A Secret, Third Option
Giving up rage in the age of righteous female anger
If you’ve ever felt like your only options in life as a woman are Silent Compliciteur (no, that isn’t a word but yes, we just made it one) or Raging Woman, this post is for you.
Anyone who’s been within 10 feet of my content over the last three years has experienced at least some degree of my disappointment, grief, and anger surrounding being a woman. This applied to many arenas of my life: a young woman groomed in patriarchal religion, a mother feeling stuck in the confines of domestic life, a wife feeling left behind in her professional potential, a divorcee feeling socially scorned and forgotten, a woman walking around feeling generally grated by the day-to-day slights of men, and a society built for one.
For many years, I understood my position in the world through polarity that made sense to me. I was either going to be a passive victim of all this or an anger apologist. I couldn’t see any other option. Since my anger was logically justified, the truth of the polarity felt very real. I either spent my life expressing this anger and getting people to understand and agree with me, or I was lying down: accepting, agreeing, allowing. This mindset wasn’t limited to my frustrations around gender but also carried over into my lens of interpersonal conflicts, like feeling personally wronged by another.
I think there is a rightful place for anger, and this point isn’t to shorten or upend anyone else’s date with anger because I certainly took my time on my night on the town with her. I needed anger for a period of time, it was the only fuel I could find to get me to do what needed to be done. (What needed to be done: claim my agency to myself and then the rest of the world, leave a marriage that felt unnecessarily difficult and lonely, fight for myself throughout the dissolution process, unrelentingly to carve a path to financially provide for myself, etc.).
When I needed to make a move, neither my logic or limited sense of self-love was enough to propel me onto the path that I knew I needed to be on, so I reached for my anger, and it did the job. Initially. But as time has gone on I’ve realized that I created a false polarity that no longer serves me.
The simplest way I can articulate the turning point for me was to tell you that I began to learn the difference between being right and being free. I could (and did) channel my energy into being right, into raging on my rightness. Hear me! Validate my perspective! Act right, damn it! I needed to react. If I didn’t, how would they know how they’ve wronged me? The problem was, I felt like shit slopping around in the swamp of my anger, and most of the time, the people who needed to hear me weren’t even listening in a meaningful way, you know what I mean? (Cue a visual of me in a swamp, screaming at no one.)
When I focused on resigning control over things I could never control anyway, when I got the nack of letting go of reaction and feeling the freedom of that, I felt fantastic (and bad for feeling it, at first. Aren’t I supposed to be an on-duty Suffragette or some shit? ) This understanding became a portal for me, a way out of the duality, out of making unnecessary meanings that didn’t give my anything in return.
When I need you to validate my experience or my point of view and behave just the way I think you should, when I can’t rest until you do, I am no longer free. I am creating an imaginary hierarchy of power and I am placing myself beneath you, waiting for you to change so I can be happy. So I can be free from my anger. But the joke was on me; I’ve always been free. I just had to walk through the door.
And no, this isn’t spiritual bypassing. I’m not as free as a lot of men. Reality is still here, and much still needs to change. But I’m referencing a different sort of freedom. The type no one can ever take from me. The freedom of the expansiveness of my own mind and soul.
When I unshackled myself from the nearly evangelical dedication of getting everyone to see the circumstances as I did and behave accordingly (that is, behave how I felt they should be behaving) I was able to harness all of that energy into something much more productive and ultimately, fulfilling. That is, my freedom and - forgive me, because sometimes in the current cultural paradigm it almost feels as though we are meant to apologize for it - my pleasure! I felt good. And feeling good felt good.
A byproduct of all this, besides feeling great? I was of much more use to the world around me for the shit I cared about and wanted to affect change in. I had space, within and without. And with my reclaimed energy I filled that space with everything I had wanted all along: joy, contentment, flourishing, agency, creative juice, flow, and connection to the things I really wanted to nurture beyond the flames of my anger. In short, I became more powerful. The power that anyone else had over me simply shriveled.
An enemy? I can’t remember any names. . .
P.S. Useful links for you —
My new household organizer download
My workbook on how to reprogram your mind
What it looks like to have me as your private mentor
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