Rage Is a Quiet Thing

I've spent a lot of time over the last week texting Rebecca instead of speaking out to the world, because as she already has pointed out, there are times when it just makes good sense to shut the fuck up.

At the same time, anger is a feeling that needs to go somewhere, and I have been trying to funnel it accordingly. I have been an angry person since I was a small child, and to be frank, I think that is one of the healthiest things about me. You see, I'm not just walking around being angry on a personal, individual level: my anger has always been on a global scale. My anger is me, in the second grade, standing in front of my class with my best friend as we announced the formation of Earth Club because we wanted to save animals from becoming extinct and we were terrified about the ozone layer. My anger is that child awake at night, indignant that no one came forward to join said club. How was it possible that no one cared that our world was in danger? 

In the present, I see that I should have been even angrier. 

That's the heart of it, you see: I've never once been angry about the world and then thought "wow, that anger was misplaced." In fact, I am usually almost always about to find out that things were worse than I thought they were. My rage fuels me: It keeps me trying to learn the facts, it fills me with purpose, and it gives me energy to move about the world that I absolutely would not have otherwise.

My anger is flared this week by the small things, the ones that don't really matter in the long run because we're all running on fumes after a few particularly traumatic years. At the same time, my rage wants to protect others: What, for example, might a friend in Ukraine think about the not few number of people I've seen posting about how important it is to elect women this week? And will there ever be a point when a huge sector of this "progressive" country realizes that there is more to all of this than voting every 2-4 years? 

(Do people think that if we elected more women, there would... not be a Putin? Do they understand that some of the most vocal supporters of Russia right now are female elected officials? Can we ever just admit that there's no such thing as a good politician?)

I am reticent to speak often about my anger and its pervasiveness, because it conjures an image of me in real life that simply isn't correct. (An angry woman is a difficult woman, after all.) The truth is that on a cellular level, that anger just lives inside of me like the blood flowing through my body. I am, in fact, usually in a pretty good mood. I take my own life not particularly seriously, and in fact I am currently sitting on my couch singing loudly along to a Maggie Rogers song while wearing a tank top that says The more I learn about women, the more I love my Harley. I have homemade candles cooling on the counter. I am wearing orange eyeliner. It is impossible to be hard-hearted in orange eyeliner.

My rage is a shield, and it's a course of action, and it's a propeller that keeps me from walking into the sea. I think that I will keep it.

In the spirit of balancing one's natural spice with a certain daily ease, here is a no-recipe recipe for sloppy joes, which I will be making this weekend. It takes a lot of iron to get through any of this.

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