Anger Is Good, Actually

Stick with me here.

So, one of my favorite uncommon themes I explore in my upcoming book, Daughter of Or, is the acceptance of anger. Not giving into it, not being fulfilled by rage. But accepting its power and place in one’s own life. Let’s give some context why.

I lived most of my young life a flawless pacifist. Not because I didn’t have anger. Everybody does. It’s because I was raised to understand that anger is bad, anger is evil, anger is a cruelty. Oddly enough, contrary to this ideal, my father was a very somber, very angry man. But I might’ve had a little too much of a vagina for that to be allowed. And for many years, that’s what I accepted and embraced.

When I stopped talking to my parents, I was overwhelmed with many feelings, but I was used to and comfortable with a lot of them by then. The grief, emptiness, relief, guilt. The one that threw me for a loop was my anger. I spent a lifetime swallowing it and now, in the face of the hardest heartbreak and frustration and disappointment I’d ever faced, that anger was bubbling up through me like tar, eating at my skin, burning through my floors. I tried so hard to find bigger holes to bury it in. Wait it out like it was a hungry animal and as long as I kept moving, it would starve out. But at some point I realized the waiting was going to kill me first.

Lots of articles on the internet, like vultures, started finding me and telling me that anger is a virus. A sickness. “You must let go or you will poison yourself”. And I couldn’t. I sat there horrified with myself. But a small, growing voice in the back of my head replied to those accusations with “yes, and.” Because letting go, it felt like a new version of burying. Like carving out a part of myself and setting it out to sea.

I’m someone very comfortable with my emotions. And I also am very aware any of them—including happiness—can be toxic in extreme levels. They all will corrode the human brain and make you cruel, ignorant, clueless, cold, etc. They all have flaws if they are the only thing you allow yourself to feel and bury yourself in it.

And I think the good and bad can apply to anger, too. A lot of it will kill you. But without some anger?

Anger is protection and anger is power and anger is motivation. It can be what pushes you to work harder or push yourself further or keep yourself from bad situations and bad people. You shouldn’t let yourself fester in it, but as said, you shouldn’t fester in any feeling.

But anger has its power. Anger reminds me not to welcome in people who would harm me. Anger helps fuel my motivation to be my best, in writing, as a parent, as a person. Anger has its place.

And that’s what I wanted in parts of this book. I wanted my main character Benca to embrace her anger AND I didn’t want this book to be her “descent to evil/madness/etc.” I wanted her to be a hero and to have embraced her anger. She’s not a perfect hero with perfect morals, but she is still herself. She is angry and hateful and still someone doing something right for the people around her. Dangerous and reckless and a little too willing to take great risks and sacrifices, but good.

I wanted anger to have a space to be good.

She has every right to be angry at her Dracula, she had every right to kill him, and she does. There’s no teaching her to be the better person. No calling her the villain. Benca just is. She embraces the anger and hatred and uses that power to protect people she cares for. It’s not perfect and she’s not doing her best emotionally or psychologically. But allowing and harnessing that anger helps her push forward through the horror.

So, yeah. Let me be the messy person giving what some would call bad advice. Anger can be good. Use it.

Anyway, if you want to embrace some anger, maybe read my book, Daughter of Or. It’s one of its many themes and possibly the one I myself needed to hear the most.