Mislabeling rage as nervousness

Your chest is tight. Your heart is racing. Your thoughts are spiraling about everything that could go wrong, everything you can't control, everything that feels overwhelming and impossible.

You call it anxiety. You've always called it anxiety. Because that's what it looks like from the outside. That's what makes sense.

But what if you've been naming it wrong this whole time?

What if that tightness in your chest isn't fear? What if it's rage that has nowhere safe to go?

You learned early that anger wasn't allowed. That expressing it meant punishment. That showing rage made you dangerous, difficult, too much to handle.

So you learned to suppress it. To swallow it down. To redirect it into something more acceptable, more manageable, something people could tolerate.

Anger became worry. Rage became nervousness. The fire in your chest got renamed as fear because fear was safer to admit than fury.

And now you've been living with anxiety for so long you can't remember what you're actually angry about. You just know your body is always tense, always on edge, always braced for something you can't quite name.

That tightness? It's not about the future you're worried about. It's about the present you're not allowed to rage against.

The person who keeps crossing your boundaries. The situation that keeps draining you. The expectations you're exhausted from meeting. The injustice you're pretending doesn't bother you.

Your body is screaming about it. But because anger isn't safe, it comes out as anxiety instead. As panic about things that haven't happened yet. As spiraling thoughts about everything except the actual thing making you furious right now.

You're not anxious about the meeting tomorrow. You're angry that you're expected to show up for people who don't show up for you.

You're not worried about the future. You're enraged about the present you're not allowed to change.

You're not scared. You're pissed. And you've been taught to fear your own anger more than the things making you angry.

When you call anger anxiety, you treat it wrong. You try to calm yourself down when what you actually need is to let yourself feel the fury.

You breathe through it. You rationalize it. You try to talk yourself out of feeling what you're feeling because you think the problem is that you're overreacting, being too sensitive, making things bigger than they are.

But you're not overreacting. You're under-expressing. You're taking rage that needs to move and forcing it to stay contained, controlled, manageable.

And your body pays the price. In tension that never releases. In exhaustion that never lifts. In an edge you can't shake no matter how many calming techniques you try.

Because you're trying to soothe something that doesn't want to be soothed. It wants to be heard. It wants to be acknowledged. It wants permission to exist without being immediately reframed as something less threatening.

Healing doesn't mean you start screaming at everyone who's ever wronged you. You're learning to recognize anger for what it is. To stop calling it anxiety when it's actually rage.

To let yourself feel it without immediately trying to make it go away. Without judging yourself for having it. Without convincing yourself you're wrong for feeling this way.

Sometimes you name it out loud. I'm not anxious about this. I'm angry. Sometimes you let it move through your body. Let yourself shake, pace, feel the heat of it without trying to cool it down too quickly.

Sometimes you just acknowledge it exists. That you're furious. That you have every right to be. That anger isn't the problem. The situations creating it are.

Your body has been trying to tell you something for a long time. Maybe it's time to stop renaming the message and start actually listening to what it's saying.