Yesterday I wrote some very mean things to someone I love. He suggested I don’t love him. Perhaps someone who can write such things isn’t capable of love (my thought, not his). I don’t like writing mean things – too much of the f-word makes me queasy, too many bitchy accusations and whining questions drain me. Is there any way to do anger with dignity?

I am awash in anger right now. If I let it, I can ride it all day – slamming down my laundry basket, unable to write, snarling at the dog and at my kids. It exhausts me and makes me feel, as I did yesterday afternoon while I pressed SEND on one black and blue email after the next, like a character from The Sopranos. A minor character. A character who will be whacked soon.

My seething ebbed in and out of self-pity, but I came to a quieter place late in the day when I talked to my dear friend and godmother. She told me that her husband–they were married just two weeks ago in one of the most beautiful ceremonies I’ve seen– has pneumonia and that her 96-year old mother is choosing to die. “She’s lucid. She’s ready.” The words snapped me into equilibrium, not out of sadness but out of anger. Anger is such a selfish reflex. I told her I was ashamed to have been hiding out in its immense shadow all day.  ”You deserve to feel anger,” my friend allowed me, “A lot of people have been letting you down. But don’t let it drain you of your beauty and light.”

Letting me down. Draining me. Confusing me. 

I try to sort the knotted chains that led to this angry space:

• The husband who has been away more than he’s been home, who is going to Africa for eight months, “and nothing you can say or do will change my mind.”
• The lover who said beautiful things, who exposed his heart so nakedly and then took it back, placing it at the feet of the woman – his wife – to whom it rightly belongs. When he read to me how they’d made love in an alley, how small she was beneath his hands compared to me, how she’d come to love him anew, I sank.
• The father who died, planning his entire funeral without asking for my input, who made his final slip into unconsciousness when I was out of town, although I’d been there every day, week in and out for a year.
• The therapist arrested on child pornography charges.
• The long distance romance who said of me: “I was never attracted to you.”
• The dear friend who after making love to me once said, “I will never love you. I could never love you.”
• The boyfriend who upon breaking up with me said, “I never loved you. I just said that because I knew it’s what you wanted to hear. Because you were pregnant.”

Yes, there are many ways to be heartbroken, abandoned, deceived. And many situations that will bring mean and ugly things to the surface. That’s the not the place where I want to live. But I don’t want to live in such sadness either. 

“Don’t react from scarcity,” a friend told me recently. “Act out of fullness.” I’m trying.