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This is one of those subjects that feels like it should be broached with a joke. A soft opening. A little anecdote featuring lots of comic relief to fuel the facade, slightly blurring the serious undertone. But here’s the thing, I’m not laughing. Even with a joke I wouldn’t be laughing. So I say let’s burn this whole fucking thing to the ground and just get started. I like being an arsonist in this way; burning things with crude and shocking words. And if I’m honest, I’ve always been a bit of a pyrotechnic. I was the kid who was always silently shoving random things into the campfire to see how they would disintegrate. Twirling the flaming wad of aluminum foil between two supple fingertips. Once I even stuck the soles of my shoes into the flames (while they were still on my feet) and then pressed them together to adhere the hot plastic all while I was sitting criss-cross applesauce. (With the shoes still on my feet.) 

In this particular story I was 20. This was six months ago.

This may all seem very manic to you…perhaps adjacent to random furious scribblings indicating the unraveling that will ultimately result in a villain's origin story. And while these are furious scribblings, I can assure you that I am not just becoming a villain. I’m becoming a lot more, too. This is not my villain origin story, it’s one of becoming whole. I taught myself to be angry to be free. 

I love feeling angry. It has become synonymous with “powerful” to me. It tastes delicious. There’s gravity in that emotion accompanied with a sort of meatiness that makes me salivate and bare my teeth in a wry smile. It thrums between my skin and my ribs and is thick in my throat like an oyster I had swallowed was coming back up whole. It’s a burning in the bosom; a revolution, a “don’t you dare tell me what to do or else I’ll do the exact fucking opposite,” a rebellion that feels as though it’s just yours. Like a raven sitting on a hanging perch right where your heart should be. 

I think I feel this way because it’s something I was always taught not to do. “Be good,” I was taught. And then when I had mastered the “being,” it became hard to seperate the “good” with who I actually was without it and before it. There was no Venn diagram for that. Only two separate circles. 

I began to see a therapist to scavenge for the pieces of myself that I had sacrificed in my soulsucking quest to be good. Her name is Christie. I had suppressed every emotion except happiness for too long, and the consequences of inauthenticity, lack of emotion, loss of self, and wind-ripping-through-me-and-shocking-my-breath-away despair had caught up with me. Christie saw me in a way that I had never felt seen before. 

Which, I guess, is her job. 

Nevertheless, for the first time I felt confident that someone knew what I meant and that I was actually fulfilled and truly heard. Thinking back, I believe it’s because I had never been that honest with anyone, including myself. 

I didn’t want to be “good” anymore. And I still don’t. At least not in the way society depicts it. Just the words “good girl” shoots bile up my throat and makes me want to pull my hand away and his as if I've touched a hot stove top. 

For two years Christie told me over and over, session after session that she could sense a wall in me and if I could just break that wall the anger was there. The fury was there. The emotion was there. She knew I could break it, it would just take time. I believed her, and I knew she could help me. 

Fire is perhaps the most free thing I have ever known. Birds can be caged. Songs can be muted. But fire? It burns. Burns and burns and burns whatever comes into its path. It is beautiful and wild and at times angry. It is light. It provides wonder. It is fertile and tactile with abundant resources. It can be bright or dull or ashy, whatever it wants to be. Coincidentally in a way that I deem as no coincidence at all, every one of these attributes remind me of women. Or at least the woman that I want to be. And I don’t want to have to hide that fire. Especially not to make other people more comfortable. I don’t want to douse it with “good,” I want to stock it with “free.”

I remember the first time I felt it–the fire. All of those culminated years of refusing to feel had snowballed to a point where I was lifted out of myself staring down at my physical form. I was a genie and the lamp was my body. The raw sensation filled my heart with sparks and laughter and disbelief and made me want to scream until it bubbled up in my chest and frothed at my mouth. It felt like I was going to be turned inside out from the way I wanted my lungs to explode that fork scratching a plate sound. I had never felt so much anger in my entire life, and I loved it.  

This was the first time I had felt free in as long as I could remember. Christie marveled at me with loving tears nearly kissing her cheeks as I experienced this body-mind-soul-morphing moment. “This is the wall I was telling you about. And you fucking tore through that sucker today.” 

In Glennon Doyle’s book Untamed she gifts the audience with a quote by John Steinbeck: “and now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.” But Doyle takes us one step further when she expands the permission to, “and now that we don’t have to be good, we can be free.”

And I taught myself that. I taught myself to be angry, I taught myself to be free. 

Chloe's personal essay won first prize in SVA's Annual Writing Contest in the spring of 2022. She is a sophomore majoring in Illustration at the School of Visual Arts. She is so excited, thankful, and honored to have her work shared by The Match Factory. judges Xan Price & Mark Curley have this to say about Chloe's work: "This essay really 'burns it to the ground' with its joyous and rambunctious description of how a 'good girl' becomes free by unleashing her inner rage. With very original and painfully personal imagery, this essay is honest, confrontational and very funny. This writer has the skills of a verbal arsonist, breaking through their emotional numbness in a way that demonstrates not self-destruction but a crackling emotional intelligence."