Calling my anger home
Calling my anger home
on people-pleasing, flamingos, and female rage
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The ceremony ends, and I join the herd funneling downstairs for cocktail hour. I sip a white wine spritzer and make small talk with friends-of-friends, clink the ice cubes in my glass while a man with wild eyes and whiskey breath laments how hard it is to find a 'real man's' version of Trivial Pursuit these days. All anyone sells anymore are bubblegum versions for women and children.
I am split in two.
Static blooms between my ribs, bleeds into my shoulders, a hiss only I can hear. Outwardly I smile, sucker punched by the sound of my own laughter. Every woman I know has a story like this. Why didn't I fucking say something? And for god's sake, WHY did I LAUGH?
The answer, of course, is that I was primed to. That from the moment women are born, this exact reflex is reinforced by a thousand invisible hands until one day I wake up and realize I am fluent in easing tension, allergic to creating it.
Strangely enough, flamingos are not actually born pink. They enter this world not with their signature salmon-pink hue, but as a blank canvas of white and grey.
It is those first few years of dining on brine shrimp and plankton that pinks their feathers and turns them fully flamingo. I can't help but relate, knowing the waters I swim in are at least partially responsible for the cotton candy cloak I've worn for so long, I've rarely stopped to ask who handed it to me.
I never really identified with, or even liked the term 'people-pleasing.' You'd think decades of deference and expertly anticipating other people's needs might have tipped me off, but in fact it took working with a coach at age 31 to see just how well the shoe fit.
I learned that the fear of rejection and abandonment often underpins a people-pleasing habit—a fear I can trace back to a tender age when I learned girls who felt like friends could decide one day they didn't like you anymore. That they could hide behind fake screen names at sleepovers I wasn't invited to, and come for their own. Since then I've been skittish around conflict of any kind, which also meant being terrified of anger. First other people's, and then eventually, my own.
This new ability to see myself and my achilles heel so clearly made me want to help others do the same. I completed coach training, started a tiny coaching business and began sharing content on Instagram that I hoped might help others gently interrogate and understand their own people-pleasing tendencies.
I wrote an article called It's Ok to Be Angry: How (and Why!) to Let Yourself Feel Your Anger that still ranks among the top visited pages on my old website. Every month when I log those metrics, I feel like a fraud.
When did I kick anger out of my house?
There was no blowout fight, no single day I sent her packing. Just a slow estrangement, so seamless I hardly noticed it happening while the world nudged me toward her rosier cousins: nurturing, accommodating, polite.
When anger came knocking for me that day at the wedding, I did not know her. She was a stranger rapping at my door after midnight, while I crouched below the peep hole in an empty house. I froze, fawned, hoped she'd leave.
Every flamingo has a secret layer of darkness: twelve long, black feathers that hide beneath each wing, invisible until the wings are spread. These surreptitious feathers are what allow their avian owners to fly, making them highly functional albeit unseemly next to their blushing counterparts.
Once, an extremely rare all-black flamingo was spotted in a flock of pink brethren on the southern coast of Cyprus. The scientist who observed her cautioned that, while her inky exterior might help her elude predators, "black feathers could make it hard to attract mates with a taste for rosy pink."
She is a warning to the rest of us. Shed your pink and show your underbelly, and seal your fate as undesirable.
These days I ask what it might look like to mother my rage.
What might change if she were not a stranger, but a welcome guest in my home with her very own room? If I donned a crown of black feathers and beamed to anyone who asked, she made this just for me. Would I stand a better chance of not abandoning her—abandoning myself—the next time a man delivers a slight like a pizza I'm supposed to want?
Flight feathers are built to weather more wear and tear than their pinkish peers. The same pigment that turns these feathers black adds a layer of keratin, the same substance found in human fingernails, which helps them stand up to the elements. Without our shadow layer, we become flightless birds: wing-clipped and shaky, handcuffed to a life of smiling while being insulted.
There's a Polish word, jouska, that means a hypothetical conversation one plays out compulsively in their head.
Sometimes in the shower or on long walks I play out braver, crisper versions of my exchange with the man at the wedding. There's one where I interject, feed his words back to him and watch him choke. In another I manage to engage with curiosity and the benefit of the doubt, though it ends in a devastating burn. (Mine.)
In all of them, the same restrained fury ripples through my brows, saying clearly: that shit will not fly here. I meet anger at the door with a smile that says, there's no need to knock, just come on in. You know where we keep the sodas. Make yourself at home. I make her favorite for dinner, put fresh sheets on her bed, pull her in close beneath feathered wing.
Until next time,
Michelle
It’s like you were listening in on my therapy session about people-pleasing! This is so deft and masterful. LOVE
Are you KIDDDDDDDING me with this flamingo tie-in?! Now I love them even more. This was bloody brilliant, my friend. I resonated so much with so many lines, like: "I am fluent in easing tension, allergic to creating it." But I especially loved the descriptions of what it feels like to be a woman in silent rage: "a man delivers a slight like a pizza I'm supposed to want" and "handcuffed to a life of smiling while being insulted." I'm so glad you wrote this piece.