Rage is not Meant to be Silent

Sometimes, it can feel like the only options are to stuff it down or completely explode.


Knowing the horrors enacted on the Palestinian people (which are not new and have been happening for a very long time), I've vacillated between wanting to scream with rage forever and ever, and feeling like there's nowhere to put my feelings but to hold them inside my body.


I find that this is often the bodily relationship we can have with rage—this conflicting need to release it all lest we die, and to keep it all in because it can often feel too hopeless to try to express any of it at all.


And rage and grief, I've found, come from the same roots, and can often be experienced very similarly in the body. 


This is what I try to remind myself when I feel that push-pull of my anger and I don't know what to do...


...I start by connecting with the grief parts. 


I feel a deep, full-bodied grief for Palestine.


They are being attacked. Murdered. People are attempting to invalidate them as human beings.


And I deeply grieve, with my whole body.


And I tune into the intense rage that results.


Rage is not to be feared. 


It is to be heard. Felt. Validated.


It partners with my grief. 


Together, they remind me that expressing what the body is holding is a self-care practice.


Honoring rage is self-care.


Expressing grief is self-care.


Advocating for people who are being discounted, harmed, killed is self-care.


Community care is self-care. 


Now, let's listen to our rage.


Let us not ignore it.


Let us never accept anything that tries to convince us that what is happening is ok.