HELL IN A HANDBAG
(Author’s note: I wrote this a few years ago, then let it languish on my computer… but I started watching the Amazon streaming series based on the book “The Power”, about teen girls developing an electricity producing organ as an evolutionary ‘protection’ against today’s world. The show has really struck a chord and made me think of this piece, enough to share.)
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Why were we never given a proper handbag for rage?
I found this question as I unpacked on a summer trip at my parents’ vacation house. I felt an odd sting of happiness that I had a found a place for everything in the room — that there weren’t stacks of orphan sweaters on the floor, instead folded on a shelf in a closet. The suitcase was stored away. I thought of Virginia Woolf’s book, ‘A Room of One’s Own’. And then I thought of all the delicate handbags the women would have worn in that era. Dainty purses full of decorum, civility, poise, motherly love, controlled intellect and subservience. And then I wondered about the rest of it all. The important stuff: the dreams and ambitions, the fears and uncertainty, the wildness, and the dark things: the rage, the jealousy, the grief. Where did they put it all? Where am I supposed to put it? They must go somewhere, they can’t just be strewn on the bed, on the floor, to be tripped on.
The first punch I ever threw (that connected to something), I loved. It was an explosion of life, intense, full, sharp. Energy shooting back up my arm, to my brain. It felt meaningful to pummel a stitched bag or mitt, full focus, the mind’s wandering eye replaced by survival instinct. We must have fought in our past, wild women (my Mitochondrial Eve shared this secret). When were we softened and shackled? I want to know that moment. Was it clear across the continents? Was there a war between men and women that we lost and our sentence was protection, direction and council through patriarchy? When were we instructed to shed those excess pounds, the storage places for our shadow sides, our dark wildness. Skin and bones encouraged! Sculpted curves only for the pleasure of others! So the fire and fury that swirled in our hearts were purged in closets and pantries.
Without a place to put it we have quelled our rage with water, drowned it, submerged it (kneeling naked in a shower, the water mixing with our tears and screams) but now, we are starting to give it oxygen. What if we give it permission to take its natural course, inflaming the wildness that all women possess though nature, yearning to expand and move into others. A nuclear chain reaction. To even be aware of your rage is a step. To feel it in your body, your chest, your stomach, your womb. The place they still itch to control. Your connection to the universe. A portal to creation. If you feel it there, your rage is infinite.
The trick is to not get stuck. Make that power portable, potable. No more collapsing on our knees where the rage is mixed with grief. (We get mere minutes for that.) We must be expansive. Move. This new handbag we create, a bag of ancient power, is bottomless if we carry it together. It can hold ALL of it. It can hold yours, when you are too tired to carry it. That is what we are here for.
We all deserve a place to light our rage. It’s time.
A rage of one’s own.
