I spent my whole life working to be selfless, strong, and brave woman.
I was clear on my mission from a very young age: Help people who want it.
I was taught by society what a graceful, kind, educated, ladylike, woman I was supposed to grow into.
I was also supposed to be strong, put together, responsible.
No one ever told me I needed to also be angry in order to be safe as a woman.
Guess what happens when you tell a little girl she should be...
Healthy
Beautiful at all costs
Strong
Independent
Sexual
Not slutty
... without teaching her to understand and listen to her anger???
You get girls who get molested or raped by people they know, sometimes love, and are totally dumbfounded and confused as to what to do.
The clear answer of what to do is to get enraged and hold them accountable and defend yourself and never ever let them back in your life.
Yet there are so many accounts of women who stay friends with their rapists, stay in abusive jobs, or awful relationships, or who are fine doing aaall the work and getting paid too little.
You see, anger can be beautiful.
It keeps us safe.
It alerts us when something f’d up is going on.
But anger- taught well, is meant to inspire us to stand up for ourselves, to say “F No” to a situation, to say “I deserve better” when you do deserve better, to say “you fucked up and there will be repercussions”.
Anger fuels us to follow through during impossible situations.
But women are taught that anger makes us look hysterical, crazy, out of control, ugly, weak.
So guess what happens??
We don’t stop people and situations from taking advantage of us.
We use all that strength and bravery we were taught in order to suffer through being disrespected, taken advantage of, misused, abused.
Men were taught that aggression is power. It’s sex. It’s strength. You see the difference?
Because I do.
I look back on all the times in my life someone pushed past my “no”, or took a little (or a lot more) than I was ready to give, and I wish with all of my heart that I hadn’t been strong, put together, and graceful about it.
I wish I would have stood up and been f’ing angry. On fire. Deeply flooded with it. So there was no confusion as to whether what happened had been valid enough. OR my fault or not.
If you too were raised to be strong and beautiful.
Falling in love with anger is like falling in love with money, we need to do it as women. We were not raised to believe these functions were non-negotiable relationships we would inevitably have to build one day.
If you have a daughter, teach her the value of her anger. Have her validate and honor it and learn to wield it like a samurai.