First, all anger aside, it's actually a true pleasure to be back in community with all of you. I've MISSED everyone. I've missed being creative and present in this virtual space. I'm excited to continue growing Pop Culture Healing and want to commit to showing up for you all moving forward.
While I was away, I did some really deep and miserable healing work. It wasn't planned. It wasn't beautiful. It wasn't restful. It wasn't a fun adventure. It sucked. It continues to suck. It's a nightmare that I'm still desperately trying to wake from.
I spent the beginning of this year living in Peru and reluctantly returned to the Bay Area in May. I rather immediately started recovering deeply traumatic memories that I had repressed from childhood. Memories of childhood sexual abuse and neglect that I had hidden away from myself as a means of survival. These are missing pieces to a puzzle and now that they've returned they've recontextualized my entire life. It has been horrific and devastating, but also strangely miraculous to recover these pieces of myself. My inner child saw that it was finally safe and so my body gave my memories back to me.
It would be naive to think that one could have a business with the word healing in its name without experiencing profound healing on a personal level. And what I'm learning is that true healing and integration cannot happen without an honest reckoning with one's own rage.
Typically, when anger showed up for me as a small child, I was quickly pointed toward compassion. I was encouraged to think of the wounding of the person that was causing me harm. I have always been a deeply compassionate person. Empathy has been a survival strategy for me since I was a little girl. And so I get other people's tears in my eyes, broken hearts crush into my chest, and I feel stress and fear that doesn't belong to me. When I talk about my rage, I hear my mother's voice telling me that, "everyone is doing the best that they can." Her way of trying to keep her daughter safe. But some people are truly not doing their best. Some people are here to dominate and dehumanize. Some people die with their good name despite being horrible sadistic abusive pieces of shit. I don't have love for those people. Loving myself means that I do not love those who would seek to destroy me. I don't hold space in my heart for them. Someone else can do that work right now. God bless them, but it's not where I'm at. What I am holding instead is my rage.
In our society, rage gets squashed pretty quickly in children. And it's forever silenced in women. When did you learn to disconnect from the part of yourself that felt righteous anger? I was seven. Maybe younger. I know I'm not alone when I tell you that up until a couple of years ago, I was unfamiliar with what rage even felt like. When I gave the sensation of rage permission to exist in my body, when I actually took the time to explore it, it emerged as a crackling energy that collected at my mid back and spread itself through my arms and legs. I shook it loose and I become a spider, a lion, a wolf. A woman who would kill you if you touched her one more time. Rage wanted to be pushed out through my hands and stomped out through my feet. It demanded writhing, a clenched jaw, guttural moans. It was ugly. I imagined myself screaming a sea of spiders onto the feet of the person who wronged me. The first time I let rage move through me I thought I had done real witchcraft. I felt fucking powerful.
I am powerful, as it turns out. You are also powerful. And I am not a little girl anymore. I have a right to my anger. I want that tingling, crackling energy at my fingertips so that I can create and heal and love at my discretion. My intention is to move through the world as a woman in touch with her authentic power. My hunch is that rage is a vehicle that can get me there. And I want to explore it here with you all. Thank you.
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