When I was younger, I thought the greatest task in life was to figure out what I wanted to do.
Now, I think the greater task is to figure out who I really am.
It is a journey we all take, though we don’t always know we’re on that journey. Some of us walk it willingly. Others are dragged to it by life’s storms. But whether with open eyes or reluctant hearts, the search for our authentic self beckons us. The search doesn’t ever end, not really. Permit me to share why I believe this is so.
Along the way, we pick up masks. You and I do this to protect ourselves. But from what? Some masks are given to us when we are small: be strong, don’t cry, don’t be too much, don’t be too little. Others we craft ourselves: the mask of competence, the mask of cheerfulness or the mask of having it all together. All the while knowing we don’t have it all together. But neither does anyone else.
One of the most common masks is anger.
I watched a news program on PBS where one of the guests talked about this very issue. Sadness disguised as anger. We may rarely wear it out of anger, of course. It comes dressed up as indignation, righteousness, withdrawal, sarcasm, even a stiff upper lip. But beneath it, almost always, there is sadness.
Sadness that things didn’t turn out as we hoped. Sadness that someone hurt us. Sadness that we are afraid to feel. Sadness that we have unmet needs no one bothered to see or cared to ask about.
It is far easier, after all, to feel angry than to feel sad. Anger makes us feel strong, at least for a moment. Sadness makes us feel vulnerable. Why are we uncomfortable with vulnerability, you ask? Good question. Why are we?
But here is the paradox: the more we resist our sadness, the more it shapes us. The longer we cling to anger, the further we drift from our true self.
I once had a friend who carried a deep reservoir of anger. He would bristle at small slights and lash out in ways that surprised even him. Over time, he came to see that beneath his anger was an old, unspoken grief — a lifetime of disappointments, betrayals and unmet needs he had never allowed himself to feel.
When he finally gave himself permission to grieve, the anger began to lose its grip. In its place, he found something softer: compassion, acceptance, love and, yes, sadness — but a sadness that could flow through him, not trap him.
Our authentic self does not need anger to survive. It does not need to prove or defend itself. It simply is.
But to uncover it, we must be brave enough to remove the masks we have worn for far too long.
This is not easy work. Sometimes the masks have been with us for so many years that we believe they are part of us. But they are not. They are only strategies — strategies we needed at one time, but that no longer serve us.
The great philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once said, “The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all.”
And I would add: often it occurs when we mistake our anger for who we are.
The next time you feel anger rising in you, I invite you to pause and gently ask, what sadness might be beneath this? What longing? What wound?
You may not have the answer right away, and that’s fine, but it will come.
Make no mistake — the asking itself is an act of courage.
Bit by bit, question by question, feeling by feeling, we peel away the layers.
And as we do, we find that beneath the anger, beneath the sadness, beneath all the masks we have worn, there is a self that is whole, tender, wise and free.
That is the self worth finding.
That is the self worth living from.
And that is the journey we are all on — together.
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Richard Stride is the current CEO of Cascade Community Healthcare.
