Today I felt frustrated, tired, sleep-deprived and stressed-out. I was angry at the world. I took my usual running route at the park at an unusually early time, when treads were crowded with other joggers. I felt annoyed. I actually pictured kicking some of the most space-hogging and slow in my mind. I had a lot of anger inside of me.
Some people argue that competitive sports and aggressive video games are great outlets for suppressed anger. Maybe. However, nothing consumes my anger like a steady workout, such as running.
Why? Because I prefer to process my emotions, rather than just channel them somewhere without a thought. I know no better way to think anything over than stomping the ground rhythmically, listening as your heart pumps blood through your veins.
Where does it come from?
Anyway, there was no particularly good reason for me to be fuming. It’s just that anger is a go-to emotion for many of us, when life does not turn out to be as we planned it in the morning when we face some form of injustice. Just like that monkey, who didn’t get his grapes. Basic emotion even for animals, as it turns out.
Yesterday, after classes I felt tired and sleep-deprived because I was working on my writing assignments late. Still, I went to the library, where I was supposed to meet my buddy and work together on our projects. He didn’t show up. Today I learned that he is getting his term paper help from a service, so he just doesn’t need us working together anymore.
So I got angry. It was unfair, so it made me mad. However, there also was all my frustration at the unfinished task, all my fatigue, and irritability due to the lack of sleep. All clumped up in one bundle of negative emotion that made me want to scream and kick things.
I understand all this is rooted in a greater scheme of human survival. Anger helped us to stay alive, it helped us fight. Yet doesn’t it have way too much influence over every aspect of our complex modern life? Isn’t it hopelessly outdated and harming more than helping?
Angry boys, angry men?
My dad always was quick to lose it – raise his voice, slam the door, hit the table with the kitchen towel, if we were late for dinner. He never touched us, and therefore I thought that it was cool. Cool to be angry and show it, but never overstepping the line. Sometimes I pretended to be angry to impress my friends.
However, was it really cool?
- What put a rose-tinted filter over it?
- Was it merely the fact that he was my dad, my role model, my hero?
- Why a true man had to be angry in my eyes?
The truth is that the basic difference between traditional gender roles prescribed in our society is how we are supposed to handle fight-or-flight response. Think, what did you hear as a child?
- Boys don’t cry.
- Boys don’t run away.
- Boys are brave.
- Boys stand up for themselves.
Or was it:
- Girls do not fight.
- Girls must be gentle and pretty.
- Fighting isn’t pretty
Instead of standing up for themselves, girls are told to solicit help from the grownups. They have no way of letting out the anger that is bottled up inside them. Little girls often cry angry tears because they aren’t allowed to do anything else about it, their autonomy is taken away from them (and it sucks). I know it because my sister used to tell me how frustrating it was for her growing up.
Yet boys are confined to their roles as well. If a little boy is gentle-natured and feels perplexed when he faces injustice or violence, he is supposed not to “cry like a sissy”. He is supposed to “man up”, i. e. to have anger and wield it as a tool. If you do not have anger, find it. They will shame you, bully this anger out of you, they will drive you mad.
However, are we inherently angry?
Is this two-year-old experiencing his first conflict on the playground hardwired to get angry rather than upset? The “blue box” and the “pink box” that we are assigned at birth by our biological sex is at the very basic level defined by the restrictions put on us in the fight-or-flight situations and sometimes this deeply contradicts with our personality.
Men are socialized not to process and express their emotions, but rather to channel them. We are supposed to put emotions into action and to shape the world in their image. With all the angry men trying to bend the world with their un-examined, bundled emotions, no wonder there are so many problems.
My escape
I was taught all that. Not by my parents, I must do them justice (not explicitly, anyway), but rather by the narratives I internalized. By my friends and their fight stories, by the sitcom tropes where “showing who’s the man” is always about getting angry (slamming fists on the table, raising voice, looking daggers). In other words, behaving threateningly. Controlling your anger while brimming with it.
I had this anger. I learned to have it and wield it, although I never wanted it in the first place. Now I’m learning to get rid of it. Because I don’t think that anger solves things. Because anger kills. It kills you, the angry man, and it can kill innocent people around you.
Running helps me to process my anger.
It is a necessary measure. Physical exhaustion acts as a prism that breaks that hot mess of emotions into a more nuanced spectrum. I discover I work with all sorts of emotions – fatigue, sadness, frustration, surprise, fear.
Today after a mile in the park, as sweat became cool on my forehead, I came to realize that people around me weren’t an annoying bunch of obstacles dragging along and blocking the way. They were fellow joggers, they were here with me, doing the same thing, and I loved them for it.
A warm feeling rose from my heart and extended to them. An old man in front of me reminded me of my grandfather who passed away five years ago. I wanted to hug him and it made me want to cry. Not to punch a tree. And I’m not ashamed of it. My masculinity is now free from anger, mine to reclaim and redefine how I like.
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Photo credit: Pixabay