Salty Anger

As I am learning to recover from the deep, dark recesses of repression, I'm coming to see how much anger I keep pent up inside. My family has a history of anger and poor anger management. It runs on my mom's side. My mom got it from her father. Apparently their relationship was so bad, that my mother can hardly say anything good about my grandfather, even though he's been dead for 40 years. My mother's anger was an off and on part of the majority of my childhood. It is within the context of this family history that I began to recognize how angry I am. I am angry a lot. I'm easily frustrated. And I always repress it. As I seek to abolish this repression, I must embark on a journey of anger management and expression. What are healthy ways of managing and expressing anger? I don't know, cause I've never seen them before. I was never taught how to handle anger. So now I find I have a legacy of anger in the past, a present full of anger, and a future with no coping skills. This isn't looking so good for me. But tonight I began to find some release, some small way to draw the anger to the surface and wash it away. It all started with a science class. An Atmospheric Science Class to be more precise. A quote from my professor, "Think of Science as a country to which you are visiting. In order to understand the country you must speak the language. Math is the language of science." The subsequent thoughts that went through my head were, "Oh Shit!" I haven't taken math in 5 years. The last math I took was Algebra. My professor is talking in class about how we'll probably recognize this equation from high school calculus. Yet another "Oh Shit!" from me since I never took Calculus, and even if I had, it would have been 8 years ago. I'm fucked. Hence how a science class could begin my process of anger management. I was so frustrated with an assignment for that class tonight, that I went downstairs to use my punching bag (my favorite Christmas present this year). My anger fully surfaced at my own inadequacies, at the class, at math, at stereotypes of women who aren't good at math. I punched...and I punched...and I punched. I punched until the anger was pouring out of me in sweat and in tears. I punched till my fingers hurt and my heart was ready to explode. I punched till the anger subsided and I felt some release. My anger came out in salty droplets, and I took one small step towards the death of repression.