I have more anger in me than the people around me would ever guess

Dear Delyara, Because I don’t show it in obvious ways. It lives under politeness. Under good parenting. Under practical speech. Under tired smiles. Under competent emails. Under the way I keep moving while privately carrying more than I have language for most days. It shows up sideways — in the sharpness I hear in my own voice sometimes, in how intolerable a small inconvenience can suddenly feel, in how much I need privacy by evening just to stop resenting everybody for being near me. I’m not proud of that. But I’m done pretending the anger isn’t there. I think women are trained to convert anger into acceptability so early and so well that by adulthood it often returns only as symptoms — headaches, withdrawal, numbness, sarcasm, self-attack, exhaustion, depression, distance. I think some of what I have been calling tiredness is anger with nowhere clean to go.