It wasn’t that I could say for sure what had happened in each of those cases - of course I couldn’t, they were just anonymous numbers on the page - but their sheer volume seemed horrifying. Of course it wasn’t anger when, during a faculty meeting early in my teaching days, I distributed statistics about how many female students in our department had reported instances of sexual harassment the year before: more than half of them.Ī faculty member grew indignant and insisted that most of those claims probably didn’t have any basis at all. Of course it wasn’t anger when I was 34 and fighting with my husband, when I screamed into a pillow after he left the house so our daughter wouldn’t hear, then threw my cellphone across the room and spent the next 10 minutes searching for it under the bed, and finally found it in a small pile of cat vomit. Of course it wasn’t anger when I was 16 and my boyfriend broke up with me, and I cut up the inside of my own ankle - wanting so badly to destroy something, whatever I could. Of course it wasn’t anger when I was 4 years old and took a pair of scissors to my parents’ couch - wanting so badly to destroy something, whatever I could. By which I mean that at a certain point, I started to suspect I was angrier than I thought. At the shrillest moments of our own self-declarations - I am X, I am not Y - we often hear in that tinny register another truth, lurking expectantly, and begin to realize there are things about ourselves we don’t yet know. Why? Sadness seemed more refined and also more selfless - as if you were holding the pain inside yourself, rather than making someone else deal with its blunt-force trauma.īut a few years ago, I started to get a knot in my gut at the canned cadences of my own refrain: I don’t get angry. In truth, I was proud to describe myself in terms of sadness rather than anger. It’s easy to misunderstand the self as private, when it’s rarely private at all: It’s always a public artifact, never fixed, perpetually sculpted by social forces.

“I get sad.” I believed this inclination was mainly about my personality - that sadness was a more natural emotion for me than anger, that I was somehow built this way. įor years, I described myself as someone who wasn’t prone to anger. To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

Accepting the Fall by Meg Harding