When I Finally Met My Rage

What a bitch.

I am, for the first twenty-seven years of my life, not an angry person. I am even-keeled, I am a mediator. I am argumentative, in that I love a debate. To be taken seriously by the adults around me, you need a voice, a take. I learn how to retort, but how argue, but I do not lose my Northern California cool.

I am raised around tempers. Hot, mercurial personalities. I am measured at home, twice over. I am dancing on eggshells, I learn the choreography but my parents, my grandmother, do not tell me when the stage changes. A worthier essay would detail the blueberry story which lost me dinner, the abusive volleying I managed as the messenger between animus divorcees, the screaming.

At my most frustrated, I can access tears and a flagellation of despair, but not the energy or righteousness of rage. The emotional calculation of home life means little emotional space for anything else. I am muted to any extreme feelings—good and bad. I am always in control of myself. Throughout elementary and middle school, I am rambunctious to compensate, eager to burn off energy, to be noticed, eager to break rules, knowing I will endure social humiliation.

My closest friends from high school and college tell me I'm outgoing, but reserved, stoic, secretive.

I think I must be lying as I write this. It feels like that could not have possibly been me. I am extremely candid. Exceedingly direct. Quick to tell you my feelings. There are are traces of my most intimate moments strewn across my social media! In all my published nonfiction writing! But now is not then.

I find something more solid and subjective in the words of my friends, the hours they spent prodding me in my teens and 20s—tells us something, who was that English guy that called you? What do you mean your grandma once offered to—? Wait wait, why do you go into your closet to take calls from your parents? You really don’t like being touched, do you? Why do you never talk to us about, well, anything personal?

poor kid–she finally got friends and did not know how to let them in

Unfettered emotion and expression was a privilege, but I am beginning to see how I am distant and veiled from the world my friends exist in.

I begin to ease my way into feelings after college. If I knew how, I would’ve sold my story many year ago, but it’s hard to really notice change until it’s well in motion.

“People feel so much,” I remark to a therapist. I am maybe two years out of college. “And so many times a day.”

I still feel this way sometimes. Astounded at how many different ways I can feel in a day, an afternoon, sometimes an hour. But two years out of school, while I’m dancing with so much more, I haven’t added anger to my repertoire. I didn’t think I was capable.

My anger, my rage. Our uncontrolled introduction.

By my late 20s, I have been taking, on and off, the same antidepressant for ten years—cocktailed with others. No combination, no dosage, ever seemed to get me much beyond apathy. With the guidance of two medical professionals, I begin to titrate off my antidepressants.

And I lose it.

The anger comes on quickly, the juxtaposition to the new suicidal ideation. My rage is an infection, a corporeal manifestation. One day, I rip all my photos off my wall, another I send needling and cruel texts to my nearest and dearest. By the end of the week, I have also lost two freelance clients and slammed the glass door to my bedroom. It explodes into thousands of pieces: in my laundry, my open dresser drawer, my bed. I move to the five-foot couch in my living room and slept there for three months.

I become the most extreme version of myself, incapable of feeling any happiness, and incapable of moderating the feelings I do have access to. I feel at intensities I did not know could exist in myself. My entire spectrum of emotion is from a baseline of zero and can only plunge the negatives. The best I can hope is a numbing tide to claim me for a few hours a day.

In the interim, I am terrified of myself, but I don’t recognize myself. I think I am on an irreversible brink, but I don’t know quite how seriously to take myself. I am disgusted and enlivened by the things my anger says. Borne in me is someone new, she is fascinating, revolting, irresistible. Whatever I have always wanted to say, I say in the worst possible way. The rage is like lightning striking the ground, erratic, damaging but, at least, not constant. My emotions feel outside of my body. I harass my parents, a constant and torrential list of their every injustice. I scream on the phone. I scream at anyone I can get on the phone. I have never screamed before, and now I am finding ways to be wronged, ways to let my lungs vibrate.

Each day, as my anger continues, I am maddened by the knowledge that my rage is a booming reverberation of my parents' own tempers. It is humbling to feel powerless and cliché.

Of course, I lost my mind in other ways. I am exposed to harrowing new depths of myself. Depths I cannot extricate from the chemical processes of weaning off my antidepressants. We are furiously intertwined. I had to face a sadness, loneliness, a despair that wailed from my belly out through my stretching jaw. So much spite, bile, ire towards myself and everything I touched. I put myself in an abyss, tormented and ruled by my own villainy. And I could not even if I was that person at the very bottom. I will not know until I die, until I never become her again.

Predictably, while the other symptoms of my lost-it-era found a way to integrate themselves into my life less dramatically, the anger is different. She is a flint lit, one I still find as emotionally intoxicating and baffling as ever. I am never quite Northern California cool again. When my rage, I see the appeal of lighting my life up, and I resist modulating. I am only a decade into knowing my anger, but I know I should not burst the dam. A trickle seems so much worse though.