When I was seven, I threw a rock at a boy’s head.

We were alone; our parents momentarily swept away to another part of the vineyard. I tried to focus on anything but him—pleading silently for anything I could use to ignore his words and how they quickened my breath. I tried to focus on the hot Italian sun beating down my neck or the way the rocks poked the soles of my feet through my sandals, but he was moving closer. I could hear his whiny little voice getting louder, rattling around in my skull. He forced me to look at him, grabbing my narrow shoulders with his large hands.

“What are you going to do, idiot? Do you even know what that means? Huh? Ih-dee-yut.”

He pushed me backwards and turned around. His retreating footsteps were muted by the sound of my fingers rummaging through rocks for one aptly sized for my seven-year-old fist. Before I could think too hard about it, I wound up my arm and threw the rock as hard as I could. 

I missed. 

The parents returned to find a crying boy, a shattered back windshield, and a girl with grimy hands. I remember the adults separating us. He received soft coos from his parents, who peppered kisses over his nonexistent wounds. Tender hands swept his cheeks, and gentle arms held him close to their hearts. I received a quiet scolding from my mother.

“That was very mean, Reid.” She was crouching, bringing herself down to my level. “Be my nice little girl, okay?”

I wanted to scream at her. I wanted to scream about how he hurt me, how I wasn’t sorry, how I wanted to pick up another rock and throw it at his head. I didn’t. I couldn’t, because behind my mother’s eyes, past the scolding and disappointment, I saw fear. So I stopped screaming. I wiped the earth off my hands and my anger fizzled out, settling in the pit of my stomach.

Things become blurry after that.

I can’t tell if I regret it now. Maybe that makes me a bad person. All I know is that when I came home from Italy, that kind of violence left the vocabulary of my anger. 

The pain of moving from little girl to young woman can be found in the loss of the ability to release your anger. I want to punch something (I can’t).  I want to throw a tantrum (I would never). My anger is forced to fester inside me until I am so bitter and resentful that it kills me.

Because an angry woman isn’t lovable, she’s crazy. She’s a bitch.

The only person that gets a glimpse of my anger is my dad. He’s the only person I can afford to see me that way.

When my dad and I argue, we yell until we are both red in the face. Our voices shake the foundation of our walls and bring our household to the verge of collapse. The other members of our family clear the area like little mice preparing for a natural disaster. Even my dog, who usually resides in my dad’s shadow, disappears when the shouting starts. 

Though the way we physicalize our anger is different, I know that my dad and I feel it in identical ways. When I am angry, I want to destroy something. I want to thrash around—to kick a wall, to destroy anything within arms reach. My dad does too. I know so because he does it all the time. Our arguments are peppered with the sounds of his palm coming down on our marble countertop and the slamming of drawers. 

I don’t have the freedom to be so openly violent. Instead, I am tense. As I shout, my limbs are glued to my sides like a toy soldier. Even so, my vocal intensity is enough for my dad. He made that clear to me during one of our arguments earlier this year. 

My face was hot. My dad and I stood on opposite sides of the kitchen—a stand-off. An argument that had started over something silly had exploded. 

I was on the brink of tears. 

“I don’t understand why you are so difficult to argue with,” his hands were over his face, muffling his words. 

I didn’t think before I replied. “It’s because I’m the only one who’ll yell back at you.”

Silence. I think both of us might’ve been shocked at my acerbity. 

“Yeah, I guess so.” 

He couldn’t look at me. I didn’t force him to. Instead, I turned around, walked directly to my room, and collapsed onto my bed. 

The moments after my anger are always the same.

I lose it. I sob until I can’t breathe. I’m in agony. It is so painful that sometimes it feels like I won’t survive it. I need the anger to leave my body, and it escapes through tears and fingernail cuts in my palms. The release of anger is so visceral and so painful that it becomes something else: sorrow.

Even when my tears run out, my pain has not. The remainder stirs around in my brain, staining the neural pathways I use to function. I wonder if it has changed the way I think. I’m certain it’s changed the way I experience emotion. I hate it. I hate the way I sometimes feel like I have been moulded into a sad, tired little woman.

Because as much as society hates a mad woman, I think they might love a sad woman even more. 

They love to watch a woman cry. They love the picture she paints, posed just so, her makeup masterfully askew and her clothes perfectly undone. Their eyes are drawn to the way she crumbles to the ground, helpless, pitiful, and oh so small. They can’t take their eyes off of her. They love her. 

She is so achingly tragic and so tragically beautiful.

Oftentimes, after I have cried out all my tears, I feel the urge to take a picture of myself. I want to frame my puffy eyes and the tear tracks running down my cheeks and turn them into something pretty. The camera shutters and shivers kiss my vertebrae tenderly. Once I’ve taken them, they go to a special folder, locked away. These are my most intimate photos. 

The photos are real. Sometimes it feels like my anger is not. Sometimes it feels like maybe, I’ve just always been sad. 

Despite all of this, I would not say that I am an exceptionally sad or angry woman. In fact, I think quite the opposite. I think that I am an exceptionally normal woman feeling exceptionally normal things.