As you anticipate leading a normal life again, you may be facing extra work and extra hurdles just to return to where you were before you were sick. You may expect your colleagues at school or work to be alive to your needs and provide the necessary leeway to help you ease back. Unfortunately, you may be expected to perform at least up to full force, in order to prove that you are ready to work. You may feel angry for being, in essence, punished for going through the trauma of cancer.

Lastly, you may feel disproportionate anger toward people and circumstances when things do not go well at work or at home. Since your cancer was not a person, any anger you may feel toward your cancer may end up getting directed at someone or something that also makes you angry. For example, you may feel explosive anger toward someone who turned you down for a job. It may be not that the job was so important but that you can express anger to a person but not to cancer. Besides, the person could have chosen to hire you, so you may feel anger that, with a choice available, things did not turn out well. Your cancer left no choice. Another example is anger at a loss, such as the loss of fertility. You may have had no intention or desire to have any more children, but the fact that the decision was made for you angers you.

Not only does anger come from many sources; it is often mixed with grief, anxiety, and fear. To further stir the pot, you may feel that anger makes no sense if your priorities have changed. Things that you consider relatively unimportant in the grand scheme of life should not make you angry, and yet they do. You really believe that a job rejection or someone’s inappropriate comment is relatively unimportant, and yet it triggers anger. It is natural that these things affect you. Even when you have settled in to your new priorities, and when job rejections or inappropriate comments bother you less, you may still have a reaction because the issues remain important in the short run.

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