Last Friday night when the kids were away, I went to a Reiki and sound bath experience, and I know the eye rolls that happen when I say that, but I’ll say it anyway. (Cliche headline: Middle-aged suburban white lady discovers Reiki.) I’ve experienced the brief use of sound with gongs and singing bowls or other instruments at the end of a yoga class before, but never a full hour. It felt like a massage somehow. I don’t know what happened or how it worked, but I know my body felt so limp at the end of it that it took a minute to get off the floor, and I felt disoriented for a bit as I stumbled to the parking lot, then euphoric as I drove home to make dinner in my quiet kitchen and put myself to bed.
I’ve had childhood experiences in pentecostal churches planted in the deep south where hymns ring with urgency and there’s a “laying on of hands” with prayer. I have no desire to revisit those places, and I feel a tightness in my belly even remembering enough to type that short description of them. So I really wasn’t sure how I would react to the Reiki piece of the event, but I will say that I knew when she arrived at my mat and her hands were hovering in the space above me. I felt something. Even with my eyes closed and a weighted mask over them and the overwhelming feel of vibrations hovering in the room from wall to wall with the immersive volume of sound everywhere. I still knew when her hands were not touching me but near me. What is that? The way you feel something that is not actually touching you in a physical form, the charge of the space around you? I don’t know the answer to that question, and I don’t want to know. I just love that it exists at all, that the physical sensation echoes what I know in an intuitive way which is that the space between people is not nothingness, that there is some kind of unnamable charge between each of us.
The next morning, I drove to meet two old friends for an early breakfast, the only time slot we could get to work in a life of three moms and six kids and volunteer commitments and bouncing extracurricular schedules. We shuffled into a tiny NYC-style bagel spot with paper lined trays and styrofoam coffee cups and found a booth where we parked ourselves for a couple of hours to unload our minds without a breath in between. This is a different kind of beautiful singing bowls: women talking without withholding. Women offering support, women who have known you for nearly twenty years and are grateful to know you still. Women who show up again and again without fail.
One thing we didn’t get a chance to talk about was the news last week. Horrifying though it may be, it has become such an echo that I hardly registered it. The Weinstein conviction overturned as the Supreme Court discussed just how many organs have to fail, how many vital signs have to decline, for a pregnant woman to be treated in an ER in a way that could save her life but lead to an abortion. All of this on the heels of states resurrecting laws from 160 years ago to force rape and incest victims to birth children and criminalize doctors who practice IVF or recognize a women’s bodily autonomy. And protests flare on college campuses with over 13,000 children dead and a presidential election looming in the near future.
The world doesn’t look like what I imagined it would. It’s a weird space to be in as an elderly Millennial / young Gen X / whatever I am. I cut my teeth on a steady diet of riot grrrl rock, Ani DiFranco, Tori Amos, Alanis Morissette, and Liz Phair. And that screw you glare of 90’s models in Seventeen magazine with too much eyeliner and no need to please. This isn’t the world my Lilith Fair ticket stubs promised me it would be. After the events of last week, I remembered that Dorothy Allison line from Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, that there is “magic in the belly, the domed kingdom of sex, the terror place inside where rage and power live.” Sex and terror and rage and power all mixed up is what it feels like to me right now to be a woman in the world, to be living in this soft body that defines me even when I wish it didn’t, and to feel like we’ve moved backward in a way I never in my wildest dreams imagined when I was 17. Cue the Tori Amos lyric This is not really this, this, this is not really happening. You bet your life it is.
I don’t know what to do with this rage. It’s burning me up, and I don’t know where to put it. I want to be louder and scarier and more threatening than I will ever be. I’m tired of being disappointed by men and the world they’ve created that I have to live in. I’m exhausted from living in a world where I have to know how to inhabit both spaces to survive and to succeed. I have to channel something masculine to set a goal and get it done, to have a difficult conversation, to plow through challenges, and to survive in the world at all. Then lean into the feminine that feels more natural to me when I mother, when I guide students and encourage them, and when I open the flow of whatever this is that pours when I write. I have to be fluid and multilingual and dance with both polarities. But I’m at a loss when I try to spot a man who can do the same, who stands with a soft heart and a robust backbone, who holds both truths in the same hand.
Another Dorothy Allison line: Behind the story I tell is the one I don’t. Behind the story you hear is the one I wish I could make you hear. Behind this story is another story and it ends with this: I’m realizing that maybe the gift of such strong relationships with the women in my life is part of what makes it difficult for me to maintain relationships with men. It sets the bar high. It leads me to hold male friends to the same standard that I have for my female friends, and perhaps that isn’t fair, but why not? I have such richness, vulnerability, reverberation, and trust in my circle of women. This moment in history makes it hard to open that way to a man. And sometimes it feels like even the men who vote like I do don’t understand it the same way, or they don’t have a backbone strong enough to hold my rage and to reflect it back to me as my own power.
That is the story I can tell you, and behind that rests a whole host of ones I don’t. I watch most of my married friends act as the glue that holds everything together in their homes while they also maintain a full-time job just like their husbands do. And as a single woman, it feels like over time my dating life somehow became that meme with a folding table and someone (me) holding a coffee cup and a paper sign that says “Change my mind.” I’ll know him when I see him, but after one too many disappointments, I’ve stopped looking. When I paused at the close of 2023 to recalibrate and examine what I want and what I need, what fills me up and what drains me, I considered how much strength I’ve loaned to men over the years, how much I’ve poured out, and I realized it’s enough to propel a rocket. I decided to see what happens if I save that for myself for a while. It’s been enlightening to feel the difference when I made that choice. I know to others this may seem like I’m conflating the personal and the political, but to me, in this moment in time, they are nearly one and the same. Don’t tell me what you think or how you vote, show me how you show up for the women in your life, how you can dance with both polarities like I have to everyday to balance my spinning plates and somehow hold my center in whatever we call this place we’re living in. I don’t hate men. I haven’t given up on them. But I just stopped approaching it like some treasure hunt and stopped doing what it seems like everyone else is doing, which feels a whole lot like shopping, turning what used to be an organic experience into some reductive, capitalistic system men invented in the first place, swiping through portfolios like an interview assembly line until one clicks. I’m out in the world meeting new people all the time and reminding myself that synchronicity hasn’t failed me yet. Sometimes I’m willing to share my time for a little while, share my humor, my encouragement, my listening ear, my joy, but I’m no longer interested in pouring out my own grit to carry what isn’t mine to hold. I’ve de-centered men, both personally and professionally, and that energetic shift has opened doors I didn’t expect. Collectively speaking, women hold so much for men, and I guess I just decided to lay it down and watch what happens.
I still have work to do. What I know is this. I have made myself smaller in moments that make me feel sick with shame to remember them. I have hiked alongside someone and mumbled something about the challenge of the incline to echo his complaints when I wasn’t actually winded at all but didn’t want him to feel like less of a man by admitting I was unbothered. I’ve averted my eyes when a stranger’s stare has made me uncomfortable instead of holding my own glare to his to communicate my rejection. I have chosen my words so carefully that it muffled my own voice just to provide comfort for a man and to avoid making him feel something he might not want to feel but probably should. I have bitten my cheek and smiled to avoid saying what I think too many times to count. I guess what I’m saying is that I have absorbed the messaging I hate so much. And the older I get, the more I see the seeds of that living inside me, and I want to tear them out. I think about that moment in Poor Things when Bella explains her captivity with a shrug and says, “They love me tight.” I have been loved tight by men in ways that nearly choked me, but the love of my female friends is something different, expansive and free.
I remember one night during the summer after I’d graduated high school, I was in a car with four friends and we got lost on the way home from a concert, before smartphones, before GPS, before the world felt untenable. I forget who was driving and whose old car it was, but I remember that the radio didn’t work and the air conditioning wasn’t cold enough to break the heat. We stopped at a gas station somewhere on Roswell Road in north Atlanta once we’d figured out the general direction home. The three of us in the back seat bought a pint of ice cream with chocolate and cherries in it, and we grabbed three plastic spoons from the coffee station inside. Windows down, passing the pint between us, we sang all the way home. It was humid and thick outside, and I still have this memory of us with the thawing pint in our hands, the chill of ice cream on the tongue, hair flapping and cheeks sore from laughing, mouths wide open, harmonizing as best we could. All of us on the cusp of adulthood and ready to grab it with both wild hands. I miss whatever current that was inside. The hope and optimism and persistent joy that lives when there’s assurance that the world is moving in the direction of progress and that it’s wide open and safe and waiting for you. I haven't felt that in so long.
I don’t know how to raise a daughter in a political landscape that looks like this because I myself don’t know how to move forward in a place that looks like this. Two bumbling geriatrics handed the keys to the kingdom before we’d dare trust a woman to handle it. A world that is burning, both literally and metaphorically, because we have followed a model centered on profit and competition that places women and families dead last. I want to imagine another world different from this one. And I’m scared of what is beginning to feel like the whispered promise of another Trump presidency. Sometimes it feels like sorrow, and sometimes it feels like rage. It always feels like fear and dread all mixed up and screaming.
Lying on the floor last Friday night, feeling the hum of the singing bowls and then feeling the charge of someone’s hands over me, I’m reminded that there is a current inside of all of us. And sometimes it feels loud. Maybe rage and rebellion can move through me to birth hope and fierce optimism again. Growing up as I did, I received so much programming about how undesirable a bitter woman is, how angry is the last thing a woman should be. I think I’ve feared that all my life, afraid of what will happen if I let myself get mad. I’m fighting it still. But whatever river is underneath, it’s about to overflow its banks. The same rebellious current that had me hiding Little Earthquakes under my bed from church-going family is here again. I’m not sure where it’s going to take me, but I know I can’t hold this same shape I’ve always had when the world around me looks like this. I want to shed this skin that doesn’t fit anymore.
There’s an Eavan Boland poem I love so much where she writes about a river and personifies it as a woman. She says In the end it will not matter that I was a woman. I am sure of it. The body is a source. Nothing more. My body is a source for sure, like that river, moving and flowing toward some place I cannot see. But in the end, it will matter that I was a woman. I cannot separate myself from that immutable fact, and I don’t want to. I don’t have anything to say that makes any of this any better, but I came here to write and say it anyway. It took a long time to get here, but I think I’m finally ready to admit I’m angry. It feels like some bait and switch where I was promised a world very different from the one we live in. It was there, and for a fleeting moment I tasted it.
Anger is like any other emotion; it’s a physical force that needs to move through me and teaches me something as it does. I’m letting it burn. Maybe one day I’ll find myself so hungry I have to eat these words, but not yet. I want to dream again about some future time when I can feel like I did when I was 18 with the windows down, singing as loud as I could with other voices that harmonized with the truest parts of me. I want to be louder than everything that terrifies me, everything that tries to silence me. Maybe, if nothing else, it will be as Eavan Boland promises in that poem, in the end everything that burdened and distinguished me will be lost in this: I was a voice.
so good, so relatable. i love women so much 💕
I love this, Katie. You may be interested in Burn it Down: Women Writing About Anger Edited by Lilly Dancyger.