A Conversation About Anger

A conversation about anger

“Break through,” my coworker encourages me. “You’re not angry. You’re hurt. Break through and cry.”

I don’t cry. I laugh instead because to suggest my anger is something so easily broken is ridiculous. I am molten with it, melted and reshaped all in the crucible of a trauma I can not give voice to.

“I’m just trying to help,” he says, face twisting. He hunches over the wheel and won’t meet my eyes. “You don’t have to laugh.”

“I could be angry,” I suggest and grin wider until my face feels ready to split in two. “We could have a fight.”

“Let’s talk about something else,” he says.

I think about letting him. Honestly, I do. I think about letting him change the subject to mortgages or kids or whatever else he usually likes to talk about during our long work hours. I think about the rage that I can hold back while he does it, the acid taste of resentment and hatred that’ll burn the back of my mouth as he pretends to close the can of worms he opened.

“Anger is hurt,” I say instead. I try to meet him halfway by gentling my voice and smoothing the vicious furrow of my brow. “Not all women–” I think and change the words “–not all people hold hurt the same way. I’m angry when I process these things because I’m hurt. I’m not angry to hide it.”

“Lashing out doesn’t help you,” he says. His hands are on 10 and 2 even with the rig sitting cold and dead around us. “It just keeps people away.”

“Am I lashing out?” I ask, interested.

Keep reading

Sarah Manguso, from “Address to an Absent Lover”

“People say I love you all the time. When they say ‘take an umbrella, it’s raining,’ or ‘hurry back,’ or even ‘watch out, you’ll break your neck.’ There are hundreds of ways of wording it - you just have to listen for it, my dear.”

— John Patrick, The Curious Savage (via thelovejournals)

I think I could sit outside for days

Just listening to the poems in the wind, 

The birdsong, 

The leaves of the trees.

They say

Hear me, hear how alive I am.

The world is beautiful, and I’m experiencing it with fresh, open eyes

Do they know that I write about them?

Their lives are poetry.

I’d like that, I think,

To not not have to tell poetry through writing, but simply by being

Oh sweet birdsong,

If only I could hear what you sing about.

Then you could teach me what it is to be alive

You tell me pristine is perfect.

And I'm miswriting and misinterpreting a line in a poem I don't truly understand.

But pristine isn't perfect.

Untouched (unused), unmarked (unloved).

Pristine is just that.

Pure and unsullied.

Unappreciated and unwanted.

Read my stupid stories again and then read Pristine by Hilda Raz. I'm in love with the line "You tell me the word pristine was perfect" but I don't think it has the same meaning to me as it had to her when she wrote it.

Pristine means untouched, unspoiled, or otherwise spotless. But that has never put a good feeling in my mouth. All I see when I buy something new is an item that has yet to have been loved, and after loving it, it will change into something that I have left a mark upon. The idea that pristine means perfect (I know I'm misquoting but I don't care) is so strange to me. Pristine means something that isn't cared enough about to be worn, or to be used. Like a trophy on a shelf more than an item that you genuinely value.

Anyways that's why I am very rough on shoes when I first get them. I hate it when they're all like right off the shelf and unmarked or anything.

(also I wrote a short poem about it that I will post when I get around to it)

So, okay, fun fact. When I was a freshman in high school… let me preface by saying my dad sent me to a private school and, like a bad organ transplant, it didn’t take. I was miserable, the student body hated me, I hated them, it was awful.

Okay, so, freshman year, I’m deep in my “everything sucks and I’m stuck with these assholes” mentality. My English teacher was a notorious hard-ass, let’s call him Mr. Hargrove. He was the guy every student prayed they didn’t get. And, on top of ALL OF THE SHIT I WAS ALREADY DEALING WITH, I had him for English.

One of the laborious assignments he gave us was to keep a daily journal. Daily! Not monthly or weekly. Fucking daily. Handwritten. And we had to turn it in every quarter and he fucking graded us. He graded us on a fucking journal.

All of my classmates wrote shit like what they did that day or whatever. But, I did not. No, sir. I decided to give the ol’ middle finger to the assignment and do my own shit.

So, for my daily journal entries, over the course of an entire year, I wrote a serialized story about a horde of man-eating slugs that invaded a small mining town. It was graphic, it was ridiculous, it was an epic feat of rebellion.

And Mr. Hargrove loved it.

It wasn’t just the journal. Every assignment he gave us, I tried to shit all over it. Every reading assignment, everyone gushed about how good it was, but I always had a negative take. Every writing assignment, people wrote boring prose, but I wrote cheesy limericks or pulp horror stories.

Then, one day, he read one of my essays to the class as an example of good writing. When a fellow student asked who wrote it, he said, “Some pipsqueak.”

And that’s when I had a revelation. He wanted to fight. And since all the other students were trying to kiss his ass, I was his only challenger.

Mr. Hargrove and I went head-to-head on every assignment, every conversation, every fucking thing. And he ate it up. And so did I.

One day, he read us a column from the Washington Post and asked the class what was wrong with it. Everyone chimed in with their dumbass takes, but I was the one who landed on Mr. Hargrove’s complaint: The reporter had BRAZENLY added the suffix “ize” to a verb.

That night I wrote a jokey letter to the reporter calling him out on the offense in which I added “ize” to every single verb. I gave it to Mr. Hargrove, who by then had become a friendly adversary, for a chuckle and he SENT IT TO THE REPORTER.

And, people… The reporter wrote back. And he said I was an exceptional student. Mr. Hargrove and I had a giggle about that because we both knew I was just being an asshole, but he and the reporter acknowledged I had a point.

And that was it. That was the moment. Not THAT EXACT moment, but that year with Mr. Hargrove taught me I had a knack for writing. And that knack was based in saying “fuck you” to authority. (The irony that someone in a position of authority helped me realize that is not lost on me.)

So, I can say without qualification that Mr. Hargrove is the reason I am now a professional writer. Yes, I do it for a living. And most of my stuff takes authorities of one kind or another to task.

Mr. Hargrove showed me my dissent was valid, my rebellion was righteous, and that killer slugs could bring a city to its knees. Someone just needs to write it.