How anger saved my life

   It’s hard to share a very personal story about myself on the internet for all to see, but I know this is what I have to do. I feel called, in a way, because I know that if I don’t do this, there is someone out there who would benefit from this knowledge that will never be told. 

My confession

   I’m not all that special. Not in most ways. And when I was younger, I was very depressed. Over the years, I had come up with many creative ways to punish myself, and talk badly about myself to, well, myself. 

   Now of course, I wasn’t happy this way. Far from it, actually. Even though I was miserable, I had grown used to it and found a strange sort of comfort in hurting my own feelings. It was predictable and “normal”. It helped me feel I had some sort of control over things. 

   I felt like a victim of circumstance, or really, a victim of my own life. In my heart of hearts, I felt powerless to everything—including myself. 

The self-defeating cycle

   There were a lot of things I “knew”. Like I “knew” that I wasn’t good enough to have the love I wanted, I “knew” I didn’t have the skills to perform well at a good job. I “knew” that all my friends secretly hated me, and I “knew” that the future of both myself and the world was going down the toilet very quickly. 

   As I said, I felt very much the victim, and in some ways, I was. I had been the victim of a crime, I dealt with bullying at school, and home didn’t feel like a safe place to me. But there was a sort of learned helplessness to it all, and that’s the part that doesn’t sit right with me anymore. 

   I had been taught that I wasn’t good enough and that my thoughts and feelings didn’t matter both implicitly and explicitly throughout the years. The problem was that I accepted this as part of my reality, and even when nobody else was around I didn’t respect my thoughts or feelings. 

   Now I’ve mentioned this before on this site, but there’s something called an emotional scale. The idea is that if you can find where you are on the emotional scale, you can find out which emotion would be a step up for you. Or basically, what would be the feeling that would resonate as “better” for you. 

Introducing…anger! 

   And sometimes, the feeling that is a step up is anger. It was for me. When I got angry, it scared me. It was like a tidal wave of all this primal emotion that didn’t want to be tamed. 

   I felt like a madman (or madwoman, I guess), and for years I couldn’t decide which was worse—anger, or this fear and shame I carried around with me everyday. So I flip-flopped, back and forth between the two. Anger and shame, anger and victim, anger and fear. 

   I think we have this stigma around anger. We say that anger is bad, and that we shouldn’t give into it. We can recognize that people sometimes do horrible things with their anger, and some of the biggest atrocities in the world have been committed with rage. 

   It’s important that you know your anger is nothing to be afraid of—it’s a gift to embrace, if you can embrace it right. The fact is, you’re never going to get rid of your anger by ignoring it or pushing it away. 

A way out

   If you’re in the cycle of fear and shame, and you feel despair on a regular basis, the next step up is anger. I don’t remember at what point I felt this shift in myself, but one day I decided that I wasn’t going to hate myself for my anger. I was done telling myself the story that being angry made me a bad person, and unforgiving. 

   It’s true, that everyone just wanted my negative emotions to be done, me included. But I realized I wasn’t getting anywhere trying to stifle this anger. As I say all the time, “when it comes to your emotions, the only way out is through.”

   So I began to honor my anger. When someone short-changed or disrespected me, I allowed myself to become angry. And instead of dampening the feeling by telling myself I should feel ashamed of myself for rising up against someone else in anger, I let it flow. 

The downside

   I definitely lost some people along the way. Friends, acquaintances. Most people weren’t thrilled that I began standing up for myself. Especially those that counted on me to be there to push around. 

   It wasn’t just the manipulative people that I lost though. I can’t say that I’ve always handled my anger in a constructive or respectful way. Even after learning to honor this emotion in myself. 

   Sometimes, I lashed out. I said or did things that I didn’t mean, or that hurt others. I’ve said things that I knew would hurt people, all with the mistaken idea that I was “speaking my truth”. 

The long road

   In short, I was, and am, learning about anger. I spent so many years in sadness, fear, and shame that now, as it turns out, I know a fair bit about them. I know how to cope and how to navigate when it starts to get dark. 

   My next journey is anger. It’s a double-edged thing. There is a balance with anger. Having enough can pull you out of shame, and give you the energy (or passion) to take action and change your life. But it’s important to learn to use it constructively, so it doesn’t tear your life down instead. 

You can be angry forever

   It wasn’t until I got angry and let myself stay there (if I wanted) that I stopped being suicidal. It absolutely was cause and effect. I needed to get angry enough to say, “hey this isn’t how it should be! Something’s wrong!”

   And you can do it too. Anger—this natural response of anger, will rise up in you and tell you when something isn’t right. It’s up to you to believe it, and allow it to be there until you’ve learned and gotten all you can from it. 

   Anger truly saved my life. From me. From all of my shame and fear. Anger is the emotion that riled me enough to the point where I stood back up in life. I stood up for others and I stood up for myself. 

   It won’t break you, it won’t spin you out of control. Anger doesn’t make you a bad person, but rather a human. A human who knows something better is out there somewhere. Anger is your messenger telling you that you can have more. Your life can have more, you can be more. Don’t shoot the messenger.