Don't Anger God.
A phrase that once meant deeds became a leash on feelings – and joy, tiredness, and tears were never the crime.
Bella opens her journal and writes two words: I'm tired. And before the sentence can breathe, a voice in her head answers – don't anger God. Instead of obeying it, she turns around and looks at it: where does this phrase actually come from, and what did it originally mean?
What she finds deserves the space she gives it: the phrase was about deeds – cruelty, deliberate harm – never about feelings. Joy, tiredness, and tears were never the crime. It took generations with no safe room for emotions to turn it into an instrument: don't rejoice, don't complain, be grateful and keep quiet. The Blind Spot describes the same machinery from the inside – the invisible hierarchy that sorts our inner world into welcome and unwelcome feelings, and becomes the greatest obstacle to healing. This way holds the opposite: every feeling is a guest with a full right to exist. Tiredness included.
Her last line names why this matters beyond one diary morning: it gets handed down – until someone stops handing it.
“Don't anger God”
Today I was writing in my journal, and I started with the phrase: I'm tired. Tired of not sleeping at night. And right away I heard a voice in my head: “don't anger God.”
I noticed I hear it far too often, and I got curious about its real meaning – and where this scare tactic even came from.
Originally the phrase “don't anger God” wasn't about feelings at all.
Not about joy. Not about tiredness. Not about tears.
In the religious sense it referred to deeds:
cruelty, pride, deliberate harm, the destruction of yourself and others.
It was about moral choice, not human emotions.
Feelings were never considered something that could “anger God.”
But over time the meaning changed a lot, and that is directly tied to the times our mothers and grandmothers lived in.
Those were periods when:
• individuality was not encouraged,
• there was no safe space for emotions,
• personal feelings were treated as secondary,
• survival and “enduring” mattered more than understanding yourself.
In those conditions the phrase became a convenient scare.
People began to use it not as a moral compass,
but as a way to stop a person:
– don't rejoice,
– don't complain,
– don't feel too much,
– don't stand out,
– be grateful and keep quiet.
The phrase stopped being about deeds
and became about control and fear.
And that is exactly how a great many people were psychologically broken back in childhood:
not because something was wrong with them,
but because they were taught not to feel,
not to trust themselves,
and to constantly expect punishment for being sincere.
And the scariest part is that it was passed down from generation to generation…
Thank you for reading.
If her words reached somewhere mine don't – good. That's what this blog is for. Take what fits and leave the rest.
– Jan