Here Be Danger (The Abyss)
FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT
"Anger makes you strong," is a common sentiment.
Well, I'm here to argue it.
I was the angriest kid you ever met. I could be quiet or friendly enough, but as far back as I can remember, I just smoldered, all the time. I was usually "the quiet one", but when I felt cornered - which wasn't always when you'd expect - it would come out like a freight-train on PCP. I couldn't fight worth a damn, but I never fought on purpose - not once, until I picked up martial arts at the age of thirtyish - all of my violence was cornered-rat explosiveness, which worked in a sense, if you didn't count the intense amounts of collateral damage it caused.
Harder with age, Sharper in the dark
When I was young, general sexism and bullying fed my anger; as I got older and shouldered my way into Detroit, and into worse and worse social groups and scenes, everything fed it, and I learned to hide it less, because being a quiet smoldering white chick is a lot less safe than being a leather-and-spikes-and-visible-weaponry snarling fuck-you white chick.
That was all a long time ago, but anger doesn't dissipate with age; it just sits there getting old and hard unless or until something breaks it up. I still have a metric shitload of it, I suspect, though I've been making an effort for years to bleed it out of my outward/social, and lately my inward/psychological personalities too. (The latter is much harder - nothing I ever did to anyone in the outside world out of anger compares to the things I've done to myself. Trust me. Anger also grows sharper in the dark.) I can at least recognize it now, though it's surprisingly difficult to set aside the temptation to resort to it pretty much all the time.
Staying alive at what cost? Shrapnel…
Anger is like a trampoline: If you hit bottom and it's there, you'll bounce back, propelled by the energy of the explosion. That can feel like a life-saver when you're in a freefall, when you see the ground coming up and then you hit rock bottom and something in you flares and thinks, nuh-uh, FUCK this. I am NOT going to be killed by X. You want me gone, world, you're going to have to send in some bigger guns than this. I'm here until you drag me out kicking and screaming, damn you!
And then, amazingly, you survive. You shamble out of the smoking wreckage feeling utterly spent but, amazingly, crazily, alive.
The problem is, like all explosions, that one a) burns fuel and b) involves collateral damage. It takes resources, for one thing: building and maintaining an emotional store of explosives keeps you tethered, to a degree, kind of like maintaining a weapons-store at your house; it's never resource- or cost-free to "have protection" like that. Anyone who says differently is selling something.
And the collateral damage is significant, too. The things that happen when it goes off are often extreme, unintentional, messy, or all of that and worse. But that's just the tip of the iceberg.
…and addiction too.
Keep it up, and you learn to rely on anger as a survival mechanism, and it gets easier to rely on and harder to move past or give up the more you use it. (This is an addiction based on, not dopamine, but adrenaline - kicking it means defying not your pleasure-centers, but your fight-or-flight mechanisms. Have fun!) So not only do you get stuck on using anger whenever you need rescuing, you can also get addicted to feeling it when things are fine. You've got X years of historical data that goes SHIT SUCKS -> SHIT GETS SCARY -> ANGER KICKS IN -> SURVIVAL HAPPENS! WIN! LIFE! -and the incredible rush that goes with surviving when you thought you weren't going to.
Now, what happens when things are just…ok? Or meh? Or difficult, but not scary, really; and just leave you wishing you could feel a Win! Life! moment, just to draw strength from it? Well, people without "anger issues" (as I guess we can call them) typically go climb a cliff or camp in the woods or hell, even just go drinking or something, and they find their YayWinLife rush and get back on with things. But as someone who's been using anger as your primary life-saver and motivation to survive horrible shit for years, that's where your mind and your chemistry goes first. (Nothing handy to be angry at? Oh, you'll find something…often yourself. Which is double great because then you get hurt by it coming and going, pre- and post-explosion.)
Resistance: Really, actually, futile.
The thing is, anger is just a name for a specific form of "No-ness", or what I find it easy to call Resistance: The state of mind that pushes away. It's not efficient, and if aimed sloppily, it can put holes in your inner ceilings, start fires, and generally wreak all kinds of havoc.
What it almost never does is actually free you from the thing you're pushing against: Rather, it binds you to it, for reasons like those described above, and others.
It also burns you out: You'll get off the bottom, but then you're wasted by the effort, and chances are that things aren't better enough to really let you slump in relief, either. Burning anger is like burning nitrous: it works, but it costs, and the costs will catch up. If you want endurance, sustainability, and real change, you're going to need fuel that you can burn slowly, and control. (Some people say their anger burns slowly and controlled, but they're wrong: They've just buried it so far that the heat is hard to feel. It's still raging under there. Anger only rages. Again, you should probably just trust me on that. ;)
How not to be angry, or how to recover from having made a habit of surviving via anger for most of a lifetime, is totally another post; but this was useful to write down; thanks, Internet!
Originally published at *Transcendental *Logic. You can comment here or there.