A Thousand Thoughts

Anger is a complicated emotion for me. Somehow it became an umbrella term for a range of emotions that are not actually anger, but that I confused with it because of a shared intensity amongst them. Add to that, I heard so many times that my words, tone, and behaviour looked angry to others, and who was I to question my impact on them? I was deeply apologetic and took that feedback to heart.

Believe it or not, years before we were a couple, my beautiful husband, my favourite person in the world, was given a helpful heads up that ‘Hilary is a very angry woman’. We joke about this now but it’s still got a tiny sting. It didn’t put him off and maybe had the opposite effect.

I do get angry. I have always had a burning rage about injustice, personal and political. But more often than not, I am passionate about something. I’m all in about ideas and dissecting what I or another mean with their words; I’m curious and intense, and yes, my tone and even choice of words can sound blunt or sharp when I don’t mean it to be.

But a quick rise to anger over things I would rather not get angry about is a burden. When I stumbled upon a by-the-way comment about emotional extremes as a feature of ADHD, I grabbed that clue like a lifeline. I was not wrong. It IS part of ADHD for me. 

Coming from the background I did, I had a lot of shame about getting angry, or showing the intensity that others interpreted as anger. At least when I was angry about ‘issues’, I felt like I had the righteous anger defence on my side. Unfortunately, that seemed to trigger a counterclaim, because I was also supposed to be slow to anger.

While I might have been privately satisfied that my passion for truth and justice was not misplaced, I was perpetually concerned and self-conscious about the fact that my internal world was evidently not understood by others. I took responsibility for that. Intellectually and experientially I knew that there was more than one way to be genuine, and that I had my heart in the right place. But at a social and community level, I felt like I continually failed most of the characteristics called the ‘fruit of the Spirit’, and I was ashamed. Where I felt my self-control, patience, gentleness, love, and peace were inherently part of what I did or said… well, there was a language barrier.

Lest these charges seem to be levelled at church culture alone, let me be clear. Neuronormativity is everywhere. Most settings and subcultures have their own version of emotional homogeneity, and being the socially wired creatures that we are, it is currency.  Get mad, but get mad about the right things. 

Shame goes deep. It’s hard to tell where you end and it starts. It’s a delicate operation, performed over time.