Here’s the thing about anger: it’s complicated. If expended in the wrong direction, or if indulged for too long, it can be futile, all-consuming, and self-defeating. You can’t concentrate. You lose sleep. You eat crappy food. You’re truculent and prickly. You bite when you should only bark.
On the other hand, if well-managed and judiciously deployed, anger can keep your teeth sharp and ready for those times when you really should bite. It can prevent you from repeating mistakes, or allowing others to repeatedly offend. It can make you intolerant of injustice. It can stimulate, motivate, and activate. For all the quinoa-and-yoga talk of finding your “center of peace,” it remains the case that there are plenty of things in the world (and in our individual lives) that are unjust, unfair, mean, and infuriating. Anger is an entirely appropriate response to those things.
I’ve heard people say “I don’t spend a lot of time being angry” and I used to envy them, thinking that seemed like an eminently healthy way to go about life. Now, I wonder what rock those people are living under, what truly epic level of privilege structures their world, and how their moral compass got so broken.
My go-to song when I’m angry is Cee-Lo’s “F**k You,” which was re-recorded, re-titled, and made safe for radio as the much-less-satisfying “Forget You.”
The song is about Cee-Lo seeing his ex with her new paramour and so it might be slightly too petty to rise to the level of “worth it” anger that I would want to defend. Then again, I don’t know her. Maybe she deserves it.
At any rate, I think this song is a good example of how to deal with anger that doesn’t have an obvious outlet. Sometimes you need to address a person or issue directly when you’re angry– to confront, to tackle, to challenge, to fight– but every hill can’t be your hill to die on. For all of those other, smaller, and non-fatal hills, a full-throated “F**k You” is enough to do the trick.
Runners-up for #30DaySongChallenge, Day 20:
- Jay-Z’s “99 Problems”
- Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright”
- Beyonce’s “Irreplaceable”
- OutKast’s “B.O.B.”