Anger - by Darylynn Starr Rank
February, 2006

Reader, please note the quotation marks immediately below. (I don’t want to worry you about my emotional state, even temporarily…)   

“The world is horrid right straight through and so am I… I want to grouch and sulk and rip and snort. I am a pail of milk that has gone sour.”

This is a marvellous quote. I use it in my journal writing courses, specifically, because it goes on to say, “Now, perhaps, having written it all down, the hatefulness will melt off to where the mist goes when the sun gets up?”  (Poetic, no?) 

Bear with me. I promise to tell you whose quote it is. Eventually. 

I love this quote for many reasons. But the first and foremost is how perfectly it echoes my own thoughts, even the cadence of my uncontrollable, incessant, internal ranting – some of the time.

Anger’s a heck of a thing. It can move in on you in a second, erupting, taking you over, exploding instantaneously. Or it can rise slowly, simmeringly, over hours or days, taking over your consciousness bit by bit, darkening each of those bits as it goes. 

It can be gone in a minute. Or linger over years. 

It can be trivial. Or the most important issue in your life. Both the cause of it, and how you deal with it, how you express it, how you cope.

It happens to every single one of us. It’s natural, normal. And inevitable. It’s even good, oftentimes. Healthy.  Empowering. It can give us the motivation to take care of something that needs to be taken care of. (For example…  It isn’t acceptable when someone treats us badly. We have to find a way to take that on. Anger is often the road into finding that way.) But that’s just one example.  It’s useful in all sorts of ways.

Of course, we all know that anger can be destructive, or debilitating, completely out of control. The key is using your anger to work for you. Finding ways to deal with it that get you what you need, that make you feel better, without wrecking yourself or anybody else. Finding strategies that help you both deal with your feelings, and deal with the situation. Those are sometimes the same thing. And sometimes different. 

The quote continues. “Perhaps the nastiness in me has scooted down my right arm and through my fingers into the pencil and lies spilled openly on the paper… Writing is a splendid sorter of …feelings, better even than paint.” 

Apparently, for Emily Carr, the author of this quote, writing (of all things!) was often the way she dealt with those feelings. (Another reason, as a writer, that I love this quote.  It’s how I deal with anger a lot of the time, too.) 

But there are all sorts of methods. And believe it or not, even at this stage in your life – basically, I think, at any stage – they can be discovered, practiced, and learned. There are books and lectures and workshops. Tapes and DVD’s. Even TV specials. All sorts of resources.  

So good luck with your own “grouching” and “snorting”.

Take care, all.

Darylynn Starr Rank (psychologist/writer) works part-time for Family Services of Greater Vancouver as a group facilitator. Her articles appear bi-weekly in The Record (New Westminster) and the Richmond Review.

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