Choosing

I have been living in anger for a very long time now. It’s comfortable, it’s familiar, it’s easier not to deal with how I really feel when everything’s a big, black blur of anger.

I was going to list the reasons why I’ve been angry and who I’ve been angry at but I realized that that is pointless. The main person I’ve been angry with is myself.

I have been angry that I have allowed myself to lose so much time and so many things by simply letting fear and insecurity take over my life. My anger is based so strongly in fear yet I rarely can see that that is the case.

It’s familiar because the main emotions in my family are anger and fear. We communicate in shouts, not whispers. We fight more than we hug. Raised voices are what I grew up with and it’s the way I learned to communicate. When you are unhappy, be angry. When you are uncertain, be angry. When you are afraid, be angry. It’s not your fault you feel this way, it’s everybody else’s. Everybody else is to blame.

My mother schooled me well in anger and self-righteousness. She is a fury when she feels out of control - which is very often, especially now. She is unreachable in that fury and she is devastated when the fury ceases but she has no tools to understand or deal with the aftermath, so she dives further into the fury.

More and more often as I get older, I hear my mother coming out of my mouth. I see myself echoing her self-preservation techniques - drive everyone away before they can hurt you, before they can reveal your flaws and your weaknesses. And if someone crosses you, cross them off the list and leave them behind. Live your life in a dark room, alone, empty, with alienation and loneliness your only friends.

I let go of a lot of anger last night. I realized how much energy and attention it takes to be that angry that much of the time. How it eats away at you, how it was eating away at me. How the anger and the fear were taking the joy out of things because I was allowing them to.

I reached out to my ex last night, one of the main sources of my anger. I realized that I am I control of my life and I can choose to let him in and how much to let him in. Despite all the pain and the fury, I miss him. And my anger was coming from the residual hurt and pain of our relationship and from fear that if I opened myself up to him at all, he would hurt me again in some way. But last night, I gently reached out, cautiously, fearfully, and he reached back just as tentatively. But we managed to meet in the middle, have a moment in time when we were gentle with each other, just to say, hey, hope you’re well, what’s going on, and leave it at that.

And it felt good to do that. To let that anger go, leave that fear by the side. I realize I can control how much access he has to me and how much information I give him. I can let him in to my life if I choose and in the way that I choose. And if I don’t like the way it’s going, I can choose to push him away.

I guess it comes with discovering that I am in control of my life, not him, not anyone else. When it comes to the other people who I have been angry at lately, I also realized that it accomplishes nothing to carry that anger around. It shuts me off from them, leaving them no choice but to stand at a distance and reflect that anger back at me. The only way to not live in that fury is to let the anger go, realize that I participated in creating that situation, and choose to step out of the fury and leave the hurricane behind.

I am a faux Buddhist. I say this because I know so little about Buddhism but I desire to embrace that philosophy. My grandfather was a Buddhist and I think I inherited that sensibility from him and from my father, who is maybe a little too passive within the fury but mostly seems to possess the best of that Eastern way of living. And in my moderate attempts to understand and to create a life of peace and contentment, I am slowly discovering that anger cannot exist within that life. That doesn’t mean I have to be a pansy and allow people to run over me and treat me like a doormat. Respect and dignity are a large part of the way I’d like to live my life. But in order to receive that respect and dignity, I must allow myself to be vulnerable enough to treat others that way, even if we don’t agree, even if they’ve hurt me or disrespected me in some way. I have to choose to not allow that anger to take over and color every moment of every relationship.

So this morning, I woke up relieved and relaxed, that ball of fury in my stomach gone, that pile of fear cut down significantly. I am still fearful of letting go of that familiarity of living in anger and fear. I am terrified that I am leaving myself open to truly being hurt and scarred and mangled by those I have been so angry at. But in living in that fury, I fear I have cut myself off from everyone else, not allowing someone who will treat me with dignity and respect and pride and love come through because of the wall of fury existing around me.

I know I am not done being angry and I know that the fury is going to be a battle every single day. But I also know that it was easier to sleep last night and my heart is at peace this morning. Let’s see how long I can hang on to that.