Granny's advice

I'm not an angry person. I'm more of the "Keep calm and carry on" persuasion. I believe that anger is pointless and usually self-defeating.

Some of you may remember from earlier posts that at the age of ten my grandma urged me not to be like my father - habitually bad-tempered and out of control. I took her advice and I've been remarkably even-tempered ever since.

On the rare occasion that something riles me enough to make me angry, other people are taken by surprise. They're so used to me having a cool and measured approach to whatever situation I'm confronted with that they wonder what on earth's going on.

Of course some people say that anger is one of our basic emotions, the emotion that brings us to life, and that never being angry is a bit abnormal. On the contrary, I think anger is as negative as guilt or jealousy or bitterness. Someone who is regularly angry just makes other people wary and defensive.

Anger is very fashionable at the moment. Look at a newspaper or go online and there are any number of people getting furiously angry about something or other. Where they get the energy from I can't imagine.

I also resist anger because it so often leads to violence, especially misogynistic violence. Once you allow anger to flow freely, it easily morphs into something much more dangerous. Keep a lid on it, I say.

PS: Several blogmates have suggested I'm bottling up my emotions and that expressing anger is a normal human trait that I'm lacking. Well, expressing anger may be the psychological norm but norms don't apply to everyone and to my mind it's also normal to be an un-angry outlier. I've never felt that I'm bottling up my emotions, I just hardly ever feel angry.

Go with the flow

Anxiety is seen as something very abnormal that we shouldn't be experien-cing. The assumption is that it needs to be banished or at least greatly reduced. But is that right? We live in an increasingly uncertain world in which the future is far from predictable, so isn't anxiety a rather normal reaction to what's going on around us?

There's climate breakdown, the invasion of Ukraine, the cost of living crisis and the crumbling NHS, just to pick the most obvious problems.

Yet we're told we should be free of anxiety and trundling along happily in our little domestic bubble, not paying too much attention to what's happening in the rest of the world. Just go with the flow and follow your instincts.

But if more and more people are saying they suffer from acute anxiety, doesn't that suggest that anxiety is actually a normal reaction and that calmness and serenity (or whatever is the opposite of anxiety) are not normal at all?

In which case, what needs adjusting is not our individual reactions, which are perfectly healthy, but the world around us that's causing those reactions?

I've been an anxious person for decades, and no matter what I do to lessen the anxiety, it stubbornly persists. And I think it's significant that I wasn't anxious as a child but very happy-go-lucky and carefree. It was only as I got older and learnt more about the wider world that my anxiety developed. Is that really so surprising?

Perhaps we should live with our anxiety as a healthy emotion and not bust a gut trying to get rid of it.

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Five comments failed to appear on my last blog post. Only two comments were missing on this one. Things are improving.

Off the boil

I don't understand anger. I'm a pretty placid, patient person, and when I see other people fuming and raging about something I wonder where all that boiling energy comes from.

My father was an extremely angry person. Not half an hour would go by without him raging about something or other - the government, my mother's messiness, my own messiness, his boss, other people's bad manners, young people, you name it.

It wasn't altogether surprising when he suffered a stroke and discovered his blood pressure was way too high. But that didn't stop him flaring up about one thing after another. He seemed to see everything and everyone as a personal affront, out to annoy him and make his life difficult.

When I was ten, my lovely grandma took me aside and advised me not to grow up full of anger like my father. It would only make me unhappy, she said. For some reason I was so struck by what she said that I resolved from that moment not to be an angry person but to be more philosophical.

And so I have been. All my life I've found it difficult to get angry about anything. People who know me are always flabbergasted if I get seriously angry, they assume something enormously traumatic must have occurred.

I just don't see the point in getting angry. To my mind, it seldom achieves anything except to make a difficult situation worse and to alienate people. Decisions taken in the heat of anger tend to be either disastrous or badly flawed. The energy it consumes leaves me drained and battered.

I know that if I take a deep breath, stay cool, and assess the situation calmly and carefully, I'll react far more sensibly than if I explode in anger. Other people will also react more sensibly, not being cowed and intimidated by a violent outburst.

Some people think that by not getting angry I'm repressing some vital part of myself, something healthy and life-enhancing. I don't think so. I see it as taming a rather primitive and destructive emotion that tends to cause more harm than good. I have no time for it.

PS: If it's repressive to avoid anger, then isn't it also repressive to modify any kind of unpleasant behaviour, like rudeness or malice? That would be absurd.
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Finally met up with the wonderful Grannymar, who's been a blogmate for around three years now. I thought I knew all about her but there was plenty more to find out. We were amazed to discover how long we'd been chatting....