When a poll came out during the week that said Australians reported the same levels of happiness as before the pandemic (albeit with a few more financial worries), I thought, “How can that be?” After all, everything fun has been replaced by JIGSAW PUZZLES.
It would make more sense if the survey averaged out the responses – because from my own casting around, people’s moods vary widely, according to innate temperament. Some people (introverts) are deliriously happy that they can go to bed at 9pm, don’t need to make up some excuse to cancel social events (literally everything has been cancelled anyway, saving them the guilt) and have all the time in the world to make sourdough.
Meanwhile, the extroverts are plunged into an almost operatic form of despair, as they are forced to attend virtual nightclubs and watch drone footage on YouTube instead of skiing in Japan. “When will it end?” they scream-text into their phones. “OMG I heard it’s going to end in May, which is five years away!”
I’m an extrovert. By mid week it was clear I wasn’t coping after six weeks in iso. I mean, I thought I was coping, so my column this week was meant to be on the joys of acceptance and stillness. I thought I was there, at the final zen stage. After that, I was going to retire, bitch.
That was until I woke up on Wednesday to find my iso buddy had left his dishes in the sink overnight. WTF, man. Wash everything. Leave nothing on the bench overnight! DO YOU WANT THE MICE TO COME AS WELL AS THE PLAGUE?? Normally I wouldn’t care, normally I leave dirty dishes in the sink, but something in me snapped – hard. I was filled with a deep, sudden and volcanic rage. I was a rage vessel. I’m not proud of this, but in the surge of anger and energy running through me, I picked up the dirty dishes and smashed them in the sink. Glasses, a bowl and some ceramic thing that I quite liked, shattered. In the process I cut my hands on the broken glass – but I DIDN’T CARE!! THERE WERE DIRTY DISHES IN THE SINK AND I WAS ANGRY.
My hand, bleeding now, but my anger not spent, propelled me outside where I picked up the empty washing basket, which was made from a heavy, durable plastic. I hurled the basket with great force towards an outside wall, which not only caused the plastic to shatter but an arch of blood to spray from my hand through the air. Plastic shards and blood rained from the sky. The urge to primal scream was strong.
Instead I took my bleeding hand inside – not even feeling pain yet, just a slight dissipation of rage and also curiosity about it (what the hell just happened? Am I … losing it?) and went to reply to an email before realising I was still bleeding – all over the keyboard.
I sat outside and waited to calm down – but still the rage was there. An old Smashing Pumpkins lyric took on an eerie, fresh meaning: “Despite all my rage/ I am still just a rat in a cage.”
My hand had stopped bleeding but was now throbbing, as I thought of all the introverts, happy at home, quilting and darning their socks by the fire – never wanting this to end ever. They like their cage. But I want out.
My mate Trav called. I told him about the rage. He laughed. He had been there last week. “It’s rock bottom, dude, but that’s the worst it will get – and from here, you’ll feel better.”
Pure anger and rage are not emotions I experience frequently – they are once-a-year things that come from nowhere and always stun me with their enormous surge of energy and power and the way they scramble things in their aftermath. Pure rage shifts things quickly. Directed at another person in full throttle it can alter the relationship irrevocably. Atoms and patterns shift around it. Rage can also have an immensely clarifying effect. In its wave you suddenly become viscerally aware of your limits and feeling. There is no ambiguity in anger.
Some psychologists believe anger is the emotional expression of powerlessness, and a flawed means of trying to take back control – which makes sense to me as that’s what I’m feeling at the moment as the pandemic drags on.
The ancient Stoic philosopher Seneca wrote an entire book about it: De Ira (On Anger). He didn’t see anger as a flaw indigenous to those of volatile character but as something that anyone, even the most chilled person, is susceptible to.
He wrote of plagues and anger:
Just as physical robustness and careful attention to health are of no benefit against plague (for it attacks the weak and the strong without discrimination), so men of a calm and relaxed nature are as much at risk from anger as those who are more excitable, and the more it causes a change in these, the more it brings shame and danger upon them.
Seneca recognised that anger is the one emotion that has its own intense forward momentum and is difficult to control. Once logic and reason reassert their grip it’s almost always too late: the plates have been smashed, the words have been said, the damage has been done.
Instead the Stoic advice was to strive to maintain a baseline tranquil state. “There is no more reliable proof of greatness,” wrote Seneca, “than to be in a state where nothing can happen to make you disturbed.”
It’s not the end of isolation I should be looking forward to – instead stillness and tranquility is the place I need to get to in the end.
• Brigid Delaney is a Guardian Australia columnist
