Fly Your Rage Flags

I tried to end my life when I was nine years old. I’m not even sure I knew that’s what I was trying to do. I took half a bottle of aspirin. The aspirin sat on a high shelf in the pantry. It was what we took for pain. I had pain. So, in my nine-year-old mind, it made perfect sense. If a couple helped pain, maybe all of them would make it stop.

That’s how a child thinks when she’s been taught to be seen and not heard.

I don’t tell you that because I want your pity. Fuck pity. I tell you because somewhere there’s another little girl… or a fifty-year-old woman still carrying that little girl… who was raised under the same religion, the same rules, the same family code.

Smile. Obey. Don’t embarrass the family. Don’t question authority. Don’t tell.

Well…No.

You’re going to hear me.

For decades I thought healing meant becoming softer. More forgiving. Less angry. Then one day I realized something. Nobody had ever given me permission to rage.

Women are taught to fear their own anger because an angry woman is hard to control. She leaves. She speaks. She reports. She tells the family secret. She refuses to protect the people who never protected her. So here’s my permission slip.

Rage. Rage for God’s sake.

If you were physically abused…

Rage.

If you were sexually abused…

Rage.

If you were emotionally manipulated until you questioned your own reality…

Rage.

If you were taught your silence was holiness…

Rage.

Your voice isn’t a sin. It’s a pulse. Forgiveness? Maybe. It helps some people. It isn’t the only road home. Sometimes healing starts with saying the thing you’ve been swallowing for thirty years.

Sometimes healing sounds like:
“You hurt me.”
 “It was wrong.”
“I’m not protecting you anymore.”
“People are going to know what you did.”

I even told one of my abusers I hoped he died alone. There. I said it. I’m not exactly proud of that moment. I’m not ashamed of it either.

It was the first time in almost fifty years that I stopped protecting the person who hurt me more than I protected myself. That wasn’t the end of my healing. It was the beginning.

Because vented anger moves. It has somewhere to go. Silenced anger stays trapped, and many of us know what that feels like in our bones, our sleep, our bodies, and our relationships.

Don’t wait until you’re almost fifty to let your voice out of its cage. Don’t spend forty years making yourself smaller so someone else can stay comfortable. Raise your voice.

Wave your rage flags. Not because rage is where you’re meant to live. Because sometimes rage is the bridge that carries you back to yourself.

And once you’ve crossed it… You don’t need to stay on the bridge. You get to go home.

They told us good women keep the peace.
They forgot to tell us peace built on silence isn’t peace.
It’s captivity.
So raise your voice.
Raise your daughters.
Raise your standards.

And if you have to… Raise a little hell.