You wouldn't think so from looking at me, but I'm a very angry person. I'm basically furious all the time.

My quasi-infamous moniker, “sarathofkhan” was one gifted to me by a former coworker who said that I got angry too quickly. I honestly thought it was a totally normal way to be; in fact, I don't think I ever really identified what was always brimming under my skin as pure anger. You can’t blame me, though.

Look at the fact that no one takes COVID-19 precautions anymore even though it’s been known to affect the immune system similarly to how HIV affects the immune system.

Look at the fact that we’re quickly coming up to a whole calendar year of Israel bombing the fuck out of Gaza and no one in power is willing to use their privilege and call out Israel for being the settler colonial terrorist that it is.

Look at the fact that we’re seeing summer days that reach into the high 30s Celsius in Canada and winters so mild I often don’t even pull out my winter coat until February. Look at the fact that fascism is slowly but prominently rising to power all over and people still think “It can’t happen here.”

With the world as it is and humanity habitually proving itself unworthy of everything we have, I’m highly suspicious of people who aren’t furious. If you’re not constantly angry about something in this day and age, it means you either have the privilege of not needing to be angry about it or you just don’t care. Often, it’s both.

I started seeing a therapist again recently and she pointed out that I need to find a balance between being (rightfully) furious at the state of the world/humanity and taking care of myself. It seems a simple enough task but it has me struggling more than I expected because I don’t know how to step away from the anger. Being a brown woman with a Muslim name, who lives an untraditional life, I do not have the privilege of not being furious all the time.

But, oftentimes, I think my anger really stems from fear: fear of being an outspoken woman, fear of not doing enough, fear of doing too much and burning out, fear of disappointing family and friends, fear of disappointing myself, fear of having to stay around and literally watch the Earth die.

Mama Khan has always reacted to fear with anger. When we were kids and skinned our knees or broke curfew, we would get a verbal whipping from Mama Khan. It took decades for me to realize that that was her way of coping with the fear of harm coming to her spawn, and when I realized that, I started noticing that I do the same thing. No one likes to live in fear, and I guess anger is easier to deal with — and there’s a lot less stigma about anger.

Anger seems to imply knowledge. If you know what’s going on in the world, you should be angry. Fear somehow automatically gets conflated with cowardice, which is the biggest load of bullshit ever, I swear. My whole life I've been made to feel like a coward when I was just imaginative and careful.

I’ve always been afraid of the dark (and to this day sleep with a string of fairy lights on) because the idea of being enveloped in darkness is suffocating and not at all appealing to me. Scary movies and TV shows have always spooked me because I've been a little too good at imagining how those fictional scenarios could be 5,000% worse. I've never been a risk-taker because that just seems unwise; thinking things out and planning things makes me feel safer and more in control — even when I’m doing something impulsively, there always is some sort of plan (or multiple plans to account for anything unexpected).

Growing up believing that fear automatically meant being a coward while also growing up in a household that was unintentionally unsympathetic to vulnerability makes it no big surprise my fear presents itself as anger. I’m constantly terrified.

I’m terrified that people I love will become disabled and/or die prematurely because they fail to take COVID-19 precautions anymore (or their carelessness with infect me and lead to my physical demise), so I’m angry at them and the government for ignoring public health in favour of capitalism.

I’m scared that we are witnessing the real-time genocide of Palestinians and are so immune to war that we don’t seem to give a shit, and that makes me angry at humanity for being so selfish and cruel.

I’m scared that the world is literally dying and we have known it for decades and still the people in power do nothing to stop it, and that makes me angry that we live in such an ugly, capitalist civilization.

Sure, there’s legitimate anger there too, but the foundation of it all is fear.

The older I get and the more I learn about the world, the angrier I get. Though, in actuality, the older I've gotten the more I've convinced myself that fear is weak and anger is strong. Even though my rational self knows that's bullshit and I'm unashamedly admitting to you all right now that I am scared pretty much always, I also recognize that saying “I'm scared” and “I'm angry” will garner two very different responses.

So, I'm fucking angry. Not just at the whole fucking shitstain of a world we live in but at the fact that humanity is so fucked up that I can’t even admit to being scared. I have to admit to being furious in order to be taken seriously because cowards get scared but the educated get angry or something. It just makes it another thing about the world that makes me furious — and there's no fear in this particular thread of anger.