Aim Your Fire
A few weeks ago, I wrote about Anam Cara, a concept that came from my late friend John O’Donohue, the esteemed poet, philosopher, and priest, Anam Cara means “soul friend,” and it’s a person who loves you from the deepest place within. It’s someone who sees what you have the potential to become, tells you it’s real and possible, and loves you forward as you bloom safely and securely into your most authentic self.
So many of you responded after my last essay about this topic. Some of you wrote that you’re still waiting for that kind of relationship in your life. Others said you already have it, but that you didn’t know what to call it until now. And several of you said something that stopped me: perhaps we need to become an Anam Cara to ourselves.
My friend Tom wrote me and said: “If Anam Cara means anything, it means a person who will—and who you allow to—dig up the buried parts of yourself. That is always going to stir up fear and pain, because fear and pain are the reason they’re buried. So while an Anam Cara can offer occasions of immensely soothing feelings, they must also drive you to deeper intimacy with yourself. Yuck.”
Yuck. And bam.
I laughed when I read Tom’s final word. And then I sat with his message for a long time. Because he’s right. The Anam Cara is not only here to comfort you. The Anam Cara is here to help you excavate. And excavation, by its nature, disturbs the ground.
My spiritual teacher Roxanne said something similar in her own way. She told me that everyone and everything that enters our lives is here to wake us up and to teach us something. Seeking to understand how you’ve been awakened and what the lesson is, she said, will bring you to a deeper understanding of yourself.
I have been sitting with both of these ideas this week, and they have led me down a path I didn’t entirely expect to go.
In this summer of friendship and connection, I have been examining my purpose, my calling, and my connection to my heart and soul. I’ve been asking hard questions about where I am in my life, what I am here to do, and why. And alongside that examination, I have been trying to look honestly at what triggers me—my central nervous system, my judgments, my feelings—in ways I don’t always understand and can’t always control.
Because here is what I have come to believe: the people and situations that trigger us are doing the same work as the Anam Cara, just from the opposite direction. The Anam Cara excavates with love. The trigger excavates with friction. Both are pointing at something buried. Both are trying to bring something hidden into the light. Tom told me he thinks the Anam Cara wakes you up by ringing a painfully loud alarm. I think our triggers do the same.
And right now, if I am being completely honest with you, the person triggering me most is the President of the United States.
I know. I know. But stay with me. Because this isn’t the column you might think it is.
I have tried to examine what it is about him that activates me so deeply. And when I dig past the easy answers—the outrage and the values that oppose my own—I find two things that are hard for me to admit.
The first is that he can be an effective messenger, in his own way. Now, I don’t agree with his message. I find much of it harmful, dishonest, and cruel. (And yes, that includes many of the tasteless, insensitive jokes he made at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner last night.) But despite the venom that frequently comes out of the president’s mouth, I have had to sit with an uncomfortable truth: he is extraordinarily effective at grabbing people’s attention. He has taken the politics I grew up with and turned them on their head. He has found a way to deliver his message that lands with a lot of everyday people. That’s something I have spent my entire career trying to do for issues I care about like Alzheimer’s and women’s health. And when I watch him do it, when I see how powerfully he moves people, something rises up in me that is part outrage and part something else. It’s recognition, and the sting of my own unfinished work.
The president, in his own way, is showing me the gap between the importance of what I am fighting for and the reach of how I am communicating it. And when I see someone else close that gap—even someone whose message I find destructive—it disturbs me in ways that go beyond politics.
The second thing I’ve recognized is even harder for me to admit. The president triggers my anger and rage in a way that brings up my uncomfortable relationship with both. What is my rage really about, and who is it truly directed at? What should I do with it, and is it acceptable? Is it power, or is it poison?
I grew up in a world that did not have much room for women’s anger. I think we still live in that world. And so most women have had to learn to manage their anger, to redirect it, or to find a more palatable container for it. I, like many women of my generation, learned to bury it the way so many of us bury the parts of ourselves that feel too dangerous to bring into the room.
And now here it is. Rising. Demanding to be heard. And I’m listening.
The Anam Cara excavates the tender, buried self—the unloved parts, the self you hid to get along, to be okay, to survive. When someone truly accepts you, it surfaces the ache of all the times you didn’t accept yourself. All the ways you made yourself smaller. All the longing to be seen that you learned to pretend you didn’t feel.
And the trigger excavates the fierce, buried self, along with the anger, the fire, and the parts you decided were too much. When someone enrages you, they are often touching something you locked away long ago because you didn’t know what to do with it. Didn’t think you were allowed to have it. Didn’t trust yourself with it.
Both are excavations. Both are uncomfortable, unwelcome invitations, but they’re ultimately necessary to go deeper into yourself. They call you to ask: what is this rage showing me? What have I buried here? What would it mean to stop burying it?
What we bury doesn’t disappear. It waits. And it also sends us teachers. Some who come with love and tenderness, and some who come with fire. I think both are trying to bring us home to ourselves.
I don’t have this fully resolved. I want to be honest about that. I am still in the middle of understanding what my anger is trying to tell me. Still learning what it means to let it have a place in my life and to use it as information. To ask it what it knows. And I am still learning how to use my faith to try to dig deeper and treat those who challenge me with love and acceptance. (In fact, my brother Timothy is running a whole movement that examines how we can learn to disagree with compassion and he has shared a document that can help us find more productive ways to channel our anger. You can learn more here.)
I am also still working on the gap between my passion and my ability to communicate it effectively with the world. On how to take what I care most about and make it land the way it deserves to land. That work continues. It probably always will.
All that said, I am grateful for the discomfort, because discomfort is where the buried things surface. And the buried things, when they finally come up into the light, are almost always trying to tell us something we needed to hear.
So here is what I’ve come to understand, sitting with all of this. This isn’t about Donald Trump. It never really was. Just as the Anam Cara was never really about the other person. It was always about what they surfaced in me, because the trigger is the same. He is a teacher I didn’t choose and wouldn’t have chosen. But he has shown me something I needed to see.
And I know I am not alone in this. Some of you are triggered by what is happening in Israel and Gaza. Rightfully so. Others of you are triggered by what’s unfolding in your own cities, schools, police departments, and local politics. Rightfully so. The specifics differ. But the anger is the same. And the question is the same: what do we do with it?
Because here is what I have come to believe, after sitting with this long enough to stop being afraid of it: Anger is not the enemy. Misdirected anger is the enemy.
Rosa Parks was angry enough not to get up out of her seat. My mother was angry enough to refuse the idea that people with intellectual disabilities had to stay in institutions. Martin Luther King Jr. was angry at the second-class citizenship that so many of his brothers and sisters were forced to endure. Dorothy Day was angry enough to start the Catholic Worker movement. Mary Oliver—who had her own Anam Cara in her beloved partner—wrote from a place of excavation and from love and from anger intertwined.
These were not people who extinguished their fire. They were people who aimed it. Who took the heat of what they could not accept and turned it into something the world could not ignore. I love these examples. They are clear, they are centered, and they are arresting.
And this is not ancient history. It is happening right now, all around us, in ways we are only beginning to name.
Not long ago, I read a piece by a women’s health doctor who said something that stopped me cold. She said: Every single patient of mine comes in discussing a symptom that I do not see written about, talked about, or examined anywhere. And that is women’s rage. She was talking about menopausal symptoms, but she was really talking about the rage that so many women have buried and now experience as their bodies change. It’s a rage that is real and physical and chemical and emotional and deeply human, but that our medical system has not known what to do with, so it has largely pretended it isn’t there. But it is there. It has always been there. We just haven’t been given permission to name it.
Jen Levi—whom many of you have come to know through The Sunday Paper—has taken her grief and her anger about what happened to her son and turned it into a fight to change drunk driving laws. Laws that will actually save other lives. People talk about her pain. But underneath that pain is fire. And that fire is what is changing the world.
A Sunday Paper PLUS subscriber recently reminded me of an interview my mother gave many years ago. In that interview, my mother said: “I guess you could say I’m lucky with the adversity I faced. I’m lucky that people thought real power was not available to me.” (By real power, she meant political power.) So she took her invisibility and raged her way into the public square. Not just because of what she had seen, but because of what she herself had felt.
My mother understood something that I am still learning: the rage is not a liability. It is the engine.
That is what anger is for. Not to turn inward, which only makes us smaller, sadder, and more confused. Not to direct at one another, which only deepens the divisions we are already drowning in. But to look at it honestly. To speak to it. To ask: Where do you want me to go? What do you want me to build? What will you not let me accept?
I tell my daughters: do not be afraid of your fire, and find partners who aren’t afraid of it either.
My granddaughters have fire. I see it in them already. And I hope life does not crush it or extinguish it (which it will try to do, because life always tries). I hope they learn what I am still learning: that the fire is not a problem to be managed. It is a gift to be aimed. And each of us, if we are lucky, should surround ourselves with people who marvel at our fire instead of trying to snuff it out.
So let us take our anger and put it into the great mixing bowl of life alongside our love, our tenderness, our compassion, our grief, and our hope. Let us learn to work with it rather than run from it. Let us stop apologizing for it and start asking it what it knows.
What I know for sure at this moment in my life is that the Alzheimer’s issue—particularly women and Alzheimer’s, which I have fought for decades—needs my fire. So do the discrepancies in women’s health. In fact, most of what I’ve accomplished professionally came from a place of fire. And also I know I cannot allow my rage at the inequities I see to drown out the gifts brought to me by love. Being a person who can hold the fire and the love together is the goal of any Anam Cara. It’s the goal of any real, true friendship.
So here is my invitation to you this week.
Think about the people who trigger you. Who activate something in you that you don’t always understand. Try to look at them as teachers. Not to excuse what they do. Not to make peace with what is wrong. But to ask: what are they excavating in me? What buried thing are they bringing to the surface that is asking for my attention?
And if you have an Anam Cara in your life, think about all they have brought to life in you. The parts of yourself you might never have found without them. The tenderness they surfaced. The courage they called forward.
And then consider this: you may be an Anam Cara for someone else. You may already be the person whose love and presence is excavating something buried in another human being—something they needed to find and couldn’t find alone. Ask them sometime what lessons they have gained from knowing you. The answer might surprise you.
And finally, turn all of it inward. Because the real work of the Anam Cara, the real destination of every trigger and every teacher and every soul friendship, is this: to help you become that for yourself. To help you love yourself with the same fierce, excavating, unconditional presence that the best friendships offer. To stop burying the parts of yourself that feel too dangerous or too tender or too much.
You are your own most important Anam Cara. And you are worth the excavation.
So the next time someone looks at you and says, “Wow, you have a lot of fire,” or “You are high octane,” look them in the eye, then throw your head back, smile, and thank them for noticing.
Then say: “Yes, I do. And I intend to use it for good.”
Wish me luck as I start to do this myself. I wish those who stand in my way the same.
P.S. I hope you’ll also take a moment this morning to engage with our stories below: my conversation with my great friend Simon Sinek; the insightful friendship advice from the bestselling author of Platonic, Marisa Franco; and the new research that Emma Bloomberg reports on about how small acts of connection can be the foundation for lasting change. I think each pairs beautifully with today’s reflection on Anam Cara and the value of friendships and connection to help us become more fully ourselves.
Prayer of the Week
Dear God,
Help me receive every loving friend and every difficult moment as an invitation to uncover what You have placed within me. Please also give me the wisdom to aim the fire in my heart toward love and use it for good.
Amen.
Also in this week’s issue:
• The Overlooked Piece to Deeper, Better, Stronger Friendships
• Where Americans Still Find Hope
• Maria and Simon Sinek on the Ingredients of a Great Friendship
• News Above the Noise—Week of July 26, 2026
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تم النشر: 2026-07-26 03:16:00
