the hard season
will
split you through.
do not worry.
you will bleed water.
do not worry.
this is grief.
your face will fall out and down your skin
and there will be scorching. 
but do not worry. 
keep speaking the years from their hiding places. 
keep coughing up smoke from all of the deaths you 
have died. 
keep the rage tender.
because the soft season will come.
it will come.
loud.
ready.
gulping.
both hands in your chest.
up all night.
up all of the nights.
to drink all damage into love.

--therapy by Nayyirah Waheed

What do I want to say but this? This and only this. This a thousand times until I stop hanging on every single word. Until my heart lets me move on. Until the burning quiets. Will it ever quiet? My anger applauds and my grief relaxes when I read this poem. I am not alone. And it's then that I know for sure that all that my anger wants is to be understood. But this is not a world that understands anger. This is a world that fears anger and shames the angry.

As I do this trauma work, I am learning that my anger is here to protect me, to guard that part of your mind that is so adaptable that it accepts trauma and abuse as normal as a means of survival. Anger is the tether that can bring you back to yourself after you've given everything valuable away just to stay alive or stay loved. When it is functioning properly, anger is healthy and necessary.

But I cannot expect anyone to understand because they have to reconcile with their trauma, grief, and anger in their own way. Most people will wait until their lives are falling apart to even start the work. Most people will blame you for being angry instead of seeing your hurt. Which means it is up to me to understand my anger. There will be precious little help from the outside. If my anger wants to keep me safe, but I haven't done the work with my trauma to understand what it is trying to keep me safe from, my anger will live and boil just beneath the surface no matter how much I forgive or try to ignore it. I've been sitting with it for at least a year, but I still struggle to accept my anger for what it is and to let it live inside of me. But the more I ignore or reject it, the harder it is to tell when a real emergency is happening and when it's just the past clouding my vision.

To reach my goal, I have to be friends with my anger. I need to be able to know when it is new anger and when it is old anger. Otherwise, I'll never know when I am safe and when I need to fight. And believe me, there are still plenty of fights worth starting or joining in this world under a curse. But I cannot fight all of the injustice in this world with the rage of a hurricane. There are days when I want to. But that will only burn me out. And all of these worthy causes need compassionate people in it for the long haul. People who are soft even though the world rewards hardness.

Lastly, as I've done this work with my trauma and my anger, I have begun to see the marks of anger on other people. How a coworker's difficult attitude is just a mask for the rage that they don't know what to do with from pain they haven't finished listening to. It makes it easier to not take these things personally and to find a way to encourage them without being engulfed in their flames. But I wouldn't have known what I was looking at if I hadn't spent time with my own anger, listening and listening, waiting and waiting. Understanding blooms slowly. Even after you find the words for what you think is growing inside of you, the roots and the flowers take their time. But with each new lesson from my anger, I look forward to a soft season coming nearer. Keep the rage tender, don't harden against it.

This week, I have been doing more work on abuse and the effects that I find in myself. It's helping with my anger by showing me what it guards.

I am the oldest daughter of an abusive family. Not the kind of abuse that is brutal or forceful but the kind professionals call "narcissistic" in which the needs of individual family members are minimized or neglected to protect family members or habits or a status quo that is not healthy. Not the lightning strike or earthquake but the steady erosion of ground beneath your feet. 

I became the first line of defense, offense, whatever was needed. Our parents had already partially failed by the time I took on the mantel of being the stop-gap, plan B, the soldier who never gave up because all I had to lose was loss itself.

I am the oldest daughter and I learned to volunteer to go without or go to war as a means of controlling my environment. If you volunteer, you feel like you have more agency or identity or will than if they rip it from you. 

And I am nothing without my will to survive. 

Oldest daughter. Older sister. The first to gain her voice is not necessarily the first to be attacked. And nothing will make you yell like love. 

And I am nothing without my love for my sisters.

I volunteered. To need less, to fight, to heal those who cannot heal themselves. But no one told me that no one can control the trajectory of their gifts. People will do what they like with your iron-willed effort, your carefully given love, your dutifully surrendered gifts. There are no rules that dictate the use and administration of such sacrifices even if it leaves you gasping

I am nothing...
I am nothing...
What was it all for?

If it wasn't for healing, then it was for love. If it wasn't for love, then it was for hope. If it wasn't for hope, then it was for the next best thing. 

And what is that?

I am still looking for the answer. But I'll give it to you when I find it. Because the world is full of takers and I am trying my very best not to be one of them. 

Oldest daughter. Older sister. The biggest of the small warriors. I did what I could. I gave what I had. Now they want me to bury me weapons and wipe away my scars. 

"Drink from the cup of forgiveness." They say.

But I need a drenching not a cup. A long soak in the pool of Siloam. There are so many to forgive. I think of them when the sun rises. And, when the sun sets, I think of myself and how it still hurts to try to name the ways I gave too much to mouths that chose hunger and too much to wounds that chose blood. And yet I also never had enough. I think of how I didn't know any better and in so many ways, I still don't. Who will forgive me?

I am nothing without my will, my love, and my mistakes.