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.