It has been over a year since I became angry to a detrimental amount. It has been exactly 488 days since I gathered my broken body and found a dangerous mission in upholding an anger that burned brighter than a flame. It festered in my body. And within, amidst the pain, guilt, shame, and continual self-defamations, it packed a punch, convincing me that anger was the path to choose. If I could still hold one thing against someone who took so much from me, that was, in fact, a restoration of autonomy, was it not? I was gladly mistaken.Â
P, as we shall call him, the ultimate miscreant, took everything from me in three hours and rightly deserved my anger. I was lost in time and time was lost in me, a universe whose ambiguity wreaked havoc over a civil logical existence and world. His actions had brutalized my self-worth, and a sense of shame was instilled in me that depleted me of the brutal cognizance of everything around me brought about by self-awareness. I wanted desperately to leap out of numbness and into sensation, where I could finally feel what I had been robbed of. I didn’t even recognize myself and more concerningly the numbness of defilement had made me not want to recognize myself, glimpse myself, feel myself. If P had taken my body, my choice, and my confidence, I deserved to be angry. It was one thing I could own and take hold of when I felt that I was at a yard sale of my entire self, bits, and pieces that I so regularly had felt, loved, and cultivated on display to be bought. I was whisked out of my body and into that of a customer, attempting to buy back what had always been mine rather than up for grabs.Â
For months after, I held onto anger as if it was the singular thing untouched by the ferocity of P’s perversity. Nothing felt unscathed by him. I touched my hips and all I felt were the bony tips of his fingers. I embraced a beloved friend and all I felt was the suffocation of his body heat wafting up, around, in and out, unrelentingly. I smelled his scent almost every time I passed a boy on campus, looking up in an anxious glance, and withdrawing into a corner of campus to relieve myself of the anxiety of confronting him. I looked at art and all I heard was his light voice bestowing egocentric praise on his creations. In summation, I was mad. He was always there, in everything I did, imprinting himself like the scent of an obnoxious perfume unable to easily be removed without a smidgeon of scent still hanging in the air. Anger was destructive to me, an exhaustive effort of constantly keeping my emotional guard up with a strict fervency. To maintain madness was to carelessly and constantly deplete me of my currently sensitive resources. Yet, I desperately wanted to solve my sadness and shame.Â
To be mad was to embody the ultimate “female girl boss warrior”. I pictured my anger manifesting as a clenched fist raised to the sky, while I wore a pink feminist pussy hat and continued to scathe my Doc Martins at women’s rights rallies. If I transformed trauma into action, I would resolve the heaviness inside me immediately, I thought. However, being proactive was more protection than indicative of desiring to be a social warrior. Anger was action and therefore I was acting, a way to theatrically engage and distract myself from the realities that I needed to process without attempting to gain ownership of tendencies that debilitated the rehabilitation of my reality. When others close to me in my life trod carefully and inquired into how I was feeling, I responded with remarks that displayed my anger but cleverly made my true state of being slightly ambiguous and shrouded. If I told others how I really felt, in simpler, but more vulnerable terms, I had to not only admit it to the people who knew me the best but therefore, by extension, admit it to myself. It was anger that attempted to replace a succulent sense of solitude that penetrated and infested the rawest parts of my sense of self. Feeling fury was more desirable than feeling oh so implicated as culpable in an act whose intent I endlessly wondered how I could have drawn up.Â
I held onto anger as a fantasy of the punishment for P that never was. Perhaps if I felt it hard enough, imagined it strong enough, it would magically manifest itself in reality. To be continually mad at P was to exercise autonomy in an alternative scenario where I had control over myself, where I was not tricked nor treated with flattery as a means to an end, where self-doubt plagued me, and thus said flattery sank in. I thought back to that night, when the lines between choice and denial, acceptance and rejection, yes and no, were blurred into a psychedelic antithetical line of lust and fear. Control had slipped away, at a moment when I had taken it for granted, and not only was my newly formed conviction of palpable anger a method of punishing P, but it was also a way of punishing myself for what could and could not have been. As much as I hurt P I also hurt myself. Because of the perverse way that we were connected, by violence and violation, and that I could feel him everywhere wafting in the air like a perfume of torment, a smell wherever I went, inevitably my anger towards him was anger towards myself. His sin was my misstep. His crimes meant I deserved punishment. He was the first word of an adage and I was the last. Was my anger successful, or did it do me more harm than good?
I held onto my anger for so long without realizing that his harm was also my own. I was not forgiving his misdemeanors, but I realized that anger so fervent was not being a warrior of social justice; it was being a warrior of self-hatred, a combatant that reinforced shame and guilt. I realized then that being angry was not always the correct, nay, the most healing solution. To direct anger at another, in such a painfully intimate scenario, often meant getting yourself painfully caught in the crossfire of such brutal abuse. Holding an eternal space for anger is not often about delivering retribution to the wrongdoer; it is about seeking vengeance against your past self. It is your shame enticing blame to be put upon yourself by your most judgemental parts. Anger is not a bad emotion; it is most natural and is often justified. Yet to have anger that is so deeply seeded, anger that feels like an extension of one’s personality is merely warped self-loathing. Holding a space to feel mad is important. It is important to feel powerfully, to feel everything all at once, to feel the sea of emotions overwhelm us to remind every one of us that we are capable and how much we are capable of in our bodies and minds. Sometimes anger deceives us into thinking we are punishing the deserving when really we are punishing ourselves. Instead of holding onto an anger that overcompensates and depletes, hold a space to let go. Feel the shame and the guilt, the pain and the freshness of your internal wounds. You will feel raw, delicate, and corpse-like even, but you will not force yourself to expend energy that reinforces what you are trying to exercise from your very trauma center, your heart. When we let go of such personal anger we have to reconcile with letting go of something that hurt us to the point of being inconceivably unfair. We are forced, with that personal pain, to let go and realize that the worst happened without an ounce of retribution against the other to soothe us. I went through pain that will never be brought to a tidy resolution, but that doesn’t mean I have to bestow more pain on myself to impair any sort of compassionate closure. Treat anger as a wave rather than manipulating it to be a constant. When anger is simply anger there will be power, but when anger is held onto, grasped onto firmly when anger is a personal tenant, a conviction, a belief used to resolve, no matter the deed done against the one who holds, let go and come to terms with beauty within the madness of the natural pain. I still struggle to maintain a healthy relationship with my anger. It comes and goes, an old friend and a new nuisance. I say hi and I say bye. I live and let go and remain always and simply just as I am. I know that anger will never go away. It is a part of me that will forever boil under the surface and will sometimes resurface. Now that I am realizing I don’t have to maintain my anger, it simply is rather than always acts. It’s a powerful thing to be invested in calm anger. I’m letting go, learning to feel my pain, listen to my pain, and know that anger is ok, but so am I without it.