Don't Look Back in Anger

Until recently, I thought of myself as a woman in touch with her emotions. That changed when I realized how much trouble I have expressing the feeling of anger directly or sometimes even acknowledging that I feel it.

I was reminded of this when I was writing yesterday's blog post. I wanted to link to the post in which I wrote about knitting Goose a scarf for his birthday, so I Googled "known associates" and "scarf." That didn't lead me to the post I was looking for; it led me to another post that included an email I received from The New Guy and my response to it.

When I look back on my brief relationship with The New Guy, I remember him being a jerk, but I also have some pleasant memories of sweet things he said to me. When I reread the email from that post (the text of the email is reprinted there completely, changed only to remove people's real names), I was shocked by how much of an asshole he was being. Even more than that, I was shocked by how sweet I was to him in response. I didn't completely let him off the hook for all his shitty behavior, but I largely absolved him of treating me completely like dirt. I should note that The New Guy is not a perfect example of someone I was angry that I failed to confront adequately because I genuinely feared that he might hurt me. The New Guy initially seemed like a kind-hearted, genuine person, but he quickly revealed himself to be emotionally abusive and on the way to being physically abusive. It was not a good situation in which to assert myself because there was a very real possibility of physical retaliation. Even so, when I reread the emails, I felt angry all over again.

Recently, I also thought about a woman I used to be friends with. We were such close friends that I chose the neighborhood I live in and where I bought my house because she and her husband lived here. Then, a few months after I moved into the neighborhood, she became elusive. She responded to emails and phone calls, but she wasn't as receptive to hanging out. On one occasion, I invited her to do something on a weekend, and she told me she couldn't because she would be out of town, but I thought I saw her and her husband leaving a local park. Because I viewed her as such a close friend, I gave her the benefit of the doubt and assumed she was busy. I thought things had turned a corner one weekend when we met up with our dogs at the dog park and spent some time together chatting and catching up. About a week after that, she sent me a venomous email in response to a series of posts I wrote on a previous blog I had. That blog, like this one, served as a diary, and I used the posts that offended her to work out some issues I had with family. In other words, none of the posts mentioned her or impacted her directly. I guess she just found whatever I had to say to be self-indulgent, and she thought that she had had a more difficult life, so I had no grounds to complain about my life. She contended that she said these things because she cared about me, but we never pursued the friendship beyond that. I didn't respond to her at all for a week before finally telling her that I was sorry she felt that way and asking her to return some things of mine she had borrowed.

I wish I had told the bitch where to stick it. What kind of person sends a mean email to a friend, calling her names and belittling painful experiences from her life, and claims to do it because she cares so much? I also have no patience for people who say that just because they have suffered something worse than you, you don't have the right to be upset about some misfortune that befell you. If that was a valid argument, nobody could ever be upset about anything because the Holocaust happened. Ridiculous. She also got some facts wrong in the email, such as saying I hadn't done anything for her birthday when I had, in fact, called her and bought her an expensive gift. Anyway, as you can tell, I'm still a little bit angry with this person.

What do you do with this residual anger? After a certain amount of time, it's not really fair to confront people out of the blue. I guess if I ran into this woman and she tried to be nice to me, I could tell her not to bother acting like we're friends, but it would be pretty strange of me to email her now and let rip all the things that pissed me off about what she did.

Obviously, the best thing to do with anger is let it go. But how do you do that? It's the question of how you stop caring what other people think all over again. I don't know how other people work, but I can't just say, "I no longer care about this" and then automatically no longer care about it. Even though I recognize at an intellectual level, the anger does not serve me nor does it hurt the person I'm mad at, I can't just decide to be done with it. So what do people do to let go of their backlog of anger?