It’s tough to type with a clenched fist, but I’m trying. I wanted to write about anger while I was actually mad at something, which means I couldn’t start working on this essay for a good, oh, 10 or 15 minutes. If anger were mileage I’d be a very frequent flyer, right up there in first class; if it were food I’d have to be hauled around by a winch. If anger were sex, I’d have my own 900 number.
But anger is like none of these things. It’s an itch, an allergic reaction to some little piece of life’s pollen blown your way. Anger is personal. Somebody else might not even notice what’s bothering you, but the grievance sets your heart racing and your eyes watering and your face blushing. Anger is more particular than sexual attraction or greed. Anger is the quintessential individual-signature emotion: I am what makes me mad.
In my case, this makes me a trucker whose vehicle is making love to the rear end of my Volvo or an automatic teller machine that summarily eats my bankcard without telling me what exactly I’ve done to offend it.
What else am I mad about? Do you want the list in alphabetical or chronological order, or would it be better to organize the list by height or perhaps geographical location? Today I am furious at everyone and everything around me. I started off the day by getting mad at myself. I forgot to put gas in the car yesterday, which means that I need to go to the service station before heading into the office, which means I’ll be late for my first meeting. I’m mad at the foolish woman I was yesterday who didn’t plan for the efficient and considerate woman that I woke up as today. I’d like to go back and yell at me. (When this wish to tell myself off in different voices becomes too frequent, I’m going to book into the Sybil School of Behavioral and Chemical Therapy).
I’m mad at my husband. I come home after getting a $30 haircut which, I was assured, makes me look glamorous, thin, sophisticated and adorable (none of which I looked when I went in to get the haircut). My husband greets me not with adoration, but with the less than glamorous and delightful news that the cat threw up on the good rug. I am not thrilled with the cat, whom I resent only slightly less than my husband at this point. My haircut and I clean up after my indifferent pet, who sits grooming herself in disdain and contempt, as if to say “I never need a haircut. So much for being higher up the food chain.” (No doubt she is mad because her bowl contained only cat food and not Mouse du Jour).
Now, I return to the living room and dare to use the terrifying phrase “Notice anything different?” on my spouse. My husband, wildly scanning his imagination for possible answers as if he were being asked a tough question on the marital S.A.T.s, suggests that perhaps I’ve changed my makeup. I mention that I’m not wearing makeup. He says that counts as a change and so he has answered correctly and has to get full marks for the response. I tell him I got my hair cut. He asks me what he should say about it.
I leave the room and count to 5,987, return to where he is reading the paper, and proceed to tell him that he might say something like “Your hair looks nice.” He says, “Your hair looks nice. You should see how it looks if you put on makeup,” at which point he returns to reading the paper. I leave the room and count to 9 x 5,987, which is a very high number, and contemplate a life of celibacy.
I’m mad at a colleague who has sneered, “Well, if I wanted to stay home and write popular books, I’d consider myself a traitor to the academy,” and equally angry at the student who has somehow calculated that by getting a C+, a C, and a C- on last term’s exams, she deserves at least a B “because I showed up to almost every class and took a lot of notes.”
I’m not feeling all warm and fuzzy about the old friend who has told me that he’s getting divorced because “after she turned 40, she just couldn’t make me feel the same as she did when we were first together.” I grip the phone until my knuckles are white and give in to the temptation to tell him that he hasn’t exactly become Mel Gibson in the passing years. I can hear him smile when he says, “Oh, but it’s different for a man.” I am mostly angry that he is right, and angry that in the space of five years Sally Fields went from playing Tom Hanks’ object of desire in “Punchline” to playing his mom in “Forrest Gump” because she hit the age wall in the film business. And all the while I’m thinking that it’s a really good thing that gun control laws exist and apply to me personally.
It’s Gross Generalization time: Men and women have different ways of expressing anger. Women eat too much, cry, throw up, and ruin their lover’s garments. (One woman I know accomplished this by washing all of her husband’s underwear with his red socks so that his skivvies were a perfect shade of pink, which just tickled the guys at the firehouse where he worked; they made several comments about his taste in Fruit of the Loom.)
When men get mad, they could steam vegetables with the heat of their rage. They drink too much, drive too fast (when there’s a car screeching out of a driveway at 60 miles an hour, you know there’s a husband who isn’t finding wedded bliss), get sarcastic and mock their wives’ voices to torture them.
Men act out their anger, and women absorb theirs. For many women I know, anger takes over when they’re feeling out of control in their lives (when the kids are screaming or the doctor won’t return a phone call or they can’t get a line of credit because they lack a Y chromosome). For many men I know, anger is what they use to try to control the world around them (the very threat of their wrath keeps the kids silent in the back seat for at least 15 minutes. They stare the car mechanic in the eye and demand a loaner by lowering their voices to a growl. They punch each other when words no longer articulate their needs).
Neither gender is particularly cute when mad. And the responses of neither particularly helps to foster an atmosphere of trust. A friend of mine who lives in a small suburban town plagued by armed robberies grew fearful enough to suggest to her husband that they buy a handgun to protect themselves. The husband thought for a while but then decided it would be a bad idea. “You can’t keep ice cream in the house for more than two hours without eating it,” he pointed out to her. “You think it would be a good idea for you to own a gun?”
Because anger depends on a lack of perspective, it distorts reality. In this way, Anger resembles its sexier sister, Lust. They both involve tension, irritation, obsession, intellectual blindness and lots of late-night phone calls. When we’re lusting after someone we see only that person’s desirable qualities; when we’re angry, we see only the negative ones. Both assessments are unrealistic.
Anger and lust are also elusive states once they have passed. Trying to recall why you were angry about something when you’ve calmed down is like trying to remember why you were in love with someone who no longer attracts you: The initial impulse triggering the emotion is impossible to recapture fully.
So what can be done with-and about-anger? It’s like nuclear waste; if you bury it, it only reemerges at a later date in a more obscure and destructive form. The ghosts of undead resentment haunt the best of us: We’re driven to bad dreams and indigestion from all the words we’ve bitten back and all the bile we’ve swallowed.
Anger is like a magnifying glass: Depending on your perspective, it either distorts everything or makes everything clearer. Anger is one of the last remaining emotions that can, when looked at honestly, make us feel ashamed of ourselves. It’s embarrassing to be angry, and so many of us have learned how to hide anger so effectively that we sometimes manage to hide it even from ourselves. But anger doesn’t disappear just because it’s not seen; not every closed eye means a peaceful sleep.
Paradoxically, anger is also an emotion that can make us feel unashamed, can make us feel stronger after we have felt defeated and humiliated. It can help to restore a sense of self-worth-anger is an indication that you merit judicious treatment. It’s also an indication that you believe the world is not chaotic, not unreasonable and not random in its distribution of goodies and whacks. Anger indicates that you think life should be fair.
When life isn’t fair, we get angry. Perhaps I should narrow this down a bit: When life isn’t fair to us or to those we love, we get angry. When life is unfair to others we get philosophical. It’s pretty easy to deal with the gross inequities of the world when you’re dealing with them from a distance. Anger is a response that draws on the immediacy of experience, although it must be emphasized that historically the best and most productive anger does move beyond the personal into the political and the social. When, for example, individuals are angry enough at an injustice perpetrated by the society of which they are a part to take it personally, they can effect great and lasting change.
Anger, like smoke, curls around the edges of many civil rights demonstrations; anger informs and always has informed some of the most important debates and movements in this country. To believe in a cause with passion is to risk encountering anger-in oneself, in one’s opponent-but the risk is sometimes worth it.
To say we are willing to fight for a cause might not be literal, but the figure of speech is telling: When we put ourselves on the line for an idea, there is at least an implied threat that the overthrow or defeat of our position will raise a response-that we will become angry, and perhaps angry enough to literalize the metaphor. We might actually have to fight in order to win. When it comes to matters of belief, we might find that we would rather fight than switch. Anger is inflexible. Perhaps its inflexibility makes it a sin.
It’s undeniable that inflexibility can be a weakness; after all, anger makes us lash out at our loved ones, makes us bitter and self-destructive, makes us miserable company. But righteous anger’s unwillingness to compromise can also be a strength. And the same can be said of anger: It can mark a blind and foolish refusal to negotiate with life’s realities and disappointments, but it can also mark a triumphant turning point. “Anger stirs and wakes in her,” writes Toni Morrison in “The Bluest Eye,” a novel about an abused child’s coming-of-age. “It opens its mouth, and like a hot- mouthed puppy, laps up the dredges of her shame. Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth.”
This last point is perhaps the most important one: If you allow yourself to get angry at an injustice committed against you, you underwrite your emotion with a sense of self-worth. If you get angry at an injustice committed against others, you underwrite their value with a sense of shared worth. Call it Quality Anger, perhaps, because it isn’t petulant or selfish but rather driven by a sense of community and humanity. Anger can offer a sense of indignity to replace a sense of shame, and offer a voice-raised above others-which can finally be heard. Those voices are most effective when they are raised in unison, when they have mercy as well as anger behind them, and when, instead of roaring at the anger of old pain, they sing about the glorious possibilities of a future where anger has a smaller house than hope.
