Let this meet you where you are.
“Be the better person. Rise above. Don’t let them see you angry.” Yes… we’ve heard it all before. Don’t let them see you angry, because we are taught to rise above that very human emotion—to make sure no one else’s feelings get hurt, to avoid looking ridiculous in a moment of heat, and to prevent the regret that might follow… the moment we “throw the plate.”
Yes, it’s all valid. It truly is, and it makes sense. Anger just doesn’t feel ugly, it IS ugly, and in so many ways, we are surrounded by it. Conversations fueled by frustration, division, opinions… whether it’s this side or that side, even something as simple as sports, (well, is sports ever simple?)…people are, quite frankly, pissed off.
So, a short little whimsical true story for you, a “funny, not so funny” kind of thing. A much younger version of me, a little over 30 years ago, launched what I now call an “anger missile,” in the form of a TV remote, aimed in the direction of my former husband. I don’t think I really had a specific target, and I certainly wasn’t really aiming, because as it flew, it struck a beautiful porcelain dish sitting on our coffee table—a wedding gift from just a few years prior. I really loved that dish; and guess what, I pissed myself off even more!, because, that dish did not survive, and sadly… neither did the marriage. Collateral damage.
It’s kind of “funny, not so funny” when I look back on that time. Not just that moment, but so many moments that followed, where this version of me knows I would have chosen differently, I would have met those moments from a different place. But that space is called regret, and we are not meant to live there. What I do know is that it was the last time I physically launched an anger missile, the last time something innocent got caught in the crossfire of me simply being blatantly, humanly… pissed off. Because that one moment wasn’t just about a broken dish—the collateral damage of non-communication and misdirected emotion reached far beyond it, into our children, our families, our home.
My daughter will always tell you that I speak in metaphors—it’s how I make sense of what moves through me. And this one has stayed: yes, you can throw the plate, but the deeper question is… should you? Because this is where we are given the gift of the choice point—the moment where you can say, “I am angry. I am pissed off,” and also recognize that there is something between you and what happens next.
That space—the in-between—is where everything lives. It is where we are given the opportunity to pause, to breathe, to choose differently. And in that pause, we soften the impact, we reduce the collateral damage.
Most of us carry regrets—from younger years, or perhaps not-so-younger years—of things we wish we had done differently, said differently, handled differently. And yet, in the same breath, we cannot live entangled in the shoulda’s and the coulda’s. There is no resolution there, only looping.
So today, let this meet you where you are, and in your next moment of fire, pause, breathe, reflect. Lean into that sacred in-between space…the pause… because that is where conscious awareness lives, that is where self-awareness becomes peace, and sometimes… that is where you Save the Plate.
and as always…Stay Bloomin’🌸
