WHAT ANGER?

Anger’s not graceful. It’s not beautiful, it’s not feminine. It’s ugly, out of control, mean, even scary. I hate it. I hate getting angry, I hate feeling angry. I want nothing to do with it. I’ve squashed it down most of my life - it escapes only once in a while when I’m particularly vulnerable, but rarely. I’ve been proud of this part of me. The world can throw practically  anything at me and I won’t get angry.

I do, however, battle crippling panic attacks, have been suicidal, have OCD and anxiety, am on antidepressants and mood stabilizers and there have been many months in which I’ve barely gotten out of bed. None of these emotions are beautiful or graceful, but unlike what I imagine anger to be, anxiety and depression are private and quiet and I am so familiar with them, that they have come to feel like an inextricable part of me.

Only in this past year have I begun to examine what I believed to be my command over my anger. In the past, my mental illness made it hard for me to self-examine; so much of what I did, felt like trying to survive each day, that I didn’t feel I had the capacity to do more. When I went back on medication last February (which I had foolishly weaned myself off of years ago without a doctor’s approval), I slowly began to have more space to consider my actions and my emotions.

Returning to medication coincided with COVID, and suddenly, as the world turned upside-down, I was spending 24/7 with my husband. As a fairly introverted person who needs a good amount of time to myself, this proved a tad challenging, to put it mildly.

With no place to escape when I felt pushed to my limits, I would feel my body react first. My skin would prickle, my chest would tighten and my face would get hot. And once I couldn’t hold it in any longer, I would burst - I would become catty and I’d act in this odd “valley girl-esque” attitude I’ve seen in movies that is completely ridiculous (not to mention a deeply degrading portrait of women’s anger), and all my responses would be utterly unlike any other aspect of me. It feels almost like an out-of-body experience as I roll my eyes, and spit out sarcastic and vitriolic remarks that only escalate the situation. I hate myself as I’m doing it, and yet it feels completely out of my control. 

Once a fight ends and I’ve calmed down, I feel ashamed. Who is this person inside of me who acts like this? Where has this part of myself been hiding and how am I only seeing her now?

I suppose that I shouldn’t be surprised that my anger presents as juvenile, as almost a caricature of anger; I have spent 34 years not getting angry, and now when I do, I feel like a child throwing a tantrum. I know this isn’t a healthy display of anger, but I also don’t know what one is. What does that look like? I don’t think I’ve seen it in movies or on TV, read it in novels, or watched it play out between family or friends. 

Although I continue to despise my outbursts of anger, feeling the weight of the internalized notion that anger is hideous, I am finally beginning to understand what anger is. It’s not that I wasn’t angry for 34 years, but rather that by refusing to recognize my anger for what it was, my anger was forced to contort itself into anxiety and depression. With this realization, I hope to slowly learn how to undo that automatic stifling of my rage, and allow it to express itself in ways that do not harm myself or others. I think this will be a long path, perhaps a life-long exploration, but even just writing this feels like a very big step in the right direction. 

By Emily Rose Hill, Cofounder