Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Beheading Holofernes, c. 1620.
There’s a fair amount of rage in me that I’ve begun to acknowledge and unpack for what it is. It comes with the sensation of feeling like my head is full of a horrible pressure that is pushing back in on itself and it makes me want to bang my head on a wall and rip whatever is fat and bursting inside of my brain right out. It just feels like I’m trapped in a reality and a body and an experience that I hate and I can’t do anything about so my only option feels like destroying the thing which caused me to feel so out of control and put upon in having an emotional response to it.
Today, I meditated on the remnants of this rage after an argument with my partner. It came to me that in the conversation that led to the argument, I had been energetically trying to come out on top, to dominate him. He had an opinion and I, even though I was stating my response calmly and rationally, was trying to somehow “win” at it. It was either I was on top or I was on the bottom– there is no equal.
It came, ironically enough, after we had gone to see The Nightingale, a film that follows a woman in 1800’s Tasmania who is brutally raped and subject to horrific violence and now seeks revenge on her abusers. I have to wonder how much of my rage at my partner and need to be on top have to do with a historical built up legacy of trauma that women have suffered at the hands of patriarchy.
This is by no means to excuse it– quite the opposite, I am acknowledging that my reaction to him is beyond the situation’s reality, and is related to something beyond the actual conversation.
Aisling Franciosi in Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale (2019)
There is a frightful sensation I have around other people’s energy that comes up more often than I’d like to admit and makes me feel quite weak, in a toxic masculinity sort of way, when I really tune into it. I’ve contemplated on the idea of past lives, and often I get images of being in sort of a Game of Thrones-like environment, and having to be a backstabbing cunning sort of woman that does her dirty work behind the scenes. I also have the sensation of being frustrated because I am not allowed to actually exert my power– all my work has to be done through a man, and ultimately, I am at the mercy of the power of men. So I dominate, or fear being dominated. There is seemingly, in my mind, no in-between.
There’s remnants of that in my childhood and my experiences in life as well. I’ve often felt like a wild horse that instead of being properly trained, was broken into submission because I was deemed unruly and unpredictable. Rage eats at me as I am blocked at every turn for freedom, and even more so as I realize more and more as an adult how much I need to build healthy relationships yet my limited capacity to handle disappointment, disagreement, and stress– a limited capacity that I did not choose to be taught or given– keeps me from even having that. It feels as if the past is constantly controlling me.
I work to change it but it is slow and heavy work, each step not just mine, but with the weight of a thousand ancestors hanging onto my ankles that I must pull along with me. My work is not just for me, it is to change the very patterns that have been passed down through every person that shaped the child that shaped the next child, etc etc that led to me.
And I think many times my rage is at this– the fact that I feel as if I am looked at with shame and confusion as to why I am so emotionally immature, when I know that not only am I aware of this and working to change it, but it is not just me I am dealing with, it is an entire history of pain and trauma that extends from so long before me. My work is so invisible to many, and I do not wish for it to be mine. Yet I know that much of my life is around dissolving these ties to the mud, and emerging with the light of the lily that grows up through mud that my ancestry also offers up to me.
I desperately desire the light. I know it is in me, yet I must climb for it every time. I must choose to climb out of the mud, and through sheer will, rise above, reach for something higher– grasp it in my hand and bring it back to the center of my heart.
Or rather– perhaps climbing is not a good metaphor. It implies desperation, it implies reaching for something beyond this moment. Rather, I must seek it in the sense of knowing that it lays inside the mud, at the very center, and plunge my hand in to the mud to either blindly fumble or intuitively locate it. And when I do, it is enough to just hold it, to know it is there. I do not even need to be able to see it yet. With my other hand, I work to clear away the mud, to scoop it out, push it away, or wash it clean so that I can reach the submerged pearl.
EACH MOMENT OF WORKING AWAY THE MUD IS A MOMENT OF RAGE THAT I BREATHE THROUGH AND SURRENDER,
AND MOMENT BY MOMENT, MONTH BY MONTH, YEAR BY YEAR,
I WORK THROUGH ENOUGH TO UNCOVER ONE MORE PEARL,
UNTIL BY THE END I HAVE A STRING THAT I PRESS INTO MY TOOTHLESS GUMS AND BARE AT THE WORLD,
A SYMBOL OF THE POWER OF MY HARD-EARNED INNER CLARITY.
So how do I do this, in a practical sense? For now, I will focus on the energetic dominance as a sign, and work to find a place of energetic equality, meeting the other person at the same level– neither above nor below– and see if speaking from there brings better results.
I am guessing that this is a way to wash away the mud, whereas engaging in energetic dominance/submission/power struggles only draws me right into that mud and leaves me neither grasping the pearl nor clean. As I feel today, when I engage in power struggles, I still feel covered in something I don’t like and can’t shake, no matter how much I may have “won”.
In the past, there may have been no escape from the brutality of the cycle of violence and oppression but I am not in that situation for the most part. I have room to breathe, room to respond, my life is not at stake.
