Anger, Fear, & Love. Staying true to yourself during divisive times.
The growing tension and divisiveness in our world has left many people befuddled: especially those who consider themselves to be caring, empathetic, and loving people. How do we stay true to ourselves as kind and loving people even toward those who challenge us, police us, and who try to stir up hateful rhetoric? In short: how do we not let ourselves succumb to the hate?
If you’re like me, you may have already been questioning your own sanity. When so much of the world around you feels completely unhinged, it is easy to be gaslit into wondering what reality even is.
Importantly, I believe that one of the first things we must always do in moments of strong emotions is acknowledge and feel the emotion. There are various ways to do this: name the feeling, check in with how it is showing up in your body, even just be curious and exploratory about the emotion, as sometimes we’re unsure of what we’re feeling.
Next, validate. In the case of anger: your anger is real, and it is important. You’re not wrong for feeling angry, in fact, our collective anger right now is incredibly necessary and important. Fear is valid too. There is a lot to be scared of. There’s nothing wrong with being afraid, we just have to be intentional about how much we let fear control us.
From there, we can discern how to move forward. Without acknowledging the feelings, we are likely to react to them in ways that relinquish control. If we don’t validate them either, we might risk missing out on something important. It is my firm belief that all of our emotions are there to tell us something important: whether as a warning and to keep us safe, or to let us know that something is important to us.
Now, we are able to get into the nuance of what is causing the anger. Context matters. What does this situation tell us? Where is the harm originating from? Where is the injustice? In the context of society at large: what beliefs are being upheld? What truths are being withheld? When we talk about tolerance for differences in opinions, what are we asked to be tolerant of? Ongoing, systemic harm that encourages hateful belief systems, and thereby perpetuates real-life violence toward oppressed communities? No, thanks.
Specifically, giving platforms to those who share hateful rhetorics is not just about freedom of speech and it is not something that we should just “tolerate”.
Niceness is not love.
Tolerance is not love.
For me to love the world, I have to give up the idea of being nice, tolerant, and submitting to the idea of “free speech” under the guise of someone else’s harmful and violent views of the world. Nor does my impact on the world consist of sitting idly by and allowing harm to perpetuate, because I’ve been conditioned to be “nice”. (Yes, I was raised in the American South. And there is a very specific and racist ideology in which niceness and politeness hold hands with active, ongoing oppression.)
Love reveals the truth. Showing up in love does not mean tamping out your anger - because your anger is true. Rather, it means using your anger to fuel a more loving, equitable, and kind world. One that holds others accountable, and believes in the greatness and capability of everyone to do better. By submitting to “niceness” and “tolerance”, I am actually denying others their capacity to become their own highest self.
It’s not something that we often talk about, but holding people accountable can actually be its own love language. What they do with that is up to them. We are in a world that has dangerously combined white supremacy with an inability to tolerate our own feelings - leading to cognitive dissonance and justification of prejudice in all forms.
Stop being nice. Start loving the world, and believing in it.
