The List Keeps Growing

On rage, recourse, and what we swallow to keep functioning in a world that keeps confirming our worst fears

There is a specific kind of shock that doesn’t make you scream. It makes the sound disappear. The days after the Epstein files surfaced felt like that - like a bomb had gone off and taken all the noise with it, leaving only a low, pulsating current of rage that grew and grew the less anything happened in response.

And the rage. Oh, the sacred and holy rage. The rage we have all been conditioned to avoid. The rage we have been shamed into not embracing. Anxiety? Yes. Sadness? Yes. Anger? Absolutely not. And we have to ask why. Why do we feel so much shame about that which is so powerful? Why are the emotions that keep us small and disempowered perfectly acceptable, but the one emotion with the potential to unlock something - that's the one we can't feel without judgment?

I have experienced significant rage following the violation of my personal trainer and the many other violations that followed. I have been shamed for it over and over again. I have been told it is toxic. Told it is not worth my energy. Told I am not spiritual enough because I succumb to it. This very morning, while writing this, a stranger (man, of course) messaged me saying I should model my response after Elizabeth Smart and move on with my life. As if survival that looks palatable to men is the only kind worth having. As if there is a prized way to move through the world as someone who has been repeatedly violated by men.

I never really made friends with my rage - until recently. I’m starting to understand why they don’t want us to.

Because here is the thing about rage: it is a completely reasonable response to an unreasonable and deeply sick world. It is information. It is the body saying something is wrong here with enough force that you cannot look away. The problem isn’t the rage. The problem is what we’ve been taught to do with it - which is nothing. Swallow it. Convert it into anxiety, which is acceptable. Convert it into sadness, which is palatable. Medicate it. Move on.

So eventually, because you have to, you tuck it away. You make the snacks and the lunches. You go to the birthday parties. You pull at the threads of your own wounds trying to make sense of something bigger, and you do what women have had to perfect over generations - you compartmentalize and you carry the fuck on. Because there is a life to live and a family to take care of and a raging tornado serves none of it.

And then.

On a Wednesday afternoon in mid-April, we learn of a global rape network. 62 million site visits in a single month. And before the weight of that number can even land, there are men in comment sections mansplaining that it’s not 62 million men, it’s 62 million clicks - and every woman reading it wants to pop their heads off like dandelions and scream what does that even matter?!?

We are so tired of debating the details of our own violation.

Because we all have details. Every single one of us. We carry them in our bodies, in the things we explained away that don’t feel so explainable in hindsight, in the drunk friend who took it too far, in the coaches and the trainers and the men in positions of power who knew exactly what they were doing. We know this pain with an intimacy we never asked for and many of us carry it under a huge veil of secrecy and shame.

And now we are learning of men rallying in comment sections the way you would for a kid going to a championship. Except it’s not a championship. It’s a man drugging and raping his wife with a cup of tea. A tea that you must envision the wife receiving with gratitude. For how lovely it must feel to be comforted with a warm cup of tea by your loving husband. Why would anyone suspect. It’s knowing what the “eye check” is when you never knew such a horror existed before Wednesday. It’s sitting with the fact that there are that many men visiting places like this - and then wondering how many of them you passed in the grocery store this morning. How many are in your contacts. How many you smiled at and said have a nice day.

There is no trust anymore.

And just because this site got taken down doesn’t mean the practice is gone. They are all still doing it. Epstein’s network is still active. Nothing has changed. Our individual traumas activate and re-activate as the next wave surfaces - and still we are expected to log into our team meetings and say nothing from me, thanks.

Weinstein. Me Too. The Epstein files. The coaches. The priests. The gymnastics doctors. The fathers. The husbands. The creepy uncles. Now a rape network with 62 million visits in a single month. Each one was supposed to be the moment. Each one cracked something open. Each one produced the think pieces and the hashtags and the hearings and the documentaries, and then the news cycle moved on and the men who run things kept running things and we were left holding the weight of it, again, while the world asked us to please keep functioning normally. And you’d be a lot prettier if you’d smile while doing it.

Trump still runs this country. There has been no recourse from the Epstein files. The list keeps growing and the accountability never comes. And when a woman fights back - when she has video evidence of her own husband raping her while she slept - she is told she could have been faking it. It took four years of court battles, her sons bullied throughout, to get him eight years. Eight years! We are supposed to call that justice and move on.

The cycle just keeps spinning. Collective outrage, hashtags, a news cycle, nothing changes, we carry on, and then the next wave hits and we do it all over again. We are broken and burnt out and we keep fighting anyway. What the fuck.

My daughter’s innocence slaps me in the face when I look up from my phone. I’m holding a picture of the “eye check” in this black box in my hands while my daughter’s beautiful and very alive eyes look at me with so much hope and radiance. That woman in the picture was a little girl once. She may have children of her own.

Moving through the world right now feels like swimming through toxic tentacles. Every glance lands differently. The man tailgating me while I’m already going five over feels like a threat I have to calculate in real time - I want to slam my brakes and cause a ruckus but I am a woman in this world who also has to fear her safety. That’s the math we do constantly, invisibly, without anyone asking us to and without anyone thanking us for it.

This morning I have a dentist appointment. A male dentist. I am going to walk in there and sit in that chair and let a man put his hands in my mouth and I am going to smile and say thank you, have a nice day when it’s over. Because that is what we do. That is what we have always done. We swallow the rage and the grief and the exhaustion and we smile and we show up and we carry on, because the world does not pause for our fury no matter how justified it is.

We are not crazy. We are not overreacting. We are not too angry or too sensitive or too political.

Men have no fucking idea how hard it is to swallow this all down and keep going. How we all carry our own individual stories most people will never know. And then these collective waves come and drown us all, and the only thing we’re allowed to do is keep our heads above water long enough to pack the lunches and show up to the meeting and smile at the dentist.

But I am done swallowing it.

The rage is not the problem. It never was. It’s the only honest response left. And I would rather be a woman who is too angry than a woman who is quiet enough to make any of this easier for the men who built it.