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Part 18 of the Things I Wished I Knew Sooner Series
🦋 The Takeaways
Belief: Whatever I’m angry at is clearly the problem.
Reality: Anger is the foam boiling over the top of the pot — the real problem is the liquid underneath.
Action: Look under the anger, stop resisting what’s there, and talk it out instead of withdrawing.
⭐️ Introduction
Welcome back to Things I Wished I Knew Sooner, a series about being diagnosed with ADHD late in life.
I want to be honest about how I’m writing this one. I usually show up with a lesson already learned, neatly packaged for you. This week, I don’t have that. I’m in the middle of the thing, and I’m writing my way toward understanding rather than from it.
Here’s the thing: I’ve been angry. Not my usual self. Most people would call me laid-back and good-natured — but lately, there’s another side, angry a lot of the time, snapping at the people around me, and wanting to withdraw from everyone. I oscillate from feeling helpless to wanting to punch something. I’ve been kickboxing more partly to put that anger somewhere (as well as regulate my ADHD.
I’m writing this in the hope that by the end, I’ll understand a little more and have a better idea of how to carry less of the anger.
😵💫 The Belief — What I’m Angry At Is the Problem
When I’m angry, I believe the thing in front of me is the obvious problem. The anger feels like a pointer, like it’s showing me exactly what to fix or fight or make go away. So I aim at it. I want to make the thing that’s making me angry disappear.
It’s worth asking where that wiring comes from. I learned young to hold everything in — that you don’t express the hard stuff, you keep your head down, you go along with the flow, and everything’s fine. My parents were immigrants to a country historically hostile toward people like us, and I don’t fault them for teaching me that. It was a survival tactic, and it’s a survival tactic for a lot of immigrant families: don’t make waves, don’t push, work hard, and you’ll get what you deserve.
The trouble is that holding it all in doesn’t make it go away. As a kid, everything would bottle up over time until I couldn’t hold it anymore, and then it would all come out at once. I’d feel better for a while. And then the cycle would quietly start over.
That cycle would emotionally hurt others and me. As someone with a young daughter, I have to learn to break the cycle so they don’t learn it and I can live a better life.
🤝 The Reality — The Foam Isn’t the Problem
What I keep relearning is that anger is rarely the real thing. Picture a pot boiling over. You see the foam spill over the top, and it’s easy to think the foam is the problem. But the foam is just what’s visible. The real problem is the liquid underneath, and the heat under that.
My anger is the foam. Underneath it is something I haven’t fully faced or processed — and the more I resist that something, the louder the anger gets. What resists persists. Brené Brown writes in Atlas of the Heart that most of us can name only three emotions as we feel them — happy, sad, and angry — so “angry” becomes the word we reach for when we don’t yet have language for what’s really there. For eight years, I’ve tried to deal with this: therapy, coaching, leaning on friends, even medication. And what I’m realizing is that most of that effort went into skimming the foam, when the work was always under the surface.
Anger, for me, is what helplessness feels like from the outside. It shows up when I’ve run out of ideas for how to make something better, and I don’t yet know what to try next. That’s uncomfortable to admit, but naming it that way is the first honest thing I’ve done with it in a long time.
🛠️ The Action — Look Under It, Then Talk
I don’t have this solved yet. I know I’ll get there eventually. But I know the shape of what to do, even when I’m bad at doing it.
Look under the anger and name what’s really there.
When you feel the heat rising, ask what the anger is sitting on top of. Anger is usually one thing — or several things — boiling over together, not the root itself.
The actions anger pushes you toward rarely match the actual problem. I hit the punching bag, but my problem was never physical. My body just didn’t know what else to do with the feeling.
Stop resisting what you find.
What resists persists. The thing you’re refusing to face doesn’t shrink from being avoided; it waits, and it grows.
You don’t have to fix it in one sitting. You have to be willing to calmly look at it — to admit what’s driving the fear underneath the anger, even before you know what to do about it.
Externalize it — connect instead of withdraw.
Anger tells you to isolate, to be alone, and make the problem disappear by force. The healthier move is the opposite: say it out loud to someone. “I don’t know what to do with this” is a complete and worthy sentence.
Sometimes the first person you tell won’t be able to meet you there, and that’s not a reason to stop reaching. Keep going — to family, friends, a coach, a therapist — until you find someone who can hold it with you.
✨ Conclusion
I told you I’d be honest, so here’s the honest ending: I don’t have a tidy resolution. I’m still angry, and I still don’t know exactly what’s under the foam. I only know I can’t keep living at this baseline, because the way I’ve been coping is quietly destroying something in me, and that’s not who I am.
But writing this and sharing it with my wife did what I’d hoped for. I have some ideas of what to try next, and more hope that other solutions exist.
That’s what I’m learning, in real time — a little more understanding, a little more hope, and, today, a little less anger than yesterday. I think I can do that.
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⏭️ Next Week
Grieving a life lost to being diagnosed late in life.
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