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A post shared by Rachel Lake ? (@she.gets.real) on Jun 12, 2019 at 8:07am PDT

Call me an angry woman. Go ahead.

Because I am.

I’ve been angry for a long time.

I tried to squelch it. I really tried. For years, I tried.

But over time, it morphed into a silent abhorrence of myself. Into weight on my hips. Into reckless behavior. Into disdain for other women. Disdain for my own body. Transmuting my inner child into cynical rot of contempt and despair. It turned into blood on my wrists and bile in my belly.  

Call me an angry woman. Because that is what I am.  

I am angry that you positioned yourself—just so—as I squeezed to pass you in the crowded store so you could touch my most intimate part without even looking.

I am angry at the terror you struck in my heart, following me down those dark streets, block after block. Making me think of your face each time I enter my own home, rushing as I do to bolt the door behind me.  

I am angry that you put your ugly hands upon my beautiful body. Your parts inside of me as I lay unconscious. Because letting you buy me too many drinks and laughing a little too hard at your jokes is synonymous with rape me.

I am angry that the strength that you promised would always protect me was what pinned my voiceless throat to the wall. Your yellow eyes boring into mine in what I believed were my final moments as I tried to pull air in and push screams out that would not come.

I am angry at your hands helping themselves as if this body were your buffet. Because my power threatened you so, and I needed a reminder that in your eyes, I am nothing more than a piece of meat. I am just a woman, right?  

Yes. I am just a woman. An angry woman. And at long last, it is not anger with the little girl who thought it was her fault all of these years. Finally, she knows.  

She knows.

It was you who turned my body into your trash can. It was you who taught me to hate myself. It was you who made me believe I am worth nothing.

I will speak your name to anyone who will listen. I will not be silenced.

I will tell that girl, and the world, that she was the one who was wronged, not the other way around. That she was created in love, and not sin. That she is perfect, just as she is. I’m letting her cry the tears of the thousands of years that we did not have permission.  

And, most of all, I am reminding her that her beautiful temple is not a stumbling block. Oh no. Her body is the manifestation of her divine nature.

And she is a queen.

You can say that I’m too much. I say I’m only getting started. I say let there be anger.  

I say to you, my sisters, let there be anger.  

We have been defiled. We have been dehumanized. We have been made responsible for the ravenousness of the savages who seek to empty their poison out on us, without a thought to the soul they have decimated. 

I am angry. Finally, I am angry. And I am done believing that she is deserving of anger.

And now, she can heal.