Several weeks ago, I started thinking about the anger in my life. I’d written my fill of words on this blog expressing several of the things that really make me angry, but the only thing to return back from the great void of expression was a simple question: now what?
At the macro-scale, the things that make me most angry are those things that pressure me to be someone I don’t want to be or to do something I don’t want to do. The things that clash with my personality but which feel like requirements, or prescriptions, or mandates. At the micro-scale, far too many things make me angry. Non-intuitive apps. When my VPN freezes when I’m trying to work from home. Tiny video game failures. “POISON? SERIOUSLY?!” Accidentally dropping something. It can be pretty ridiculous.
I have to ask myself why. Nothing in this life requires you to be angry. There is never a time when anger, in itself, produces anything good. It’s okay to feel angry. It may sometimes be important to express your anger. But the anger in itself, is nothing more than a toxic smoke. And I seem to have a lot of it.
2019 was a very solitary year. Not that I didn’t have friends, I just don’t think I’ve ever needed more space to myself before. Almost all of my snowshoeing was alone. Almost all of my hiking was alone. Most days when I came home, I didn’t really care to talk to my roommates, I just needed to hold onto my sanity, Tower of Doom style; you hold on just long enough to breathe after the G-forces are done crushing the air out of your lungs. Somewhere in the midst of all of that, something else was going on, as I found myself irrationally angry at so much around me.
I have a lot of bitterness toward our culture’s philosophy of work. The ‘virtue’ of work we see today was the same ‘virtue’ that came from Europe to the New World, found Native Americans lounging around, and basically enslaved them to teach them the ‘importance of work’. But we just call this part of Christianity. And my first software job added this twisted caveat that passion is required. Thou shalt enjoy one’s slavery! But where really does my anger toward all this go? So people are wrong. So what? Is that somehow stopping me from taking agency in my life, from doing what I believe to be right, and true, and beneficial? Is anybody standing in front of me, preventing me from the goals I have for my life? No.
I have bitterness toward the whole outdoors scene, because it feels like an exclusive club I’ve never been good enough to join. I feel pressured to be someone I’m not, because the things I enjoy outdoors don’t garner the same praise, and how I long for that praise. Five Iron Frenzy had a message for this long ago: “What’s the point of not conforming, if it changes you?”
I have bitterness toward travel because I feel like I never got the chance to do any. Another exclusive club I was never good enough to join. But I don’t think feeling that way produces any fruit. Do I spend the rest of my life hating something because I never had it? That’s clearly self-defeating. (I don’t hate it, I actually have plans for it, it’s just…it’s been a complicated road)
I have bitterness toward people who don’t understand life in a lower-middle class family, whose only perspective comes from the eyes of privileged success, and whose learning comes from parents who mistake their luck for intelligence. But how else could they know, either? I had a roommate in college whose parents were in the oil business. He literally never thought to clean up after himself because they literally had maids do the cleaning for him. It was a slow, tough process for him. It’s easy to hate people like that, but it’s never justified. They simply don’t know, and there’s plenty I don’t know, either. Compassion goes both ways.
I still have some bitterness toward the fact that the vast majority of people in any given church could not tell you what Ugarit is. My years of doubt were hell. And the people preaching didn’t seem to know anything about the world the Bible was written in, which you would think would be more important to them. Those were the hardest years of my life. But there was a plan for it, as cliche as that sounds.
How much more do I need to express? It’s a legitimate question, maybe I’m not done. But I think for all the angry words, the returns must be marginal by this point.
I guess I like to swear on the blog because I like to be real. But I’d be the first to tell you I wish I swore less in person. Drop a pen: “Oh, shit”. THE PAGE DOESN’T LOAD. “Dammit!” Nasty habit. Do not recommend.
And of course, part of swearing is my bitterness toward the ‘perfect Christian’ image. I’ve always been sincere in my faith. Even when I was questioning and struggling with my faith in college, I was sincere. None of that conveniently-question-my-faith-so-I-can-party bullshit. I just guess there was a time when I woke up to how the behavior could be so far from the heart, so I decided the behavior could never be trusted. I hated what it stood for, so I allowed myself a different image. Swearing does have its place, but that’s still different from saying that swearing does anything good in a person’s life. It can be neutral or amusing at best. It might actually make some people feel more comfortable around you. But that’s it. The rest is all a gray slope of ‘toxic’.
So where does all this go from here? I don’t know. I guess I’d like to start by being less of an angry person. But that’s not something you just jump up and ‘fix’. That requires a gradual changing of the heart. And humans have always needed help with that.