Reflection:When Will You Rage

I’ve always had problems with anger. Impotent anger, cold anger, seething anger, it was always there, just below the surface. I never wanted to be an angry person. From everything I’d ever experienced in my life, I learned that angry people were dangerous, harmful individuals who only caused pain to the people around them, and I never wanted to be a source of pain to others. I wanted to help, to build, secure, and protect. Every attempt at self improvement was never done for myself, but for others, which has been a sticking point in a few of my relationships (of many kinds, see the blog on love if you need a refresher). 

So I buried my anger, locked it away as the poison it was, and only recently started really learning why that wasn’t advisable, despite all the shows and movies and people telling me just that. There’s a huge difference between hearing something and the act of truly understanding it. Two things really helped solidify my understanding of how ‘anger is poison.’ 

1. Anger isn’t a real emotion. 

Despite what Inside Out might have taught us, I’ve come to the conclusion that Anger isn’t real. Or, it isn’t really an emotion. Anger is, at least in my opinion and experience, what we feel when we are unable to express the emotion we’re really feeling. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, as Yoda once said, but fear isn’t the only thing that leads to anger. 

Sadness does too. 

Loneliness. 

Hurt. 

Embarrassment. 

Each time I felt these but didn’t have a way to express it, or let it out, anger would build within me, drive me crazy, and make me sick. When I was able to talk to someone about it, the anger died down not because they soothed the anger, but they addressed the emotion that was the cause of my anger. This is one of the reasons I really loved training in Krav Maga, which I’ve not had the time, money, or opportunity to do lately, but working the bag or sparring with someone really helped me let out the emotions that were built up. I wasn’t “taking my anger out on” someone, I was addressing the emotion I couldn’t any other way. 

I remember when I started training. I was about twenty-six, twenty-seven, and I just got dumped by a girl that, at the time, I really thought I was in love with. Not the first time it happened, but I found out later from a friend that she had been cheating on me with another guy who had the same name as me and she described as “just like [me], but more of an asshole.”

There was a mix of emotions at that time, but all of them culminated into anger. I was really angry. I went to Krav that day, burnt out, angry, and unable to focus. We were doing roundhouse kicks against a shield that our partner was holding and after about forty of them, I felt myself just giving out. My partner, a woman probably in her late forties or early fifties, looked at me and told me to give it more. I told her I didn’t have anything left as I threw another weak kick. Joanie looked at me and said, “So. How’s the girlfriend?”

The next kick nearly knocked her over. She laughed at that and told me to keep that up. All those emotions that were creating that anger burned away with every kick until by the time I left that dojo an hour later… I was happy again. 

2. The people who love you, want you to do it for you. 

I’ll be honest, this one I still struggle with. When I put the work in, it's for people I love. I want to do better for them, help support them, make their dreams reality… because I love them. I can always find the energy to cook for others, though I’ll often just grab something fast for myself as long as my belly is full. I’ll encourage them to sleep or drink water, while staying up late or drinking pure sugar because “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.” Or the one that hurts people the most when I do it, when I encourage them to take care of their own health, but often look at the cost of my own and think it’s not worth the money (Thanks American “health care” system). The hurt expression I got from someone when I joked about how if I got hurt at work it would “just be cheaper to die,” is one I’ll never forget. 

So when I struggle with the anger, or even when I feel that it is justified and righteous, I have to remember that my anger doesn’t just poison me, but those around me as well. When I let it fester and then burst out of me, when I let my words fly heedlessly, it affects the people I love, affects their opinion of me, and changes how they feel about me. Just like how Callie reacted to Grey. She felt they were on par with one another, but when his anger came out, he made her feel small and weak and in danger. You never want the people you surround yourself with, the people you love and trust and rely on, to feel like they’re in danger when they’re around you. 

Learning to deal with anger is difficult, especially these days. I often just need to turn on the news or look at social media to feel the rage building in my chest, followed quickly by the depression of knowing that there’s little to nothing I can do to change it. This actually makes the usage of the Garou in this chapter even better. See, their blood is resonant with rage, because rage is like the hunger to vampires in the game world. It is part of what they are, but something that needs to be balanced or there’s a chance that they’ll be warped into something they don’t want to be. Bury the rage, and it will poison you, give it too much leash and it will consume you. 

In Werewolf: the Apocalypse, there’s a balanced system called Harano and Hauglosk. In a state of Harano, the werewolf is in a deep, spiritual depression where they see their actions as being meaningless in a world that is slipping into entropy quicker than any action they can take to reverse it. Hauglosk is the opposite, where the situation is so desperate that any action, no matter how cruel or vile, is justified because the cause is righteous. Anger feels a lot like this, and I think the game did a fantastic job of recognizing and verbalizing what this kind of anger feels like. 

There are days where I’ll say, and even believe, that certain actions are justified because action needs to be taken against injustice and the horrors of the world. Those are days when I can see worry on the faces of those who love me, who fear that I truly believe the things I’m saying in anger, and wondering if I’m the person they truly believe me to be. Then there are others when I feel like there’s no point to fighting anymore. Just let these assholes destroy the world, we can’t stop them anyway. These are days when I can’t even vocalize these thoughts, so I don’t know if the ones I love recognize the Harano that I’m feeling. 

It’s in moments like these that we need our own Isadora, someone who will let us just let out the anger in a healthy, safe way, someone who forgives us for our weakness in succumbing to the feelings of anger (not forgives us for abuse, these are very different things, and if you’re in a situation where there is abuse, please leave as soon as you can, your safety is more important than anything else). Someone who can help us process the real emotions, not just the frustration of not understanding them, in a way that can soothe the beast within us, and allow us to remain human in a world so full of monsters.