AnYi 安亦

My relationship with anger is what some may call crass in web romances – a careless juxtaposition of binary opposites and polarised concepts with no structural forethought whatsoever, created purely for attention-seeking.

In other words, it’s messy.

A good friend of mine said to me this morning, when I was having another emotional archaeological session on despair, “Do you think it’s because you’re increasingly unable to direct anger at other people that you’re in increasing pain?”

She continued to comment on the number of things simultaneously occurring in my life right now that ought to make me angry at some people, and expressed anger on certain matters on my behalf. In truth my life is on a long hiatus and the most recent events have not made it any better, but I am not angry at people. Not because I am trying to be nice and forgiving, but because there is no point.

The other side of the truth is that it is incredibly useless to direct one’s anger at the big grand structural things – of course it’s the structural imbalance of NHS that left me untreated for four years; of course it’s the structural inequalities immigrants have to face in the UK that makes housing so unbearably hard for me; of course it’s the structural lack of support for disabled people that make my problems so invisible for some people. I know all this. And then what?

I can’t blame individuals who simply presented those truths to me. It’s not a subjective choice to overlook the hurt these individuals can and have caused me as they, too, are part of the loop, but I simply don’t have it in me to be angry at realities that are so self-explanatory.

And this is tiring.

Because why should I be so understanding and cooperative, when it is down to the collection of small acts by people that my life is falling apart?

The answer to this question lies in the other half of my polarised conceptualisation of anger – there is no middle ground for me. I can’t be “cross” at someone and make it up with them afterwards. My anger, once existing, expands to a level of cruelty and unfairness. And no matter what people have done recently that made my life worse than it already was, they don’t deserve cruelty or unfairness. I’m not a child anymore, so I know you don’t resolve a simple argument by throwing chairs at people’s heads.

And as a matter of fact, I’ve never thrown chairs at people’s heads.

But as a possibility it will, I’m afraid, always be the top of my go-to options when I am angry, and this is why I can never trust myself to promise not to do such a thing. Once you’re exposed to that much violence and soaked in it as the only solution to everything, it grows into you. It’s like quitting drugs. You get obsessed with the illusional sense of power it creates in you when it happens and infatuated with the pleasure of destruction – it will never stop waving at you once it’s been in your bones. Everything that comes before and after it is disastrous, but in the moment, it is delicious.

I didn’t have a choice but to grow into a violence-addict because that’s what grown-ups were like in my life; choosing to grow out of it was probably the hardest thing I have ever tried to accomplish. I don’t know how much of that process turned me into someone who simply doesn’t get angry to hold back the violence, or whether there was originally a small complacent AnYi that just simply found everything funny and forgivable, but just got lost in the giant shell of daily emotional tsunamis.