Clean Burning Anger

When you're surfing the wave of emotions and feelings, you may encounter anger. Sometimes, this anger will burn with a white-hot intensity.

The normal response to anger is to try and suppress it, to reject the emotion. This is a smart thing to do, in most social situations! And you certainly don't want to act out in violence on this anger.

However, burying the anger deep inside of yourself isn't a good long-term solution. At some point, you need to allow the emotion to express itself -- your anger is trying to tell you something. Listening to your anger will prevent you from adding a bunch of cumulative stress and trauma to your body, and it will also help you to grow and develop as a person.

Anger is a negative emotion, but it's not a bad thing inherently.

Anger can motivate us to take positive action in our lives: it can motivate us to seek justice, to protect our loved ones, to refuse to be a victim for the second or third or seventeenth time.

Anger can cut through the bullshit and clarify our thoughts.

I know this damned well, because I'm very angry.
I'm angry at what's happened to me. I'm beyond angry -- I'm furious! I lost so damned much of my fucking life to sickness, debilitating disability, excruciating pain, and the emotional ups-and-downs of a teenager. I am angry. I am very, very fucking angry.

I've been bedridden and sick more often than I was healthy, for my entire adult life. Emotional and mental comas have been frequent. So how the fuck can I be this old? I don't identify with people in my age cohort -- in my mind, I'm barely out of fucking grad school. I was able to 'experience' only around 1/3 of my life. That's a lot of my fucking life that I lost.

Am I supposed to learn a lesson from all of this pain, and be grateful for the wisdom and experience? Fuck that! My experiences were torture. I don't use that word lightly. I was tortured by incredible pain and fear of death for years and years and years. Is this supposed to be some sort of growing experience? In that case, let's all sign up for waterboarding and electrode shocks to the genitals. It's what all the kids are doing these days, right? Fuck that. This level of pain is NOT fucking necessary to learn wisdom.

Anyone who thinks that "whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger" clearly hasn't experienced enough pain in their lives. I didn't need to keep repeating this same fucking lesson over and over and over and over. I'm a pretty fast learner.

I'm angry. I was already on the path to creativity and self-determination and general awesomeness, back when I was 23. It got interrupted for 14 years. 14 fucking years! Am I supposed to feel good about this? Am I supposed to just grin and accept the fact that I won't be able to accomplish everything in life that I'd like to do, because of all the time I lost?

Fuck anyone who disagrees with me. You're fucking wrong. You don't have a fucking clue what real pain is.

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This is anger. It is a clean-burning fire that clarifies, cleanses and strips away artifice.

Anger is a part of you, it's a part of me. It's even a part of that calm Zen guy who thinks that swatting a mosquito is murder.

You should never act on your anger, not without a lot of introspection and reflection. However, you also shouldn't bury and ignore your anger. It's a powerful emotion that can help you to grow as a person. It's a powerful teacher that can help you to avoid making the same mistakes over and over again.

I'm angry. This anger hurts.

The alternative is to suppress my anger, to pretend that I'm OK with the quality of my life and how other people have treated me. 

I'm not OK with what happened to me. Therefore, I'm learning to accept my anger. I'm trying to listen to it, to find out what it's trying to tell me.

I'm not sure where my path will lead, but this writing is a part of it. Trying to prevent others from experiencing the same pain is part of it. I think so, anyways. It's hard to translate 'angry rant' into English :)

Originally written on 2013-12-12