I went to watch The Odyssey recently, and there's a scene in it I haven't been able to put down since.

Penelope, queen of Ithaca, has held the kingdom together alone for twenty years, fending off suitors, keeping the palace from collapsing, keeping a whole nation running while her husband Odysseus is off at war and presumed dead (you know, regular life as a woman). Then Telemachus, her own son, tells her, like he's being helpful: "It's time to choose a new husband." He says it as though the whole thing could be solved and the kingdom saved by simply installing another man beside her.

She turns on him with a fury that has burned off every last trace of grief. Twenty years of holding an entire kingdom up with her own hands, and the one thing anyone can offer her is to disappear back into a man, as though the only version of her that counts is the one standing next to a king.

I felt it move through my body like a current, my breathing going shallow and fast, my palms fisted like I was ready to hit someone, heat climbing up my face. The emotions that came were partly grief, but mostly they were the rage taking over, but underneath all of it a single thought kept surfacing: when is this ever going to end for us.

I have never in my life felt so seen by a fictional woman, and I left that theatre unable to stop thinking about it, because I know that rage intimately. I have watched it move across the faces of women I love, women I have never met, and women who sit across from me in therapy every single week.

I want to talk about it. I haven't figured it out and I'm not going to pretend otherwise, but I think a great many of us are carrying this thing alone, and the truth is that we don't have to.

Anger has a target. Rage doesn't.

Real anger usually knows where to point itself, because someone did something, and you can name it and confront it and sometimes even resolve it, which is to say that anger moves.

Rage is what happens when there is nowhere for the anger to go, when the thing that hurt you isn't a person you can face down but a system that is invisible and everywhere. It's older than you, older than your mother, older than her mother. You cannot confront a system over dinner, you cannot make it apologise. You cannot always point to a single moment and say there, that is the injury, because the injury is the accumulation, every small moment stacked on every other small moment until one day a woman in a movie says a single sentence and the whole of it comes down on you at once, in a dark theatre, and you find yourself gripping the armrest like it owes you something.

That is what rage is: what remains behind when your anger has nowhere legitimate to land.

The system that needs you invisible

Think about the kind of labour Penelope did, keeping a kingdom from falling apart. All while everyone around her assumed it would hold on its own, raising a son alone and shielding him from men who would have used him, or worse, to reach the throne, holding off a hall full of suitors for years and managing their egos and their threats without ever fully saying yes or fully saying no, because either answer could have gotten her or her son killed.

That is the kind of labour so many of us do too. We keep a household running that everyone assumes runs itself, and we manage the moods and the schedules and the unspoken needs of everyone around us while being expected to have none of our own. We hold a career together with one hand and a family with the other, and somehow we are still the one who remembers the doctor's appointments, the birthdays, the school forms, and the fight that nobody else noticed was brewing. We field the quiet demands of people who expect to be managed without anyone ever naming that they are being managed, a difficult boss, a controlling relative, an in-law who tests every boundary we set, because saying no outright always costs more than simply absorbing it.

It only works if no one notices that it is being done, because the moment it becomes visible, it becomes a demand, a debt that someone else has to acknowledge and repay. So the system doesn't just ask us to do the holding, the feeding, the fixing, the keeping of everything from falling apart; it asks us to do all of it quietly and invisibly and gratefully.

And if we don't, if we point at it and say "I am doing this, please see that I am doing this", then we become the problem, the ones who are too much and too loud and ungrateful. Other women have it worse, you know, as if our pain only counts once it is the worst pain in the room, as if noticing our own exhaustion were a kind of moral failing.

So we learn to swallow it, and we learn to be grateful instead of honest, and nothing we swallow ever really goes anywhere; it simply joins the rest of it, sitting low in the body, waiting.

I think that is what the scene cracked open in me: twenty years of being essential and invisible at the very same time, twenty years of holding a kingdom together with her own two hands, and the one solution anyone can offer her at the end of all of it is to disappear into a husband, as though that were how you fix a thing like this.

What I don't tell my clients about rage

I sit with women who carry this every week. We name it together, we trace it back, we say the sentence out loud in the room, the system is rigged and you already know it, and for a moment something in there loosens. There is real relief in being believed, in having someone say yes, you are not imagining this, you are not too sensitive, you are not ungrateful.

Then the session ends, and she goes back out into the same system, and so do I.

I don't know what to do with this rage either. I am a therapist and this is supposed to be my area, and I have sat with more grief and more fear and more shame than I could begin to count and found some kind of way through it with people. But this particular rage, the one that comes from fighting something that will not move no matter how much of yourself you burn trying to move it, is the one I have not solved, not for my clients and not for myself.

Sometimes the only way I know how to handle the rage of not knowing how to handle the rage is to pretend that it isn't there at all. I tell myself that things are fine, that life is good, that I need only look at everything that is working, and it holds for a while, until something small happens, a comment, a scene in a film, a moment that should not even register, and the whole thing comes rushing back up and I realise that I never dealt with it, I only got very good at not looking at it. So I push it back down again, behind the version of me that has it together, the one who shows up for her clients and seems fine, because pretending is easier than sitting with the fact that I don't have an answer.

Pretending that things are fine and accepting them are not the same act, however alike the two of them look from the outside. Acceptance means facing what is true, while pretending only means looking away and quietly hoping that the truth will look away too.

I have been told, more than once, to just accept that this is how it is, that I would suffer less that way, and maybe that is even true, maybe acceptance really would loosen the grip this has on my chest. But I can't stop asking whether accepting it means also accepting the treatment, and whether letting go of the rage means letting go of the fight, because everything I believe and everything I have built my work around tells me that I am not meant to make peace with this, that I am meant to push against it.

So I hold both of them at once, the exhaustion of carrying the rage and the fear that setting it down would mean giving up, and neither of them feels survivable for very long.

Why I don't let it out

I know exactly why I don't let this rage move the way it wants to move, at full size, unfiltered, with no editing of myself for the comfort of the room, and it is because I don't think it would ever stop cleanly. I think it would take out things that never did anything to deserve it, the relationships and the people I love, the good and undeserving parts of my life that rage holds no real grievance against but would burn down anyway, because that is what happens when something has been contained for this long and finally finds itself a way out.

That is where it becomes unbearable, because it means choosing between two things I cannot actually choose between: the people I love and the relationships that have made me feel cared for and safe in a world that so rarely offers either, and the fight against the very system that shaped those relationships in the first place. It feels as though I can't have both, as though the two of them could never survive in the same reality, and I am left to either hold on to what I love or let the rage out and risk losing it. Underneath that impossible choice sits something sadder, a helplessness that simply sits there, and most days that conflict doesn't make me want to fight harder at all; it makes me want to shut down completely.

So instead I keep it contained and managed, simmering under a lid I check on constantly, because it can never quite go out and I can never quite let it rise, which is its own particular exhaustion. It's a controlled burn that keeps going forever so that the house doesn't go down along with it.

I think this is the unglamorous truth of it: the system doesn't only make us angry and helpless, it engineers a trap in which those are the only two exits on offer, burn it all down or go numb and call the numbness acceptance, with nothing in between ever extended to us, and both of those exits cost us something we never agreed to pay.

What I do know

I don't have a tidy ending for this, and I am not going to pretend that I have found the third door, the one that leads to the place where the rage gets to exist without either destroying me or everything around me. I am still looking for it, and I imagine that a great many of you are still looking for it too.

But here is what I do know. That scene didn't only make me angry, it made me feel less alone, because a story had finally said the quiet part out loud, that a woman can hold up an entire kingdom for twenty years and still be told that the fix for everyone else's discomfort is her own disappearance, and somewhere in a dark theatre a great many of us recognised the shape of our own lives in that single sentence.

So maybe that is what I want to say, underneath all of this. If you have felt this rage, the kind with nowhere legitimate to go, the kind you find yourself managing instead of resolving, then you are not broken and you are not alone in not knowing what to do with it. And if you have felt the helplessness instead (which is only the flip side of the same coin), then what you are feeling is not weakness at all; it is exactly what happens when a system has been built to make sure that neither response will ever truly threaten it.

I don't know what we do with any of this yet. Even as I was writing it, I wasn't sure where it was going to end. It just felt necessary to write it down, because a woman's anger is so rarely allowed to be seen, and on the rare occasions when it is seen it gets called hysterical, or she is told that she is simply being dramatic. None of this is dramatic, and maybe I am writing it because I am finally done pretending that things are fine.

Maybe that is my odyssey.