If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention…

Sezane sweater
Pixie Market skirt
Zara boots (similar)
Gucci handbag
Zara sunglasses (similar)
Madewell rings
Elizabeth Lyn Jewelry Cee earrings (c/o)
Location: Maison du Saigon – Winnipeg, Manitoba

…or maybe, you’ve been so angry, for so long, while no one else was paying attention, that your capacity to be angry is at its limit. In light of new abortion bills – also know as “heartbeat bills” – passed in Alabama, Georgia, Ohio, Kentucky and Mississipi, I feel like that’s the point I’ve reached. Of course I’m angry. But I’ve been angry since 2010. Maybe, if I really think about it, since even earlier than that. So am I upset by this latest assault on human rights? (I won’t say women’s rights because we are all human. Women are simply the humans who are disproportionately affected by repeals of human rights laws, particularly women of colour.) Yes. But these new bills are just the latest editions to the litany of injustices I’ve watched women face since I became a woman myself.

At this point, anger is a state of mind for me, not a reaction. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t angry. It’s little things that bother me. For example, the fact that men on airplanes automatically assume that my gender makes me incapable of lifting my own suitcase, and forcibly take it from me, without ever first asking if I need help, to put it in the overhead bin. If the inferiority of women is so ingrained in the fabric of our consciousness, how is it possible that we can avoid injustices like heartbeat bills? If men, as a collective, believe I am not capable of lifting a suitcase, there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell they believe that I have the intellectual capacity required to make decisions about my own body.

The kind of anger I live with, day in and day out, the kind of anger that leads to conclusions like the one I just came to in my last paragraph, isn’t palatable for most people. When I speak up, I sound extreme, even militant. I hear that, “All men aren’t like that.” I hear that I am, “exaggerating.” That all men aren’t, “like that,” is true. But the ones who do see women as equals don’t live in a safe space, either. Those men cannot call out their peers without facing the threat of social stigma, ostracization or even violence. So while there is some validity in the first counter argument, there is none in the second. I am not exaggerating. And the minority of good men not only can’t make up for the bad ones, but they themselves have very limited capacity to effect change among them.

I am angry. But this kind of anger does not only makes me an outsider, someone who is difficult, someone whose propensity for pointing out the truth makes the people around her uncomfortable. It also makes me tired. And jaded. It makes heartbeat bills feel like an inevitability rather than an outrage. I have been so angry for so many years and in that time, things have gotten worse rather than better. So if I don’t seem angry, it isn’t that I’m not paying attention. It’s just that I saw this coming, and there wasn’t a thing I could do to stop it.