At the next pain level, grip your anger when despair is going to wash you away.

This is good advice for a medium day, but on the pain 10 days it’s anger that kept me alive. So my thought is: focus it where it’ll do the most good. If you have a flu or something on top of everything else, visualize you’re beating the pants off it, literally murdering the microbes while you drink juice and take vitamins and over the counter remedies.

Get mad if you’re too tired to do your exercise regimen and do some of it anyway.

Count even half a point as better than none.

Channeling anger is better than denying it. Focusing anger in positive ways, to beat the flu or to beat the fatigue, to stand against despair, to fight instead of lay down and give up, that can help a lot.

I learned not to take it out on individual people around me. At first I learned to take it out on impersonal big issues like politics, jumping into discussions and trying to out-debate anyone I disagreed with. I’d out-polite them so it’d stay rational and I’d make my point with the middle of the road folks who can be convinced rather than the extremes who won’t be convinced no matter what I do.

Activism like writing articles to help others with the disease, raising funds for research, those are ways to use the anger to directly fight the real cause – being too tired and too sick to be anything but grumpy. That’s a way to use it where it’ll do some good.

So is finally making the bed when it needs it and no one’s got time to help. Getting fed up with that, getting mad, not at them but at the weakness, and doing it myself. Doing it my way because I had the nerve to use my anger. That’s what I did tonight – and halfway through, I’m resting and looking at an accomplishment that was, just barely, within reach even though it didn’t look that way.

Anger is adrenaline.

Your body’s keyed to fight or flight, so becoming a gentle person and a loving person isn’t denying that – it’s healthier to use it in some form of physical or mental activity that is actually using the adrenaline. Then it doesn’t backblow into more pain and fatigue. Use it, don’t deny it. Use it in the most creative, constructive ways you can think of.

Physical activity like cleaning up is great for it. That’s when your body is fighting something, goes back to its primal instincts. Plan it so that you tackle something in reach, or something that if you get it started and don’t finish doesn’t really disrupt you much. I do need to get the sheets and pillows back onto that bed but the emergency thing of getting the cat armor back all the way over the mattress is taken care of.

I could sleep in a pile of blankets tonight and finish tomorrow if I had to, but I’m getting my wind again and determined to do it. If I don’t get all the pillows heaved back onto the bed, big deal. Sheets and blanket and one of them would be enough – as long as the cat armor’s in place.

If you do some of the dishes, there’s less of them next time.

One of my favorite things to do when I’m mad is attack things I need confidence for – like sending out story submissions. I get mad, that kicks the anxiety out, and suddenly I’ve got this driving need to show Them – anyone who ever gave me a hard time – that I’ve got some courage. And so the manuscript gets edited and sent off. Anger can also beat back fear.

Best of all, if you use your anger in something productive and important to you, you don’t feel helpless and you don’t feel mad any more. There’s the tiredness of real accomplishment, a different and far less demoralizing ache. Count any win, however small, and treat set backs as failed trials.

There, I wrote an essay to supplement this, because just containing anger isn’t enough on the bad nights.

I have had to work on that one! I held in my anger for years! I repeated the phrase, “GET BITTER, OR GET BETTER’ THE CHOICE IS MINE.