Anger Deserves Better Lighting

Day 118 – March 21, 2026

I think anger gets treated badly.

Not all anger. Men’s anger gets full production support. Men’s anger gets microphones, metaphors, think pieces, justification, history, context, room to breathe. Men get to be furious and still be interpreted as serious, powerful, wounded, deep.

Women’s anger gets treated like a stain.

An inconvenience. A loss of composure. A thing to lower the volume on, explain away, spiritualize, soften, forgive past, or turn into “growth” before it makes anybody too uncomfortable.

I am not interested in doing that today. Because I am angry.

Not abstractly. Not poetically. Not in some vague “I’m processing” way that makes it easier for everyone else to stay relaxed around my reality.

I am angry because what happened to me was real. I am angry because it changed my life. I am angry because the man who did this is still free. I am angry because I am the one expected to absorb the consequences in my body, in my sleep, in my memory, in my daily life, while he gets the luxury of distance from what he did.

I am angry because disappointment has become one of my most intimate emotional climates. Disappointment in people. In process. In how slowly truth moves once it has to pass through institutions built with very little imagination for the inner life of a harmed woman.

And beneath all of that? Heartbreak.

That’s the part no one really respects enough.

Because anger is not just heat. Sometimes it is heartbreak with its makeup done. Sometimes it is grief that got tired of being elegant. Sometimes it is the soul finally refusing to call something survivable just because it was survived.

What happened to me should have mattered more, faster, harder, cleaner.

There. I said it.

I should have been heard better. I should have been seen better. I should not have had to become this fluent in aftermath just to remain standing. He should not be free while I am the one learning how to breathe around what he did.

That is bullshit.

Real bullshit. Not the cute kind.

And I think part of my problem is that I know how to explain so well. I know how to make complexity legible. I know how to hold contradiction. I know how to give language to emotional architecture that most people can barely feel, much less name. Which means I can sound composed even when I am devastated. I can sound insightful even when I am furious enough to crack my own teeth.

It also means people can miss how fucking shattered I actually am.

Not all the time. Not every day. But in the places that matter, yes. In the tender understructure. In the part of me that is still standing in disbelief that I am the one doing all this labor while he still has the absurd privilege of movement, freedom, normalcy, and whatever version of a day men like him think they deserve.

Some days that reality makes me feel dangerous. Not because I’m reckless. Because I am very close to the truth of how unforgivable certain things are.

And that kind of clarity has voltage.

Roger spent part of the day staring at me like he knew I was upset and was trying to decide whether the appropriate intervention was snuggles, emotional surveillance, or bringing me a toy like a tiny furry therapist who works exclusively in chaos and unconditional love.

It helped more than most people do. That is both beautiful and extremely embarrassing for our species.

Still, here I am.

Angry. Heartbroken. Deeply disappointed. Still functioning, somehow. Still writing. Still wanting language that tells the truth without putting a soft floral border around it first. Still believing my anger deserves more than apology lighting and a quiet voice.

It deserves full definition. Because anger is not my flaw here. Anger is one of the last clean things in the room.

Chaos in one hand. Grace in the other.

And a woman whose anger, heartbreak, and disappointment are no longer interested in being made more convenient for anyone else.