My Anger Has Become So Well-Behaved That Even I Sometimes Mistake It for Tiredness

Dear Delyara, It almost never arrives cleanly. Instead it hides. In headaches. In sharpness. In needing the house to go quiet immediately. In how intolerable one more practical request can suddenly feel. In the private cruelty I direct toward myself after I have been too patient in the wrong room for too long. I think part of the problem is that I was trained early to make anger acceptable before I was allowed to feel it fully. To soften it, explain it, convert it into understanding, guilt, maturity, or silence. So now it rarely gets to stand up in its own true size. It leaks sideways through symptoms. And I am beginning to suspect that some of what I have been calling “being worn out” is anger with nowhere clean to go. That matters. Because tiredness asks for rest. Anger asks for truth. And I do not always know how to give it either.