In defense of my anger
Or, that one time I took a forgiveness class
Four years ago, I stood in a parking lot, slipped a pebble into my shoe, and began walking along the grassy perimeter.
I had enrolled in a forgiveness class at church, and this was the first homework assignment: to spend an entire day walking around with a pebble in my shoe. The instructor wanted us to understand on a visceral level how our unforgiveness was like the pebble. “You might think that you’re getting revenge and hurting the person who hurt you by withholding your forgiveness. But really, refusing to release your anger and fixating on it — that will only hurt you,” the instructor had said.
“Carry unforgiveness with you long enough, and it could deform you, the same way the pebble would deform your foot.”
I did not want to be deformed.
I felt desperate to forgive. Good Christians forgave, and I wanted to be good, so I limped along, jiggling my foot every few steps to move the pebble to a more comfortable position so I didn’t feel it as sharply.
In the evening before bed, I walked out to my front yard, removed the pebble, and chucked it into the woods. That had been part of the homework too. “Let throwing the pebble become a metaphor for letting go of your anger. Ask God in that moment to help you release it.”
As the pebble disappeared into the trees, I stood in the dark and fumed.
The exercise had not had the intended effect on me. I felt even angrier than before.
I decided to enroll in the forgiveness class upon returning from a two-year stint in Honduras managing a library at a bilingual school. I was unemployed, broke, and living with my parents. I needed a reason to leave the house every Tuesday night. This fit the bill.
The goal of the class was what you might think. By the end of ten weeks, each of us would forgive someone (or even some ones) who harmed us.
At 28, I was the youngest one there. I was afraid I’d have nothing in common with the women, but I worried for nothing. They were just like me. They had been reprimanded for their anger (“it’s sinful;” “it’s not of the LORD”) and shamed into silence. Church people called them bitter behind their backs. They were walking wounds, and they were furious about it.
Throughout the course of the class, we did exercises that prompted us to forgive. In addition to the pebble assignment, we read about the health benefits of forgiveness. We wrote psalms of lament and shared them in the darkened sanctuary while candles and incense burned. We imagined ourselves in a safe place with Jesus. My safe place looked like the generic Windows XP background, with its cheerful green field and reassuring blue sky.
We also selected stuffed animals that reminded us of our wounded inner child and spoke to them the way we wished we had been spoken to. The animals sat expectantly in the church pews, an assortment of browns and tans. I remember craving color. I spotted a tuft of pink and made a beeline for the smart looking pig that I would name Reed. A pig was perfect. Since childhood, I had been made to feel shame for my body and for what I ate. I had been called a cow. A pig. A person wearing a fat suit.
This was a chance to redeem that.
On the first day of class, the instructor asked us to make a list of people who harmed us.
I jotted down about ten names. Many of them were the North Americans who’d hurt me in Honduras. Those wounds were the freshest. But there was that one pesky wound that would not close, no matter how many times I pleaded with God to change my attitude.
I scratched the other names off the list and resolved to forgive that person once and for all. If I could forgive her, I could forgive anyone.
One evening, I returned home from visiting my boyfriend. I had taken the stuffed pig, along with my notes from forgiveness class, to share with him. As I neared the house, I saw my mother through the screen door, standing in the foyer. I regretted that I hadn’t taken a bigger purse to hide Reed in; she was going to ask about him.
Sure enough, when I came through the door and took off my shoes, she pointed at Reed. “What’s that?”
“It’s nothing,” I said, casually putting the pig behind my back, avoiding looking at her, and inching toward the stairs to my room.
Her eyes narrowed, and I knew what she was thinking: Why couldn’t I talk to her, share my life with her, the way I did with so many others — my boyfriend, my friends, even the women at church?
As I climbed the stairs, she decided to punish me for refusing to engage her.
“Maybe you have a pig because you’re a pig.”
I paused but didn’t turn around. I said nothing. After closing the door to my room, I sat in a chair facing the wall, pulled Reed onto my lap, and stared. I didn’t cry. I didn’t pray. I was 28. I had been asking her not to talk to me that way for years. It hadn’t stopped. It would probably never stop.
Every week, I watched my classmates take out their lists and cross off the names of the people they’d managed to forgive. But I never did.
All my life, I’d been good at forgiving. When I converted from Catholicism to evangelical Protestantism at 13, I learned that Jesus died so God the Father could forgive my sins. Jesus’ suffering obligated me to forgive others, even if it meant forgiving the same person for hurting me the same way over and over again. If God could forgive my repeated wrongs — speaking sharply to my sibling, daydreaming about a boy during a church service — I could do the same.
I got good at making myself small, making myself invisible so God could be seen, making sure I did not inconvenience others by having opinions of my own. I chalked over any selfish emotion that slipped out of me, like anger or grief, with the set of Church-approved pastels: love, joy, peace, patience.
I did not realize it then, but I was crumbling under the weight of my own self-diminishment and what I was not letting myself feel. In demanding sainthood of myself, I had not let myself be a person.
Where are the men? I found myself thinking as I looked around in class one week. Why was the task of forgiveness left to these women, some of whom were not wrongdoers, but victims? Who convinced them to be here ten consecutive Tuesdays, participate in self-flagellatory exercises involving pebbles, and forgive the husband who lied and the doctor who killed?
I was livid. Why was I here, carefully policing my own emotions, telling myself that I needed to change or else be deformed, forcing myself to relive the most painful parts of my life when the person I worked so hard to forgive couldn’t be bothered to stop when I said “stop”?
The energy and the will I’d once had to turn the other cheek, to let myself be slapped again after being slapped a first time, was gone. And in its place was rage. Rage that came forward and insisted on being felt. Rage that no amount of scripture or prayer could stop.
The class ended, and my mom’s name remained on my list, clear as the day I wrote it. I moved out soon after. I got married in that church a year and a half later and returned less and less, until one day, I didn’t return at all. My mother danced at my wedding, and afterward, I decided she’d hurt me no more. We became estranged.
I found a job with insurance benefits and began therapy.
Yesterday I received a message from a Christian woman who told me there is “poison in my well.”
We had been debating the ethics of a Christian practice that I had legitimate reason to feel angry about and oppose, based on my time living and working in Honduras, when she asked if she could message me privately.
Her message ended up being an unsolicited evaluation of the way I’ve chosen to respond to the wrongs I see in the world, post-religion. This was not the first time a Christian had saddled me with words like “you have a bitter root,” “your anger is toxic,” and “you’re always on edge about to be triggered” — and it will probably not be the last.
In her book Rage Becomes Her, Soraya Chemaly offers a probable explanation for why men did not attend my forgiveness class. As children, most of us learn to regard girls who express their anger as selfish and disruptive, whereas with boys, anger “is often seen as a virtue, especially when it is used to protect, defend, or lead.”
If we carry these gendered views about anger into adulthood, women who speak assertively are often cast as “hysterical,” “irrational,” “overemotional,” and “bitter.” Women become experts at repackaging, ignoring, or trivializing their anger, she said, because they “well understand the costs of displaying it.”
As a woman, I was supposed to prioritize the needs and emotions of others over my own — and here I was, centering myself in my own life. I was being vocally disruptive. I was breaking a rule.
The only way the woman who messaged me could coexist with my anger was to delegitimize it with language like “overreach,” “resentful,” and “poison,” all the while expressing concern for (read: calling into question) my “health as a person.” My mental and emotional health.
Church was not a place where I could safely express my anger, which had become precious to me. As Audre Lorde said, my anger was “loaded with information and energy” that clarified my circumstances and protected me. It was the way I expressed my compassion for those who faced injustice. It was the emotion that prompted me to act, to write.
Why had church members wanted to wring it out of me? Why do they still want to?
Under the guidance of my therapist, I discovered that contrary to what I’d believed about anger, healing demanded that I feel the fullness of my rage without judging myself for experiencing it. For months, I let it cycle through me. I’d recall a memory and rage would descend for hours or days at a time. But it would lift, then leave until next time. Emptied of my rage, I could devote time and attention to other emotions, like grief and hope.
I think now about deformity. I had been contorting myself to suppress my anger, to find a way to live with abuse. I have such admiration and affection for the four-years-ago version of myself who said, “No more.”
And in a sense, I am still her: honoring my rage, pitching these words, like pebbles, into the dark.
Originally published August 30, 2020 at https://lyndsey.substack.com.