Member-only story
It’s not Ladylike to be Angry
But it’s gotta go somewhere
From the outside, I appear to be a wimp with a long fuse. I rarely get riled up. While inside, I’m going ballistic.
Case in point. When I worked in rehab, one of my jobs was to assign each new patient to a therapy team. Using a simple formula, I would calculate which team would get the first admit, which the second and so on. This I did and posted first thing in the morning so we’d be ready any time someone got admitted.
One of my co-workers often got pissed when his team got a new patient and he was overwhelmed with paperwork. He often yelled at me as if that was my fault.
And I’d usually mutter something about I’m just the messenger and walk away.
Finally, I had enough and told the boss who called him in for a meeting and wrote him up, which meant a letter going into his personnel file. He was pissed.
He came into the office we shared, closed the door, and confronted me at high decibels with matching body language. I sat there like the proverbial deer in the headlights and sputtered out something under my breath.
That was an extreme example. But something like it happened this week and it hit me. I never learned how to effectively express my anger, except in passive aggressive ways.
