On the utilities of anger

Dispatch #36: Wholeness calls to us

Those are my boots up there which makes you the lavender.

It’s been a few months since I wrote you. I got married. I got married! The event brought a life-changing influx of love - not just between Angel & I, but between our whole community - a swell of love that I’m still processing. I feel changed. Angel feels changed. Beautifully, friends have told us that “it was one of the best days of [their] lives.”

At the risk of sounding deeply duh: love is powerful. Transformational. An unprecedented force. It does what nothing else can do & it does it quicker than anything else can do it; love highlights reality in a sheen of immense, overwhelming gratitude; it seeps into your lacks & says fill with wholeness & deservedness. I’m still processing the mammoth wow of being immersed in such love. I’m still processing being a wife! As the words come to me I’ll share them with you.

At the same time, in truly human (messy) form it’s been strange, dear reader, to also be feeling massive waves of rage, both in what we are witnessing politically, but also tucked into some matters in my personal life. Today’s dispatch is largely about rage. Its utilities, expressions, & vividness.

Before we dive all the way into it I want to offer you some joy – which is not rage’s nemesis, after all, but its wise older sister.

We need deep-felt moments of joy as sustenance if we are to continue to meet the many challenges unfolding before us.

After ten years of leading In Surreal Life it remains one of the most consistent & critical joy-fostering spaces for me. It still stuns me how every session I’m replenished by the voices & faces & spirits of students from across the world. We are all united by our love of language & the common value of self-expression. So here’s my piece of joy: registration for our January 2025 session opens today (!). Below you’ll find the link to check the program out & register. & yes, that roster is real. Joy champion Danez muthalovin Smith. Wonderbeam Joshua Jennifer Espinoza. The newest lightning beam to hit earth, Brittany Rogers. I’m guessing the theme of the New Year is going to be Lit From Within.

So, where were we? Oh yeah, rage.

Historically, I am what you call an anger-represser. I seethe, I store tension in my body, I “manage,” I get angry at my anger, I’m one of those types. Controlled. “Better” than my anger. (How would you guess that’s going?)

I also, as you probably know, have a Buddhist meditation practice & while the Buddha never labels anger as “a bad thing” (just something to work with using good ol’ loving-kindness & compassion) it’s certainly not considered a wholesome state of mind & it’s definitely not advocated that you stoke those flames. I’ve gotten myself in trouble when trying to not be angry. (Girl, you are.) Anger has always seemed excessive, unreasonable, even a point of failure.

Without going into the bloody details, the last few months have brought a rage that won’t be ignored, siloed, managed, or silenced. I’ve had to sit (& walk & tremble) with rage. It’s taken over my body, my sleep, my appetite, my capacity. I recently told my therapist that it feels like my gut has long housed a hundred tools to deal with the difficulties in my life – I’ve tried this & that & that & this.

Now the very last tool, sitting red-hot & alone at the very bottom of my belly, is my rage. There’s nothing else left. I’ve tried all the other tools. This is all I’ve got. So shouldn’t I listen to it? Don’t I want to know the heft of it in my hand? See what it wants to dismantle, to tighten, to change?

Herein lies my favorite part of this whole big feelings mess. Because rage has recently crescendoed in unignorable ways I’ve become (to my own surprise) curious about it! I’ve become a bizarro unofficial sociologist asking everyone about their anger:

• “How in the royal F do you deal with it?”

• “Was anger an emotion you were allowed to express as a kid?”

• “What do you actually do when you’re angry?”

• I even took to Instagram stories one afternoon, asking you all to “Tell me about your relationship with anger.”

So I find myself overwhelmingly angry, yes, but I’m also fascinated. I’m crowdsourcing, asking questions, conducting research, LOL.

The night before the election Angel & I went to the Brooklyn Academy of Music to a sold-out screening of the 1991 documentary A Place of Rage featuring rare interviews with Angela Davis, June Jordan & Alice Walker. Throughout the film, Angel punched me in the arm (softly, people!) because of the Lessons, the capital L Lessons!

Black women, unsurprisingly, remain foundational teachers on the utilities of rage. Watching June Jordan speak so boldly, lovingly, & freely about Palestine three decades ago was mind-blowing & deeply heartening. As the inimitable Doreen St. Felix wrote about Jordan, “Throughout the 1980s, Jordan’s work was rejected by presses that had previously published her, and she was made a pariah by agents in the women’s movement, who charged her with antisemitism. Jordan held firm to a vision of Black radicalism that was international in its scope, even as a sense of interconnected struggle in continental America lost its grounding.”  

When speaking of the intersectionality of her Blackness & her Queerness, & how political activism must reflect all sides of herself June Jordan said, “My heart is not peripheral to me.”

Jordan’s words incite & invite me: I must get to know my heart in its fullness. Rage included. I must refuse to exile any part of myself, my identity.

When anger protects self-abandonment from happening it is undeniably an act of self-love. It says: my heart cannot be peripheral to me. How could it be? What kind of life would that be?

On my Instagram Stories I also asked, “Who taught you how to be healthily angry? & how?” I loved your honesty.

While our anger rises & we struggle to cope with it I think it’s crucial to remember who “the helpers” are (in the words of Mr. Rogers.) There are people out there who can guide our steps & missteps. Here’s a little round up of people & places that are helping folks with (expressing, exposing, evolving) anger. This is crowdsourced as well as from my personal vault. It is incomplete, of course. So please add your own “helpers” in the comments!

• June Jordan, Alice Walker, Angela Davis

• Lama Rod Owens, self-described “Buddhist Minister, Author, Activist, Yoga Instructor, Authorized Lama, Queen”

• Therapists get a big shout out!

• David Wojnarowicz, American painter, photographer, writer, filmmaker, performance artist, songwriter/recording artist, & AIDS activist: “Instead of giving in to political exhaustion, Wojnarowicz fanned his rage and channeled it into a message of — not hope, exactly, but insistence. I am here.”

“David Wojnarowicz Smoking” by Peter Hujar

• Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldua, Cherrie Moraga

• Recently my brother let me borrow a book on the Enneagram called “Discovering the Enneagram” by Richard Rohr & Andreas Ebert. I have not been able to stop thinking about this notion of holy anger:

• An angry poem

• Tanaïs says “Anger is an underrated path to intimacy.”

• Fady Joudah dares us “to listen to Palestinian words—and silences”
  You have entered the tunnel.
  There is a light in the endless tunnel.
  Every word you think of
  has already been written
  by you or others who skim
  the spume of their seas.
  They love to travel.
  They love you more when you’re dead.
  You’re more alive to them dead.

• If you don’t have conflict together, the relationship will end painfully

• Anaïs Nin with the realness:

fossilisedflowers

• Clarice Lispector echoing June Jordan’s “my heart is not peripheral to me” & bringing in flavors of self-exploration & understanding: “It’s inside myself that I must create someone who will understand.”

Always remember that the cultivation of joy must not merely exist alongside rage but as a lantern throwing clarity all over it. Our capacity to address our anger & not be consumed by it relies on joy. What revitalizes us & reminds us of our humanness? What highlights why we’re here in the first place? What teaches our hearts openness? Joy.

Wholeness calls to us. It’s not just that we must answer, but that it might be delicious to.

Angel always reminds me that when I invest in myself, in what is nourishing me, I can’t lose. Investing in joy is healing in & of itself. So invest in what lights you up. Give yourself the gift of pleasure, laughter, ease, cooking, music, rest, dance, parkour –

Al Jazeera

& Now, an ending prayer but I want you to imagine that as I’m saying it I’m balancing precariously on a giant inflatable beach ball, croaking into a child’s tiny pink megaphone, wearing a hat covered in french fries while sea gulls peck my head. Why? Because prayers should reign dirty feathers down. Because laughter is itself a worthwhile prayer.

May our anger bring us closer to ourselves & to others.

May we find that anger is not the end but a beginning.

May anger bring us intimacy with our banished parts.

May it bind us to the whole sorrowful, blessed, & radiating world.

With ample maple syrup,