seeing red, moving through anger

this morning, I woke up very angry with my eyebrows furrowed into one straight mountain ridge spanning my forehead. I didn’t have a very good sleep, and I had a dream about a figure from my past who harmed me deeply. I woke up several times throughout the night struggling to breathe, and so when I finally arose in the morning with cold dried sweat in the crevices of my body, I felt consumed by a pounding headache that morphed into a full body anger.

at first, I tried to close my eyes and return to sleep, I thought that if I could atleast have fifteen or twenty minutes of blissful sleep, I could recover. but of course that wasn’t the case. so I sighed, pulled myself out of bed, and dragged myself into the shower. thankfully the sky was blue when I opened the blinds, so that gifted me with the tendril of encouragement I direly needed to begin my day. 

I entered the shower sighing, and intentionally didnt put on my contact lenses, so everything remained a blur. I’m not sure if this was the best idea, because even as I was showering I felt my body tight with anger and my mind kept repeating the incident and thoughts that were triggering my anger. the shower did help me bring my emotional self back into the realm of my physical body, but my mind was still aching to scream and lash out at one person, no, two people, no all the people who had triggered this feeling in me before. 

at this point, after getting dressed, I walked to the front of the house to open the door and windows and let the breeze in. I left the house for a few minutes to move my car, and those few fragments of sunshine, the scent of the wind on my cheeks, and crossing paths with elders in the neighborhood calmed me down. it reminded me of life, and sensation, and possibility beyond the constrictive, narrow vision that my anger was trapping me into. 

thankfully, this brief respite gave me a window of possibility into self control and self regulation. I was able to distance myself to a bird’s eye view, and softly ponder the roots of my anger and what triggered it, rather than blaming the person who triggered it. coming from a place of compassion, I am sure the person who said the thing that made me angry did not intend to do so, but that they were speaking from a place of being hurt themselves. it is interesting because I think this triggered me so severely when I consider that I felt my mother had treated me this way for years during my childhood. 

recently, I have been reading fariha roisin’s book “who is wellness for?,” where in part of her personal journey with wellness, she describes her tumultuous and painful relationship with her immigrant mother, where she was treated as a sort of emotional dumping ground. in contemplating the long term effects of this dynamic on her orientation towards the world, she writes, “there’s a pattern here, how people feel entitled to me, possessed by me, but when I ask for anything, I am told I am asking for too much. The more I existed in this refrain where I felt so lacking, believing I was nothing and everybody else had value, the further away I got from myself.”

this quote hit my core and reverberated throughout my tendons, veins, and bones. so much of my life, I have minimized myself and my needs, especially in matters of love and family, that I cannot take it anymore. I can no longer subjugate the essential parts of my self and my being out of fear of upsetting a loved one, especially when they do not extend that kind of self-placating behavior towards me. I need to become tougher, become a stronger advocate for myself and express these limits to my loved ones, as an act of honoring and loving myself, and an act of trust to my loved ones that they will respond to my feelings with acknowledgment, contemplation, and growth.

like fariha said, I can no longer permit myself to be distanced from my essence by others. but I think the difficult aspect of this kind of conversation is finding the delicate balance between asserting oneself and remaining compassionate.