Nobody wants to hear
about the rage.
They want the wise one. The one who learned something. The one who writes a tidy little post about how suffering becomes medicine. They want the alchemy, skipping the part where the lead is actually lead — heavy, toxic, and yours to carry.
So we don't talk about it. We swallow it. We call it anxiety. We call it insomnia. We call it "I'm just tired." We let it leak out sideways at people who don't deserve it and then hate ourselves for the leak.
The rage is how your body remembers
that something was taken.
Your nervous system is not confused. It knows what should not have happened. It files it correctly. It is the only part of you that refused, from the beginning, to pretend.
// rage is an alarm that never got turned off
// because the threat was never named.
The well-meaning people will tell you to let it go. They mean well. They are also wrong. You cannot release something you have not yet been allowed to fully hold. The rage has to be witnessed before it can be composted. Otherwise it just goes underground and builds a city.
So here is a small thing. A container. A place to say the unsayable thing — the sentence that has been sitting at the back of your throat for a year, or ten, or thirty. Write it. Nobody will see it. It never gets stored, never gets sent. You will burn it in the next breath.
What needs to be said that you've never said?
— returned to ash —
Notice your body. Did your shoulders drop? Did you exhale without meaning to? That's information. That's the nervous system getting one molecule lighter because something that needed air finally got it.
You can come back and do this again. You can do it a hundred times. There's no quota on rage, and there's no gold medal for getting through grief quietly. The people who loved you don't need you to perform peace. They need you to come back to yourself — and the self you're coming back to has all the feelings, not just the palatable ones.
about what happened.
That's not the opposite of healing.
That IS the healing.
Somewhere in the story there's forgiveness, maybe. Or there isn't. Both are valid endings. The rage isn't the villain of the arc; it's the witness. It was there before you had words. It will be there, quieter, when you learn new ones.
For now — just let it be real. Let it take up the space it earned. Pour it into a cup that can hold it. And when you're tired of holding, set the cup down. It will still be there. You can come back.
The furnace is not destruction.
It's how iron remembers
it was ever sharp.
Come back to this page when the rage rises and has nowhere to go. This is a sanctuary. Use it.
Continue to Chapter III · The Hollow ◆ All Chapters