Let Me Be Angry

TW: SI and abuse

It turns out that when my brain tells me "I wish I was d++d," a lot of the time I'm actually angry—and I feel powerless and unable to express my anger. I’m sure I’m not the only woman out there who doesn’t know how to express anger (I’d say “in a healthy way,” but actually I don’t know how to express it very well in any way at all). I don’t have practice at expressing anger. Let me explain why.

As a child, I learned that anger was terrifying and evil. My father was often physically (and emotionally and verbally) abusive. When he came home, I had no idea if he was going to be the “nice” dad or the “angry” dad. Even the “nice” dad was scary to me because it always seemed fake and you never knew what you might do that would turn him into angry dad, but you sure as hell knew that it would be your fault if he got mad that you weren’t “enough” of whatever it was he expected you to be. I cowered from my dad. I ran away. I hid in trees and read books. I hid in the furnace room with a flashlight and read books. I hid at the library and read books.

And when I couldn’t hide, I turned into “perfect Mette.” Perfect Mette was always happy and nice and obedient and smart and good and all the things my dad wanted me to be. Perfect Mette tried to coax other kids into doing chores or whatever was necessary to keep Dad from being angry. Dad loved me the best because I was so damned good. I got perfect grades. I did all the church things I was supposed to do. I tried to please him in every way possible, even getting a PhD from Princeton when I was 24 years old. He liked to brag about me because I was so perfect.

And guess what? I never learned to talk back to him. I never learned how angry I was at him. Because it was stuffed down so deep inside. Because I told myself that I was never going to be like him. I was never going to abuse anyone. I was never going to be angry, because that would make me like him—and that was the worst possible outcome for my life.

Only of course I am sometimes angry. It’s a normal human emotion. If you can recognize it and let it out easily and quickly, it often just goes away. If you stuff it down and refuse to name it, something else happens. It doesn’t go away. It becomes resentment and it poisons everything in your life. You never get to speak its name. I still remember when my children would ask me if I was angry, and I would refuse to admit that I was, even though it was obvious to them in every way that I was angry. But I couldn’t let myself acknowledge it because I wasn’t going to be my dad.

Here’s one of the most painful realizations of my life: my dad also did this. He refused to acknowledge his anger. He thought of himself as “slow to anger,” like the scripture says. That’s what his self-image was. He was so unaware of who he was that he never understood that all of his children were terrified of him and his anger. He couldn’t learn to manage his anger because he was so busy refusing to allow himself to be angry. And he did what I began to do: he brought his anger from other spheres (often work, but sometimes church) home to his children. He let his anger come out when he felt safe, and on people that he felt were safe to let it out on: his family.

In so many ways, I have become my father because of my very attempts to not become him. I hate this irony. It may be too late in some ways for me to make up to my children for being angry (No, I’m not angry—I’m just unhappy), but at least I’m going to show them a model of adulting that my father was never able to show me. I’m going to learn how to express my anger now, after age 50, when I suppose most people think there’s no point in trying to change anymore.

So I’m asking for a favor today: Please don’t tell me not to be angry. It’s so easy to tell women not to be angry, so easy to tell them that no one listens to you when you’re angry. But if I don’t allow myself to be angry, then I want to be dead instead. Being angry is a form of power. It seems obvious to me now, as it is obvious now that I didn’t want to use power in the way that my father did. But being powerless is not a way to want to stay alive. Anger is often an emotion that shows us what needs to change in our lives. It gives us the energy to make those changes. If you stuff it down again and again, you don’t make those changes. You tell yourself that you’re not allowed to ask for changes, that you don’t deserve anything for yourself, that things will never get better. And that is deadly.

My anger comes out mostly on the internet in the form of snarky posts, sharp criticisms of institutions like the Mormon church and the Supreme Court of the United States, and essays like this one where I call people out to help make things better. I’m working on allowing myself to be angry more quickly and without as much judgment. I’m working on acknowledging that anger is an emotion that every human has. It doesn’t make me good or bad to be angry. It just makes me human. I don’t have to let the anger control me, and the best way to do that is to recognize it and name it when it comes up.

If you’re tired of me being angry, then let me assure you that I am also tired of it. I would like to come to the end of the well of anger inside of me. Lately, it has felt sometimes like the only emotion I ever have is anger, and that’s because I’m still processing a lot of past anger. So be it. Eventually, I have to believe I’ll come to the end of all that anger and there will be other emotions that come up more often. For now, letting myself be really, truly, on fire with anger is an important way to show myself that I don’t have to cut off a whole part of my humanity in order to be allowed to be alive.

I’m afraid all the time that if I show anger, no one will love me anymore. But today, I’m telling myself that maybe the person whose love I should most be concerned about is my own. Maybe I need to feel anger so that I can love myself, and embrace my whole, bad-ass, angry self.