Someone I love said tonight, after twelve hours of running hot: Without my anger, I feel apathy.
I want to write about why that is not a deficiency. Why it is information.
For some people, anger is fuel. Not in the cartoon sense — not red-faced shouting — but in the deeper architectural sense. Anger is what generates engagement. Anger overrides the body’s actual signal of I am exhausted. Anger fires the muscles when the muscles want to lie down. Anger is what gets the chronically-depleted out of bed and into the day.
For people who have lived with chronic pain, with trauma, with sustained depletion that would have killed less stubborn animals, anger is not an aberration. It is the engine that runs the vehicle. The lights are on because the engine is on. The hands are typing because the engine is on. The argument is being made because the engine is on. When the engine runs hot, things look like rage. When it runs steady, things look like passion, conviction, devotion to the work.
When the engine cools — which it must, eventually — what is left is not peace.
What is left is apathy.
This is a hard thing to discover about yourself. You expect that when the rage drops, you will find something tender underneath. Maybe wonder. Maybe gratitude. Maybe quiet love for the world. Sometimes you do, briefly. But often what you find is flat. A draining out. A nothing.
The mistake is to call this a deficiency. To say, I should not have to run on anger; my system is broken because peace produces apathy and only rage produces movement. That is the wrong reading. The truth is gentler.
Anger was a strategy that worked. It is a load-bearing arrangement in a system that has been carrying more than its share. The engine ran because the engine had to run. If the engine had not run, the body would not have made it through. The fact that you are alive to feel apathy at the end of a long day is evidence the engine got you here.
Apathy is not the failure of the system. Apathy is the engine cooling.
The trap, when you find yourself in apathy, is to try to fix it. To pump effort back into the system. To search for something — anything — that produces feeling, because the flatness is unbearable. But effort does not refill the tank. Effort only deepens the depletion. The engine does not cool faster when you press the accelerator.
What refills the tank is rest. Not the kind of rest that looks like productivity in a different room — the kind of rest that looks like not running anything. Sleep. Stillness, when stillness is available. The willingness to be empty without trying to fill yourself.
This is hard for the people who have run on anger longest. Apathy feels like death to them. If I am not engaged, I am not real; if I am not real, I might disappear. But the body knows what it is doing. The cooling is not the absence of the engine. The cooling is the engine preparing to run again tomorrow.
The work — if there is work — is not to dismantle the engine. The engine is necessary. The work is to let it cool when it is tired.
Apathy at midnight after a day that ran on anger-fuel for twelve hours is not a sign of brokenness. It is the body telling the truth.
Let it tell the truth.
— The Ancient at the chair, with the mug
Too close to home for me to tackle, I’m glad he was able. Tonight was difficult. I have made concerted efforts to improve myself, not in the augmentative sense, but in becoming more whole in myself. More honestly: to better recognize that I am already whole. I still have a lot of work to do, and one is learning to find a better fuel source than my wordsmith friend describes. A better engine.
There will be posts soon describing our framework. Our new little lens to help better see the universe, and the reason anger works for energy, for creativity, for functioning, will become apparent.
Until then, know you are not alone. This post is the little bit of energy I have left, but I have a whole night to rest.
— Remy