Why Don't We Talk About Anger? Mental Health Month 2026

If you're depressed, just be happy!
If you're anxious, just stop thinking about it!
If you're burned out, just rest!

And when it comes to anger, just calm down!

...like that'll work any better than the other platitudes that misunderstand mental health.

If you get angry, you're told you're the problem, no matter what. Anger's scary. Anger demands change, and action, and the skill of healthy conflict that we no longer know how to do.

If you feel angry right now, and you don't know what to do and it's something that digs underneath your skin and burns in your chest, and you hate that the only thing you're ever told is to become stoic, become emotionless, become numb, then this is for you, because...

Hi, I'm Tim, and I'm one of the angriest people you'll ever know. Not that you'll be able to easily tell. No one likes to talk about anger, even during Mental Health Month, so let’s talk about it.

I think I'm generally known as "nice," I've been called a very kind person, extremely generous, and all other manner of opposite labels to someone who's brimming with anger all the time.

But I'm not.

The same fire that gets praised as passion and conviction is the same rage that simmers beneath the surface all the time. They're the same feelings that got me forced into an anger management classes as a kid, and one that I quit, ironically, in anger.

Because anger, I think, often comes from optimism, and a positive outlook on the world. Sounds strange, doesn’t it? And yet, anger is what happens when we have an expectation of the world, a lofty, high expectation of it, and those expectations get shattered. We get angry when we expect people to keep their promises, and they don’t. We get angry when we expect fairness, and get treated differently. Meanwhile, cynics, who truly and genuinely believe only the worst of the world, expect the worst... and when it meets their expectations, they simply sigh glumly, and continue on. Those of us who are angry all the time, those of us burning alive with rage are the ones who believe things should be different than how they are... And yet, what do we, as a society, do with those people

The way we're told to approach anger is to make ourselves smaller and make it less inconvenient for everyone else. We're told that it shouldn't be bottled up, but also to never release it as a pressure valve, lest it be inconvenient for everyone else around us.

Is it any wonder, then, that we have an angry, young and lonely generation that everyone knows is a problem, but no one seems to want to do anything about?

The only solution ever given to anyone is to shut up, be docile, be meek, be demure, be less of yourself and who you want to be, and suffer through it, lest you're inconvenient to anyone else.

See, when I was sent to anger management as a kid, the moment I'd stepped into that room, I began to understand the problem. This class wasn't to help me, it wasn't so that I could feel better, it wasn't so that I could understand my anger, no. It was designed for everyone around me, so they could feel safe, so they could say they'd done something about the angry kid, so they could check the box and sleep at night knowing the problem was being "handled."

The anger management system as we know it wasn't designed to help the people who were angry, but was designed by the criminal justice system where anger means nothing but violence. And so, when you walk into that anger management class, you are already branded as guilty of unchecked violence, even if you’ve never committed any.

It becomes a source of shame and failure, and deems you as dangerous, violent, as if chronic anger can only ever manifest in hurting others.

Every step, they were there to tell me how I was the one who was wrong, and how I could calm down, and how I could simply look the other way, ignore the problems I saw, and not be angry anymore, if only I’d acknowledge it wasn’t other things that were the problem, but me that was wrong!

But I'd argue back, because I thought I was right to be angry, and why shouldn't I be? I was angry because I was an autistic, ADHD kid growing up in an environment that constantly told me to be normal, to simply pay attention, that I was broken and bad for being different from the others. I didn’t have the diagnosis then, the formal reads-- but I felt it all the same.

Back then, my neurodivergent parents were still making poor attempts at being oppressive tiger parents, pressured by their own social groups to do these things they felt wasn't right in their hearts, but tried anyway because they were told that extreme pressure and control were the only right way to raise children who forgot things and asked why too much. I was a fascinating case, the managers at the anger management class said, they'd love to talk to me more. Recommend meds to calm me down, more workbooks, more ways to understand how I was looking at it all wrong because I just wasn't a normal kid, and certainly, they could figure out how to make me more normal.

We love to point our fingers at symptoms, and never once ask why they're there, and wonder why nothing ever changes. And often, we never think about if those symptoms are even problems, or if they’re simply misdirected. Anger, after all, has more uses than anyone cares to admit, something I’d learn in the Michelin Star kitchen I’d cooked at... but not before a decade of misguided attempts.

In my teenage years(and perhaps, even now), I loved to seek out fights. Not physical ones (at least, nothing of note that would get reported), but brought my rage to the internet.

Not through "violent video games," as if the act of doing something in game is enough to delude the mind into thinking it's real, as if winning a game of Overwatch makes you feel like you saved the world, or playing Cooking Mama makes you a 3 Michelin Star chef.

No, I would exchange barbs with people, fighting strangers and friends alike on forums and roleplaying games. I'd always try to keep the peace, of course, because I knew that's what you were supposed to do, but I also knew that it'd never work, and so when that fight I was eagerly seeking inevitably came, I'd be completely justified in stepping into the ring.

But it'd always feel hollow, later. A surge of adrenaline, a temporary relief at best, and then a hollowness, because I'd done nothing but release the temporary symptoms of the anger.

And if fighting didn't work, then what about just letting the anger out? That’s the other school of thought that's been paraded around as a solution. Rage rooms where you physically smash things, punching bags, and other violence-coded actions, as if associating getting angry with immediate release via physical violence wouldn’t ever create habits that become a problem later.

Because as I went on in the years, I met others who went that route, and released that pressure in violence that I'd never done. I met them in the kitchen. In the culinary field, even among Michelin Star restaurants and fine-dining, the line cooks and chefs are a lot that come from all walks of life. There are those who grow up in more sheltered environments, like mine, and then there are the ones who'd been in gangs, who'd dealt drugs, who'd beaten people badly enough to carry the weight of it. The kitchen doesn't care where you came from, whether it was from a hoity toity culinary school or through grinding your way up every year-- It only cared if you could do the work.

People there were nice on the surface, too, but each and every one of us had a barely contained anger, a chip on our shoulders, else, we wouldn't endure the brutal hours, the cuts and burns, and the conflicts and fights we'd constantly get into. Some of them came from backgrounds where they’d get into physical fights all the time.

It's no secret that the professional kitchen is well known for the chaos and the yelling and the anger, and the pain and lifelong scars it inflicts on people. It's an industry where anger was the default, where hot tempers clashed as often as the flames that licked the sizzling pans.

Perhaps it's because of that, not in spite of it, that people like me might feel like it was home, and where angry people like me would learn how to use our anger in a way that finally felt good. It was in that kitchen where I met a guy named Dio. While I was cooking at the Michelin Star restaurant and leading a station, we had Korean externs who flew all the way from Korea to live in the United States and do nothing but work. I got one of them on my station. Dio, we called him, which I'd only learn much later was likely because his initials were D.O, and not that he was a fan of the band or he decided to be named god. He was proud of himself and his skills, how could he not be, having been good enough to be chosen to fly to another country to work at a prestigious restaurant many people would be proud just to step foot in?

On the first day, we told him to brunoise shallots and slice chives. A simple enough task, you'd think, but this was a Michelin Star restaurant. When he brought the containers of tiny cubes and little ringlets to me, I looked down at those rough, inconsistent cuts, shook my head in dismay, and told him to do it again.

And so he did and came back, and again... it was a mess. I told him to do it again and again until he came back frustrated, angry, not understanding what he was doing wrong, convinced that perhaps, we were hazing him. And so I passed out shallots and chives to the others, and we picked up our knives, and we brunoised those shallots in perfect tiny cubes and cut those chives into perfect tiny rings and showed him that each and every single one of us did it perfectly, in the way he did not.

He got quiet, and nodded, and said he understood. The next day I didn't have him do shallots and chives again. The previous day, he'd taken too long and had put us behind. I told him to practice and he would get another chance to prove himself, and he'd only nodded quietly in response.

It'd taken me a month and a half, two months before I'd gotten my knife skills to the point where they could be used on the line, after all. He'd have a long road ahead of him still.

The next day, I gave him those shallots and chives again, expecting the same as before. Five minutes later, he brought it up to me again and I looked at them, ready to critique again to tell him what he needed to do to improve. I picked them up, and looked at them, and shook my head in disbelief.

"They’re perfect. How the hell did you improve so fast?"

I’d heard from his roommate later, another Korean extern, what he had done the day that he went back. After the rest of us were off and leaving exhausted at 12am in the morning, he had gone to a 24-hour Safeway. He'd bought up all of their shallots and all of their chives and cut and cut and practiced throughout the night, getting only four hours of sleep before he came back and then the next day, went back again and practiced it again.

In those two nights, he cut more shallots and chives, and practiced more than I'd done in the two months that I'd taken.

And it'd taken me two months, because back then when I got angry and frustrated I just did what everyone else did at those young ages: nothing. I stewed in it, I ruminated, did nothing but run on that stupid little hamster wheel in my head.

Dio was one of the kindest people I ever met. Sincere, honest, a gentle giant. Friendly. His English wasn't the best, but he would still be able to express himself in action and smiles and, more than anything else, his dedication to improving.

See, the reason why he got so good, so fast, is the very reason why anger is also so dangerous, and so scary to others. Anger creates action, and action creates change. That action can burn everything it touches.. or it can be the catalyst to building something new into this world. There were those who let that fire run wild, burning everything they touched, their anger cooking nothing but ash. And there were the ones like Dio, who took that same fire and compressed it until the flame roared and turned blue and punched through whatever is in front through the sheer force of will behind it.

Anger’s the gap between what you think the world should look like, and what you got instead. You can sit in that gap and stew, run on the hamster wheel in your head forever, or you can take that fire, that energy, that passion, and build toward what you think it should be-- skills, systems, creations-- without that anger, without that fire, we aren’t able to fight through all the hardships in the way. But even so, building things is change, and change scares people. People want to stay with the pains that they know instead of the pains that they don't. Comfort is often prioritized above all.

When someone looks at something that's wrong with the world, and has their sadboy hours, they don't move. We, the spectators, are safe from change, and we can even build up our own sense of worth by feeling like a savior, a good person by helping them.

But when someone's angry that something's wrong with the world and wants to change it? Then we get scared. We tell them to stop, to slow down, to think about their actions.

“What is wrong with you?”

It's the question we always ask the angry person, never the world that made them angry.

The people burning alive with rage are the ones who still believe things should be better, and they always were. It’s that very same spite, very same rage and anger that let me build Vite, because when a food consultant laughed at my face and told me that I couldn't do it and I would need $2,000,000 or more to build this, I got angry and out of spite did it anyway. And nine years later, I'm still angry, all the time. But now, I’m constantly building, constantly creating-- my anger, channeled, into things that make me feel proud, are defiant in the face of passivity, things that I want to do to change the world, little by little, because I’m still the angriest person to walk into the room. So if you're angry right now, and you've been told your whole life that your anger is the problem, I'm not going to tell you to calm down.

Because perhaps, when someone's angry, we shouldn't ask, "What is wrong with you?"

And perhaps, we shouldn’t even ask, "Friend, what has happened to you?"

Instead, what if we looked to see where the world has fallen short for them? What if we looked to see where those foundations crumbled for them, and where their anger was built from broken hope?

Then, perhaps, we could finally ask them, "How will you use anger to build the world towards what you believe it should be?”

-Tim, Founder Vite