How Anger Becomes Depression

I was angry for years, maybe most of my life. Anger kept me going. When I was worn out, anger got me back in the game. Anger in the face became a decision of suicide. Not all of me agreed, I told myself there was work and people dependent on me. I concocted a plan that led to my arrest. I told myself I would have to kill myself. Then my wife came to my place of pretrial detention and told me one of her sons was threatening suicide and I had enough sense left me that I could not provide him an example that might encourage him. Then I had a real breakdown. Out of that breakdown, I came to the idea I was alive and I had to not repeat the life that been fueled by my anger and hate, that my life from here on out had to be more positive.

I have tried to write about this. There are discussions in this in the journal I kept in prison which I have not been able to publish since my PO procrastinates in approving my new laptop. I overslept, my right arm aches with numbness, there are murdered children in Texas, so I am grumpy this gloomy morning. That was the mood I was when I started reading Prayer Consists of Attention: On Reading as a Spiritual Practice published by The Millions. The article quotes a text wherein I recognized myself:

...I read the last chapter of the 2021 novel Hell of a Book, in which Jason Mott writes about anger in a way that reads like a psalm of lament. Reflecting on the pain, loss, and oppression intrinsic to Black life in the United States, the book’s protagonist, a writer who is struggling to tell the story of his life, muses:

You’ll be angry and not know why. And the anger won’t ever go away, not really. It’ll hang in the back of your mind. It’ll hang in the back of your world, haunting you, guiding all of your decisions. And when you get tired of being angry, it still won’t go away. It’ll just change into something even worse. You’ll take that anger and turn it on yourself and it’ll call itself depression. And, just like anger, it’ll take over your life. It’ll live with you every day.

I thought only I felt this way. I thought it was my own madness. I have not been able to state case as well as Mr. Mott. My anger at my own failures, at the corruption of the world I turned on myself. I went into places only to confirm that nothing mattered.

The Orthodox Church and my writing and Zoloft have quelled my anger. I live with the damage I did only by trying to some positive good while I still live, by telling the depressed to get treatment, to get those committing crimes online to stop, by bearing witness to those whose lives went astray and became ignored by the wider world. This is all I can do. 

sch 5/25/22