About a woman’s anger, Ukraine, and even more on a woman’s anger

Valentyna Konstantynovska — a 79-year-old woman in Mariupol, Donestsk region, eastern Ukraine. She is holding a weapon during basic combat training for civilians, organized by the Special Forces Unit Azov of Ukraine’s National Guard.

My predominant emotion related to the war on Ukraine (and the image above) is anger. Which then begs a few questions:

What am I to do with the anger I feel? Where do I direct it? How do I express it? DO I express it at all?

Ukraine aside (which I only mean grammatically, not literally: that conflict and Ukraine’s people deserve to be front and center in our minds, hearts, and voices), we struggle with these questions all of the time — uniquely and painfully as women.

We are on the fence about our anger. We feel it, but are pretty sure we can’t let it out. At the very least, we just don’t know how.

There is a reason for this. Lots of reasons, actually.

We are not fluent in expressing our anger, we are afraid that we’ll be seen as too emotional, we feel it in our body but rarely let it be expressed through our words or our actions.

How many times does a woman say, “I’m so tired,” because she cannot say, “I am so angry!” How many times is women’s anger deliberately miscast as exhaustion? ~ Soraya Chemaly, Rage Becomes Her

It is rarely a question of whether or not we’re angry; rather, whether or not we express it; whether or not we feel like we can. Because, of course, the pressure to…