I Forgot I’m Not Allowed to Be Angry

Why I insist on being a woman who expresses a full range of emotions

Y.L. Wolfe
Fearless She Wrote
Published in
6 min readMay 30, 2020

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Photo by Kasra Karimi on Scopio

I’m a nice woman. It’s probably the first thing people who know me would say about. I’m nice. I’m gentle. I’m soft-spoken. I’m compassionate.

I am proud of these qualities and I work my ass off to maintain them. People think being nice, gentle, and compassionate is easy. No, effortless. Especially for a woman. (It’s how we’re expected to express our femininity, after all.)

But you know what? It’s hard work. It demands that I shut my mouth more often than not and listen to other people. It necessitates constantly acknowledging the fact that everyone is going to have their own perspective and that I have to celebrate that fact. It obligates me to ceaselessly ask myself what I can give up, let go, and forgive. And it requires me to immediately dissociate myself from anger when it rises within me — or at least to try — so that I can interact in peace or choose not to engage in conflict.

Anger is not nice. Anger is not gentle.

But over the past year, I’ve been questioning my lifelong decision to maintain my conduct as a “nice woman.” I’ve been questioning the validity of my determination to sidestep anger.

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Y.L. Wolfe
Fearless She Wrote

Gender-curious, solosexual, perimenopausal, childless crone-in-training. | Newsletter: http://eepurl.com/gleDcD | Email: welcome@yaelwolfe.com