Trying Times for “The Cool Girl”

I don’t want to be angry–I’ll start there. It isn’t enjoyable to know you’ve been unjustly treated, or that the circumstances of your life are beyond your control. This doesn’t feel good. That’s where I’ll start–by saying that I get absolutely no pleasure from anger. It isn’t a choice I’m making, or a way around really feeling the heaviness of this moment in our global history. I don’t want to be angry, but I am. 

I think a mistake a lot of people make, especially when talking about women, is that anger is the first emotion on the scene–that anger comes first, then the real emotions show up, i.e. sadness, grief, guilt–whatever else is more pleasant to feel. And let’s be real, sadness is SO MUCH more pleasant to feel than anger. Sadness doesn’t ask for anything–I can lay in my bed and feel the weight on my chest and let the waves come, all without feeling the need to act. Sadness is painful, but passive, and anger’s a bitch. It forces a response. 

For a lot of us, anger is a mark of unlovability. The belief that an angry woman is an unlovable woman–that an angry woman is the opposite of the “cool girl”–that an angry woman loses to the effortless one, every time, is a dangerous one. 

To talk about the “cool girl” is necessarily to talk about anger. The Cool Girl doesn’t get angry. The Cool Girl is unbothered–not jaded–but she’s easy in the same way. She is smooth enough to take whatever she’s given without it feeling unjustified. She cannot get angry, because The Cool Girl has no boundaries that can be crossed. She will not feel the need to act out of protection for herself, because no part of her is vulnerable to attack. 

I don’t mean the “bitch” or “mean girl” trope. I don’t mean she’s withholding or cold or stuck up. All of which, by the way, are exactly the same kind of garbage identifiers as “cool girl.” 

What I actually mean is, like, she is unbothered. She doesn’t feel the need to respond with force when she is affected by force. She isn’t angry–this is what I mean. 

Right now, I am curious about her opposite–She is the logical conclusion of a world forcing itself inside her. She is responding to an unjust situation with action. This is what I mean when I talk about an angry woman. 

I have always been proud of the fact that the hard things that have happened to me have not made me hard. I was placed, against my will,  in an underfunded, completely unsanitary psychiatric facility in upstate New York. I was then, a few months later, certified by the state of Colorado to remain in eating disorder treatment for 6 months, where I lost the ability to be under my own power. I was asked to be in a huge amount of mental and physical pain every day, for 6 months–unable to do the things that make life even remotely enjoyable. I have been assaulted. I have been abused. I have withstood a tremendous amount of pain, and I have always been proud that this didn’t make me a callous person. 

I was proud of the fact that I wasn’t angry. 

Recently though, I’ve been unable to contain a substantial amount of anger. I have been more outwardly angry than I’ve been in my entire life, and the people I work with are starting to notice. “Allison is spewing more angry, marxist propaganda” (this was a good one honestly) and “Allison, why are you always so angry?” 

 I was starting to worry, dear reader, that I’d lost my resilience to hard things–that they made me a huge, uncaring bitch after all. 

What I’ve realized lately, dear, sweet reader, is that this isn’t true. I am angry that the patriarchal fucking circle jerk of headass world leaders have lead us “this close to armageddon.” I am angry that we are watching our planet become dangerously uninhabitable while doing next to nothing to stop it. I am angry that I worked three consecutive jobs, with little more than a week between them, during a global pandemic, and still have no savings. I am angry that I can’t get an abortion in the state where I live because religious extemists sit in the highest court in our country. I am angry that we elected a narcissistic, baby, sociopath in 2016, and didn’t riot in the streets. I am angry that people are so beaten down by the circumstances of their lives that they blindly follow this sociopath. I am angry that black and brown people are killed just for existing. I am angry that the minimum wage in Tennessee is $7.25. I am angry that I cannot walk home at night because I am afraid. I am angry that over a million people have died of COVID in this country, and we still don’t care about each other.

We are all angry, and that is a whole goddamn lot of anger not to let out. It is nearly impossible to be The Cool Girl in these trying times, trust me. It is nearly impossible to not be notably, visibly angry–and often. 

But see, I was looking at it wrong. We are angry because hard experiences didn’t make us callous. We are angry because we still fucking care about the circumstances of our lives. The anger is the resilience–it isn’t a bad thing to be angry often, or loudly, or “at the wrong time.” It is not a bad thing to be angry, and it isn’t useless either. It’s quite literally all we have to fight with. 

I don’t know. It doesn’t feel good, and I’m not choosing it, but I’m glad I’m angry. Fuck The Cool Girl. It’s angry girl autumn, or something like that. Whatever. Be pissed, it doesn’t make you unlovable. 

It’s obvious, maybe, but I needed to hear myself say this.

Love you,

A