Dear Diary, I had a Moment of Clarity About Anger
For a brief moment, after I finished my reBLUEvinate piece, I felt clarity. I was angry and comfortable with the feeling, for I knew I was still on the right path at that particular moment. In that comfort and with that clarity, it became swiftly apparent just how afraid of my anger I’d been for the majority of my life. It was a realization that felt just out of my reach all this time, on the tip of my tongue but yet unspoken. As soon as it clicked, I didn’t feel shame but a sense of relief. I debated immediately writing this piece, but I was pretty drained from everything I had been up to at that point and figured I’d come back to this soon.
Anger is what I’ve been exposed to most in life, and so much of that exposure has been a destructive form of anger. Whether it be my family trying to destroy my opinion of other family members, politicians trying to eliminate the quality of life of other citizens, or people wearing my flag on their shoulders, angry they didn’t kill enough (insert racist term here), it’s been countless events of people taking an emotion designed to protect and deciding the only way to protect is to destroy.
I have rarely shared the common viewpoint wherein protection equals destruction. While I was forward deployed, people would get angry about the tactics employed by people defending their homeland against an invader (in this case, us). Yet, a great many of those same (types of) people had no problems with Trump locking up kids in cages at the border during his first term, an echo of the Japanese Internment Camps during WWII. People here hoard guns and yell loudly about defending against invaders, but the overlap between them and the ones who participated in the insurrection on January 6th and are actively encouraging the Trump-Musk coup going on now is relatively high.
Having seen so much destructive anger from the battlefield to the boardroom, from the pulpit to the pub, and from the everyperson to the elected official, I never want to be that way. I carry a deep regret for the permanent and unchangeable damage I caused, and not a day goes by without me mourning that loss. As such, my anger has typically come out as an at-the-moment reaction or as an unintentional consequence of a manic state where I don’t have the same control of my faculties.
When I am more me, as in not overly manic nor anxious – my anger is generally locked up and buried. It may come out as individual comments here or there, but I learned to throw it away. When I was finding my voice as an artist and doing the art shows and such, there was a distinct lack of interest, including some outright rejections, of my works by the people closest to me at the time. Mostly, the people who found my works appealing were the art show folk and those with whom I only had occasional contact. In essence, the closer someone was to me, the less they wanted to be exposed to what I was doing, so I learned to keep it all to myself.
People don’t tend to stay in my life for long. People find me when they’re in a position of hurt; I help out, and they express gratitude and move on. Even if I still exist in someone’s life post-problem, I become a background character rapidly. This pattern, historically, has not been conducive to expressions of anger outside of me joining in theirs. Combine the general social apathy I’ve received when I’m not being useful with the remorse I feel for what I’ve done, and it has been pretty easy to put my emotions on the back burner.
It has been easy to be someone quieter, to be someone ‘on standby’ for when the next transaction needed to occur. I’ve gotten better over time at benefiting from said transactions, but it’s not the same as someone just being excited about me being around because it’s me – that doesn’t happen so much. After the reBLUEvinate piece, I almost immediately ruined my comfort with anger by offending someone special to me because I spoke before I thought. There’s a big difference between comfort and proficiency, and it was doubly defeating for me because being proficient with communication is something about which I know a thing or two. Even knowing I didn’t say anything terrible, and my heart was still in a good place doesn’t help much – I still have a long way to go with anger, and allowing myself to feel it consciously with an intent of expression is only the beginning.
I don’t know what’s next, but feeling ok with being angry is new. After I immediately made a mistake with it, it was clear I needed to sit with it and learn. I don’t know when the next window of opportunity I’ll have wherein I have something I sincerely want to express with the confidence of my reBLUEvinate piece. I know it’s ok to stand up for what is right, but I also don’t want to veer into destructive territory which is so easy to do and is why I largely just soldier on and keep my mouth shut.
There is a sense of irony to me in how I write about anger; I teach about anger, and people have told me to my face how I’ve helped them learn how to stay present and stay in control, and yet underneath it all was someone afraid of theirs keeping it locked away. I know it is merely another facet of me atoning for the unatonable and, in many ways, trying to wipe things off a ledger I didn’t even create. All the anger I’ve been exposed to is not of my creation. I didn’t hurt my family; I’m not a white man trying to keep the world for white men only; my actions abroad were always of good intent, just as they are here today.
I teach Mindfulness and Meditation in part to help remove anger from the world, one heart at a time. I have been trying my best since COVID to make my published works more than a series of endless pain with no end in sight. I know I’m trying, but as I’ve said before, ‘Those who suffer alone, celebrate alone.’