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Is There an Upside to Feeling Angry all the Time?
I’m mad for the reasons you are. Thankfully we are not alone.
Shortly before my 31st birthday a couple of years ago, my boyfriend gave me an ultimatum: Start going to therapy (again) or say goodbye to the relationship. When my boyfriend told me something had to give, I knew — for my sake more than his, or even ours — that he was right.
Something had unraveled in me. I turned romantic disagreements into unnecessary blowouts, unleashing blistering screeds in fits of rage. I picked arguments with loved ones over what were, in retrospect, minor perceived slights. It occurred to me that I was no longer a person who merely felt anger as an emotion, an occasional waltz with the cartoon frown we learn as kids to call “mad.” Anger was now, it seemed, integral to the way I processed reality. The transition had felt somehow developmental, like an initiation into a new phase of being. I wasn’t just a person who got angry sometimes. I was an angry person. The feeling was corrosive.
There are plenty of things for me to be angry about. It’s no secret that ours is a hyper-polarized political environment. We’re living in angry times, inundated with angry headlines and exchanging angry ideas in angry forums. It makes sense that a group of people whose worldview overlaps with my own would also notice an increase in their own sense of rage, given the circumstances of our era (say, for instance, two deadly mass shootings in the span of a single weekend).
At the same time, it feels as though my very capacity for anger has expanded, independent of the myriad events that might feed it. I’ve aged into a deeper emotional well, at a moment when there’s no shortage of things to fill it.
A few weeks ago, I tweeted an observation: that nobody had warned me my thirties would be so angry. Dozens of women, and some men, responded in the affirmative. This had been their reality, too. “Just wait until your fifties,” one woman warned.
The responses gave me pause. I couldn’t stop myself from asking whether there’s more to the story than what’s in front of us, a developmental footnote inscribed somewhere in the recesses of our brains.
