Hello, anger.

In a four-month period between October 2022 and February 2023, I lost my oldest cousin, my grad-school roommate, my dog, whom I loved more than anything on the planet, and my house, to a catastrophic flood.

I guess I didn’t lose the house. Not permanently. But it had to be largely rebuilt, and I was living in a hotel. And after all the rest of it, it sure felt lost.

And *I* was lost and sad and panicked and my lovely FL told me I needed to go back into therapy, even offering to pay for the first month when I balked at the cost.

And since that time, 22 months ago, I have had the most intensive therapy of my entire life. 2-1/2 hours a week, every week. Week in. Week out. On a cruise. During Christmas. When I am on vacation.

Therapy is sacred.

And here’s what I have learned, as I stand on the precipice of reducing those hours by a quarter, as my primary therapist tells me that I don’t need 10 hours of therapy a month right now, that we can safely scale that back, that we can do *slightly* less without compromising my wellness journey.

I’ve learned to not focus on things that I can’t control. I’ve learned to prioritize myself. I’ve learned to breathe through the anxiety. I’ve learned that meditation really does work for me, and that I shouldn’t forget that it does. And I’ve learned that, above everything else, I am angry.

Except that anger doesn’t really exist.

One of the first things that Juliana said to me, in response, likely, to me saying “I’m just so fucking ANGRY!” was “Anger is a secondary emotion. What’s really going on here?”

Anger is a secondary emotion. Anger arises from other emotions that are too painful to process. Anger arises from other things that are more exhausting to deal with.

Anger is exhilarating. Anger. Anger keeps you up at night, and not from worrying, but from research. Researching so you can fight more effectively. To fight as effectively as I need to, you need to know all the things, even about shit you don’t care about.

I had a Christian once tell me, a real and clear pragmatic agnostic , that he was done discussing religion with me because I was making him feel stupid.

Yes. Give me more of that, please.

Anger is a drug. Who am I if I am not angry?

I feel like I have been angry for most of my life. Angry I that I wasn’t graceful or athletic. Angry that I was so much smarter than everyone else, and that made them not like me very much because I wasn’t great at hiding it. Angry because none of the boys that I liked ever liked me back. They always picked Amy or Judy or Angie. Angry because my brother was fucking perfect, while I fell short of that measure every single day. Angry that I was not an attentive student, or a dedicated musician. Angry that I never really fit in, not anywhere, and certainly not with my family, who might as well have been martians.

Angry that for most of my life I felt so completely misunderstood.

But that is not why I am angry now. I’m angry now because I am a goddamned patriot and Donald Trump and Elon Musk seem to want to destroy this country and I kind of love it here.

So, if anger is a secondary emotion, what’s currently under there?

Well, what’s left if you peel away the anger is just…Sadness. Disappointment. Fear.

I’m sad that most of this country has a very different opinion than I do about what it means to be human, and who is deserving of the protections we offer to those we consider to have passed the test.

I’m disappointed that for so many people-about 77,297,721 if you want to be pedantic—didn’t find blatant racism, sexism and adjudicated sexual assault to be dealbreakers when choosing our next president. That they put their own comfort ahead of the actual lives of the people that this man and his administration are going to hurt. I know these people, and I’ve always thought they were better than this. So, I’m disappointed to find out that I was wrong.

And I am scared. Every day. Every minute. Like scared in my bones. Scared like I live in Poland and it’s 1939 and I can see what’s coming. And I know it’s going to be bad.

Scared scared.

But see, if I am those things, then I will just crawl in my bed and pull the covers up over my head and not come out. And that doesn’t seem all that productive.

But to be productive, you guessed it, I need the anger.

And I know that it’s wearing thin on everyone around me. I know that most of my friends are tired of being scared, so they are choosing to just not talk about it, or think about it. They are just going to “deal with things as they come” and not let it get them too down just yet.

That is a luxury that I don’t feel that I have. Because I don’t think that I have a middle-ground where I can dance while the ship is going down, certain that surely *someone* will save me a lifeboat.

Maybe they will. Maybe the chaos will prevent anything at all from happening till we can get some grown-ups back in the room. Maybe someone with a modicum of both sense and influence will finally figure out that Elon Musk has grabbed too much power.

Or, maybe this has just been a good run at an ultimately failed experiment.

Either way, love y’all.