The Anger Was the Signal
Before the anger there was confusion about what was wrong,
before the anger there was the accommodation of the long
list of things I was telling myself were normal and were fine.
Before the anger I was standing on the other side of the line
between the person who endures and the person who can see
that what they’re enduring is the problem, and that clarity
arrived precisely in the shape and texture of the anger.
Before the anger I was numb and after it I was the danger
to the status quo that had been built around my willingness
to absorb and explain and contextualize and bless
the treatment I was getting with the benefit of the doubt
that eventually the anger burned completely out
and replaced with the knowledge of what had been happening.
And the knowledge felt like clarity
and the clarity like reckoning,
and the reckoning was the first clean feeling I had in some time.
Before the anger I was lost and after it I knew the crime.
The anger was the signal and I finally heard it right,
the anger was the signal saying something is not right.
Get out of the accommodation and into the accurate account
of what is actually happening and what that amounts
to, in terms of what you’ll accept and what you won’t any longer.
The anger was the signal and the signal made me stronger,
not by burning everything but by telling me the truth.
The anger was the signal and I listened and it’s proof.
My body knew before my mind caught up with the inventory.
My body had been running its own version of the story
for months before I was willing to write the chapter that it wrote.
My body had the anger and my mind had the footnote
that said let’s contextualize and let’s assume good faith,
and let’s not draw conclusions from the evidence that’s chafed
the situation into something that would be hard to take back.
My body had the anger and my body had the facts.
The anger came as information, came as the data
of a system reading its own state and saying there’s a strata
of the situation that you haven’t let yourself admit,
and the strata is the problem
and you’re standing in the middle of it.
And the anger was the reading of the instrument against the truth
of what was happening that I had been explaining since my youth
in terms that left the other person’s role ambiguous at best.
The anger was the instrument that finally failed the test.
I’m grateful for the anger
in the way you’re grateful for the check
engine light that tells you something’s wrong before the wreck.
Grateful in the way you’re grateful for the pain that says stop
before you do the further damage, before you can’t stop.
The anger was the body’s check engine, was the system’s care
for the self that had been compromising past the point of fair,
and I am grateful for the anger and I’m grateful it arrived
before the situation became the one from which I could not have survived.
And I would tell anyone who’s sitting
in the confusion of the numb
that the anger is the clarity that’s trying hard to come
through the layers of accommodation that you’ve stacked on top
of what is actually happening, and the anger wants to stop
the narrative that makes the situation your responsibility to manage,
and tell you clearly what is causing all the ambient damage.
The anger is the signal and the signal knows the score.
The anger was the truth I’d been refusing to hear more.
Before the anger I was explaining and adjusting and revising,
before the anger I was doing the perpetual rationalizing
of something that did not require that much rationalizing
if I had been willing to call it what it was from the beginning.
But calling it what it was would have required a response,
and the response would have had a cost and I was choosing since
the beginning not to pay the cost, which was the accommodation.
And the anger broke the accommodation and brought the situation.