A note for you, if you’re having a bad day.
Dear Friend,
Of all the emotions, you’ll probably find it unsurprising which one I consider trickiest. Anger is an enigma to me. I’m not sure what to do with it or how to hold it, and I don’t know how to meet it, either. Anger is fire; it is always in motion. Anger is not paying attention to traffic lights; it’s gonna drive no matter what, regardless of the consequences. When I feel it coming up in me, I reflexively internally reach for a big bucket of water to drown it out, and transform my anger into sadness. Sadness is still — or, at least, it’s slow. It’s soggy; it’s wet clothes. It’s uncomfortable but it’s not really hurting anyone, so long as it eventually dissipates and dodges the threat of hypothermia. So a lot of time my sadness is just anger that I let get wet so it would stop moving — since I don’t know how to make anger safe.
There are a lot of examples of anger not being safe. You have probably encountered unsafe anger at some point in your life, and it’s also the kind of anger we see most on television and in movies. Some people get angry in an explosion of harm — physically or emotionally lashing out until someone else gets hurt. Other people get angry and flee the scene, getting as far away from their triggers as they can without thinking about the ways in which their absence might affect others. Anger is related to fear, and it brings out some primal impulses (that’s that animal fight-flight-freeze stuff that you’ve read about in 9 trillion pop psychology pieces by now).
Furthermore, people socialized female were taught to not get angry. We were taught to get catty or to get hurt or to get smaller. Angry women were demonized; held up as examples of why the modern English language has made so much space for the word “bitch.” (For the record, I’m not 100 percent sure what “catty” means, except that I know a lot of socialized-femme people who love nothing more than shit-talking other people behind their backs, finding great catharsis in the offloading of any anger they might have been holding on to, with no outlet to express it.)
But anger exists for a reason. Indeed, all emotions evolved to help humans survive, and anger, with all its energy and fire, will move you forward. If you’ve been stuck somewhere, surrounded by the goop of how sad everything is and how helpless you ultimately are in the midst of it all, consider the question: “What is making me angry?” The energy will be different, and you might find that you start to move.
It’s tough to get angry when there are so few models of how to express anger safely. And that’s precisely why it’s so important that you honor your anger and figure out how to feel it in front of other people. That’s how we fill in missing narratives: by creating and living them.
The first thing to do is to name it out loud: tell someone you’re angry. Then, be aware of the effect that your anger has on your brain. Anger is going to try to give you a sense of control (when a lot of things are, in actuality, out of your control), and it’s going to want to solve a problem fast (when a lot of problems, in actuality, aren’t going to get solved right now). The problem-solving energy and the sense-of-control energy aren’t inherently bad — they actually create motion where there might not have been motion before. It’s just crucial to know that you may need to slow down and be held accountable. Put someone next to you in the car and tell them to point out the traffic lights to you; and when they do, listen to them.
Here’s a huge list of all the psychological benefits of anger. You might find that letting yourself feel something different will give you just the push you need. Or maybe you’re already good at anger, in which case: UGH, GOOD FOR YOU, OK!?
(Jk. You’re amazing.)
Love,
Sophie
Add this to your to-do list.
Eat a vegetable. Why not?
When you’re in the bathroom, practice kissing on your own fist like you used to do in middle school. Then, compliment yourself on how good you are at kissing.
A drawing.
I recently re-posted this old essay I wrote about making books. It actually has a bunch of new drawings in it (one of them is below the old drawing), and also a bunch of useful information about book-making!
What’s on my mind this week.
(This will be about new parenthood. Skip it if you don’t want to read about new parenthood.)
It was just the briefest of windows. There was this period of time — two months, maybe — where T was always seemingly content. She no longer had the stomach trouble she had early on, she was sleeping through the night, she got along with everyone she met, she smiled constantly. You could take her anywhere and she would basically be fine with it; she was so, so easy. And I knew that it wouldn’t be like that forever, so I tried to get present as often as possible, closing my eyes and breathing her in, trying to hold each moment.
She has outgrown this period, as well as almost all of her clothes. At four months, she is 20 pounds and stretches the length of the changing table. Today I moved all the 9 month clothes into the “too small” basket. My girlfriend and their partner watched her on Monday, and things were OK, although Kat said that T cried 20 or 30 percent of the time, which is more than she usually cries. (As a side note, what a FUCKING GIFT that my girlfriend was able to take over for the nanny for a day. I still find the support of the community dizzying. And it’s still STILL so hard to ask for help anyway.) The next day, she had a different babysitter, and T was having none of it. She SCREAMED the whole time the babysitter was with her, which ignited the cats and created a general ruckus in the kitchen. The babysitter felt terrible; I felt guilty. T has been teething, but she is also so much more aware of how to communicate her wants by screaming. Yesterday, her want was for her parents to not go to work and to hold her all day. Which… is basically what she got. I called Luke to come home and watch her and the two of them had a jolly time, but it’s not sustainable.
Extras.
You know what journalism movie my students always, always love? “Shattered Glass.”
I will take a moment now to recommend everything by Lynda Barry, but specifically “Making Comics,” which is a really fun book that everyone can and should buy and use.
Come play Pictionary with me and Eugenia Viti, please! You will almost certainly win a prize!
I recommend dog stickers.
Let me be real with you, friends: this has been a bad week for consuming things. But if you want to get angry about that, I highly encourage you!