Don't Avoid Your Anger, Honor It

Photo by Brooke Lark on Unsplash

Many people will tell you that you shouldn’t be as angry as you are lately.

I am not one of those people.

I actually want you to honor your anger.

Many really good people are furious right now and for good reason. This outrage is natural and called for and deeply human. It is the appropriate initial response of working hearts to the outrageous things we're witnessing in these days. The sickening parade of terrible continually passing in front of us certainly merits our collective fury. We should be offended to the point of disgust and it is a redemptive thing to feel so deeply at the pain of others that we are so altered.

Anger (at least initially) is an almost involuntary response; it’s an emotional alarm telling you something is not right. And if you’re a person with working empathy and you’re at all paying attention right now, you know there’s a lot that isn’t right. All movements of justice, positive change, and civil and human rights progress were birthed by decent people’s productive pissed-offness.

But much like a seemingly attractive vacation spot—we might visit such fury and stop briefly in outrage, but we can't live there. It is unsustainable.

Anger as a catalytic moment is often necessary, moving us from complacency or ignorance and propelling us into movement. We've seen the virtue of outrage in this Resistance movement over the past few years. That doesn’t happen without anger.

But as a cultivated condition, anger is almost always caustic. If we sit with that rage too long and nurture it too intently, it slowly begins to pollute us, seeping into our bloodstreams and contaminating the compassionate hearts that caused us to be angry in the first place. Little by little, we become used to a posture of irritability and grievance. Gradually, we can become more about the fight itself than about anything or anyone we're fighting for: We can begin to live angry.

And the problem is, people who live angry are the very reason so many of us were outraged in the first place and are outraged now. It is those men and women who are fully marked by malice and bitterness that initially caused us to dissent. This is what we're pushing back so fiercely against.

People who live angry eventually discard their humanity and default to contempt for the world. Unable to transform their profound emotion into something beautiful or life-giving or productive, they end up only able to destroy stuff, incapable of building. We've seen this in a GOP and a MAGA movement who’ve spent the last 8 years learning only to fight against something or someone, never to participate in thoughtful construction, and who now have nothing of value to offer but destruction, exclusion, and eradication.

We who feel a furious, passionate desire to defend equality and diversity and decency, need to make sure that this noble fury is channeled into lives that reflect these things. Our work may begin in outrage but it cannot be built or sustained on it. We have to be fierce protectors of humanity: ours, those we fight for, and yes, even those we oppose. We have to guard against becoming people marked only by our outrage.

Since November 5th, I like tens of millions of people have been fully furious but I don't want to be a perpetually pissed-off person. I'm totally at peace with the anger that wakes me up and moves me, but I don't want that anger to fester and to define me.

This is the way we will be a rival people of hope, as we genuinely oppose those who we see being hateful. It is precisely the softness of our hearts that makes us different. Our ability to care and to feel and to grieve is the antidote to the violence that so repulses us and it is what will separate us. Compassion and gentleness and kindness are our true superpowers in such dangerous days when heroically human people are so needed.

So, we want don’t want to avoid anger, we just want to make sure that we transform that first unpredictable emotional prompt into something else: something focused, something positive, something helpful, something tangible.

That way, we don’t allow that outrage to become toxic within us.

So please stay aware, absolutely get angry, and then honor that anger by moving forward well in response to it.