“So, let’s start calling anger what it is--a form of grief. When people fear Black women's anger, what they are really afraid of is the depth of our bereavement. They are afraid of feeling powerless when faced with the depths of our pain, especially when they are implicitly implicated. The acuity of our grief is a reminder to a society that has normalized terror against us that we are real. We are human. And by letting ourselves experience the expression of things about it. But they don't know what to do, and so they look to us for a map back to innocence. As a result of their feelings of powerlessness, the onus is reflected back to us to do something--to be friendlier, to react differently, to teach lessons, to pardon mistakes, to clean it up.” - Breeshia L. Wade, Grieving While Black
I cannot remember a time in my life, especially as a child, when I was encouraged to express anger about something that had been done to me. For instance, I could be angry about oppression as long as it wasn’t my personal experience of oppression. I wasn’t supposed to tell when I was angered by something done directly to me. It wasn’t “ladylike,” or my choice of words may have been too harsh for the situation. I distinctly recall being punished back in the second grade, for responding to an insult with an insult. The other kid never got in trouble and was thanked for telling on me. It was solidified for me at age 7 that my emotional truth wasn’t welcome, especially if that truth came unvarnished and unattached to the interests or demands of others. If I was excited or eager to do something, expressing it was shot down as “too much.” I was too much. Everything I said, did, breathed, sang, and thought was too much. This pierced me in ways I am still realizing.
As I aged, I received messages from all sides that my anger was not only unreasonable, but that my sadness was pointless and silly to indulge. All of my feelings, really, were hindrances to what I “should” have been thinking about and doing: studying, getting good grades, serving as a shining example of the value of diversity, or being a good girl on whom my family could boast. There was no room for feelings as much as there was room for the performance of certain pre-approved feelings. By the time I was a teenager, I was so accustomed to pretending not to feel, I would curse my propensity for crying when upset. If my face couldn’t hide it, I stood absolutely zero chance of pretending I was fine. This masquerading was key to my survival, as I understood it. I was not going to “get away with” being sad or scared where people could see it; there was no way in hell a feeling as big as anger could come to the fore without profound consequences for me.
I became deeply unaware of my feelings. This, combined with my enjoyment of deep analysis, meant I was always willing to talk about things while I may not permit myself to feel them. That was and is a form of bypassing myself, my feelings, and my needs. That lack of awareness has permeated my relationships and work, mainly my relationship with myself. I am often uncertain that I will be heard, seen, or even taken seriously by others. Even when I’m interacting with people I know and love dearly, I am often afraid that they will not receive me well. Being unaware of my fear has made me reactionary without knowing why, easily fixating on worst case scenarios as if my only destiny is to suffer. I used to misplace my anger because I was divorced from its root, separated from my own blessed self.
Divorce is a loss. Grief is a universal response to loss of any kind. I did not understand my misplaced anger as a form of grief. I recognized my visceral reactions, which often feel like being shaken or suddenly struck. My body was telling me, but I didn’t get it; I experienced, over and over again, what Ruth King refers to as “the mind/ body split” in her book Healing Rage. The disconnect was so familiar to me that I one day learned that feeling like I’m only halfway secured in this plane wasn’t necessarily a common experience. I don’t want to say normal, because normal is the same mask that kept me from knowing my emotional landscape; it’s the farce that turns us all into our own police, our own punishers. I had to acknowledge and grieve, too, that I was undoing something that never belonged to me.
The clearer I became about the things not belonging to me, the more embittered I became. Patriarchal values that I used against others like the assumed safety of a bully’s lackey; fatphobia that had me pretending I wanted a man that I didn’t. It was like the unpeeling of snow clothes: parkas made of shame and fear, weighty boots fabricated to insulate my lack of confidence. I am still pulling away at items, examining them as if they’re skin I’ve shed. Where did this come from? Was this once something I wanted? I certainly needed it to bear certain conditions. I realized that where I’m headed in life, I need those things less and less.
In my journey to acceptance of myself and the life I live(d), I have learned the necessity of separating from the loads of centuries old indignities, foulness, and hate. I grieve for the self who tried repeatedly to make these things her own, misguided by lifetimes of survival mode through bloodline, time, and space. In the multiverse of experiences, loss touches all life as my humanity allows me to understand it. Plantlife follows the sun and water; when they wilt, they look the way we do when laid low by grief. Animal kin lay their close ones to rest the same way humans do. The planet which we inhabit currently grieves its destruction, as water brings land back to the depths from which it formed and weather patterns become more varied. We are living in the grief of earth; earth is living in our grief, too.
Anger comes from often unaddressed, repeated losses, failures, and disappointments. The smallest grief can grow to any size when it’s left unacknowledged, minimized, and/ or dismissed. The grief that shows up as anger can propel one to harm self and others, thus creating more grief. If that new grief is not cared for like a newborn child, it will most certainly grow into anger that destroys. So, what happens when we take care of it?
I am eager to know what it looks like to take my anger by the hand and have it walk me through its origins. I seek to live in discovery of myself in that way; connectedness may yet be the best support for anger. It is not a remedy, as anger is not some disease to treat. Anger is as natural as breath. I will treat mine as such, knowing that natural things are sacred things: laughter, sunshine, the very earth on which I stand. If my anger is sacred, so is my grief. If these are sacred, so must I be, as the one who feels them.