Today was a truly strange day. Or perhaps not strange, but rather, I’m still trying to wrap my head around it. It was a day that started with an odd google search: “What does a hand look like after it’s broken?”
I had this concept for a while: the image of a daughter cradling a broken hand as her mother consoles her through it. But mostly at the heart of it, this relinquishing to anger; most especially female rage. It’s a concept that I’d been trying to get right for a couple of years, yet to no avail. Even today, I’m not sure that I do female rage enough justice. It’s something that’s not easily seen, swallowed up in fact, and takes the course of many years, even a lifetime. It’s hard to capture that in one singular vignette collection, without making it feel preachy.
I don’t really think that I was able to get it right until today, because growing up I never associated with my anger. It truly felt like a stranger to me, (though it showed up most often as sadness or hurt) until one day, it was all at once released. From there, I noticed how much everything made me angry, the little injustices that happen to us every day. Though the odd thing was that while I used to be scared of anger, it was in those moments that I felt the most empowered. I understood intimately just how many wrongs I’d been shouldering from people and how I was tired of it. I still view anger that way, as a first step to draw boundaries.
I finished with Knuckle Down, though I keenly want to change the title. I’ll think about it some more tonight, before I go to asleep. Hopefully, I’ll have the answer in the morning.
A very good video essay by The Take: Why You Root for Gone Girl’s Amy Dunne
A good TedTalk: The power of women’s anger | Soraya Chemaly