Unapologetic Rage & Articulate Truths
Last week I decided to load up my Kindle on feminist books written by powerful women and a few prolific BIPOC artists. Unwell Women. Mediocre. Nice White Woman, In Defense of Witches, Communion. All anchors of brilliance I start my mornings with now.
As I navigate this completely foreign world of chronic pain and debilitating neurological flares, which start from the structural state of my spine and collide with the hormonal arc of a woman crossing 50, I’m finding deep solace in the writings of women who are unapologetic in their rage and articulate in their truth.
Bearing witness. My life’s work always circles back to the Witness. For decades, this is what drove all of my work. And now, the witness is one of self. My own personal journey of being an “Unwell Woman” is not one I saw coming, nor one I cared to really embody– until it forced itself upon me. But I’m about to cross the three year mark on this injury and at this point I can accept reality and adjust accordingly. Or not.
What I wanted for this phase of my life and what I’m currently navigating are polar opposites that forced me to release unnecessary past identities and scrub the remnants of masks that lingered long after their usefulness and to learn how to surrender.
Going quietly into that dark night is not something I was wired to do as a human. Quite the opposite, hence the destroyed spine. And while there are lonely nights where going quietly seems like the most logical and kind act I could give myself, I always seem to find a reason to keep moving. And that reason is raw rage.
The rage of being a woman in an unjust world, for the span of a lifetime. The rage of the injustices, personal and societal, keep me just pissed enough to stoke the flames of rage so I can harness that energy and survive the wildfires creeping towards my doorstep.
If you’ve been blessed enough to mostly avoid the absolute devastation of navigating a chronic illness or pain inside the most broken and systemically violent, extractive, racist and misogynistic medical system as the one we have in America, then I suggest you close this screen and go do a dance of gratitude and count your blessing. Often.
Our “health care system” is simply an extension of the colonization and profit extraction frameworks that drive our entire economy, only this time the violence is waged against our physical bodies. And goddess forbid if that body is brown, has breasts and a uterus and falls outside of the white, male medical establishment that brought us the current medical system. Even worse if you are a woman with chronic pain and illusive symptoms trying to get a doctor to actually listen and take you seriously.
In order to navigate this system of cruelty, one must become their own unwavering patient advocate. Which is really fucking hard to do when your body is on fire and taking your brain with it. But here I am, doing just that. In the last 2 months I’ve had to:
1- Switch PT clinics to one that works with athletes to restore functional activity, not one that serves the elderly to maintain their infirm status and keep the insurance money pipeline flowing from one CEO to another.
2- Hire a Direct Primary Care doctor to coordinate the care I need for this condition, including pharmacological options because the PCP covered by my insurance and the university health care pain clinic both refused to allow me to talk about pain management using medications and made me sign paperwork saying I would not bring those conversations into the doctor’s office. I refused. So I had to find, and pay for, new doctors.
3- Six months ago, I had to build an entire communications operating system to log my daily symptoms and direct my care toward solutions, (with my professional care providers in the loop) using AI to surface peer reviewed research and scan my symptoms for patterns to monitor my care and keep my PT from failing and my pain and activity protocols from destroying the delicate spinal and nervous systems that are mine to understand and navigate. I’m literally directing my own care in a wildly complex condition and I have zero medical training. I have a Bachelor’s degree in Yoga. And a fucking machine of "intelligence" created with the bias of whiteness and the arrogance of the Silicon Valley tech cult.
I had to do all of this without a partner, a job, a steady paycheck, employee health care, a back up safety net, a trust fund or just someone to make me a fucking cup of tea on the days where peeling myself out of bed is the biggest accomplishment I could hope for along with getting the tears to stop flowing freely.
Any wonder where that rage comes from?
I don’t say all of this for sympathy. I say all of this so that others who are facing seemingly insurmountable realities from inside one of the cruelest social systems imaginable will find solace in the fact that they are not alone. And I hope my writing will help people refuse to internalize the cruelty of late stage capitalism as some personal failure. Being forced to choose between groceries, rent and medicine does not make you a failure. It makes you a vulnerable human living under the weight of a system extracting the life blood out of you one bill and pill at a time. By design.
Women navigating chronic health conditions need to be seen, witnessed and held. And if there’s no one to do all of that, we must do it for ourselves. For most of our lives, women’s voices have been silenced and ignored by mediocre white men and the systems of misogyny that see us as disposable baby makers and perpetual house cleaners.
I’ve had to fight for my voice to be heard twice as hard as every single male in the professional rooms I’ve passed through. Even now, with decades of communications expertise and a strategic approach to understanding human communication behaviors, a decade of deep knowledge in blockchains and 3 years of daily AI expertise, I’m still perpetually ignored, denigrated, tossed aside once my expertise is extracted and/or silenced. The rooms where my strategic experience could do the most good are closed to me. I am not welcome. And if you speak truth to power freely and without apology, you are not welcome either.
And well, I’m too fucking broken and pissed to even give much of a shit anymore. And that’s by design too, isn’t it? A major miscalculation by the manchildren in power is that women will simply submit at some point and shut the fuck up about it all. Actually, push us hard enough and we'll breath fire to initiate transmutation by destruction as we harness Kali to burn your violent systems to ash.
And then we’re back to that going gently into that dark night conversation. An entire cohort of GenX women are transitioning towards their Wise Woman phase and we have absolutely no fucks left to give.
Our bodies are undergoing a wild and destabilizing, yet beautifully natural milestone inside societal containers where white supremacy, greed and rape culture are the dominant playbooks and our rage has no where to go except outwards. Channeled through art and action.
We’ve lived with these injustices our entire lives.
We were the first cohort of women to have youth sports, to have the illusion of equality, to have legal abortion and bodily autonomy, to have careers that gave us the same access as men, in theory. Not the same pay and definitely not the same power, but we were told that the world was ours if we worked twice as hard as the mediocre white man next to us who had the whole world handed to him by birthright in a country bred and built on the supremacy of his skin color.
We believed it. We saw the laws our mothers fought to get passed that allowed us to have bank accounts, play sports with the boys, open our own businesses and choose not to have children, reversed by the most abusive and weak white men in power this world has to offer.
We grew up learning how to shrink our divine feminine selves into the patriarch’s containers built for male bodies filled with brute force, individualism and violence. We then watched as the reign of the mediocre consolidated power and destroyed the advances the women before us sacrificed their bodies to manifest. We now have to keep our mouths shut as the manosphere destroys well– everything.
The women of my generation are done. Our fucks are gone and we are far beyond our tolerance for being silenced by insecure male egos. We are using our voices and our bodies to channel the rage of all the injustices that we are simply tired of navigating.
Our Wise Women phase will be a collective scream into the void as our world collapses under the weight of cruel men hoarding power and wealth.
We will not go gently into that good night and the broken among us might just be the light everyone else needs to witness. And follow.
Share this essay with someone who is also channeling the rage right now. Let people you love know you see them by just sharing these words so they can bring a little comfort to those suffering under the violence of capitalism.
