What to do with all this rage

A reluctant essay about a necessary feeling.

Sarah Nielsen

Sarah Nielsen

— 5 min read
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What to do with all this rage
Photo by Anandu Vinod / Unsplash
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I am not an (outwardly) angry person. I can be petty, sure, ask anyone about the specific tone of voice I use when I'm still beating a dead horse from something that happened ten years ago. I hold grudges the way my earth sign demands, but without much fanfare and usually out of comic relief — ask about my one-sided beef with geese.

Yeah, I can talk shit. A degree most Connecticut women receive summa cum laude before graduating high school. And I will yell at my TV or at my own sports teams in ways that would surprise people who've only seen me in professional settings. But confrontational? Not really. I get secondhand embarrassment watching strangers argue with wait staff in public the way others might get from bad karaoke. I don't like conflict and I don't love being the reason for it.

Face-to-face, it's a different register entirely. My whole thing, for better or for worse, is that I can usually see both sides of almost any interpersonal conflict. Even when someone's hurt me, I can usually find my way to understanding why they did what they did. If I do feel the need to say something directly, it comes out carefully — every real frustration dressed up in enough context that it sounds more like a performance review than a grievance.

Not because I'm hiding the anger. But because I've decided, most of the time, that naming the behavior and asking for something different matters more than making sure the other person knows exactly how mad I am. Many might call that letting people off easy. But if you're getting the hard conversation, consider it a compliment. It means I still think you're worth the effort. There can be a point for some people, when I'm done, I'm done. No further announcement required, but that point is rare. A dam breaking after many a storm.

The past few weeks, though, I've been really fucking angry. The kind that doesn't have an outlet because there's no one specific person to be angry at, and also somehow everyone — which is exhausting in its own right.

I've been angry reading the news. The case out of Cornell has been sitting in my chest for days now not because it's rare but because it isn't.

Rape has one of the highest rates of impunity of any crime, and the reason is almost always the same: the victim has to be perfect. Perfect, or dead. And even then, someone will ask what she was wearing, how much she drank, whether she sent mixed signals, whether she was asking for it, deserved it, somehow invited the thing that happened to her body without her consent.

We are taught, as women, from a very young age, to minimize our own pain. Don't make a fuss. Try to be cool about it. Why let someone else experience consequences to their actions when you could just absorb it and say it's fine. Don't ruin his future over one bad night. As though false accusations are the real epidemic, when they are vanishingly rare —while real ones get buried by universities protecting their reputations, by institutions protecting their donors, and powerful men who are rapists or abusers, or people who protect them, and have simply never had to answer for it.

Moira Donegan made a point in a recent Guardian piece that stuck with me: sexual violence is so widespread that most women have experienced some version of it — and that fact only holds true because many, many, men are the ones committing it. It's an obvious conclusion, and also one most people spend a lot of energy not acknowledging.

I'd like to live in a world where I could trust men not to betray the people around them. I am genuinely grateful for the men in my life who have never given me a reason to doubt them. But gratitude for the good ones doesn't cancel out the math. When it happened to me, the statistic was one in four. Now it's one in three. A third of the women you know have experienced sexual or physical violence. If you don't think you know that many, it just means they haven't trusted you enough to tell you.

Underneath the anger is grief, right? I mourn the women who deserved so much more than being called resilient, as if survival were the finish line instead of the bare minimum. I wish we didn't have to bury it and carry on, but resilience was never the goal — it's just what is left after no one did anything to prevent the thing that required it in the first place.

Here's the part that makes the anger feel almost pointless: it won't ever be resolved. It happens so often, so predictably, that someone could run The Onion's school-shooting headline as a template and just swap out the crime. "No Way to Prevent This..." the kind of lede you read with a hard swallow and a white-knuckled fist.

But this isn't a college campus problem, or a fraternity problem, or even strictly an American problem. Rape has never really been about sex, it's about power — who has it, who doesn't, and what people with power will do to keep it that way. It shows up in wars, in marriages. Between friends, colleagues, and strangers. It's one of the oldest tools in the oldest playbook. And the people with the actual power to change the system are so often the ones benefiting from how it already works — the ones who can't, or won't, see past black and white into the much more complicated gray where most of real life, and real harm, actually lives.

So I don't have a tidy ending for this one. I'm only one person, not a legislature or a prosecutor's office or a university review board. I can't reopen a case or rewrite impunity rates by publishing my thoughts online.

What I can do, I've been doing for 20+ years, in rooms most people never hear about: sitting on boards for women's organizations, writing checks, spending hours in domestic violence shelters with kids who shouldn't know what they already know, joining marches when marching was the only tool available that week.

None of it has ever felt like enough, and I've made peace with that a long time ago. It isn't supposed to feel like enough — it's supposed to be what you do anyway.

Some additional resources worth sharing:

If you're looking to learn more about international, local organizations to donate or volunteer:

  • Women for Women International | Founded after the Bosnian War for survivors of rape during war and conflict.
  • Ni Una Menos | Argentine collective that shares resources on gender-based violence and femicide.
  • House of Ruth | DMV-area nonprofit providing housing, childcare services, and counseling.
  • N Street Village | DC women's shelter with counseling and career resource.
  • Casa Myrna | Domestic violence shelter that provides counseling and educational services in the greater Boston area. Operates Safelink, Massachussetts' statewide domestic violence hotline.
  • Dove MA | Domestic violence shelter and community-based service provider in Massachusetts.

Thank you for reading, and for sitting with something heavy alongside me. Tonight I'll be treating myself to a solo concert experience, screaming along to ballads like "I Know the End" with 20,000 strangers without their phones. My cup will be full.

Until Soon,

Sarah

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