The Anger I Was Never Allowed

She was the good one. Everybody knows the good one in a family, and in hers it was Antoinette, and it had been Antoinette since she was about six, and it was never anything she chose.

She was the one who did not make a fuss. The one who was helpful. The one who could be relied on not to be a problem in a house where problems had to be rationed because there was only so much room for them.

Antoinette is forty three. She stopped drinking eighteen months ago.

And what came up, about four months in, was not sadness. It was not grief and it was not fear. It was rage. And it did not arrive as a thought or a memory; it arrived in her hands and in her jaw, standing at a bus stop on an ordinary Thursday, out of nothing at all, so strong that she had to hold the pole.

She has never in her life been allowed to be angry. Not once. There was no place in that house where an angry Antoinette could have been put, and so she became a woman without that setting, and everybody praised her for it her whole life.

And now it is here and she has no idea what to do with it, and she is frightened of it, and she is more frightened of what people would say if they saw it than she is of the thing itself.

You know that feeling. It might be anger, or something else you were never given permission to have. It has been underneath for a long time and something has been sitting on top of it, and now the lid is off and there is a thing in your chest that nobody in your life has ever seen.

You are told to pour it out rather than tidy it, and you were never asked to hand God an edited version. The psalm says trust in him at all times, ye people, pour out your heart before him, and pouring out is a word for emptying a vessel completely; that is exactly what stands written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that instruction real for a woman holding a pole at a bus stop.

Pour out your heart before him

Let me be careful, because this is the exact place where people start telling other people what is wrong with them, and I will not do that to you.

I am not going to tell you why the anger is there, or what it is about, or what it means about your childhood, because I cannot see any of that from here and neither can anybody who writes for a living. And I am not going to tell you that working it out is what will keep you standing, because that would hang the whole of your life on a piece of work nobody assigned you.

What I can do is show you what Scripture says to do with a thing you cannot manage.

Trust in him at all times; ye people, pour out your heart before him: God is a refuge for us.Psalm 62:8

Pour out your heart. That is the instruction, and it is given to everybody, and the verb is the one you use for emptying a jar. Not filtering. Not presenting. Not selecting the parts that are fit to be seen. Emptying, until there is nothing left in it.

You are instructed to empty it rather than manage it, and you were never asked for a filtered version. That is what stands written in Psalm 62, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that instruction land on a woman who has been the good one since she was six.

And look at what the psalms themselves actually contain, because this is not theory. There are psalms that shout at God. There are psalms that accuse Him of sleeping. There is one that says thou hast laid me in the lowest pit and finishes in the dark with no resolution at all. God did not edit those out of His own book. He kept them and had them set to music and sung in public worship.

You are holding something Scripture already contains, and you were never carrying a thing too raw to be brought. Scripture keeps the angry psalms in the songbook, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person believe that the same door is open to them.

And then the last clause, which is the reason the pouring is safe: God is a refuge for us. A refuge is a place you are allowed to arrive at in whatever condition you are in. Nobody has ever been turned away from a shelter for arriving wet. The invitation to empty the whole jar and the promise of refuge are in the same sentence, and they hold each other up.

You are pouring it out inside a refuge, and you were never doing it somewhere you could be thrown out of. The written word puts refuge in the same breath as pour out, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that safety real in a room with the door shut.

And the plain thing, which this site says every time. What is under the lid is worth taking to somebody trained to sit with it, and a counselor is not a criticism of you or of your family. And the friend, the doctor, the room where people sit in a circle and say true things out loud. All of it is God's kindness with a face on it, and using it is not a failure of faith, and a woman who has been the good one for thirty seven years is allowed to be helped.