Dr. Buddy Rydell feeling pretty.

I’m hopeful. I’m resolute. I’m grateful.

But I’m also angry.

I confess that I am uncomfortable with feeling angry. I believe this is because anger was not one of the “allowed” emotions of the fundamentalist church I spent years in. We were expected to be nice. And being angry isn’t being nice. (One of my first moments of detaching from church teachings was realizing that Jesus expressed his anger). I’m also uncomfortable with anger because I lived for years with latent, seething anger about life circumstances, my perceived unworthiness and defects and more. As I began to awaken in 2014, I let myself feel everything; including anger. In doing so, I often expressed my anger in ways that were hurtful to people I love, went on acerbic social media rants and otherwise used other people as a projector screen of my anger.

My relationship with anger has changed. I have learned that impulsive, flashes of anger usually mean I’m depleted spiritually, biologically or mentally. I have learned that anger is a natural emotion and its the response to anger that can be toxic; both suppressing it and expressing it in unhealthy ways. In meditating on this topic, a message came to me: “There is a place for anger, but it’s never above Love.”

In the midst of this crisis, anger is one of the emotions I feel. I can intellectualize why that is. Instead, I’ve chosen to just feel it. And try not to express it in…