Contending with anger

It has been a weird couple of days. When time moves syrupy slow and it feels like there is only enough space for your body and nothing else. That maybe all you are is a body. Nothing but endless body. There has been a lot of contending lately. Reckoning with certain parts of yourself that you thought lost, or that you left behind long ago. Buried so far underground you hoped it would never be able to claw its way back to the surface. I tried to drown it out with endless YouTube videos, music, sound, but it would not be silenced. So one Tuesday morning, I sat down at my desk and started to weep. For it had arrived and I did not know how to deal with it.

I wondered at first if it was too much to even post or write about. Maybe it’s a little bit too personal, sits a little too close to the skin. Maybe I could just gloss over this becoming. Wait until it was alright again, until the roil of emotion inside me had settled into something I could package up in a neat little box and put pretty words around it. But try as I might, it would not let me. It would spit at me for my dishonesty, for my inability to allow it to find its own way out into the light. It would not allow itself to be confined to my precious words, chained down by prose edited and deleted and edited again. It reminded me today between the pages of my journal that healing and life has never been one for cleanliness. It’s messy and gritty. It is dark and most of all it’s a process. I questioned why it would need to be done here, in this place that I wanted to keep special and safe. But it reminded me that all of my becoming, my transforming was done at the hands of conversations had over dinner tables so what better place to be than right here.

I wished there was an answer. I wished it was easy to bottle emotion and put it back inside on a shelf to only be poured out at certain times. Like birthdays or Christmas, maybe even a funeral if necessary. I wish for there to be a shelf full of beautiful glass bottles labeled with all of the emotions that I can stir and make into a cocktail for these right occasions. Add a little bit of sadness there to be just the right amount of nostalgic. Maybe a little bit of happiness there, so people will know that everything really is okay. Ahh, but that’s not how it works is it? There is no neatness to it. No order. No control. Just the choice to either let it overtake you completely, or learning to live with it wild and writhing beneath the surface of the skin. Contained but in a healthy way. Whatever that means.

——

So if we start from the beginning, it was a sunny Tuesday morning and everything was moving exactly as it should be. The morning routine was moving perfectly timed and at an adequate pace. Life was quiet but good. Coffee was half drunk and the pages were opened, ready to be tended too. When suddenly it felt like I was standing on a beach, knee deep in water I could not see, but felt all the same. It was tugging insistently at my legs. Endless tugging. I took one step and that was it. Pulled under a wave so big I could not do anything beyond just sit there and let it overwhelm. They always say, if you are caught in a current, just relax and let it take you. Fighting it just makes you drown faster. So surrendered I did.

I wanted to scream. Scream so loud that I would go hoarse. But I can’t. I live with my family and a scream would just bring them running and I can’t let them see me like this, with all of my nerve endings on the outside of my body. So I take pen in hand and scribble so hard on the back of my notebook, cutting through multiple pieces of paper, hoping that some of that emotion would just spill out and leave me alone.

As always, there are more questions than answers when a moment like this arrives. What brought it on? What is going on? I thought I was behind all of this? Am I slowly losing my mind? I like being put together, but life has shown me time and time again that it does not care. That it will not hold my hand and let me lie to myself. There is always more work to be done. I should not be surprised by that, but I always am. I always think that maybe this is enough, but there is always more. More to undo, more to unlearn, more depths to reveal, more layers to peel back, more pain to heal. Just more.

And so, for the rest of the day it sits there, just under my skin. Volatile. A part of me is horrified that I still had this much anger left in me. I thought I had left it burnt out and hollowed in the body I left behind in Singapore when I got on that first flight to Sydney all those years ago. I thought I had laid it out on the altar. Wept out on bruised knees and a bent back. But somehow, somehow it has found its way back. Tunnelled into my system and remained dormant until the right time. I thought I had buried it in memory. Spoken of only in quiet moments, in past tense. I was angry. I had a lot of rage. Once upon a time. But here it is, sitting pretty on my desk. Legs crossed and sipping delicately at a glass of red wine, snorting with laughter every time I try to push it back into a cage. Laughing as I fight with myself. Turns out that I just got good at ignoring it.

——

I have realised that we don’t like that emotion. Anger. Rage. It comes described with words of violence. It brings pain. Guilt. Accusations. And it does, when left unattended. Like a neglected child throwing a tantrum or a lion stalking the walls of her cage. Watching with wary eyes for a moment of weakness. Waiting for the slip up. So it can lash out with tongue and teeth.

So we fear her. We bury her. We hide her away even from ourselves. But she never really goes away. She just bides her time. Waits. Until you can’t hold it back anymore and then she takes over. Leaves you to pick up the pieces of a broken heart, to deal with the consequences of your actions. So tightly you have kept her coiled that when she strikes out, it’s no longer with precision, but with wild abandon, hitting anything and everything in her path. Dangerous. So you try to stuff her back into her cage but she will not go quietly. Not this time, she has had enough. She will not be relegated to some dusty corner of your mind. Left there to rot along with all the other emotions you do not wish to deal with. No. She will be heard this time and so she remains. Curled around your vision like a red mist. Settled on your back, her hands around your neck. Slowly choking the life from you until you deal with her. So on a sunny Tuesday morning in may, you do. You finally give her the time she requires.

So you spend the days learning about her. You let her spill every injustice out onto the page, purge the poison you didn’t know you had from your veins. Prick every finger to make you bleed out memory and story until you can see her for who she is. What she does for you. Once upon a time, she was protection for you. A shield you would wield so people could not get close to you. The force you would use to push them back to the start line. It was what you needed to declare boundaries, what you used to bury your heart in a box, anger the coiled serpent twined around it. Then it became the armour you wore. The excuses you bore as you tore through life. Unyielding but determined. It became what you were known for. That sharp tongue and no regard for others. Protector, defender, keeper. All stitched together with anger for thread and the realisation that you must have left some bodies on the road to where you are now. Then she became memory. Something you wanted to leave behind you in the wake of you slowly starting to understand yourself. Shamed that this was the way you once moved through the world. So you left her behind. Refused to call on her for moments where anger was allowed. Only gave way to irritation, maybe annoyance. Tried to force zen on yourself in the name of being someone who loved peace.

But anger has always been one of the building blocks of your bones and she refuses to be culled by shame. She will not. She wants acceptance and understanding. That there are times when she is allowed. Righteous anger she says, is allowed. It is holy even. Anger at injustice, anger at discrimination, anger at unfairness, anger at wilful ignorance. Anger can serve if you let it. It can sharpen focus, bring steel and forge and iron will. But it is something that must be wielded with wisdom. No harsh words simply because you can. Anger I have found must be tempered with love. Laced with it. Spoken with it. Delivered together. Because anger on its own just causes more pain. But when used with love and done at the right time, it can bring change, it can be encouragement. It can be the water poured onto thirsty soil. And so anger lives intertwined with love. Different shades of the same colour all curled together, threaded through each other. Coiling and alive. Because sometimes love without that righteous anger, is just as poisonous.