Articulated Anger and the Gift of Rage

Until recently, I have always told myself that I am not an angry person. I have told myself I hate feeling anger because it’s a useless, selfish, destructive, reductive and all-consuming emotion. I have told myself I don’t harbour any anger. I have told other people I am good at letting anger go.

The truth is that our current society views anger as a highly negative emotion. Especially for women, anger is often perceived as ‘a disproportionate reaction’, or lack of reason, or madness or selfishness. It is absolutely fine to be a sad woman, or a happy woman but not an angry woman – no that’s not allowed.

This does sometimes make me wonder how many of the people we deem as ‘mad’ are in fact full of justified anger but to protect the bubble of social reality, we say ‘they are mad’ and ‘they have lost their minds’, as to devalue their anger as absurd. Condemnation gets a voice, and anger stays silent. I wonder perhaps, are they just fucking angry because the world has lost its mind? I certainly am. Call me mad.

In fact, I’m even angry as I write this: I’m angry at the government and its recklessness, I’m angry at twisted misrepresentations on our media channels, I’m angry at the way women get sexualised, I’m angry because I’ve been victim of that sexualisation. I’m angry about things that have happened in the past, I’m angry at myself for things I’ve said and done and I’m angry for getting myself into situations which have hurt me.

Then there’s a sort of grumbling macro-anger that sits there like a platform of thick ice under the surface:

Right now, there are unspeakable horrors occurring in the Middle East and I can’t find a voice, not because I don’t care, but because I cannot fully comprehend how we, as a humanity, have reached a point where we can cope with and even justify this level of brutality. I have stayed silent because I feel beyond helpless and the situation feels beyond hopeless. The result is a pushed down sense of anger masked as deflation. But really, I am angry that my Jewish friends are facing insidious levels of antisemitism, I’m heartbroken for friends who have ties to Palestine, I’m angry that innocent civilians are being bombed to death in Gaza, I’m angry that women are being raped in front of their friends and that men on Twitter are justifying this barbarity.

Frankly, I’m sick to my stomach with anger about the wilful casualisation of the unfathomable unfairness that exists in the world.

But what to do with all of this anger and where to put it?

One of my favourite quotes on the topic of anger comes from a superb interview with Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who makes a valuable distinction between anger and rage:

“He said, ‘It’s because you have the gift of rage.’ I realised that’s what I’m always looking for, because I don’t think it necessarily has to be a negative thing. I think rage can be something that motivates and galvanises and changes things, and I think that’s what’s happening now.” While anger stews, she says, rage is active: “It has a forward motion to it. When I was in my twenties, I used to have these flash rages all the time, I would just get really, really ragey for, like, five seconds, and then it would pass. And it was always a weirdly positive feeling. I think rage can be harnessed. I find it exciting in women. That’s something that goes through my work, for sure.”

So much ground is being covered here. Firstly, Waller-Bridge breaks anger down into the nuanced sub categories of anger and rage which allows her to explore anger as both negative and positive. This, in turn, challenges the social perception of anger as purely negative. Secondly, by bringing in the language of motion, she suggests that whilst anger can debilitate, rage can propel, and interestingly ‘galvanise’. Often rage is seen as destructive and divisive but she reframes it to become constructive and connective. Thirdly, she gives direction to rage and shows that there is an art to it. Harness it and it can be made into something positive, powerful and indeed, ‘exciting’. This again inverts the widely held understanding of rage as something that involves complete lack of control. Finally, she makes it gender specific. Male rage is commonplace in our society often exhibited in the form of visible, physical aggression. Female rage – where is it? In my opinion, its brewing, its subterranean, but my god, it’s there.

The one thing Waller-Bridge doesn’t explore is how we take that stewing sense of anger to a point of actionable rage. Personally, I believe it’s not something we can fully control but rather something that occurs. Recently, something happened which I thought had made me upset. When talking to a friend about it, I realised I was actually really quite angry. Then suddenly, this singular occurrence unearthed this huge vat of anger inside me and in doing so, it galvanised that anger into a force of rage with direction which allowed me to write and write and write. Rage therefore helped me to realise, to create and to therefore articulate in ways I hadn’t been able to before. Rage released me.

In this sense, I think rage is anger taken to the boil. Rage cracks like lightning in the sky whereas anger brews in the soil. Rage howls, anger grumbles and growls. Rage has focus and breathes energy whereas, anger clogs and spreads like a wedge in the chest.

I am not someone who expresses their anger in the form of punching walls or shouting matches. Sometimes my anger sits quietly and seethes, sometimes I drink it away, sometimes I mask it and tell myself its sadness. But my rage, that’s a different beast and when it works, when I grab hold of it by the neck and look it in the red of its eye, my god is it good, my god is it powerful.

I think it is precisely that power which scares some people and excites others. Those excited by the power of rage are those who understand it and who can use it, those scared by it are those who have never used it as a force of good. I think it’s why our society, which is still very male-dominated, tends to dismiss women’s rage as ‘unreasonable’, ‘extreme’ or ‘disproportionate’ because if we let women express and act upon their often very valid rage, it could dismantle hierarchies, break glass ceilings and shatter illusions. And we couldn’t have that could we?

My rage in its current state has allowed me to better see other people’s poor behaviour, it has made me say ‘I want to change this’, ‘I want to make this happen’, ‘I want to write this, create this, articulate this.’ I no longer hold my anger in a box, I wear it on my sleeve just as I wear my love for people and my vulnerability. And whilst it is ok to be angry, I think it is actively valuable to be rageful from time to time.