personal journal : i welcome back my anger
Anger is a valid emotion
Lately I’ve been getting pretty angry at night, usually about things outside of my control. I blast metal, hyperpop, punk, anything intense and angry in my headphones as I co work at a coffee shop I’ve been coming to every day for the past few months. The baristas know my name, my order, I feel welcome here.
But random times throughout the day, I get these headaches. I remember how much I’ve allowed people to get away with when it concerns me – all for the sake of being the bigger person, of being in the right, not stooping to their level, not causing conflict and preserving peace. What was hammered into me long ago is no longer a lesson I am able to agree with, it has never served me, never one I agreed with at all.
Placed upon me was the incessant need to forgive those that have wronged me. By Christian pastors and ministers in Sunday school, by my parents, relatives, teachers, and peers. My anger, like many other people out there, was branded into my soul as something for me to be ashamed of. I’ve written about this before, but as a teen I was told to forgive and forget my bullies because they had bad home lives, and that I should feel sympathy for them—that I should forgive them. So I pretty much took it in stride. If someone hit me, or insulted me—hey, that’s alright, your life sucks so I forgive you. My parents, even though they were just trying to help, would often give them rides even after school or a basketball game because their parents hadn’t shown up. I guess the logic was that if my parents were nice, they’d be nice to me in return. But instead it just made it worse. People could take from me and there’s nothing I could do about it—this was the lesson that was given to them. The lesson I had passed to others as well in recent years, unfortunately.
A constant cycle that I am attempting to break upon a wheel.
Been wondering more and more about it lately, and I feel like all the self-help books, the being the bigger person—the “just get over it” speeches are all bullshit. Movies of some character rising above their environment. Not losing their way—in contrast to the one who had wronged them who eventually pays the price down the line with a karmic lesson of sorts—is a complete and total fantasy. It’s a movie after all, right?
I’ve always sympathized more with fallen characters that were once noble and proud, only to become jaded and harsh, cold. Citizen Kane, Anakin Skywalker, Day of Anger, The Godfather 1 & 2, etc., etc. Even as a kid I always found the story of Lucifer to be far more interesting in Sunday or Wednesday school. I sympathize with these types of stories but why?
I think it’s because deep down, I want to act in a way similar towards how people have acted towards me. To stoop to their level, to reclaim my agency and power. To show that I am not a pushover, that I am capable of doing terrible things. I want so badly sometimes to cause someone to feel the pain that they put on me. For them to hurt as much as I do. Is that wrong, or simply just a human emotion? Sadness masking itself as anger, a feeling I had not experienced for so long.
There’s bad people in the world, people who don’t give a single fuck about morals, just their bottom line. They’re everywhere—no matter what you’re a part of or where you go, they’re all around. They muck up everything and usually are the loudest and often the most social. They’re the worst, they chew their way into everything. Every community space has one, every job, every organization—assholes exist everywhere. Common sense.
Holding onto anger for as long as you need it is valid. The idea of someone coming to you, telling you that you should forgive someone that hurt you before you’re ready—fuck off.
What right do you, an outsider, have to decide something like that? Someone who was not in that situation, whatever it may be, who doesn’t know the full story—what makes you qualified to tell me or anyone else how to feel? This ideal notion of being benevolent, incapable of anger—people like that legitimately annoy the absolute fuck out of me.
Someone who needs to be liked 24/7, to be accepted, to constantly maintain the peace—they annoy me. They annoy me because I was once, and even sometimes still am, stuck in that place. The place of total acceptance, of intellectualizing why someone did something, not focusing on what they did. The need to shirk away from conflict. To find a suitable resolution.
People pleasers fabricate a simulated reality to manipulate and preserve their ego and shallow sense of identity. Nowadays, they often speak with pop psychology terms, sometimes speaking often of community without truly knowing what it is—or even being capable of facing conflict, which is essential. Not understanding that anger, disgust, and sadness are normal human emotions that at times need to be expressed. I am not saying that it is not wrong to know psychology-specific terms, nor is it wrong to speak of community often. These are real, beneficial tools and places that can help us all figure out what we need for our own personal lives. But people pleasers, they use these tools and topics to avoid conflict or to have an excuse for everything that they do wrong. People pleasers, which are essentially most of us, some more than others, often project covert pleasantry, hiding the real them in the hopes that the identity they’ve conjured up, as fragile as it is, cannot be harmed. Anger is normal, reaction to harm is normal. What you do afterwards and how you react is what matters most.
It is my belief that if you were the subject to someone’s cruel behavior, intentional or not, you deserve to be able to choose when you will allow that person to come back into your life—if at all.
Your agency, your boundaries, what you need to feel better to go on about your day—that’s for you to sift through, that’s for you to decide. No one else. Your agency was taken and challenged, robbed from you. To let someone else cross that same line again for the sake of keeping peace is self-abandonment. Anger is normal, it is justified, it is just as valid as any other emotion. Too much of it can be volatile, it can corrupt, just as too much happiness can often make you unbearable to be around—someone who ignores the truth.
Anger was lifted from me, buried and gutted. Taken from me, robbed.
I am a good person, an ex-people pleaser as well. I don’t need to prove it by performing all the time and thinking that I’m incapable of harm. A part of me was amputated and stored away from me in a place that I cannot reach, just as it was for many of us. Bullied kids and teens, adults that find themselves in dangerous friendships or relationships, uneasy family ties and connections, unsafe workplaces—you name it. This idea that we should feel ashamed for having anger towards someone, towards the people that have wronged us, towards a group or organization, a workplace, all for the sake of being “better than they are”—treating it like it’s some sort of contest. Like we need to “pick our battles and just get through it.” It is treated as a game—a game that denies the truth of what you went through.
People treat conflict with another as some sort of competitive contest. Saying things like, “You know they aren’t thinking of you at all right now?”
I know. That’s the thing—I care, they don’t.
I don’t care about winning, I simply just care. So the fact that someone can do something shitty and just go on about their day and put in no thought afterwards, or is unwilling/unable to sit down and think about what they did, upsets me for two reasons. One, because that person's shitty behavior and unwillingness to correct it for THEMSELVES is disappointing. The second is because they’ll do it again to someone else, and they won’t learn unless the situation gets dire, typically. If it’s someone you truly love and they’ve repeated the same patterns more than once, there is nothing you can do to help them. Nothing at all. No amount of community conversations or interventions will help people who don’t want to change. It is my opinion that they need to do it on their own. Give them the chance, but if they don’t take it, that’s on them.
All the times I felt like I had to forgive someone before I was ready, just to keep the peace, to make the offender not feel so bad for crossing a line—bullshit, complete and total bullshit. There are so many young adults I meet who are masking all the time, me included. To pretend we’re okay with someone crossing our boundaries, to prevent conflict and avoid hurt at all costs. Pretending like we don’t notice when someone does something wrong, we don’t speak up or address it in the moment or afterwards. We just let it pass, we let it happen, and later we beat ourselves up wondering why we had put up with it in the first place.
Headaches | stiff shoulders | upset stomach
I can feel it. I get headaches, my back hurts, my stomach hurts, I get a little irritable—it’s normal, sure, but it’s so alien to me now. I’ve been taking so many long drives lately just for the bitterness to still be there, the sensations of the sides of my head swelling up like I’ve got allergies. A hole is in my chest and all the breeze outside just whistles on through, and I can feel the sharp sting running all throughout my body. It gets so bad sometimes that I worry about how I’ll turn out 10 years from now. Will I feel a normal amount of anger, or is it just going to get worse and worse until I have a stroke or something? Am I going to be a bitter old person, will I be stuck like this forever? I’m told that the anger I feel now is normal, but this is the longest I’ve felt angry. The ex, bills, the past, other things, what’s currently going on in my life and outside of it.
It’s like a door has opened and all the shit I was stuffing behind it is now pouring out.
I used to be so angry when I was younger, anger was a physical feeling and emotion that I understood all too well in my younger years. I tapped into it so easily—albeit unhealthily—but it was always there. An inherited lesson I had learned at a young age from my father was that punching things was the solution to dealing with my anger. That if I break something, then that’d make it just fine. It wasn’t intentionally taught, I’d make a mistake and then he’d throw something across the room or overreact. I did the same as I got older. Rarely ever did reacting in that way do anything, I always felt guilty after. The only time that ever worked was when I had a punching bag in high school, and I’d wail on it until I got tired or my knuckles started to get tender. But even that at some point got to be a bit too much, that punching bag was my solution to everything, it was not healthy. I could’ve written about how I felt, jogged like I do now, maybe even talked to someone I cared about. But no, all I did when I was angry was hit the bag for a good hour and not speak to anyone about what was wrong.
Years later, I was told that hitting things and breaking stuff was a form of self-harm, and I’d done it for years when I was growing up. Holes in walls, a dent in my old car, beating my punching bag. You hit something as hard as you can and get a couple of bruises and vent out all that frustration, pretending it’s someone else you really can’t stand. I haven’t reacted that way in a long, LONG time, and I’ve come a long way since. I've broken the cycle and moved away from what I was taught or what was “gifted” to me by my father, and my father's father, and so on.
Whenever I get pissed off I just write, I run, I make art, I isolate for a little bit. But these past few years in my 20s, I feel as if I’ve become disconnected from my anger, as if I’ve gone too far the other way.
In A World of Convenient Half Truths | Why Can’t People Just Apologize?
The world is full of bullshit juxtapositions and contradictions that create a series of half-truths that don’t stack up. Speak up and defend yourself—but then you do, and you’re punished for it, wrongfully so most of the time.
Sometimes that’s just how it goes, that’s life, sure, sure. But to have systems that are set in place to protect you only to fail—to have people that are supposed to watch over you betray your trust and then get away with it—what then? I always thought that justice was something that was a given, that maybe there'd be some karmic force that’d put someone in a place of potential redemption or facing the consequences of their actions, but that doesn’t always happen. The world isn’t black and white like I thought it was growing up. It’s gray, and it’s complicated. Sometimes shitty people do good things, sometimes good people do shitty things. It’s common sense, but I always had it in my head that being good means that you always do good things. Come to find out that this way of thinking is somewhat brash, narcissistic, and beyond people-pleasy—it’s fucking dangerous. The idea that you never make mistakes with other people or inflict harm is wholly self-absorbing. But that’s insane—quite literally impossible. Sometimes, I’d argue that people who only set out to do good all the time—the ones that think they’re incapable of harm, the ones that are passive-aggressive all the time—are, indeed, dangerous.
Someone who’s beyond passive is just as emotionally immature as someone who’s overly aggressive. Both groups, I often find, are incapable of apologizing when they make a mistake. “When did I say that?” “I don’t remember that.” “I think you’re misremembering the situation.” It’s beyond vexing to deal with someone that refuses to apologize for what they did wrong. It’s so insanely easy to own up to what you did, but some people really do struggle with it, and I can’t understand that. Acknowledging that it wasn’t okay, saying, “I’ll do better next time, I’m sorry.”
If there is one thing I cannot stand, it’s catching someone behaving in a way towards me that’s shitty, then seeing them try to act buddy-buddy with me the next minute. The amount of times I’ll run into someone that I know—who knows they fucked up by saying something awful towards me or behaving in a shit way—sends me flying. They give you a random hug after not speaking for a while; they sit in your car and tell you they really like the music you listen to after a moment of silence, or give you a gift of some kind randomly one day, ask you to hang out—and not say sorry. It’s a shitty tactic and it doesn’t work on me anymore. I don’t address what went wrong, I just leave. I make myself scarce. I don’t feel the need to say, “You did this, this, and this,” to someone I don’t consider a friend or worth my time, I just leave or don’t come at them with as much interest.
All I want to be told sometimes is, “I’m sorry I made you feel that way,” but we often don’t get that—just gifts, invites, compliments, and quick conversation changes. I appreciate it so much more when a friend attempts to make it right, but it tells me even more when I meet someone who can’t even say "I'm sorry" or admit that they were wrong.
The earliest recollection I have of someone doing this to me is, again, my own father. I remember once when I was a kid, my dad and I argued around Christmas time. I had to be about 13 years old or so. I was going to be on my way towards high school when the summer came. I can’t remember what the argument was about, but I remember it got so bad that my dad just snapped. He charged at me, tackled me to the ground, and put his hands around my neck—choked me. My mother and sister ran over to stop him and pull him off of me. I’d been sent to my room after, told by my mother, “You were being disrespectful, you shouldn’t have done that.” The next day, my father showed me a blog post about how even parents make mistakes, but not once did he apologize to me. No "I shouldn’t have done that," no “I’m sorry,” just “Don’t push me, I make mistakes, but it’s your fault in the end,” and “I didn’t choke you, if I choked you, you wouldn’t be here right now.”
For years, even as a young adult, I had nightmares of us both fighting. It wasn’t the first time we fought, or when he’d laid his hands on me—I was kicked out of the house more than once, multiple times. I’d have dreams of me yelling at him and him not moving, me somehow moving him around with my mind and throwing him around a room. Only in recent years has this stopped for the most part—sometimes I have an aggressive dream towards him, but for the most part, it’s stopped.
Still, I never got that apology. Even years later, my mother had apologized profusely for not stepping in at times, but my father—not a word. When I remember what happened, when I think about how I was treated, the anger comes back, and I am consumed by it yet again. It doesn’t fade, it doesn’t disappear — just sits with me. I have to be alone for a bit. Sit and write bad poems, edit pictures, watch a movie, jog.
I had made peace with my father after something terrible had happened some years ago, well after past incidents of him hitting me, kicking me out of the house multiple times as a teen. It feels so complicated because sometimes I get so pissed off and angry at my father for the shit he pulled. But then I remember the stories he told me about my grandfather—about how my grandfather had beat my dad when he was young. How he and my father didn’t speak for years until I was born. I feel sorry for him, and I still love him, but I wonder what it was like for him when he was 13 with my grandpa. My own version of forgiveness?
But also, being able to put it to the side and acknowledging what he did.
What do you do when someone who loves you hurts you? I don’t think I ever really learned how to properly deal with it, or maybe I’m dealing with it just fine—I’m just exhausted?
All I know is that I’m done with abandoning myself, and I’m done with staying and hoping someone will change. It’s no longer my business, it never was mine to begin with.
I think the next thing I’ll be writing about is my experience with forgiveness, funnily enough.