slow burn
n. Slang.

A gradually increasing sense or show of anger: did a slow burn while waiting three hours in the doctor’s office.

My shattered marriage and the subsequent emotional breakdown is the ideal example of a slow burn. I can’t remember a time prior to my marriage when anger was a part of my life. In fact, I don’t recall a time when negative emotions ever really played a part in my life before then. I was the perpetually sunny, easy going person who took EVERYTHING, good and bad, in stride. My feathers didn’t ruffle, my eyes didn’t roll, I was the duck that let everything roll off her back until that one night when something inside me snapped and a whole new world opened up for me – one I’ve grown to dislike a great deal and wish I could forget exists. The world of emotions. What a wide reaching place that is. I never knew one person could feel so many different emotions at any one time and I certainly had no experience in how to “channel” or “control” them. When they hit me it was like a ton of bricks came crashing down on me much like the Twin Towers in New York.

Flash forward two years later and there are still days when I feel like that and I wonder if I’ll ever be the same again. No, I won’t. How can I be? I can’t go back and erase what has happened. I can’t change a thing. I just have to go forward and continue to try to dig my way out of this pile of emotional hell that rained down upon me one slow burn after another.