When Anger Has Served Its Purpose, But Won’t Go Away

Anger can be useful. It can mobilize us, tell us when something matters, push us to protect what we care about, and make a needed boundary impossible to ignore. But what happens when the problem has been handled, the boundary has been set, and you’re still fucking furious?

I’m writing about this because I’m currently in the middle of it. This isn’t something I processed six months ago and now have wrapped up in a neat little lesson. I’m still pissed. I’ve slept on it, I’ve had some time to look at my own part in it, and I can understand some of the other people involved more clearly than I could in the moment. The immediate crisis is over, and the anger is still there.

When Anger Has a Job

A few years ago, my partner and I went on a cruise and his grandmother stayed at our house to watch the animals and property. She really is a wonderful human being. She’s sweet, generous, incredibly helpful, and the kind of grandmother who somehow cleans things you didn’t even realize were dirty.

During that trip, though, I came home to one of my aquariums basically destroyed. The water was black. Most of the fish were dead. The chemistry had crashed, and fixing the tank took almost a week. I had to move the surviving fish, drain everything, remove substrate, clean the tank from top to bottom, throw away plants, replace things, and basically rebuild the aquarium.

After that, I was explicit: if something ever starts looking wrong with the tanks, call me. Nobody needs to understand aquarium chemistry. Send me a picture. FaceTime me. Tell me the water looks strange or the fish are behaving differently. I can figure out what needs to happen from wherever I am.

Fast-forward to our most recent cruise. By the time we got home, we had been traveling for fifteen hours. I walked through the door wanting to see the animals, shower, unpack, and sit the fuck down.

Both fish tanks were black.

The bottom of each tank was covered in food. It had swollen, started decomposing, and was coating everything. The water looked like sewage. When I opened the lid, the smell hit me in the face. The fish were at the surface gasping for air. The lights had been turned off, yet nobody had contacted me. Nobody sent a picture. Nobody asked what to do. I literally had just walked through my front door, put my suitcase down and immediately started cleaning.

I pulled out the siphon and started pumping literal black water into a thirteen-gallon container. Rotting food, algae, debris, and dead fish were coming through the hose. I drained and refilled the tanks repeatedly, trying to get the water safe enough that whatever was still alive might make it through the night.

I had been traveling for fifteen hours and suddenly had enough energy to spend another three hours hauling water through my house.

That is something anger does very well. It mobilizes us. Something matters. Something is threatened. Something needs protection. Something needs to change. My body was exhausted and anger gave me the energy to act.

When One Problem Becomes Five

Meanwhile, my partner was excited to be home and reconnect with the cats, including our newest addition kitten. So now I had a kitten bouncing around my feet while I was siphoning black sewage water. I had the front door open because I was running a hose through the house, and the other cats were hovering near the doorway.

That activated another old frustration about feeling like I’m managing the aquarium and supervising the cats at the same time.

Now the anger had layers. I was angry about the tanks. Angry because this had happened before. Angry because I had specifically asked to be contacted. Angry because nobody contacted me. I was exhausted, watching animals suffer, surrounded by water and aquarium shit, and already anticipating a conversation with my partner that I knew I didn’t have the capacity to have yet.

When he came into the room, I told him I was extremely upset and wasn’t ready to talk about it. I also told him I could not hear him defend the situation right then.

There’s ownership for me there because he hadn’t defended anything yet. I was responding partly to history. In the past, he has defended his grandmother by talking about her age, her limited education, and things she may not understand. I knew that standing over a tank full of dying fish was the absolute worst possible moment for me to hear any of that.

At one point, I tried to hug him. I was furious and didn’t particularly want a hug, but some part of me was trying to communicate, “I’m angry and I’m still on your team.” He rejected it because he was upset too, and that became another layer. Later, he told me to look around at everything his grandmother had cleaned: the windows, kitchen, bathroom, patio.

My internal response was that I could not give one flying F how clean the microwave was while I was siphoning dead animals out of black sewer water.

I understand what he was trying to do. He loves her and was trying to protect the whole person from being reduced to one terrible failure. I was trying to protect the seriousness of what happened from being minimized. What I needed in that moment was acknowledgment before context. Something as simple as, “Yeah, this is really bad. Somebody should have called you,” would have landed very differently.

What Does the Anger Still Want?

Eventually, I got the tanks into survival mode. They weren’t fixed. They weren’t clean. I had simply done everything useful I could do that night.

I also knew what needed to change. She won’t be responsible for feeding the fish again, and next time I travel I’ll have some kind of verification system in place.

Anger had done its job. It mobilized me, helped me act, and showed me the boundary.

Then I went to bed, woke up the next morning, and I was still fucking furious.

My brain was still prosecuting the case. How did nobody see this? How did nobody smell this? Why didn’t somebody call me? How long were these fish living like this?

That was when I started asking myself a question I would probably ask somebody sitting across from me in therapy:

What does my anger believe still needs to happen?

Did something still need fixing? I knew what to do with the tanks. Did a boundary need to be set? Already handled. Did I need to talk with my partner? Probably, once we were both settled. Did I want acknowledgment? Absolutely. Did I want to somehow reverse the fact that this happened while I was fifteen hours away and had no idea?

There it was.

When You Don’t Get the Repair You Want

Part of me wanted somebody to look at those tanks and say, “Holy shit. This was really bad. You explicitly said to call if something went wrong. Somebody should have called you.”

Sometimes you get that acknowledgment. Sometimes you never do.

There are situations where the other person never fully understands the impact. They never apologize in the way you hoped. They continue believing their explanation should be enough. Maybe an ex never understands what the betrayal did to you. Maybe a parent never acknowledges what your childhood was actually like. Maybe somebody who fucked you over goes on with their life convinced they did nothing wrong.

Eventually, your healing cannot remain dependent on the defendant entering a guilty plea.

That also doesn’t mean giving someone the same access again. I can eventually have no anger toward my partner’s grandmother and still never let her feed my fish again. The boundary remains even after the anger leaves.

What Was Underneath the Anger?

Once I got through that, I noticed something underneath the anger that I didn’t particularly enjoy: helplessness and grief.

If I stop repeating, “How the fuck did nobody call me?” I’m left with the fact that I wasn’t there and couldn’t protect something I care about because I didn’t know it needed protecting. Some of the fish died. They suffered. I cannot go backward and get the phone call on day one. I cannot save the fish that are already gone.

Anger gives me a lot to do. I can clean, argue, plan, establish rules, and replay evidence.

Helplessness asks me to acknowledge something happened that I cannot undo.

There’s grief in that too. Anger can make us feel powerful. Grief asks us to admit that something mattered and we lost some of it anyway.

The Second Arrow

There are Buddha heads inside both aquariums as a reminder of Buddhist practice, awareness, impermanence, and the suffering we add to what has already happened. So there I was, cleaning rotting fish food off a Buddha while furious.

The Buddhist concept of the second arrow felt almost offensively appropriate.

The first arrow was what happened. The fish suffered. Some died. The tanks were damaged. I spent hours cleaning them. My partner and I got into it.

The second arrow was every time I continued recreating the event after I had already extracted everything useful from it: How could nobody see this? Why didn’t somebody call? This should never have happened. I already told them.

I don’t have to force myself to stop being angry. I can simply check whether the anger has anything new to tell me. If there is something left to address, I address it. If there isn’t, I already know what happened. I was there. I smelled it. I cleaned it. I don’t need another closing argument.

I’m still angry. I also know what the anger was asking for, what it was protecting, and which parts of that request reality can actually give me.

Whatever anger remains can leave on its own schedule.

I don’t need to evict it. I just don’t need to give it another assignment.