ANGER
Don't worry.
I am going to try to alternate positive emotions with negative ones.
Or, at the very least, write about the ones I know best.
Joking aside...
Anger.
Fuck.
Remember when I told you I was born with courage in my blood?
Well, I am afraid courage wasn't the only thing that came with the package.
I was born with anger too.
Have you ever witnessed something that makes your blood begin to boil?
Your heart accelerates. Your muscles tense. Something inside you starts getting hotter and hotter while the rational part of your mind desperately attempts to cool everything down.
Don't.
Calm down.
This is stupid.
And then—
you kick a bin in the street.
Or punch a door hard enough to leave a hole in it.
I have done both.
Fortunately, I have never hurt another person. Objects have historically been less fortunate.
But anger has been something I have had to understand and learn to manage throughout my life.
And strangely enough, I don't think anger is necessarily my enemy.
I think uncontrolled anger is.
Years ago, one of my martial arts instructors told me something I never forgot.
He said that two of my greatest strengths were my anger and my humility.
At first, those two things sounded almost contradictory.
But in martial arts, perhaps they aren't.
Anger gives you force.
Humility decides whether you have the right to use it.
You can possess enough power to seriously hurt someone and still choose not to.
Perhaps especially then.
But humility deserves its own post someday. Along with honour, it is one of the values I consider most important in life.
For now, back to anger.
What Is Anger?
I can only describe it as I experience it.
For me, anger has almost always begun with a perception of injustice.
Something is happening that, according to whatever internal laws I carry inside me, should not be happening.
Someone humiliates another person.
Someone abuses a position of power.
Someone treats another human being as though their dignity were negotiable.
And something inside me reacts before I have had time to ask whether the situation has anything to do with me.
That last part is important.
Because anger can make us believe that every injustice requires our intervention.
It doesn't.
That was one of the hardest lessons for me to learn.
If I see someone being treated disrespectfully, for example, my anger does not necessarily come from believing that disrespect itself belongs to me.
It comes from something more primitive.
That person has dignity.
I have dignity.
Therefore, somewhere inside my strange internal system, an attack on theirs feels like an attack on something universal that also belongs to me.
And then my brain performs an extraordinarily dangerous calculation:
Someone clearly failed to educate this person.
Perhaps I should help.
This is usually the moment when things begin to go wrong.
Because anger is exceptionally good at convincing us that we have jurisdiction over territories that were never ours.
The Excited State
There is something in quantum mechanics that reminds me of anger.
An atom can absorb energy.
When it does, an electron can transition from a lower energy state into a higher one: an excited state.
Excited states are generally not where the system wants to remain forever.
Eventually, the system can transition toward a lower-energy state, releasing energy in the process — often as a photon.
Absorption.
Excitation.
Release.
A new state.
Of course, anger is not quantum mechanics.
My temper is not an electron transition, and punching a door is certainly not spontaneous emission.
But the analogy fascinates me.
Because anger, at least in my body, has always felt like excitation.
Something happens.
Energy enters the system.
My heartbeat changes.
My breathing changes.
My muscles change.
My attention narrows.
And suddenly I am no longer experiencing the world from the same state I occupied thirty seconds earlier.
I am excited.
In the physical sense of the metaphor, unfortunately, not the fun one.
And an excited system has to do something with what it has absorbed.
The question is:
what?
Three Punches
I am going to tell you something quite private.
When I was a child and teenager, my father struggled with alcohol.
There were nights when he would drink too much, arguments would begin, and our home would become a place where nobody quite knew what was going to happen next.
One night, he was drunk and speaking terribly to my mother.
It wasn't the first time.
I had witnessed versions of that scene before.
But that night, something inside me crossed a threshold.
I remember the feeling more clearly than I remember the words.
Fire.
I walked to his bedroom door.
And I punched it.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
The door was destroyed.
My hand was bleeding.
My sister was frightened.
My mother was in shock.
And my father—
my father suddenly looked sober.
For a few seconds, there was absolute silence.
I had released the energy.
And I had accomplished absolutely nothing.
What came after the fire was not relief.
It was shame.
I had wanted to respond to something I believed was wrong.
Instead, I had simply introduced another form of violence into a house that already had enough of it.
For all the righteousness I had felt seconds earlier, looking at my bleeding hand and the destroyed door, I did not feel righteous anymore.
I felt smaller.
That may have been one of the first times I understood that feeling justified does not make every reaction justifiable.
Anger had identified something correctly:
Something is wrong.
But anger had been completely incapable of answering the next question:
So what should I do?
Those are two very different problems.
And perhaps that distinction changed my relationship with anger forever.
A small note before we continue.
This story sounds dark because it is.
But it is one state of a much larger system.
There will be other posts about forgiveness. About how I eventually forgave my father completely. About how he changed. About how life continued moving, as life tends to do.
There will be posts about how none of those experiences managed to take away my desire to love being alive.
But one emotion at a time.
We have a lot to observe.
Energy Does Not Choose Its Destination
This is where the physics becomes interesting to me.
When a quantum system transitions between energy levels, the energy difference has to be accounted for. Energy can be transferred between system and surroundings according to the physical processes involved.
Physics describes what happens.
It does not provide a moral direction for it.
And I think that is where the metaphor becomes useful.
Anger can give us an extraordinary amount of psychological and physical drive.
But anger itself is terrible at choosing where that drive should go.
That part belongs to us.
The same anger that once travelled through my fist and into a wooden door has, at other moments in my life, made me protect people I love.
It has made me refuse things I believed were wrong.
It has given me the force to change situations I could no longer tolerate.
It has pushed me toward action when passivity would have been easier.
Same human being.
Same capacity for anger.
Different destination.
Perhaps the objective was never to eliminate the energy.
Perhaps it was to learn where to send it.
That is something martial arts eventually taught me.
Power without control is not strength.
It is simply power.
And uncontrolled power is often just destruction waiting for an object.
Maybe that is why my instructor's strange combination made sense after all.
Anger and humility.
One generates force.
The other reminds you that not every battle belongs to you.
The Cost of Remaining Excited
Eventually, I realized that anger was a problem I needed to work on.
So I did.
Martial arts helped enormously.
Travel helped.
Adrenaline helped.
But strangely, solitude may have helped most of all.
I have spent a great deal of my life alone.
Sometimes very alone.
I have travelled through places where there was nobody around me for miles. I have been lost in deserts, surrounded by landscapes that had absolutely no interest in my opinions about justice, disrespect, human stupidity or anything else.
And something happens when you spend enough time alone.
There is nobody to offend you.
Nobody to disrespect you.
Nobody behaving badly in front of you.
Nobody whose actions you feel mysteriously responsible for correcting.
The world simply exists.
And so do you.
There is something profoundly humbling about that.
You begin to realise how much energy we spend reacting to one another.
And when the stimulus disappears, eventually the excitation does too.
The system relaxes.
The noise becomes quieter.
At some point — and I cannot tell you exactly when it happened — I almost forgot what anger felt like.
I rarely get angry anymore.
I can be disappointed.
Deeply disappointed.
I can disagree. I can walk away. I can decide that someone has no place in my life.
But anger?
It has become increasingly rare.
And I like that.
Because anger has a cost.
The body pays for every prolonged state of excitation. Heart rate, muscle tension, stress responses — the body does not experience our metaphors. It experiences physiology.
Energy is valuable.
Attention is valuable.
Time is valuable.
And I no longer want to spend mine indiscriminately.
Perhaps maturity, for me, has not meant becoming incapable of anger.
Perhaps it has meant becoming increasingly selective about what deserves access to it.
I still have the fire.
I know it is there.
I simply no longer believe that everything deserves to burn.
Maybe that is what I spent all those years learning.
Not how to extinguish anger.
How to give it direction.
How to let humility decide when the energy should become action — and when it should simply be allowed to dissipate.
Because an excited state is temporary.
And perhaps we should be too.
Feel the anger.
Observe it.
Ask what excited the system.
Then decide, carefully, where the energy goes.
Because anger may tell you that something matters.
But it should never be allowed to decide what happens next.