NOTES FROM A WEEK OF RAGE

By Angela Patel

This essay emerges from a lifetime of emotions, but more specifically from a week during which I set out with the intention of feeling and focusing on the emotions that I usually try to suppress. These are my notes from a week of rage — a political and therapeutic exercise of emotion.

Day 1

I’m angry that I have to get up today. I woke up feeling like shit and I don’t want to be a human. If feeling these feelings means that I’m going to stew in self-pitying grumpiness all day, then so be it. Being grumpy in the presence of others isn’t always so easy. I’m often hyper-aware of how my emotions could potentially be affecting those around me, and I worry that by coming off as angry or upset I am signaling to my peers that I don’t care about them. I even start to worry that my worries about how I’m being perceived are irrational.

Being the mentally ill queer that I am, my emotions are not exactly stable. On any given day, I employ a variety of tactics to distract myself from some of the less pleasant emotions: virtual escapism, overworking myself, delusional daydreaming, the occasional drug use.

Healthy distractions are good, my therapist tells me, as long as you’re letting yourself feel your feelings most of the time.

Feeling feelings, setting boundaries, advocating for oneself are all “healthy” behaviors that don’t come easily to me. Unfortunately, these difficulties are some of the common symptoms of being raised as a girl.

The tricky thing about rage is that it’s a political emotion, not just a personal one. Feminist rage has historically been policed and dismissed as an overreaction to a problem that doesn’t exist.

In our society, men are the angry and assertive gender. And while certain groups, such as Black and Latina women, have been stereotyped as overly aggressive or “spicy,” this rage masculinizes these women, dehumanizes them and denies their femininity. Rage is almost never associated with womanhood in positive or empowering ways.

Instead, women feeling or expressing strong emotions are called “crazy,” “insane,” or “hysterical.” Those in power want us to believe that we’re beyond the days of patholo- gizing feminine hysteria and feminist rage, that we’ve even moved on to celebrating powerful and emotional women. But like so many other aspects of the patriarchy, society continues to minimize and vilify our emotions in subtle yet pervasive ways.

Because we are taught to associate emotion with the opposite of reason, we see rage as inherently irrational. Not surprisingly, this is connected to narratives that position womanhood and non-white personhood as stuck within the realm of emotion rather than the supposedly far superior realm of reason and intellect.

Rationality is a bunch of patriarchal bullshit. Pitting feminized and racialized emotions against reason (usually embodied by some glorified white man) creates a harmful paradigm in which anything and anyone that does not conform to privileged logics is relegated to the margins. Normality, sanity, legality and other privileged statuses of being, despite being subjective and harmful, continue to be the standards by which we are expected to measure ourselves.

To attempt to make feminism, anti-racism, and anti-capitalism about rationality is to appeal to a white masculine ideology. The interlocking systems of patriarchal domination, white supremacy, imperialism, ableism, genocide, transphobia, homophobia, and other structures of power have always been based on logics that do not acknowledge the feelings and the humanity of the oppressed.

Society treats our anger as something that needs to be worked through, therapized, medicated. My rage is unspeakable. My rage is a rage that the world does not care about except to deny and suppress it.

Day 2

I’m angry that I feel the need to appeal to those in positions of power and guard myself against their unpredictable emotions. I spent my entire childhood hiding myself away from emotionally immature parents, and some days it feels like I’m back there with my professors. These are the professors (usually white men — shocking) that make it clear from the start that they look down on their students and are unwilling to change. The number of times that I’ve had to put up with cruel and indifferent professors, and felt unsafe to speak up against them, is unfortunately too many.

In this institutional setting, power imbalances give rise to inequalities of emotional legitimacy. White male anger is and always has been legitimized. White male anger has been the foundation of empires, religions, universities and countless dominant ideologies.

What white male anger and white male ‘rationality’ cannot give birth to is a world which fully acknowledges what has been cast aside as feminine, as racially inferior, as queer, less-than-human and “oth-

To center the margins means centering emotion and irrationality.

It does and should make us enraged to grow up in this world. Where that rage goes matters; what it creates and destroys matters.

Unfortunately, marginalized people, especially multiply marginalized people working within movements that may exclude them, have to be aware of who and what their rage upsets. Allyship and solidarity become essential when expressing rage threatens the livelihoods of those who feel it.

When my tenured white male professor deliberately creates an unsafe learning environment, I feel as though my rage must be made respectable, that I must go through the “proper channels” if I want to be heard. I feel fear. I cannot be sure that my fellow classmates will support me. As a result, I do nothing (except feel angry).

The burden of speaking out should not be placed solely on the victims of injustice. At the same time, though, it can be enraging to to have to hold back, to silence yourself and let someone else speak for you. Some days I’m not sure what’s greater: my rage or my fear.

What do we do when the only rage we know is the white male rage that has been physically and psychologically beaten into us? The white man, who is obsessed with what he thinks he deserves and what he believes “the left” is trying to take away from him — coercive sex with women, exploitative labor practices, the uncontrolled freedom to be racist, sexist, transphobic, xenophobic, etc. — is so often the center of the narrative surrounding respectability and emotion.

White women act in subservience to this patriarchal anger when they use their whiteness, and often their class privilege, to approximate white masculinity by directing their rage at those below them. This behavior threatens feminist solidarity and creates a need for women and femmes of color to define themselves in opposition to white supremacy in all forms.

Oppressive institutions want us to feel like we are just another number in the system, and that we have no power to change anything. They count on us not talking about our feelings and needs, and they count on us not coming together in solidarity to respect and celebrate one another. An individual’s anger can be silenced, but the anger of a thousand people is a force that must be reckoned with.

Day 3

Often I feel troubled at my instinct to share my feelings on social media, especially when I’m struggling. Somewhere I picked up this idea that posting about my feelings of sadness and anger is a “cry for help” or “attention seeking,” and that these things are bad.

What if I do need help? What if I do need attention? Do we all not need and deserve this care?

Sharing emotional experiences is not only a vulnerable starting point to individual healing, it is a crucial part of recognizing that emotions are never only our own.

We are all part of something bigger than ourselves — and this empowers us. Our emotions are so frequently made out to be extremely individual — we write in our private little diaries, we vent to our therapists — but collective emotional experiences are so vital on both a personal and a communal level.

Especially in the current moment, it is very easy to feel disconnected from the world and become apathetic.

Apathy can be a coping mechanism when one feels unprepared to process suffering and feelings of powerlessness. Just like emotional connections can inspire us to take action and create, emotional disconnection can rip us away from the things we care about. For activists, an inability to balance the needs of the self with the needs of the collective can produce an apathetic void.

This void cannot be filled with rationality (“you should care about this because it affects this many people” and other similar statements). Emotional connection is what inspires us and urges us to keep going.

When I think about expressions of rage, solidarity, and self-determination that transcend rationality, I think about Audre Lorde. I think about Riot grrrl and Queer punk and performance art. I think about Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. I think about all the people who died for liberation causes that are still being fought today.

As Audre Lorde famously said in her essay, “The Uses of Anger:”

“Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change. And when I speak of change, I do not mean a simple switch of positions or a temporary lessening of tensions, nor the ability to smile or feel good. I am speaking of a basic and radical alteration in all those assumptions underlining our lives.”

Lorde describes anger as a literal weapon–she does not think rage exists only to be seen or heard but to be felt and used as the basis for a major paradigm shift.

If we see our rage as individual, as something that must be worked through alone, therapized, and medicated, then we lose the potential of collective rage and power.

Many of us stop ourselves from speaking out about injustice because we are afraid that others will react with anger or misunderstanding.

What about our own rage? Doesn’t it deserve to be witnessed and heard and understood and acted upon?

Another Audre Lorde quote, one that is on a poster that hangs over my bed, says, “When we speak, we are afraid that our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak.”

As a Black lesbian woman who spoke out in opposition to anti-Blackness and homophobia in the white feminist movement as well as capitalism, racism, and imperialism more broadly, Audre Lorde was not a stranger to what it meant to speak truth to power. Still, she believed anger was a necessary tool for radical change.

Day 4

Today I am trying to be nice to myself. It is usually easier for me to be nice to others. So, I want to let myself fail and make mistakes without self-judgment. I want to feel rage without turning it inwards and destroying myself.

Letting myself feel the rage that arises from existing in this world is a tool for understanding my own oppression. I think it can also be called .

The general understanding of selfcare has been warped by neoliberal capitalism and consumer culture.

Instead of recognizing one’s needs, especially those that may fly in the face of what a capitalistic society expects from the individual, selfcare has become synonymous with buying yourself shit that makes you temporarily happy. It’s all incredibly feminized and tied up in a lot of the same issues that all of consumer culture creates.

Men, especially cis-het able-bodied white men, are brought up to believe that they don’t need to take care of themselves because they will always have a woman (a mom, a girlfriend, a wife) to perform that emotional labor. Women, on the other hand, are socialized to be experts in controlling their own emotions and managing their stresses on their own.

Material things can and do bring us genuine pleasure, but we also must step back and think about why “wellness” and “self-care” products are so heavily marketed towards less, romanticized, pathologized, fetishized, vilified.

Rage, directed inwards, becomes self-destruction. It’s easier to hate yourself than to hate other people when you’ve never been allowed to express rage without getting rage in return, or when you’ve felt like an outcast your whole life.

Oppression and trauma shape our experiences of the world, and with that our emotional responses. Everything feels unstable, life-shattering, cataclysmic. Some days my rage manifests as a hatred for the world and everyone in it, especially myself. All I feel able to do is scream into my pillow (metaphorically and literally).

Today, though, I will be gentle to myself and allow myself to need love and care and an outlet for my anger. I deserve that much.

Day 5

young women. What about being a woman makes us so in need of being calmed, being soothed, being cared for by ourselves? Do we need a spa day or do we need revolution?

Self-care means not letting our rage be made individual, small, meaning-

One of the shitty things about gender is how you identify with your own body is so wrapped up in how you are perceived by others. Today I wanted to dress masc, and I had picked out the perfect outfit and was feeling the gender euphoria — until I walked out of the door and onto campus and was immediately met with strangers greeting me as “miss,” assuming my pronouns, and generally perceiving me

When I am walking down the street and someone tries to get my attention by calling me “ma’am,” I do feel rage. It’s easy to call this rage an overreaction, or to ignore this rage because it is less significant than other emotions, or to explain away my emotions with rational explanations. Similarly, for me to turn this rage inwards and tell myself that there is something wrong with me because of how the world perceives me is easy, albeit painful.

What is not easy is to let my rage at the world, at how ideologies and institutions allow for someone to misunderstand and hurt me in this way, become externalized, collectivized, and empowered.

Not all trauma has to be made into something useful and good. Not all rage has to be extraordinary. Rage can be petty, simple, straightforward, apparently meaningless. Sometimes shitty things are just shitty things. This is all true. But at least for myself, imagining how my individual emotional experiences are not just a reflection of my inability to maintain calm, or my failure to conform to what others expect of me, makes me feel better.

When friends affirm my gender identity, I feel joy in knowing that who I am can be understood and celebrated. When my pronouns are not only heard but used correctly, I feel safe and warm. Where there is great potential for pain, there is also the possibility of even greater love.

Day 6

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about if there’s a right way to respond when someone bluntly disrespects you, whether out of hatred or ignorance. When that hurt and anger wells up inside of you, it has to go somewhere.

It’s not worth spending my energy on a response, I’ve often thought to myself when I see someone making an ignorant comment on social media. I feel a deep cynicism about being able to have a meaningful conversation on online platforms that are designed to spark conflict and elicit strong emotional reactions.

Is it ‘right’ to lash out against the trolls and the bigots and the assholes? Should you express anger at them, or at what they represent, even if doing so is unlikely to change their mind?

Philosopher Amia Srinivasan uses the term “affective injustice” to refer to the ways in which public expressions of rage are not equally accessible to everyone. Many women of color are forced to choose between suppressing their anger and expressing it to a world that is not willing or able to receive it.

Affective injustice is very apparent on social media. The Internet is not a utopia for the oppressed. Depending on one’s positionality, there are real dangers to existing openly online, especially if you are expressing rage against injustice.

In the diss track, clap-back, internet drama-obsessed culture we inhabit, it might seem as though fueling the fire with anger is a sure way to get attention — and whether negative or positive, attention is money.

But femme-presenting people online are vulnerable to very real violence, including stalking, doxxing, and harassment. The mental and physical health toll that this violence has is significant. We are taught that harassment is just part of what it means to be a marginalized person online, and that expecting any less is naive.

Online hate is not just ignorant 15 year-olds on Youtube and minor celebrities beefing on Twitter. It is not just “cancel culture.”

In the face of violence, why do we expect marginalized people to respond “respectably?” Again, only certain public expressions of rage are considered legitimate and acceptable. People should be able to emotionally respond to those who are oppressing and attacking them without fear of even more violence. In cases like the overturning of Roe v. Wade, it’s perfectly acceptable for people to direct their anger at the conservative judges and politicians who are suppressing their bodily autonomy. Fuck ‘em. Concrete action does not happen without public outrage and anger.

Day 7

I hate toxic positivity. I hate people who refuse to discuss politics be- cause it “brings down the vibes” or whatever. It is a privilege to be able to ignore politics. For many of us, our mere existence and livelihoods are political.

So yes, I will be angry. I will be sad. I will hurt and grieve and feel openly and loudly. I will tweet too much about my feelings. I will talk about uncomfortable things that will probably make others angry. I will hate.

I really wish that I could care less about making privileged people feel uncomfortable. In my fantasy, I call out every professor who refuses to acknowledge their students’ needs and experiences. I correct every stranger who misgenders me. I flip off every cop I see in the street.

Thankfully I don’t have to do it all on my own. It is enough for me to know that I am not the only one feeling all these emotions. Being able to witness moments of collective strength and outrage and joy lets me know that I am not something that needs to be therapized, medicated, or ‘selfcared’ into oblivion.

I am joyful, sad, stressed, tired, angry, excited, hopeful, and enraged. I am not alone in feeling all of these things. I am queer and neurodivergent and mixed race and genderfluid and mentally ill. I am part of communities of people I’ve never even met, and they know my rage and my joy and my exhaustion just as I know theirs. Fuck everyone who denies us our feelings!

Mar Escusa

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