a strength because the pillars protected clients from expediency, convenience and occasionally from my own frustration. In the family it meant that whatever I had experienced as a child was going to stop with me rather than become an inheritance passed down to my boys.

There is an uncomfortable connection between that certainty and anger, however, because the same part of me that can establish an absolute can become extremely intolerant when somebody appears to cross one. The ability to draw a line and mean it can protect people, provide consistency and make principles worth considerably more than the paper on which they are written. It can also make the man who drew the line very certain of his ground when he becomes angry about somebody stepping over it.

That does not make the line I drew with my father wrong. I would draw exactly the same one again, and I suspect I would draw it even more firmly knowing what I know now. What it does tell me is that the certainty I later built into the Four Pillars did not begin in an accounting practice; Banks Consultancy simply gave a professional structure and a set of words to something that had been part of me for much longer.

Some things could be discussed. Some things could be negotiated, compromised upon or reconsidered when new information arrived. Others became absolutes, and once they did, neither my father nor a client nor an employee nor I got to decide that the rule was inconvenient today.

The Four Pillars worked because everybody, including me, was subject to them. The line I drew around my children worked on exactly the same principle, except that this one had been drawn years earlier and there was considerably more at stake than the reputation of an accounting practice.

To Dad’s credit, the grandfather my children knew was nothing like the father I had known. They did not have my experience of him, and I am pleased they didn’t. Perhaps that difference made what happened years later more confronting rather than less, because when I began recognising anger in myself I was not comparing myself with some abstract stereotype of an angry man; I had known one intimately and had spent a considerable part of my life determined not to become him.

The prospect that I might be becoming something resembling the man I had once needed to protect my children from frightened me. That does not mean I became violent like my father, and I don’t want hindsight to create an equivalence that wasn’t there. The fear lay in recognising something familiar in myself and knowing where I had once seen that road lead, even if I was nowhere near the same destination.

Anger doesn’t fix everything, although for a short time it can create the satisfying illusion that you are doing something about whatever has offended you. You can raise your voice, state your case, establish who is right and who is wrong and experience the temporary certainty that comes from having identified both the problem and the culprit. The difficulty for me is that identifying the culprit has never necessarily meant that the anger disappears once the prosecution has rested.

Some people seem capable of having an explosion and then carrying on as though somebody has flicked a switch. They get it out, calm down and ten minutes later want to know whether anyone would like a cup of tea. I don’t drink tea and apparently haven’t mastered the accompanying emotional technique either, because anger can stay with me for a long time after the event that produced it.

That may be part of the reason apologies have never come particularly easily either. In my mind there is often a line: something is right or it is wrong, and if I remain convinced that the underlying thing was wrong, apologising for being angry about it can feel uncomfortably close to conceding the original point. The distinction between apologising for the response and conceding the argument is perfectly obvious when I am sitting quietly thinking about it, but it has not always been nearly as obvious while I am still angry.

There is undoubtedly a flaw in that reasoning because being correct about the cause does not automatically make every response to it correct. The magnitude of an emotion does not become proportionate simply because there was some justification for having the emotion in the first place. Logical Jeff can understand that proposition perfectly well while sitting here writing it; applying it while angry has occasionally proved rather more difficult.

That is where the difference between anger and some of the other emotions associated with depression becomes interesting to me. Anger frequently arrives carrying evidence because there has been a bad refereeing decision, an incompetent response, a ridiculous system or some other identifiable offence against the natural order of the universe as I believe it should operate. There is something wonderfully convenient about an emotion that arrives with its own prosecution brief.

I particularly dislike having to identify myself in order to pay somebody a bill. I understand why an organisation might need to establish my identity before disclosing private information, changing an account or allowing me to move money somewhere it shouldn’t go. But when I ring for the express purpose of giving them the money their own invoice says I owe them, being required to prove that I am really me before they will graciously accept it seems to me to have achieved a particularly refined level of stupidity.

That irritation is not automatically depression, and it may not even be unreasonable irritation. There really are systems that are ridiculous, people really do make mistakes, referees really do make decisions that commentators subsequently question and incompetence does actually exist. I don’t suffer any of those particularly well, but that does not mean the Black Dog gets the blame every time somebody does something stupid.

There is a connection there with some of what I have written about in Dumbing It Down, although probably not as much as might first appear. I don’t think everybody who fails to see something I can see is stupid, and I certainly don’t think intelligence gives me some special entitlement to anger. People process things differently, know different things and reach conclusions by different routes, and my ability to arrive somewhere quickly does not mean everybody else is obliged to travel at the same speed.

Incompetence is another matter, particularly if somebody is supposed to know what they are doing and demonstrably doesn’t. My tolerance can disappear fairly quickly in those circumstances, although the difficulty is establishing where reasonable frustration finishes and something else begins. Being entitled to be annoyed does not provide any particularly useful measurement of how annoyed I am entitled to become.

The Cub Scouts at Chidowla probably taught me something about that long before I had the language to recognise it. I have remembered that hill for years because of the effort involved in getting our Cubs up it while the Yass Cubs seemed capable of disappearing ahead without requiring anything like the same level of encouragement. There are only so many times you can cajole, encourage, organise, push and effectively drag people up a hill before the person doing the dragging begins to wonder why everybody else isn’t supplying a little more of their own momentum.

That hill has appeared in other parts of my life in different forms. Businesses have hills, clients have hills, families have hills and organisations can manufacture hills in places where any sensible landscape designer would have installed a bloody escalator. I have often been willing to help people climb them, but there are times when dragging everybody upwards becomes exhausting and anger can arrive somewhere in that exhaustion.

The problem is that the person standing closest when it arrives is not necessarily the person who built the hill. Robyn has probably experienced that more than anybody because she has been the person closest to me for most of my adult life. I could maintain the veneer with clients, employees and people who had every reasonable expectation of dealing with Professional Jeff, then come home with considerably less veneer available for the person who should have been entitled to more of it rather than less.

Sometimes the trigger could be ridiculously small, and Robyn’s hearing provides a perfect example. She spent much of her working life in industrial factories and her hearing is not as good as it once was, so if either of us speaks without facing the other it can often be difficult for her to understand what has been said. I know this, there is no mystery involved and none of it is something she is doing deliberately.

If I say something from another room, or while facing away from her, and she doesn’t hear me properly, the sensible solution is to turn towards her and repeat it clearly. Logical Jeff could probably prepare a short instructional video explaining the process, complete with diagrams if required. Yet having to repeat myself several times can see frustration rise very quickly despite my knowing perfectly well why the repetition is necessary.

The first repetition is simply information, while the second can somehow begin to feel like inconvenience and by the time I am repeating something again the volume may be carrying rather more than the words themselves require. None of this improves Robyn’s hearing, of course, and raising my voice in frustration is not a recognised treatment for industrial hearing loss. I know why she hasn’t heard me, I know she isn’t doing it deliberately and I know that if I had spoken directly to her in the first place there is a reasonable chance the entire problem would have been avoided, yet I can still become frustrated.

We have never been people who argue about what is for dinner, which perhaps demonstrates that even irritation has boundaries. We were both brought up to be thankful that there was food on the table, and that lesson seems to have survived everything else life has thrown at us. It is an oddly useful boundary in a marriage because whatever other stupidity might be taking place, neither of us has apparently felt the need to declare war over sausages.

Other things have not always enjoyed the same immunity, and I am sure there have been occasions when my anger has hurt people around me even though I cannot now produce a neat catalogue of incidents and consequences. I don’t want to invent one simply because a memoir chapter would be tidier if every behaviour came supplied with a representative victim and a beautifully remembered apology. Memory isn’t that cooperative, and neither was I.

The absence of a remembered incident does not mean there wasn’t collateral damage. Living beside somebody whose frustration can rise quickly, whose voice can become loud and whose anger does not disappear five minutes after the argument finishes has consequences even if I cannot reconstruct each one decades later. Depression might eventually help explain some of that behaviour, but explanation and absolution are not the same entry in the ledger.

At the time I first went looking for professional help, however, I wasn’t thinking in those terms because I thought I had an anger problem. That seemed almost manageable because anger was something I understood. I knew what it looked like, knew what it sounded like and had seen far more of it during my youth than I ever wanted to reproduce, so if I was becoming too angry then presumably I needed to do something about being angry.

In my mind I wasn’t sick; I was just a little angry. Even that description understates what was worrying me because somewhere underneath it sat the fear that I was becoming like my father. I had spent years building a professional life in which control mattered, and years building a family in which the anger I had known as a child was not going to be handed down as some compulsory inheritance, so if cracks were appearing in that arrangement I wanted them fixed.

That was why I went to the doctor, quite capable of walking into his surgery, quite capable of explaining why I was there and quite prepared to listen to sensible advice before walking back out again. That was how these things were supposed to work. You identify the problem, consult somebody who knows more about it than you do, accept the advice and take whatever corrective action is required.

Then came the bloody test, and the questionnaire did not appear particularly interested in preserving my diagnosis of being a bit too angry. It asked questions whose significance I did not fully appreciate while answering them, attached numbers to things I had been experiencing and produced a result that changed the scale of the conversation. I had thought I was living somewhere near the edge, while according to what the doctor was seeing I had fallen off it.

Hospitalisation entered the discussion, and suddenly the problem I had carried into the room looked very different from the one being discussed on the other side of the desk. I had arrived prepared to accept advice about anger and moods, but the possibility of being admitted to hospital was something else entirely. More than anything, it threatened the veneer.

That veneer mattered enormously to me then because I had clients relying on me, a professional reputation and an accounting practice. I was accustomed to being the bloke who understood the problem rather than the bloke who had apparently scored sufficiently badly on a questionnaire for somebody to contemplate taking him out of circulation. I had walked into the surgery under my own steam expecting to walk back out under much the same arrangements, and the concept that something inside my head might justify hospitalisation frightened me in a way that being told I was angry probably never could.

Perhaps that is one reason anger had been easier, because anger did not require me to regard myself as unwell. It did not threaten my ability to work, advise clients or maintain the persona I had spent years constructing. Angry Jeff could still be competent Jeff, professional Jeff and the Jeff who solved other people’s problems; he simply needed everybody else to stop being so bloody irritating.

Depression presented a much less convenient proposition because it suggested that perhaps the problem was not always located outside me. Worse, it raised the possibility that there might not always be an identifiable problem at all. That remains one of the distinctions I find hardest to reconcile because the accountant in me prefers an identifiable transaction behind every entry in the ledger.

If a referee makes a dreadful decision, I can tell you what I am angry about. If a bureaucracy creates a ridiculous process, I can identify the process, and if somebody is incompetent, I can usually prepare a reasonably detailed case for the prosecution whether or not anybody has asked me to. Depression is much less cooperative because it does not always provide a defendant.

Sometimes the Black Dog doesn’t scratch at the door anymore because I have reached the stage where he can simply sit in the room. There need not have been a particular disaster, argument, financial problem, rejection or incompetent official who invited him in. That makes anger almost comforting by comparison because anger has somewhere to point, whereas the Black Dog can apparently arrive without feeling any obligation to provide reasons.

There are still days when the tolerance level disappears, and there are nights when the football becomes unbearable and I go to bed at half-time rather than watch another minute. There are times when somebody failing to hear me, a ridiculous procedure or an example of incompetence produces considerably more frustration than the objective importance of the event would seem to justify. None of those things necessarily tells me that depression is responsible, and I no longer expect the Black Dog to announce himself by making everybody around me suddenly appear more irritating.

The following morning can nevertheless look completely different because a client rings and Professional Jeff answers the telephone. Whatever happened the night before, whatever mood remains and however much of the Black Dog might still be sitting somewhere in the room, the client has a problem and I know what to do with problems. I listen, I think, I solve what I can and, if necessary, I put another coat on the veneer.

Perhaps anger was easier because it allowed me to remain the person doing the fixing. There was an offence, there was an offender and there was a case to argue, even if arguing it achieved absolutely nothing. Depression was different because sometimes there was no incompetent person to correct, no ridiculous system to dismantle and no referee whose decision could be replayed from six different camera angles.

When there was nothing external to prosecute, there was simply me and whatever was happening inside my head. That was much harder to put into the familiar categories of right and wrong, cause and effect, problem and solution. Anger offered certainty where depression frequently offered none.

I still don’t know how much of my anger over the years belonged to depression and how much belonged to temperament, experience, impatience, genuine frustration or simply being pissed off about something that deserved to piss me off. I am not prepared to rewrite my life now and diagnose every raised voice as the Black Dog speaking through me. Some things were wrong, some people were incompetent and some refereeing decisions were bloody awful, regardless of whatever else might have been happening inside my head at the time.

The more difficult question is what happened after the justification ran out. The whistle had blown, the decision stood, Robyn was right that there was nothing I could do about it, and somewhere inside I knew that as well as she did. Yet the anger could remain long after the moment that created it had passed, which makes it harder to know exactly where justified frustration finished and something else took over.

Eventually I might turn the television off and go to bed at half-time. The referee would continue refereeing, my mate would presumably continue prosecuting or defending him without me, and the world would manage to stagger onwards despite my withdrawal from proceedings. The Black Dog, unfortunately, never needed the football to stay in the room, and unlike the referee he has never shown much interest in whether I think his presence is justified.