Who would have thought that anger has a role in recovering creativity? Everywhere around us, anger is the bad boy in the room. If you are angry, you need to take anger management classes. You need to learn not to let it out. Controlling anger is critical for personal success at work, in families, in friendships, and in intimate relationships. All this is true.
But what if just before we cage it up, we take a look inside? What if we ask ourselves what anger is showing us? What does it have to teach? Where does it come from in the first place, and what does it offer?
These are the questions Julia Cameron poses in The Artist’s Way in the section on recovering your creative power. If we treat anger as an experience, as something that rises up within us, we can observe it happening, and we can take a step back to ask what is going on. When you do, the things that make you angry usually come down to two things—a boundary is being violated and soul is being sacrificed. Anger arises because a part of you is being taken away, violated, mistreated, or overwhelmed.
We don't always see it this way. Instead, we project anger against someone or something. Too often, it is someone close to us. But this is not the way to engage anger, especially not for creativity. Misexpressed anger is destructive and damaging, and that's why we always try to control it. Yet, too often, when we control it we also lose its message and its power.
The key is not to act out or blame another person. Nor is it to be angry about the sacrifice or boundary violation. The insight into anger begins with this question: What am I angry about that I did not do? For people trying to recover their creativity, it’s mostly that—you didn’t engage your creativity.
For me at sixty years old, it is all the time I missed as a writer. It is the time I missed in music. It is the time I missed for painting. One needs hours and hours to hone and develop skills in these areas, and now the number of hours remaining seems so limited. “Forever,” when I was a young man, meant my entire life. Now, “forever” means what remains after my life is over.
I’m angry at having lost the mooring of my life to a dream of money that never appeared. I’m angry that I lost myself to that seduction. And I am angry that I am sometimes seduced by that idea again.
Too often, the antidote is to center, ground, and calm. We do need to do these things, but when it stops there, we are only repressing the anger. We shut it into a closet or shove it down a hole. There it sits. Boiling. Waiting. Ready to explode.
But anger can be handled in a different way. It is the raw energy that fuels action. It adds fight. Anger can get behind the creative force and strengthen it. Because of my anger, I am not going to go lolly-gag at a bar and drink with the writers who never write. No! I’m going to create. I am not going to waste my time in front of a television set wishing I were the one writing the stories. No! I’m going to write. Anger seems to put the propulsion behind creativity. Raw energy. Force. It is what we call commitment, but it is a commitment whose source is deep in the soul, not just an ego declaration.
Anger is a source of power. It is a holding of power and a recognition of power. To engage creativity, we can be powered by the anger of having been denied, diverted, stolen from, and lost. For me, anger turns into determination. That's how it powers creativity. Determination, dedication, and commitment. When the ego makes this kind of transformation, the determination becomes harsh. It chooses things nearby to reject. It identifies them as the enemy, holds them at bay, and tries to work. It will offend friends and loved ones, violate norms for no particular reason, and celebrate its own eccentricity self-indulgently. This is not the determination I am talking about.
Anger as a source of power works when it powers at the level of the soul, not the ego. Here in the soul, there are no declarations, no enemies, and no harshness. It is not needed. Rather, this anger produces a knowing, an inner confidence, and a simple doing of the thing that must be done. Create. Write. Paint. Play music. Anger powers it and insists on doing it. And when it does so, the work becomes a gift to those around you, not an enemy or opponent. One becomes determined, not harsh, committed but not exclusionary. Gentleness and compassion toward others prevail, but so does the inevitability of doing the work that must be done. Trust your anger, sit with it. Get to know it. Don’t let it possess you. Don’t become its grotesque expression that can so easily become violent. And for God’s sake, don’t repress it. Engage it. Know it. And let it power your creative force. You will not regret it.
—Anthony Signorelli
Thanks for writing this. I relate to much of this. I have for a long time been resentful of all the writing time I’ve lost -- why did I study what I studied in college instead of writing, like I really wanted? etc. and similar resentments. I’ve adjusted my schedule recently and am now writing every day and enjoying the satisfaction I feel for having honored my creative needs. It will, in the end, make me better for those around me, too. Just gotta keep it a regular, if not daily, practice.