There was a comment on one of the threads recently where one
of our sister warriors couldn’t understand how calm and level we all were.
Where was our anger? Weren’t we furious!? Why weren’t we screaming and breaking
things!? This post is for you (and for all of us).
I think we are taught young that anger is “bad.” Especially if we are girls, the inevitable
silencing we experience emphasizes the erasure of any difficult emotion that
makes us appear unladylike or, worse, makes others uncomfortable. We must be
quiet and submit. We are fed messages that tell us we must always be positive. Don’t pout. Turn that frown upside down. Just
smile. You’d be prettier if you smiled.
Then D-Day happens.
After the grief, pain, shock, horror, numbness, fear (or
sometimes before those things), there is an unquenchable rage, like nothing we’ve
ever felt before. And we are totally unequipped to deal with it because we have
no practice. We maybe even fear our own anger. It's big. It makes us say and do
crazy things. But that anger, in those first moments, is protecting us. It’s a
kind of temporary armor. It is shielding us from the pain and hurt that is
fueling it.
I was sitting in bed early evening on Jan.1 reading. We had returned from visiting a relative
for New Year’s Eve. It was a gruelling, exhausting trip but
one that we made, despite no one wanting to go, because of how hurt the host
would be if we hadn’t (the address is at the intersection of dysfunction
junction and codependence court). My husband had been awful. Drinking even more
than usual and being just a cocky shithead. I was glad to be home, unpacked and
resting in some relative quiet (cue the ominous music).
He walked in to the room and shut the door. Gave me his
prepared speech. He was unhappy, thinks I’ve been unhappy too and wants a
divorce. “What are you talking about? Are you crazy?” This is out of nowhere
from where I’m sitting. Then…in less than a second, all the pieces click
together and these words come out of my mouth before the synapses stop firing.
“There’s someone at work, isn’t there?”
He admits, yes. And I am, in that moment, pure rage. I have
so much adrenaline my skin hurts. I can’t see. I’m shaking. I spew something at
him like “You are the only person I have ever loved, you worthless piece of
shit.” I push him aside and race out of the room. Some hind part of my brain
knew I would not look good in prison orange and got me out of there before I
beat him to death with my bare hands.
I came to myself driving. I had no idea where I was going
but realized I was in no state to drive, so I pulled over in a park. And sat
there, shaking, raging, my skin on fire, ready to run 500 miles and kill a bear
at the end of it. And for many months since then, anger has been a regular
visitor. I did many embarrassing things in those immediate weeks, in addition
to crying and generally losing my shit, sometimes barely making it from one
second to the next, and eventually discovering my strength. But often, I was just
fucking angry.
The thing is, anger is a feeling like any other. It’s not
good or bad in and of itself. It just is. Just like love. Just like sadness.
Just like contentment. Feelings just come up. Each has a job or something to tell you.
And its what you do with them that matters. Anger scares people around us
because it generally means that we are about to not put up with their bullshit
anymore. It means they might have to face some uncomfortable things themselves.
Anger tells us when our boundaries have been violated. It's part of our body’s
fantastic and sensitive alarm system.
Anger is also a defense mechanism. Have you ever observed
someone get angry when they are embarrassed? Or feeling hurt? Or shamed? They
lash out to push the shame or embarrassment or hurt on to someone else. It’s a
kind of emotional offloading. And it armors them up, makes them hard. They think
maybe if they just stay angry, they won’t be hurt again. And they end up hurting others instead. Sound familiar?
Anger is essential to recovery. Your anger is legitimate.
Justified. You are entitled to rage. Lean into it. Do no harm. But feel
all of it. Let the revenge fantasies rise. Picture chasing her naked ass in
your car and mowing her down with it. Or, if you are like me, you prefer the
simple expedient of smashing their heads between concrete blocks or with a crow
bar. Lean into those thoughts. Don’t
fight them. Run them out. Bench press. Hit a punching bag. Expend that energy.
That’s all it is in the end. Just energy. Get that shit out of your body. And what
you’ll find underneath is what the armor of anger is hiding. The hurt, the
grief, the pain, the sorrow. All the pieces of you to be put back together.
Softened up but more beautiful than ever.
I had a neighbor who had been through an ugly divorce preceded
by her husband’s infidelity. (I didn’t get it at the time. You often don’t until you
join the club.) She wears her pain like a badge. She’s bitter but disguises it
as longsuffering. It has been nearly a decade. I’m not saying she needs to be over
it because I don’t know the other parts of her story and that’s not mine to
judge. But what I do know is that I don’t want that to be me. Although I give
myself permission to feel my anger, I won’t build a suit of armor from it.
Months after D-Day, I found two photos that my phone snapped
as I was running from that awful moment. It captures exactly what I saw. Dark
strange lines, blurred, red, hint of a window. The room familiar yet completely
alien, tilted crazily. It was like nothing I had ever felt before (or
thankfully since). And when I look at those pictures, I can still feel the
ghost of that rage in my body, the burning of my skin. I’m hopeful that someday
those pictures will not command that same power. That I will look at them and
feel only sympathy for my wounded, former self, and now it was just a single
chapter in a really, really long, incredible story. Because anger, like all things, like all
feelings, has its time and then passes.
