Your rage has nowhere to go

What if class consciousness doesn’t happen the way the literature says it should? What if everything you’re fighting for politically doesn’t shift or move in your lifetime? What will you do with yourself? What will you do with all of that frustration stored inside of you?

I’m asking because a lot of you genuinely don’t know.

I’m not here to tell you to calm down or peacefully navigate your way through your journey wherever you are within it. I’m also not here to ragebait you or tell you that you should be healed and without anger in your body. What I do believe is that a lot of you are carrying so much rage and have nowhere to put it. And I personally believe rage, frustration, and anger are important. They face us directly with what we’re dealing with inside and help us identify it. Rage in that way is useful. Rage tells you something is wrong and that something matters to you.

But rage sitting in your heart with no direction, after some time, brews more harm for you and the people around you than it does brew anything good.

Do you think you’re the first person in society to feel this kind of frustration about the conditions we are living in? Some of us carry our rage like it’s singular. Like nobody could possibly understand and I get it. But the weight of that starts doing something to you when it has nowhere to be moved.

Having rage with nowhere to put it will make you believe that almost anyone with a slightly different optic than yours is a problem or a threat. It will make you uninterested in immersing yourself in spaces of community that could actually hold some of that frustration with you. It keeps you from knowing how to pivot that frustration into building or trying something with or for your people. And so it just sits there. In your body. In your chest. Looking for a target it can actually reach. And I notice how a lot of you target those on the internet who are hopeful or solution-oriented…

For someone like me, specifically being tender as a parent, as someone with little humans I’m trusting to carry something forward, I can’t subscribe to doomsday. There is no other option for me. Whoever is in office, whatever is or isn’t moving the needle of class consciousness doesn’t change the purpose and intentionality that I believe we need to have in depending on ourselves as a people. It doesn’t change the alternative systems of care that we as a people need to be responsible for building. And it doesn’t change what I’ll be doing regardless.

A lot of the internet rhetoric right now is very doomsday. If this needle doesn’t move we won’t survive. If we don’t do this we don’t have a chance. And I understand where that positioning comes from.

But I’m interested in something else. I’m interested in being part of alternative care infrastructures that communities create. I’m interested in building with the people I live with and survive with. And the way I have learned to pivot my own rage is by putting it into something. Into building something with my community, for my community, by my community, because I want to see something happen here. Are we not reading historically what our ancestors have said and done? Where did we lose it in between?

Now, I don’t believe everyone should be building or implementing because that would be ableist of me, quite literally. African and Indigenous traditional systems were aware of such differences of ability in their communities, they often did not see this as a lack in one another, just knowing that folks physically or developmentally could not be part of maintaining such systems of care and would assign the most trusted and capable to nurture and take care of one another in different ways. I encourage you to find what works for you and figure out how you can plug in so you may continue to be inspired and committed to a better world we all want.

Again, I’m not asking you to stop being angry. I’m asking you what you’re going to do with such emotion when it becomes clear that the systems generating your frustration were never going to move on your timeline. It’s ok if you don’t have an answer, but you must remember that you should be thinking about this at some point.

I believe most of us are aware what damage it causes us when we try to store such sentiments in our bodies for long periods of time and I care enough about you comrade to pray your wellness and ambition serves you first, which in turn serves us as well.