Why are you so angry?

A couple of weeks ago, someone suggested that I might not want to be so angry.

Now, if you know me in real life, you’ll probably chuckle because of course this was like a red rag to a bull.?

I was riddled with an infection, having just recovered from a virus, and on my second lot of antibiotics. So quite fed up.

I’m feeling generous, so I will concede that I understood the premise of what this person was saying. Anger can be incredibly corrosive. Mark Twain describes anger as “an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.”?

While there is a lot of truth in this statement, I have always been very comfortable with anger as an emotion.?

Without wanting to uphold any regional stereotypes, I think this is at least partially because my family are northern and Scottish. We say what we mean without ambiguity, so much so that it’s almost a sport.

Insulting your nearest and dearest is how we say we love each other (without actually saying the L word.) Calling someone a daft sod or a clown or even a c*** are all terms of endearment among my people. Gorgeously abrasive, yet full of sentimentality in their own way.

When Jim Royle calls his put-upon son, Antony, a lanky streak of piss, or posits that his lazy daughter Denise needs a firework up her arse, the adoration of his children is abundantly clear. Or at least I thought it was, until I watched The Royle Family with an old housemate who asked why they were all so horrible to each other.

To her, the depiction of an angry father was decidedly unfunny. It did not appeal to her sensibilities.

I get it - everyone’s comedy tastes are very different.

But anger and humour are unlikely bedfellows. The actor and comedian, Steve Coogan (another northerner, a lad from Middleton) insists that humour is a useful vehicle via which to make very serious points. He has done so to great effect in much of his work, notably when he exposed the evil acts that took place in Irish laundries at the hands of nuns in the film Philomena.

The film had sprinklings of laughter and fun, but was viscerally, absolutely angry.

The real issue, if we’re honest, is that we allow some people the luxury of being demonstrably angry, but not others.

If a cis, white man is angry about a cause or political circumstance, or social issues, he is usually validated. But as Roxane Gay said in a 2016 article in The New York Times, “I am an opinionated woman so I am often accused of being angry. This accusation is made because a woman, a Black woman who is angry, is making trouble. She is daring to be dissatisfied with the status quo. She is daring to be heard.”

The harmful trope of the ‘angry Black woman’ is one that plays out constantly in our society. This summer, a Black mother was handcuffed by police for allegedly dodging a bus fare in front of her young son. She didn’t - she hadn’t - but it was too late, and the damage was done. Black men, too, are critiqued harshly for being angry, even if they are expressing no such emotion, and often suffer fatal consequences.

When I was a teenager, my older, male GP dismissed my symptoms and implied that I was making myself sick for attention. In those days, I was unassuming, polite, and the ultimate good girl. I nearly died on an operating table as a result of his negligence.?

Later, I realised that in order to be listened to and to be heard, I had to be borderline belligerent. When I experienced eerily similar circumstances twenty years later, I insisted on moving to a new hospital. I still ended up in intensive care at the height of the pandemic, but I live to tell the tale.

According to BBC analysis over the course of ten years (2012-2022), women reported feeling anger, sadness, stress, and worry far more than men. I no longer care if I’m known as a ‘difficult’ patient, or indeed if I’m seen as hysterical or even worse - unladylike. I’d rather be considered a nuisance than be dead. It’s par for the course if you’re a woman (and a small, blonde one at that.)?

Anger needs somewhere to go, and persistent, unresolved anger that impedes our own lives and those around us is clearly problematic. But it is also an important expression of feeling, and just as valid as joy, sadness, excitement, or worry.

Ideally, we would always expel our anger through deep breathing, or counting to ten, or going to a yoga class. Even throwing or breaking something (safely.) I say none of this with even the slightest hint of sarcasm, and am a huge proponent of any technique that helps to process strong emotions.

The episode Cold Cuts, in which Tony Soprano’s sister is arrested for physically assaulting a fellow parent at sports day, sees the mafioso dissecting the ‘family temper’ with his therapist. She offers a Freudian concept - that the depression experienced by him, his mother, and other relatives, is rage turned inwards.

Suppressed anger can even have long term physical effects, and in some cases can contribute towards high blood pressure and heart disease, among other things.

But it is also powerful and motivating, according to Moshe Ratson, an executive coach and psychotherapist. He extols anger’s role in helping us solve problems, energising us, and making us aware of injustice.?

Without anger, we would never have fought to win employment rights, human rights - everything we take for granted today. Everything that is eroding in front of our eyes right now.?

Yes, I will admit to getting really irked by people boarding a train who don’t allow passengers off first. It infuriates me when the XL bully owners near me walk their dogs off lead on main roads with impunity. Don’t even get me started on the volume of fly tipping on my street on a weekly basis: mattresses, cookers, fridges, bin bags, sofas - you name it, it’s like a shit jumble sale.

But the full force of my anger - the kind that makes me cry tears of rage - is reserved for the fascist ghouls that have somehow ended up governing our country, who derive pleasure from the deaths of innocent people both at home and abroad, all of whom had lives and dreams and aspirations for a good life.

When asked why I was so angry, I immediately cast my mind back to Halloween roughly a decade ago, when I witnessed a full-blown tirade from a tracksuit-clad, toothless old man with Worzel Gummidge hair. Some trick or treaters had dared to knock on his door and he was not happy about it.

An angry outburst that meant they knew where they stood, fully cognisant that they would not be getting any treats. And the old man could enjoy the rest of his evening in peace.

I love you grandad, you miserable old git.