I used to turn it inward.
That is what I was taught to do with it, not in explicit instruction but in the thousand small corrections of a childhood and a culture that did not have a place for an angry woman, that received anger from a woman as something to be smoothed, as a problem of presentation rather than a legitimate response to a legitimate grievance. I learned the smoothing early. I learned to translate the anger into something more acceptable, into the quiet persistence that reads as determination, into the relentless working that looks like dedication, into the composure in the difficult room that looks like equanimity and is sometimes rage at a frequency no one else can hear.
I am done with the smoothing.
Not done with composure, not in favor of burning anything down, not interested in rage as a permanent state or a personality or a posture. But done with the translation. Done with taking the legitimate thing and making it smaller and more palatable before I am willing to acknowledge it even to myself. The anger is information. It has always been information. It points at things that matter, at gaps between what was promised and what was delivered, at places where the wrong was absorbed and metabolized and called something else because calling it what it was felt like a door I was not allowed to open.
I open it now.
I stand in the anger long enough to understand what it is telling me. I ask it: what did you need that you did not get. I ask it: what was the wrong. I let it answer. And then, and this is the part that took years to learn, I do not marinate in the answer. I take the information and I do something with it, I write it or walk it or change something in my life based on what the anger named, and then I put it down. Not suppress. Not perform. Take the message and set down the carrier.
The anger has been a good informant. It has been more honest with me than most things.
I have stopped punishing it for existing. I have started thanking it for arriving. It has been pointing at true things my whole life and I have been telling it to keep its voice down. I am listening now. I am paying attention to what it knows.
