Anger as Grief
I recognize that my rage is part of mourning, not an obstacle to it. My anger honors what I lost.
There is a quiet pressure in the world to hurry past anger as if it were the unattractive stretch of grief, the part to be cleaned up before company comes. You will be told, in different ways, to let it go, to move on, to forgive. You do not have to take this advice on anyone's timeline but your own.
Your anger is not a detour from healing. It is part of healing. It is the soul recognizing that something wrong was done, and refusing to pretend otherwise. When you are angry, you are not in denial. You are not minimizing. You are looking at what happened and naming it accurately. That is progress, not regression.
Anger gives you energy when grief alone would keep you still. It helps you hold the line when softer feelings might let you waver. It makes room for you to be on your own side, sometimes for the first time in a long time. None of that is small. None of it deserves to be hurried away.
Today, you can let your anger be what it is. You can feel it without performing it for anyone. You can give it somewhere to go that is not turned against yourself. You can let it sit beside the sadness and the longing and the relief, because all of those are also true. None of them cancel the others out. Anger is not the storm anymore. It is the wind in the rigging of a vessel that finally has a direction.