It's arguably the most common question I was asked by my mother in the last few years we still talked to each other.
It's also the question I could answer eight ways until Sunday, and it didn't matter. She just never seemed to get it.
Neither, unfortunately, did anyone else really.
In their defense, it's not their fault, nor am I blaming them. Anger is a hard thing to rationalize or make sense of, and we're seeing more and more evidence of that as we become increasingly split between political, social, cultural, religious, economic and gender divides with both ever-increasing frequency and ever-escalating hostility.
If I'm honest, the anger I've carried for much of the last four decades pales in comparison to what I see wielded by other people, either on social media or in the real world, every day. Most of it for nothing else than to be pissed off about both something and/or everything they find objectionable about the world at present.
And thanks to the power of the internet, social media and the ability to foster a true outrage culture, I watch tens of millions of people launch their intercontinental ballistic rage missiles at each other day after day without even a nanosecond's thought as to who they're directing all that angst toward in the first place.
If there's one thing I can say makes me an exception to that, it's I can both identify the reasons why I've developed my rage arsenal into what it's become and why I'm not so quick to hit the button to obliterate the targets they're currently fixed on.
I once heard an axiom which states, Having strength is one thing. Knowing how to use it is another. The same, as I've experienced, also applies to anger.
To truly understand the foundation of where mine emanates from requires the ability to comprehend a person's life in both totality and context of the various episodes that make up said totality. You have to be willing to examine a childhood interspersed with abuse and neglect. Where I was made to feel both powerless and stupid, no matter what I did to show I was actually neither.
You have to recognize that many of the labels that are thrown about indiscriminately nowadays to define pretty much everyone, don't necessarily apply to me.
Yes, I am a white, cisgendered male. Contrary to popular belief, I had no say in that whatsoever. That's how I was built at the factory and how I rolled off the genetic assembly line.
The dominating rhetoric at present would have it believed that that construct automatically guarantees I also came with inherited traits like privilege, bigotry, misogyny, entitlement. And while I am the first to recognize and admit that I am far from a flawless human being and that I carry my share of prejudices and biases, the assumption that I subscribe to any of those things is antithetical to who I am or have always been.
How do I know? I've either been subjected to them or I've seen people I cared about subjected to them. I've had to watch as every door that potentially led to a better life get slammed in my face by people with those exact same traits, without a damn thing I could do to pry them back open, and all it did was add even more fuel to my anger, because how can it not when you see lives you'd give anything to have squandered by those who never deserved them anymore than they thought you deserved yours?
Not that matters to most people nowadays, of course. We live in a world so cynical and untrusting that I could say the sky is blue or water's wet and someone would have to take to Twitter or Facebook and call for the social media lynch mobs to gather their pitchforks and torches before marching off to bring me to heel.
Editorial Note: For me to recognize just how cynical we've become is saying a lot considering I was a journalist for ten years. If there's a more cynical lot in the history of humankind, you'd be hard-pressed to find them.
You'd also have to venture into the whacking great hole in the center of my being where my heart used to be, and you'd have to be willing to understand why it's not there anymore.
If you did, then you'd see that every person I've ever loved in this life, from my mother on down, took their shots at it, smashing it to pieces over and over again because I wasn't good enough for them to love back. It didn't matter how much I cared about them, how much I wanted it or what I tried to convince them otherwise. The answer was and has always been the same.
No.
And all that's done is add more fuel to my anger, because how can it not when the one thing we're all told we need to survive and be happy is the one thing you have to live without?
I know I'm not the only man to find myself in that situation, nor will I be the last to either. Right now, there's an entire legion of them so pissed off that they believe it's somehow their right to subjugate every woman for their own sick and twisted purposes.
We call these people InCels, and more than once, I've been lumped into their ranks by someone who usually operates solely by indiscriminately slapping discriminatory labels on those they think fit their own prejudicial profiles.
For the record, the ideology these people operate under abhors and disgusts me, and were I to ever come across an InCel in person, I'd be more inclined to knock his twisted head off than shake his hand and say I agree with him in any way, shape or form.
But good luck trying to convince a supposedly rational and open-minded person of that these days. You're just as likely to get a response of socio-political doublespeak cultivated from their own personal echo chambers of media and like-minded sorts who would never dare to think their twisted view of the world could ever be wrong.
And all that's done is add even more fuel to my anger, because how can it not when someone is so quick to define you without realizing the definition it places squarely on them as well?
Now the obvious question at this stage is, Well, if you're so angry all the time, why don't you take it out on everyone who makes you feel that way?
Believe me, there's days where I find the idea more than enticing. Some days, the rage is so intense that I'd like nothing more than to channel in the direction of everyone who, for whatever reason, caused it to build up in me in the first place.
It's one of the most Newtonian things we can do as human beings. Action met with an equally-opposing reaction.
Except here's the thing. I'm old enough to have been introduced to the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction when it was still a relatively new term in human existence. The idea being that in nuclear war, if both sides launched their arsenals either simultaneously or in succession, the outcome would be the same.
Neither side would live through the aftermath.
If I wanted to, I could destroy the people who destroyed me and I know there would be at least some modicum of even momentary satisfaction in that. That I would feel just as justified as they did.
But that doesn't necessarily mean I would survive it either. And there's a second axiom that I've tried to adhere to with each passing year: The best revenge is to live well.
And part of living for me, whether I like it or not, is with my anger and not using it against those who gave me all the reason in the world to have it in the first place.
It may be the harder option. It may not always be the better option. But I choose that over salting the Earth with the emotional firepower I carry any day.
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