Start With Yourself: A New Vision for Work & Life by Emma Grede - 4

One of the hardest things in life to learn is which bridges to build and which bridges to burn.

—Bertrand Russell

“Excuse me!… Excuse me! Excuse me!” I was yelling. I was definitely shouting. We were underground in a tube station in London, and the woman in front of me was fumbling with her card, which was stopping her—and me—from moving through the turnstile and getting on the incoming train.

“Excuse me!” I screamed, the politesse of “beg your pardon” completely obscured by my very explicit anger, which was about to become physical. I wanted to shove her out of my way.

She turned and gestured to me, her mouth making sounds. “I’m deaf.”

“Well, are you blind, too??????? MOVE!” She stepped aside and I pushed past her.

Even as I type this, I feel horror, and my throat burns with deep shame. Can I even include this in my book? It was so embarrassing. And as I sat on the train, my frantic pulse finally slowing, I put my head in my hands. What the fuck is wrong with you? And then: You have totally fucking lost your mind. You just blew up on a deaf woman. I knew in that moment that if I didn’t deal with my anger, it would deal with me. I could not and would not vacate the driver’s seat and let my full, unthrottled rage take the wheel again. More than that, I couldn’t even let my anger ride unchecked, whispering in my ear that I had every right to unleash my fury on the world. I must have been about nineteen, but that night, I enrolled myself in a free anger management course with meetings that I went to for three years. I still practice what I learned there today. In the years that followed, I also quit smoking weed, which I hadn’t realized was a contributing factor for me.

Until I took this course, nobody had ever taught me the power of simply closing my eyes and taking a few deep breaths until I felt myself come back into my body. In those sessions, I plumbed my anger deeply, until I really understood the roots of my despair. For the first time, I realized I had a choice to not ever let anger get the better of me again. I walked away recognizing that the goal was not to avoid feeling my anger, but to become much more skilled in expressing it. I knew it would ruin my life if it stayed unmanaged and uncontained. I had ample evidence for that all around me. I understand that anger made it difficult to stay in relationships with people and that I would need to forge stable relationships as a bridge out of my old life and into the new. Burning relationships down was not an option; I was working too hard to set myself free.

I’ve done a lot of work on myself to access and process all my childhood anger. I spent all my teens, and most of my twenties and thirties, feeling mad at my mum until I realized that not only did she do her best with what she had, but that she couldn’t give me what she didn’t have—she wasn’t withholding from me; she just didn’t have it to give. My mum got up and put on a suit and went to work, and she gave us what she had left over after a long day in the office. Staying angry didn’t magically give me a different childhood; it only hurt me.

This type of self-work isn’t fun, or pleasant, but it is essential—particularly as I’ve needed to prove to myself that an adult is in the driver’s seat, an adult who is equipped to look after that younger, indignant version of me that is still inside. I do a lot of work to keep that inner child settled and calm. I also came to understand that I had learned anger as my default emotion, and I needed to learn how to choose something else instead.

This does not mean that I’m now “soft,” or that I don’t get angry. I have fierce boundaries about what is okay and what is not, boundaries I don’t feel badly about patrolling and enforcing. Too many of us are afraid of our anger, and we leave it bottled to fester inside—or it leaks out of us in unproductive and passive-aggressive ways. I am not that. I am direct. If I’m unhappy about something, I say it. There have been a few people in a business context in my life who have pushed me too far, and in turn, they have seen my harder side. I am not someone who feels compelled to operate according to Hollywood standards, or who abides by the insidious idea that a good woman should swallow her discomfort, allow injustice, or not have her own back. I am not a pushover; in fact, I will push back. All that said, moments of intense anger are quite rare for me, in part because I try to practice impeccable emotional hygiene, dealing with things as they come up.

Most of the time—and always when the power dynamics lean in my favor (I never punch down)—when I find myself overcome with anger, I take the time to calm myself until I’m ready to express myself without destroying the people around me.

My team at work would say that I have incredibly high standards, but that I have a very fair way of ensuring those standards are met. I’m kind in how I ask for stuff to be done, though I have a low tolerance for what I perceive to be a lack of care. You can make a million mistakes, and you can ask a million questions, but if I think you don’t care about the quality of your work or how you show up with your colleagues, then we’re probably not meant to work together for long.

We’re living in a culture where everyone feels aggrieved and takes the world personally. I don’t think this is a productive way to live. This isn’t to say that I don’t understand why people feel resentful. I understand. I, too, was full of blame—and I grew up in a blame-drenched culture, too. Nothing was ever anyone’s fault. It was always the neighbor’s fault or the government’s fault. Nobody was talking about personal responsibility. A culture of blame is infectious, and it was in me, too. When I got to the London College of Fashion and found myself in a sea of girls who had been privately educated, I felt furious with blame and feelings of injustice that I hadn’t had the same privileges. I told myself that I’d never get through these classes, it would be impossible to succeed, and because everyone had a better start than me, they’d have a better ending, too. I’m not the sort of person who can suffer getting second place, much less last, so I dropped out.

But soon after, I snapped out of this headspace. Of course, I was watching Oprah, and she was talking about taking responsibility for yourself—that you couldn’t change the world, but you could change your relationship to the world—and it clicked. My attitude shifted, and the way people responded to me shifted, too. I dropped the blame. I picked up a sense of steering my own ship.

These days I see myself as the creator of my own experience; I do not see myself as its victim. To that end, I’m generally not looking to “get even,” or settle scores publicly, or to prove myself right. I do not live my life as a giant “fuck you.” Honestly, that’s a terrible waste of energy. When one of my first bosses threatened to take legal action on me after I left her company to start my own agency, I was angry—but it never occurred to me to try to get back at her. I I simply cut her out of my life. Psychiatrist Phil Stutz calls our need for payback, or an apology, or to be vindicated, “the Maze,” and I believe that’s an apt description. As he writes in True and False Magic , “The only way to get out of the Maze is not to win. The only way you can get out of it is to say, I don’t have enough time to waste on this shit, so I have to let the other guy win. The moment you do this in your mind, you can move forward.” He continues, “The Maze represents your posture, or your interpretation of life, when you say, I’ve been wronged; it’s not fair. The person who wronged me—robbed me, punched me in the face, disparaged me—has to make up for that in some way. I refuse to take even one more step in the direction of my goals and my needs until I get paid. It is predicated on the idea that the universe is fair and is supposed to be fair. But if you’re waiting for someone who has harmed you or hurt you to apologize, you’re an idiot.” Well said, Phil. After all, what do you get if you win? This is actually a very deep question. The next time you feel like you need to “get even,” or be proved right, sit with it.

While I’ve made a lot of progress in managing my anger, there’s an essential part of its cycle that I have yet to master: I am not good at forgiveness. As mentioned above, my instinct is to cut people out of the fabric of my life and move on because I don’t want to spend any energy maintaining a relationship that doesn’t feel positive or productive. In some cases, it’s probably easy to argue that I should do the work to reintegrate this person on new terms. But at this point, I’m not there, and so there are plenty of people who are no longer in my inner orbit. I’ve either removed them from my galaxy altogether, or I keep them at a distance where I can function around them, because I do not yet have the time, energy, or skill to forgive and reach for renewed closeness. I give myself grace here. To quote trauma therapist Prentis Hemphill, “Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously.” 1 I choose this type of peace instead. It’s important to remember that forgiveness and repair are a process, and some people can’t give you what you want because they simply don’t have it to give. This is okay. Continue to move forward anyway.

Anger is an essential emotion—it can show us what’s important to us—but you need to become skillful in dealing with it. Do this work for yourself as early in your life as you can (though it’s never too late to begin).