July is already half gone when the rage comes. He has just finished telling me something that knocks me breathless, that will knock out the rest of the summer.
What it is doesn’t matter as much as what comes after it. Plans scrapped, a third quarantine, the time ahead even more uncertain than before. In a year of nothing but loss over and over, this is thievery too close to my heart-chambers: my lush, sun-sweet native month, gone. I nod, but say nothing. The two of us sit at the counter, eating, silent. The air is thick with moisture, and restraint — mine.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
“It is what it is,” I manage.
It’s unnerving him, the quiet. I know it and I hold it anyway. Continuing to chew and swallow feels like the only defense against what is simmering in my chest, carmine, volcanic. Who am I trying to protect? Him or myself?
I go to the sink without speaking. I like washing dishes, something that confuses people when they learn it. I have never been good at meditation, my heart writhes too close to the skin, but I think dishes must do for me what people say sitting still and breathing does for them. Warm water moves over my hands, which in turn move over plate, fork, pan. Unspoiling them, wiping them blank again.
Not this night. My palms scream red under the steaming faucet. I scrub a pan so hard that my hands slip: sudden clamor of metal on porcelain hits my bloodstream. I have cracked the basin.
It isn’t enough. When there is nothing left to wash, I scour the basin, the stovetop, the burners. The angles are hard and clean, metal seemingly lit from within. My fury, a jewel — dusted and polished, hard and cold.
There were always two kinds of anger in my house. My mother came up like skinned knees all over the place: she shouted easy and softened easy. My father simmered so low we didn’t even know there was heat there — until we pushed too far, and his fury left us flinching and unable to look him in the eye for hours.
When it came to my sister and me, it became clear quickly where we diverged. She seemed to revel in raised voices and riotous arguments, but never stayed at boiling point for long. I tried everything to avoid even catching that fever.
In a house of more than one language, anger was not one I ever became familiar with. When it comes for me, it comes all at once, flash of open desert heat. Breathing turns from habit to combat, forming coherent sentences even more so. Adrenaline is so rare a substance for me that, feeling it in my bloodstream, I always get the sense I am being slowly poisoned. Unthinkable, terrible words rear at the back of my throat, cobras waiting to strike.
When I am angry is when I feel most like a weapon.
In bed, he puts on an episode of something mindless, distracting. Neither of us speaks, still. Neither of us are distracted. I hold my body as stiffly as I have in MRI machines — like he can see it in me, all my rage lit up through my skin by the bedside lamp.
After half an episode I can’t take it anymore. I don’t want to explain myself; don’t want to sit there with the smoldering thing in my chest, either. Wordlessly, I rise and go into the other room. The air conditioning and the lights are off: the darkness is damp, a cave to hide in, to howl from. I pour a glass of wine. I sit on the couch. I put my earbuds in. For what feels like ages, but is maybe just half an hour, I blast decade-old boy bands and take my wine as a lover. The dark wraps us in its sheets. I feel myself stewing, steaming, in the thing that is rising all around me.
And I know what it is, suddenly. I thought it despair or apathy, but no — those are always colorless, muffled, grey film playing in the background. This is a cacophony of senses, sharpened like blades. I am angry. To have so much taken away in so little time. To have no say, it feels like, in how the cards fall. My gods, am I angry. It’s glory, a sheen over everything. Raucous guitar, icy mineral ferment, the soft dark. All of it soothing, all of it spurring what I know will eventually come out.
In some ways, anger has long been synonymous with destruction. In films, angry characters scream, throw things, and leave trails in their wake. In real-life rage rooms, people pay good money to exorcise their demons, smashing up computers and dishes with bats and crowbars. Wreckage isn’t the only shape anger takes, far from it — but it is the fallback, the easy assumption.
Anger wreaks havoc. This is what we are told, and so we turn it into a barrier, a judgment. The “angry black woman” trope has longtime prevented black women from expressing any negative sentiment and being heard. Anger has continually been gendered, painting men as strong and women as difficult. Tone policing in a conversation happens when someone takes issue with the emotion behind an argument instead of the argument itself (“I’d be more open to listening if you weren’t so angry”). Here anger becomes a flaw of the individual, turned against them, rather than a natural emotion.
This April, when my roommate gave up our impending lease with only four days’ notice, my first reaction was a full-blown panic attack: How would I fill the spot on such short notice during a pandemic? Where would I live if that didn’t happen? But my second reaction, after talking with people I trusted and arranging a phone call, was rage. It was white-hot, unfamiliar. For a period of twenty-four hours it consumed everything: I sharpened my every word on it, sleep evaded me to make space for it.
On the phone, I was fully prepared to combust. I wanted my roommate to feel the brand of her wrongdoing, the full sun-blindness of my furor. But as we spoke, whatever glowed in me began to cool. My instinct to let things settle kicked in. She knew what she had done. To level my anger at her felt like excess, something foul bubbling over the edges. It would mean that I had somehow failed.
But after I hung up, we got in the car and drove. I put on the pop-punk soundtrack of my teenage years and screamed. I screamed for having had to keep myself level on the phone, I screamed for all the things I was about to lose. Any scent of failure was carried off on the buffeting wind. How could anyone, I thought, be alive in this ruinous world and not be filled with rage?
When I come back to the bedroom I am smiling. I am just ankle-deep in the drunkenness that comes with being alone: it shimmers in my eyes, just above my skin.
“Are we going to talk about this?” he says. As it happens, it’s the first thing either of us has said in hours. My rapture punctured, I look hard at him. He’s scared, I realized. He has never seen me like this.
“I’m angry,” I pronounce. A ribbon of delight shoots through me when I say it. “And I’m tired of acting like I’m not. I just needed to feel it,” I add when he starts to speak, “And I need you not to try and get me not to feel it.”
There is more to the story — shouting and volleys and deciding when to give ground. It isn't that easy. But what it is doesn’t matter as much as what comes after it. My fury transforming, icy gem to warm, firm grip. A transparent kind of certainty.
My astrologer says anger is healthy in moderation, necessary to clear out emotional buildup. Science says it can blind us to risk, but also strengthen relationships.
I think anger is a boundary.
It is saying, this is my line, step back.
It is saying, I have had enough.
It is saying, This will not happen again.
I still don’t like the taste of adrenaline. I still have to bite back the snakes. It is slow going. I have to remember it is a kind of freedom that my anger is heard at all. But I know now that it tells me what I won’t abide. It tells me what I deserve.
Parting notes—
Who Has the Privilege of Anger? — Whitney Friedlander
The depiction of women’s anger in “Big Little Lies” is accurate and refreshing — Cate Sevilla
Lessons from James Baldwin on betrayal and hope — Clea Simon: “The late writer and activist James Baldwin was an angry man...”
punching bag — a playlist for when the rage hits.