Who I Am Without Anger

Author's Note:

I was selected to write this entry on behalf of Maybelline's #BraveTogether writeathon for National Coming Out Day (Oct. 11) throughout the month of October. This entire month (and NCOD) is really important to me since it's the month that I publicly came out a few years ago as a lesbian. If you also want to participate in the writeathon either as a member of the LGBTQ+ community or as an ally, you can write an essay and post it with the tag #BraveTogether. Every entry using that tag will result in a $1 donation to the Trevor Project, the world's largest suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning (LGBTQ) young people.

There are a lot of warnings about what being an adult will feel like. It can be boring and repetitive. It feels like all you do is go between your home and your office (or maybe not even leave your home at all for work anymore with the pandemic). It gets lonely. Everyone is tired all the time.

But what no one ever warned me about was the anger.

I might be alone in some of the rage that I experience, but I doubt that I am. It feels like there are things to be angry about all the time. I recently told my girlfriend that I feel like I went through some kind of transition in my mood and haven't been able to bounce back to who I was before; I barely even remember who I was before. I don't even know comfortably enough when the before was to determine what period of my life I want to go back to.

The whole thing is, I experience this rage and this fear at a kind of baseline. It hums in my body every second of every day. And I think of it as so strange and so uncomfortable sometimes because it doesn't feel pretty or cute or funny. It's hard to feel likeable when all I want to do is vent about how my estimated pay-off period for my loans is ten years or how there are only so many jobs in my field or how there is so much happening every second of the day everywhere around the world. I'll have fits over how unfair it is that I was closeted for so long and wasted so much time and that I have to ask myself if it's safe for me and my girlfriend to hold hands in public. I'll think about deaths in my family, mistreatment at the hands of others, moments of being so supremely hurt I don't physically know how to cope. It's hard to bring myself down once it starts and it can start so early into my day, or entirely at random.

And it's hard to not immediately think about how this reflects on me. Rather than thinking maybe I have a reason to be angry, my immediate response is it's not cute to be this angry. There's a lot to potentially unpack from that but, from the very bottom of my heart, I say this: Regardless of my flawed internal reasoning, I do not exist to be cute. I do not exist to be liked by everyone. I do not exist without emotions and to try to force myself to no longer experience them is a disservice to myself.

I think of myself as getting angrier, but the reality is that I've always been angry. My rage is what inspired my debut novel; without my anger toward double standards and sexism and flaws in protecting victims of sexual violence, that book never would've happened. My rage is what made me start a podcast, join non-profits, decide to pursue a Master's.

The United States in particular has a culture built on happiness and being the happiest we can be, and I think it can be hard to break out of that. But I think experiencing emotion outside of just the positive ones—allowing ourselves to fully experience our joy as well as our disappointment and anger and sadness—is what makes life really beautiful. I have been angrier than ever, but I have also loved harder than ever and been more inspired than ever and will sometimes get weepy because there's a light breeze on a beautiful day.

So, while the concept of adulthood is typically promised to us as something scary and overwhelming and stressful (because it often is—there's really no way around it), I no longer fear growing up. Every year, I become just a little bit more self-aware, a little bit more in touch with my feelings, a little more open to doing what I want and feeling what I want without worrying if I'm still desirable. I can be angry; it's okay sometimes, so long as it's channeled healthily. It's okay to experience 'scary' or 'bad' emotions. It's a simple sentiment but telling myself that has done me a lot of good in making me feel like I have to repress what I'm going through. I'm starting to realize my 'negative' emotions aren't something to immediately run and hide from. And I think there's a lot of power in that.