People say happiness is a warm gun. But really, anger is.
For years, I thought the frustration I was feeling in my life came from grief. A deep sadness, a sense of loss I couldn’t get away from, consuming me as surely every year sometime in late January or February as the sun returns in spring.
It took me many years of going through cycles of pain to understand that the roots of my recurring depression in fact lay buried in something different. It was anger that triggered me. Anger wasn’t the symptom, as people often tried to convince me, it was the source.
I’m an angry woman. That’s not something I am supposed to write or you are supposed to read. But here it is. As it should.
One day, I stopped my bike in the middle of the bridge. It was my early morning commute and once again the wind was so strong I could barely move the wheels. I was peddling and getting nowhere. Suddenly, I was so overcome with rage, I had to stop.
I got off the bike, walked to the edge of the bridge and...screamed. The wind blew it away. Nobody heard. That was the day I acknowledged it. My anger. Things got better then. Something snapped gently into place.
I recognize the driving source now. The one that fuels my semi-successful career, thousands of poems, any ambition I have and have had. A driving source that isn't supposed to be a driving source. Anger. Rage, even.
As a society, we've come a long way. We've widely accepted sadness as a tolerable emotion. It's ok to talk about it. It's ok to feel sad (sometimes). We can deal with sadness (mostly).
It's not like that with anger.
Anger isn't modest. It's right there, in our faces. We can't run from it nor can anyone who faces us when we feel it. We don't teach our children how to deal with another angry child. We teach them to walk away. To wait it out. When they themselves have an angry outburst, we send them to calm down and then ask them to apologize.
And yes, the things we say or do in anger are often worthy of an apology. But there is rage in the moment and there is a little bubbling pond of rage that lives on, inside us. It grows into a lake as we try to hide it from the world around us. After all, it's not supposed to be there. We bounce rocks off its surface trying to read the ripples, but we don’t understand what it’s trying to say.
My lake is more of an ocean. A lot of things make me angry. The 64-year-old driving teacher who abused me when I was 17. The 14 and 16-year-old boys who cornered my 3 and 5-year-old sisters on the playground, forcing them to take their clothes off. The professors in engineering school that tried to flunk me in my oral exams so they could have an all-male group to make sexist jokes with. That guy from New Years’ Eve 2012 who tried to convince me a tissue could easily replace a condom. The startup founders that made up stories about a workplace affair instead of admitting they had failed as leaders. The ex-boyfriend whose wife I found out about on a trip to Oslo he had insisted on taking me on.
But not only men stir my ocean of rage. I'm angry at all the insecure women in power positions who have stood in my way or in the way of talented women in hopes of protecting their positions (we see you). I'm angry at my grandma for never being able to look beyond her extremist religion to acknowledge me. I'm angry at my sister who decided to become a Mormon at 18 and remove me from her life because I refuse to pretend like that’s normal. I'm wild like that.
It's another windy day. I question my own intelligence as I walk my dogs by the water. Why move close to the sea if the wind makes me furious? It hits me quite suddenly then. Maybe as suddenly as the salty breeze in April or Burce Springsteen’s New York Serenade turning into, well, a typical Bruce Springsteen song.
Rage makes for some pretty good fuel. See, it's not like sadness. It doesn't make you feel tired or small or scared. Quite the opposite in fact. As you feel it, your heart beats faster, your muscles grow tense, your breaths expand your chest; first a tiny bit, then even more. You feel strong, you feel powerful. You feel all there, in the moment. Your feet are tightly pressed to the ground. This is it. It overcomes you, totally. Absolutely. So much power.
I feel pretty powerful. When I win business from people who are my seniors. When I deliver projects better, faster. When I write beautiful sentences. When I lift heavy. When I hold a man's greedy stare or question another's authority. When I don’t stand back. When I call them out. When I share. Like this.
Who I am now would not have been possible without anger. This is my ode to anger.
Stay safe,
Nicole
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