You Should Probably Be Pissed

“Anger is bad.” “Give me facts not feelings.” “Science is unquestionable.” “Religion equals God.” What do all those statements have in common? They are, quite simply, wrong. Yet that’s not all there is to it: each and every one is designed to control you. Now you may think that you are impervious to such statements, that you would never fall for these simplistic notions, that you understand nuance and are not a victim of all-or-none thinking. If you do, I can certainly understand why. At various times in my life, I believed each and every one of those statements and would have gotten quite nervous if I had been called on the carpet to deny or defend any of them.

Things have changed.

Just this morning, I came across a captivating idea, and the more I think of it, the more I see how true it is. The statement is this: “Anger is a creative stage—higher than depression, which locks you inside—its active presence means that you may be very close to breaking through into manifesting what you seek.”

In 2020 and 2021, I was ANGRY, angry about a lie that had the entire world living in abject fear and bending over backwards to appease tyrants who were not following the arbitrary rules they had created for everyone else. And this anger led me on from one breakthrough to another and another and another.

Did you know that before the long planned and created pandemic got off the ground, I would easily have been classified a germaphobe? Before March of 2020, I worried about every cough, every sneeze, every wheeze of anybody near me or my kids. But when the world got locked down, I got pissed. Don’t tell me that I need to wear a mask to buy my groceries. Don’t tell me that my personal liberty guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States suddenly no longer applies. Don’t you dare. In fact, I got so angry, I began reading and watching everything I could get my hands on about health, about religion, about mind control, about buried history and mysterious deaths and “coincidences” and terrorist events that never truly got investigated. I got so angry that I told a cashier at a convenience store who refused to sell me two gallons of milk that she and all the other mask wearers in the store are a bunch of fucking sheep and if they didn’t wake up soon, they’d never wake up again. I don’t know if any of them are still alive, but I know far too many others who have died suddenly*, including the pastor of the Catholic parish my family and I used to be part of, friends and relatives of people I know, and a man here in town who used to be a friend.

Anger is an emotion, and emotions are never wrong. They are produced by your body without your consent, and they are meant to tell you something. If you don’t listen to your emotions, if you stuff them down, refuse to express them, they will control you. They will make you do things you can’t figure out. They will burst forth at inappropriate times. When you get annoyed, upset, or even enraged and try to convince yourself that you shouldn’t feel that way, you betray your body, and your body will betray you in return. When I was not allowed to express my anger, I swallowed it down, thinking I was doing a good thing, keeping the peace, keeping everyone happy. What I was really doing was adding twigs, branches, and other combustibles to a brush pile in my soul, a brush pile just waiting for a spark to ignite it. Far too often the spark was a broken glass dropped by one of my kids or a maddeningly crowded Easter Mass or having to wait too long for a waitress to take my order (I did eat out once, long ago, in a land far, far away, before that got ruined for me). It might have been just about anything, but it was always a substitute for what or who was really the problem. The worst part is that it was almost always my children who suffered for it, and that is crime I will regret for the rest of my life.

So, how do you feel right now? How often do you ask yourself that question? How often do you follow it up with this one: “Why do I feel that way?”

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*If you or anyone you love rolled up your sleeves in 2021 or later, you may want to investigate various enzymes like nattokinase and papain. I have also recently learned that an herb, wormwood (Artemisia absinthia), may be worth looking into.