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On Anger

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On Anger

Two days ago, my mother asked me if I thought I was aggressive when I stepped away from a man who invaded my personal space. I said yes, I probably had been, but if he was a good man he would understand I was uncomfortable. She said she worried she had made me afraid with her history, with telling me too many stories of her past. I told her I wasn’t afraid. I told her I was aware. I didn’t tell her I was angry.

Yesterday, the president signed a bill to defund abortions.

The comments told women just to keep their legs shut, as if there weren’t at least two parties involved in making a baby.

A man said not to take out the pain of rape on a baby by ending its life, that he had known someone who carried the child and raised her rapist’s child as her own.

Today I read articles for class about anger. This seminar is all about emotions and how to perceive them, how to write them. We’re focused on anger right now. In some ways, I wish we weren’t.

I read about a woman unable to get a college to see her as anything but a non-white, but not allowed to complain about the whiteness and anti-female edge to anything they did. It wasn’t acceptable. It was complaining. And no one listens to complaints.

I read how college students are being raped and colleges do nothing to the assailants, while the victims are harassed.

I read about Uma Thurman’s utmost anger and inability to speak without fury seeping into every word.

And I read about how even now, women are only viewed as objects that can birth children.

So yes. I think I’m angry. I think I’m aggressive. Because I’m older now and I cannot just sit here and pretend this shit doesn’t get to me. I don’t want a man near me, so I move away, and I’m purposeful when I do so. Don’t come that close to me, I say. Because it makes me uncomfortable and if you do it again, I won’t remain quiet about it. A good guy should understand his proximity isn’t comfortable to someone he doesn’t know. He has no right to be that close. He has no right to my body.

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