Anger

Yesterday, I was angry. Furious. Rage-crying-in-a-hot-car angry. This particular moment was not centered around my grief for Bryan, but I’ve been thinking about anger a lot. I’ve not really expressed that emotion in the process of my grief for many reasons, I think.

I’ve witnessed the long-term health effects of unchecked anger on people I love and have loved dearly. Unchecked, it becomes poison. I’ve seen and heard the ugly things done and said in anger that I don’t want to participate in. The emotional marks are permanent. I want to be so careful. But I know anger repressed is also poison.

I love Pixar’s Inside Out because it explores anger’s role in our full humanity. It’s a key piece in our emotional and mental health. Anger directs our passions and helps us fix wrongs that need to be righted and needs that should be fulfilled. And yet, my own terrifies the ever-loving stuffing out of me.

With cool piano jazz playing in the background of my nearly-cleaned kitched (those two pans on the stove are kinda staring at me), I don’t feel that hot burn at the back of my neck and legs, the drop in my stomach, the bursting energy in my chest. Nevertheless, when I think about what my girl and I have been dealt, this home without his vibrant life filling it, the gross unfairness of an athletic, zestful-for-life man, to be taken down by not one, but TWO kinds of cancer. Yes. There’s anger there. But this anger can’t be channeled into fixing that fact so what am I supposed to do with it?

Maybe that’s my error. I think I can do something to fix or outrun or to placate feelings instead of just having them. Feeling them. Letting them visit, be a part of me, and then leave like wanderers stopping by for tea, waving as they become just a memory of a time and place.