Show me your rage...

...and I'll show you mine

Next Wednesday 11th December at 7.30pm I shall once more be joining

Layla O'Mara

,

Lindsay Johnstone

and

Chloe George

for another raw and raucous conversation inspired by

Miranda July

’s blistering novel, All Fours. To keep in line with this festive time of year, this month we are focusing on RAGE. I never considered myself a particularly angry person, but turns out I was wrong - my anger just looked different to what I thought it would look like, and felt different to how I presumed it would feel. Actually, I am frequently angry and it’s intriguing trying to figure out how that rage manifests itself.

Earlier this year I spoke to the brilliant

Women Are Mad with Jen&Salima

podcast - you can listen here - and we talked about why anger has historically been such a taboo topic for women and why it is important to have an ongoing conversation about RAGE.

So ahead of our festive, possible mulled-wine-fuelled chat next Wednesday, here are some of my reflections on my own relationship with anger.

I wrote about anger in Twelve Moons, about how society finds it unpalatable when mothers are angry, and how I unleashed my anger by embracing my wildness:

‘A few months ago a woman was assaulted just around the corner on the bridge and my babysitter texted me to tell me to be careful. I’m not being careful tonight, I don’t see why I should. I’ve read somewhere that there is a Hunger Moon, and tonight it feels like every moon in the sky is a Hunger Moon. Some men don’t ever seem to lose their appetite. It feels like the anger of a million women is simmering under my skin and if anyone grabbed me now I would destroy them with fingernails of fire as my wild hair tied them in knots.’

I usually experience rage as something visceral, though often I conflate it with other emotions. Frustration is a huge issue for me, because of the constraints I am under as a full time carer. Sometimes my frustration might look a bit like anger because I might snap or shout, and perhaps my frustration is dipped in rage because my life could look so different if the systems that should be in place to support my family actually functioned properly. So I’m frustrated that I can’t work more, earn more so that my dreams feel more achievable, or leave my house and spend more time with other adults, and this frustration often feels like rage. Notice how many times I typed ‘more’ in that last sentence. One reason that women’s anger threatens to bubble over is that we are told not to hope for more. I feel that I am expected to do it all, but I am unreasonable to want it all. I do it all for my family, but I am not supposed to want more just for myself. This definitely makes me angry.

Sometimes my rage looks like sadness. I am writing about that for my next book, Unschooled:

‘My good-girl-anger/mother-anger/carer-anger is often accompanied by desperate tears and a racing heart. Years of social conditioning and a desire to please mean that I swallow anger down as much as I can until it spills out of my eyes. I think a big part of me is scared that if I succumb to my anger I’ll spin out of control completely and grow snakes out of my head. For a long time I hid my wildness, unsure how to reveal it to the world…’

I almost always cry when I am angry, and it’s annoying because people can perceive it as weakness. Truthfully, I cry most days because I am a massive empath and I FEEL EVERYTHING. I guess you could argue that it means I am out of control, but I don’t believe tears are a sign of weakness, I think they demonstrate an ability to feel and connect. Sadly, in professional settings when I am advocating for my daughters, my tears are generally perceived as a sign that I am overwrought and not coping, rather than a perfectly understandable response to inadequate support.

Finally, often my anger is silent, so soft and quietly spoken that I can barely hear it, a whisper floating around my house. I know that I hold my rage deep inside me where no one else can see it a lot of the time, because I’ve been conditioned to stay calm, put a smile on my face and glide like a swan.

Increasingly though, I release my anger because rage is not a dirty word. I am trying to learn how to be authentic, which means I am messy and effusive and spilling over. During my insecure moments I tell myself I’m too much, but this is because I’ve been used to making myself small. Now I’m allowing the big feelings to explode out of me, letting myself be angry, and that’s exactly as it should be.