rage

needed: emotional outlets

Photo by Noel Nichols on Unsplash

I was fourteen the first time I felt my mom’s rage. In her anger, she slammed every room door she walked through—not just once, not just twice. It was as if, in her frustration, she didn’t know how else to express it except with pure, physical force. I don’t remember what set her off. All I knew was that the air in the room shifted. That in her fury, she had sucked out all the oxygen. She teetered on a ledge she couldn’t come back from. It was horrifying to feel. And to watch.

Afterward, everything returned to normal, at least on the surface. We swept the moment under the rug and moved on. We never talked about that night. We don’t bring it up — not even now. For a long time, I believed rage was an unfathomable thing, something that took a specific, exceptional kind of trigger to rise up in someone.

But I get it now.

And I fear that, as I’ve gotten older — more tired, more frustrated with the way things are, with the way people are — I’ve started to understand what it means to be angry. To feel irritation not just as a passing emotion, but a low hum beneath the surface of daily life.

A couple of weeks ago, my dad called me. He told me I needed to relax more, that I seemed tense and stressed. He said I gave off an “anxious energy.” Apparently, he and my mom had been talking about it. Concerned, he said. It was his way of checking in. But I didn’t feel checked in on. I felt dismissed. My first instinct was to toss my phone out of the Uber. I didn’t want to talk to him. I didn’t want to talk to anyone.

If life were a movie, that would’ve been the moment I told the driver to change direction, to take me to the airport, to anywhere else. I knew my dad meant well. But instead of asking what was causing my anxiety, instead of offering support or asking how they could help, he just told me to breathe. To relax. To stop rushing home to do things.

But I did have things to do—feed the cats, do the laundry, tidy the flat, meal prep for the week ahead, write to-do list after to-do list. Things that were, as always, left to me. Maybe it’s because my mom has pampered my father for the last twenty years that he’s never stopped to wonder how the house stays running. Sometimes, I wonder if I’ve built myself into being an asset—so reliable and capable—that I’ve become incapable of trusting anyone else to do things without me hovering.

What else can you do when you’re at the end of your rope, with no outlet in sight? What else can you do when you’re told to soften your scream, to temper your anger? It’s not a big deal. Just relax. Calm down.

Until one day — you snap.

In the back of that Uber, I swallowed my tears. I buried the lump forming in my throat. I buried how irritated I felt, how tired I was. When you’ve been taught to doubt your voice, to make yourself small and convenient for others, it costs immense energy to assert yourself. You bite your tongue. You swallow your words. You push them down, over and over.

When I got home, I thanked the driver, took the stairs instead of the lift, and stomped up every step. Through each door. Rage building with every one. I raged all the way to the front door of my flat. Maybe if I had an easy-going personality, I could just let things slide. But I don’t. I’m not built that way.

Sometimes, you open a door—and just to feel something, you slam it. Hard.

You’re not mad at the door. You’re not even really mad at your dad for his clumsy way of expressing concern. It’s a build-up. Of every moment you’ve had to stay quiet. Every time you’ve smiled politely when you wanted to scream. Anger is like water pressing against glass, building in silence until it shatters the surface.

When I stepped inside, I didn’t lash out at anyone. I knew there was no point yelling at my dad—he wouldn’t understand. So I turned it inward. I grabbed a pillow, and I screamed into it until my lungs gave out. My voice cracked. I slammed the bedroom door. Then the living room door. I moved through the flat like a storm, doing everything in anger until the rage bled out of me. Eventually, I collapsed on the bedroom floor, emotionally spent.

I lay there on the floor, my breath slowing, my body aching with the weight of what I had let out. The room was still now, except for the hum of the fridge and the faint murmur of the city beyond my window. From where I lay, I could see the sky—a patch of blue through drifting clouds. I should get off the floor, fold my emotions back into the box and get on with the day. After all, I had things to do.

The anger hadn’t disappeared. It never really does. But it had drained enough to leave me hollow. Exhausted.

I’ve noticed my rage more this week. It simmers beneath everything, like a tide pulling back and forth. I find myself snapping in strange moments — not at people, but in the quiet of my mind, on the pages of my journal. The anger bleeds out of me for reasons I can’t always name. My mind spins with every time I’ve been made to feel small, or stupid. And more than that, I’m angry that I’m not allowed to be angry.

“I think I want to go to a rage room,” I joked with B one afternoon. I was frustrated with work, and I felt that emotion bubbling up. I imagine what it would be like to smash plates, to take a hammer to walls, to swing something at full speed and release the energy at force. I can only imagine it to be therapeutic.

I thought of my mother. Of that night when I was fourteen. Of how her rage had filled every corner of our house. I used to fear it. Now, I wonder if she had spent her whole life doing exactly what I’d done—swallowing her rage, pressing it down, down, down until there was no more room inside her to contain it.

Maybe that’s what scares me the most.

That one day, I’ll crack louder than I already have. Just like she did.

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