Anger is not an emotion that I experience often. I’m generally a slow burn and will likely feel frustration, sadness, anxiety, or a myriad of other emotions before I get to anger. By the time I make it to anger, I’m usually done and moving on from the situation. There are three people that I can think of who made me experience anger with any regularity, and thankfully they are no longer in my life.

A side effect of being slow to anger is that I’m not sure what to do with it when it happens. I recently thought back on those three relationships and how I handled the anger then. One of them was with a person that I only saw in a martial arts setting, which was rather perfect for finding things to punch or kick, with the additional buffer that I expected this person to try and make me angry, so I was prepared for it. It still wasn’t great, but at least it didn’t take me by surprise too often.

Another one was with a person I was in an (unfortunately) long relationship with. He was rather quick to anger and rather prone to yelling. There’s only so much yelling one can take before one starts yelling back. He was great at pushing my buttons and I began to recognize that he wouldn’t quit until I was either screaming back or crying, so eventually I stopped trying to rein myself in and got right to the shouting. It was an emotional manipulative relationship and I’m forever thankful that we didn’t end up married.

The third person was a friend who was great at gas-lighting. We had great fun together when she was happy with me. I even considered her one of my best friends at one period of time. She also had a habit of getting upset at imperceptible infractions that her friends would unknowingly commit. On the few occasions that I remember this happening, she would passive aggressively freeze me out until I started wondering what the hell was wrong. (One time I remember she completely turned me around into thinking I had imagined the entire thing and had overreacted.) Another time I remember she refused to be available by any means other than texting, and I remember receiving some texts that made anger flare so suddenly and heatedly that my hands shook. Fortunately, I was at the gym at the time and I had the presence of mind to put the phone down and throw myself into some cardio until my head was clear enough to respond in a mature way. Our friendship didn’t survive the third freeze out.

I like to think that overall, I am a positive person. At least I try to be. I’m well versed enough with the vicissitudes of life to realize that it’s usually cyclical. Winter will eventually become summer again, even in Chicago, bad times don’t last forever, even if they last for an entire year (I’m looking at you, 2020) and even in the pockets of turmoil, usually there’s some joy to be eked out.

I’ve been on a very public grief journey before, during and after losing Jake. I wasn’t myself for a long period of time and I often had to struggle to get normal things done. I did a lot of mental ‘hiding’ by reading the entire Harry Potter series. I believe I read book four in one day. In the last week and a half, I’ve finally felt like I’m starting to come out of it. I have motivation to do some passion projects occasionally and my appetite is becoming more regular. I’m starting to feel things other than crushing sadness and longing.

Unfortunately, a lot of that extra feeling space has suddenly been devoted to an uncharacteristic amount of anger.

Playing with dogs does not make me angry.

The world is in a volatile state right now and many changes are occurring, a lot of them are long overdue, a lot of them are a survival reaction to the pandemic. There are many people out there who are on board with ‘we’re all in this together’ and ‘we’ve all got a lot to learn, let’s get to it’ but, as we know, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Or maybe we don’t all know that. I’ll bet there are some people out there who would argue with me about Newton’s third law right now just because they’re out of their comfort zone. And I’m seeing more and more of it. People arguing with indisputable facts. Just wear a mask in public, for Pete’s sake, why is it so hard? And because everything is on fire right now, I’m angry a lot more than I’m using to feeling angry. And I don’t know what to do with it.

I can’t continually punch things. I don’t have anything really to punch at home. Shouting has never really been enjoyable for me, although I did try ranting in a loud voice while stomping around the living room once and it was mildly cathartic. The effect didn’t last long though. And this isn’t a fast flash of anger that will exit in a few minutes if I can just keep my head, stay quiet and breathe or run it out. It’s a smoldering anger that runs around in my head. Talking it out with friends helps the most, but I can’t call them at 3am when I wake up unable to go back to sleep. That would just be rude. I’ve sent more incoherently ranty texts to people just to let it out than I ever have before. And that doesn’t really help. I even did something that I’ve got a solid gold rule against and got into a ‘debate’ with a stranger on Facebook. (Mind you, he deserved it.) But it did nothing but make me angrier until I came to my senses and left the conversation.

No one else is doing these things. No one is sending crazy rant texts to me. No one is calling me to blow off feelings. I don’t know what’s going on. And I don’t know what to do with this. It’s not productive. In the height of an an anger fire last night, I tried to write about it. I read it this morning and it was utter crap on a page. I suppose there is some value in just exorcising it from my system, but I honestly don’t think it helped.

Meditation seems inaccessible to me. I tried when I was dealing with the deeper aspects of grief and it just made me sob. I try now and I either cry or it’s chaos in my head. And I know that technically I should just sit with the chaos until it eventually swirls itself out but wow, I really do not want to. I don’t want to sit in it AT ALL. I suppose I have written some emails to my representatives (I even got a response to one!) which is slightly productive, but it feels like the bare minimum.

So where is the upside? Honestly, the one that comes to mind when I ponder this is that I’m learning how to deal with it. I’m having to learn how to deal with an emotion that I’m not very familiar with and make something out of it. However, I am open to suggestions if you have any to spare. I have a feeling that this new skill will come in handy in the very near future.

Is there an upside to anger?