I’ve been thinking about anger a lot lately. How I don’t write when I’m angry. How when I do, it’s rarely something I can post. How what makes me angry maybe something I can control but only by causing tremendous collateral damage to the people I love most in the world. How sometimes courage is not changing the things you can but, rather, enduring those things for someone else.
Today I’m not feeling any serenity from knowing what I could and couldn’t change. My anger could almost swallow me whole on this cold February morning. I am watching my two little touchstones – Thing1 and Thing2, and most of the time, they have a psychotropic effect on my darkness. I sometimes wonder if they are the remedy or if their antics and exuberance are more anesthetic than answer. I know that in my wondering, I’m tacitly admitting that the remedy is in me somewhere. I’m just don’t know where.
Sometimes I feel guilty and self-indulgent writing about anger or even dwelling on it. For the most part, I try to follow Woody Allen’s advice when he says, through the character of Gertrude Stein in the movie Midnight in Paris that the artist’s job is not to succumb to despair, but to find an antidote to the emptiness of existence. But, nine months ago, when I started this blog, I said to the mentor of a Writer’s Workshop at Hubbard Hall, our local community theatre and art center, that I wanted to become a real writer.
At the time, for me, that meant becoming a published author. That is still high on my priority list, but one of the beauties of writing in this group, has been that it has breathed new meaning into what it meant to become a real writer. It is more than finding a publisher or finishing a first opus. It is about writing – and living – authentically. It is about recognizing the good, the bad and the ugly in my own stories – and, hopefully, finding a new meaning in them.