Anger

Of all the feelings on the Feeling Wheel, the one that has vexed me the most, and for quite long time, is Anger.

I have never known what to do with Anger.

For most of my life, Anger has been like a distant cousin, a deadbeat dad, a half-sibling I’ve never met. I feel it coming and have no idea how to relate to it, so I avoid it.

Typically, this is how it would work:

Someone or something violates me or my values. I feel anger rising. I feel my stomach and chest heaving like something is about to escape. I take a deep breath and close my eyes. I tell myself not to react. I put the tiger back in its cage and now my voice is trapped in my throat. I can feel it stuck there. Swallow it.

But the tiger wants blood. The tiger has been provoked and now it’s pacing around, making my stomach hurt, disrupting my body and coming out as tears.

Maybe next time, tiger.

I don’t particularly like the feeling of Anger. I really do try to avoid it as much as possible and convince myself that being sad, anxious, avoidant, or passive aggressive are better options than being angry.

Anger is a new dimension for me. To feel it is to open the door to a room that I’ve been told to avoid my entire life. Curious, sure – what’s in there and how big is it? But also terrified – can I handle it and what if it is bigger than me?

But then I hear Audre Lorde’s voice in my ear: I have lived with that anger, ignoring it, feeding upon it, learning to use it before it laid my visions to waste, for most of my life. Once I did it in silence, afraid of the weight. My fear of anger taught me nothing.

Where did I learn to fear Anger? I can name a few places right off the bat: the Catholic Church, the American South, the patriarchy – each one a pressure cooker that will leech every explosive emotion right out of your body because an explosion from a pressure cooker could be very dangerous. Throw in some family dynamics with my natural disposition, and you’ve got a ticking time bomb, baby.

What makes me angry?

It’s the cage.

The feeling of being trapped. Speaking and not being heard, my self-expression and desires trampled by someone else’s rules. Being told I can’t when I know that I am capable. It’s the one thing I can’t tolerate, and it’s why racism and sexism and all the other twisted lies of society piss me off so much. Because systemic oppression is the biggest cage, and we’re all in it.

And lately, I’ve been exploding. I skip over all the selective numbing of emotion and the disembodied rationalization that’s kept the tiger in for all these years, and go straight to a roar.

Just as I suspected, it’s incredibly unpleasant. Hard and ugly. Exploding Anger comes with its own consequences, just like silencing Anger – so I’m on a quest to find a middle ground in between those two extremes. After three decades in this body, I now must learn how to deal with Anger and not allow it to deal with me.

I’m trying to be with it, know it, understand it, maybe even make friends with it. But most importantly, to stop trying to change Anger into something else. It wants to be here, and it has something to say.

As Audre said: Anger is loaded with information and energy.

These days, I’m trying to figure out what my Anger is trying to say to me.

And, perhaps just as importantly, what I want to say to my Anger.