If angry women manage to successfully hide their inconvenient feelings, they are praised for being "strong." So often, "strong woman" is used to mean "a woman who doesn’t complain." At most, we are allowed to speak about fear, about upset. Society can cope with girls who are "broken" — but girls who burn with fury are a problem, and they need to be controlled. Whenever my friends and I have to deal with harassment, abuse, and threats from people who would rather we not talk about women’s rights, we can expect some sympathy as long as we talk only about how frightened we are. But we’re not just frightened. We’re furious. We’re livid, because what is happening to us is unfair and unjust.

Boys learn to disguise their hurt and vulnerability as anger — girls, all too often, learn the opposite. Unfortunately, denying your anger does not make it disappear. It grows in the dark, away from daylight, into something twisted and unhealthy, eating away at you from inside. When I was a teenager and going through a difficult time, I didn't know what to do with my rage, so I treated it like a stained shirt and turned it inside out, keeping the rancor close to my skin where nobody could see. I directed my frustration inward and took it out on my own body, hurting and starving myself. In the slow, painful years of recovery, I learned that there were better ways of dealing with my anger, and I didn't have to be afraid of it. Part of me was always afraid that if I stopped hurting myself, I would start hurting other people — but anger does not have to lead to violence.

Anger is not the same as hatred, although it's easy to confuse the two, especially in a political climate where hatred of others comes easy and rational rage is met with mockery. Anger is a feeling. Hatred is an action. Hatred is anger applied indiscriminately, anger attached to cruel — rage reworked into an excuse to lash out at another person because of who or what they are. Anger itself is no more or less than the human heart rebelling against injustice, real or imagined, and often it has damn good reason.

It’s all right to feel angry. It’s all right to feel anything, in fact — as a society, we still fail to distinguish between emotions and actions, but it’s what we do, not what we feel, that delineates the difference between right and wrong. What matters is not how angry you feel, but what you do with it. Choosing to control your rage, to use it for good, is better by far than squashing it down or letting it eat you away from inside. Anger can be useful. It can keep you moving and working when you want to give up. It can give you courage when you need it. It can focus your attention on what has to change, in your life, in your community. Anger can be a tool as well as a weapon, and it’s a tool we shouldn't let rust away and never learn to use.

We worry too much about how men and boys will respond to our anger. One of the things I hear most often when I speak about female anger is that angry women are unattractive. This is supposed to end the discussion, because more than anything else, women and girls are supposed to want to be attractive. If we let on that we're cross, boys won't want to date us, especially not if it's them we're cross with. If we show our teeth, nobody will love us. I’m here to tell you that that’s not true. Being honest about my anger has made me surer in myself, and my life is now gloriously full of friends and partners who don’t require me to take up less space. The responsibility of making men feel safe and unthreatened was interfering with my plan of taking down the patriarchy and helping to build a world where the common human experience of being a woman doesn’t have to hurt so much. As far as I'm concerned, boys who want to be with only "cool, chill girls" should try dating in the morgue.

As I’ve grown up, I’ve stayed angry — but my anger has grown up, too. It has boiled down and condensed into something strong and subtle, something that I can control. Writing out my rage is cathartic — and useful, too. I’m lucky that my coping mechanism is also my career. Plenty of women are angry, and why wouldn’t they be? It's bad enough that women and girls are still being attacked and undermined, as individuals and as a group — when our basic rights to health care are stripped away, when we are blamed for the violence that is done to us and shamed for our sexuality, when we have to get up every day and deal with racism and homophobia and class prejudice. It's bad enough that we still have to fight to be treated as full, equal human beings without also being shamed and silenced if the whole situation makes us furious. Yes, we're angry. Why shouldn't we be? Why aren't you?

Related: Why We ALL Need to Be Activists Right Now

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