By: Zoe Bocquillon
Illustration by: Sylvain Chan
Every death in an alley,
Every meltdown? We know
We wouldn’t be much, if thorns
Didn’t drive light into wet blooms
(Yusef Komunyakaa)
I am tired of the self-help books telling me to let go, because I am not tired at all. I’m angry. The wellness industry can respectfully shut up. It’s a multi-billion dollar circuit that profits off our pain. It does not sell solutions. It prescribes a version of who you should be. It imposes behaviours – forgiving, positive – and pathologises anything otherwise. This isn’t to say you should not meditate, but too often the recommended products gloss over the messiness of real life, like being angry.
Yet I do not know how to be angry so I am tired, and I am sad. And ultimately, I write. That is how I let anger take over.
I let it crawl all over the white page, a pressing need. Let me write. I have fits of rage where I bring justice to scenarios. My face is in a filmic close-up, mouth open, drooling and screaming and kicking everything around. I am on the tube, my knees pressed together. Narrow and on the side. Can the man on the tube stop staring when I am wearing blue tights? I raise my voice until I see in his eyes the disgust, as my fists dance around the silent air. I scream, again and again until my breath is sharp and my guttural echoes. I peel off my skin and my blue tights and frantically rip the book in his hand. I am an animal that has learned to live again. I learn of my existence in his eyes and return to my skin. Every single page pulled apart erratically, the wagon thrashing about and me in the middle.
But, ultimately I fail. I do not know how to be angry. When is it safe for me to be? I am tired of being a sad girl—the poster child for girlhood everywhere. Like my tears are crystals in an aesthetic Reubens painting, where I play the role of the Virgin Mary. Crying is the ultimate catharsis, I know I will feel better after. But where do the meltdowns and fits of rage take me? Nowhere. They do not happen and instead, I cling to words and argue with the little loud voice in my head. As a woman, anger is easy for me to suppress because that is all I know. A history of mediated hysteria reminds me that it might not be better to sit down, be quiet, and smile pretty. I want to be like Toni Collette in Hereditary or Scarlett Johansson in Marriage Story. So relentlessly, I am trying to destroy that small and fragile image of me. Repressed anger causes all sorts of horrid and useless things, from depression to eating disorders. So after all, maybe I should be angry, and so should you.
Anger comes for us all, and has in the past too. Anger can organise and rage creates change. Do not get too caught up in feminism being wrapped in shiny neoliberal packaging. If you think feminism is passé, think again—Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff’s collection on New Femininities helps us to rethink gender, race, and class in a world where nothing is as ‘liberating’ as it seems. Because monitoring yourself constantly makes you silent. Let’s not do this. Anger is underrated. Without it you could not say ‘That is not okay’—it’s not impolite, it gets things done. The most transformative moments in history started with women being furious. If we were all still sitting around drinking Earl Grey and politely telling each other how great it is to vacuum well, we would probably still be today. Anger gives us the audacity to ask to be heard, to exist in our own ways.
So let’s be a little angry… or maybe a lot angry, because you should be. You should be angry.
