If you’ve ever said you don’t get angry - this one’s for you

I wonder if the process of waking up is just a series of moments where we realise that everything we thought was true is in fact the opposite. A constant, disorienting unlearning?

We are at the end of the year of the snake - the year of shedding. And I am being asked to shed an identity I have held dear for as long as I remember.

That of the “not-angry” woman.

Let me explain.

I Don’t Get Angry

I’ve always said I am someone who is not angry. Sad, yes. Hurt, for sure. But anger? “I just don’t feel it”.

And so when I started this mythic women series, Kali Ma was the one I felt most averse to.

For those who don’t know her, Kali is the Hindu goddess of destruction, time, and transformation. She is the dark mother who destroys what needs to die so that new life can emerge. She wields a sword that cuts through illusion with surgical precision. According to Hindu mythology, particularly the Devi Mahatmya, she emerged during a desperate battle when powerful demons, or asuras, threatened to take over the world. The other gods, who themselves were afraid of her, called on her because she was the only one ferocious enough to give them a chance of winning.

She is fierce, wrathful, dripping blood, adorned with skulls and severed heads - so not me (I thought).

But when I started this series, I set out with the explicit intention of asking these archetypes to illuminate what needed to be activated in feminine leadership, my own and the collective. And I am learning that when we invoke goddesses, we open ourselves up to forces far beyond what the rational mind can grasp. It is in a sense, a conjuring. We ask the universe to send us the very thing we ask for.

And so, fittingly, over the past few months I’ve found myself in repeated situations where boundaries were crossed or people treated me badly. And I did what I always do - I forgave, accepted, loved.

That is, until I didn’t.

One of my closest friends and I started working on a project together last year, something that mattered deeply to both of us.

The first time she cancelled last minute, I told myself it was fine. When she didn’t follow through on her commitments, I quietly picked up the slack. When she didn’t get back to me, I focussed on what she was going through.

But each time, I felt something rise in my body - a heat, a tightness. And each time I pushed it down, reached for the love in my heart, and smiled. “It’s totally fine.”

The pattern continued. More cancellations. More broken promises. Each time the heat got hotter, my smile tighter. But I kept finding my love for her. Kept letting it go.

Until last week, when something finally tipped me over the edge.

I went from “it’s all totally fine, I love you” to “you are a terrible person and I’m done.” No in between. No conversation. Just explosion.

Does anyone recognise this pattern?

This is the pattern of a woman who has spent years, or decades, suppressing her anger, but the flame has not gone out yet.

And in that moment, I was ready to torch the whole friendship.

It reminded me of the moment in Game of Thrones when Daenerys finds out that Cersei murdered Missandei and she snaps and torches King’s Landing. The righteous anger she had been carefully cultivating in service of liberation and justice turned into indiscriminate destruction, ultimately ending in her own death at the hands of the man she loves. (I still think she was robbed of her rightful ending, but that is a story for another piece!)

This is what anger looks like when it has been suppressed for too long and is finally unleashed without discernment. It is chaotic and consuming, destroying everything in its path and ultimately destroying the one who wields it.

Here’s what I am learning about anger.

Anger will always destroy. That is its nature, its purpose. But the important question is what will it destroy?

Now, if you have been with me for a while, you may be reading this and thinking, wait, is this really Holiday writing this? Holiday who has spent the past decade urging us to collapse the victim / villain binary, toward love no matter what, radical empathy and forgiveness as the path to healing.

And now she is telling us to get angry? WTF?

I get it. This may feel disorienting. It has been for me too.

But hear me out. Martin Luther King Jr. once said that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. But what happens if we substitute power for anger?

Anger without love becomes destructive, reckless, abusive. We have all seen that. But love without anger, I am realising, is also sentimental and anemic. It can lack the force required to interrupt harm.

My refusal to feel and speak my anger didn’t make me more loving. It delayed the truth until it could only arrive as an explosion, and by then, the roles of victim / villain were already written.

The love-only approach had me continuing to accommodate, continuing to forgive, continuing to see her humanity while abandoning my own. It kept the peace, but created the conditions for victim and villain to emerge.

On the other end, righteous rage without discernment burns everything down and creates new victims and villains in the ashes.

The sword of Kali is neither of these. It’s the precision that knows what needs to die - the pattern, the dynamic, the violation, and what needs to be protected - the humanity of both people).

The Mother’s Rage

And so what does Kali show us as a blueprint for feminine leadership now?

Like many of you, I have been brought to my knees as the horror of the Epstein files unfurls like a slow car crash. It sickens me to my stomach and I feel a profound grief.

But I am learning that this isn’t enough. I also need to tap into the primal rage of the mother. The wolf who will tear the predator who threatens her cubs limb from limb.

Grief yes. But this moment also calls for anger.

Kali.

Here she is not in service of protecting individual boundaries or speaking our truth, but she is here in her original form, the one who all the other gods call on when it’s time to slay some demons. And it is time to slay some demons.

I don’t have a neat prescription for how we organise and rise up practically and protect the children. For the victims here, it is already too late. And for those who continue to be harmed, there is often very little we can personally do.

So what can we do?

Here’s a belief of mine that hasn’t changed. The cultural and systemic change we want to see always has a root inside of us.

The root, inside of me and I’m guessing inside of many of you reading, is an inability to come into contact with our own anger. A fear that our anger makes us harmful, unattractive, unladylike, dangerous, unevolved - pick your narrative, the solution is the same.

We must learn to come into right relationship with our anger. To stop suppressing it in the name of being good, kind, or spiritual. To learn how to feel it early, cleanly, and truthfully.

To let go of the story that we are “not angry women”.

It’s time to get angry.

And here’s the spoiler - it might be the most loving thing we ever do.