Dealing with Some Anger….Finally?

Ironic that the only time I’ve written explicitly about anger was a year ago. Perhaps these things are quasi-cyclical, but I’ve been grappling with some anger issues over the last few weeks.

Much like other emotions associated with this process, these deep, grief-triggered emotions like anger present themselves as over reactions to surface level phenomena: I get rattled by an event that doesn’t normally rattle me, or I over-react to something, or I carry around a baseline level of pissedoffedness for a longer-than-normal period of time. That’s been the story of the last few weeks, where I’ve had some legitimately shitty things happen (as they always do) and have experienced a larger than normal reaction to those events.

I see a young family smiling and laughing at a park, something that normally makes me happy, and I get jealous/angry at their situation; I doomscroll a little longer than normal and get furious at humanity; I get mad at the logistical hurdles associated with being a single parent (why aren’t things like childcare easier to access)?

Again, these activating events/factors are always around, I’m just better able to focus/block them out most of the time. Except when I’m not, and those times are when I feel my anger bubbling to the surface.

The source is rage. Absolute rage. Rage that I can barely describe in words. Rage at the universe for striking down the best part of my life, and robbing us all of a genuinely wonderful human being. Rage at a lack of fairness; Chelsea was so good, so committed to helping, and there are so many with talents who have devoted their life to the pursuit of power and divisiveness, who actively make the world a worse place, and yet she’s the one who dies randomly.

Absolute rage.

I’ve never been particularly good at dealing with anger, and my knee jerk impulse is to look past it, or move past it as quickly as possible. Anger runs through the men in my family, and it’s never been pretty: while I’m fortunate that I’ve only ever let anger get the better of me a handful of times, those times still haunt me. I hate who I am when I get angry, which presents a bit of a pickle with respect to processing my rage at the universe.

I’d imagine Lucas cribbed this from Buddhism or Taoism, but there’s an interesting discourse in Star Wars about how to distinguish the light from the dark, and the idea is that you only can truly tell the difference when you are calm and at peace, and that’s the state in which I’ve aspired to be since Chelsea died. That’s where I try to put my focus, on the here and now, the peace and grace associated with the good things in my life.

At the same time, I haven’t exactly suppressed my anger; if anything I tried to invite it early on by getting in the pool as often as I could have, expecting to use the water as a place to scream and physically release my rage. But, rather surprisingly, the anger didn’t come, and the pool became a sanctuary in which I was at peace.

All that is to say that the last few weeks have caught me off guard, as I wasn’t expecting anger to hit me for a prolonged period of time like it has.

But I had a thought earlier in the week that was helpful: maybe, prior to this time period, I just didn’t have enough emotional space for anger, as there was too much on my plate that needed to get done. Not that emotions are that clear cut and logical, but maybe I was so overwhelmed by life, so exhausted, that I lacked the capacity to be angry, and the fact that I am now represents some progress.

Not a perfect analogy, but there’s a parenting story seems applicable: when E was a little one and didn’t sleep that much, Chelsea and I got so tired that we were unable to have trouble sleeping; our bodies were just exhausted, and insomnia was a luxury we could no longer afford. At around the 12 month mark, we finally got to the point where we were getting enough rest that we could finally have trouble sleeping again. A lovely prize from nature, to be sure.

So again, I’m wondering if something similar is going on here: I just lacked the capacity to be angry until now, and I should welcome the opportunity to sit with my anger as both a sign of progress and an opportunity to grow.

Perhaps. Or maybe it’s just been a crappy week…