Guided by Anger

on winter's darkness and enduring outrage

San Diego, California

Advent begins this Sunday, the liturgical season known for “beginning in the dark” (as Fleming Rutledge writes), arriving in the seasonal shift from autumn’s end to winter’s beginning. I cherish seasons because they make the passage of time somewhat measurable or at least, palpable. Temperature changes and crisping leaves and cloud-drenched skies… I need that trust, that reliability in cyclical change. I need physical evidence that (as The Weepies sing) “the world [still] spins madly on.”

The world may spin madly on but I can barely sense it's spinning—have we not reverted backward? Back toward another era, another November, another election? Anger seethes beneath my skin and I cannot dismantle or deny it. Perhaps I’ve always known anger as a woman formed within a patriarchal world, denied equity, encouraged, instead, toward submission. Four Novembers ago, we lived in Colorado. I trudged through snow to cast my ballot, disturbed by my choices but certain of my vote. I decorated early that year during the first snowfall, which arrived weeks before Thanksgiving. We were so battered from months of isolation and anxiety, so disturbed by a country in crisis. I strung lights and spiked hot chocolate. I watched the streets absorb falling snow until it accumulated inch by inch by inch. Depressed, lonely, isolated, but comforted by a wintering world.

I haven’t known how to write about disappointment, about enduring anger. Instead, I’ve focused on work and school and the Peloton bike at my apartment gym. I bake my anger into focaccia, whisk it in carbonara. Men don’t like angry women. The world disregards angry women. I know because I’ve been unliked and disregarded. I’ve sat with this weighty emotion for weeks and I’ve questioned its validity (only because I've been told to do so). But in every conversation I’ve had with women, especially since November 5th, I’ve observed shared outrage. We’re not angry because we “lost.” We’re angry because we see it so clearly—especially now: that a man can violate, degrade, mock, and abuse women and still be considered eligible for the presidency. Not only eligible but electable. Not only electable but elected.

The world ceases spinning when life becomes immediately less-safe. I have written about women because I am a woman. But my god, it’s not just women at risk or in jeopardy. I am angry because I am worried for the safety and well-being of the marginalized and vulnerable. I am angry because the faith tradition that taught me to consider the least of these has overwhelmingly voted for someone openly hostile toward this country’s “least.”

It is the day after Thanksgiving and I am not supposed to be angry. I’m supposed to be full of gratitude and contentment, preparing myself for a season of waiting and hoping. The world feels backward and fractured and stalled and I’m trying to figure out where to store my anger, how to use it, how to honor it.

Nina MacLaughlin writes in her book length essay Winter Solstice, “We peer into the abyss, tread into the mystery. It’s a temporary death—an end to the limits of the self—and an emergence from it in the form of rebirth, a waking up.”

Winter is supposed to feel abyssal. We’re supposed to sense the ending of a particular point in time (for us living in modernity: the end of a calendar year, the end of a 12 month liturgy). Rutledge writes of a stalking darkness, of an all-consuming heaviness that’s meant to be recognized and named. Things feel so dire now in the aftermath of an election, on the cusp of an inauguration. Anger is heavy but it is a guide when used correctly, a tool against apathy, a measurement of care.