Anger and Healing

Dickinson College Take Back The Night
April 9, 2025

I’m going to start with some lines from Dorothy Allison, a survivor and poor rural southerner and beloved poet novelist who died recently and whose work really mattered to me when I was trying to find my voice. She writes:

Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is what it means to have no loved version of your life but the one you make… the way you can both hate and love something you are not sure you understand…

Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is how long it takes to learn to love yourself, how long it took me, how much love I need now…

Two or three things I know for sure, and one is that I would rather go naked than wear the coat the world has made for me…

Two or three things I know, two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that if we are not beautiful to each other, we cannot know beauty in any form…

I’m a queer and genderqueer survivor of childhood sexual abuse and physical violence. That’s not all I am, but those are what most give shape and texture to most of what I say and how I say it, and likely also to how and whether I’m heard. I was beat the shit out of most days growing up by just about every member of my immediate family, and that made all of my emotions go a little haywire, and in unique ways it affected my anger, gave it deep roots really early and fed and watered it in an environment where all I was learning from anyone to do with anger was hurt people. I’ve spent most of my life either consumed with anger or relearning how to be angry, as a tool rather than a weapon. How to do anger as communication, how to be angry as self-expression and art, how to be angry as protest, how to be angry maybe as joy, how to be angry as love.

This isn’t something I have talked or written about a ton, only sideways sometimes when I lightly cannibalize my own life for a sermon, which is not delicious. So you’re getting an early draft that may be too raw or maybe won’t be raw enough. Sorry about that.

I may swear during the next half hour, a good bit, fair warning, mostly because some stuff is just so fucked that other words don’t do it justice. Partly because swearing is cathartic for me, and liberating. But partly because of what I hope to land on pointedly tonight, for the reason that I do any of the authentic, irreverent, unorthodox, mostly-frowned-upon shit that I do: I don’t believe in good victims, I don’t believe in good plaintiffs, good queers. The rules about good victims and bad survivors and what’s polite or civilized are almost entirely made up, and usually hurt women and transes and queers and Black folks and neurodivergent folks and other folks already getting hurt. They mostly serve the comfort of folks already fairly comfortable. They are usually used to re-code the discomfort of so-called polite society as physical threat. These days they’re used to arrest and jail and deport, to silence and erase dissent and disagreement. They are almost always used in any political or social climate to undermine the voices and dismiss truths that feel too raw or wrong or real. We’re supposed to ask nicely. We’re supposed to smile. I’m shit at smiling. I’m not saying anything we don’t already know; we’ve been talking about tone policing and coddling privilege for decades; Audre Lorde gave her keynote on the Uses of Anger forty-four years ago.

I’ve been talking with survivors of power- and gender-based violence for a while. I’ve work in a couple states with crisis centers, with churches, with this state’s sexual assault coalition, with schools and universities. I’ve listened to folks as they tried to make sense of their sexual and physical trauma, who’ve tried to find lessons in it, who’ve tried to forget it. I’ve talked with folks who felt loved because they were being assaulted, and who still aren’t sure whether feeling special wasn’t worth it somehow.

Most of the people I worked with were kids and teens who’d been harmed almost always – I almost want to say always – by family, people they were supposed to trust, who were supposed to be taking care of them. Abused by people who were supposed to be in their house, who were supposed to be in their room. That’s not the outlier; that’s the norm. Most of the time that’s how it is, not just with kids. Most of the time for all of us its someone we know, work with, study with, live with, someone who is supposed to have our back. Someone we love. Someone who says they care about us.

That betrayal feels bone deep. If it’s the church pastor or vacation bible school teacher who talked us through a bad breakup. If they were the high school counselor or girls basketball coach who helped us with math homework and always had the best encouragement. If they were Aziz Ansari or Louie CK or Joss Whedon and Justin Baldoni, men who wrote and ran media addressing sexual violence, highlighting women’s experiences, grappling with masculinities, lauded as feminist, championing women and supporting women’s success. Maybe you don’t know these names. They were some of the good guys over the last twenty years or so, often beloved. I really loved a couple of them a lot. All have been accused of harassment, assault, coercion, gaslighting, defamation. The guy I felt I knew best couldn’t be left alone in a room with a 16-year-old cast member. The entire executive staff made sure she was never alone with him in a room.

Last month, all of the national sexual assault and domestic violence coalitions pulled their resources for trans survivors and Black survivors, without being asked. Nobody asked for it of any of them. There were of course shitty campaign ads, and shitty state bills framed up with shitty tropes, and then shitty Executive Orders saying hateful, undisguised biased, maybe unenforceable shit, but there was no directive. And the coalitions without being asked had their people search for and remove pages that talked about Black folks and trans folks and, because transphobia is weird, a bunch of gay stuff got wiped, too. Sorry about that, gays; transphobia is not smart or very focused. Most of them put it all back up, I think, and it didn’t take them long. At least one of them made an apology, and it was a really good apology. It was a good one. But I don’t accept it.

They know my name and my face, and that stings, but I didn’t think we were friends or anything. Every place I’ve worked in Pennsylvania is a hard place to work and be me, whatever that is. To be angry. Or to be genderqueer, or New York queer, or whatever. To take a knee, or think critically, or say when shit is insidious racist or when it’s anti-gay in sneakier, subtler ways. What really stung and what still stings and what they haven’t acknowledged or tried to repair is that they are, these coalitions are, our coalition is, these are the folks who teach us about the dynamics and politics of sexual violence, who create models of the socio-ecological framework of prevention and ending it. They’re the ones who teach that sexual abuse is about power, that it’s tied to all other oppressions, that we will not end sexual violence without ending racism and ableism and other systemic biases. They’re the ones who teach that; I learned it from them. They’re the folks who teach that some of us are targeted more because of our lack of power, because of animus against us, because we’re less likely to be believed and more easily threatened and that fewer people give a shit if we’re hurt, so that a bunch of us are made more vulnerable to violence and sexual violence and to victim blaming, and apathy, erasure.

Maybe someone else can make sense of it. Deleting the folks made most vulnerable to sexual violence to save your jobs to keep doing the work of what, of supporting who? How do you do the work by erasing people who need it and the resources we need? Who the hell is their victim? Their good victim. Who is the survivor that they think deserves the job they’re trying to save? Convince me they aren’t the oppressor. How are they different than white supremacist abuser, the Christian nationalist abuser, the transphobe abuser. They reproduced the violence that produces the violence they claim to fight. Tell me I’m wrong. Make an argument that makes any of this coherent.

And then we’ll talk about who makes up almost all of our dead on Transgender Day of Remembrance. About who is going to advocate for trans women transferred to men’s prisons, trans women hounded out of the military, trans kids bullied at school and forced off of medicines considered by doctors to be best practice, harmless, fully reversable. Then we’ll talk about the white house’s so-called sexual assault awareness and prevention month statement last week blaming immigrants for sexual assault and human trafficking, when we know that immigrants are among those more vulnerable to be targeted for these violences. Which we know because of the coalitions. Who is going to teach the interconnections of violence and sexual violence and dating violence and human trafficking when the teachers have joined the pig pile of trans, Black, and Latine erasure? Muslim erasure? I don’t accept their fucking apology. It was a good apology; I don’t care.

Dorothy Allison called herself a bad poet, and maybe you’d agree with her, but I’ve always felt seen and safer in her words. (I’d say I feel at home in them, but now you know that “at home” doesn’t work for me in an aphorism.) Her words and the writing of poets and mentors are like a touchstone, a polished rock in my hand or my head, like a smooth piece of glass in my pocket to grip and worry with my fingers to remind me that I am real and what I feel is shared and maybe life isn’t a fight, or not always a fight, or not only always a fight; but that fighting is worth it.

A while ago I gave a 12-year-old kid a touchstone for her testimony in court against her rapist who was in her own family. She picked it out herself from the half a dozen or so I had for that, so she could hold it in the box giving testimony and grip it and fidget with it and remember the stuff we talked about and the affirmations we talked into that rock. I think it helped; she said it did. And she still pissed herself on the stand. She still froze and shook and peed herself. Not everyone will get why I’m angry; maybe folks think I’m being rigid or petty. We’re going to be messy, with or without community. We’re going to pee our pants, either way, a lot of the time. Imagine, though, going without any support. Imagine going when your support abandons and betrays you.

People who don’t live this, live with it or near it, good people, good supportive well-meaning people who really do care, people who don’t know-know-it don’t always know it isn’t really a thing to tie up neatly. Even the people who say, “I don’t know how you do it, that’s so hard, I could never do that work,” even they usually want to tie it up neatly, want survivor support and healing and distributive justice to be something cleaner than I think it is.

The places we survive in a lot of times are spaces where the things assumed to be so can’t be assumed to be so, I want to poke at those tonight and fuck up some taken-for-granteds. Where love isn’t love, healing isn’t healing, where bodies aren’t clean and coalitions aren’t good. My body, our bodies, if you will, our bodies are sweat and puss, greasy hair and body odor, and piss. Good decisions. Bad decisions. No decisions. My healing, our healing, if you will, our love and our grace isn’t always, maybe isn’t ever, calm and organized but often flailing, torn nails, dripping sweat burning my eyes. My thoughts feel messy so goddamn much of the time. I feel grabby a lot. I feel too loud sometimes, and I still don’t have a handle on my adrenaline spikes.

I feel anger, and also lots of my other feelings initially feel like anger: it feels first like anger when it’s fear, anger when it’s hurt, when it’s brokenhearted, anger when it’s impatience or irritable, when it’s hunger (but they have commercials and portmanteau words about that, I know that’s not just me). It feels like anger first when it’s grief and betrayal. Anger and anger-adjacent feels messy and shameful to me, messy and embarrassing even when it stays mostly in my head, which it does more and more with mindfulness and sobriety. (Heyo to all you sober folks; I hope you’re holding up. I hope you’re checking in with your people.) I’ve been practicing mindful anger for years, doing shame sober a day at a time for years. But by south central Pennsylvania standards, by my home state eastern Iowa municipal standards, by middle class hetero good neighborhood standards even my good, more skillful, sober emotions usually aren’t well-enough behaved. Anger is an entitlement I seem not to be entitled to, and I’m supposed to smile more.

People are uncomfortable just with disagreement. Just with questions about Beyonce’s country album, whether it was country, whether it should’ve been Doechii’s first or Swift’s fifth. People are pathologically uncomfortable when our disagreement is painful, when our pain is visible and audible, especially for those of us who are also being whoever we are that people are already being uncomfortable about.

Even most Buddhist and mindfulness teachers I study talk about anger as something to overcome or transform. Sharon Salzberg, my favorite teacher and my first teacher, calls anger the emotion we reach for when we feel weak because we think it will make us strong. I disagree. I’m a little grumpy about it. She quotes a lama who says that healing is about moving through anger to that fundamental sadness and hurt that’s beneath the anger. I really do love Sharon Salzberg, but I don’t understand why fundamental sadness is a more-evolved healing emotion than anger. Why anger is a transitional, unruly emotion. Why is hurt a better, more equanimous feeling. Why do they assume I’m leveraging my anger and not my sadness, or my joy? (That was rhetorical, I don’t feel joy; but more on that later.)

Most of the survivors I talk with aren’t angry when I meet them. Mostly they start out talking about shame and embarrassment. Mostly they are blaming themselves, still bargaining with the universe, “What if I this,” or “If only I had that.” They very often, very, often when we meet are feeling guilty for causing this trouble, for getting someone they love into trouble, still loving and caring for and very often trying to protect the person who hurt them.

Most of the folks I talk with do start to feel stronger when they start to feel angry, because they begin to feel more whole.

You don’t have to be angry. I’m not pushing anger. Folks don’t have to be angry any more than everyone needs to be queer or trans, but I’m cool with it. I support it. It’s entirely fucking appropriate, and sensical. Anger is an emotion. Like happiness, grief, fear, sadness or whatever, it is not good or bad, it’s human. I think what’s unhealthy is not feeling or not expressing emotions. I think it’s morbid that I’m unwilling to cry when it’s called for. I think it’s weird that people conflate only some feelings with unhealthy behaviors. It’s not uncommon in this country, maybe especially in Philly, no shade, for people to celebrate by destroying cars and other property after their sports team wins a thing. For whatever reason, people seem able to distinguish between the emotion and the violence in those cases; I never hear anyone shooting down happiness or joy when that happens.

The mental health collective Decolonizing Therapy sums it up beautifully. They say about rage what I think is true of anger. It’s sacred and powerful. It protects your boundaries. It acknowledges the unseen and refuses to be silenced. It is self-love, defending your dignity. It is the spark that fuels revolution and transformation. It says fuck neutral and demands we take a stand. It isn’t a flaw or disorder but a sacred alarm that something is deeply wrong.

Anger is protest. It is a Columbia University sexual assault survivor carrying a 50-pound mattress for eight months when she felt unprotected. It’s an aging child sexual abuse survivor carrying signs for more than 20 years in front of the Vatican embassy in DC when he felt unprotected. It’s thousands of people, maybe 5.2 million, on their state capitol steps. Anger is giving up the films of the artists who signed the 2009 Roman Polanski petition. That’s almost a whole job. There was a woman I knew in Brooklyn who was groped on a crowded subway car, I don’t know if you know the name Maxine Wolfe out here, but she’s worth digging into a bit. She was one of the founders of the Lesbian Avengers, among other havoc. She was groped on a crowded train and she grabbed the man’s hand and held it in the air and said, “This hand was just groping my ass.” Everyone on that crowded train stared at her and she said, still holding the guy’s hand in the air, “Why are you looking at me? Look at him, he was groping my ass with this hand.” That’s anger, that’s fantastic. Anger has a voice. Anger makes a spectacle.

In Brooklyn, my girlfriend got catcalled every day several times a day walking from home to the train, walking from the train to work, coming back home. That was a day that ends in Y for her. Walking together one day we were arguing, I don’t remember why but it was her fault, and she went ahead of me mad and I dropped back mad because we couldn’t stand each other to even walk together, but I was looking up ahead as she approached the subway steps and I saw a man lean into her and say something I couldn’t hear. And I saw her whip around and say really loudly, “Fuck you.” And she’s a good girl, she’s an Iowa nice, good Lutheran lady who says fuck you quietly when she says it. All that anger at me was primed and ready to go at that moment with this beautiful outcome. His face was priceless. I have no illusions that she stopped him from harassing women on sidewalks forever, but I’d bet you money he left women alone for the rest of the day. Anger is fierce and beautiful.

I’ve been unlearning for a while that my feelings are a disgrace. It’s ongoing. Excavating how my body and my pleasure is personal and delicious and mine. How my body is remarkable and unremarkable. My feelings are understandable and sensical and not always clearly warranted, and mine and fine, not untethered, too much sometimes, but probably not unhinged. Unlearning that I’m shit. It’s ongoing. That I am like anyone else, unlike anyone else, skillful, messy, sometimes hurtful. Making apology, doing repair. And I and we belong in all the places. The church and the courthouse and the classroom. Exceptional, unexceptional and sometimes dull, but not monsters, not in a bad way. Proud.

Anger doesn’t make us unlikeable. Love isn’t one thing. There are people who have hurt me and others a lot, and I don’t allow them to have contact with me any more, and I love them. I’m fine if we don’t ever speak again, and my heart aches a little when I don’t answer their calls. I don’t think I’m alone with this, but we don’t always know how to talk about it with each other. Hallmark doesn’t make those Mother’s Day cards. Because of this I know that love is not necessarily tied to feeling safer or to trust. Because of this, I think love isn’t synonymous with happiness. Because of this I know that forgiveness, whatever that is, is closer to loving than to forgetting, that maybe forgiveness is as much grief as mercy. Because of this I know that when we talk about love, we’re talking about something confusing, that cannot be held by a single word.

Lately, especially, I’ve been thinking about joy and what that is and whether I have any. Mostly I’m being asked in group ice-breakers to name what gives me joy. I’m being told a lot by therapy and self-help and popular culture to spark joy, that joy outweighs pain, that joy is resistance. But, on some basic level, I am constitutionally suspicious of joy. Joy feels like one of those things, like forgiveness, that people talk about with a lot of certainty and confidence, like it’s inevitable, or fathomable; people telling us that we should have it and how it feels. And to smile more.

Joy is lovely, probably, of course, I’m not made of wood. I don’t want to spoil joy. But I don’t want to keep getting battered by it.

Because we are living in this terrible time where everything seems to touch on sexual violence and rape culture. People are being detained and put in camps without liberty or body autonomy, without adequate food or water. States are assigning kids to bathrooms according to genitals without thinking through how that will be enforced and by whom. The death rate for people in childbirth has increased for everyone but Black women, and still the mortality rate is most deadly for Black folks in childbirth. That’s not a coincidence. It’s not an accident. That’s the brutally logical result of racism and misogyny and the violence and weathering effect on every person who lives at that intersection. And the implications for reproductive access and sexual violence will crash into those folks’ bodies yet again.

It may still be possible to remain connected with joy while also sitting with and naming violences. It probably is; but is it, though? I worry about moving too quickly to optimism or positivity. I worry about skipping over the raging awful, of minimizing the magnitude of injustice, dismissing it by taking sides or with lemonade or with quick and over-simple platitudes that folks make about healing and tough love. As noted in some length, I worry about the demonization of anger and discomfort with grief. I worry about compartmentalization and dissociation. We are not really taught emotional vocabulary and how to use it or encouraged to express a full and complex emotional range of sadness and grief and rage and fear, let alone how also to feel something joyous or like joy. Something that smiles.

Now, though, I wonder whether we are challenged by survivors like Dorothy Allison, like Marge Piercy and June Jordan, Jordan who writes in Poem About My Rights “if after screams if/ after begging the bastard and if even after smashing/ a hammer to his head if even after that if he/ and his buddies fuck me after that/ then I consented and there was/ no rape because finally you understand finally/ they fucked me over because I was wrong I was/ wrong again to be me being me where I was/wrong/ to be who I am …”

I wonder whether we are challenged and encouraged by these old-school folks and their legacy, writers, survivors, poets then and now to be untidy, to be loud on purpose. I wonder if that is itself joy, or like joy. Not for shock or to stand out but to be and celebrate being visible, queer, odd, unsavory, just. To be alive and known in the world just as we are. I wonder whether we are called or permitted or welcomed by our poets to be angry and messy and unappealing in order to bring about healing. In order to change people and perceptions. In order to give permission to and provide a trail map for our fellows and comrades still unlearning that messy and loud has no worth. Our poets, maybe, point to the pull and the awful joy, maybe, of healing, even in hard, awful times. That it is possible to be present for and patient with those of us struggling to hold our shit together. That we can be more gentle with ourselves when our grief and anger is not high-minded or well-mannered.

I didn’t know where to put this next paragraph. And several drafts of this talk left it out. But it seems, as long as I’m reframing anger and derailing monolithic joy a bit, it may be time to name revenge fantasy. Its ancestors are Roman Colosseam spectacles and other blood sport; but the thing I’m talking about is daydream or nightmare, imaginative release. Something like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, 2009 Noomi Rapace Swedish version. A Promising Young Woman. Working at crisis centers, with kids, with adults, with heinous violence done by family members, done by colleagues, it’s hard to process some of those feelings. The revenge fantasy we had when we didn’t know how to channel that anger and powerlessness and disgust was a plan involving two cars, a parking garage, and a couple baseball bats. It wasn’t real, it was never going to be real, it was just talk. I’m spiritually and politically non-violent, even for these offenders. The fantasy was cathartic. It was a satisfying way to work through what we were feeling. It seems dishonest not to name it as a tool. It seems to maybe belong here, talking about joy and anger, as almost a hybrid of the two, a chimera, at least for me. But, to some degree, we feel like it’s something we shouldn’t talk about in public, like I just did.

There’s a classic Buddhist story that the nun Pema Chodron writes about in When Things Fall Apart, but I’m pretty sure that I first heard it in a dharma talk in DC. It haunted me:

A man was determined to get rid of his unwanted emotions, like anger and fear. His teacher told him to stop struggling, but he didn’t understand. Finally his teacher sent him to a hut in the hills to meditate. He settled to practice and, when it got dark, he lit three candles. At midnight he heard a noise in the corner of the room, and in the darkness he saw a large king cobra, right in front of him, swaying. All night he sat frozen, unable to move, staring at the snake.

Just before dawn the last candle went out and he began to cry, not in despair but from tenderness and recognition of shared human alienation and struggle. He finally fully accepted that he was angry and afraid, that he resisted and struggled. He accepted also that he was precious. He felt such gratitude that he stood, walked to the snake, and bowed to it; then he was able to sleep.

We are ashamed of and repulsed by messy feelings and messy healing a hundred ways, others’ and our own. We package goodness and expect adherence to it. We judge anger and expect people to sublimate it or disguise it, and to dismiss those who don’t instead of listening to their truth and pain. We elevate forgiveness as a paragon, almost as an idol, of goodness or righteousness without any clear sense of what forgiveness means or is or does, or why those who have been traumatized and violated have to extend it.

We use these judgements as justifications before and after the fact for our unwillingness to listen and engage, and for our unwillingness to be rejected ourselves. To deem folks unsavory instead of making ourselves unliked with them and for them. To say instead, “See! See? I was right, they are so unseemly.” To say, “They are not worth my goodness, because they are not being good.”

I have spent the better part of my sobriety trying to find the guard rails and traffic paint between raw emotion and skillful, mindful anger. That’s ongoing. I think there is a line, but I think it’s farther south and west than most people believe. But I do not give two shakes whether or not people like me. That’s hilarious, I care a lot. I wish I didn’t. I do find that, in the crisis work and advocacy with others, by embracing and affirming their rawness and messiness, I can find some freedom for myself to be raw and messy. I don’t know which came first, but I tend to be rude to myself so probably others first.

There’s a post-it note I’ve moved into every office I’ve had for the last ten years or so that says “emotions are habits,” I have it tattooed on my arm, to remind me mostly what I’ve re-learned about anger, and maybe someday also shame, but also how I’m re-learning that joy isn’t a mandate, that peace isn’t only a product of my circumstances that day, that lovingkindness is almost never something I feel. Joking but maybe also not joking.

The most enduring impact of my trauma is shame. There are several – I shudder a lot when someone walks behind me. I have this annoying thing where it’s more upsetting than it should be when somebody moves my stuff from where I put it. But the deepest lasting harm of my abuse is shame, which I poetically describe as my demons and, more literally, characterize as telling myself stories that hurt my own feelings. I’ve stopped thinking about shame as something I’ll get to outlive; I may have stopped hoping for that. And I don’t think of any emotion as something any of us reaches or doesn’t reach for, they come and go more or less as they please. But what I do when I feel, whether it’s anger or joy or grief or existential fear, what I do doesn’t have to be decided by what I feel.

What I do is shaped by what I practice doing. Like sobriety and tai chi, mainly. Like distance running and long bikes rides. Like breathing from my belly and lowering my voice. Sometimes literally wringing my hands. Feeling the feelings as they come and go, trying not to grasp at the good ones or push away the bad. Recognizing in them my shared humanity, although those aren’t the words I use at the time. Accepting my anger and fear, accepting my desire for justice that sometimes looks like retribution, accepting that I am precious. That’s hilarious; I don’t accept that I’m precious, that’s a stretch, but accepting that I would say that to anyone else in my shoes. Not accepting shame but knowing sometimes that the shame I feel isn’t truth. Every day practicing like I’m the man in the dharma story, every day sitting frozen locking eyes with that fucking king cobra and breathing.

Thanks for letting me work through this out loud with you. Thanks for showing up for yourselves and others tonight. It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault. I wish you healing.

Peace.