Befriending My Rage

What to do with our compounding collections of small and immense rage?

I’m trying to remember the first time I felt rage.

There was a moment in second grade—Valentine’s Day—still young enough that the primary recipient of my affection was my mom. I’d labored for what felt like weeks to make her a heart-shaped collage of construction paper and clay and paint. But somehow the reception wasn’t what I had hoped for, and—wanting to hurt her, or hurt myself—I went into her room when she was downstairs, took the valentine off the dresser, and tore it into pieces. I remember going back to my room and crying. It felt terrible. Was it rage or shame or heartbreak? Or are those the same feeling in different shapes?

That’s the only time I recall feeling like that, until much later. Usually in the face of conflict I shut down, retreat, close the door. Occasionally I’ll perform petty indifference. I almost never feel rage. I rarely feel out of control of my emotions.

Fast forward to last month, getting the last of my belongings from the apartment I shared with a man who had been my partner and then, for many months, in peaceful cohabitation and ongoing codependency, my ex-partner.

Out of nowhere, he had a new lover. He’d been insensitive about it, maybe unkind, maybe enacting some subconscious revenge for my having broken off our romance, but probably not. The circumstances don’t matter. None of it justified the pure, potent rage I felt at the revelation. Not slamming-a-door rage, though I did, on accident; more like might-end-up-in-a-Netflix-documentary rage. I wanted to get a refund on the years I’d given him. To punish him somehow for how kind and loyal and fun he could be, how close it had come, only to be undermined by the corrosive contagion of his complacency. I wanted him to be miserable. I wanted to hurt him. I moved out.

Now it was pouring rain and I was alone in the apartment that I’d found and designed and largely paid for. There was a bouquet of flowers on the dining table, the table that I had sourced and schlepped home at the beginning of our lease. There was a bottle of wine fancier than any we’d ever shared by a long shot. There were clothes on the floor where they had been, presumably, stripped off in passion. My cheeks were hot and my ears were ringing. I wanted to take our largest kitchen knife and stab it into the couch.

Obviously ransacking our home was not the play. That would just give him the out of saying, turns out she’s crazy after all; really dodged a bullet, and perhaps he’d be correct. It would give him and his new lover a common enemy—which we both knew, from watching and rewatching Wicked together for the past year, was a powerful tool. Or worse, it’d give them someone to laugh at, to pity. Or worse still, it’d give them nothing; they weren’t thinking about me; I was already disregarded.

“Take the wine,” both my sisters texted at the same time, and I considered it. He had never once hesitated to drink mine. But I didn’t—too petty for my pride—impossible, after that, to feign indifference. Instead I took the wine openers.

Recently, on the topic of rage, my mom mentioned a night when my sisters and I were young and my dad was working constantly and she was raising us and maintaining the home and holding it all together. She got angry about something, took her wine to the bathroom, and rage-cleaned the tub using her empty glass to splash off bleach.

My mom isn’t an angry person, but she enjoys a good Sangiovese and exercises excessively, daily. I ask a friend why I feel murderous and she asks if I’ve tried intense exercise. She’s heard about a boot camp where “you just go in, don’t think for 45 minutes, loud music, they tell you what to do.” “An exercise lobotomy?” I ask. “Is that a thing?” she says. “Seems like a thing.” I go to the gym. It helps, for a few hours. But still this rage hits me in waves. I’ve been trying for weeks to understand it. Where is it coming from? Where can I redirect it? Will it help or hurt to type it out?

Surface level: The disrespect of being displaced from my home. The betrayal of being misled then discarded by my closest confidante.

Deeper than that: Discomfort at my own misogyny, never quite scrubbed out—seeking out reasons to dislike this new woman, to feel superior. Resentment from years of caretaking in exchange for feeling special, singular, only to be hastily replaced by another proxy mother with funds enough for expensive wine. The shock of seeing myself as part of a pattern. A sudden solidarity with his previous girlfriend, who we ran into once at the store. The insane sense I had then of having won something—sensitive, now, to the moments he spoke poorly of her. Rage turned inward because I didn’t listen to myself, listened too long instead to his passive platitudes about an “end game.” Indignation that of course he has every right to move on and to be happy.

Still, this rage doesn’t add up. This overwhelming, bodily anger. He didn’t really do anything wrong, nothing that would normally elicit in me much more than a closed door.

The answer, I think, lies in something I’ve started calling rage seep. The rage I feel, as the months get darker in this cursed year, as I doom-scroll through the hours, is not really, or not entirely, about my ex moving on months after I dumped him. Mostly the circumstances just opened up an outlet for my rage. Rage at the world that sometimes comes out sideways, that begs to be channeled in a specific direction.

Rage about October being too hot and the coral reefs passing a tipping point. About families in Gaza being bombed as they celebrate another performative ceasefire. About children scream-crying as their parents are ripped violently from our streets. About Trump posting late night, AI-generated memes—vitriolic, idiotic—tearing half the White House to the ground while we work two jobs, too tired to pay too much attention. About the decay of information, the dissolution of shared realities. The cognitive dissonance of going through the motions of a life, amidst all of it. The rising cost of everything, life goals retreating into the distance, a future that once existed and now doesn’t. My niece doing a school shooter drill in pigtails. My nephews laughing about “brain rot” and seeing it in myself, sitting in bed at night unable to sit with a thought, to read a full book, to work through the prickly, contradictory emotions. Rage that I’m holding so much less than so many others and still reeling with the weight. Rage to be filled with rage, which feels so toxic, so ugly in my cells.

Rage that as soon as I wrote this list of rages it felt outdated, another round of rage-inducing news descending in its wake, updates that compete and escalate, always more tragic, more absurd, increasingly impossible to visualize an off-ramp. Rage that the rage is intentionally incited—bait we can name but can’t avoid or dismiss entirely. Rage at my own dismissal nonetheless, the slow turn away from staying informed, the silence in me that I criticize in others, the trap of caring so much but never enough.

For a few years in my twenties, I dated a philosopher who insisted that anger was a non-starter in relationships, even as he lied his way through ours. I internalized it; I believed him. I felt sadness and disappointment but not anger. When another man repeated this script a few years later, a therapist tried to reawaken a latent rage in me. She reframed it—told me anger is a survival instinct, an important emotion to heed, a real thing that exists in my real body. That it must be metabolized and moved through me with intention. She suggested I create an anger ritual, but I didn’t stick with it. I still didn’t feel angry. Instead, emotional pain manifested as nausea. In hindsight I can’t remember when exactly I started screaming in my dreams.

Perhaps there’s nothing new to say about female rage. I looked up the etymology of rage, scrolled through references to rabies, downloaded a book called Women Are Angry and read a few chapters. Maybe mad is the more interesting term, which I repeated again and again as I packed up the apartment, at a loss for more measured or nuanced reflection. “I’m just so mad!” Mad—meaning foolish, insane. Furious. Uncontrollable.

We all know, intuitively if not academically, about the anger that has flowed through our family trees and the lengths that some will go to to suppress it—even more so when the women in question are not white and privileged, as I am. Independence as illness; ambition as insanity; padlocked asylums full of writers and thinkers and dreamers; hysterectomies to cure “hysteria;” chloroform and ether to dull bright minds; clitoridectomies; lobotomies; Mother’s Little Helper; any sign of defiance smashed under the thumb of the patriarchy. We all feel the tension in a nice tale about the end of inequality, foremothers who fought hard and solved the problem, while we experience it over and over again anyway—overt, or worse, insidious, hard to prove.

“This woman-crushing machinery works the wrong way,” a woman named Elizabeth Packard wrote from an asylum in the mid-1800s. “The true woman shines brighter and brighter under the process, instead of being strangled.” Rage, like anything compressed long enough, becomes sharp and shining.

And here, at last, at 36, is my rage—a perfect, violent diamond—finally making itself felt. Dismissed, distrusted, and diminished for so long. Pressurized by manipulative men and romantic disappointments, by the state of a beautiful world that breaks my heart daily, that holds more cruelty than seems possible when it could be so kind.

Still, the question of what to do with it. How to metabolize, but also use, this rage?

“Rage isn’t meant to stay in one place,” author Kelly Barnhill wrote in a rage-themed listicle a few years back. “It moves us from one state to another—like a refiner’s fire, or a catalyst. Rage brings heat, light, and clarity. It burns the chaff away, leaving that which is essential behind.”

I left our apartment in a blinding rage, shoving the detritus of my life into my car with the full weight of my body, rain and tears streaming down my face. I see now that I needed that catalyst, the pain of it, the burning of the chaff, even if I still wish it had gone differently. I was holding myself back. The fire burns and, if you let it, rebirths.

At my new home, I pour a glass of wine, blast Lily Allen, and rage-clean the bathroom. There’s no bow to tie on the story. My ex and I haven’t spoken since I left. It feels really sad; I’m really sad. But there’s also something else there, something moving me to put words to the page in a way I never did, never could, when we were together.

Our one fragile, resilient, miracle world is on fire. Our rage can be shoved down or our rage can be channeled. I’m not an academic. I took one Women’s Studies class in college and remember it being hard and a little boring. What I’m learning about rage is mostly felt. I’m curious about other people’s experiences of rage, how other women have processed, repossessed, and befriended it. This isn’t a denouement—only a personal whisper into the abyss to say: welcome, rage. You belong here. You are part of me, my friends, my sisters. You’ve run through the blood of my mother and my long forgotten ancestors. You are legitimate and powerful. Show me what you can do.