You won't like me when I'm angry

Anger has been on my mind recently.  I've come to the realization that a good part of my depression over the years (other than the genetic pre-disposition/brain chemistry part, THANKS PARENTS!) has been due to anger that I've turned on myself.

Societal norms don't leave a lot of room for human beings to express anger in a healthy way, but it's made particularly difficult and problematic for women.  Until a few months ago, I never really understood the extent to which I've been trained to suppress my feelings of anger, justified or not.  I was sitting in therapy, trying to suss out what had triggered a depressive episode, when my therapist hit the nail on the head: "Jackie, I don't think you are sad.  I actually think you are really angry."  It was a revelation.

Ever since I was a small child, I've known that anger is Very Bad.  Anger leads to shouting, and fighting, and people not liking you.  You are angry?  Well, that means you're mean, and loud, and you fight with people, and good girls aren't mean.  They aren't too loud.  They don't fight with people.  They are liked.

So whenever something happened that made me angry, I would twist the situation in my mind until it was all my fault:

"Another little girl tells me I'm a show-off because I sang well in the school play?  Well, I must seem too stuck up then; it's my fault.  It couldn't possibly be because she was jealous and wanted the part for herself!"

"A boy on the bus calls me a loser and spits in my face?  Well, I must be ugly and nerdy and unlikeable.  It couldn't possibly be because he's a mini-misogynist and a sociopath who picks on every girl in the class because he enjoys hurting them."

"My 10th grade biology teacher leers at me and laughs while my male classmates make fun of my large breasts?  My shirt must be too low-cut; I should wear something with a higher neckline.  It couldn't possibly be because he's a predatory creep who shouldn't be within 500 feet of a school, much less teaching high schoolers."

When you're trained to outwardly express and feel anything but anger, these convoluted justifications for other people's inexcusable or inappropriate behavior become automatic.  They supplant reason and make it impossible for you to view a situation rationally.  And they direct anger inward, where it wreaks havoc while bubbling like lava just beneath the surface of your consciousness--until it inevitably explodes.

I've had several explosions over the years, and they were bad.  One in high school made me some enemies and pretty much ruined my senior year of high school.  Instead of reacting appropriately to individual situations that inspired justifiable anger in me, I kept it all inside until one last, tiny, insignificant straw landed on the camel's back and the camel blew up and screamed at fucking everybody.  That was a bad day--what I remember of it, at least.  My mind has blocked out a lot of it, the fallout was that traumatic at the time.

Much worse, however, have been the much more frequent implosions: the times where the anger burned bright hot and bored a giant black hole in my head and my heart, a hole I tumbled into and couldn't climb out of for days or weeks or months.  When things imploded, I wanted to hurt myself and I thought about ways to make it happen.  I realize now that the Big Breakdown in 2013 was really all about anger, mostly directed at people in my job who were taking advantage of me at the time.  Instead of telling them how I felt and using my anger as a tool to defend myself from their tactics or at least call them out for bad behavior, I blamed and hated and raged at myself for everything that was going wrong and then fell apart.

Now I'm working on expressing anger in a healthy way.  If I need to scream or throw (soft!) things in my apartment at night, I do it.  At work, I try to channel anger into actually, for the first time in my life, telling people when what they are doing is inappropriate, rude, or simply mean.  This has been especially hard because most of the people at work I push back on have 10 years of experience on me and think a lot of themselves (sometimes justifiably, sometimes not).  But I'm learning, and it's actually making me even better at my job--an unexpected and pleasantly surprising bonus.

This week has been interesting, because there is simply a lot of shit going on in the world that is pissing me (and most people with a modicum of common sense and human decency) off.  This whole HobbyLobby business has cast a pall over the week since Monday.   Yet another blow by a bunch old white dudes to the dignity, health, and autonomy of women in this country.  And, just like when I was a child, I hear the same old message loud and clear from all sides: "Women: don't get angry don't get angry PLEASE DON'T GET ANGRY.  Not only does it make us SUPER UNCOMFORTABLE, it also means you're a Shrill, Hysterical, Very Bad and Mean Feminist (TM, Fox News).  No one will like you if you're angry."

Here's the thing - some people won't like me (or any woman, really) when I'm angry, and I'm finally getting that this is good because anger is necessary, and if they see that I'm angry then I'm going in the right direction.  Anger gets things done.  Directed at the right targets, anger can be a powerful tool for change, both on a personal level and on a broad scale.  Harnessing my anger has made me better at what I'm currently paid to do, and it's helping me understand and fight my depression.  Harnessing anger has fought injustice and ended atrocities around the world.  Harnessing anger of millions of minorities and their allies is what will fuel the ongoing fight to stop nutjobs and bigots from trying to take the world back to the Middle Ages.  It's also what will ultimately win that fight.  GO SHRILL, HYSTERICAL, VERY BAD AND MEAN FEMINISTSTM!!!!!!!

So, yeah, some people may not like me when I'm angry, but that's cool.  It worked for the Hulk, right?

Thirteen years

When I was sixteen years old, I had my first full-blown encounter with depression, a disease that has followed me from high school, to college, to my first job (still my only job); from dorm rooms to roommates to my first one-bedroom; from the West coast, to the East coast, and back again.

I remember crying so hard that I thought I'd blinded myself with tears on the floor of my childhood bedroom.  I remember one of my college roommates dragging me to the campus health center as I blubbered and babbled.  I remember breakdowns in a dizzying array of bathrooms - high school bathrooms, lecture hall bathrooms, grimy nightclub toilet stalls.  I recall many impromptu outdoor walks at my office campus spent sobbing and staggering, incoherently wailing on my cell phone to my poor, beleaguered mother.  

I remember going on meds and the elation of the cloud lifting for the first time.  I remember thinking I was "better" and could go off them on my own, leading, of course, to a sudden drop back down the familiar black hole.  I remember doing this two or three times until I finally realized that I needed the meds, that I would always need them, that I could very possibly die without them.

I remember five or six failed attempts at therapy with awful practitioners; women who thought that if I could just eat better and exercise more and meditate daily I would be fine.  I remember thinking that if one more therapist told me to eat more fruit and meditate I actually would kill myself.

I remember wanting to kill myself, more times than I can count.

Most of all, I remember this week last year.  In late January of 2013, I had what I now think of as "The Big Breakdown."  We had some sort of awful week-long work meeting with "planning" and "strategy" and a million people milling around everywhere, asking, "How are you, it's been so long," and I lost it it.  I got a migraine that turned into a flu that turned into a bleeding, aching hole in my chest out of which my depression screamed "DIE DIE DIE YOU ARE NOTHING." I made some sort of minor mistake at work and lost my shit.  My boss at the time, bless her heart, had no idea what to do with me, but was compassionate when I realized I needed to get some help and didn't guilt trip me about what happened next.

I took two weeks of medical leave.  My poor beleaguered mother flew out to stay with me, and she helped me get what I needed.  She listened to me when I cried, and she helped me make and keep therapy and doctor appointments.  She walked with me in Golden Gate park and watched TV with me and took me to IKEA to buy a side table for my living room, which was something I desperately needed, apparently.  She washed my dishes.

I found, for the first time in over a decade, an amazing therapist.  I had begun to think that they didn't exist, but they do, and he is one of them.  I got a new diagnosis and new meds and they helped.

My mother went home, I went back to work, and it was hard.  Really hard.  A year later, it still is.  But I have a therapist now, and my friends, and my family, and the knowledge that after thirteen years of this shit, there are good times in between the bad ones and that I have what I need in place to get through the bad ones.  This past week was a bad one, this Anniversary of The Big Breakdown.  But I survived it, and I can feel myself coming out of it.  It will be ok, for now.

I turned twenty-nine earlier this month, which means it's been thirteen years with this disease.  That's nearly half my life.  I know that I will have this disease as long as I live.  I know that it's a part of me, and that no matter how many times I beat myself up about not being "normal" that this is my normal - and that many others share this normal with me.  And so I try to remember instead that I'm one of the lucky ones.  I have help.  I am lucky.  I am so, so lucky.

I write this not to indulge in self-pity or self-aggrandizement, nor to celebrate my triumph over depression (especially not the latter, because there is no triumph over depression, as any sufferer knows).  I guess that on this Anniversary of The Big Breakdown, and after thirteen years of my brand of normal, it's good to remember where I've been and what I have and to be grateful.  And to take a breath before diving into whatever's next.  Here's to the next thirteen years.



 

Joining the 31-day reset craze...

So, now that two of my friends have begun the #31dayreset with good feedback, and I've been feeling pretty depressed and powerless lately, so I decided: why not go for it? I haven't blogged in over a year, and as you can see from the grand total of 2 previous posts I wasn't that committed to it when I was doing it lol. This time, however, I hope to use this space to talk about the reset as I think my main issue with blogging is that I had trouble coming up with something to actually write about, and, well, here we go, a ready-made topic! Also, concentrating on a daily writing task will hopefully provide some focus in my life, which has become rather unfocused of late. Other than work, I seem to spend most of my time sleeping and watching TV and crying most of the time, which isn't healthy, obviously. Perhaps if I can throw some energy into this I'll be more motivated to get out of bed and less afraid of, well, everything than I have been recently.

The first step, other than picking a notebook (a large blue moleskine for which I've been searching for a use for some time now), is to pick a personal mantra. I found a quote from Audre Lorde, which I love and is very applicable to my life:

“When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.”

I'll continue to blog about the reset as it continues, and, hey, maybe someone will read this eventually!