Dear Anger

A letter to the what I carried through the hardest season of my career, and finally set down.

You’ve been with me a long time. Longer than most of the people I work with, longer than any job title I’ve held. Through all the tech support years you rode along quietly, low in the mix, a hum I could mostly ignore while I answered the phone and fixed faulty printer connections and told people it wasn’t their fault. I could live with you like that. You were a passenger. You didn’t grab the wheel.

Then came the season you grew teeth.

About a decade ago I took a two-year detour out of my usual work and into a manager’s chair, running a one-person IT department for a college across campus. That’s when you emerged. Not a hum anymore. You started yelling to the point where it drowned out other voices in my ears. You sank your fangs into my shoulders, right where I carry my power, right where a man holds the weight of the thing he’s trying to build. I’ve carried you there ever since, like a backpack I never take off. Most days you stay zipped in the compartment, wriggling to break free. I know you’re back there. I choose not to reach in.

I remember the day you tried your hardest to damage me. I know you remember it well.

Two months into the job, the college held its fall retreat. It was my first real introduction to my new clients, a full room of faculty just back from summer break, contracts freshly renewed for the year ahead. I got asked to stand up and walk everyone through a system I’d inherited, something the college needed for a review coming down the line, built in-house by someone long gone. My first time in front of these people, and the thing I was there to defend wasn’t even mine. It was a product with my name on it now.

I saw you in the back of the room the whole time. Smirking at me. I watched you lean toward strangers and whisper the words you knew would find my soft spots, because you always knew exactly where those were. The room turned rough on me. When a stranger stands up and starts selling you a tool you never asked for, you push back. Heck, I’d have pushed back too. But it didn’t feel fair from where I stood, taking arrows for something I didn’t make, in front of the people I’d been hired to serve.

You wanted me to return fire. I could feel it coming off you. Lash out, put the room in its place, show these people who they were dealing with. I didn’t give you that. What I gave the room instead was a sentence: “You raise some very important questions. Let me meet with you after the retreat, somewhere quieter, and we’ll talk through every concern you’ve got.” Even humiliated, even with your teeth in me, I reached for the relational move. I was doing this work before I had a name for it. You hated that.

My presentation was scheduled right before lunch. I couldn’t eat afterwards. I couldn’t stand in the buffet line making small talk with people who’d just lit me up. I couldn’t look at my new clients and see anything but unsafe adversaries. So I walked out of the conference facility to the parking lot and sat in my car with the door locked, the windows rolled up, and my eyes closed. I almost started crying, but I didn’t. I had never experienced this amount of embarrassment, Anger. I blame you for it. In the silence of my car, I asked myself if I should quit. It was a lot of negativity to swim against, two months in. I stayed in my car for half an hour, engine off, just breathing. Somewhere in that half hour I made a decision. I pictured putting on armor, actually visualized it, plate over the soft spots, because those soft spots were real and you knew every one of them. A people pleaser takes a room like that straight to the chest. I opened my eyes, and they narrowed with a new attitude. I got out of the car, and I marched back in for a plate of food.

You know what greeted me at the buffet, Anger. Not “welcome aboard, Chris.” I’m standing there with the salad tongs in my hand and the first words from the first person to reach me are, “Hey, I have a problem with my computer.”

That’s the moment I threw you into the back seat.

Something inside me went still. “I’d be happy to help with that. Send me an email and I’ll come by your office during your hours and take a look.” Courteous, and behind a sheet of hurricane-proof glass. The friendly professional voice that says yes while keeping one hand on the door. More of those computer needs came trickling in that afternoon between sessions, and I gave them the same answer. I walked back into the fall retreat wanting a getting-to-know-you response, but instead I faced a difficult job of surviving the rest of the week.

Here’s what that cost me, though, and I’ve never said it out loud. I came to that college wanting to be known by these people. That’s the only way I know how to work. And you taught me to meet my own clients from behind glass. To lead with the wall instead of the handshake. The wall worked. It got me through a brutal fall quarter. But a people pleaser doesn’t raise a wall for free. You cost me months I can’t get back, months I could have spent knowing them, because you talked me into seeing them as transactions, not people to meet and develop a rapport with.

After that retreat I stopped waiting for the college to feel like home and started immersing myself in the job. I double-timed my learning, mapped the tangle of servers, deactivated software nobody needed that kept firing pop-up notifications at people, and found solid paths through the friction. Then, a week or two later, fall quarter started and the real flood arrived. A four-month backlog from the vacancy before me, every request that piled up while the seat sat empty, slammed straight into the busiest weeks of the academic year. No budget to hire help of any kind. Just me, a backlog I didn’t create, and a calendar with no mercy in it.

So I went hunting. I read about the work-study program, cornered some office staff who didn’t much care for me until they coughed up how to fund students through another line, and I hired four of them. I trained them my way. I tried to be the boss I’d have wanted when I was 19 and broke and standing in someone’s office asking for a shot. I called them my Aces, never minions, whatever a certain kind of faculty preferred. Nine months of hard, consistent, unglamorous work later, I took a day off. I could actually not be chained to my email for a workday, and the Aces would manage the store.

Anger, I built that department while carrying you. I didn’t set you aside to build it. I built it with your fangs in my shoulders the whole time, and I aimed you at the work instead of at the people. I fought you, not my clients. Every faculty member who roughed me up that day, I’ve gone on to build something better, years later, in a different corner of the university. The room that lit me up is full of people I’d now call allies from my seat as their Canvas Admin. You don’t get to keep them as my enemies. And there was one man in that tough season whom you could never turn into a foe, the one I answered to, who looked past the kind of IT manager he’d grown used to and gave me room to be a different kind. We’re friends now. I bet you didn’t see that coming either.

I won’t pretend the years since were sunshine, rainbows, lollipops, and waterfalls. There’s been a long stretch of management that never quite saw me, that filed me under one narrow skill and forgot the rest, that standardized and neglected in the same breath, and you fed on all of it. For a long time you ate well.

Lately, though, you’re fading. Like the photograph in Marty McFly’s pocket, the people in it going lighter at the edges, harder to make out, until one by one they’re gone. The landscape’s been clearing. The people who handed you the most to work with are moving along, and I’ve turned toward something better, toward the clients who send the genuine thank-you notes, toward the work I choose because I know in my heart it’s right and get to watch land with people. You’re still in the car with me. I hear you back there, shouting and flailing, telling me to remember, telling me to stay mad.

Instead of giving you my attention, I turn the stereo up. The client-praise channel, loud enough to drink my seltzer to. And I keep driving. You’re still in the backpack, zipped in, riding on the shoulders where you first bit down. Some days now I go a good long while without remembering you’re back there at all.

More later...