I used to live engulfed in rage.
Not just frustration. Not irritation. Rage.
Rage at the herd of dolts blindly swearing allegiance to the very people leading them to slaughter. Rage at a world too blind to see that there is enough. Rage at police officers abandoning their communities to become boots for the bourgeois—pretending it’s justice. Rage at the rich, hoarding wealth like evil dragons needing to be slain. Rage at parents passing their pain down like heirlooms. Rage at the daily stupidities that cost lives, dignity, possibility.
It felt righteous. It was righteous.
And it nearly burned me alive.
Because beneath the fury lived something else—a realization that haunted me into clarity:
We have no choice.
None of us.
Every person I hated was also a domino—falling in a chain they didn’t build.
The officer, the billionaire, the abuser, the enabler—they didn’t start the machine. They were born into it. Just like I was.
Somewhere between absurdism and determinism, I saw it:
Consciousness isn’t freedom in the way we imagine. We’re not choosing our thoughts, just noticing them. The pattern began with the first flicker of energy, and we’ve all been cascading since.
That realization didn’t numb the rage.
It transmuted it.
Now I still burn, but the fire is aimed at the pattern.
At the systems.
At the incentives that manufacture monsters and mask them as heroes.
At the stories we inherit and internalize until we forget they’re stories.
I no longer waste energy hating individual players in a rigged game.
That’s just shadowboxing.
Instead, I’ve learned to use the fire—to paint with it, to write with it, to speak with it.
To name what’s broken without turning bitter.
To keep my heart sharp, but not cruel.
That’s what honed rage does:
It doesn’t lash out blindly.
It focuses.
It asks: Where can I push that might matter?
It says: This canvas is a battlefield too. This sentence is a strike.
It learns to wield anger as a scalpel instead of a shotgun.
Because while we may not have choice in the traditional sense, we can cultivate direction.
We can shape where we point. How we show up. What we amplify.
That’s the agency we do have: the ability to become intentional instruments inside a pattern that rarely is.
And when enough of us refine our rage into presence, into clarity, into art and action—
we don't just burn.
We illuminate.