JEREMY JOJOLA

Over the last few months I’ve been reflecting a lot about anger and how the emotion clouds our judgment and makes us do things we regret. Anger, if left unresolved, can fester and change our personality. It can change our character. It can make us miserable. It can make us become someone unrecognizable. 

I’m compelled to share these five reflections after I became extremely and persistently angry for a period of time earlier this year for a few months. I’ve never been an angry person and I was miserable when I let anger consume my thoughts. I became a prisoner and I wanted an escape.  

I don’t need to get into the exact details of what erupted this anger, but in short, I engaged with the wrong people online and I betrayed who I was as a person with how I lashed out.

Here are my five reflections about anger that have helped me navigate the world with a bit more mental armor, especially in a time when many of us use social media for work. 

1. Anger is a virus. Angry people are looking to infect you if you let them.  

If we go back to middle school biology and remember how infections spread, we know a pathogen can quickly infect cells if our immune system does not recognize the virus for what it truly is. 

A virus seeks to infect the next host and then multiply. Angry people are seeking to make others uncomfortable because they are not at peace. They may see you as the next host.

Think of our mental state as our immune system for emotions. If we understand anger for what it really is, we can prevent infection, which leads to my next reflection. 

2. Angry people are hurt.

When I examined my anger and really asked myself why I felt this way, I finally understood the pain of losing a loved one is still very much intense and raw and I allowed others to use that as a tool to pierce my defenses. 

Anger is often a cloak for our internal pain when we haven’t been able to learn how to heal this discomfort. We then seek to make others uncomfortable as a way to express our pain. 

We see this with trolls online. We know those who persistently say angry things online or constantly attack others have some serious internal struggles they haven’t been able to resolve. 

3. Anger can be dangerously addictive.

Recently, the juxtaposed term “angertainment” came across my screen. I found the word  a perfect descriptor of what we see in our social media feeds and a perfect element for this reflection. 

Like a drug or alcohol, anger serves as a way to eclipse our pain. When we can’t get to the root of our pain and understand why it is there and how to heal it or live with it, anger is often at the ready. 

We can instantly turn to social media and lash out at strangers to find our anger fix. We can listen to talk radio and political shows that are specifically designed to deal out doses of this addictive, distracting anger. 

It’s easier to blame and be angry at a politician or public figure when deep down we may be angry at ourselves for our own personal failures. It’s easier to be angry at someone else than confront the problem within ourselves. 

And because anger is more acceptable to openly express in society than tears, it becomes a publicly acceptable vice that is free and addictive. Social media is fertile ground for this to persist and we should be careful about interacting with people and entities online that persistently express anger. 

For many people, anger is a lucrative business and they want you as a full time customer for clicks and shares. 

4. Forgiveness, especially self forgiveness heals anger, but don’t try to fix others.

It took a lot of self reflecting to really understand why I let myself lash out at others online. A few weeks ago, I came to an epiphany that helped me finally arrive at a place of peace, like a raging river does when it finds the ocean. This definitely did not happen overnight. 

I realized I was trying to fix and correct others in my online postings when I needed fixing internally. I confronted my pain and meditated on the roots of it. I saw myself as a human being. I told myself it was okay to be angry, but not okay to let that anger continue to manifest towards others outwardly, no matter what they do or say. 

I became a host of anger. 

When I finally recognized angry people are hurt, I began to try and see them with a sympathetic lens. They are much more complex than their internet postings and so am I. 

The internet, while it can be a wonderful place, often reduces our humanity and limits our communications to character limits. A twitter or facebook post is bereft of facial expressions or body language and tone of voice. 

This means things we post in response to angry people is like throwing a drop of water into a fire to try and put it out. You rarely win someone over to your perspective.

5. You can never justify revenge because it ends up hurting yourself.

33 years ago, in fifth grade, I punched a kid on the playground who launched a popsicle at my head during recess. I punched him hard in the jaw and I can still clearly remember seeing the pain and fear upon his face when he collapsed as blood poured out of his mouth. His braces exacerbated the wound I caused and I felt so guilty immediately after the fight. 

This is a core memory that has remained with me for so long because the feelings of seeking revenge backfired and I ended up hurting not only the kid, but myself with remorse and guilt. 

On the playground of social media, we often get into these petty fights and in turn, when someone launches an attack on us, we try to retaliate. We succumb to the virus of anger, allowing it to spread through us, and we end up generating more animosity and pain. We become the next host of anger and then we seek to spread it. 

Final thought

While my above reflections can seem to characterize anger as a terrible emotion, I do believe anger has a necessary place in our lives. There’s a reason we feel it. Anger, if we can control it, can motivate us to call for change in our relationships. We can use its energy to express a wrong against us through civil conversations or through collective activism for policy change.