You Are Angrier Than You Think

[Sitting on the rooftop... drinking a matcha]

I had not felt it… or seen it show up… in years. I was not expecting it to hit me the way it did. And if I can be honest with you, it caught me completely off guard.

Anger.

This week, it came out of nowhere. It walked in and took over everything. Now I have over the years felt hurt, sad, disappointed, upset… but angry… not in years.

I already know… most people will not tell you the truth about how angry they are. Most people hide it. They smile over it and post through it.

But this week I did something different.

I accepted it and allowed it. I let it sit in the room with me like a guest I did not invite… but was not going to pretend I could not see it or feel it.

You might be asking… what in the world happened? What made you angry?

Keep reading I will eventually get to that part. But I want to show you something I found underneath it that I believe belongs to you.

Because as I sat with it this week, one question circled me. And the question unsettled me a little bit more than the anger did.

If I have not seen anger in years… where has it been?

I know my story. I know what I have lived through, walked away from, rebuilt, buried, and survived. And you cannot tell me a life like mine produced no anger for years at a time.

And me being an over-thinker, detective and conspiracy theorist… I had to get to the bottom of it. What I discovered was maybe anger had been showing up the whole time.

It just came in wearing something else.

What I’m about to hand you on this Sunday… is something deep.

God showed me, anger you refuse to feel changes clothes.

And me of all people should have known that. I have written to you for months about the costume I wore. I just never thought to check whether my anger had a wardrobe of its own too.

So let me describe some of the outfits anger likes to wear. See if you recognize anything hanging in your closet.

Outfit 1

There is an exhaustion that sleep does not fix. You rest and rest and stay tired… because the tiredness is coming from the full-time job of holding something down.

Outfit 2

There is a sarcasm that calls itself humor. The little jab dressed up as a joke. “I’m just playing”. But watch where the jokes keep landing…

Outfit 3

There is a cynicism that calls itself wisdom. Nothing moves you anymore. Nothing impresses you. You call it discernment. But discernment sharpens a person.

Outfit 4

There is a numbness that calls itself peace. You have not blown up in years. You also have not felt much of anything in years. You call it peace. But what if It’s really anesthesia.

Outfit 5

There is the strange math of small things. You stayed perfectly calm about the big betrayal… and came undone over a drawer left open. Because the big thing went in the ground… and the small things keep tripping you up.

outfit 6

There is the politeness with ice in it. The “I’m fine”. The “it’s all good”… said through a jaw that has been tight for ten years.

Outfit 7

And there are the tears that show up out of nowhere… in the car, or right in the middle of a song… and you cannot explain them. Sometimes those are grief. But sometimes they are anger that was never granted a voice… so it has borrowed the only exit it could find in that moment.

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Here me clearly, somewhere along the way, somebody taught you that anger was not allowed. It wasn’t appropriate. It wasn’t classy. It makes people afraid of you. It doesn’t look good on a women and it makes men look evil.

Maybe you grew up in church like me and got handed the eleventh commandment… thou shalt not be angry. So you kept the anger and got rid of the evidence.

Maybe you watched anger tear up a house you lived in… and you swore you would never become that person. So you locked the whole room and called it self-control.

Or maybe you learned very young that your anger changed nothing. So you got busy just being good.

Or maybe somebody you love needed you to be the calm one. The steady one. So you took the job… and everytime you thought about resigning you became remorseful.

Hear me.

All you were doing is burying your anger alive… and calling it maturity.

And even buried anger is still anger.

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There is a man in scripture I have written to you about before. I called him “The elder brother”. The faithful one. Never left home. Never broke a rule. Never raised his voice. Never missed a day in the field. Stay faithful to his father.

Until his father threw a party for the brother who did everything opposite.

And then it came up… out of the ground in one sentence.

“I have slaved for you”.

Anger!

Read that again… slowly. Years of fury… buried underneath years of faithfulness. He did not know it was there. Nobody knew it was there. He looked like the most peaceful man in the whole story… right up until somebody else got celebrated.

That is the thing about buried anger.

It always surfaces at somebody else’s party.

… nope don’t do that.

I can sense you trying to logic your way out of this feeling. But let me make it more plain.

It’s that feeling you got when you saw their IG post and that resentment and anger started coming up through your chest… heading towards your head. So you put their page on mute because in your mind you couldn’t unfollow them.

That feeling that came over you while standing as a bridesmaid in your girlfriend’s wedding. And you had to swallow it because there was no way you could break character in front of all these people.

That feeling when you did all the work… but only your boss got publicly recognized for it. They accepted it and never even acknowledged you.

So what do you do with it?

Let me hand you the verse the entire church skipped:

Be angry… and do not sin.

Look at that. Scripture opens with the permission. It assumes the anger. It commands the honesty… and it draws the line at what you do with it.

And then the very next line… do not let the sun go down on your wrath.

Do not bury it overnight. Deal with your anger while it is still light out… while it still looks like what it actually is.

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This week, for the first time in a long time, I let mine speak.

Someone who cut me off, reappeared in my life. And I wasn’t going to have a repeat and just go along with the motion and act like everything was good. I wasn’t going to bury this visit. This time I sat with it. I felt it. And I opened my mouth to express it… and I didn’t sin.

The anger had finally been heard. And anger that has been heard stops needing a costume.

So before the sun goes down on you tonight… maybe let yours speak too.

I’ll write you next Sunday.

Gold,

P.S. Sometime this week, find a page nobody will ever see… and finish this sentence honestly. “If I am telling the truth, I am still angry about…” Do not fix it. Do not spiritualize it. Just finish the sentence… while the sun is still up.

P.P.S. If you want to go deeper… I said the rest of this out loud. The second entry in The King’s Notebook is called “The Two Letters Anger Carries…” It is waiting below, whenever you are ready to sit with it.