Little Despairs or Notes on What Is Pissing Me Off Lately
Anger always returns me to my true self.
1. I learned young that anger is powerful. Despite every warning — personal and cultural — relayed to me about anger and its unbecoming nature for women, I came to find it a necessary and useful fuel. Anger has the potential to be an emotional path to truth if you treat it honestly. Even more important it functions as a spark for revolution whether intimate or grand.
2. It is depression that mires me in muck, makes my body ache with the unspoken longings and deeply felt traumas that reverberate with time. But when I become angry with a situation, a comment, a person? That’s when I step back into my power. I see events more clearly. I am able to sever myself, however momentarily, from that cunning voice in my head that has told me for decades of my lack of worth.
3. Anger has always returned me to myself. My true self. Today, it has helped me burn off the excess sorrows and bodily tension that came with a recent, stunningly debilitating suicidal episode.
4. I rewatched Cape Fear (1991), for the first time in over a decade, with my partner last night. Like him, I chuckled at how leaden the film is in its melodrama, the sheer goofiness of the performances and that whirlpool ass ending. It’s a rare mid as fuck Scorsese picture that starts with some tension and devolves into boringly indulgent silliness undercut with a curious misogyny that isn’t unpacked. But what struck me was this. Cape Fear is a film about male impotence and the male desire to remake their environment in the image of their own traumas. But film’s concerning male impotence reveal their truths through manipulating the flesh of women. The pain of Jessica Lange’s wifely character and teenage Juliette Lewis’s confused desire put into harsh relief that these aren’t so much characters with complex interior lives, but ornaments for the more fully realized pain of the male lead played by Nick Nolte. I love Scorsese as a director but like even the best male directors I am interested in asking him, Why is the price for male violence paid in female flesh? Why must a woman’s interiority be sacrificed in the face of a man’s suffering?
5. For many men — even (especially?) those who tout their feminist bonafides and seem aware of the patriarchal binds we all must navigate life encased within — women aren’t whole and autonomous but vehicles for their own self-discovery, empowerment and control. “Some men are drawn to/seek out powerful, successful, independent women and then resent those traits once they have them, and then they try to break the woman down,” my close friend texted me not that long ago. I have unfortunately dated men in the past for which this applies to. No matter how many times I’ve come across this phenomenon, I am still taken aback by the vehemence that powers it.
6. Men’s mental health is a unique dumpster fire but it shouldn’t be on the women in a man’s personal life to quell those flames!
7. I am exhausted from the effort it takes to be continuously strong on this journey of healing. I keep it all together because I have so few people I can be vulnerable with and trust they will hold my heart as gently as I hold theirs.
8. A close (straight dude) friend of mine once told me how remarkably resilient I am when I was speaking about a personal struggle. This resilience was cultivated through decades of trauma at the hands of parents, family, the psychiatric industry, men who said they loved me but really loved the ability to tear a woman down they once thought impenetrable. I don’t want to be forever resilient. I want the kind of care that promises a soft landing when I fall and help standing back up.
9. I am wary of identifying wholly with my (ever-shifting) diagnosis which is, at the moment, borderline personality disorder. A diagnosis I received during my last hospitalization at 28 years old during a chilly Thanksgiving week in Chicago. I merely mention it to give some understanding of the seriousness of my mental health struggles. These struggles are compounded by the forces that make up the psychiatric system in this country.
I am rather angry about the unspoken side effects, the harm done to my organs by the three different meds I’m on, the horrible nature of trying to get off of certain medications. Brain zaps will occur even within just a few days off of my medication. Are we, as a culture, actually addressing the deeply rooted problems of economic strife, poor health care, disconnection, loneliness holistically or are we merely ignoring the root of the matter to medicate symptoms?
10. Silvia Federici writes in Beyond the Periphery of the Skin, “Psychology had demonstrated itself able to transform itself and recognize the subjectivity of the subjects it studies. But it had not found the courage to break with Power […] Psychology can no longer displace the pathologies provoked by capitalism onto a preconstituted human nature.”
11. Capitalism has alienated us from our bodies and what we truly desire. This is never more apparent than in witnessing the maladaptive ways American culture seeks pleasure.
12. This maladaptive tenor foments a host of harms that contaminate everything in its path like an errant oil spill. I see it in friendships, romances, familial bonds — both my own and of people in my social constellation. But it is also gravely apparent in the realm of film, where the pleasure principle and the truths only a body can speak have been suppressed. This isn’t just about the lack of sex scenes. It also extends into a lack of embodied criticism to meet our present moment that actually cares about the body rather than just giving it a passing glance in a pithy sentence about an actor’s beauty. These thoughts have been percolating especially since watching Ira Sachs’ lush, potent, slippery masterwork Passages.
13. Passages is a film of tremendously realized and acutely enveloping performances, costuming with an astute color story, camera work that has a silken curiosity. It’s a narrative that asks us in its visual rhythms and performances to not just remember the stories our bodies tell but to study and honor them too. Sometimes the curve of a back, the tension in a neck, the fumbling delicacy of an outstretched hand can reveal what your eyes are trying to obscure.
14. What story does my own body tell? What do its curves, dimples, scars, and those reorienting tattoos whisper in the dark? I think I will be learning the answer to this and telling stories rooted in this understanding for my entire life.
15. I have spent the last few years of my life — as I’ve made grand strides with my mental health, healing old wounds, tending to my inner child, learning to live embracing the full brunt of my own desires — apologizing way too fucking much. It’s as if I am afraid of being emotionally excessive and pushing people I care about away. This was magnified in an emotionally abusive relationship I had in my late twenties that fucked with my head so much I’m still learning to not bring that past hurt into the present. I apologize for being too loud, talking too much, taking up too much space. I apologize for wanting, for longing, and refusing to let go of these glimmering desires. This is an untenable space to be in. It leads you to making yourself smaller, more digestible for those around you. But I’m fucking done. I’m tired of apologizing as if there is something inherently wrong and excessive about me. There isn’t. I’m a gorgeously imperfect, intelligent, wild, beautiful being. I need to embrace that in order to live fully. After all…
16. Pleasure is my discipline.
17. After a nasty depressive and suicidal episode — marked by chaotic thoughts and nascent planning for death and body aches and self-harm and a voice diligently telling me I will always feel alone — I am spending today caring for myself. Like my foremothers, I have walked through fire. My confidence has dimmed recently. But the anger boiling within me — about familial strife, personal hurts, and more expansive issues about the state of this burning world — has reminded me of just who the fuck I am. A true Southern broad and bad bitch who has faced the abyss time and time again yet survived to alchemize the truths that come with facing such darkness.
18. This is a call for those reading to study your anger. What enflames you? Where is the kindling from this fire born? Where is your anger empowering? When does it curdle into cruelty whether toward yourselves or others? Anger need not be a wholly destructive and cruel force. It can be revolutionary too. Its energy can help you carve out ways forward. The kind of beautiful and necessary anger I’m talking about is undergirded by a hopeful belief that change isn’t only possible but within our grasp.
a shot of joy
I am a big fan of the anime Jujutsu Kaisen, which recently returned from a brief hiatus to continue its second season. So, this reel that sets footage from the season two credits against the Flyana Boss song, “You Wish” (which is great to listen to when you need to boost your mood and remind yourself that you are an undeniable bad bitch) is an endless delight.
Brava! 💚 Feeling this LOTS right now, myself. Somatic-dissociation is a HELL of a thing, huh?😩 Maybe that’s why revisiting “The OA” on Netflix recently has hit different for me? Have you ever seen that one, Angelica? Thoughts?🧐
Beautiful post, Angelica. Thanks for sharing.