“Even a man who is pure in heart, and says his prayers by night, may become a wolf when the wolfs bane blooms, and the autumn moon is bright.”  – Lon Chaney, in The Wolfman, 1941.

I loved “The Wolfman” when I was a kid, I watched it a million times. I remember one scene in particular, when poor Larry Talbot begs a doctor to lock him up before the moon turns full, and the doctor pooh-poohs the plea and Talbot knows he will turn into a werewolf, escape from his confinement, and kill.

Talbot’s face was a study in torment and  guilt. I was very young when I first saw “The Wolfman” and I was convinced that was my story, there were demons inside of me that I could not control or understand. To some extent, this turned out to be true.

Unlike Larry Talbot, I am in no trouble, and will harm no one, unless one counts truth and directness. I am angry.

I have a meeting to go to this week,  and it is an important meeting, I am going to fight for something I believe in very strongly, and I am going to defend a friend I love very much who has been mistreated. The meeting is very much at the core of what I believe and do. The people calling the meeting have disturbed and upset me in a number of ways, and I am angry with them.

I fear going to the meeting, not because of what they might do, but because of what i might feel and say. The wolfman definitely lives inside of me, he has not ventured out in years, even in the full moon, even when the wolf bane blooms. He used to come out at almost regular intervals and tore my life apart.

The wolfman is a metaphor, I think, for many of us, the things inside of us that we fear and cannot always control.

I am a bit embarrassed to say I checked the phases of the moon for my meeting day, and it is a waning crescent, far from full, about 13 per cent of the moon. I take this as a good omen. I am no wolfman, yet I am, in a way. This madness was always inside of me, and it is insidious, it sleeps and hides, and stirs when provoked in certain ways.

I hear the growls and echoes sometimes, but I suspect he has found some other soul to occupy most of the time.

I have written about the anger in me a bit, and the damage it did to me and others. I quit about a dozen good jobs, and moved a score of times and caused much pain to others. I love being a writer, one of the reasons is that I can keep to myself much of the time, I have not been to a meeting in many years.

I stay away from the things that always made me mad and social media sometimes reminds of the meetings I used to hate – angry voices gathered in an unthinking mob.

So many things made me angry, and the rage that came out was destructive, not as deadly as Talbot’s – I never killed anyone or tore their throat out – but I feared the anger in me. I fear it, I hate it boiling inside of me. It is not who I want to be, but it is sometimes who I am.

Meetings always brought out the worse in me, they were triggers in some ways of the things I most resented about the world. I felt trapped in them, surrounded, furious. There are no meetings of any kind at Bedlam Farm.

Anger, I can testify, accomplishes nothing, solves no problems, makes nothing better. I have worked very hard – decades of therapy and some medication – to put the wolfman inside of me to sleep, I so rarely feel this anger any more than I can barely recall it.  Except I feel it in the night sometimes, and it is fearful.

Therapy helped of course, falling in love helped more, living the life I wished to live helped even more. And writing has always helped me, grounded me, saved me, I think.

I am feeling that anger again, I begged these people to think about what they were doing, and  not to push me into going to this meeting, I almost begged them, but they could not hear me, I tried very much to do what I could on the phone. It’s not that I am afraid of hurting anyone or anything like that, I just hate the anger and what it does to me, what memories it provokes, how grotesque it feels now.

And I want to do right by my friend.

I want to be over it, past it, I want to be calm and gentle in the meeting, to listen and be thoughtful, not impulsive and judgemental or combative.

I want to help my friend and solve this problem, and I know anger will not do that, so I must step outside of myself and try to be selfless. To see how far I have come.

When I think an injustice has been done, that is like a full moon for me, it is like the blooming of the wolfs bane.

I can’t say more about this meeting, it wouldn’t be right, but it has brought me back to a dark place. I think of the wolfman, sitting in his room, looking through the bars of his cell, looking at the fur growing on his hands, losing  himself in the awful night.

What a strange thing to be haunted by an old black and white horror film. Some people like to tell me that I have changed, but life is not that simple. I can improve, I can live with myself, I can evolve and control myself, but no person can completely change who they are or have been. I can only be better.

And that is what I will be. Tomorrow, I will take a walk, meditate,  get up early read some Merton and Campbell, find the center of myself, and leave the wolfman at home. Then, later in the week, I will set off and try to do some good for people at this meeting. That is a better legacy to leave.

There is no place inside of me for the wolfman any longer, especially on this day. The full moon was on the 8th. And there is no wolfsbane near the farm.