A few days ago, an actor friend of mine brought to my attention an interesting blog post, written specifically with actors in mind, but whose broader implications I saw straightaway. It was titled
How To Deal With Rejection, and three things caught my attention as I read it. First, the advice it contained applies not just to actors or even to other performers, but just as much and just as well to academics, for reasons I'll mention in the minute. Second, instead of simply giving advice, it led the reader -- entertainingly, too, which is a plus -- through some tempting though ultimately self-damaging responses to rejection, before suggesting a different, insightful, and ultimately more productive response. Third, what the author,
Josh Pais, wrote in his short piece fits in well with, and would provide a good springboard for, several classical thinkers' theories of anger.
What is really going on in our responses to rejection is a set of emotional responses, closely tied in with our verbalizable thoughts, other emotions and moods, coalesced in more or less malleable habits. Anger is a common affective response to rejection. In fact, one might say it is
the common affective response, if it were not for the other emotions rejection tends to evoke in people: sadness, despair, fear, even perhaps in some relief (if the rejection means one gets out of something causing anxiety). Notice, though, that these other emotions differ from anger in a very important way: one tends to remain in them, or turn to something else to displace or numb them. They are not particularly active responses.
But, anger is an active response. Even if the response of anger is choked back, that takes effort (until it becomes habitual, and then the effort to maintain the calm, even pleasant mask becomes concealed, unconscious). When it goes underground, and becomes transformed into passive aggression or into bitterness towards oneself, others, one's situation, it manifests itself in activity. If misdirected, at the wrong people, the wrong things, flaring up on the wrong occasions, or perhaps fanning out to color one's response to everything surrounding oneself, it is active. When one becomes angry at the right object, that which inflicted injury, which treated one or those one identifies as of little value, that which threatens the loss of some good. . . (the listing of general dynamics could go on) -- then the active nature of anger unmistakably shows itself. It gets the person feeling it ready for conflict, for engaging in a battle in which, in the angry person's mind, the first shot has been fired, the first blood already drawn.
