When I think about the emotion of anger, I am faced with two diametrically opposite mental images. One is fire. Everything is hot to the touch. Anger flares up in your blood and races through you at a hundred miles an hour, igniting every inch of you until it finds an outlet. Otherwise you’d combust.

The other image is that of water, cold to the verge of becoming ice. It’s the feeling of being numb but also the flash of fury that accompanies being rudely awakened by a bucket of ice water. You wake up with a start, cursing, but realizing, once you’ve dried off and calmed down, that it was a pretty refreshing way to wake up from what was a fitful sleep.

Fire destroys, water cleanses. That’s not the takeaway message here, though.

To elaborate the metaphor a bit, imagine being trapped under the ice of a frozen pond, and desperate to get out. The ice is thick, your clothes are weighing you down, and you’re so desperate for escape that you feel as if you could just punch through the ice. But, instead of believing in that ability, you wish that a fire would come and melt away your only barrier to sweet, sweet oxygen.

Assuming that you have a fantastic lung capacity and supernatural strength, however, you keep punching at the ice, and eventually find the weak spot. One final strike, and you’ve broken free, all on your own accord. Pyrotechnics not required.

What I’m really talking about here is focus. I’m talking about letting your haters be your motivators: Pushing the base drive to anger higher, and allowing it to become a call to action. Because, while altruism is great, they don’t call it “lighting a fire under your ass” for nothing.

I made the best decision of my life so far when I was figuratively drowning in a similarly icy pond. What had begun as a kind of vague, harassing anger at the state of the world, and questioning why the road to adulthood seemed so fraught with soul-crushing conformity, had turned into apathy, a feeling you don’t want to have when there’s ice to punch. But one day, after having one too many conversations with advisors telling me to jump headfirst into convention, a lightning bolt struck hot and fast, jolting me back to action.

At first it wasn’t pretty. The lightning sparked a fire that raged for a few weeks. One day, after considerable brooding, it was as if someone had suddenly thrown a big ol’ bucket of ice water on the fire. The fire wasn’t completely put out, but it started to change direction and shape. As I purged bucket after bucket, and began to reach the bottom of the pond of frustration, I stumbled upon something shiny.

That something shiny was a kind of way around the system. I realized that I didn’t have to sell myself out just yet, that I still had opportunities to break the cycle of the typical and stay a bit truer to myself than I would have been able to otherwise. For me the shiny thing was a summer study abroad program that I happened to fatefully stumble upon on the UMass website.

“Wait, what? You mean to say that after all this philosophizing, this was all just a clever ruse to talk about studying abroad?”

Bear with me here. I’m not about to pontificate about how going abroad “changed my life.” No one cares about that. Was it awesome? Yes. Should everyone who can do it, do it? Yes. But it is an unfortunate fact that a lot of people return from their foreign escapades with a pretentious, world-weary righteousness, believing that somehow they have been deeply, irrevocably changed by their travels.

Learning, on various levels, is of course a big part of the experience, but I think what the oft-mentioned change really boils down to is breaking the routine. And there are lots of ways to do it that don’t involve foreign destinations or any destination at all.

Breaking the routine, or punching through the ice, or throwing the bucket of water on the fire, are empowering acts because they’re proactive. It’s about waking up. If you can pinpoint one area of focus at which to aim the incredible energy that being angry or being desperate for a change affords you, you will succeed, somehow, even if your aim isn’t so great. You’ll land on the board, at least.

This isn’t a motivational speech; this is a transmutation of the quote, “Don’t get mad, get even.” Without the spark of fire, without the cold water after too long a dead sleep, we have no impetus for action, because without that passion or drive, things can’t change. Anger needn’t be a destructive fire: you can get mad, and then get even better.

Hannah Sparks is a Collegian columnist and can be reached at [email protected].