Radical Pleasure: Athena Dixon on How Anger is a Necessary Part of Pleasure

Understanding what causes me to get angry helps me appreciate the flip side of that emotion

The third time I caught myself cursing at another driver on my commute home from work, I started to understand the evening ahead of me had to be full of ease. Navigating the streets of Philadelphia on a normal day is chaotic. Add in some rain and it’s like people forget how to drive. In the thirty minutes between my office and home, I had dropped a couple of f bombs, thrown my hands up in the rearview mirror at a driver who’d beeped at me, and sighed more times than I could count.

By the time I parked, I was done. I sat in my car listening to rain pelt the roof, twirling my hair around my fingers, and just existed. My body ached and all I wanted to do was teleport to my bed. That was impossible so I settled for slow steps down the block and across the street until I reached the steps of my building. I didn’t care about the rain soaking into my hair and clothes. I just needed to be unhurried for the first time that day. I needed to be out of the chaos of my ringing desk phone, emails, and the bumper-to-bumper traffic of the city. Maybe the rain beating down on my skin was the first step to washing the stress of the day off my body.

Since that morning I’d been a little angry. Annoyance mixed with work demands made me snappy. Sure, I’d joked and laughed with my co-workers. I talked to my clients with a smile and respect. But if anyone had truly looked at my face, they would have seen my eyes rolling so far back into my head I’m surprised they hadn’t gotten stuck. They would have seen me taking off my glasses to rub my eyes and me slinking away to the bathroom to get away from the infuriating din of too many voices and the nausea of too many office smells. Being openly angry in spaces like these invites too many questions and too many “solutions.” I didn’t want anything to do with either. Maybe I wanted to be angry. I don’t really know.

What was true was once I settled into my apartment and changed into my favorite sweatpants and cardigan, I started to come down . I thought if I’d given so much of my energy to being upset about things out of my control (the traffic, the smelly lunches, the talking on the other side of the cubicle wall) then I could spend just as much energy on making sure I felt better, too. And what would make me feel better? Double steak nachos in bed chased with an ice cold soda. I could control that part of my day. So, that’s what I did. By the time I licked the last bit of queso and guac from my fingers, I was calm. None of what had made me so upset was likely to change overnight but at least I had something to counteract it. What I’ve been learning as I’ve started to take my journey into living for pleasure is that it can take feeling the full range of your emotions to understand what any of them truly mean.

I think about it like this: If I don't know how anger exists in my body and if I don’t acknowledge it, I’m not really getting anywhere. If I don’t allow myself to feel the tremble in my hands or the headaches that begin right behind my left eye or how I can’t quite get my face to not show annoyance, then maybe I’d have a hard time deciphering what emotions exist in my body when those tells are absent. I let myself be angry, irrational, irritable, and any other negative thing I may feel because if I can dissect what causes me to feel that way, and what eventually turns the tides of that, I’ll have a better basis for what joy, pleasure, and happiness feel like. I’ll come to know that I don’t have to swallow down the bad for the sake of the good. There is no light of joy without the understanding of the shadows on the other side of it.

That doesn’t mean my plans always work. There are days there aren’t enough double steak nachos or trinkets or smutty novels that can reverse the course. On those days I am surly and isolate in my bedroom. I know myself enough to know I don’t want to project that anger onto other people and shift their joy to something sour. I wallow. I cry. I cuss and yell. I toss and turn until the new day dawns. Then I try again.

Sometimes sitting in that anger is a form of pleasure, though. If I think living my life exactly how I want to is the goal, then why can’t anger be a part of that pleasure? The real pleasure is feeling what I want, when I want, and where I want as a means to live into the totality of me. Anger is part of that. It’s a gift of sorts. Not to say it is always productive, but it lets me feel, and for so long I made myself numb in order to be “good.” I treated my anger as some sort of character flaw that needed to be hidden in order to be presentable. I didn’t curse. I smiled and nodded when I wanted to scream. I apologized even when I was wronged. It got me nowhere other than backed up emotionally and cheated out of living fully.

Understand, though, I’m not just freely cursing at people and being mean when I’m angry. It just means that I acknowledge and accept it because it’s a new part of my life. Yes, the goal is pleasure. It’s living a joyous life on my own terms but that doesn’t mean my life is two dimensional. On my walk in the rain that day I let the anger start to roll off me. I concentrated on the tiny dots of water on my forearms and the splashes on my glasses. I felt the pressure of my purse strap digging into my shoulder. I listened to my work ID clattering on the lanyard around my neck. I used all of this to ground myself. I was still angry, still muttering under my breath about the driver who’d beeped at me, but I was coming back to the fuller me. That me could be angry just as much as she was starting to yearn to walk barefoot around her apartment the closer and closer she got to the door. That version of me was already opening the app on her phone to order the nachos so they’d arrive by the time she was changed into the most comfortable clothes she owned. She was already ready to put on one of her comfort shows (Unsolved Mysteries) while she waited.

The anger was there, but it wasn’t alone. That’s why it’s important to acknowledge it. It has its purpose and its place, but it’s not the only important thing to pay attention to. Just like pleasure and joy aren’t the only emotions you should acknowledge. We need all of them to be fully fleshed people living in a world that requires us to be many things, often at the same time. My anger, in whatever ways it manifests, helps me ground. It helps my vision get a little bit clearer.

If I sit with it for just a little while I can start to question what I need or perhaps what I’ve been missing. Maybe my anger that day came from a lack of common courtesy from the other drivers or maybe I was upset I’d recently been required to come back to the office full time after nearly five years. Once I could figure out what I was missing I could start to fill in the gaps. That rainy day it was the nachos and the soda. Another day it could be a few screams into a pillow as a way to vent. Neither is better than the other. They are both means to an end, both steps toward the goal of staying on the road of a pleasurable life and creating the proper guardrails to keep me there.

Athena Dixon is the author of essay collections The Incredible Shrinking Woman and The Loneliness Files and her work appears in publications such as Harper's Bazaar, Shenandoah, Grub Street, Narratively, and Lit Hub among others. She is a Consulting Editor for Fourth Genre and the Nonfiction/Hybrid Editor for Split/Lip Press.