The Truth About Anger: How it Saved Me
Then it left me empty and numb
Hello lovelies. It’s Tuesday, August 19, 2025 and we’re talking about anger, fear and the origin story of character defects. First time reading? Join more than 1K devoted readers. Sign up here. Feeling smashy? Smash the heart above ❤️ You can find me at jodishdoff@substack.com or in the comments.
I was an angry child—there are stories of how I’d cut up the couch cushions, temper tantrums where I’d slam my head into the floor, and the Popeye the Sailor Man punching bag they finally bought me. I’m somewhere in the middle of the dissociation spectrum, not remembering most of that, or feeling much of anything, ever. I don’t trust my feelings and I have a complicated relationship with facts. Agnosthesia1 still has me sifting through evidence and trying to extrapolate a life from that.
Here’s what I know:
I didn’t start fires or hurt animals, I wasn’t a budding psychopath, but I was an accident waiting to happen.
I grew up to be an angry, sarcastic, and sometimes violent woman. In my twenties, I punched a man in the face when he didn’t thank me for returning money I’d stolen from him. By age 30, I knew I was capable of killing an infant in a fit of rage. I’d be tired or hungover or just me being home with a crying baby and —I could see it clearly — picking up that infant, screaming Shut Up, then smashing it into the nearest wall to make it stop. I had a tubal ligation to make sure that could never happen.
After twenty plus years of alcoholic insanity, I found my way to 12-step recovery rooms in church basements. I was 33, with big hair, short skirts, and a chip on my shoulder the size of the USS Intrepid. I did what I could to contain my anger because I believed if I turned it towards you and let loose, a fireball the size of a cantaloupe would burst out of me and incinerate you.
That wasn’t a metaphor. I believed I had the ability to do that. It was my super-power. Thirty-three years of repressed anger came off me in waves, keeping people at an arms length, or further.
If I cared about you even a little, and you hurt me, I removed myself. If I stayed, I’d say something I couldn’t take back. I had a vicious tongue and kept a mental file of your weaknesses and soft spots. I knew how to hurt you, but not how to fight without eviscerating you. So, I left, got off the phone, walked away until the air around me cooled down.
I left to salvage friendships.
Needed surgery to save the life of a hypothetical infant.
I couldn’t control it and I was afraid of it killing us both if I opened that door.
Years later in recovery, at the point of introspection and evaluation where I was meant to become “…entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character” that weren’t serving me anymore, I was willing to let them all go—except the anger. I’d keep that, thank you.
Rage was fuel. It kept me going.
Rage was protection, an invisible shield that surrounded me.
Anger helped me focus.
It defined me.
Sober, I hung around Hell’s Kitchen, 10th Avenue, 11th Avenue, following a migration of pimps, only some of whom I knew. Keeping an eye out for one who’d raped and tortured me in my 20s, I choreographed music videos in my head where I seduced him, mutilated him, cramming his penis down his throat and watching while he bled and suffocated. Anger and music building to a crescendo. Watching until he was dead.
If I let go of the anger, I wouldn’t be able to do all that when the time came. And I knew I’d catch up, eventually. Or get killed.
Walking on 11th Avenue one of those nights, I had an epiphany of sorts. A pimp named Lightfoot, who’d kidnapped (but not raped) me years earlier had been bragging on the streets about how now he was working for Evelyn Wood Speed Reading.
It was a lie.
But, if that was the lie he thought was a step up, that would get respect from people who’d remembered him as a top money making player…I had a flash of understanding. The universe balances the scales eventually. I didn’t need to know how or when, I just needed to get out of the way. The anger I’d thought I needed, that I’d hung on to so dearly, had kept me stuck in time, replaying and reliving that night over and over, while the rest of the world had moved on.
Surely, after twenty years, my rapist pimp wasn’t thinking about me. Probably, he wouldn’t remember me at all.
And with that, I was able to let it go.
There was no forgiveness or forgetting, but I was able to unclench my fists, to relinquish some control and let some of that anger dissipate. I could turn it into something else, advocating for other women, escorting those who wanted to file charges. I could write about it, each time releasing a little more of the power the anger had on me. The room where he’d lived rent-free in my head for years, that door swung open. It wasn’t an empty room, there were remnants of his life, of that night, but he was gone.
Loosening my hold on that dark pound of anger gave me room to begin the work of excavating older tar pits of rage.
Here’s what I know about my anger:
It’s always been a mask for fear. Fear of not getting something I want, or losing something I have.
Here’s what I know about fear:
It’s a gift from the universe, installed to help us avoid harm. Instinctual fear is an early warning system designed for preservation of the species.
But, some fears are learned responses, things we’re taught as children. In our house, fear was weakness, a chink in the armor that sooner or later would be used against you. In my family and then in the life I made for myself, there was no room to be sad, in pain, or fearful. If I slowed down, stopped to sit on the curb and cry, the infamous they would eat me alive. They would drive right over me.
Anger, on the other hand, could protect me. It was the castle that surrounded me, the turrets manned with archers. A moat. Anger kept you at bay and kept me safe.
Living inside that armor for years, inside castle walls, surrounded by a moat of alligators and crocodiles, I was alone. Alone felt safe. Alone was numb.
Anger, the only feeling I’d allowed myself for decades, was corrosive, like battery acid destroying me from the inside, until I was skinless & raw, until your tenderness was painful. It seared my nerve endings until I felt nothing, until I was empty. Hollow as the Tin Man. A ‘57 Buick coasting on gas fumes, the needle on E. So, I’d push the envelope further each time—just to feel something, anything. Pierce something. Tattoo something. Put myself in life-threatening situations and then have to protect myself.
Self-protection had become self-destruction.
My survival mechanisms persisted beyond when they were needed,
My life had changed, but I hadn’t in many ways.
Those survival mechanisms, my coping strategies manifested now as character defects. They were hinderances. Relics that weighed me down.
For decades, I’d felt like a fist with feet. Fighting imaginary dragons was exhausting. One morning on the way to work, I stopped and screamed into the sky—or maybe I only screamed in my head—”If you’re gonna make me angry again, at least tell me what the fuck it’s about!”
And for a moment, the fist unclenched, for just a moment.
That was the beginning. Then came the real work.
Do I know where it all stems from? The original wound? Mostly, yeah.
Is that helpful? Not so much, no.
I can’t change the past, but I can change my understanding and my response to it.
I can’t control what I feel, but I’m in control of my actions.
I decide which wolf I feed.
I was recently described as ebullient by someone who’d just met me.
A woman I’ve worked closely with for five years told me I was cheerful and energetic.
And, my best friend remembers who I was, and still worries about making me angry.
If this resonated with you, please subscribe.
If commitment isn’t your thing, slip a buck or two into the Therapy Ain’t Cheap Fund.
Take a moment and share this with someone you think would enjoy it.
Or restack to spread the love. As always, I appreciate a good heart ❤️ smash. Thank you and tell me what you’re thinking.
The state of not knowing how you really feel about something, which forces you to sift through clues hidden in your own behavior, as if you were some other person—noticing a twist of acid in your voice, an obscene amount of effort you put into something trifling, or an inexplicable weight on your shoulders that makes it difficult to get out of bed. - the dictionary of obscure sorrows
Your memories and revelations are always so compelling, Jodi. Thanks for this latest. You're a true survivor (whatever that means but you know what I mean).
Such a clear powerful vulnerable important piece. I feel like I say that about everything you write - but you do land those every time. But each work has its unique strengths built on that foundation. The excavation of anger has me thinking about my own relationship with it. This week has been a terribly hard one for me. Anger is in the mix. Thank you for your work.