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| Photo by Jamie-James Medina | |
ANGER
Is An Energy
The counsellor at my anger management course once told me Britain is in a state of devolution. At first I didn't understand what devolution meant but he explained that as more teenagers leave school without qualifications (over 30%) and the number of young offenders being tried for adult-crimes keeps growing (it doubled last year), the government is left searching for some solution to a generation of young men with little or no real understanding of what life should be like. When you think about the lack of structure in homes and schools, he said that for a lot of kids it's like "the past cancels out the future without them ever noticing".
Growing up on an estate in Essex, I used to walk around with a bottle of gas, fighting, robbing or just acting stupid with my mates. I wasn't that bad at school. I had a stutter so I kept quiet and left with some qualifications.
At one point I even won an award for a short story I wrote, but didn't show up to collect it because I didn't want to read it out loud. In all, I've been arrested for truancy, aggravated assault, holding, possession, driving without a licence and setting fire to a Coke machine outside a supermarket. The last one was the worst for me. We'd been driving around the supermarket a couple nights before, just racing, so they had our plates on CCTV already, so we deserved to get caught.
I'd been ordered by the courts to attend Think First classes twice before, which is a 43-step programme dealing with anger and responsibility, but failed both times because I missed classes or got in some kind of trouble. With an arson charge, the court changed my requirements to include not only anger control, but to also consider the "moral reasoning" behind my offence. This is what got me. Why was I so fucking angry at that Coke machine?
Part of the therapy was getting up in front of the class and explaining why we committed our crime. I was nervous speaking, but having to explain my crime was too much. I broke down. Not crying, but my body couldn't do anything because I was so confused. In class, we're put into two groups, Exploders and Imploders. At the moment, I'm an Exploder but I'm trying to change that. My medication slows me down a lot.
BRADLEY TENNANT
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