On Anger & What It Hides
Anger Is Not
the Feeling
It is the cover. Underneath it
is something far more honest.
I spent a good portion of my life being angry. Not the fleeting kind — the kind that passes through you in an afternoon and is gone by evening. The other kind. The kind that settles in and makes itself at home. The kind that colours the way you see people, the way you interpret their decisions, the way you construct the story of your own life and your own limitations.
And for a long time, I was convinced the anger was justified. I had reasons. Specific, nameable, credible reasons. My circumstances. The people who failed to show up the way I needed. The opportunities that slipped through fingers that were not entirely my own. I wore the anger like a coat I had earned — because the cold was real, and the coat kept me from having to stand in it.
What I did not understand then is what I want to write about today: that anger is almost never the real feeling. It is what sits on top of the real feeling. It is the cover story the heart tells when the truth underneath is too vulnerable to say out loud.
My Father and the Guitar That Never Came
I am a creative person. I think in images and sounds. When I was younger, before the world had fully taught me to manage my expectations of it, I could feel clearly what I wanted to do with my life — music, photography, the making of things. That clarity was not ambiguous. It was real and it was mine.
My father is a different kind of man. He grew up in circumstances that made education not a preference but a lifeline — the one rope he could see leading somewhere better. Having fought hard to educate himself, he became, understandably, a fanatic about it. For him, a life built on a qualification was the only kind of life he could fully trust. Everything else felt like sand.
I was still young, still living under his roof, still needing him to open certain doors. So I went to him and I asked. I laid out what I wanted — a guitar or a DSLR camera, whichever he could manage first. I told him what I saw for myself when I looked forward. He listened. He agreed — reluctantly, in the way that men who disagree with you but love you sometimes agree — and then the agreement dissolved quietly into nothing. The guitar did not come. The camera did not come. And I was furious.
I carried that fury for years. I told myself — and believed it — that his failure to follow through had cost me something real. That the trajectory of my creative life had been altered by one man's inability to see beyond the academy. I filed his reluctance as obstruction. I filed his traditionalism as the reason my dreams had no runway.
than to be honest about what you are afraid of.
But here is what I know now, looking back with the uncomfortable clarity that only distance provides: my father's failure to buy the guitar was not the beginning of my story. It was the excuse I needed to not begin it myself.
The Audition I Never Took
There was a musical competition. My friends and I were selected — noticed, chosen, invited. The winner stood a chance at a recording contract. It was, by any honest measure, the kind of opportunity I had been telling myself I needed. The kind that does not find you unless you have something worth finding.
The auditions were in Nairobi. I had never been to Nairobi. The city felt enormous and foreign and full of variables I could not control. I overthought it — turned every unknown into a reason why it would not work, why I was not ready, why the timing was wrong. And underneath all of that thinking was a fear I could not name at the time but can name clearly now: I was terrified of going and discovering that the talent I had been protecting was not as large as I needed it to be.
So I did not go. And then — and this is the part I have to be honest about — I blamed my father for that too. I convinced myself I had not gone because I feared he would deny me permission. That his strictness had made Nairobi inaccessible. That he was, again, the wall between me and what I was capable of.
He did not stop me from going to Nairobi. I stopped myself. And I handed him the anger for it because the anger was easier to hold than the truth.
I was afraid of myself —
and anger was the only language I had for it.
What the Anger Was Actually Protecting
Anger, in these situations, is not dishonest. It is a protection. It is the psyche's way of keeping you from having to look at something more painful than the person you have decided to blame.
In my case, the thing the anger was protecting me from was this: the possibility that the naysayers were right. That I did not have what it took. That if I actually tried — fully, with everything available to me — and it did not work, there would be nowhere left to hide. The anger at my father gave me somewhere to hide. As long as he was the obstacle, I did not have to find out whether I was one too.
This is what low self-belief does when it cannot admit itself. It does not say: I am afraid I am not enough. That sentence is too exposed, too raw, too close to the wound. Instead it says: I would have been enough, if not for them. It finds a credible external reason — and in my case, the reason was credible, because my father was genuinely strict, genuinely traditional, genuinely limited in his vision of what counted as a real career.
But credible is not the same as true. And I confused the two for far too long.
The question the anger does not want you to ask:
If every obstacle had been removed — if the guitar had arrived, if Nairobi had been familiar, if your father had cheered — would you have moved? Or would another reason have surfaced to explain why the moment was not quite right?
Because if the answer is that another reason would have appeared, then the obstacle was never really outside you. The anger was never really about them. It was about the part of you that was afraid to find out what you were actually made of.
The Person Behind the Anger
I want to be careful here not to reduce my father to a villain who turned out to be innocent. The truth is more layered than that. His reluctance was real. His traditionalism did create friction. There were genuine moments where his inability to see my creative vision as legitimate made the path harder.
And — this is the and that matters — I used all of that. I used his limitations as raw material for a story in which I was the thwarted creative and he was the reason nothing flourished. That story let me stay small and feel righteous about it at the same time. Which is, when you examine it honestly, a very efficient arrangement. You get to keep the potential intact — shining, untested, theoretical — and you get to have someone else to blame for its never being realised.
The cost of that arrangement is enormous. I paid it in years of stalled movement, in the quiet accumulation of things I almost did, in the particular exhaustion of maintaining an anger that required constant narrative justification. It is tiring, being furious at someone for your own life. But it is less terrifying than the alternative — which is to pick up the guitar yourself and find out what you can do with it.
What Comes After the Anger
The moment I began to see this clearly, the anger did not immediately disappear. That is not how it works. You do not have one honest conversation with yourself and wake up free. The anger had been load-bearing for a long time — remove it too quickly and everything it was holding up comes down at once.
What changed first was smaller than that. I stopped being as certain that I was right. I started to notice the moments when I reached for the familiar fury and ask, before I picked it up: what is underneath this? What am I actually feeling right now? And the answers, when I was honest, were almost always some variation of fear. Fear of failure. Fear of being ordinary. Fear that the dream and the ability might not be the same size.
And here is what I have learned about fear — it is far more workable than anger. Anger requires an enemy. Fear only requires courage. And courage, unlike anger, is something you can actually do something with. You cannot resolve fury. But you can take a step despite being afraid. You can go to Nairobi even though you have never been. You can pick up the camera even without your father's blessing. You can begin even without the guarantee that the beginning will be enough.
The anger kept me standing still and calling it waiting. The fear, once I could finally see it, at least told me honestly what I was waiting for — and that it was not my father's permission, or better circumstances, or the right moment. It was my own.
A Final Word
If you have been angry for a long time — at a parent, a person, a circumstance, a door that was closed — I am not asking you to abandon the anger immediately or pretend it was not earned. Some of it was. The people and the situations that made your path harder were real, and the feelings they produced are legitimate.
But I am asking you to look beneath it. Just once, with whatever honesty you can manage. Ask yourself what the anger has been keeping you from having to admit. Ask yourself whose face you have been putting on a fear that was actually yours all along.
Because the moment you can see the fear clearly, something shifts. The enemy disappears — and what is left is just you, standing at the edge of something you have been meaning to begin, with nothing left between you and it except the decision to move.
My father did not stop me from becoming what I was capable of becoming. My fear did. And the day I finally understood that was not the day I stopped loving him. It was the day I stopped needing him to be the reason.
Is there someone you have been angry at for a long time — for holding you back, for not believing in you, for closing a door?
And is there any part of you that suspects the anger might be covering something closer to home?
You do not have to answer that out loud. But sit with it. The answer tends to know where to find you.
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