Sometimes, it can feel like the only options are to stuff it down or completely explode.
Hearing about the remarks at CPAC about trans people—adding to the list of recent horrors being done to trans and non-binary communities—made my blood boil.
And since then, I've vacillated between wanting to scream with rage forever and ever, and feeling like there's nowhere to put my feelings but to hold them inside my body.
I find that this is often the bodily relationship we can have with rage—this conflicting need to release it all lest we die, and to keep it all in because it can often feel too hopeless to try to express any of it at all.
And rage and grief, I've found, come from the same roots, and can often be experienced very similarly in the body.
This is what I try to remind myself when I feel that push-pull of my anger and I don't know what to do...
...I start by connecting with the grief parts.
I feel a deep, full-bodied grief for my trans people.
There are people who are attacking them, murdering them, attempting to invalidate them as human beings.
Laws are being enacted that will, without any doubt, deeply harm the lives of trans people, including trans youth.
There is hatred being spewed under the guise of protection. Of religion.
(Ignoring the fact that abuse and other harms most often happen in churches and among family, friends, and mentors...not at drag shows or with strangers in bathrooms.)
Some are loud about it, some are more subtle...the harm being done to trans people is multifaceted and has many faces.
And I deeply grieve, with my whole body.
And I tune into the intense rage that results.
Rage is not to be feared.
It is to be heard. Felt. Validated.
It partners with my grief.
Together, they remind me that expressing what the body is holding is a self-care practice.
Honoring rage is self-care.
Expressing grief is self-care.
Advocating for people who are being discounted, harmed, and scapegoated simply for being their full selves is self-care.
Community care is self-care.
Now, let's listen to our rage.
Let us not ignore it.
Let us never accept anything that tries to take our joy, our love, our fullness.
Rage is not meant to be silent