What I Learned From My Anger
This is perhaps the best time in my [redacted] years so far on this earth to examine anger. To quote the perennial philosophy of the bumper sticker, “if you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention.”
Anger is good. It is natural. It’s healthy. Anger causes change. Anger is a reaction to pain and a catalyst for action.
While it spurs us to action, anger is ultimately a reactive emotion. We use anger to avoid pain. This can be good on a civic level, because it inspires us to remove the causes of societal pain. That can also be problematic. Anger doesn’t have a code of ethics.
Anger dictates the manner in which we experience our actions and the change or work they produce.
That’s why, as someone who has lived under the looming sword of anger for much of his life, I argue that only compassion can create lasting change and only compassion can create for each of us personally a truly fulfilling experience within action.
How might my experience and my actions differ if I act from compassion for victims rather than anger at perpetrators?
In my personal work with compassion and anger, I’ve learned the following:
Anger makes me feel powerful.
Compassion is powerful.
Anger avoids pain.
Compassion alleviates pain.
Anger is easy.
Compassion is hard.
Anger is ultimately about me.
Compassion is about someone else.
Again, anger is natural and healthy. It spurs great art and great change. But a revolution, personal or social, built only on anger can only create a simulacrum of what it replaces.
How does this touch our practice as artists? Here, I can only speak from personal experience. This is the first time I’ve shared this publicly, because I feel complicated shame around it, and because I know that family members read these pieces.
My journey with anger begins when I was a child, and it begins with experiencing someone else’s expression of it. I can’t say flatly or simply that my mother was an angry person. I don’t think she was. But I think she struggled. I think there were times she felt claustrophobic, trapped with a son and a life she hadn’t imagined for herself, both pre- and post-divorce. She grew up in poverty and experienced traumatic experiences that sound abusive to us today, but that she publicly laughed off. I think she loved me very much, but she didn’t know where to put that, and I think she let her anger funnel down to me, because she didn’t know where to put it, either.
She scared me. She hit me, terrorized me with little threats, rewarded me abundantly and then rapidly took things away. As a young child, she would seemingly swoop in from nowhere, her face nearly touching mine, and she would mutter things like “I should mash your mouth” through gritted teeth. Terrifying to a four-year-old. I didn’t even know what I’d done. One minute I would be singing along with the Letter People or Mr. Rogers, the next, she would snatch food from my plate and sneer at me.
Later, when I was an adolescent, she had what we used to refer to as a “nervous breakdown.” Anger and feelings of powerlessness overwhelmed her as she dealt with divorce, and it didn’t help that I had a close relationship with my father, no matter how much she verbally attacked it. During this period, it wasn’t unusual for her to wake me in the middle of the night, shaking me, slapping me and screaming at me for some imagined injustice against her on the part of my father. I was the anger proxy.
I grew up, but I didn’t move on. I held this well into adulthood, while I watched my mother seemingly forget it had happened. She would talk to my friends and my wife about how happy we’d been in those days, and how much she missed it. People who hadn’t been with us in our two-person dance of rage saw my mother as a sweet Aunt Bea character, extremely southern, extremely adorable, and generous with money, time and conversation.
My mother was not a devil. She was not abusive to the level that so many others have experienced. The emotional and physical abuse I experienced is nothing compared to the horrific abuse experienced all over the world by so many children. But it was my experience.
In my adult life, there were plenty of blowups between the two of us where I tried to come to terms with what had happened, and my mother flatly denied it. None of that had ever happened. Why would I be so hurtful?
When I was in my 30s, my mother had a stroke. It didn’t damage her mind much, but it affected her mobility. Eventually she moved into assisted living, and my family moved back to Tennessee from California to be near her.
In our last years, she and I came to terms in our own way. There was never closure, and I still haven’t quite made it to forgiveness. But, compassion won out over anger. Was it because she was physically and, eventually, mentally debilitated? Was it because I came to understand her anger? Perhaps. In some small way.
Eventually, I just grew tired of being angry. It couldn’t make her “remember” what had happened, and it only polluted my experience of pretty much every moment of my life.
Ok, back to how it affected my practice. This is an arts publication, not an autobiography.
I was never able to write about my mother. In any way. Every time I began, the piece would dissolve into acrimony and, to be honest, turn out quite bad. In a journal from 2014, there’s a short story I began but scratched out, writing under it “Don’t go here. You won’t like the person you will become.” The story began with the line, “I should mash your mouth.”
She began to imagine things that seem common to people experiencing dementia or brain trauma. She was convinced that every night they moved her to an identical facility in an abandoned shopping mall. She wasn’t frightened, just worried they’d lose her jewelry. She believed a man lived in the tree outside her window.
She died in 2018, and the grief I experienced startled me. Maybe because of lack of closure. Maybe because the last bit of anger snapped away in a flood of compassion.
In January of 2020, I wrote about her for the first time.
In her final year, my mother told me
That a man lived in the tree
Outside her window
What does he do up there I asked
And she said he had a grill
And he cooked
I see I said I would encourage you
To consider the possibility
It’s a dream
You see she also thought they moved
Her to a different identical room
While she slept
But we never take our old mothers
Seriously until the time we wish
We’d just listened
It was a year later that I learned
Of mad King Sweeney and the
Vengeful clerical curse
That made him birdlike that sent
Him fleeing across Ireland
Alighting in trees
And now I wonder was it this old king
Outside my mother’s window
Cooking his dinner
Born of deep archetypal conjuring
In her labyrinthine brain
Its boxes upturned
Is there a short-tempered bird king
In all our nearest trees
Leaping great spans
To be near in our final year to hold
Our hearts like hatchlings
Spirits like springwater
