- Two friends and I went to a Rage Room to break stuff and get some anger out.
- I had high hopes and even made a rage-y playlist for us.
For a few weeks, my two friends and I have had "BREAK STUFF" on our calendars. This was both the activity and the location. We were going to a "rage room," a place that stocks unsalvageable, old electronics and glass bottles and lets people come in to break them. Workout, tension release — one Yelp review said it had healed a father-daughter relationship. I had high hopes.
I made a rage-y playlist, which started to fill mostly with songs from when I was 14 — Evanescence, Incubus, Linkin Park, and Trapt. At first, the songs seemed funny and cringe-y, but before long, my heart ached along familiar grooves.
We view teenage pain as silly and trivial — and yes, at 14, we do not know what we don't know—but to me, the depth and intensity of our young selves is a gift. At 14, we are lightning rods—pain cracks into us, and we feel its current through the homes of our bodies, but we withstand it. Our houses might be scorched, but we survive it.
I'm not an angry person
I always felt everything deeply, but I never considered myself an angry person. I've never punched anyone, I don't yell, and in a fight, the thing I'm most likely to do is cry. I've been both proud and ashamed of this. I'm glad that violence doesn't come easy, but now that I have a daughter, I wish my fight or flight or freeze instincts were, sometimes, fight.
When my daughter was born, she dissolved whatever seams I'd been using to hold myself together. I was never angry at her, never — I was angry at everything else: the world that said it wanted to protect her but did nothing to do so, the way women with children are both martyr angels and invisible ogres, the pandemic, the wildfires, the unending list of tasks, and mostly, myself.
I was no longer a lightning rod; I was lightning. Twice I cracked — throwing a basket of laundry across the room after everyone had gone to bed, and once getting into the car alone and screaming as loud as I could. The scream hurt my ears. I'd been wrong. It wasn't that I was never angry. It's that I never let myself feel it anymore.
I was conditioned to hold my emotions inside and not show them
Just like teenagers, women's emotions are dismissed and belittled —"It's just hormones," "she's just emotional," "overreacting." For women, anger is a loss of control, undesirable, bitchy. A good mother is never angry. For men, anger is perhaps the only emotion allowed — which is its own pain — and it's not only allowed, it's encouraged. For men, anger is power; anger is strength; anger is how you wield control.
Anger is strength. I wanted to feel angry.
So I was excited to break stuff.
It felt like we were doing something wrong
When my friends and I got to the place, we suited up with safety goggles and gloves. We were shown to our room, black walls scuffed from ceiling to concrete floor. On a barrel in the middle was a pile of old cassette players, projectors, and other electronics. We had a basket of glass bottles, two sledgehammers, and two crowbars. We plugged in our playlist. As mothers, we all thought we carried rage ready to spill. We hoisted our sledgehammers.
For a while, we stood there. It turns out that undoing yourself after years of holding it together is not easy. We felt like we were doing something wrong. We were being careful not to hit each other accidentally. We've been conditioned to be nice, to get along, and even letting out anger felt dangerous.
We started with breaking bottles. That was relatively easy, fun, and satisfying. Taking a heavy sledgehammer to a projector took longer to enjoy. We didn't scream or cry. But I started to love the rhythmic swing of the sledgehammer, the way the plastic didn't give until it did. For a few minutes, all we were thinking about was a fight, making a mess we didn't have to clean and finishing something all the way through.
In the end, I was a little heartbroken we weren't able to really lose control. But the rage room wasn't only about rage — instead, we were practicing the freedom to feel whatever we felt and the freedom to make mistakes. Letting go will take practice, maybe a lifetime of it. The next day, my arms ached. Next time, the breaking will be easier.