Being Angry Isn't a Sign of Intelligence

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"Being Angry Isn't a Sign of Intelligence" - I found this note scribbled down in the middle of one of my comedy notebooks. I had written it down in 2011. At that time, I was coming out of a two year spin of depression. I don't know what exactly caused that depression because today it seems weird to me that I had ever felt that way but that depression was followed by a rather typical cycle of hopelessness, anger, and eventual acceptance and healing.

At the time, I didn't know this was going on. I felt entitled to my mellow mood and mood swings. I felt certain that the whole world was a terrible, horrible place where I would, in fact, be a bad person, if I felt too good about my life. I didn't go to the doctor, I wasn't medicated, and I didn't go to support groups. I did what came natural to me - I got upset a lot, I cried, I wrote, I got drunk a lot, and eventually, I decided to pull myself up by my neck. I got up, I started exercising, I took better care of myself, and eventually I healed.

In hindsight, I realize that I wasn't really depressed about MY life. My life wasn't actually all that bad at the time. I was in graduate school and slightly worried about my future with over 100K in student loans beginning to feel like an unmanageable burden on my future happiness. I was more upset about all the bad things going on in the world, out there, for some other people with much worse lives than mine. I was spending a good bit of time thinking and feeling the fears, hopelessness, and stresses of other people's lives. In most cases, people who I had never met. I vented my frustrations of those people's lives by arguing over issues of social justice online with people I had never met in real life.

Now it seems, that I was upset about stuff I had never seen with people who I had never met. I felt powerful and intelligent and the people out there who didn't feel strongly about these important issues were a bunch of thoughtless, sleepy, sheep!

Then, one day, I had a novel thought that changed that anger for me. I DID something. Instead of just forwarding a photo, posting a link to some "important" website with information people "needed" to be aware of, or signing an online petition and urging my friends to do the same, I got up and moved. I packed a weekend bag and dragged my husband to Washington DC to protest the wars. I yelled, I screamed, and I waved my protest sign at empty government buildings for about 4 hours and then I laughed. I laughed at myself! The whole situation was so stupid! What did I accomplish by spending an entire weekend and over $500 just to yell in the streets with a whole host of other people with creative protest signs and drums?

I laughed at my self. That is what I accomplished. For a second, I wanted to feel upset that I had spent so much money and my birthday weekend on this foolishness but that foolishness changed my life. I had gotten up and done something, even if that something didn't affect any change in the world.

That's about the time I wrote that line, "Being Angry Is NOT a sign of Intelligence - doing something about the issues you care about is." Then I continued, in this note to myself, "If you were being intelligent and if you truly cared THAT much, you would be working on the solution, not sitting around feeling angry about the issue or sitting behind your screen debating the issue with strangers. If you don't go out and find out what you can DO to change things, then you don't really care enough to be pretending that you do."

I never went back to caring about an issue I wasn't going to help change.

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