Anger

Anger saved my life, and I’m done being told to let it go.

Every wellness voice for the last thirty years runs the same instruction. Breathe it out. Release it. Let it go. Let it go where? Breathe it out into what? The people who most want you to release your anger are very often the exact people who’d rather you never looked too hard at what you’re angry about. Sedated and compliant. A good customer.

I’ve got a deep well of it, and I know precisely where the well got dug. I watched my mother self-destruct across my entire life. Slowly. In a way that looked, at every single step, like her own bad choices, and was — I see it clearly now — a system doing exactly what it was built to do.

She was big my whole life. It started with me. Gestational diabetes, the pregnancy that’s supposed to be a beginning, and instead it lit a metabolic fuse that burned for forty years. Then the 80s showed up with the war on fat. Out went butter, in came margarine and that “I can’t believe it’s not butter” garbage, low-fat this and low-fat that, which is just a polite way of saying high-sugar everything, because when you strip the fat out of food you have to put something back and the something is always carbohydrate. The food pyramid told her bread was the foundation of a healthy life. She believed it. Why wouldn’t she. It had the government’s name on it.

I’m certain it wrecked her hormones. A body run on that fuel doesn’t just get fat, it gets sick in the head, because the gut and the hormones and the mood are one system wearing different hats. So came the depression. And for the depression came the antidepressants, one after another, none of them doing much, because most of them barely beat a sugar pill in the trials and the trials were run by the people selling the pill. The diet broke her body, the body dragged down her mood, and an industry was standing right there to medicate the mood while never once touching the cause. She never had a chance. The trap closed on her before I was even born, and she spent the rest of her life inside it thinking the walls were her own fault.

Then I caught myself standing at the same edge. Fat. Stuck. A junkie — and I mean the word. I had my vices and they had me. The one thing that separated me from my mother, the only thing, is that I figured out it was a trap before the trap finished closing.

But seeing the bars is not the same as being out of the cage. I saw the lie and I was still living in it. I knew the food was poison and I ate it. I knew the cycle and I rode it anyway, which is the particular hell of addiction — full knowledge, zero movement.

What finally moved me wasn’t a diet plan or a fresh start on a Monday. It was the moment the whole picture clicked into a single image and I understood, all the way down, how thoroughly I’d been lied to. About fat. About what food even is. And I didn’t get sad about it. I got furious.

These motherfuckers. These industries. These doctors reaching for the prescription pad instead of the truth. This entire fucking system killed my mother by inches, for money, and it had me lined up next. That thought is the single most useful one I have ever had. It did what fifteen years of knowing better never managed to do. It got me off the floor.

Anger is a clean fuel if you aim it at the right target. Aimed inward it’s just another way to die — that’s the version that ate my mother, the anger that curdles into shame and shame into the next binge. Aimed outward, at the machine that actually built the trap, it’s the most powerful engine I’ve ever run on. It doesn’t care that you’re tired. It doesn’t need a pep talk. It gets shit done on the mornings when nothing else on earth could drag you out of bed.

My mother never got to be angry at the right thing. She pointed it at herself and it consumed her. I pointed mine at the machine, and it dug me out. I’m not done being angry, because the machine isn’t done either.