Issue #92: Is getting angry ever a good idea?

As Toni Morrison wrote, anger is an 'awareness of worth'. Some thoughts on seeing red.

The other day, I woke up on the wrong side of the bed. Not literally; as it happens, I’m a stationary sleeper, and the bulk of my king-size mattress is wasted on me. Figuratively, though, everything felt wrong from the moment I woke up, a wrongness compounded by the sudden absence of my favourite mug (reader, I found it a full 12 hours later in the microwave, but also, it wasn’t about the mug). The reality was: I had woken up unfathomably furious.

Anger is not a look I wear often. The staples in my emotional wardrobe are joy, curiosity, sadness, anxiety and stress, worn on rotation throughout the week. As a 5’2” female (read: not exactly physically-imposing), I’ve always felt, instinctively, that red is not my colour.

And yet, the weird thing was that I didn’t hate it. OK, it became quickly apparent I should limit contact with other people for the rest of the day. My anger lay precariously close to the surface, like one of those big red baboon butts. But, when I paid attention to the triggers for my anger – a carelessly flaked-upon social plan, an unrealistic (actually, impossible) professional demand, the satsuma-faced chauvinist who might soon resume premiership over the Land of the Free – I thought, you know what? Kudos to me. That is enough to get angry about.

In my self-imposed time out, I journaled on that anger. I realised it taught me a lot about my values. The world wasn’t against me (of course it wasn’t that black and white). But nevertheless, the rage stirring inside me correlated with qualities I inherently hold to be important, like communication, reliability and respect.

It presented an invitation to act. When defaulting to sadness or anxiety, I turn in on myself, for better (yoga; meditation; cathartic crying) or for worse (bizarre food choices; the bitten skin around my nails; my literal wardrobe strewn around my bedroom). Whereas, the anger was something I wanted to channel through outward-facing action.

Anger gave me a cut-throat clarity. When a plan for the next day got changed at the last minute to be less convenient for me, I just pulled out. When someone made a potentially-sexist joke, I didn’t laugh it off – I challenged them on it. This didn’t manifest itself as rage so much as cool-headed directness. But it was fuelled by a fire inside me, a refusal to dismiss my own feelings in favour of keeping the peace.

Anger is active, which differentiates it from other negative emotions like shame, guilt, sadness and anxiety. Anger creates a sense of urgency, a forward momentum that says the world has to change to accommodate you, rather than you changing to accommodate it.

In Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye, her protagonist Pecola Breedlove tells herself:

‘Anger is better [than shame]. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.’