What is underneath your anger?
I got married in May of 2015. One Saturday morning that summer I got up early to make waffles. I had never made them before, and it just felt like a sweet/cute newlywed thing to do. Like the rookie I was, I started putting ingredients together in the bowl before I checked to make sure I had everything I would need.
Of course, there was some key ingredient I was out of. I was super frustrated, but thought, “it’s fine, Google knows all. There has to be a substitute I can use.
15 minutes later I had nothing. Lots of conflicting commentary and opinions, and with each passing minute my heart rate was increasing. It was getting hard to see my phone screen past the tears I was trying to keep in my eyeballs.
My new husband - not knowing I was on the verge of a catastrophic meltdown - simply asked, “do you not have what you need?”
That was it. I lost it. Tears streaming down my face, I yelled “NO” with a lot of other, probably regrettable, words.
I startled my husband. I scared myself. And once I was done yelling, it was what was underneath all that anger that shook me most. I mean, no one gets THAT mad about waffles. With the tears still falling, I whispered “It would’ve been so easy to just call mom and ask what to do.”
It burned my throat to say that sentence. It hurt my chest to feel those words. I was so, so angry. All it took was making waffles to trigger my anger about what I had lost.
Grief is unpredictable like that. It’s messy. It’s inconvenient. It hurts you and sometimes those around you.
Anger can feel like an out of body experience.
I often find myself looking around and asking, “how did I even get here?”
This thought was really formative when writing the song for this stage of grief. Anger can send me into a complete tailspin because I’m obsessing over all the things I’m afraid of, and instead of acknowledging the fear or sadness, I become angry.
I wanted this song to communicate the battle that anger creates inside a person. The battle of identity. Who are you in your anger?
In the moments when my anger seems way bigger than the situation, I’m better at asking myself, “what is underneath this?” “What is hurting?” It’s hard and feels so vulnerable to do. But I think every time I do it, I’m healing a little piece of myself.