Anger and Art

Anger can “make us feel small and puny until we figure out that it is a power within ourselves and not the sheer wall of the “odds” stacked against us. The odds are against us until we are “for” ourselves. – Julia Cameron, Walking in this World

Those of you who have been reading my blog for awhile will know that I struggle with anger. Just type in “angry ” or “anger” in my blog search field, and you’ll get a plethora of posts on the subject. Even though my anger has been surfacing for awhile, since becoming a mom almost 7 years ago, it still kind of baffles me. It’s an emotion I’m trying to figure out. That’s why I found it so interesting that Julia Cameron would choose to write a section specifically on “anger” in one of her books about being an artist. It would seem that anger and artistry, in some ways, go hand-in-hand. A realization that leaves me feeling quite relieved.

For quite some time, as long as I’ve had this blog and almost as long as I’ve been a mom, I’ve been on a very active journey towards defining myself as an artist. The more I nurtured that longing, the more I found it to come alive inside me. The more it came alive inside me, the more it wanted to be expressed. The problem is I was believing in a dream while at the same time not taking it very seriously. I’ve already written a series of posts on that topic of taking art seriously, but I want to take this post a different direction, specifically on that topic of anger.

I do know that being a mom has great challenges, but I now know that it wasn’t only “being a mom” that was making me angry. What was making me angry is that I was simultaneously stepping into the role of being a mom and being an artist and the two weren’t working very well together. I had stirred up all sorts of hopes and desires about art and then I was having no opportunity to release any of those. My needs were butting up against the needs of my children and I was feeling stretched too thin. If our life does not allow space for our dreams then a tension will surface that will either push us to make room for those dreams or to give them up. The odds seemed so stacked against me, and yet, just a little over a year since my Angry Homemade Noodles meltdown, I can tell you that being an artist and a mom simultaneously is possible, I just had to rearrange some things and let other things go in my life so I could choose to be “for” myself.

The anger itself isn’t wrong, though I’ve certainly acted out on it, and continue to act out on it, in a corrupt manner at times. Instead, as Julia mentions, “the anger signals us that we are being called to step forward and speak out.” The anger says, “something has got to change.”

“If something angers us, we can try to ‘make do’ with stuffing our anger or we can ‘make something of it’ in the literal sense of a piece of art.” - Julia Cameron, Walking in this World

It takes time to rearrange your life to make room for your dreams. You have to go about the business of recognizing your anger first and then finding out where it’s coming from and then there is that whole painful process of realizing you can’t possibly do everything you are currently doing in your life if you’re going to be serious about this new thing. Changing the way you live takes time. It takes trial and error. I’m finding anger flare-ups happen all throughout this process of dream-chasing. I’m also thankfully realizing that anger is normal. My anger is a sign that something is askew or something needs to be expressed, and so I politely try and back down from it so I can evaluate and make adjustments.

Other times, my anger comes out simply because I get interrupted while I’m right in the middle of seeing a creative vision and trying to wrangle it down into some sort of expressible work of art.

“We want to be reasonable. To not fly off the handle. But it can be too much to handle the building up of something yearning to be expressed (inner pressure) and the nudging to conform (outer pressure) to what a ‘normal’ person might act like. Creativity is a birth process. Labor pain is not a time for manners.” - Julia Cameron, Walking in this World

What I love about this quote is that Julia acknowledges the tension in art. She proclaims it. She makes it known, so that I don’t have to be surprised by it when it rears its head. “Hello anger. I thought I’d be seeing you.”

I wake up most mornings and feel like I’m going to puke. This life I’m living, this dream-chasing life, is so much bigger than myself. I’m constantly attempting things I want to do, but I’ve never done. The impossibility of that looms over me like a gray cloud at times, threatening to swallow me whole. My anger is my wake-up call. It is there to remind me what I am doing IS hard. It is there to remind me what I am doing DOES require focus, attention, nurturing. It is there to remind me that I am MERE HUMAN and in need of an immortal source of power. It is there to remind me to make space for my family just as I must make space for my creating. It is there to remind me not that I’m doomed by the odds stacked AGAINST me, but that I am set free because of the choice to be FOR me.

I’m making my peace with you, Anger. I realize now that you are just spurring me on to be an even greater version of myself.