07/28/2022
Buckle up y'all, feminist rant coming up.
Anger. As women, we have been taught to fear it. We seek to become emotionally regulated, to avoid losing our cool. We know that if we were show anger, we would be viewed as incompetent, unstable, and dangerous. So we suppress it, hide it, and run from it. Instead of being allowed to feel angry, we medicate ourselves, we burn ourselves out, and we assume that we must be the problem.
But what if your anger is not the problem? What if we acknowledged that you have a right to feel angry when faced with systemic oppression? What if we allowed women and minorities to share their stories and their anger? What if you acknowledged your own anger?
The theme of anger has emerged in a lot of conversations this week and has left me feeling such an ache for the way that so many of us have been forced to repress healthy expressions of anger for fear of being called unstable. Women held to higher standards of regulation than men, fearful of legal repercussions in custody battles, individuals of LGBTQ and BIPOC communities afraid for their physical safety if they were to express any anger, even in healthy ways.
I wish that I could snap my fingers and change the systems that have led us to this point, but I do wonder if anger may be part of the key to our healing. I wonder if allowing ourselves to experience anger in healthy and safe places might open the doorway, even just slightly, toward a better world. What do you think?
