Anger

I had been intending to write about anger here, even before the latest posts from Jim and Anthony.

I am currently - though not for much longer - working as a local radio journalist. The week before last, on the sixth consecutive day of working unpleasantly early shifts and not sleeping enough, I went to an ATM at 6am and found I hadn't been paid. Since I've been at the hand-to-mouth phase of my economic cycle, this meant walking to work instead of taking the bus. I was already feeling burned out by work which, despite its other satisfactions, I wouldn't do if it wasn't for the money. Then there was the ninety minutes in total of phone calls to various offices and call centres it took to clear up the situation and its knock-on effects. In between which, I had to deal with a colleague whose lack of commitment to his work had, for the second day in a row, sabotaged good stories which I had found and set up for him. Finally, I went out to do the story he'd failed to do - and it turned out to be a story of a bureaucratic nightmare that seemed the mirror image of the maze of call centres in which I was stuck.

The result of this cocktail was a virtuoso performance of sustained anger, directed at faceless people on the other ends of phones, witnessed by my colleagues. It was skilfully measured, in as much as I never quite overstepped the legalistic boundaries of my being "in the right". And it was at once satisfying and toxic - an anger bender, binge fury. I went home, slept for two hours and woke feeling hungover and ashamed.

In the conceptual toolkit of Transactional Analysis, there is the idea that different people (and families) collect different "trading stamps", which can be cashed in for the right to a particular behaviour. As a child, I learned to collect "anger" stamps. It's a habit, a kind of addiction - and if I go on putting myself through days like that, one which will damage my health.

So, how to handle this? Clearly, I have a lot to figure out! But, reading Anthony's last post, I wonder if I'm drawn to others who have had a similar relationship to anger? Because "anger" is also an important subject for several people whose writing and thinking matters to me. Here is Alan Garner, writing about the source and use of his own anger:

The trouble was that within me were two people. One was the son of a family of rural craftsmen. They had shaped the place in which I had grown; everywhere I turned, their hands showed me their skills; yet my hands had no cunning; with them I could make nothing, and my family despaired of me. The other...was the first to be taught...and had long had one ambition: the Chair of Greek at Oxford...

I had left the Army swearing never again to oblige anybody to do anything against their will...

...I felt an anger, at once personal, social, political, philosophical and linguistic. I knew...that to express that anger directly would be negative and destructive; and I came from a family of makers, not breakers. The anger had to be a creative act.

What can we make out of our anger?