On Anger, softly!
How easily power becomes pain when it is not held gently.
When I was down under last year,
A friend told me they were going through a journey
a journey of absolute emotional expression.
They felt they needed to experience everything fully,
to say everything aloud,
and to stop hiding their innermost feelings.
They asked me to accompany them on that journey,
to be their friend along the path.
I agreed.
Partly out of curiosity,
partly because I wondered
what it would awaken in me.
So I surrendered to it all
the anger,
the irritation,
the uncomfortable honesty.
We spoke closely,
sometimes too closely,
again and again,
about what displeased us,
What hurt us,
What we found difficult in each other.
And eventually,
I felt the need to express myself more, too.
More feelings.
More truth.
Even my anger.
For a time,
Anger came out of me
in a way that felt unfamiliar.
And I found that fascinating.
Because anger is never just one emotion.
It carries many others within it
hurt, disappointment, fear, exhaustion.
It moves with force,
with a strength that feels as if it might burst through the body itself.
It is heavy.
So heavy that sometimes
The heart can no longer hold it.
What I realized was that anger is powerful.
A moving force.
An energy that can protect you,
but also destroy what stands too close.
It can illuminate,
But it can also create chaos.
At times, I felt anger was more frightening than hate.
Hate can remain distant, almost cold.
But anger burns from within.
It demands action.
It craves movement, reaction, explosion.
And for a while,
I was afraid of it —
afraid of what might emerge
When feelings move faster than understanding.
I learned that expressing anger
is not the same as losing control of it.
And that learning to sit with anger,
to hear it without surrendering to it,
is not something we achieve once.
It is a lifelong process.
We learn it slowly, piece by piece
how to soften it,
how to understand what it protects,
How to let it pass
without leaving destruction behind.
Anger taught me
where my boundaries are.
But it also taught me
How easily power becomes pain
when it is not held gently.
And maybe that is the work of a lifetime
not to erase anger,
but to learn how to carry it
without losing ourselves.