Rightful (hysterical) anger

First things first: consider yourself warned, as this is an angry and definitely not family friendly rant.

I’m angry and I want to scream: loudly, hysterically, desperately. I’m on edge and have been feeling like this for over a week now. Doom and gloom, I feel like giving up on humanity altogether. And it’s not even about my personal, inner crisis (which is nonetheless happening alongside)!

Whenever I try to unload and discuss it with someone, I get “kindly” lectured on the importance of detachment (“for mental health”!), and the ultimate need to look for positives. WHICH ARE PRECISELY PART OF THE FUCKING PROBLEM!

What I learnt from my anger

I have always been a very impulsive and emotional person. I’ve always felt things before I knew or understood them. I’ve always seemed to feel stronger and deeper than anyone else around me, just as I’ve been getting affected by other people’s emotions way more than anyone else. Emotional landscape was quite naturally my kind of world.

Of course, over the course of my life I’ve been led to believe that this is undesirable, unhealthy, childish, irrational, hysterical, problematic – all sorts of bad, really. It got hammered into my head that I need to change it, hide it, withhold it. My parents, while they’ve always meant well and wished nothing but the best for me, managed to convince me I have some anger issues (I don’t). That I’m too loud, too direct, too vulgar and no one will ever want me that way.

And yet, even though I tried hard, I could never successfully supress my emotions, be this restrained, levelled “adult” people expected me to be. Sure it caused one hell of an inner conflict and laid out solid basis for most of my existential crises in coming years. I’ve been conditioned to believe that my natural sensitivity and emotionality are bad, at best unwelcomed. And so I kept them to myself, consequently denying myself the right to be vulnerable in front of the others.

Loads of bullshit that I now have a doubtful pleasure to unlearn.

Must admit though: it teaches me A LOT.

Resilience

Most of my life I believed I’m a late bloomer. And in many ways, when compared to some sort of standard, I indeed am: there is an abundance of things I got to do way later in life than most. I know now that it never mattered (still doesn’t) how quick, slow, hard or easy I find things in life. As long as I’m moving and changing, at my own pace, I’m doing it right. And so do you, fellow late bloomer, or you, slightly less familiar early bloomer.  

But I’ve recently realised that alongside being a late bloomer, there has always – or at least for the past decade – been a sphere of life in which I seemed to be right ahead of my peers. Emotional sensitivity, intuition and self-awareness were the things that – then and again – kept setting me aside. And ultimately getting me into endless trouble.  

Life is ambivalent

At the beginning of this year, I read a sentence that deeply resonated with me. It could be roughly translated into: maturity is an ability to bear the ambivalence. How very true! Because life itself is, always have been and is going to be, just that: ambivalent. There’s no bad without good, no easy without difficult, no happy without sad, no vice without virtue and so on – one does not exclude the other, only complements it. Emotional maturity is based on ambivalence too: lots of seemingly opposite emotions exist alongside each other, and it’s learning how to hold them together (rather than repress or defy them at all cost) that is the real game-changer.

In short: accepting life’s ambivalence has a potential to transform your life.