Permission to Feel Anger — Interruption #1

Anger can be instructive, if we take the time to feel it

Hello! 👋 I’m trying something new for my paid subscribers this year—short reflections on interrupting social norms and defaults. Because the fact of the matter is, we can’t just fight the white patriarchy “out there.” It also requires an internal mindset shift, which requires some degree of intentionality when it comes to our own learned assumptions and behaviors.

I want to be abundantly clear — these reflections offer no life hacks, or, God forbid, mommy hacks. This isn’t a self-help course. There is no journaling or gratitude or meditation required.

This is simply an experiment that I imagine will evolve over time. (Or maybe it will just fizzle out, which is okay too.) More than anything, I hope these reflections will incentivize me to examine my own socialized reactions, and in sharing them, incentivize you to do the same.

I’m opening this initial interruption to all my readers. I’m actively seeking feedback, so I hope you’ll take 1-2 minutes to fill out the short four-question survey at the end. Thank you in advance!

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I had a lot to feel angry about last year. I’ve had a lot to feel angry about in other years, too, but in 2024, I tried something new. I let myself feel my anger. I sat with it. I got to know it.

Anger has a bad rap these days. In women it manifests as muted resentment; in men, it’s all bluster and rage. Neither of these iterations are particularly helpful, but just because anger is a so-called “negative” emotion, it doesn’t mean that anger has to be a negative force in our lives.

My learned default, of course, is to tamp down my anger. I didn’t consciously set out to interrupt this instinct—like many women in their 40s, I think I’d just had enough. I was coming to terms with just how much I had given up to be a “good wife” and a “good mom,” and I felt furious that society continues to demand these sacrifices from women.

I was also just… done. I was done with being anyone’s wife, and I wanted to be a “good mom” on my own terms.

I came to learn that if I take the time to feel my anger, it has a lot to teach me. That means resisting the urge to bury it, or ignore it, or set it aside.

Feeling anger is important; equally important is naming it. Some people might call this “venting,” which also has a bad rap, but oh, I’ve done some delicious venting over the past year! We all need at least one person in our circle we can vent to, someone who we know will validate us without judgment or who won’t put undue pressure on us to “fix” anything just yet.

We can’t wallow in this phase, of course. Eventually we must move on to process our anger, pick it apart, consider other perspectives. That doesn’t mean invalidating our own perspective; it just means considering our anger from different angles.

As I alluded to in the introduction, it could be tempting to turn this into a magical three-step formula (feel, name, process), a no-fail anger solution, a life hack. After all, I’m as qualified as any other Internet self-help guru, which is to say not very. But like most things in life, this isn’t usually a tidy linear process. Sometimes I have to process variations of the same anger over and over again, sometimes I process it too quickly, and sometimes I wallow for too long.

The important thing here is to give ourselves permission to be angry. If we find ourselves feeling angry in reaction to certain things, that’s instructive. If we find ourselves feeling angry in reaction to certain people, that’s instructive. If we find ourselves feeling angry a whole lot of the time, that’s instructive.

My anger told me something wasn’t right. It had been trying to tell me that for years. In 2024, I finally decided to listen.

I’d love to get your feedback on this concept and its execution! Please take 1-2 minutes to fill out this four-question survey. Thanks in advance for your input.