At the start of the year, I was doing a ritual about what the year would hold in store for me. One of the main themes that I pulled was around anger—a man’s face full of rage, shouting. When I pulled the card, I felt so much dread and avoidance; anger is such a difficult emotion to hold, both in myself and in others.
Part of me secretly hoped that perhaps I had misread my cards and that wouldn’t be a theme of the year. Lol. That proved to be very untrue, and I’ve spent the last few months really trying to hold, make space for my anger, acknowledge it, and see what it’s trying to show me.
Like many of us, I’ve been taught to shame my own anger, and then to hold guilt around even feeling anger. This has occurred through a myriad of ways—from my family clearly internalizing and projecting that myth that anger from femme folks was seen as not okay and unbecoming, relationships and friendships where when I’ve expressed anger that anger has been weaponized/ the focus becomes more on the expression of anger and not the cause that triggered the anger, living in a world where we see when people express their rightful anger they are demonized and thought of as disposable, and spiritual communities where anger is judged and seen as an indicator of being inferior or less spiritually developed.
At the beginning of this year, an incident occurred that triggered a great deal of my anger. In addition to having to absorb the trauma and hardship of said incident, I was also furious that it had kicked up so much rage inside of me—a complex spiderweb of rages that once hit, touched all of each other, and became an angry pulsing web. It then became very easy to be activated by the slightest thing—like rubbing an open wound against any hard surface that was around.
And so started the familiar cycle—I would be furious, I then would feel guilty about the anger and shame it inside myself, I would apologize for feeling angry (even when my anger was justified), then I would spiral, then I would feel anger again, and then I would try and suppress it and pretend like everything was okay. It felt like layers and layers of anger were pearling around the original anger; a hot sun burned inside.
I rarely feel safe enough to express my anger to people. Partially because so many of us are unable to hold the anger in ourselves, we’re unable to hold anger in others when they express it. Because so many of us judge the anger in ourselves, we judge the anger in others when they express it. We personalize it, we villainize them, we dismiss or downplay or deny what they are saying, the very real causes that lead up to the anger in the first place.
One of the things I feel grateful for in my current relationship, is that I think my partner is extremely good at creating a container to hold my anger when it comes up, and to not judge it and validate it. I was speaking to a friend about partnerships, and she offered the beautiful insight that people come into your life sometimes when you’re ready to face something— a difficult truth or a difficult moment, but you can’t face it alone.
One morning when me and my partner were praying, I felt consumed by anger. And then I felt awful that the anger wouldn’t go away, no matter how much I tried to suppress it. eventually I gave into it and told them I was feeling angry. I was so surprised by how they met it—open armed and with curiosity. Okay, you’re angry. That’s good. What are you angry at? Are you angry at me? That’s okay—tell me what it is.
I can’t tell you how much this felt like a relief amid a storm—a life jacket in a raging ocean. I told them what was going on with me, how much anger I had been feeling (both at them and at other people in my life) and we talked through each thing slowly, holding it preciously, validating that they were reasons to be angry, and that anger was actually a good thing: it was a fire that showed a line had been crossed, it was your self-worth saying this is enough, it was a part of you that had been so stepped on and refused to be hurt any more.
The center of rage, the eye of fire, the pit that we’ve all been taught to fear and consider akin to hell—a hot place pulsing with anger and burning. It’s the pit that creates worlds, that fuels the Earth, that births open a new possibility when there wasn’t one before. When acknowledged, when held, when validated, that pit of anger becomes fuel.
Understanding that now, it’s so curious[1] to me how many spiritual lines of thinking offer up teachings to shame us out of rage, out of anger—the very thing that once embraced, can offer us the gas tank of new possibility. It’s curious how many religions correlate images of hell with images of anger, stirring in us the idea of the demonic. Almost as if, we didn’t have these associations, we would actually be able to understand and hold our anger, not judge it, and then perhaps also have healthier outlets and ways of expressing it.
For weeks after that conversation with my partner, I noticed a shift in myself: an ease in the ability to say when I was at my limit, to say when I was angry, to catch myself in the cycle of self-shaming my own anger, when I was judging others for being angry, when I was participating in the repression of an anger that was real, earned, and needed to be acknowledged.
One of my favorite stories I’ve learned from my Earth Warriors Oracle deck is the one of Pacha Karmaq, the father of the world in ancient Peruvian Ichma culture. From the deck:
“Pacha Karmaq is known as the Father of the World in Peruvian Ichma culture, which preceded the Inca tradition. He is the provider of the gift of agriculture. Part of his mythic story is that, in creating the first man and woman, he forgot to create food for them, also. When the man died, the woman cursed Pacha Karmaq, accusing him of neglect. In response, the god made her fertile. At a symbolic level, this story tells of the need for sacred rage towards neglect and the creative resourcefulness that we can generate only when we get angry enough to demand healing change.”
I’m angry, at so many things in my life, in so many ways I’ve been hurt, in so many ways I’ve been betrayed and let down. May I use that anger to fuel my rebirth, my work, and the world I hope to live in.
[1] My friend Irma always says “isn’t it curious” when some shit is just blatantly wack, fucked up, or problematic