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?

Asshole alert! Also, sexism in the workplace.

So I've been in HR at a major tech company for nearly seven years, and throughout my tenure I've spent a lot of time putting on a smile and pretending to be nice to assholes.  Well, as of today, I'm done.

This morning, at the request of my client group, I gave a optional, extra, special, not-required-by-my-job presentation on new performance management practices to about 30 people live and on video conference.  These practices are controversial and are causing folks some consternation, which is acceptable.

What happened during the meeting, however, was not.

About halfway through the presentation, one of my senior clients got up, wrote a word he "didn't want to hear" from me anymore on the whiteboard in huge letters, and then crossed it out to demonstrate to me and the room (because I'm a fucking five-year-old kindergartener, apparently) that he really doesn't like that word and he doesn't want to hear it ever again!  He was visibly agitated the whole time, his eyes widening and his jowls shaking as he chastised me, his colleague, in front of his peers and direct reports, for the HR department being "the politburo." Of course, as all assholes who want to cover their asshole-ish asses do, he proceeded to clarify that he "wasn't directing any of this at me" but was "just so frustrated with the system," etc.  After holding back tears for the remainder of the presentation,  I tried to take him aside to give him some feedback about treating me like a 10 year old in front of a good chunk of his team.  He cut me off abruptly: "I know what this is about, and, you know, I apologize, but I'm just so frustrated..."  I told him that I found what he did humiliating, and that my hurt feelings were not related to what he said, but how he said it.  He cut me off again: "I don't understand why you feel that way!  I'm just frustrated about the process!"  We decided to talk more later.  He sent me one of those "sorry that you were offended" bullshit emails, and I repeated that we'd talk later in the week.  I didn't think I could look at his fucking face twice in one day.

I'm sure some people reading this would say that I'm overreacting.  That I'm too sensitive.  "He apologized, what's the big deal?"

I'll tell you what the fucking big deal is.

The big deal is that this man thinks it's ok, just because he's frustrated about an HR process, to belittle a colleague in front of his peers and reports.

The big deal is that these same peers and reports will now think it's ok to treat me the same way he does.

The big deal is this guy has a history of intimidating and bullying his coworkers, and he's never been disciplined for it.

The big deal is that my boss's response to it was, "That's too bad, I'm so sorry!"  In case you were wondering, my boss is also in HR.

The big deal is that if I were a man, this never would have happened.

Oh, yeah, I'm pulling the sexism card.  I'm fucking doing it.  And you know why?  Because it's in my hand, motherfuckers.

I've supported dozens of leaders over the years, nearly all of them men.  I have lost track of the number of patronizing, rude, and downright overtly sexist remarks and attitudes I've witnessed and experienced from almost every single one of them.

There was the guy who once referred to me as a performance management "dominatrix" in front of his team.  The guy who spent an entire meeting staring, quite obviously, at my chest while we were supposed to be discussing talent strategies.  The guy who called me "hot" to my fellow HR coworkers in the office while I was standing 20 feet away (this guy was also in HR, whaddya know!).  The countless, countless managers who have praised male workers for being aggressive go-getters while, in the same breath, suggesting their female reports "tone it down."  I could write a fucking book.

Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of female assholes, too, all over the place.  But while the majority of leadership positions in corporate America are held by men (and yeah, they mostly still are, especially in tech), the majority of assholes I work with will be men, too.  Leaning in is great and dandy, unless you want to avoid assholes and sexism, apparently.

That's the big deal.  Today, this man was such an asshole to me that he made me want to quit my job.  He looked down on me from his position of power and maleness and decided that it was ok to belittle me, the HR girl, because I am not powerful and not male.  And he taught a bunch of other people who look up to him (most of them male) that this is how they should treat me, too.

So I'm done being nice.  I will be Catbert the evil HR cat, if that's what these fuckers want.  I'll give back as good as I get.  I'll be the asshole.  Let's see how they like it.