I think often of this line from a Junip song:
where nothing is compromised
nothing is lost
when everything is realized
nothing is crossed
Looking back: when I’ve been angry, like really mad, it’s been a reliable signal that everything is not realized, that I’m missing something. That I’m about to do something stupid.
So I have a process: I try to look at all the angles, and then decide what feelings are actually going to help me deal. And when I follow this process honestly, I find that anger, even righteous anger, is just never on the menu of productive options. It’s not something I get to feel and then feel good about afterwards.
I’m a tall, straight, pale male; of course I’m going to have fewer real reasons to get het up than my ego might invent for me. I walk over the earth as I please, and I owe people the care it takes not to step on or hurt them.
I like to hope that ultimately, everything probably resolves: “when everything is realized / nothing is crossed.” Not in the sense that everything turns out right, but in the sense that if you had all the information, you couldn’t have written it any differently. That for every harm one person can do to another, there’s a missing twin of understanding out there somewhere that would take the poison out of it, if not the pain.