I never learned to express anger well. I was taught to squash it, to nullify it, to pretend it away.
I was taught to put on the rose colored glasses and the Pollyanna veil. Anger lived in other people's homes. Nice, good people didn't get angry or if they did happen to squish a little anger out between their eye brows, it was quietly folded up in the bottom dresser drawer and hidden underneath the ugly plaid pants Aunt Eunice gave you for Christmas two years ago.
It was a tacet lesson given and received and yet its potency lives on. Its medicine has flowed through me for all these 49 years I have been alive.
My parents made it a rule to not fight in front of the kids. Instead, silence reigned over their marraige and trickled down upon us children. I wonder if I was the only one who didn't get it. Maybe if I had any semblance of relationship with my four remaining siblings we could talk about it, but we don't so I don't know what their take on it was or is.
I have taken something of a remedial course in expressing anger and am consciously walking toward constructively using anger rather than destructively using anger. I have been prickly and bristly and anger has been coursing through my blood lately. I have been working with it and through it and not shoving it underground.
I no longer see anger itself as something sinister. I do see unconscious anger as something destructive, just like unconscious anything has the power to be destructive.
Apathy, the Emperor and Empress of Unconsciousness, may be the most destructive and insideous of all because there is a big void of nothingness to respond to, to create from or with or come to know. It is like trying to come to know invisibility. And before all the Harry Potter fans rush in with how they are intimate with invisibility just please, stay here and stay present to the metaphor of apathy and anger and unconsciousness and fear of becoming more conscious because then one must deal with what is so -
The "What is So" is lovely beyond word loveliness and yes, it may also look a lot more frightening than invisibility.
Last night there was a unique meeting for the women of the Bakersfield Community Campaign VDay, the annual international awareness event to raise money and consciousness to end violence against women and girls. The focal point locally is several performances of Eve Ensler's Vagina Monologues. We weren't rehearsing the Monologues we will be performing next week-end, we shared our own stories and self-written monologues instead.
I was suitably humbled and amazed by the authenticity and truth spoken there.
I almost didn't want to read the monologue I wrote because I have been taught and it is so ingrained in me that a nice girl, a good girl, a girl who wants to have friends and not be lonely for her entire life does not say controversial things. She doesn't purposefully push buttons, she doesn't show the deep creases between her eyes or prowl about in frustrated emotion. She may show humor and sexuality or both, preferably, especially if it is a nod to her femininity. She may cry, in fact, crying is feminine and therefore acceptable, especially if it awakens sympathy.
But openly talk about sexual experiences of the very recent kind and then call culture to its feet, including the very culture you are swimming in? To be angry at that culture for only meeting its call half way? That won't do.
And yet, last night, it did.
Reviewing my experience last night, I see how quickly I leap to conclusions about what people are saying to me. One of my dear friends began applauding a section of my piece before I was done. I told her to stop it because I wasn't through yet.
Here is how remnants of unconsciousness layer themselves in my psyche. I took her applause to mean I should shut up. I shouldn't go on, I had told enough of this boring rant-y story no one really wanted to hear anyway. I took her applause to be a door slamming, nose scraping "all right, all ready, JULIE. We got it, ok, now shut the F up you fat, boring, ugly, stupid, lame-ass, uninteresting, yesterday's news excuse of a woman."
Hear me: That is not what her applause meant - and it is so interesting that with all the personal development work I have done, all the creative work I have sprinkled across the globe I still think the majority of the planet just wishes I would shut up. Stop talking. Stop filling the air with my diatribe and insignificant word-flailings.
I don't hide the fact that I have experienced some pretty serious bouts of depression with the rest of the world.
In my worst episode, back in 1999, my depression got so bad that I stopped speaking. I felt my voice my words my language was an affront to God himself so the best strategy was to go lie down, silently, and not speak. In fact, it was during those days I believed suicide was an effort only for worthy people. I decided I could will my heart to stop beating or better yet, just suffer through a life sentence of not speaking. I could barely lift my arm through the air so any dramatic, forceful suicidal effort was out of bounds. There were no pills in the house, none of the traditionally more passive ways to end ones life. I would will my heart to stop beating.
Thankfully, that time of darkness ended and yet when I am paying attention, there is still a piece of me standing in that doorway waiting for the rest of me to show up. The pathway to that door is marked with silencing my voice.
Last night was a time of women speaking. Sacred moments of breaking down prison walls that have held our stories in, that didn't trust others to know us very well. It is easier to stay behind those walls of insincerity. Other people are more comfortable with bland-always-give-them-what-they-expect-loaves-of-wonder-bread than the more exotic, unknown flavors of selfdom.
Last night, many of us let go of worry about "other people" and for once stood and told what was so without fabrication and without nullification.
Together a community of women laughed, cried, shouted, moaned, sighed, listened. Listened and listened some more. Some were vulnerable, cracking open their souls so all of us could peek inside and touch the tenderness with our fingers. Some were more comfortable pulling out the humor card and some were tentative and didn't allow themselves to go very deep, instead doing what I call 'ice skating' over what rumbled in the pits of their bellies.
Each one, beautiful in whatever edition her words offered.
Every woman stood up. Shared her experience. And sat down.
Every woman was heard. Angry, sexy, vulnerable, scared, celebrating, real.
Which is why I continue to do VDay. It isn't because it is another notch on my creative belt or a line on my resume, it is to give women space to speak. It is to give women the platform to share their stories without fear. It is to give women the option of opening the door to increased consciousness even if it is just a toe dip for now ~ meeting a woman where she is with love, with caring, with compassion, with the message she is just right exactly how and where and who she is.
I imagine I will continue to do VDay like activities until more women are heard. Until more women have a place to stand and share stories. There is such power in that, in being heard.
Last night, every woman was heard.
Every woman was heard.
VDay Community Campaign 2008 -Photo by Todd Powers
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© 2011
Julie Jordan Scott
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