By her own admission, Kat Daniels (11) was the angry girl in elementary school. Her routine started with waking up on the wrong side of the bed. She would step through the gates of Canyon View Elementary as the bell rang with her arms already crossed and a frown adorning her face. Threatening other kids and generally being hostile made Daniels a regular at the principal’s office.

“I was often labeled as an angry and emotional person,” Daniels said. “My friends’ parents didn’t want me around their kids because of all the trouble I caused.”

Daniels said her parents were both emotional people themselves, which caused turbulence in Daniels’ home life. 

External tensions caused her own internal tensions to rise and soon she would reach an emotional limit. 

Her anger would build up inside of her, and what for most came out as tears, instead built up inside her until it exploded in a wave of fury.

“I didn’t want people to think that I was weak,” Daniels said. “Instead of people thinking I was someone who would cry, I would [create] this persona of being really tough and really angry. And it was something that I took pride in.”

But all of this anger was snuffed out when Daniels transitioned to middle school. She was too busy making new friends to focus on being angry. 

“The beginning of middle school was probably the happiest I’ve ever been,” Daniels said. “I was meeting new people and making new friends.”

But as middle school progressed and social pressures began to increase, these friendships began to fracture. With the thing that had brought her solace beginning to flicker, she noticed her anger began to reignite within her. But this time it wasn’t towards others—it was towards herself.

“Everyone was dealing with their own stuff as preteens,” Daniels said. “I had a lot of issues with how I perceived myself, I was very insecure. It was really hard to be friends with me because I would put myself down all the time.”

In seventh grade, Daniels joined the school choir, which soon became the place where she could let go of all her pent up anger and stress. 

“Singing was a really easy way for me to let go of built-up stress,” Daniels said. “It’s nice because it’s like vocal exercise but also because when you hear the final piece all put together and everyone is enjoying themselves, you just can’t be angry.”

This love of choir continued into high school where its primary placement in her schedule allowed her to get rid of all her stress before any of her real classes even started. 

“There would be many days that I would show up to school angry and first-period Choir would just completely change my mood,” Daniels said. “Everyone in there was so positive. Some of the greatest people I’ve ever met came from chamber choir.”

But it wasn’t just that she was making new friends and relieving her anger. Daniels was, for the first time in a long time, truly happy.

“I felt really proud of what I did,” Daniels said. “Being part of a team was really helpful for me because I feel like I was being useful. Being able to be a part of that group, and contribute to the amazing things that we did really, really helped my mental health.”

But everything was cut short in March of Daniels’ freshman year when Westview moved to distance learning.Suddenly, she didn’t have her friends to cheer her up, and she didn’t have choir to release her stress.

She was alone.

“Quarantine was one of the worst things that happened to me,” Daniels said. “The more time I spent without other people, the more it took a toll on my mental health.” 

Daniels decided to download TikTok and other social media platforms in order to pass the time as quarantine pressed on. Initially, this served its purpose, but it soon became a burden on her and her self-image. 

Trends such as body-checking where people would compare their bodies with one another, ate away at Daniels, bringing back thoughts that hadn’t been there since middle school.

“It was good for me at first because I started posting things,” Daniels said. “But then it started getting super stressful for me. I just got so much anxiety from body-checking. It triggered something inside of me, the same insecurity I had in middle school. I started hating myself even more.”

Daniels decided to pull the plug on the platform once she realized how much stress it was causing for her. But the damage was already done. All the issues she had with her self-image had returned.  

The resurgence of anger within Daniels coincided with the outburst of attacks against the Asian-American community. As a member of the community, Daniels started to feel something build inside her towards the world for what they were doing to her people. 

“I was just angry at everything and everyone because of what was going on,” Daniels said. “I became really interested in politics [which led to] me losing friends because of political [differences]. Just knowing about politics made me a more emotional person, as well.”

Daniels was once again the angry girl. She would lash out in the middle of passive text threads, chew people out over voice chat and just make others feel bad. 

Being cooped up with her parents served to fuel her now roaring fire of anger. Fighting with her mom increased to an all-time high as tensions rised in the quarentined Daniels household. 

“We wouldn’t just get into petty arguments, but full-blown yelling matches,” Daniels said. “We would be screaming at the top of our lungs, in our house and in public too. It was just so much to deal with during Covid and online school.”

She finally realized that she couldn’t go on like this. Continuing to let her anger build up and rise, she was going down the same road she led in elementary school. And all that led to was a dead end.

She asked her mom to get her a psychologist, who later diagnosed her with anger issues, and began giving her medication. She then got a therapist to help her deal with her weekly struggles, whom she still sees regularly. 

“The [therapist] I’m with right now is a behavioral therapist,” Daniels said. “The biggest thing he’s taught me is to let things go. I’m a person who holds a bunch of grudges and I have a really hard time forgetting about things. He taught me that if I keep thinking about these people or interacting with them I’m essentially giving them power over me. And I just don’t need that kind of energy in my life. So I decided to block everyone who I deemed stressful to me and that really helped.” 

Therapy helped Daniels work on controlling her emotions and creating an environment that fostered self-care and love instead of stress and anger. She was able to take toxic people out of her life and work towards creating a more stable relationship with her parents.

Daniels does get angry from time to time. But she now has coping devices to help block out her more aggressive thoughts. She uses fashion to help boost her self-confidence, picking out outfits based on what just feels authentically her. She has also bought a snake which helps calm her down when internal tensions begin to build up inside. 

“It’s really hard to get mad when you have a pet,” Daniels said. “You are just constantly worried that you will take your anger out on it accidently. 

 With these tools Daniels is able to cope with outbursts of anger. She says she is beginning to feel like herself, beginning to have a sense of identity. 

She is beginning to feel happy again.

“I’m not putting up a front anymore, I’m just who I am,” Daniels said. “Me and my therapist talk things out and it just feels great to talk to someone [for once].”