I'm just angry all the time, anyone else?

[WhyZed]

I've loved this place on the Internet but have had to hide it in my topics for more than six months now because I was feeling more and more despondent and angry.
I'm desperate to come back properly but please can someone tell me how to deal with the rage? I'm literally shaking typing this. I know this is a personal issue with me being unable to deal with my feelings but I'm surely not the only one who sees the news, the updates from Scotland and elsewhere and just simmers.
How do you deal with this?

Remember your self care, above all.

Take a deep breath.

Take breaks. You can't and won't solve it all by breaking yourself.

Get out for a walk.

Connect with family, friends, other feminists.

Eat well, check your vits.

Try meditation, mindfulness (not for everyone, but can be very helpful)

Look into counselling and/or therapy.

This is not a battle that is likely to be won any time soon, I'm afraid. It's been ongoing since before recorded history. Woman-hate is too deeply embedded to somehow find a switch or button or law that 'fixes' it.

There will not be a day that it's all magically solved. It's a process that will be long ongoing beyond our lifetimes.

We can hope to make many small, tiny differences, and that in itself is good enough. We can build good, strong networks, we can raise our children to be kind, empathetic, brave and resilient and practise their critical thinking. We can help out some women. We can support some women. We can do enough.

We live in an imperfectible world; to learn to accept it in all its flawed difficulty, and infinite complexity is a life's work. We learn to see it for how it is, to accept the good and the bad, to see where we can make a difference and to step up when we can and need to. Choose your battles. Count your blessings. This long, long war is won by love, not by anger.

'Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love; this is the eternal rule'. - Buddha

Take a deep breath.

Come back when you're ready, we'll be here.

Yes. Very much so. I often check the headlines and the current situation first thing in the morning and start the day angry, outraged at the injustice and the bitterness of women repeatedly being told and shown they don't matter, their needs, their identity, their problems, their intersectionalities, their words, their lived experience are of no worth. Shut up and serve or else.

I keep seeing the phrase 'the hostility of the UK' at this time to LGTB+ people used to seek more political leverage against women. The hostility of the UK and politics towards women is never mentioned or considered a problem.

I do. I consider it a massive problem. And I too urgently want to stop reading and having to think about all this for my own mental health because this country is feeling a pretty hostile, anti-woman place right now. But I can't. Because I can't leave this to other women to do on my behalf. I can't hope another woman will write the letter or read the article or raise awareness of women's needs so I don't have to.

At the furious stage right now. Read yesterday about a female author getting death and rape threats (including against her children) because she liked a tweet about - not by, about! - another female author guilty of wrong think.

And third female author weighs in with its terrible but... and essentially justifies it.

Rape & death threats are never, ever justified. Threatening someone's children is never, ever justified. I can't believe that even needs saying.

Yes, very angry. And frustrated that my personal circumstances means I can't do much more than rant

But these rants have opened my brother's eyes to what's happening as well as my mum, my dad and my in laws. I might not be able to attend meetings or march, or even go to boxing to help release the anger but once I can, I will and I'm looking forward to it! In the mean time, I will speak up and hope that our voices are heard.

Our anger can and will change things. It is exhausting and dispiriting and we can’t pretend the shit is not happening. It helps to do whatever we can fundraising, being aware of other women on the streets, calling out male behaviour where we can ,writing letters, changing minds, standing up for each other and our daughters. Women. All over the world are speaking out. We can do it.

*I'll add quickly to that: I'm talking about what I feel responsible to do and what I worry about, and definitely not what I see as being the responsibility of any other woman.

As Arabella says above, and as the main message of GC women really is: no one should be telling another woman how to feel, what to do, what is and is not ok and where her boundaries should be. No one knows what a woman's experiences and needs are, and her choice should be respected.

Sorry, I could have put that a lot better.

I feel the same.

Yes me too.
I have to step back from MN, Twitter and the media every so often as it's not good for my blood pressure.

The BBC really pisses me off as it has always been my normal news channel, but now it is so woke that it seems every single story that possibly can be is about gender or race politics.

Given the % of LGBTQ+ in the population, this perspective is way over-represented in the media and I think it's beginning to become counter-productive as everyone outside that group is just sick of it dominating the airwaves.

I look at all the things which are now promoted as being for only under-represented groups, and I think, yup, that's me, a 50+ woman!

Me too! I am seething at what I read and see going on while most people seem blind to it. So often concerns are batted away as it being only a few people who hold these views or worst it is presented as people being unkind.

It is like being in an upside down world. Have no friends in the real world who have shown an interest who share the same views and too cautious to speak to others about it.

Here is the only place I have found some sanctuary.

Very much so WhyZed. I had to stop a programme I was watching with my DH last night (NCIS!) to have a rant - the young girls kidnapped and put up for sale in it (and yes I know it's fiction but it happens) couldn't identify out of their sex. Their kidnappers knew which sex of child to sell.

Also reading about politicians joining in the talk about making places safe for women - while ATTHE SAME TIME - taking steps to remove single sex places..... My blood is boiling. It is exhausting.

@AdHominemNonSequitur...

OP it’s relentless and particularly hard to get any IRL support at this time.

Not to mention the right to protest about women’s issues even in distanced groups of women is not legally available either, even for those women who are able to get out to a place to protest of an evening:
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-56384758 (this isn’t the main article describing legal objections that have been made but it gives the gist)

I liked Arabella’s ideas.

Just seconding boxercise, which I find really helps, even if you're punching air.

Yup OP. Our collective anger is increasing On the flip side, the fury of women (and many men) after those awful Brighton hospital demands to rename maternity services, talk about chest feeding etc was magnificent to behold.

In addition to the great suggestions on here, I do try to stay away from most of the "this prat said this on twitter" threads - they're too wearing. I focus on things I know about and can influence - education, child safety, parenting, the NHS treatment of women and children.

WhyZed

Strewth, anger is always there, simmering just under the surface. Arabella has some good suggestions but I would add the boxing idea too. I need a vigorous physical release from time to time as well as the balancing of breathing & slow yoga. At the moment I'm digging manure into a veg bed and the excess anger is very useful. In the quiet moments I 'm trying to make art that deals with feminist issues. Some days my pen hand shakes with rage and I can't draw. That's when I know it's time to go shovel horse shit!

Do whatever you can to protect yourself, take strength from the fabulous women here. If you need to go away & heal for a while that's fine. Like Arabella said we will be here when you want to come back.💐

Yes, recently I have moved from distressed to angry. This week was particularly bad what with living in Scotland & watching the Hate Crime Bill go through, Sarah Everard’s murder and my DD’s school continuing to fuck us about to the point where I’ve had to ask DH to temporarily take over as the primary point of contact.

It feels like for every step forward, for every bit of light and another person understanding, there’s a massive backwards step.

Desperate impotent rage is my default state.

I admit to a love hate relationship with mumsnet. That the debate happens, is good. There have been many glimpses of solidarity for our sex extended. I'm sure some of the mods feel exactly as I do.
But.
That women are still expected to be considerate here, even of men who in national newspapers openly admit to 'envying' our body parts, discuss our lives as if they were a 'girl mode', regale us with stories of shouting at and scaring teenage girls in female toilets - and that we might then be censored for referring to such a man as 'he' is immeasurably cruel to women.

I constantly feel like the real mother in Solomon's tale. With the purported custodians of fairness suggesting that my baby be divided into two parts to be shared nicely between me and an imposter.

Except they're not actually proposing this as a cruel bluff to expose the real truth, they genuinely believe this is a fair and balanced outcome and my fierce objections are often 'not in the spirit'. Both claims on my child are treated as if they have equal merit, when the just and fair facilitator would robustly discern the truth and them REFUSE to accept the merit of the false claim. Women should be encouraged to deny false claims, to say no. Supported to refuse.

Instead, I'm compelled to treat the imposter's false claim as somehow equal to my own real one, and ensure I always consider how to make them feel welcome. Never rebuff them. Never deny them. My very act of daring to openly defy them and deny them what they want - what is mine - is called 'intolerant'. I'm told I can claim the baby is mine, but I must make my case without declaring the imposter to be an imposter.
This is how I feel.

I'm so tired of choosing my words so very carefully. Tired of writing and rewriting each post several times, nervous I might have chosen a slightly too truthful phrase, editing, using a thesaurus, self-censoring. I want to speak bluntly but fairly, and I want other women to be able to do the same. And I wish the outcome of doing that would be the mods doing a fist punch in the air and shouting yeah, well said!

But for now, here is my post, edited a dozen times, carefully reviewed to not break talk guidelines, and saved offline just in case I somehow blew it and it gets deleted anyway.

I continue to try.

So much. I need to step back for my own mental health I think.

I’m 36 weeks pregnant with a daughter and I’ll be back but I need to look after myself as the rage I feel cannot be healthy.

Barracker we are in total awe of your ability to say what you need to say and not be deleted. Some of us find it harder to stay within the rules except to understand that it is only women who are expected to keep them.

Solidarity everyone. I feel I need to take a ste back for my mental health, but then I feel guilty for doing so. I am attempting a 'one feminist act a day' strategy. So I will make sure I do one thing such as make a donation to a crowd funder, write to my dd's school about their Pshe etc, but once I've done that I'm trying to give myself permission/force myself to step away and focus on other things. I am not being that successful yet but that's the aim...

This week has been the last straw for me. Sarah Everard, the Hate Crime Bill, Eddie Izzard.

I was feeling so miserable about it all last night that I decided to do something positive and engage my teens in a chat about
attitudes to women. Within minutes, I was being told that 'loads of women love being choked/gagging during blow jobs' and that to say otherwise is disempowering and negates a woman's right to sexual pleasure. I was referred to Cardi B, and told, disparagingly to google 'air-play' (formerly known as choking but it's not cool to call it that). This was from my seventeen year old lesbian daughter, who was backed up by my uber-woke nineteen year old son.

I. Actually, Just. Can't.

Simmeringly fucking furious, since you ask. For all the reasons above.

The egalitarian, kind, gentle man I'm married to is great and sympathetic, but fundamentally he Just. Doesn't. Get. It. He thinks I'm dangerously radicalised and there is a nice compromise somewhere.

With apologies to Reni Eddo-Lodge, I'm having a real Why I'm No Longer Talking to DH About Feminism moment, which doesn't help.

I agree with you op - DH tells me all the time that I'm just so angry - but how can you not be when you see what's happening?

No advice I'm afraid. The boxing son DS good though. Might give that a go when things reopen.

Sofuckingsad

Right now I'm spitting rusty nails over that 'air play' cobblers. We have gone back to the days of Deep Throat & other 70s porn tropes.
I'm glad there are women like Barracker who can express things eloquently; who can express the things we all feel but are not able or allowed to say in real life. This board is a sanity lifeline for many women and it is really galling to know how we all have to choose our words in order to stay here.

I don't feel eloquent.
I feel clumsy, awkward, muzzled and anxious and slightly ashamed of myself, for every compromise to the truth I consciously make in choosing the acceptable words instead of the real ones.

I'm in awe of the stamina of every woman here. Persevering and tripping over what may or not be an allowable truth. I'm scared. Scared that where we have arrived is already normalised, that it's already frightening to say the truth in its unvarnished, undiplomatic, unapologetic nakedness.