Smiling Through Gritted Teeth

Get angry, girls!

I’m in a bad mood. Is that ugly?

Dear reader, I want you to know that I’ve just had brighter blonde highlights in my hair and my cheeks are blushed rose. My new olive boots boost me up two inches. I had time to put mascara on this morning, and my perfume is by Jo Malone. As far as appearances are concerned, I’ve got it together.

If you looked at me writing this I don’t think you’d know I was angry. But I am.

I’m seething inside.

I am bitter.

The presence of anger in my body feels like a knot being pulled tighter and tighter until the string rips a little. It’s sore, it’s persistent, and it makes me anxious. It feels criminal, as though nobody can know that I’m feeling that way or they’ll look at me differently. Generally I do my best to suppress it, and it works until I remember and the flames ignite all over again. A nice girl doesn’t shout. Nobody wants to be around me when I’m negative.

Anger isn’t a feeling that visits me much anymore. It checks in every once in a while, but I’d rather it didn’t. That is until today.

Did anger get a new haircut? Is that a new lipstick? Has she been abroad, caught a tan? Something’s different. I can’t put my finger on what it is, but I think she should stick around for a little while longer. I’ll put the kettle on.

As women we’re always told to keep smiling and expected to handle things with grace. I think I do this most of the time just because I was raised that way and frankly, most things don’t deserve a reaction that leave us upset and frustrated with ourselves for days afterwards.

There’s a quote I frequently see online by Audrey Hepburn that reads “happy girls are the prettiest”. I’m not sure the context of this, but I do know that whatever was meant by it initially, Pinterest has boiled down its meaning to convey that girls are only aesthetically appealing when they’re happy. It’s become a way to reduce women to two-dimensional beings. We should always feel happy because if not, we risk not being pretty. I’m not saying that we can’t use this phrase to boost ourselves on a bad day, but it’s certainly not something we should live by or be held up to. And I don’t think Audrey intended it that way, either.

Audrey fascinates me for a multitude of reasons. Aside from the fact that she was a profoundly skilled actress, she’s transcended humanity to become an ideal. Audrey seems to have become an aspiration rather than a human being. The irony of this becomes clear very quickly with a quick Google search - her life was far from perfect. Yes, she was beautiful, talented, loved, kind, a muse, a humanitarian, but she’d experienced her own share of troubles. Audrey was living in the Netherlands when it was occupied by the Nazis during WWII. She said, "had we known that we were going to be occupied for five years, we might have all shot ourselves. We thought it might be over next week… six months… next year… that's how we got through". She was twice divorced. She suffered a miscarriage. She had a rare cancer. She never claimed to live a perfect life, and yet the internet has reduced her to this unfair ideal, and compares themselves accordingly.

Given the things Audrey went through in her life I’d bet that she experienced her fair share of anger, but we prefer not to remember her that way. I get it - her legacy is way more than her personal life, in fact it shouldn’t even come into play. But when we’re basing our expectations and ideals of women on icons such as Audrey, it’s crucial that we look at reality. People - women - aren’t just one thing. We are multi-faceted. We’re allowed to let our blood boil.

In Stop. Worshipping. Audrey Hepburn., Cammila Collar wrote,

‘Enforcing the notion that the ideal woman is refined and restrained, that she likes when things are quiet and enjoys being alone, that her body is extremely thin (even if this “virtue” flies under the guise of being a way she disregards the male gaze — a tough sell in a society that at this point prizes thinness anyway) is all pretty oppressive if none of these qualities map to you.’¹

The irony is that these things didn’t align with Audrey either. She was a flawed person like everyone else. None of us are just one thing. Happy girls may be the prettiest, but they can’t be happy all the time. It’s not the way the world works. What do you think they’d all think if they saw Audrey get really mad?

So here I am, sat with Anger over a cup of tea. We’re reading a text message I got on Monday morning. It’s funny - I thought getting this text would bring me closure, a sigh of relief. It hasn’t. Some things are better left as they were. For the first time, I feel as though this seething feeling bubbling away in the pit of my stomach is justified.

I talk a lot about the fact that perfection is unachievable for everyone because the limit does not exist, but never in terms of emotional perfection. We’re complex beings with the capacity to feel a wide range of things - without this, what’s the point of it all? If we never feel the heat of anger, the ache of worry, the dullness of disappointment, we wouldn’t have the experience or capacity to feel the full spectrum of positive emotions too.

If anything, this is selfishly a reminder to myself that sometimes anger is okay. Sometimes, it’s reasonable, and you can express that. I’m not saying it’s a good thing to direct it at someone else or be aggressive - don’t go all Regina George Burn Book with it - but writing a Substack? Call that art.

Happy girls may be the prettiest, but angry girls aren’t so bad either.

1. Stop. Worshipping. Audrey Hepburn. by Cammila Collar (2017)