Medicinal Anger

A letter about bitches (for all of us who are afraid of being one)

Dearest reader,

Happy Holidays! I hope you are snuggled into that disorienting period of days between Christmas and New Year’s where we’re allowed to cleave from all ambition and productivity, and melt into sweet, sweet laziness for a while.

I hope this letter finds you gloriously useless.

I’m sitting here on my couch in my newly gifted robe, finally with some free time on my hands that can be used to write to you. I’m glad you’ve joined me.

Because:

This week I find myself thinking about bitches.

Yes, you heard me right.

If I’m honest, and I’ll just launch into it here, the past few weeks I’ve been feeling completely insane.

I’m not sure if it’s astrology, world events, being far too busy at work for the past several months, exhaustion from permanently being the sole holiday magic maker for my family, or – and likely it is this, because it seems to be the source of all things – perimenopause. But regardless of the cause, I’m just feeling unlike myself.

I’m a little sharper than usual. But also a little more fragile than usual? Everything is making me cry, but also, everything is making me angry.

I’m a delight to be around, I can assure you.

Perhaps because I’ve been being one a little more often than is usually characteristic, I’ve been thinking about the term “bitch”: What it means, what it actually looks like, and why it may even be a good thing to be, a little more often than we normally are.

Now, for a person such as myself, who is incredibly sensitive, kind and patient to a fault, and who praises the value of tenderness above all else, you might find this to be a confusing and paradoxical statement.

But hear me out.

I’d like to tell you a story.

Jill

When I was in my early twenties, I worked at a place where all the staff were women.

(okay, aside from the singular male, who was the boss – SHOCKER – but he was largely irrelevant since the women ran the operation anyway and he was outnumbered.)

When I joined, I was onboarded by a super sweet woman who was 3 years my junior, let’s call her Leanne.

Leanne was so nice to me as I learned the ropes. Always smiling. Patient. She went above and beyond to make me feel like I belonged – or would belong eventually – to this new team.

Everyone else on the team talked about Leanne as if she were an angel sent directly from God.

“Oh, you’re working with Leanne? You’re so lucky.”

“Leanne is just the sweetest. What an absolute sweetheart.”

“Leanne is onboarding you? Aw, you’ll have no trouble. Leanne is just the nicest.”

And so on.

As someone who had struggled with being the target of mean girls my entire life, joining a team of women admittedly put me on high alert. So I was grateful to know I’d be working with someone who would be kind to me.

Leanne and I quickly bonded, and became fast friends in just a couple days. Things were looking good.

About a week into my new job, a woman approached Leanne while she and I were working. We hadn’t met yet, though I’d seen her around the office.

When she entered our space, the energy immediately shifted. The room felt palpably colder. I watched Leanne’s shoulders stiffen.

She spoke to Leanne rather sharply, and to my surprise, Leanne spoke sharply back to her. The exchange lasted only a couple of seconds, but it was enough to pique my curiosity.

“That’s Jill,” Leanne said with a huff. “She’s not a bad person, but… she’s kind of a bitch. Watch out for her.”

Ah, I’d found her. The mean girl.

“She’s going through a divorce, and she’s just really bitter because me and Jamie are doing so good. He’s about to propose, you know,” Leanne said, a spark in her eye turning the corners of her cheeks. “She just hates to see other girls in happy relationships because her personal life is such a mess. Her kids are devastated about the divorce. It’s really sad what’s happening in her life, you know? Anyway, steer clear of Jill. And whatever you do, don’t tell her anything good about your relationship. She’ll just be a bitch to you after.”

“How could anyone be a bitch to Leanne?” I thought. “This Jill character must be a real piece of work.”

Since I wasn’t interested in falling prey to Jill’s next attack, I heeded Leanne’s advice. In the coming weeks, whenever Jill entered the room, I exited. I gave us no opportunity to cross paths, wherever possible.

That said, one area where I couldn’t escape was the break room. It was small, and the only space for staff to retreat when not working. The office was located in a dodgy part of town without anything really near or around it, so especially in the cold winter months, it made sense to bring a bagged lunch and eat in the break room.

I made it my mission to remain quiet and relatively invisible when Jill was present, lest I catch her eye. Instead, I observed the dynamics from the corner recesses. When Jill entered, I waited to see her sink her teeth into another victim.

But instead, a strange thing happened.

Jill’s energy did bring a shift to the dynamic, but it wasn’t what I expected.

When she spoke (which was rare), she was a bit gruff, sure, but the things she said were always honest. The truth.

She didn’t sugar coat anything, but her opinions were logical. Fair even.

By contrast, when I watched Leanne through the light of this new energy, I noticed that her signature saccharine countenance seemed a bit… insincere.

I watched how Leanne watched the other women, her eyes darting from one to the next, her words carefully chosen, her movements calculated.

I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but I was perceiving something very real in the group dynamic of these women, and with very real consequences for me.

Through this new lens, I began to look back on my conversations with Leanne.

• Wasn’t it kind of shitty that she’d told me about Jill’s divorce when I hadn’t even met Jill yet?

• Shouldn’t that be something that Jill shared with me directly?

• Wasn’t it odd that Leanne had insisted on telling me about all the ladies, really, before I had a chance to get to know them?

At the time, it had seemed a kindness she was extending. But I now began to wonder if it wasn’t instead a method to shape my place within the group; to form my allegiances for me, before I had enough information to choose them myself.

Over time, I began to distance myself from Leanne, and sit closer to Jill.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the second I started to invest time into getting to know Jill, she appeared truly, honestly, authentically open and kind to me.

There was clearly something in me – perhaps the straightforward, anti-mean-girl-politics part of me – that she instantly recognized.

Jill and I became rather close.

And also, perhaps not surprisingly, Leanne grew colder towards me each day in response. Where she used to be patient, she was irritated. She snapped at me over the smallest mistakes. And she freely groaned at my requests for help, instead insisting that I figure things out on my own.

The tides had turned.

On Bitches

If I’ve learned anything in my 41+ years of being a woman, it is this:

When a sugary sweet girl tells you that another woman is a bitch, she is, in fact telling you who the bitch is. The bitch is herself.

Period.

Time and time again, I’ve seen this same pattern take shape.

Whichever girl is lauded by the group as the “sweet one” is usually a snake. And whoever is labeled the “bitchy one” is usually a clear-headed, no-nonsense, fair play kind of woman.

It comes to look something like this:

1. The mean girl: Sugary sweet on the outside, but cold, calculated, and evil on the inside.

2. The bitch: Cold on the outside, but surprisingly sweet and kind on the inside.

Statistically speaking, I tend to like the bitches way more than the “sweet girls”.

And honestly, I think these two archetypes are woefully mislabeled anyhow.

They’re mislabeled because culturally, women are not raised to be honest and truthful, but instead to be nice above all else.

When we feel an emotion that falls outside the cultural definition of “nice”, rather than express it straight and potentially be excluded from the pack as a result, we find ways to express that same emotion in a “nice way”; a way that looks nice from the outside but stings just the same when it lands.

Mean girls are professionals at disguising their scathing behaviour as nice.

They operate covertly.

Their jabs are expertly engineered so that the recipient feels the prick, but the mean girl can point to the sweet exterior, and somehow herself appear the victim instead.

If you’re someone who is kind, and smart, and – heaven forbid – also pretty, chances are you’ve been targeted by this kind of interaction before.

And, chances are, you’ve been gaslit about whether it actually happened in the first place.

The thing that was said was so innocuous, likely “true” to some extent, and yet wrong and hurtful in a way that you’re unable to put your finger on.

And for that reason, the mean girl remains immune from ever being called a bitch.

Meanwhile, the woman who chooses honesty or bluntness over niceness receives the label instead.

I think that the invasive species of mean girls that has proliferated our world is the direct result of women being forced to do what is nice all the time rather than what is right.

We’re passive aggressive – myself included sometimes – because we don’t know how to be plain, straight aggressive. No one has told us how to communicate our feelings without constantly sugar coating them. We have no role models for telling it like it is.

It makes me wonder: What if the bitches had it right all along?

After all, who is actually the bitch – the person who is open and honest about their intentions, or the one who seeks to conceal their weaponry but strikes nonetheless?

The (New) Angry Woman

Over the holidays, I’ve noticed for myself the ways in which I continue to try to manipulate circumstances to manufacture an environment that I think will make everyone else happy, with very little consideration for how I will feel after it’s done.

I notice how I wind up angry and depleted. And I notice my instinct to give sugary sweet jabs about it, rather than to authentically state how I truly feel – pissed off.

Listen, I’m not in love with the idea of fist fights breaking out all over the place. But I do love the idea of women in the future being able to just be angry instead of having to hide it all the time.

It’s interesting how the mind goes straight to the other option for anger – the historically male representation. We assume that anger, if unchecked, will lead to violence; the dissolution of our social constructs should we let it.

But what if there’s a different path here entirely?

One where we vow to no longer conceal our anger (even, or perhaps especially, from ourselves) but instead learn to communicate it without destruction?

What if we could conjure a vision of women who are allowed to be angry, without immediately believing they are no longer nice?

What if we could be a few different things at the same time?

Perhaps that’s what we’ve really been all along anyway.

Insane

As I mentioned to you at the beginning of this letter, dearest reader, in some ways I feel as though I’m losing my grasp on reality lately.

And in other ways, I wonder if in fact I’m grasping it more firmly than ever before.

Perhaps I’m just lying less about how I’m actually feeling – to myself and to those around me – and I’m coming to terms with a full spectrum of emotion that in the past I wasn’t allowed to access, lest I lose the label of “nice” that I had so desperately sought to obtain.

I’m probably being a bitch more. But I care a little less about it. Maybe because I have a bit of a different definition of the word now.

I’m curious to know: How does this land with you?

Have you ever fallen into either camp: Mean girl or bitch?

Do you struggle to communicate anger without being passive aggressive?

Did you have any encounters with mean girls or bitches over the holidays?

Tell me about it in the comments below. 👇

Sending you so, so much love.

Kyra

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