There are such wonderful blessings in my life – I have this amazing baby, an amazing family, and I loved X Factor – all these moments of joy, and then these sharp drop-offs. I’d be awake, lying in bed, crying. There’s these weird moments of misplaced anger I have.
I was a confused young girl with so much tragedy. Sometimes when you’re going through stuff, the last person you’re thinking exists is God. I mean, it was my confusion, the anger that was in my heart, all that drama. But thank God I know God now, okay?
‘Lose My Cool’ is the second track on my EP dedicated to a stage in the grieving process. This track represents anger. I really bottled a lot up after my mother passed, and one day, I couldn’t handle it anymore and just exploded on all of my friends and family. It was a very passive way of dealing with things, not very healthy.
On banks, I make no apology for attacking spivs and gamblers who did more harm to the British economy than Bob Crow could achieve in his wildest Trotskyite fantasies, while paying themselves outrageous bonuses underwritten by the taxpayer. There is much public anger about banks and it is well deserved.
We are taught to believe it’s bad to be angry, or at least it’s not good. That’s not the case all throughout the world. People are more open and not embarrassed about it. For instance in Paris, people believe Americans have a really unhealthy relation with anger. They think it’s essential to get angry.
People who are prone to anxiety are nearly always people-pleasers who fear conflict and negative feelings like anger. When you feel upset, you sweep your problems under the rug because you don’t want to upset anyone. You do this so quickly and automatically that you’re not even aware you’re doing it.
Hoping they’d been inspired by the examples of Anne Frank and other teens who had turned negative experiences into something positive by writing about them, I handed out notebooks for my students to journal about their lives. There was some initial resistance. But then the stories poured out of them, full of anger and sadness.
Anger, pain and a tinge of joy are the recursive emotions I have been waking up to ever since I read reports on how Harvey Weinstein sexually harassed women in Hollywood for years. Some of these women are actors I have been longing to co-star with even if they reside in another part of the globe.
The dog is often quick to resent a kick, be it from man or beast, but I have never known him to show anger at the door that slammed to and hit him. Probably, if the door held him by his tail or his limb, it would quickly receive the imprint of his teeth.
It’s frustrating to see part of your body not responding – even more so given the way I am and the way I like to train and always give 100 per cent. You experience sadness, anger, and powerlessness… you really want to do something, but you can’t. In the end, however, you have to be honest with yourself and those around you.
Each person’s drive to overwork is unique, and doing too much numbs every workaholic’s emotions differently. Sometimes overwork numbs depression, sometimes anger, sometimes envy, sometimes sexuality. Or the overworker runs herself ragged in a race for attention.
What I needed most was to love and to be loved, eager to be caught. Happily I wrapped those painful bonds around me; and sure enough, I would be lashed with the red-hot pokers or jealousy, by suspicions and fear, by burst of anger and quarrels.
If there are a couple of adjectives people use to describe me, anger is usually in there. I’ve never taken that as criticism. It’s the way I naturally communicate. But I’m not faux-angry, like Lewis Black, or angry like a gun-toting crazy person. I’m just angry in a mild way – it’s not like I’m going to do anything about it.
Anger, if used properly, might be for a cause, like helping feed children or stopping abuse somewhere. When we understand that every quality has importance and value, then we open up to this. Shining a light on these shadow qualities gives it balance.
I’m not like most comedians. I don’t deal with just heckles – I’m also dealing with threats and anger. Here I am, a brown person on stage being quite blunt. I talk about white privilege; I talk about U.S. imperialistic practices; I talk about colonialism. I’m not saying things that are easy for people to laugh at.
As a child growing up in San Francisco in the 1950s, I sometimes met insults when I ventured outside of Chinatown or my neighborhood. I have even been spat on and threatened with a knife. I could have let my anger fester until it became hate. However, I realized they were isolated incidents, and I simply got on with my life.
I’ve been trying to learn how to not be so conflicted about things like my own anger. I’ve always had a place in my music for my anger as a way of compensating for not having a mechanism to express it in my everyday life. So I’ve been trying to be more true to myself, and that helps me to chill out a little bit. But politically, uh-uh. No.
My mom’s whole side of the family, they’re all Packers fans. My mom’s a Bears fan. My stepdad is a Vikings guy. So that gets ugly. My mom sits upstairs watching the Bears game; he sits in the basement. They can’t watch it together. Football’s a violent anger in our family dynamic.
You’ve just got to have a sense of respect for the person you have children with. Anger doesn’t help anybody. Ultimately you have to say forgiveness is important, and honoring what you had together is important. But it’s easy to say and harder to do.
I have long believed that there are fundamentally two forces or emotions that drive our decisions – love and fear. Love has its many manifestations: compassion, gratitude, kindness, and joy. Fear often manifests in cynicism, anger, jealousy, and anxiety. I worry that many of our communities are being driven by fear.
It’s very shocking, I think, for people caring for the dying to realise how unsaintly they feel, how much anger is mixed up with their grief. In fact, often I think the anger that they feel is a form of grief; it’s a kind of raging against what’s happening.
Many are observing Ferguson and witnessing the anger, demonstrations, looting and vandalism and calling for quiet. But quiet isn’t enough. The absence of noise isn’t the presence of justice – and we must demand justice in Ferguson and the other ‘Fergusons’ around America.
One of the greatest lessons of my own life was learning to turn the inner rampage of hatred and anger toward my own father for his reprehensible behavior and abandonment of his family into an inner reaction more closely aligned with God and God-realized love.
To find gratitude and generosity when you could reasonably find hurt and resentment will surprise you. It will be so surprising because you will see so much of the opposite: people who have much more than others yet who react with anger when one advantage is lost or with resentment when an added gift is denied.
God’s love-eye does not see essentially into the wicked rebellious apostate soul; neither also into the devil, but his anger-eye sees thereinto; that is, God, according to the property of the anger or fire of wrath, sees in the devil, and in the false soul.
