The Air Purifier: Thoughts on Anger and Self-Authorship

On Monday when I returned to work from a week long vacation, my air purifier was missing. I use my air purifier to maintain a healthy environment in my windowless office, and, more importantly, as a white noise machine to block out the sounds of people in the hall and other ambient noises. This helps me concentrate and maintain my energy levels – not having it's soothing noise causes me to feel physical tension and then energetic depletion in response to ongoing environmental sounds.

I discovered via email that my air purifier had been given to a resident who just moved in and complained of air quality in the hallway. Next week, promised the email, an ionizer would be installed in the hallway and my air purifier returned. No date was given. Meanwhile, back in this week, I had become aware of an ongoing squeaking noise from the laundry room next to my office. As I tried to focus on my writing, and process my emotions of being back at work after vacation, the noise began to push on my brain with an ever growing force. It became hard to concentrate and hard to think clearly. I longed for my air purifier to block the sound. I tried to ignore it, I told myself that my colleagues, and any reasonable person, would surely say I was being oversensitive, I tried to tell myself it's just 7.5 hours a day, I tried to tell myself that I could handle my energy being depleted, but eventually I just couldn't take it anymore.

I became angry at my co-workers for disrespecting my needs and my property (technically, their property – management giveth and management taketh away!). I became angry in my story that despite all the hype about diversity in the workplace, no one ever seems to take my sensitivity seriously. I think I was even angry at myself for being sensitive!

I decided to act on the anger, but in an effective way. I went downstairs, and took the fan out of someone else's office  who wasn't there (promising another staff I would return it when that staff returned). I took the fan back upstairs, plugged it in, and delighted in the white noise.

Later on when I wrote about this experience to my mother, she asked me if I was able to distinguish where exactly the anger was coming from. She told me that anger is a response to not getting what you need – and what did I need? When she asked me this, I realized that although I had thought I was angry because I felt disrespected and misunderstood by my co-workers regarding my sensitivity – the need being, to be respected and understoood – I realized that actually I was angry because I wasn't getting my more basic need of white noise being met. I was angry at my co-workers because I felt dependent on them to get me what I need, and they weren't doing so. When I realized I could find a way to meet my need myself, their respect and understanding became less important and in fact irrelevant. I was content again in my world with my white noise.

This isn't to say that the need to be respected and understood isn't a need – it is, particularly in situations where that respect is the vehicle to obtaining other needs – but that for me, what was powerful was to recognize that what I often experience as a social need – respect, understanding, being 'seen' – is actually a physical need – having quiet, having space, getting food, getting sleep (four very basic Highly Sensitive Person needs). This happens because I equate getting a physical need met with having a social being or structure give it to me. This is understandable given the structure of human culture, in which we are reliant on others to provide many of our needs. However, authoritarian, coercive structures, which tell us that others know better than us what is right and wrong, and that we must listen, convince us that we are much more reliant on others to have our needs met than we really are. 

I think the shift away from this incorrect understanding is in the approach. Once we separate the essential need from the social structure giving it to us, we can creatively problem solve how to get that need met. We may still rely on the social structure, but our relationship to it changes. I still needed to borrow a fan from a co-worker, but I didn't feel as though one of my co-workers had to go search it out for me, or buy another one right away, or given me my air purifier back. If I had not been able to negotiate the fan, I would have possibly biked to the nearby mall and bought one of my own! I had detached the need from the structure and was thus able to work with the structure, rather than in reliance on it.

Additionally, because of being less reliant on being experienced and treated in a certain way by my co-workers, I was able to let go of angry behaviour within relationship at work, and hold non-naive trust towards my co-workers, recognizing the realities of the social structure (both at work and in the culture at large), and being curious or remaining neutral about their experience of me. This allows me a freedom and generativity in my relating to them which further reduces tension and stimulation, and leaves the door open for increased mutual understanding.

This is called self-authorship and it is extremely liberating and energizing.