A Declawed Cat

By Anonymous

Content warnings: references to self-harm

Anger is a problem. And I treat anger as a terrible person would a cat—if claws scratch things, remove the claws; if anger breaks things, remove the anger.

You’re acting irrationally; you’re misinterpreting sadness and frustration as anger; your anger is a byproduct of healing; you’ve had a bad day and week and month and year, and you’re just tired. I need an explanation for every single emotion that everyone has ever felt in every moment. Because humans are rational and we have an equation and solution to most of the problems we study. 

I’ve studied anger, seen it, felt it, heard it, tried it, and disliked it.  I found the solutions, meditated, journaled, exercised, talked, and disliked those, too. So I got rid of it (in theory) and thought myself a better person for it—better than any parent, any past friend, and anyone who has ever been and ever will be angry—because relinquishing anger means I can control myself. I can filter my feelings into rational or funny or casual comments.

So I’m fine with everything. I don’t ever get too angry or sad, I say dumb things for laughs, and I don’t take anything seriously. I’ve made myself comfortable with being the butt of the joke and taking it like a champ, and learned to regurgitate the joke in my head afterwards just to figure out what was so funny about it. Really, if my mistakes and stumbles get a few laughs, then why not amplify that silver lining? 

You should go along with it when others bring your embarrassments up, exaggerate and encourage those stories until your mistakes become you. Now you’re the funny friend, the one that isn’t able to—or at least isn’t willing to—have in-depth conversations, but who keeps up their laughter or at least always smiles while they’re with you. This only works around half of the time, and when it doesn’t I pull out the age-old “I’m just tired” and reflect alone on what I could’ve done better. 

During those (slightly self-gratifying) reflections I start to think I’m actually a very bland and negative person. And I worry that if I ever stopped the habit of laughing while talking, people around me would realise that too. The easiest way I’ve found to stop this from happening is to gloss over any anxiety, sadness, or irritation. So I’ll latch onto a joke even if it comes at the expense of my feelings, or I’ll play up my mistakes and “lightheartedness” to be more easygoing. A declawed cat learns to walk on deformed feet; a happy me learns to live on piecemeal emotions. 

I’m incapable of true anger because I dissect the statement “I’m angry” into an infinite collection of causes, and pick at the pieces until I find one that’s satisfactory. I can’t allow myself to be truly angry because I’m scared of what damage lies ahead. I play the memories of my parent’s anger in a A-Clockwork-Orange-style loop, so much so that even the thought of expressing dissatisfaction makes me feel guilty. 

But I slip up anyway. Sometimes I’ll say something too loudly, with a little too much emotion and speed. My movements become more jerky and stiff and my speech starts to stumble. My heart beats heavier but not necessarily faster. I start bouncing my feet, I scroll up and down my phone looking at the same image, I count the number of red objects around me, I take sip after sip of any drink nearby, and I think of dead relatives, or at least something bigger than what I’m feeling now. In those moments I feel like Alex vomiting when he thinks of violence, and I genuinely dread the potential realization that maybe anger is intrinsic to me. 

There are many things I dislike that I want others to know about. Some of these are things that everyone seems to be mad at, like the sixth instance of breaking news this week alone. Some complaints are pettier and more trivial than others, like how I hate loud talkers in the library. These are safe choices. The less safe ones are personal, ones that seem fine on most occasions but to me pick at some ancient scab. When someone once said I was a kind person, I felt the urgent need to correct them and stress how they should work on judging character. Another time, when someone asked about the scars on my skin, I deflected, but they kept asking until I felt like yelling at them to take a goddamn hint. 

I’ve never actually yelled in anger, though. Nor have I ever told someone they were annoying me or making me sad, because all of those actions mean I’ve let my emotions overtake rationality. And I see that as incompetence. If ever I am more angry than happy, then I’ve failed to behave properly. I’ll feel like I’ve scaled hundreds of feet of mountains, just to stumble on a pebble and fall back to the mountain’s heel. Because even though I force myself to socialise equipped with only half the human emotions, I am egotistical enough to think that my “good” half is sufficient. 

Is it that the other half doesn’t deserve as much attention? Or is it because I’m afraid of what kind of attention it will receive? It’s difficult to shimmy in some casual sadness or anger between the chunks of generic jokes I throw out, hoping the latter will stick and not knowing what result I want for the former. One time, I snapped at a friend who’d been making fun of a mistake I made years ago, and felt so terrible afterwards that I apologized to them while affirming that, yes, I actually thought their joke was hilarious. Another time I replied with “not so well” when someone asked how I was doing, and I was at a loss when they asked if I wanted to talk. One of the worst moments was when I broke down in a school counsellor’s office, and had to answer whether I’d thought of hurting others or myself. 

The statement “hurting others” is painful. That was the clearest moment where I felt ashamed to be sad and angry, because that implied my own feelings had the potential of hurting others: a burden to someone else whether I liked it or not. “Hurting myself” is something I can control, “hurting others” isn’t. 

To overcompensate, I’ve equated allowing others to hurt me to an altruistic yet selfish strategy. Altruistic because it means I’m forgiving others for hurting me when they may not have meant to, and selfish because I use this strategy to justify a personal free-pass: see how empathetic I am? How could I ever be capable of hurting someone else? And I hope this will lift anger’s weight off my shoulders. 

But I often feel like a terrible and terribly tired person anyways. Because even if I don’t act on my anger, I know it’s accumulating. I also know the dam cracks sometimes to misplace that anger into my actions. And I don’t know what to do with this knowledge. But it’s good to at least have this awareness, and I try to accept rather than reject that more often. 

A cat may spend hours cornering a bird just to find out that it can’t grip onto anything without its claws. But it’s come this far bearing the pain of deformed feet, so maybe it can go a bit further. If not, then maybe the next time. And so on.

iykyk. From the October 2022 issue.