The Origin of My Anger

And how to survive when nothing feels safe

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Trigger warnings: childhood sexual abuse, rape

Yesterday, I said to a friend, “I am so angry all the time. I can feel it bubbling up in me at any perceived injustice. I don’t like feeling this way. This isn’t me.”

Normally, I like to consider myself fairly even-keeled, prone to loving and fun conversations rather than heated battles. I don’t, by nature, enjoy confrontation. In fact, I avoid it at all costs, which is often to my own detriment.

But lately, this anger has seeped into the very marrow of my bones. That’s how deep it runs. I’ve had to sit with it for long periods of time. I’ve examined it and turned it over and placed it back on the shelf. Then I took it down and examined it again.

Yes, I’m angry at the state of our country. I’m angry that every four years, my basic human rights as a queer woman are up for debate again. I’m angry that Donald Trump and his cult following have wreaked such havoc on our psyches and our nation that we are now facing a future in which time moves backwards with abortion restrictions and the removal of LGBTQ+ rights and the continued scorching of our already burning planet. I’m angry because there are so many people who do not see what’s happening; who choose, instead, to shake their fists at high gas and grocery prices and immigrants while they yell at the TVs that are ceaselessly tuned to Fox News.

“But they’re rapists and murderers!” they say. “But we’re spending all our money on taking care of them when we don’t even take care of our veterans!” they shout.

Isn’t it funny that we’re all just immigrants complaining about other immigrants? Isn’t that what our country was founded on? Do you see the irony in the madness? Didn’t our ancestors originally travel many miles to land here, in the home of the free and the brave? To escape torture and abuse and heavy-handed rule and find a better life? Didn’t we kill native Americans and steal their land and murder their children? 

What are immigrants other than people? Fellow human beings? Blood and bone and beating hearts searching for a better life for themselves, for their families, for their children?

“But if you let 100 of them in and 10 are rapists and killers, isn’t that too many?” a friend posited recently.

I see it differently, though. I see the 90 humans that left everything behind and dragged their babies through deserts and across oceans for a chance of something better. The other 10? For me, it’s a tradeoff. Ninety new, hopeful lives for 10 new potential criminals? Those are odds I’ll be on. It’s not like we don’t have enough homegrown criminals as it is. What are we doing about them besides arming them to the nines and telling them that it’s okay to be white supremacists? That we can make a convicted rapist and felon our President and/or our King? That we can subjugate women and strip them of their rights? (Make that women, queers, brown-skinned people, Jews… anyone that doesn’t look or think or act just so.) That white, straight men are all that really matter in this country?

I think my anger began brewing decades ago when I was a happy-go-lucky little girl who believed the world was a pretty safe place filled with neighborhood kickball competitions and pick-up basketball games on a rickety apartment goal, and fireflies that lit my way home as the day eased into night. A trusted neighbor decided that he would take my safe place and sully it with his own male desires. When I was taught to give blowjobs at age ten, my entire world was reframed. That dirty, little secret remained locked up inside me for far too long because I didn’t want to bother my hard-working mother or my big sister who was, in essence, my second mom. We were poor—counting-pennies-at-the-grocery-store-poor—and my mom worked like a dog to make every penny count. I didn’t want to burden her any more than she was already burdened. She provided such a good life for us—the best she could—but that life was often unsupervised because of her long working hours. She couldn’t help it. She was doing her best. All three of us were.

Fucking poverty affects so many of us in so many ways.

But that’s another story altogether. Or is it? Because in this brave, new world (she says with sarcasm), the rich keep getting richer, and their taxes keep getting cut.

Money might not buy happiness, but it buys lots of things: babysitters, leisure, supervision, a mom who gets to stay home more than she gets to work, safety, a peaceful night’s sleep, time.

We were all just doing our best.

So I learned to acquiesce when I should have learned how to fight.

And again at age 20, when a stranger held a knife to my throat and demanded his way with my body, I acquiesced again. 

It was what I knew. 

And so far, it had kept me relatively safe. I had survived.

I want to jump in here now to shut down any assumptions that might be made about my queerness. I’ve heard people before who have suggested I am gay because of what happened to me when I was young. That could not be further from the truth. I am gay because I am gay. It is not a choice; it is who I am. I love the softness of a woman, the kindness, the gentleness, the shared female experience.

I don’t hate men. I gave birth to three of them, beloved always, in my heart.

But I don’t trust most men.

I especially don’t trust men in the age of Trumpism and Project 2025. Why? Because I have firsthand experience of men who—when given the opportunity—took my body for their own pleasure simply because they could. I don’t trust men when my experience has been them forcing their dicks and their caveman policies and their Bibles on me. I don’t trust men because they have claimed my professional work as their own and taken my seat away from workplace tables where I belonged, where I had earned my right to sit. 

If we allow this threat of Christian Nationalism to overtake our country, how many white men will be emboldened to continue taking whatever they want?

And when will it stop?

If the most empowered among us can use children for their own pleasure, or hold their guns more tightly to their chests when six-year-olds are slaughtered in their classrooms, or enact laws that prohibit women from making decisions about their own bodies, or dictate that we are only free to love who we love if it agrees with their own religious beliefs, where does it end?

Right now, I am feeling how I felt when I was barely ten years old. When a man more than double my age taught me how to put his dick in my mouth—a mouth that was still too small to properly execute what he instructed. I feel like I felt when I was 20, and a rapist whispered in my ear that he would kill me if I screamed. That my life depended on my silence.

I didn’t scream then. 

But I am screaming now.

I am screaming loudly.

I am screaming even though my voice is shaking.

I am taking little 10-year-old me by the hand and teaching her that screaming is okay and warranted and sometimes necessary for survival.

Even in First Communion white, it’s okay to scream.

I am screaming because I deserve to feel safe and whole and equal in this world. I deserve to love whomever I love. I deserve to live my life without fear of being shot in the grocery store because everyone in America gets to have a gun or an assault rifle or two or thirty. I deserve to live without having someone else’s religious beliefs forced on me. My daughter deserves bodily autonomy. My sons deserve to not have to fight in a civil war they do not support.

We all deserve better.