Cou(rage)

The other day I listened an episode of Glennon Doyle’s new podcast - We Can Do Hard Things - about Overwhelm. Glennon and her sister Amanda talked about the ‘mental load’ that women carry, and described it as the ‘ticker’ in our heads that is constantly ticking off all the things we’re keeping track of.

(If you’re not familiar with the ‘mental load’, I recommend you read this comic, ‘You Should Have Asked’).

I won’t go on about the episode (but please listen to it if this topic speaks to you), because what stood out to me what Glennon uttered at the very end:

“You can’t have courage without a little bit of rage.”

If you’ve been waiting for a permission slip to tap into your own rage, there it is.

Permission to rage, granted.

I immediately thought of all the the things I feel rage over..and how often I tamp that rage down.

Because women have been socialized, politicized, and cultured out of being allowed to even feel, let alone express, any type of rage. Not if you want to be a ‘good girl’. Not if you don’t want to be called a bitch. Not if you don’t want to be questioned or second-guessed to death about the ‘why’s’ and ‘what’s’ and ‘how’s’.

There’s a giant cultural invisible fence that discourages women from speaking our minds and expressing our rage.

We’re told it’s not there. But it is, and we all know it. That alone is rage-inducing.

But, if we see rage as a part of courage, how can that help us reconsider our own relationship to feeling it in the first place? Instead of something to avoid, what if rage becomes something not only useful, but necessary?

Not necessary for the sake of rage itself. Rage for the sake of rage is incomplete, dangerous even.

But instead, how can we mine our rage and turn it into something different?

The author Austin Kleon said in a recent interview that his books are his response to something in society that disgusts him. But rather than unleash his disgust all over the page, he lets it be generative. He mines the diamonds from the rough and produces something useful.

The paradox is that rage and courage appear to be at opposite ends of the spectrum. Most of us try to avoid rage and lean towards courage, but what that actually does is just leave us somewhere in the middle, numb.