Understanding Suffering: From Anger to Care

For quite some time, I was thinking about writing on suffering to understand it better. The urge was persistent, living in my mind like an unfinished conversation. But whenever I sat down to write, the words wouldn't come. The picture wasn't clear enough, and I abandoned the attempt, leaving my thoughts scattered and unexpressed.

I had a firm belief that suffering culminates in many other forms. When one cannot contain it, it transforms into anger—a volatile energy that hurts both the person venting and the person receiving it. Often, we remain clueless about its origin, watching as pain morphs into rage without understanding the journey between the two.

What I came to understand is that most suffering which culminates in anger stems from our unmet desires in all their forms—emotional, physical, and material. The wound deepens when we suffer silently, refusing to reach out for help or support. False or inflated ego plays a larger role here, suppressing our desires until they inevitably erupt.

Recently, I was reading Ocean Vuong, and his wonderful reflections on suffering started fully resonating with me. It felt like what I had been trying to express was already there in his writings—a deeply satisfying discovery. 

He writes about writing itself as "a medium for understanding suffering," for understanding what hurts us, why we hurt each other, and how to stop.

Vuong reflects on his own experience:

I was in a world where anger, rage, and violence was a way to control the environment, and it was a way to control the environment for people who had no control of their lives. A lot of them were hurt and wounded… Because so much was close to me, I always had to look at it. And it behooved me to understand it in order to survive. So when I see cruelty, I look closer, and I say: "Where is this coming from?" And a lot of times, it comes from fear and vulnerability — you're too scared, and you have to strike first… I have great compassion to that, because the doorway through to violence has always been suffering…

What strikes me most is his metaphor of perspective:

It's interesting: You see the doorway in front of you and it feels so immense — it feels like the only path — but when you step back… it's almost like the doorway is in the middle of a field. And you're like, "Oh my goodness — I can step back, and I can just take one step to the side and go around, and the whole world is in front of me."

This image captures something profound about how suffering narrows our vision. When we're in pain, the path through anger and violence can seem like the only option available. But stepping back reveals countless other possibilities—a whole field of choices we couldn't see when we were too close to the door.

Vuong describes his career as "a slow attempt at stepping back and stepping aside from that door." There's something deeply moving about this—the idea that creativity and understanding can be acts of stepping away from destructive patterns, of finding space around our pain.

The poet's task, as he sees it, is to look more closely at this world. It's a task "resinous with the consolations of causality"—the more we see, the more we understand; the more we understand ourselves and each other, the less we suffer; the less we suffer, the less we lash the world with our suffering, and the more we can transmute the anger of helplessness into something more tender and tenacious.

But perhaps most revelatory is his insight about anger and care:

When you feel the somatic experience of anger, you throw things, you shout (perhaps at the people you love), you're on the floor (metaphorically, physically). And then, after a while, you have to get up. You have to feed your dog, answer emails, meet a student — in other words, you have to move towards care… For me, care is anger improved. It's part of the same ecosystem. And I'm interested in dismantling the border between these two things, because we're told that they're two opposite sides of a spectrum, but I think they're actually very close together. They inform each other.

This completely reframes how I think about these emotions. We're taught to see anger and care as opposites, but Vuong suggests they're part of the same ecosystem—care is simply anger improved, refined, transformed. Both emerge from deep feeling, from investment in the world and the people in it.

This connection becomes even more beautiful when he talks about language itself:

Writers have produced incredible amounts of work with the energy of rage and anger. But, for me, that care that I have to give the sentence is then the medic — it almost calms me down. It's hard to be rageful when you're working with something that needs your care. If each word is a citizen in this world of the text, they are so dependent on me to think clearly and with restraint and with a sense of compassion and dignity to them. And I would lose their confidence in me, in a way, if I were to approach it with too much of myself.

Here, the act of writing becomes a practice of care. Each word is a citizen depending on the writer's compassion and clarity. The very attention required to craft language with dignity transforms rage into something more healing—both for the writer and, ultimately, for the reader.

Reading Vuong has helped me understand why I struggled to write about suffering before. Perhaps I was trying to approach it quite narrowly, without the mediating care that language requires. The words wouldn't come because I hadn't yet fully learned/grasped to step back from the door, to see the field of possibilities around me and immediate world.

Now I see that writing about suffering isn't just about expressing it—it's about transforming it. It's about that slow, careful work of stepping back and stepping aside, of moving from anger to care, of treating each word as a citizen deserving of our compassion.

The irony is beautiful: in caring for language, we learn to care for ourselves and each other. In giving attention to words, we practice the attention that can transform suffering into something more tender and tenacious—something that heals rather than hurts.