Some time ago, during a period when I felt mentally blocked and didn’t know what to write, I reread the letter I had uploaded to this site—the spark that made me realize I both needed and wanted to write. Until then, I had never seen writing as something that could become work, since I had always considered it an extremely personal way of communicating. Through writing, in fact, I have always processed my thoughts and expressed my feelings toward others (those who know me are well aware that for important occasions, my little letters are a must).

And yet, there are things I can’t manage to write about—emotions I struggle to express but which I know are always there, present. I realized this while rereading some of the other articles I’ve written, and I think there’s an underlying emotion that connects most of them: anger.

So, I set out to understand where this emotion comes from, why we feel it, and how we can manage it. I came across various psychological studies, but their scientific explanations didn’t leave me particularly satisfied. What I did learn, however, is that anger, in general, is a universal emotion within the human experience—recognized and felt by every human being. We all get angry, no one excluded. Emotions also have, first and foremost, an adaptive function: they are “coordinated responses of cognitive, physiological, and behavioral systems to changes in the environment.” Anger, for example, awakens in us the instinct to defend ourselves in order to survive—whether in response to an injustice, a wrong, or the perception that our rights have been violated.

However, like all emotions, anger is strongly influenced by how we perceive the situation we are involved in. This emotional state is determined by the meaning we attribute to events, and in this way, anger can become maladaptive: it is handled and expressed in a counterproductive way, toward ourselves and others, creating suffering, damaging relationships, and pushing us to act destructively. So yes, anger is universal, but the triggers, intensity, and management vary from person to person. Some get angry often, some claim they “never” get angry, some yell, some insult you, some turn red in the face, some raise their voices, some become aggressive, and others stay silent, trying to repress or hide it.

As I wrote earlier, these explanations weren’t much help to me—except that now I can scientifically say that I am one of those people who “never get angry, but when they do, it’s devastating.” The type of person who carries latent anger inside, which sooner or later will erupt and hurt both herself and others. Rereading my articles, however, I think I recognized two slightly different kinds of anger: one that comes from a purely personal situation, and another from a collective one. Clearly, I won’t bore you with my personal problems (you’ve been spared), but it’s obvious that my subjective way of dealing with anger mirrors what happens on a collective level.

I am someone who tends to repress anger, never expressing it outwardly—not even in writing. I suppress it until a trigger makes it explode, causing me to lose control of myself, my thoughts, and my emotions. But I don’t let anger flow, I don’t release it (I could probably resolve things with a good fight or an outburst, but evidently, I can’t). Instead, I shut down, keep it inside, and force myself to repress it even more. I don’t know why I do this; sometimes I wish I could just yell at someone, say what I really think, but I can’t. I’m literally like a swing, oscillating between moments of self-control and moments of losing it. And I know very well this is a huge waste of energy: anger has immense propulsive force, consuming vast amounts of physical and mental energy. Learning to redirect it, to use it creatively, could lead us to extraordinary things.

Aware of this and still searching for answers, I remembered a book I had read a couple of years ago. Rereading it was a revelation, giving me the answers I had been looking for. The book is Liberati della brava bambina by Andrea Colamedici and Maura Gancitano. It tells eight stories of women—figures from mythology, films, and TV series—that reveal aspects of what is called “the problem with no name”: how social conditioning influences women’s lives.

Through these stories, even though they are fictional, Colamedici and Gancitano show—and prove—that all women are linked by a shared history, a shared genealogy. And unfortunately, this history is not all roses and sunshine; it is marked by submission, violence, abuse, and silence. We all, in some way, carry within us the story of those who came before us—in joy, but above all in the pain of those who fought for their freedom and self-realization. Some of our personal fears are shared by many of us: the fear of not achieving our goals, the fear that obstacles will always block our path, the fear of being silenced, the fear of not being taken seriously, the fear of carrying too many burdens. And yet, we continue to endure all this, victims of a narrative that imposes silence.

It is impossible to deny that today’s society still imposes conditioning and standards on us—standards that must be overcome if we are to be treated first and foremost as human beings. Because this is something rarely acknowledged: the social constraints we face prevent us from expressing our true potential, from being recognized as carriers of value—whether economic, social, cultural, or simply human. Instead, society has advanced so far that it has designed every possible hobby for us: we become influencers, we buy endless products and clothes to fill closets, we diet to be thinner, we push ourselves in sports—all to meet imposed social standards. The price, however, is the loss of ourselves and our human value.

These examples, also listed in the book’s introduction, answer a question I’ve been asking myself for months: the truth is, girls, we are profoundly distracted. Distracted into following these standards as though it were a competition to see who achieves them first and best. Distracted by a society that gives us every possible “consolation prize” so we can be happy in our bubbles and stay silent, not disturbing the status quo. Distracted by a society that asks us to contain ourselves, not to be “too much,” but that will ultimately only lead us to never be “enough.” We are asked to be mothers—but not too much, because we also have to work, even though we’ll never be enough as mothers or as autonomous individuals. We are asked to be financially independent—but never “masculine” enough to truly achieve it. We can’t be too beautiful, or else we’re sluts, but we can’t be too unattractive either, or else we’re invisible. So we’ll never be beautiful enough. We can’t be too thin, but not too fat either—yet we’ll never be thin enough. We live in constant oscillation between one social convention and another, always feeling incomplete. This happens because we lose sight of ourselves, our passions, our values, and our right to choose freely. And this feeling of incompleteness makes me deeply angry.

Which brings me back to our old friend, anger, and to the book mentioned earlier. Anger is described as a “latent emotion,” always ready to explode, even though women tend to repress and hide it: “an inner worm, an incessant mechanism working inside her, constantly hurting her, never ceasing.” And we constantly ask ourselves if this is really true—if this relentless anger inside us will ever go away. Andrea and Maura try to answer this by recounting the story of Maleficent, recently reinterpreted in the film Maleficent.

The film tells the untold story of Sleeping Beauty: a tale of pain, resentment, vengeance, and anger. In both the Disney classic and the remake, Maleficent is portrayed as wicked, evil, and profoundly angry. But where does her anger come from? The film shows that all her pain and resentment stem from betrayal—one of the most devastating betrayals a woman can suffer. Maleficent is betrayed by the man who claimed to love her. This betrayal is not just personal, wounding her feelings for him, but also systemic: a man choosing ambition and thirst for power over love for another human being. Stefan not only abandons her, but literally cuts off her wings. Maleficent’s pain is immense, and her scream “brings back to the surface all the pain accumulated by women who have been betrayed, whose wings have been cut.”

The betrayal and disappointment become an obsession for Maleficent, keeping her chained to the past, making her feel “a weight inside that prevents her from flying.” This weight is shared by all the women who carry that same pain—not necessarily from betrayal, but from all the social conditioning that prevents women from soaring as high as they could. “She could be an eagle, but instead she is forced to drag herself, to struggle for everything, as if a hand constantly pushed her down.”

So how do we face this anger? Anger is energy, fuel, and it must find an outlet. Yet neither venting it nor repressing it seems to work. Releasing it often backfires—we’re dismissed as exaggerated, not taken seriously. Repressing it, staying docile and quiet, only makes it accumulate. Either way, we explode or implode, and in both cases, we lose a part of ourselves—a part we are not lacking in, but, as psychoanalyst Marina Valcarenghi says in the book, a part we have been deprived of.

We convince ourselves “there is nothing we can do to return to who we truly are, to reclaim and express our power again. And so we convince ourselves it’s better to just spend our time defending ourselves with our nails from the enemy, the villain, the oppressor, the cause of our pain: men.” And here it is—that inexplicable anger against the opposite gender, that latent anger that resurfaces in all of us every time a woman is killed, beaten, or insulted. It is the anger that unites us, but also divides us.

Maleficent is an example of this too. If anger finds no outlet, the risk is to project it onto others, making them victims of the same fate. The competition that arises among women is strongly tied to unprocessed anger, fueling the very same patriarchal power dynamic that men exercise over women. Younger generations of women can be condemned to the same fates as their mothers, who could not heal their own wounds. But competition and anger turned against other women only continue to wound us—both as individuals and as a collective. Maleficent pours all her anger onto Aurora, Stefan’s innocent daughter, who had nothing to do with the causes of Maleficent’s rage. In her desire for revenge, Aurora is condemned to a cruel fate—yet vengeance cannot heal the wound; it only creates another.

So how do we overcome this conflict and at the same time reclaim our personal power? We must learn to transform anger. Anger is energy, and we must learn to channel it creatively. Audre Lorde, African American poet, writer, and activist, wrote that “every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought it into being.” If directed in the right way, it can become a source of energy for progress and change. In the context of a still deeply racist America, Audre stated that “women’s anger can transform difference into power through insight. Because anger among peers fosters change, not destruction, and the discomfort and sense of loss it often provokes are not fatal, but signs of growth.”

We must learn to recognize ourselves even in those moments when anger can become a driving force that leads to cooperation and solidarity. For this to happen, we must tell our stories—both personal and collective. We must show and demonstrate that trauma does not necessarily lead us into oblivion, but can propel us upward. It is a force that can allow us to reclaim those wings and take flight again.

“To transform anger means to learn how to express our creativity, to learn how to listen to our deeper selves that demand to be expressed and told.”

Perhaps this is what I’ve been trying to express all along: the anger and indignation I carry within me as a woman. Because the narrative about women remains wrong—extremely belittling and superficial. It does not see us as complex beings with values, ambitions, and desires. It does not represent our depth, our occasional contradictions (as if men were exempt from those). We are simply not allowed to be more than what society dictates.

And yet, I feel deeply, profoundly angry.