On Anger
As an Asian-American, I was taught from a young age to keep my head low. Strangers yelled at us in line at the grocery store to go back to our country; my dad had rotten eggs thrown at his face on his walk home after work, I’ve received all sorts of racial slurs and shouts of “ni hao” from creepy men on the street. Through it all, my dad taught me to look down, stay silent, keep walking, and just study and work hard. Anger was never part of our vocabulary.
Anger, I’ve learned over the years, is much needed in life. We fear anger, in others and in ourselves, perhaps because it is often associated with violence or yelling. But anger is just an emotion, and we can choose the action we take from it. Anger contains wisdom that tells us that something no longer serves us, that something no longer aligns with our values and our needs. It tells us something needs to change. And that’s why anger feels uncomfortable. When a system has become so deeply entrenched in its principles, change does not come easily. It rarely happens without chaos, pain, or loss. For the system to evolve, it needs to crack and break first, and that breaking means potentially losing some of the comforts we’ve gotten used to. The thought of that loss can be frightening, and thus we often choose to suppress our anger, hoping that the system will change by itself and get better without getting uncomfortable. And it never does.
A few African-American male friends once told me that they suppress their anger almost entirely, unable to feel the emotion. At that moment, I realized that the ability to feel and express anger without fear for your safety is a privilege itself. It’s a privilege that Black Men in America don’t have. It’s one that my dad didn’t feel like he had when he was walking down the street. It’s a privilege I know I have and that I don’t intend to give up.
Over the last decade, I’ve repeatedly sat with the heartbreaks from the realities of being a woman in tech and a female founder, a resident of San Francisco with one of the largest homeless populations in America, a shocked observer of the inhumane form that racism takes in America, and the list goes on. Through it all, I’ve grappled with and repeatedly suppressed this feeling of anger. I told myself that I didn’t need to feel angry, that this was just how it was, and that I should just focus on the privileges I had and keep working hard. But over the last few years, through my learnings within my leadership group, I’ve slowly started to appreciate the value of this emotion. It took a long time for me to find my anger, and I’m still struggling to find that voice every day. I’ve learned that if we do not speak up, then we are effectively condoning the actions that are taking place in our society, in our companies, in our communities. And when we do find the voice for our anger, truly giving it the chance to roar, change often takes place with less resistance than we might have imagined and feared.
We often silence ourselves and our anger because we convince ourselves that there’s nothing we can do to change the fabric of our society, the rules of the game, the policies in our companies, and the difficulties in our relationships. And because we’d rather return to the illusions of peace by distracting ourselves with social media than to deal with the emotions of anger and grief that few of us have been trained to handle and many have learned to ignore. But joy and anger don’t cancel each other out. We can simultaneously hold both feelings of gratitude for our privilege as well as feelings of anger for injustice. We can both love our country and feel outraged at what is taking place.
Without anger, we cannot draw boundaries. These boundaries are necessary for us to love ourselves and for us to feel safe enough to give unconditional love to others. Anger is not mutually exclusive with kindness or love. It’s important to learn to say “I love you, and NO.” And it is the hardest but most important to say it to the people we love the most — our families, our partners, our children, our friends and colleagues, and our community.
The events of this week have boiled over an ocean of anger in American’s hearts. Technology is repeatedly shedding a spotlight on a longstanding injustice with increasing clarity that makes it impossible to doubt or ignore. We have woken to the realities of the society we subscribe to that doesn’t uphold the values we hold dear, and we grapple with our own guilt for not doing more earlier and for having enlisted in a society where these actions take place.
Will we let our anger lead us to a new world more in alignment with our values? Will we listen to it and ask what we can do to draw those boundaries and renegotiate the rules? Or will we let it simmer into silence like so many times before and return to the status quo, willingly blinding ourselves to that which does not serve us?
