(Still) Sore Loser

I have an anger problem.

99% of the time, I'm the one of the happiest people you'll meet in life. I typically don't let most typical annoyances bother me, and I'm pretty hard to piss off, if I do say so myself.

Until I lose. I've visited and revisited my inability to cope with losing in a mature manner, but even though I've put significant (read: woosah)effort into adjusting my personality, I cannot get past the ridiculous competitiveness that drives me to best people in literally almost everything that can be quantifiably measured.

Last night while enjoying wings and a drink after playing soccer, I caught myself repeatedly checking the level of my friend's bottle to make sure he wasn't finishing his beverage before mine. I had twice the number of wings he had, but I still found myself rushing to finish my portion before he was done with his.

Recently, I've been increasingly unable to harness my anger while playing pickup soccer. If anything goes wrong, if I misplace a pass, or (Yah forbid) my team loses, I find myself descend into an incredibly pissy mood. More often than not I'm able to drag myself out of it by trying to enjoy my successes as much as I beat myself up about the failures, but my overly competitive side always kicks in when I try to rationalize staying happy.

As I continue to work on my competitiveness, my anger issue will surely become less serious. I'll never be able to fully stomach a loss or poor performance as I am somewhat of a perfectionist and that's my personality. However, moving forward, my goal is to be able to enjoy the bigger picture of what I'm doing; i.e. playing a sport I love, playing video game, or even simply enjoying a leisurely meal or drink (without competition) with friends.