Where do you put all your anger?

So much internet ink has been spilled this past year (and the years before that, in the time warp since 2020) about our collective grief. Not having space, time, or public acknowledgement to mourn. Not having the tools or the communities or the resources to process what we've all been going through. So much overwhelming sadness and heartache.

But I don't want to talk about that. I want to talk about anger. I want to talk about devastating, unrelenting, all-consuming, incandescent rage.

The kind of anger that can hairpin trigger you to sharpness with the people closest to you, or have you mentally lashing out, imagining unspeakable horrors you'd commit if only... Feeling like your skin is made of blades and broken glass, where you're simultaneously cutting through yourself and bleeding out, but also could damage anyone who gets too close.

I want to know: what are you doing with all that anger?

There's a lot to be angry about

There's always been a lot to be angry about, probably. In a very general sense, there have always been atrocities and wars, aggressions and oppressions, slights and oversights. But if you carried the appropriate amount of righteous anger for every worthy incident of the even just the past half decade, you'd have plenty of tinder to explode at the slightest catch.

Speaking for myself, I might have been born angry. At myself, at my body, at people who should've known better or taken better care (even if I didn't know it at the time). I might have had long-simmering resentments since so long ago that they never coalesced into words. And I probably couldn't pronounce the words even if they had.

So of course it's easy to find anger rising up again, like the worst reflux you've ever had after a few poor choices, if you never really did anything about the slow simmer of it or the small rolling boil of it or the slightly-too-full pot of it before.

But it also feels like the pace of events that warrant our self-respecting fury has increased lately, doesn't it? For me it's also a one-two punch: the anger that immediately comes up with every new bold-faced lie or unrepentant genocidal advance, and then the anger at well-meaning but sheltered people who are only just now maybe acknowledging things that have been well within view, perfectly knowable if you cared to know about them.

Obviously I'm angry watching people be murdered and systematically starved. But also obviously, I get just as angry at the political infants who need to bite-size the carnage and to make it easier to swallow. They don't seem to know that sometimes you're meant to choke.