I don’t trust like that

That’s what I want, Guru Jagat. That’s exactly what I want. I mean I’m really feeling you here. 

I’m longing for a world of real power girls. Lovers, friends and allies. A place where - even if conflict arises - we are able to look one another in the eye and know that the difference of opinion is rooted in a commitment to not destroy the relationship in the exchange. If I see or sense someone wants to dominate the fuck out of the space with their need to be right, or their self-entitled anger disguised as woke for example, I don’t trust like that either.

And yet. For most women I know, reigning in our destructive side can pose a little problematic. Not least because, for most of their lives,  they have gone to great lengths to stifle their natural inner rage in order to:

• Confine to social norms
• Keep things safe and stable and risk free
• Basically survive
• Be seen as spiritual/loving/accepted/worthy of inclusion

Getting through life without your destructive side in tact is tricky however. It takes its toll on us to keep all this in. The dark feminine is a thing. It's like we've consigned her to the shadows. She's the creepy one tapping at the window pane in the rain. And it takes effort. Daily effort. To keep her locked out there.

Truthfully, me too.  As a fiesty child I struggled to reconcile what was growing within me and what was expected of me. An errant teenager. I was conditioned to behave as a female like every other female. Brutally taught that females are really only ever truly acceptable when providing social cohesion. And not when tearing social structures the fuck down. Anger makes us worthy of punishment in the eyes of our communities. It also makes us ugly - which is the opposite of female in our current culture. A power girl is fine if you are in a comic. But in real life? You'd better learn to buckle down.

One of the major problems with all this is this is that, if you are taught that anger is not acceptable - ever, and even in moments where it is needed - frankly you just become a goddam danger to yourself.

Turns Out I Like Myself

I remember the day I was almost raped.

He ran up to me in the woods. 

“Go on” he said. Like some kind of frenetic dog.  Sweating in my face with excitement. “You know you’ll like it.” Pointing at the ground where he pictured he was about to enter me.

The voice in my head knew danger when she saw it:

“Just lie down and let him get it over with” my inner voice said to me. “It’s safer that way.”

Clear as day. To get angry with a man. Was more dangerous to my psyche than to be raped by a man.

Thankfully on this occasion my anger took over anyway. (For the record he didn’t actually want to force himself upon me after all. Apparently, he was just playing with the threat.) And so he ran like a nervous puppy. Stalling and crying all the way home. I remember watching him flop around as I screamed a rage so primal I didn’t even know I had it in me. It was like a forcefield of rage. A super weapon. 

Turns out I like myself then - especially when I’m scared. He fell as he turned the corner, and I remember still screaming at him because he was a motherfucker.

I'll admit I was lucky.  He may not have been a murderer or a rapist like I’d feared. He may not have had that in him on this particular day. But I guess you could say my anger took a punt on it. Because the truth is - you and I both know - it could’ve gone either way.

This is what it means to be a woman with anger in this world. A liability without it. A liability with it.

Don’t put the blame on me

I woke the next day after a fretful night with one thought in mind. The man knew who I was and he knew where I lived. The fact that I knew who he was and I knew where he lived escaped me. Within a week I had moved.

Why didn’t I report him?

Don’t put the blame on me, frankly. I am sure I should have, yes. But - like many before me -  I was scared of the repercussions. I was scared my anger would get me in trouble next time round. I was sure the anger police would sniff me out and I would, finally, have it coming. My trauma body - my deeply ingrained conditioning - had got the better of me.

So maybe you can understand my confusion then, when people tell me over and over that I am an angry woman - like it is some kind of disease. Like it isn’t welcome. Or necessary. Or that I just need to make a choice about being angry and that choice is basically to NOT be. 

I’m sorry you feel that way

I mean look at Thich Nhat Hanh” a spiritual person actually said to me once. “He doesn’t get angry.”

Or another (male) buddhist teacher: “Your anger is like a demon, Julia. You are mistakingly identifying with it as real.”

Okaaaaay - so both of them had a point. (I'm being generous here.)

But, crucially, I was struck how neither of them paid any attention to the context that my anger grew up in and still exists in. As men in both cases, I had seen them getting angry multiple times for example, and with no apparent social backlash for doing so either. No-one was calling them out for getting angry when they needed to.

(By the way - if you disagree that I DID grow up in a context - I’m sorry you feel that way. I recommend you get your self a copy of "Rage Becomes Her" and get back to me. This text is a harrowing read and will educate`you that women have a lot of reasons to be angry. Walking alone in the woods under threat of assault just being one of them.)

Anger + Entitlement = Harm

Another thing I have discovered along this journey, is that reclaiming my anger and destructive side is not a clear cut path back to health and integration either. We cannot do this alone. And I understand the negative impact of rage on the world around me. It can destroy relationships. It can destroy health. Both in its over controlled suppression AND in its uncontrolled entitled expression. Just read Gabor Mate’s cutting account of how repressed and internalised anger ravages the bodymind of his patients every time.

On the other side of the spectrum though - the unbridled rage bit. Indeed, I have met lots of people - of all races and genders - who believe that the world owes their rage a kind of witness. It is easy to give credence to this belief when your anger has been throttled at birth. Or when you are forced to comply with the social structures around you in order to avoid isolation or even death. It is easy to believe that when anger became an experience that slowly strangled you from the inside, unleashing it on anyone who happens to trigger it is a completely bonafide thing to do.

But the truth is - it isn't.. 

And that is a hard truth to bear.

Feminism Today

My response to my own upbringing and conditioning was to try and exorcise my rage by letting it off just about everywhere I could too. I thought that was me healing. Language was my preferred option. I grew kind of proud of the firework display. I found myself courting the heretical for the sheer thrill it gave me to goad the hunters online. An outrageous post here. An outrageous post there. A drop of rage in a relationship here. A soupçon in another relationship there. Like a dog baring it’s teeth. Just so they knew. (And they knew.)

At the risk of alienating myself from the feminist club then, I have to say that I see a lot of unbridled and entitled rage around me in feminism today which saddens me greatly. Because whilst it can only be healthy to integrate anger - I would argue the utilising anger in community takes a great deal of interpersonal skill and a huge amount of dexterity at the edges. And most of the time I don’t see any evidence of this kind of skill at all. In fact a lot of the time all I see is harm.

We appear to be happy as women to just let the bombs off, in some kind of futile “I don’t give a fuck about you” act of gender retaliation. We forgot the nuance.

Sadly for me, my unbridled approach didn't really get me anywhere. Because the reality is that any kind of human being who wears anger like that, like a badge, is going to ultimately draw nothing but a counter attack. And that is what happened to me. Over and over. 

People did not look into my eyes and see a woman who was not going to destroy them, Guru Jagat. They saw a woman with the potential to destroy them. And mostly that made them attack me first. Force begets force.

Future feminine leaders

For the times we live in then, to reclaim rage as an embodied AND a relational experience, would seem like something that all future feminine leaders must get comfortable with. Furthermore, this would seem even more necessary in my opinion for all groups of people who have either been denied the right to their healthy expression of anger, or who are living in such circumstances where rage is a necessary and natural response. 

In other words - I can’t get rid of my anger just because it makes you uncomfortable. And neither can anyone else. The cry for social justice is imbued with necessary anger.

All I am urging you to consider is that we are also all in constant relationship with a world. And that that world that frequently finds itself strung out and on the edge of nervous system burnout. No group with privilege is exempt from this either. Men in the West have high rates of suicide, for example. How would it help to throw your unbridled rage at a man in that kind of state, I ask you? How does that change a goddamn thing?

Personally, I believe it is imperative then, for those of us trying to broker some sort of healing for both ourselves, and the world around us, that we pause to consider exactly when and how we use our anger for change.

It is tricky. There will no doubt be people in the "unbridled rage is freedom" camp wanted to retort right now about emotional labour and all the rest. 

But here's the thing - I think if we are to transcend our current cultural limitations and pains - we are actually going to need to just buckle up and do this anyway. We need to master ourselves. 

(And thankfully, we do have some archetypal role models along the way.)