Anger and I haven’t always been on the best of terms. Well, that’s a mild way of saying I pushed anger away consistently since childhood. I was known as the “reserved” child, and to keep up that image and to avoid anything I perceived as conflict, I chose to express anything except anger, almost every time. This would usually come out as a breakdown, where I just get so overwhelmed and then give up, crying to release all the built-up stress.
And the times when I wasn’t able to perform this emotion conversion, anger would come, but as this festered, twisted, unreasonable, unforgiving, and hateful form of itself. This suppressed anger-turned-into-resentment had lost all meaning now, only hatred remained. Either way, experiencing anger almost always left me exhausted and also severely dissatisfied with myself for the way I handled things.
The most recent occurrence of this struggle with anger came in the midst of my move to a different city. Moving your life to a different place is stressful as it is, but it’s made infinitely harder by all the systemic nonsense that surrounds and corrupts the concept of having a place to live in. “Ownership” of land and houses gives landlords so much power over people’s lives, and they do not hesitate to use that power to grow richer and hoard more.
For me, conflict with the landlord did not seem like a personal conflict alone. It was personal, social, and systemic. My mind was viewing these conflicts in all these different angles, and all of that left me with one major emotion – anger. And just like every other time, I could notice myself oscillating and trying to choose between pushing it in more and more until I cried and broke down, and seething in quiet contempt as this festered into poison in my head.
For the most part, I think this comes down to my aversion for anger. I struggle with anger, because ultimately, I don’t want it. I don’t want to be angry. And that’s because I see anger as destructive and upsetting, which is the opposite of the “peacefulness” and the inner stability I always crave. Unfortunately, anger won’t just go away just because I don’t want it. Both the overwhelm and the festered resentment that I mentioned before were twisted forms of anger, except that I am dissatisfied with both of these expressions.
That leaves me with a question: How do I be angry satisfactorily? I’m not sure I know the answer to this yet, but there are some things I noticed that helped in this particular scenario. This time around, I tried to reacquaint myself with anger, like a friend who’s come to tell me something instead of an intruder who is intent on disturbing the peace. This subtle shift in how I saw anger is what made me want to express it in the first place, instead of hiding it away. And expressing it to a few close friends gave me a chance to just let the anger be as it is, while exploring and receiving everything it was saying to me.
I also realised how a portion of my anger was also towards myself, especially the part that was turning into bitterness and resentment. I was angry at myself for not having stood my ground as much as I wanted to. I was angry for not saying everything I wanted to. Now, I understand that I can’t just directly criticise my landlord or say exactly what I thought about them without facing unwanted consequences. But there’s a difference between staying within the boundary of safety and not ever trying to find out where that boundary lies.
I want to be angry, because anger is just another part of me that wants to be heard.
I want to be angry, because hearing out anger, and being able to express it is another step that helps me on my journey to be myself and to live the way I want to.
I don’t really know in what ways I can express anger yet, but I intend to find out.
Posted to Instagram on 27/06/2023
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