A couple of weeks ago, I went with my woo-woo friend—we all need one—to something called Rage Club.
We traveled up a bumpy road. And I mean BUMPY—like heads-hitting-the-roof bumpy.
We finally pulled up to a random house.
I don’t know what I was expecting for a thing called Rage Club, but when I rolled up to the home, I did consider whether I was on the way to my death.
But I went inside.
There were 23 other people in the room. We were asked to put our things off to the side, and then we circled up and started talking about what anger meant to us.
People shouted out random words and phrases.
“Anger means shame.”
“It’s ugly.”
“It’s dangerous.”
“You lose control.”
I knew this was going to be my kind of place. We were taking mental models and putting them on the table to interrogate.
Yes. I literally just wrote a book about this. Giddy up.
Then, they said it. “Practice.”
Oh, hell yeah. Woo-woo, indeed.
And when it was my turn to practice, I surprised myself. A couple of times.
The Bucket
The first exercise involved screaming into a bucket.
When they handed it to us, I assumed the bucket was there to help with the noise.
Nope.
They told us that sometimes people get so emotional that they vomit.
Great. I’m about to sit in a really, really loud room where people are screaming, crying, and potentially puking into buckets. Fun.
Fortunately, I didn’t go first. I watched a room full of people just screaming, listening to accounts of bad relationships, abuse, and grief. People sobbed and shook. They screamed things they had probably swallowed for decades.
I sat there wondering what I really had to be angry about compared to all of this.
This is one of my favorite tricks, by the way. Comparison. It is very efficient way to disqualify your own feelings without ever having to deal with them. Someone else had it worse or a better reason. Someone else deserves the bucket more.
But then it was my turn. I sat in the chair.
And without thinking I started screaming about the thing that makes me the most enraged…public schools.
I screamed about systems that claim to serve children while repeatedly choosing adult comfort.
I screamed about the meetings, “interventions,” and the horseshit initiatives that allow us to feel productive without requiring us to ask whether a child is actually learning.
I screamed about blaming kids for disengaging from experiences that were never designed to engage them.
I screamed about how much we say we care and how often caring seems to stop exactly where inconvenience begins.
Apparently, I did have something to be angry about.
Stop
The next exercise seemed simple. A person walked toward you, and you had to tell them to stop.
I channeled my best “hey, kid. I just told you to put your hoodie down” energy.
“Stop.”
The person kept walking.
“Stop.”
It wasn’t working. It turns out I don’t really care if you have a hoodie on. I can correct it. I can enforce the rule. I can even use my Serious Administrator Voice.
But rage? No. I was performing authority.
I got coached. “Imagine it is a safety concern.”
“STOP.”
Boom. There she was. Rage came to be protective.
Don’t mess with safety. Don’t endanger my kids. Don’t interpret my calm as permission to cause harm.
I didn’t need to manufacture the anger. It was already there, attached to something I value.
And that made me wonder how often we confuse anger with ego. How often do we raise our voices because something sacred is actually at risk? And how often do we raise them because someone failed to obey us quickly enough?
The Person
The final exercise was the most challenging.
We had to identify the person who tapped most directly into our rage.
Around the room, people named the expected ones: abusers, former partners, parents. People who had hurt them, betrayed them, controlled them, or made them afraid.
The person who came up for me?
Me.
I opted not to participate in this role. I could not imagine being held back while yelling in my own face.
But I didn’t really need the exercise. I could already hear what I would say.
How could you think alcohol was more important than your life?
You betrayed everyone because you couldn’t handle your shit.
You call yourself a mother?
An educator?
How did you let yourself become that person?
The shame spiral still comes back in waves.
Four years ago today, my spouse had to keep me on suicide watch. The next day I checked myself in. In my brain, I had lost everything. I could not imagine continuing to live with a bitch like me.
The bitch who who hid wine in her car and could not make it through a fucking day without booze.
The bitch who lied.
The bitch who disappeared while still technically standing in the room.
The bitch who was supposed to be a mother and an educator and a leader and could not even be trusted alone with herself.
“FUCK YOU!”
I snapped back into the Rage Room. I had been asked to stand in as the person who was the source of someone else’s rage.
And she had a reason to be full of it. Tears streamed down her face as she screamed at me.
“You can’t hurt me anymore.”
Tears streamed down mine.
But I can.
But I Can
I thought I had come to practice rage toward the people and systems that hurt us. I had not considered the possibility that the person who still had the greatest capacity to hurt me was me.
I wish I could tell you that this realization unlocked something beautiful and that I walked back down the bumpy road lighter. It would be nice to report that I forgave myself in a random house while someone burned sage and rang a sound bowl.
I did not.
I still know exactly where to stab her. I know which memories to pull out. I know which names to say. I know how to take four years of evidence that I have changed and dismiss it with one image of a bottle hidden in a car.
I know how to put the old version of myself on trial and I never lose the case. I am the prosecutor, the judge, the witness, and the executioner.
I call it accountability but I am not sure that is what it is. Accountability asks what happened, who was harmed, what needs to be repaired, and what must change. Shame skips all of that and goes straight to the verdict. This is who you are.
I have spent years helping people interrogate the scripts that keep them stuck. I wrote a whole damn book about it. Apparently, there was an asterisk. Offer not valid for the author.
I tell teachers that current evidence is not a life sentence. I tell leaders that practice can produce a new identity. I tell people that the patterns protecting them may also be preventing them from becoming who they want to be.
I believe people can change. I have watched them do it.
I just keep acting like I am the exception.
Accountability was never supposed to mean handing shame a permanent key to the house.
A Different Kind of Protection
Rage does not always have to destroy something. Sometimes it stands guard.
It can step between me and the voice that keeps dragging the worst version of me back into the room. That voice that knows exactly which memories to use—the bottles, the lies, the hospital, and every person I disappointed.
Rage can look at that voice and say, “No. You do not get to hurt me anymore.”
I’m still not sure I am ready to forgive everything. Some days, I am not even sure what forgiveness is supposed to look like. But I am beginning to understand that I cannot punish myself into becoming a better person. I cannot hate the old version of me into healing. I cannot keep reopening the wound and calling it responsibility.
Four years ago, I could not imagine living with a bitch like me. Today, I am trying to stop using that sentence as a weapon.
When the old voice starts walking toward me, carrying every piece of evidence it has collected against me, I know what I am supposed to say.
I am still learning to mean it.
Stop.
If you know someone who is struggling, 988 is the crisis hotline.
Sister, this resonated so much. So many unexpressed emotions we carry, especially if we are trying to live our lives AND battle the beast of inequity and injustice in public education.
You are not alone. Thank you for sharing this.