Everything is amazing apart from the things that are terrible. How are you, they say. Lost, I say. A little fragile. Somewhere in the midst of it all, a chasm of anger begins to open. Let go let go let go! The sky screams. I don’t know how, I never knew how.
I want to buy a box of old china in a second-hand store and drive up into the hills and throw every piece against a sheet of cragged rock. I want to pull every picture in the house off the wall, tear every plate out of the cupboard, walk barefoot in the debris. But I don’t. But I won’t. I’ve always been too afraid of what might happen if I finally let my anger loose. The fields it might scorch, the power I might wield. It tickles my fingertips. I’d burn the whole city down. I’ve seen what that looks like in action, know the long shadow it leaves. I’ve stood witness to their aftermath in kitchens, in hallways, in dark streets. I’ve left my body, watching from above as it shatters into jagged fragments.
So instead I play dead, meet insults with gestures of love, metabolise the rage until it drowns somewhere in the abyss inside me because I learnt long ago that meeting pain with anger only destroyed us both. It’s fine, it’s fine, I’m fine. It always seemed better to absorb the disrespect and find another outlet instead. Scream at the sky, smash a glass, rationalise an irrational response.
Many years ago, I left a bad job. Within a week of my gardening leave, the doctor signed me off on medical grounds because my mental health, which had steadily been deteriorating, declined so quickly that I was having suicidal thoughts. When I admitted this on a call with my former boss, he didn’t believe me. Instead, he elaborated on the multitude of ways that he would ‘tell everyone what I’m like’, and that I’d never get another job again.
Less than a year before, a professor who was fully aware of the severe depression I’d been drowning in for months, because a kind doctor on Canal Street had given me a diagnosis and a large prescription that allowed me the extension I needed to not drop out of university, told me that since I didn’t have a plan, I’d never do anything with my life. And then, of course, the others, the endless others, a chorus of men who told me I was crazy, unhinged, hypersensitive, ugly, difficult, complicated, rude, wrong wrong always wrong. Why did I hold onto these ideas, thrown casually by bitter men who knew nothing real about me? Why did I let myself believe they might be true? Flashes of quick cruelty that sent me spiralling off in another direction. It took years to return, and by then I was a different person. I don’t regret the journey, but it didn’t need to be so brutal, so hard-won.
In hindsight, those words were catnip to a girl raised to turn negative feedback into fuel. I was schooled to believe that life was a zero sum game, that their successes would only eclipse mine, leave me scuttling into the shadows. We were all raised that way, an energy of competition among us that never fully dissipates. It’s woven into the fabric of our bodies, now.
How malleable we were, how easily modelled into Good Girls, Clever Girls. The way we turned our protest inwards, into drinking and cutting and restricting. Legacy habits, hard to shake. Even now, white-hot rage makes me want to get back into bed, throw my phone out the window, press the scissors into my arm, put my head through glass, stop eating, keep drinking, look myself in the mirror and slap myself across the face once, twice, thrice. No one knows how to hurt you better than you do; what a weapon you are, facing the wrong direction.
Controlling your emotions has long been a core commandment in the rule book of acceptable femininity. Without it, you’re just one poor decision away from descending into madness. Mad girl sad girl bad girl, triumvirate of the horrors of womanhood. Don’t colour outside the lines, don’t break the rules, don’t ask for more than you’re given. Otherwise you’ll never be chosen, and isn’t that the most important thing of all?
The world raises us to believe that we ripen, and then we rot. There’s no room for our rage. Instead we send it down the lines, decades of frustration, inherited unhappiness with no relief, no retribution, when everyone that should or could be blamed is gone. Perhaps they too were a product of pain. The tragedy is that none of us were born bad; they just let the cycle repeat itself.
Sometimes I think of all those years I was so sad, drudging through the darkness, and I wonder if it was anger all along. The rage that lingers now is mostly at myself, for not speaking up, not considering my own heart or body or ego worthy of defence. I never learnt rage as anything other than ugly, destructive, an endless aftermath of shame. I didn’t know the ways in which it could be protective.
If rage makes me unlikeable, or unpalatable, or unappealing, so be it. If anger makes me monstrous, let me be a monster. I was built to forgive but I’m done with forgiveness, done with gentle responses to apologies that never arrive, done with violence turned inwards. I tried so hard to avoid inflicting pain, or shame, or hurt that I swallowed the poison instead. I want to put my hands down my throat and claw it out, now, drop by drop. Come bear witness to my scorching cleanse.