Eat Rage, Woman.
I am really, blisteringly angry.
It's a thing I haven't seen addressed much in my readings on depression and suicide, what factor anger plays into it. There's lots of talk of hopelessness, and isolation, and I do know those feelings well; there's lots of talk of selfishness, which I find simultaneously fundamentally correct and completely missing the point. But an examination of rage, of the desire to scream "Fuck you" to the universe at large and to one's loved ones in particular, is something I haven't seen.
I've never known what to do with anger. I've never even been good at identifying when I'm feeling angry. It is a thing I lay mostly at the feet of my gender. The American cultural narrative, of course, teaches men to express their anger outward, through violence or yelling, and teaches women to turn it inward, to eat it with a smile, only letting it out in tears that are then reviled as weakness. My parents maintained entirely traditional gender roles in this regard. So it's what I do -- I feel angry, and I immediately turn it upon myself, freeze all my muscles so they don't give my feelings away and simply ride out the stabbing pain that travels from the back of my throat down to the pit of my stomach, that tightens my chest so much that I have to concentrate to breathe. Blink away any tears that start to form.
And in those moments I want, so badly, to hurt myself.
When I was a teenager, I told myself I wanted to hurt myself because I was worthless, and ought to be punished. That is still where my brain tries to go, even after ten years of having someone here every day telling me different. But now I have just enough distance, just enough objectivity from my own experience, to see that those thoughts are a mask, a rationalization to myself that I don't actually feel bone-deep.
Bone-deep, what I feel is rage, at both the universe at large and my family in particular.
On Sunday, I was forced to ask my parents for money. Not much -- $500, which is something they can afford easily. I knew that moment was coming, and I was dreading it, but only because I feel it is a failure on my part to not be self-sufficient. I had every confidence that they would give me the money, because literally two weeks ago my mom spent half an hour reassuring me over the phone that she wanted me to always feel I could come to them if I needed help, that she never wanted me to suffer materially because my pride made it too difficult to ask. And they did, in fact, give me a check for $500.
But my mom also gave me an ultimatum. She said I was not to ask her for money again until I lost ten pounds.
I have never been thin. Not like my mom is thin, 4'10" and 93 pounds, which is two pounds lighter (at sixty) than she was at sixteen. All of my self-loathing as a teenager was wrapped around that fact, that I was fat and (therefor) ugly, because that was literally the only way I did not live up to a societal ideal of young womanhood -- smart, kind, popular with both my peers and with adults, unconventional enough to be interesting but not enough to be a threat.
I have spent my twenties learning to, if not exactly love my body, resent it less, and turn my resentment instead towards the oppressive nature of beauty culture. I am fat now, where as a teenager I was barely chubby, but I am mostly happier with myself. I don't see my weight as a failure, and I certainly don't see it as a reason I am a waste of oxygen. (That was indeed a line of thought I flayed myself with in high school.)
So when my mom told me that my weight is so offensive to her that she would risk my eviction from my home to force me to change it, it only took me about three hours to recognize that what I was feeling wasn't the old self-loathing, but what that self-loathing always masked: sheer, unadulterated rage at a society that taught me that the shape of my body defined the entirety of my moral worth; and at my parents, who bought that message hook, line, and sinker.
I drove home from their house wanting desperately to hurt myself -- not because I thought I deserved it, but because I wanted to hurt them. I wanted to rend my flesh, to drive a sword through my abdomen and spill out my guts in a bloody mess, because it is the only thing I can think of that might give my mother any sense of how much she has hurt me. Because my blood spreading in a pool around me would be able to speak, more eloquently than I have ever managed, to the devastation that those messages can wreak.
It's a thing I haven't seen addressed much in my readings on depression and suicide, what factor anger plays into it. There's lots of talk of hopelessness, and isolation, and I do know those feelings well; there's lots of talk of selfishness, which I find simultaneously fundamentally correct and completely missing the point. But an examination of rage, of the desire to scream "Fuck you" to the universe at large and to one's loved ones in particular, is something I haven't seen.
I've never known what to do with anger. I've never even been good at identifying when I'm feeling angry. It is a thing I lay mostly at the feet of my gender. The American cultural narrative, of course, teaches men to express their anger outward, through violence or yelling, and teaches women to turn it inward, to eat it with a smile, only letting it out in tears that are then reviled as weakness. My parents maintained entirely traditional gender roles in this regard. So it's what I do -- I feel angry, and I immediately turn it upon myself, freeze all my muscles so they don't give my feelings away and simply ride out the stabbing pain that travels from the back of my throat down to the pit of my stomach, that tightens my chest so much that I have to concentrate to breathe. Blink away any tears that start to form.
And in those moments I want, so badly, to hurt myself.
When I was a teenager, I told myself I wanted to hurt myself because I was worthless, and ought to be punished. That is still where my brain tries to go, even after ten years of having someone here every day telling me different. But now I have just enough distance, just enough objectivity from my own experience, to see that those thoughts are a mask, a rationalization to myself that I don't actually feel bone-deep.
Bone-deep, what I feel is rage, at both the universe at large and my family in particular.
On Sunday, I was forced to ask my parents for money. Not much -- $500, which is something they can afford easily. I knew that moment was coming, and I was dreading it, but only because I feel it is a failure on my part to not be self-sufficient. I had every confidence that they would give me the money, because literally two weeks ago my mom spent half an hour reassuring me over the phone that she wanted me to always feel I could come to them if I needed help, that she never wanted me to suffer materially because my pride made it too difficult to ask. And they did, in fact, give me a check for $500.
But my mom also gave me an ultimatum. She said I was not to ask her for money again until I lost ten pounds.
I have never been thin. Not like my mom is thin, 4'10" and 93 pounds, which is two pounds lighter (at sixty) than she was at sixteen. All of my self-loathing as a teenager was wrapped around that fact, that I was fat and (therefor) ugly, because that was literally the only way I did not live up to a societal ideal of young womanhood -- smart, kind, popular with both my peers and with adults, unconventional enough to be interesting but not enough to be a threat.
I have spent my twenties learning to, if not exactly love my body, resent it less, and turn my resentment instead towards the oppressive nature of beauty culture. I am fat now, where as a teenager I was barely chubby, but I am mostly happier with myself. I don't see my weight as a failure, and I certainly don't see it as a reason I am a waste of oxygen. (That was indeed a line of thought I flayed myself with in high school.)
So when my mom told me that my weight is so offensive to her that she would risk my eviction from my home to force me to change it, it only took me about three hours to recognize that what I was feeling wasn't the old self-loathing, but what that self-loathing always masked: sheer, unadulterated rage at a society that taught me that the shape of my body defined the entirety of my moral worth; and at my parents, who bought that message hook, line, and sinker.
I drove home from their house wanting desperately to hurt myself -- not because I thought I deserved it, but because I wanted to hurt them. I wanted to rend my flesh, to drive a sword through my abdomen and spill out my guts in a bloody mess, because it is the only thing I can think of that might give my mother any sense of how much she has hurt me. Because my blood spreading in a pool around me would be able to speak, more eloquently than I have ever managed, to the devastation that those messages can wreak.