Choosing to fail

There is one thing everyone in my family is good at that I don’t want to be good at. Being angry.

My mother had a Ph.D. in it. My sister has at least a Masters. My dad is the strong, silent type. My brother is somewhere in between.

Anger comes easily to me. It’s the fail-safe. When I don’t know what to be, I get angry. Because I know it. Because it’s familiar. Because it’s always been there, waiting patiently until I found it. Comfortable. Simple.

Anger made it easy for me to blame everyone else. Made it easy for me to say, well, of course I didn’t do my best, I was very angry because -- insert excuse here. Of course I couldn’t finish this, I was very angry because -- insert excuse here. It excused me from accepting responsibility. It excused me from facing the truth in a lot of situations. It excused me from facing the harder emotions - hurt, sadness, fear, among others. Anger felt like power because it’s, well, angry. It felt like motion. It felt like feeling something.

But it was a lie. Anger just made me more angry because I couldn’t get to what was underneath. It made it easy to hide but not easy to really see what was going on.

I spent a lot of time in anger over the past couple of years. Anger at my ex. Anger at my last theater company and a wide variety of people therein. Anger at my parents, at my life, at the world, at the president (well, maybe that was justified). I was getting really good at being angry. After all, I learned from the best.

But in working hard to step away from the anger, starting with making some sort of peace with my ex, I have found joy again. I have found a whole bunch of emotions that have been waiting patiently on the sidelines, waving, hoping I’ll see them and invite them in. Good emotions like joy and pleasure and delight and excitement. Even some scary emotions like vulnerability, fear and uncertainty. Without spending so much energy on being angry, it leaves me free to feel and experience things without dark glasses on, with true, clear eyes.

It was clear tonight when I ran into the brother of a former friend, who was one of the casualties of a catastrophic situation right around this time last year. There was no win. There was no good way for this situation to end. Many people got involved, many people got hurt because there was plenty of anger to go around, me included. No one was able to step back and look at this situation clearly, including me. That doesn’t mean I would change what I did one iota. But I think we were all so lost in anger and lost in pain that we all handled every moment of it badly. Maybe we were all justified in our pain and our anger. But it left everything decimated in its wake, destroying friendships, destroying relationships, and destroying trust.

In talking to this brother tonight, I realized that I am no longer angry. Hopefully, after a year, one can let anger go. I’ve never been very good at that. I like to hang on to anger like an anchor, something to guide me on how to feel in the future about things that have happened in the past.

But I found myself saying, honestly, it was a cluster-fuck and there was no good way out of it. I found myself not wanting to engage in, “oh, yeah, well, they suck” conversation, which I would have relished a year ago. I just said, “too bad, I know they will probably say bad things but whatever. It was ugly and it was messy and it was bad all the way around. I miss your brother, I really liked him a lot and I’m sorry he got lost along the way. I know he has to support his girlfriend and I understand that.” And left it at that. We joked a lot about how this would be our one and only meeting because after he got their side of the story tomorrow, he would never be able to speak to me again. A year ago, I wouldn’t have been able to make fun of a situation like this. I would have been devastated and angry and not able to see that the hurt and anger on their side was just as real as mine.

What does this all mean? I don’t know. Maybe it means I’m growing and finally realizing that anger has its place but not in every single moment of my life. Anger doesn’t accomplish much when it’s used pointlessly. Anger just begets anger. And then we all end up standing around, pointing fingers, screaming, instead of trying to really see what’s going on and trying to solve the truth of the moment.

I’m choosing to fail at being angry. I’m choosing to find another way to handle things. I’m choosing to leave my family’s legacy behind and embrace the Eastern part of our heritage and maybe find a more spiritual and Buddha-like way of dealing with hurt and pain and challenges. That doesn’t mean I won’t blow my stack occasionally. After all, I’m not Buddha and it’s hard to change almost 47 years of conditioning. But maybe I can make baby steps this year, choosing to embrace joy and release anger. Choosing to let go and move forward instead of dwell in the nastiness. Choosing to live instead of choosing to let parts of me die.

Choosing to fail at anger. That will be my success this year.