I was Zen, and now I want to punch someone in the face

The Wrath of Can't

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I’m writing about the Seven Deadly Sins. Previously:

• Original Sin: Christianity’s Biggest Lie

• What I Learned About Lust From a Monk, A Marriage and a Breakdown

• Gluttony for Punishment: How three cakes a day saved my sanity

Paid subscribers can join the Seven Deadly Sins Writing Challenge: a therapeutic practice to rid yourself of your baggage through the art of spewing words onto the page. No priests required! Your writing challenge post will arrive in your inboxes on Tuesday.

Have you ever battered someone around the head with a hard object? A friend of mine did. It was one of the scariest moments of her life. The someone was her husband, and the object was a horse-riding hat, which she was holding by the straps.

No thought. No decision. Blind rage picked up the nearest object and made it a weapon. A few seconds of violence, followed by horror at herself. Her husband? Weirdly, he laughed. There was a satisfaction there. He had goaded her and won.

This incident is missing context. Mitigating circumstances. They were in the throes of a time so awful that it’s a miracle that they, as a couple, survived. His illness and her experiences of male anger did not mix well. But yes, horrifying. No one wants to find themselves, however briefly, being possessed by a monstrous, murderous rage.

While writing these pieces on the Seven Deadly Sins, I noted there is a traditional order for our infractions, supposedly from Worst to Least Sinful, which goes from Pride to Sloth.

Wrath is second-to-last.

What sense does that make? Has Pride ever battered someone around the head with a riding helmet? Has being a bit arrogant killed anyone’s spouse?

How can the source of a great deal of murder be only a little bit worse than lying on the sofa all day watching Netflix?

Pride was my subject this week, but writing about it has felt like wrestling with muddy mermaids. (So confusing. People say, “You must be proud,” but it’s a sin? “You should be proud of yourself,” but it comes before a fall?)

Meanwhile, the week has given me fury, twice now. So wrath it is.

Wrath is defined as an extreme form of anger, more intense and retaliatory, with a propensity to violence. Think the Wrath of God.

But don’t, because like other parts of the Bible introduced by flawed and frankly unenlightened humans trying to control the behaviour of their fellows by scaring them into obedience, they got this wrong. (Jesus, on the other hand, stayed correctly on message. If the concept of God is worth clinging to, then it is love, not vengeance.)

Anger, intensified, tips into wrath. Anger, the most gendered of emotions: the only emotion that many men allow themselves to express, and the one that women are most shamed for. But it’s thoroughly human, like all the emotions, and sits on the emotional scale right here:

On this scale, wrath is “rage”.

Many women, perhaps, if they drop through the floor of anger, not wanting to feel it, may go straight to jealousy (if they find a cause), or more likely to those disempowered, bottom-level emotions. I spent many years doing everything I could to keep out of those levels, which sucked me with a magnet glued there deep in my childhood.

From age nine, I was (in my family) famously angry. One brother used humour (and got cancer); one brother did impressions, made models, stayed good as gold; one sister made everyone happy with cakes and denial. But the third-born scribbled furious poems and said, “This stinks!” Anger was my surfboard when powerlessness was the abyss.

Drop into that: there’s no light. How can you even head for the surface? It’s roamed by horrific translucent creatures whose only false lamps are to lure you into their jaws.

So stay alive. Stay angry. And if something boots you off your board? Wrath at least keeps you afloat. Thrash around in your fury, and you might catch the edge of your surfboard again and clamber back on.

On the mission to be a more evolved human, I’m still working out the kinks. Eighteen years, I’ve been on baggage clearance. The carousel is a lot emptier, I swear. Fewer items coming through those big rubber flaps.

Sure, some of the cases are hefty. The Mother Wound, I thought I’d never lift it off and crack it open. But at the end of May, it was gone, and I was transformed. None of this work gets undone, but there are new levels.

Significant life challenges haven’t gone away. One item is still going around, unclaimed.

It’s been almost a year since I was made redundant from my dream job (Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths), and very little has emerged to fill the financial hole. Projects I have invested a great deal of time and hope in have — all of them, so far — not lifted from the ground. The necessity of income has led me to say yes to work that isn’t ideal (which I thought I was a long way beyond).

So, potential creative time is now spent helping students write about marketing (at least, until August). I’m so grateful for the money. But I yearn to be paid, instead, to use the core skills I’ve spent so many decades honing: that is, to write.

• In an age when even intelligent people have stopped reading books?

• In an age when publishing, on the ropes, hankers for celebrity?

• In an age when age is considered a handicap?

Aye, even in this age, my dreams refuse to die. It’s perhaps the greatest test of faith I’ve faced. And much of it is spent, I now see, with a happy face sticker over the fuel gauge.

This week’s rage source? In both cases, delivered by my husband. Poor husband, vessel for my personal development, the easiest channel through which I might be triggered when I’m trying to protect myself from all negative input. Him, I can’t avoid.

Twice, he made important decisions without consultation. One was overriding a potential mechanic’s very obvious red flags. The other had the effect of stealing four hours of my writing time. When I objected, he ignored my objections. Like my voice didn’t matter. Like my words had no weight.

Don’t worry. I didn’t assault him with safety equipment. I swallowed my rage (as good girls are taught) and took it to my room. When you’re on a quest to evolve into a more conscious being, every experience is feedback. An emotional trigger is the flag that says: dig here. This is the work, and tapping the tool by which I go deeper.

The surface: in this moment, my needs and concerns are being over-ridden. But what, in the depths, was being pinged?

Ah, powerlessness.

Anger is always preferable to that. To grief, to despair, to unworthiness. But I know that real power, the power of alignment with love, is further up the scale.

So I acknowledge what I feel. And though I have no power at all to persuade the world that I’m worth its attention, I do have the power to shift what I feel. To surrender to the process beyond my control, and appreciate this year’s deep purple petunias, with their galaxies of stars, that sit just outside my window.

Here for now. Like me. Here for now.

Linked Posts:

What I Learned About Lust From a Monk, a Marriage and a Breakdown

Gluttony for Punishment

Trigger Blessing