Lou Ferrigno Incredible Hulk
Photo Credit: Tom Simpson Flickr via Compfight cc

Caught Between Fire and Stone

Depression paralyzes. Anger motivates. When you get them together? It can feel like you’re a bee flailing at a pane of clear glass, endlessly bouncing off to no effect.

I have been so very angry. It started last November when this country elected a President and filled Congress with people who see me as second class or less than human. Because I’m female. Because I’m queer.

In some ways, that anger was positive. I’m completely out of the closet now, whereas I once kept one foot in the door, selectively choosing who would know and who would not. I’ve stopped censoring myself based on audience. I’ve probably pissed a lot of people off by doing so, but I also realized that those are probably not the sort of people whose opinions I care too much about.

I was always a political monkey, but anxiety kept me from engaging too much. That has ended. I am writing letters. I am making calls. (Scripts help, there.)

These are all good things. And they have all been motivated by anger.

What I haven’t been doing is writing. Because while Anger motivates, it burns up energy like a furnace, and I’m usually starting each day with less energy than I should anyway. So what little time I have to myself in the last few months has mostly been spent lying on the couch, binge-watching Supernatural.

Not, that this isn’t a valid lifestyle choice, but if a girl wants to be a novelist, it’s not going to get her there.

It’s time for me to put that anger, that ball of motivation, into my art. I’m not abandoning the Resistance at all (I’ll still be writing letters and making calls), but adding to it.

Letting this destroy my ability to make my art is just letting them win.

Photo Credit: Tom Simpson Flickr via Compfight cc


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