Inviting anger in

Do you feel comfortable expressing anger?

Sometimes you wake up in that rarest of moods—the mood to write. You’re not even sure what you want to write but the urge to string words together is strong and you’re eager to see where it leads. But then, just as that twinge of excitement is rising inside you, you spill your coffee, and it somehow goes everywhere, with droplets launched multiple feet from where you’re standing. And as you’re cleaning up this mess, the most minor arch of your neck and back torpedoes your pain levels from bad to very bad, and you want to just collapse on the floor and cry. I WAS GOING TO WRITE, GOD DAMN IT! You shout inside yourself. I WAS IN A LESS BAD MOOD THAN NORMAL! You think, as that familiar tight feeling takes hold of your throat, not the kind that makes you cry but the one that wants to scream.

We all have these bad moments—the ones where we can see ourselves overreacting but can’t make it stop because, frankly, we don’t want to. We need to open the valve and let some ugly out. It’s like watching a high-speed train in the shape of your worst self hurtle towards disaster—the inevitable crash where, after an outsized freakout, you’ll see things a little more clearly and feel the shiver of shame.

I’ve become well-versed in these moments as 10/10 pain in 90% of my body has forced me to live life on edge, always highly uncomfortable with frustration simmering right under the surface… until it’s not. It’s insanely hard to stay calm, to think clearly, when your brain is always in fight mode—battling against itself as it tries to feel less, please.

My therapist often asks me if I feel comfortable expressing anger, encouraging me to do so in “healthy” ways. I still don’t fully know what that looks like, but I have tried to heed her advice. I have screamed into a few pillows, and after one particularly harrowing week with endless bad health results, I threw a glass at the wall. When I confessed to these things meekly, she wasn’t alarmed—she was pleased. But I struggled to accept that it was okay; the dent it left in the wall still pinches me with shame every time I see it.

I’ve learned that there’s a difference between feeling angry and actually letting it out, releasing it so it doesn’t consume you (or cause you to meltdown over spilt coffee). It’s easy to grumble all day long about what’s gone wrong, but it’s much harder to engage with the feeling that’s driving those grumbles, the real root of your frustration. We work overtime as humans to avoid staring the truth of what we’re feeling in the face, and I’m still working out what it means to actually do so.

A lot of people take their anger to the gym, running or cycling away from their frustration, but it’s a short-term fix—more of an avoidance tactic than real engagement. In fact, many of those people seem wound tighter than ever, giving you the sense that if they don’t increase their heart rate NOW, they might actually explode. We’re not taught how to face our anger head-on, so I can’t blame them. I did the same for years.

The reality is that we struggle to actually engage with anger because it’s still fairly taboo. We’re afraid of it in others but even more so in ourselves—even writing this right now is hard; what will “they” think? But I’m working on giving myself grace when anger comes up and finding ways to let it out instead of instantly shaming myself for buckling under the weight of intense pain and stress.

That doesn’t mean throwing a glass at the wall every day (although that does sound therapeutic). It means telling my husband I’m really angry and that I need to let it out, while he listens calmly and patiently as I unload everything I’m carrying. It means screaming into a pillow when I really need to and knowing it’s okay. Journaling pissed off gibberish that no one will ever see. Sometimes, it just looks like going for a walk and crying through the pain (rage tears are very real) or leaving a negative review for the useless doctor who dismissed my pain. Doing what I can to release it so it doesn’t break me.

But mostly, it’s a process of relearning that it’s not “crazy” or “out of control” to feel anger and express it like this, in ways that aren’t harmful. This is especially challenging as a woman, when we’ve been taught to compress ourselves like a ZIP file, taking up as little space as possible. I tried to run from my anger for a very long time and it led me to try to starve myself into submission, damaging me mentally and physically in ways that took a decade to untangle. But now I’m being forced by circumstance to face it almost daily. Instead of fearing it like I did before, I’m trying to actively invite it in.