As you may have noticed,
I’m a very angry person. I think the things that make me angry are real and
legitimate, be they political, cultural, technical, social, personal, or just
plain fucking infuriating. Getting angry – or pissed-off, annoyed, irritated
(all of Anger’s little cousins) – is what I’m hard-wired to do. It’s tied to
being sad. I’m a very sad person, too, and have been since childhood, since for
as long as I can remember.
Mad, sad, lonely and
confused. That’s me. Indeed, in the words of the great William James (1842-1910,
American philosopher, psychologist, physician, and brother of novelist Henry
James): There are two kinds of people in
this world: those who take things easy and those who take things hard. Guess
which one I am. Fortunately for me, I also have an expansive, in some ways
twisted, sense of humor. I laugh heartily throughout the day at people,
situations, and things that I find
ridiculous or just plain funny. I’m sincere when I say that if I didn’t have a
robust sense of humor, I’d be dead. But I digress…
Getting legitimately angry
and expressing that anger in a non-violent way is, I believe, often a healthy
thing. It shows you’re (a) alive, (b) thinking, and (c) have strong feelings
about things that are intrinsically bad, ignorant, insensitive, dangerous, or
any combination thereof. My day started just a few hours ago and I’ve already
been pissed off by the news, a bank, a city agency, and a stupid person at my
local pharmacy.
However, I’ve been going
through a new stage of life and state of thought recently. I think I’ve finally
been imbued with the wisdom I’d heard comes with age, but which I, frankly,
don’t think I had a lot of until, perhaps, now. I’m very smart, but
intelligence isn’t the same thing as wisdom. The latter combines freestanding
intellectual smarts with experience, compassion, [good] character, a more
holistic view of life, a greater appreciation of the importance and speed of
time, and a deep desire to live in a state of inner peace.
All of which is to say:
while it’s good to get angry, it’s not good to live in a constant state of
anger. It’s physically and emotionally enervating, decreases the peripheral
vision of one’s humanity, creates immobility, causes bad decision-making, and
only changes something if channeled into positive action – and in recent years,
I’ve engaged in less positive action and more unnecessary shopping, because
shopping (or retail therapy as it’s sometimes called) is a kind of comfort
food, especially for angry women.
I believe my
wisdom-that-comes-with-age is developing now because Mother Teresa was made a
saint; I’ve been watching re-runs of Lewis Black comedy specials (and while I
continue to share his outrage, I’m concerned his head and heart will explode);
and I’ve weaned myself off of Big Pharma anti-depressants that I suspected were
only making me feel worse (in addition to exhausted and dizzy) and I am feeling better without them.
I hasten to add that if
anyone reading this is taking anti-depressants, DO NOT STOP based on my
feelings and experience. There are different kinds of depression, different
kinds of drugs to treat them, and each of us, with our individual chemical
response system, reacts differently. So if you want to change your meds, work
with your doctor (imperfect though he or she may be). I’ve done my weaning off
with my doctor and strongly advise
you do the same.
Now to return to anger and
wisdom… I think my wisdom is seeping in and constant anger is being minimized
because I’m finally keenly aware that my time is limited and I want to spend it
more calmly, peacefully, productively, and pleasantly. I will continue to feel
angry, I want to do that, but I also
want to be able to let it go, an emotional bowel movement, if you will. I don’t
want to be anger-constipated.
No comments:
Post a Comment