A Blood Moon Lunar Eclipse and Writing our Rage
Giving myself permission to write into my anger is provocative, scary, and calming
Happy Friday, folks! I feel like there hasn’t been a full moon on a Friday in awhile, but I also feel a lot of things, and, thanks to motherhood, my memory is like mouse-addled Swiss cheese.
This month’s full moon has many unique qualities: as the first full moon in early spring, it’s dubbed the Worm Moon, it’s a micromoon (the opposite of a supermoon, when the moon is farthest from the earth), it’s in Virgo (the office manager of the zodiac), and there was a lunar eclipse first thing this morning, which allegedly turned the moon blood red. A blood red lunar eclipse. Sounds graphic, no? Like a horror movie? Great, let’s use the blood red moon as an excuse to talk about writing with rage.
I don’t want to stand on any political soapboxes here, but perhaps most of us can agree that nationally, things feel scary. There’s a lot to be angry about, and sad about, and afraid about. There’s a lot of rage, but also depression or despair — rage turned inward. Hopelessness that one person can’t effect as much change as one might want to catalyze. Despair at a bleak future. In the face of all this, how do we write?
But maybe this is it — this is the pivotal moment, the view of the abyss that we have to metabolize into our creative work. Virginia Woolf and her modernist contemporaries reflected on the splitting of the self, loss of a faith in God, and existential dread that followed a world at war, World War I. Samuel Beckett and Ionesco and their theater of the absurd contemporaries contemplated a total annihilation of everyday life and the futility of banal grasps toward meaning after World War II and the Holocaust. Maybe we can study those who wrote their way through dark times, and see how in the darkness they found humor, formal experimentation, meaning, or even hope.
I was feeling some really acute mom rage the other day and decided to write into it. I did NOT try to calm down, count to ten, do the dishes, answer some work emails, prepare a future meal, or put away laundry — my usual “calming down” and avoiding giving in to rage activities. (Sad right? Other moms, do you hear me on this? The mom rage and the truly dumb coping activities that follow as we try to cool off or avoid the feeling or distract ourselves????)
Instead, I set a timer for 10 minutes and just poured the rage onto the page, no editors, no judgments, no remorse, no apologies. No equivocations or qualifiers.
And you know what? It was energizing.
It’s hard to live with bottled up rage, despair, sadness, frustration, and furiousness, and walk around like everything is okay. Everything is not okay. The emperor is wearing no clothes and things are on fire. It felt good to take a moment to lean into that and breathe in my fiery tumult, to shine a light on that bloody moon that is the truth.
And then I could breathe again, and continue with my day.
Here are a few tips for writing into the rage and metabolizing it into an actual writing project:
Put a container around it. Let yourself in and let yourself out. It’s easy to get totally consumed by these feelings, so figure out how the writing can be the container that holds them so they can cool off and you can look at them.
There’s humor in everything, even if it’s very dark or inappropriate or morbid humor. (You can always edit later.) Reframing stuff helps, sometimes.
Now that I’ve started a rage-fueled thing, I want to keep working on it during calmer moments, and do research, and outline a logical structure… saving it from being a vent fest or a journal entry. (Though there’s nothing wrong with either of those things, if you just want to write for you.)
Find like-minded people who feel similar rage who you can talk to and/or with whom you can share this writing. Community! Burn it all down together!!!
Breathe. Rinse. Repeat.
After all, diamonds are formed when carbon is put under immense pressure. Maybe we can pressurize our writing in a good way to capture something valuable, capture this energy, and produce one tiny, beautiful thing that makes this world a better place.
Wishing you insight, and breath, and righteous anger, and the calm and space that hopefully comes after raging in a safe way.
If anyone is coming to AWP in LA at the end of the month, please do come check out my panel on Thurs 3/27 at 3:20, “Beyond Tiger Moms and Model Minorities: Imagining the Asian American Family,” with delightful graphic by Grace Loh Prasad below:
I’ll also be doing a book signing at the Bloomsbury table (1205) at the Book Fair on Fri 3/28 in the late morning and maybe a reading on Thurs or Fri at some point. Stay tuned on the website and IG (@the_kimlet). Looking forward to connecting with other writers there soon!
Here it is, Your Moment of Zen:
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