My anger is so buried under competence that people mistake it for reliability

Dear Delyara, I keep functioning. That is part of the problem. The forms still get signed. The meals still happen. The work still gets done. The people around me still get my calm voice most of the time. From the outside, it can look like resilience. Sometimes it is really anger with nowhere respectable to go. It comes out in strange ways. The need to be alone. The sharpness with the wrong person. The sudden inability to care about one more practical thing. The bitterness that surprises me in tiny moments. The secret fantasies of dropping every responsibility and walking out of the house just to hear myself exist without interruption. I don’t think the anger is wrong. I think the way it has had to hide has made it much harder to live with.