I’ve been feeling some pent-up anger for quite some time. There might be a host of reasons for it, but all I can muster it up to is simply being disappointed with this life. I’ve heard the adage, “Life is what you make it”, but I have to wonder how true that really is when so many things have been outside of my control for so long.
Currently, I feel like I’m regaining so many elements of control back into my life. For one, I’m no longer around as many narcissistic people as I was in the past. It’s crazy the amount of control I gave to these types of individuals, even under the guise of Christianity for the sake of being accountable to others.
Now that I have regained those elements of control, I still feel a rise of anger from time to time as I ponder over situations within my life where having control felt limited within my own abilities. Most often, I feel this anger rise up when I’m in traffic. I find myself losing patience with the way others drive as if my own driving can’t stand for improvement.
Then there’s the element of hidden angst when I’m at work. I get so tired of frequently dealing with immature adults and all their drama that I have to maintain my focus on the work by blocking them and their behaviors out. I also find that I’m fed put up with what appears to me to be a lack of concern about the overall workplace by managers when it comes to some employees like myself desiring to work effectively and efficiently.
If anything, this job has made me realize how much I miss some of the aspects of advocacy from my previous career. I wish that sometimes I didn’t have the type of personality that needs to set things right … to make order out of chaos. I desire alignment in all the spaces that I enter, and if things are not aligned, I can’t rest until alignment comes about. I feel myself literally wanting to scream because of what I see as futility within the workplace.
As simple as it may seem, it’s not easy for me to just up and leave the job when I’m so concerned with having other means of earning income. So, I just suck it all up and bare it and think about the fact that things could be a lot worse. I could be at my old job with would-be killers who actually got away with poisoning me. Instead, however, I’m currently doing a job that I do like but is so physically taxing upon my body that I have little energy for anything else.
There’s also the element of my family, and I’m often beside myself with so much pent-up emotion that I avoid dealing with it. I know this isn’t healthy at all. Yet, to focus on it when I don’t have any solutions isn’t helpful either. So, I just place those feelings all to the side and tell myself how little they matter when those emotions seem not to matter to others either.
Yet, here I am realizing that I’m extremely angry, but I’m not only angry, I feel a sign of resignation coming on as if I just want to stop and give up. I want to vanish. I want to get away. I want to disappear. I want to take flight. I want to run. I want to hide. I want to sleep. I want to sleep for a long time and simply not wake up, but more than anything, I want this feeling of angst to pass, and I want to come out on the other side feeling refreshed and refilled with light.
The anger within me feels like a very unpleasant sensation when it arises. I actually don’t like myself and the way I feel when it comes about. It’s not quite bitterness, but it is instead a growing resentment. I resent a lot of things, and I feel that I resent a lot of people. I wonder when this resentment becomes actual hate because I don’t want to hate anyone. In fact, I resent myself for being resentful of others sometimes because I love them as well. How does this even work?
I feel there is a need for some type of justice regarding so many injustices I’ve dealt with where some people are concerned, but then I tell myself to get over myself because there are a whole lot more injustices going on in the world against so many other people too. I’m not the only one who’s angry. I’m not the only one’s who has been hurt. I’m not the only one to have suffered great traumas and even worse atrocities. This is life and …
This too shall pass. It always does, but then that anger rises up again, and it’s clear to me that there’s a lot more for me to deal with in terms of healing, growing, learning, and changing. I could so easily project the anger I feel onto others. That would indeed be so easy. Sometimes I feel childish because I think in terms of being so angry that I’m “big mad”, and I don’t know what to do about it.
I could simply take my emotions out onto others and react in harmful ways, but I don’t want to do that. Doing so is neither productive or loving. Being angry with others for the life I have is nobody’s fault. I can’t even say that a lot of what’s occurred in my life is even completely my fault, but there are some responsibilities I must bare. At this moment, I must admit that I have not been willing to face the anger, to look it in the eyes or even become any more acquainted with it.
Perhaps this anger is simply sadness and depression which have no place to go. Perhaps I need to focus on mindful activities, take deep breaths, exercise, and find joy in activities I have loved once again. Perhaps I’m being spiritually led to take a new course of action within my life that I’ve been avoiding, and my heart is unsettled by it all. I don’t really know. I feel utterly clueless at times. I feel caged in and even helpless. I feel as if I don’t know how to do anything or that I can’t do anything no matter how hard I try (if that even makes sense).
What I do know is that the rise of anger is back again, and I need to prepare myself for what comes. Most of my thoughts as of late have been on my family. Although I don’t want to dwell in the past because I can’t undo what’s occurred, and I cannot rewrite history, I wish that things could be different. I wish that my parents would acknowledge the suffering I’ve born from years of trauma, but I expect that this will never happen.
With both parents being narcissistic, even though my father seems to be walking many of his issues out, I don’t suspect that I’ll ever hear anything about the deep hurts they’re responsible for in my life. Maybe it hurts for them to bring it up, and I’m so exhausted from having to revisit it with them when they’ve never acknowledge it, told me to forgive and forget about it. What sense does it make to drudge up the past with people who won’t even acknowledge that elements of my past even exist.
Instead, I am simply scapegoated into taking the blame for a lot of things, with the most current one being that I’m no-contact from my mother and siblings, thereby keeping the family apart. Even since my mother’s illness, divorced parents have been communicating. My father is keeping track of my mother’s health by calling her at least twice a week while one of my siblings takes care of her. I don’t feel this, and I am distant, keeping my boundaries, but I wonder if I’m the one who’s actually wrong, bitter, and holding a huge grudge only to make myself right in my own eyes.
Yet, every time I hear from my dad, I’m reminded of the chaotic lives of my family members and how they haven’t changed at all. I’m reminded that I’m the lone ranger that’s attempting to forge my way to healing from the past without repeating it, and I wish they’d all dig deeper because doing so might not only bring us back to a place where I’m no longer the outsider, but might make this anger that’s revving up within me subside. I don’t know.
No matter how my family seems to be coming together right now, I still keep my distance, and I can’t even begin to let up. It’s not like I cease to want to give in to them, and I don’t believe it’s because I’m even being stubborn. Remaining no-contact with people who’ve hurt me, won’t apologize or even acknowledge their part and will continue to just repeat their behaviors no longer seems very appealing to me anymore, no matter how much I love them.
Despite my wanting what’s best for my family and anyone else who I no longer keep in my life, I want what’s best for me too. Needless to say, the anger has arisen again, and I’m wondering now what I need to face. It’s boiling up within me, and it’s an anger so strong that I know it’s covering a great wave of incredible sadness that sometimes my eyes give way to tears before I even feel any emotion. Each time I think of the internal emotional pain, I speak forgiveness to the person who’s face comes before me.
Although I must say that the anger was so strong with me one day that when a driver stuck his middle finger up at me for a traffic violation he committed in his attempts to cut me off, I wished out loud that he’d have an accident immediately. It was the worst type of anger to have because I actually wished someone else harm. Although I immediately regretted it because I thought about the implication, I felt myself wanting to hold onto the anger. I wanted to nurse it, and I wanted to be right about the indignation.
In fact, I wanted to see this driver’s instant “karma” for flipping me off for the wrong he’d done, and I wanted to feel satisfaction at justice, but justice has no place in unrighteous anger. Justice doesn’t give way to more wrong. That’s when I realize that this type of anger is something I need to sit down with and figure out more to understand. The anger is there. The anger is here. The anger is surely rising up. God, please help me.
My Voice Unchained 