Where can a Woman be Loud by Beth Morey

I’ve been finding my anger, and I don’t know what to do with it.

What is the space for a woman’s anger in this world that wishes us, above all, to be easy on the ears and eyes?

I don’t know.  What I do know is that over the past year and some, I’ve been finding my anger, the good kind, the kind that screams NO and FUCKING STOP when needed, when racism and sexism and classism and violence and hate and abuse and all their sallow cousins sow their vicious, thieving hurts – and not quelling it with soul-crushing platitudes about forgiveness or the turning of cheeks and whatnot.  Instead, I allow the anger, allow myself to feel angry, look angry, speak angry.

My loud voice is breaking out of its cage, stealthily, dexterously, jubilantly, and awkwardly.  I am all elbows in my release.

I shout into the dark at last

and feel as if I am shouting into a box, the echoes claustrophobic in my own ears.

Where can a woman go for her legitimate rage to be heard?  To be truly heard, not dusted away as emotional, hormonal, it being “that time of the month”?

Where can a woman be loud without being hushed like a child, or dismissed, or ignored?

I don’t know.

I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know

Show me when women were first turned from people into patsies, and I’ll show you where the vacuum for our largeness began sucking needed parts of our souls away.

And know that when I point and say, “There.  There is where it began.  There is the beginning, one of the beginnings,” know that I will be angry over the centuries of silence and stifled-ness

and that it is okay.

Beth writes at www.bethmorey.com and is on twitter @sheofthewild