The usefulness of well-processed anger
This week I expressed my anger to someone I thought needed to hear it. At the time I felt relief - I felt good for standing up for myself, and I felt it was finally over. It felt good.
After a while, however, I just felt bad again. Why?
Is it because no matter what happens, the only thing that really matters from now on is how I feel about it, and what I do? And because the way I feel, and what I do now, is always up to me? And that spinning it so hard towards the positive is not only good but necessary?
Yeah. Probably.
This was a situation in my personal life, not my work as a freelance writer. But anger comes up all the time in the freelance life. I’ve had to learn to stand up for myself - both in a proactive and reactive manner - when it comes to being a working professional.
What is the benefit of anger? Is there one?
One internet search shows what The Guardian has things to say about anger, its gendered nature, and how it works. A useful Forbes article about some of the benefits of anger. These include:
Improve communication
Acheive hyper-focus
Eliminate fear
Boost confidence
Take action
Show your humanness (I think ‘humanity’ is a better word for the Forbes audience)
So there’s a benefit to anger for work, if you’re using it for positive reasons and in positive ways.
What I can’t help noticing about that list is that it is action focused - it is anger directed at creation, and at moving somewhere, rather than staying still.
What made me feel bad about expressing anger was that I didn’t get what I had so desperately wanted since the thing that happened, had happened.
It didn’t change what happened.
There would be no solution — it happened, it was done, and there will never be anything to turn back time and prevent it. And no one cares as much as me, the one it happened to.
No one cares. I don’t say that to toughen myself up. I say that with great compassion; whether it’s personal or business, the truth is that no one cares, and yeah, that sucks. Yes, part of that is The Patriarchy, which affects all of us. Part of it is social norms, that put the onus on people who are struggling to get through it and be tough. And that sucks.
There is a good version of this place, however — the place where no one cares and I don’t matter — one that doesn’t require me to tell myself that I don’t matter.
It’s the place where I can tell myself that I’m all that matters. Where I do things for me. I acknowledge that people can be shitty and bad stuff happends, while doing things for me, for myself. I’m talking professionally, as well as personally. (I’ve achieved my monthly salary goal this month. I’ve also taken care of an important personal health diagnosis.)
Perhaps I can use anger for my own benefit, with a bias toward action. In all honesty I have been doing this, and to great effect. I have done more for my business in the last six months than I ever have. I had been on that path before, and I let it all stop me. Sadness stopped me in its tracks. Anger was more useful than sadness — more toward action than sadness — but anger is the catalyst, the spark for the engine, and not the solution itself. Action is the solution.
So how to get there?
In reading about anger, the most helpful, the most transformative perspective I have come across is that of poet and philosopher, David Whyte. He speaks about anger, and forgiveness, in his book Consolations: Solace, nourishment and underlying meaning of everyday words. It gets closer to the real reason I expressed my anger - a desire to move on, and be done with it.
The following are quotes from Whyte, and his insight about anger and forgiveness are so far above anything I am saying, that I’ll leave it with him.
(I read his work while reading The Marginalian, of course, and for well-written insight, please read Marginalian writer Maria Popova.)
The following is Whyte on the usefulness of anger, and its position as the negative space of vulnerability. Anger is love (the feeling, not violence itself). Forgiveness is having a closer relationship with the wound.
‘What we have named as anger on the surface is the violent outer response to our own inner powerlessness, a powerlessness connected to such a profound sense of rawness and care that it can find no proper outer body or identity or voice, or way of life to hold it. What we call anger is often simply the unwillingness to live the full measure of our fears or of our not knowing, in the face of our love for a wife, in the depth of our caring for a son, in our wanting the best, in the face of simply being alive and loving those with whom we live. Our anger breaks to the surface most often through our feeling there is something profoundly wrong with this powerlessness and vulnerability… Anger in its pure state is the measure of the way we are implicated in the world and made vulnerable through love in all its specifics.’
‘Forgiveness is a heartache and difficult to achieve because strangely, it not only refuses to eliminate the original wound, but actually draws us closer to its source. To approach forgiveness is to close in on the nature of the hurt itself, the only remedy being, as we approach its raw center, to reimagine our relation to it.’
— David Whyte.
In other musings and helpful, rhizomic connections: here’s an article I wrote this week for The Medical Journal of Australia on two cool things in Indigenous health this month.
Sources
https://mailchi.mp/themarginalian/david-whyte-anger-forgiveness?e=4812796dad
David Whyte, Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words. https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/05/15/david-whyte-consolations-anger-forgiveness-maturity/
Forbes Article
https://www.forbes.com/sites/neilpatel/2016/06/24/10-ways-you-can-use-your-anger-to-build-your-business/?sh=4e8517085bd9
Guardian Article
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/may/12/science-of-anger-gender-age-personality
‘Indigenous health renaissance': new journal and new graduates, The Medical Journal of Australia
https://insightplus.mja.com.au/2023/9/indigenous-health-renaissance-new-journal-and-new-graduates/
Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash