First things first: consider yourself warned, as this is an angry and definitely not family friendly rant.
I’m angry and I want to scream: loudly, hysterically, desperately. I’m on edge and have been feeling like this for over a week now. Doom and gloom, I feel like giving up on humanity altogether. And it’s not even about my personal, inner crisis (which is nonetheless happening alongside)!
Whenever I try to unload and discuss it with someone, I get “kindly” lectured on the importance of detachment (“for mental health”!), and the ultimate need to look for positives. WHICH ARE PRECISELY PART OF THE FUCKING PROBLEM!
I mean, let’s get real here: I obviously don’t want to get stuck in this negative headspace forever. Duh! But because I intent to become a fairly good therapist one day (and self-awareness has always played a massive role in my life), I’m all in for working it out head on: experiencing and not so much accepting as integrating it – rather than detaching or repressing. Repressed shit ALWAYS comes back up anyway, and only in uglier, more unexpected ways. Things are shite right now and it needs to be faced. This is the reality we live in. That reality affects you, whether you like it or not. Turning your back on it may bring a short-term relief, sure, but this is EXACTLY how any depression starts. This is EXACTLY why we now have a fucking pandemic of depression out there. Believe me, there is shitloads of research and whole books on it!
Spoiler alert: therapist’s job (in my view at least) isn’t about saving or making people “happy”. Fuck no. This should be common knowledge: you can only really save yourself (even if with someone else’s help),and this full-on, constant “happiness” is not only disgustingly overrated (yet another manipulating, marketing hack), but also completely unsustainable (if not dead-on impossible). All a therapist can really do is to help people get to know themselves, their perception and reality better. Help them make peace with the omnipresent ambivalence and inevitable, constant changes. Give them back some agency over their inner life and narrative.
Change and ambivalence nuns, that’s what therapists really are.
Detachment, disconnection and toxic positivity is what I’m intending to be fighting against (fiercely and passionately) for the rest of my bloody life. And that’s precisely why I’m looking for ways to let my anger out right now. Work it out, healthily process, so it doesn’t drag behind me like an invisible baggage.
No one said that being self-aware and living a conscious, intentional life is going to be easy. Quite the opposite: if you’d care to look into it, it’s famously hard, but worth it.
Okay, but why did I need to rant about it in the first place?
Well, it all started with a book.
I have only myself to blame here, as it was my conscious choice to read HYSTERICAL, which (and the joke’s on me) indeed made me quite hysterical. With fury. Did you realise that women’s emotions are widely seen – especially by men, but not exclusively – as a reflection of their character / personality? We all have this (even if unconscious) embedded view of a woman being too emotional, unreliable and at times hysterical. Does men’s emotions get the same treatment? Of course not, men’s expressions of emotions and feelings are seen for what they actually are: a reflection on the situation they found themselves in, a reaction rather than personality trait (unless it’s vulnerability, of course, then you’re automatically “weak”). I indirectly described this bias in Bad Review. In my previous work, my emotions were never ever seen as a result of a situation I found myself in, they were ALWAYS seen as a fatal flaw in my character. That’s why I was never as easily forgiven as my male colleagues (if at all). That’s why I’m still not getting absolved! Because it’s never what happens to me, it’s me.
Mate, does it blow your mind once you see it!
It’s not to say that men have it easy: they’re on the other side of the same coin. We’re all slaves to patriarchy, and as long as men’s distant rationality and reliability is going to be seen as a desirable norm, an ultimate ideal (which current societal and cultural rules hugely – though mostly unconsciously – perpetuate), we’re all going to keep suffering for it. Men may have more agency and power than women, but it’s power and agency still very much restricted by harmful status quo. I’m not going to go into details here (it’s over 300-page research-based read, after all), but let me tell you what my main takeaway of this book is: it’s not just women who should be hysterical with anger here. We all should! And that fury should be channelled into incorporating actual change, not into fighting each other.
Even though it was a feminist read – and did initially made me angry on behalf of each and every woman out there – it fairly quickly led me to consider the condition of humanity as a whole. There is a massive schism, an acute ambivalence in how I feel about human beings right now. On one hand I have this strong, indispensable belief that we are all capable of wonderful things (duh, wouldn’t be able to pursue therapy otherwise), but on the other, I just can’t believe how utterly stupid and self-destructive we’re constantly choosing to be.
I’m so sick of all the double standards. I’m sick and tired of people refusing to look at the bigger picture and face hard truths. I’m sick and tired of the constant misdirection of all the knowledge and skills we now poses – because they have not just potential but actual power of solving the most pressing issues (like the failing economies, toxic societies and climate crisis, which of course are all strictly connected). We literally have our hands on all needed solutions and yet we refuse to execute them. In the name of power and money (which arguably are one and the same thing these days). And because those solutions would require some substantial effort and awareness. Because we’re all absolutely petrified of change, even though it has been biologically embedded in our minds and bodies ever since we came into existence as a species.
Talk about ridiculousness of it all!
As one individual I cannot do anything about it, it’s entirely out of my control. Of course I feel powerless – I really am powerless here! But ultimately, powerlessness is just another feeling that I have to learn how to feel, express and incorporate into my life. It’s universal and it’s going to be back, in one way or another, whether I like it or not. It’s the rightful part of living experience, of being a fully functioning human being. It won’t last forever (no emotion does), but for it to not get harmfully internalised, it needs to be experienced, expressed and acknowledged, not repressed or ignored.
All the anger and frustration that go alongside it, ought to be felt too.
So there: I’m angry and frustrated right now.
Because we are getting fucking fucked (as Muse accurately points out).
But at least I’m alive and kicking.
*I’m referencing “HYSTERICAL: Exploding the Myth of Gendered Emotions” by Pragya Agarwal. Use with caution, it gets you angry.
dreamyania 