Returning to Anger

Author’s Note: This letter was originally sent to a small group of friends in the middle of the night in March. I never intended to post this publicly, but eight months later, I’m on the other side of it. Reading it doesn’t make me cry again, although plenty still does—2022 was the Year of Returning to My Tears—but it does remind me of where I was and how I moved through it. I’ve been allowed to be so angry this year and sad and grieving, and I’m very grateful. Maybe read this when you’re angry, and know that you’re not alone. –Love, Kara, November 25, 2022.

On March 1, I was walking on my way to work, when I started crying. I was walking on my way to work, when I started crying, and then I got to work and I could not stop crying. I could not stop crying and while there have been pauses in the weeks since I started crying, I wonder if it still the same crying, but I couldn’t tell you, because everything seems to make me cry these days.

(It’s hard to explain, because most of you who read this know and remember: I have always cried. I cry at movies, even the ones that aren’t supposed to make you cry. I cry when I hug my parents goodbye, a fun little pandemic development. I cry when I am tired or mad or sad or overjoyed or feeling especially in love. Anything extra comes out in tears, and so I have always been told that I cry too much, feel too much. So it’s hard to explain that in the years that have passed since I’ve started writing to you, in the years that have passed since I have seen so many of you, held so many of you, that for awhile there, I wasn’t crying. That for several years now, what my therapist and I have been working on, is not bottling everything up, not holding in, and zipping everything up close. I’m afraid, I think, that most of you won’t believe me.)

It’s been three weeks of crying, and I can intellectualize and parse out the many things that happened, and I can link back to how our bodies keep the score and blah blah blah, and I can lay out the messiness that has been made of my life since I’ve started crying, but the truth is, none of that matters to me, not really. I’ve been horizontal for four days now, and after a trip to the ER to confirm that no, unfortunately, I am not dying, just in vague debilitating pain, it does not matter what weird virus this is or whatever trauma-induced psychosomatic bullshit this might be, I’m just really fucking angry.

The anger is not vague. It is aimed at many things certainly, but it is not vague. Before I fall asleep at night, I imagine myself stabbing a would-be attacker over and over again. I imagine myself pummeling my fists into the faceless man who lunged at me, smashing the phone of the disgusting man who I caught taking photos of me on the subway, slashing the tires of the car where cowards call slurs from at the light before speeding off. I imagine kicking the shins of the men who run up at me from behind “just to say hello” and I imagine bashing the heads in of the strangers who whisper at me as I walk past. I am fucking angry.

My mother will tell me that this is not right. Of course, we see what happens when this anger festers. A woman is stabbed 125 times in her own building. Women who look like me, who look like my mother, attacked in the daylight, brutally murdered in their own homes. So yes, we agree, that this anger is not good. But I wonder where else it’s supposed to go.

Anger is tough, you see, because the way many of us have experienced the outlet of someone else’s anger is through violence. Let’s make this smaller: when we are children, we are taught to identify anger as a very physical emotion. Sure, other emotions have their physical markers: smile equals happy, tears equal sad. But these markers we’re taught all live quite literally in the head. It’s only anger that we give balled fists, stomping feet. It’s a base emotion, it lives in our reptilian brain. It’s primitive and uncouth so we seal it shut. We become “not angry, just disappointed” instead. We cannot possibly be allowed to express anger (because how else could anger possibly be expressed other than violence?) so best not to feel it all.

I don’t actually know how to express anger in a way that is not some sort of violence, other than tears. I’m racking my brain and I just don’t know. My weapons of choice have generally been my words, but I never feel good after using them (is the guilt mine or the shame from another voice? I’ll save this question for therapy). For a long time I heard “take it out on [physical activity],” “channel it into your [creative work].” And I mean sure, but what does it mean when these things are tied to our rage? What becomes of them?

I started writing this angry and I am less angry now. I feel it simmering there still. Anger at a lost month, anger at my body for failing me, anger at my mind for not being stronger. Anger at too many things and people to name. While I hold it alongside hope and love, I am exhausted. It will be there tomorrow.

Love always,
Kara