Hysterical
A letter to my enraged women. On how we speak to the men we love when the world is on fire. Following Motherless, Fatherless, and Severed..
For most of my younger life, I was a woman who knew how to incinerate a man.
This is the letter I have been afraid to write. To my enraged women. On how we speak to the men we love when the world is on fire.
I learned it young. My older brother was angry, and he was bigger than me, and I was scared of him. I did not know how to stand up for myself in any other way, so I sharpened my tongue into something that could cut him in half before he had finished his sentence. It was not a choice. It was a survival. The only one I could find.
And then, as I grew up, I became aware. Of the horrid inequity between women and men. Of the perils and abhorrences of patriarchy. Of the long bloody history we have been living inside. And the fury I had honed in the small kitchen for my angry brother fused, suddenly, with the fury of three thousand years of women, and I became a young woman who was angry with men. Period. Full stop. I would not have said it that cleanly at the time, but my body had said it, and my mouth knew.
So I had really good practice. I learned, early, exactly which sentence would unmake a man across a kitchen, across a meeting, across a bed. I became the castrating queen. I was effective. And it cost me everything I most wanted.
I know I am not alone in this.
After thirty years of working with women, I know only too well how easily we hone this ability, the blade of our words, used to protect and to obliterate at the same time. We get good at it because we had to. We pass it down to each other without quite meaning to. We mistake the sharpness for sovereignty, and only later, sometimes much later, notice what it has cost us, and the people we love.
I have spent the last decades learning a different art. A different kind of sharpening. The art of saying the true thing in fewer words, without the desire to destroy underneath them. The art of letting my words mean what they mean, without arming them first.
What I have learned, slowly, is that the less I say, the more easily I am heard.
When I share a feeling in a thousand words, building the case for it, explaining it, justifying it, anticipating every defence and pre-emptively dismantling it, the feeling itself disappears underneath the construction. The person across from me, regardless of who they are, stops being able to find me. By the time I am done, I have made my feeling airtight, and unreceivable.
The same feeling, in twenty words, lands.
This is not about men needing it simpler, or women being too much, or any of the old tired stereotypes that get reached for in this conversation. This is about something more interesting. The thousand words are not for him. The thousand words are old armour. The thousand words are the part of me that learned, very young, that my feelings would only be received if I could prove they were warranted, justified, defensible.
The heart-forward woman in me does not need her feelings to be justified and she does not need a sword in her mouth either. She just feels them. And speaks them, cleanly, in as few words as it takes. And lets the room do what the room does.
I am still learning her. Some days I do this beautifully. Some days I absolutely build the thousand-word case again, or feel the old blade rise, and watch the room go quiet, and notice it too late. Ha.
So this is the letter.
A word about the title
Hysterical comes from the Greek hystera, meaning womb. For more than two thousand years, this word has been used against us. Hippocrates believed the womb wandered through a woman’s body causing chaos. Medieval doctors burned women for hysteria. Victorian physicians sent us to asylums, prescribed forced bed rest, performed clitoridectomies, called every woman’s grief and rage and refusal a disease of the female mind. Freud built his early career on diagnosing us with it. The American Psychiatric Association did not remove hysteria from its diagnostic manual until 1980.
The word has been weaponised against every woman who refused to be quiet. Against every woman who knew the truth before the room was ready to hear it. Against every woman who was right and was told she was crazy. Against every woman whose body said no and whose culture said that is your problem, not ours.
I am taking it back.
What this culture has called hysterical is, in fact, often the most accurate response a we can have to a world that has gone insane. The rage is correct. The grief is correct. The refusal is correct. Our bodies that scream when they can no longer bear what we are being asked to bear is not malfunctioning. It is telling the truth.
So when I call this piece Hysterical, I am not using the word the way it has been used against us. I am returning it to its root. Hystera. The womb. The seat of life-giving power. The body that knows. The voice that names. The fire we have been told for two thousand years was our disease, when it has always been our medicine.
This is the letter from inside that medicine.
Link to The Hysterical Reckoning
What we are sitting with
I have spent the last weeks writing into the reality of this moment in three pieces — Motherless, Fatherless, and Severed. The Mother in exile for ten thousand years. The noble masculine missing alongside her for four thousand. The Sacred Marriage driven underground for both. The first three pieces did the diagnosis. This one is the practice.
Something has been moving through all of us across these weeks. And what has become clear is that the conversation now has a fourth question, and the fourth question is ours.
We have named the wound. We have seen it. We are on fire. We have refused the premature reunion.
Now what?
How do we carry this rage. How do we speak now. How do we walk out of a dance that has been running for thousands of years, without either swallowing our fire, which we will not do, or letting it burn down the very people we are trying to call home.
That is what this piece is about. And before I go any further, I need to be very clear about the ground I am standing on.
To my women readers
I am not asking you to swallow your truth, diminish your rage, manage their feelings, or make yourself more palatable.
I am not asking you to take responsibility for men’s inability to hear us. I am not asking you to carry one more ounce of what was never ours to carry.
What I am asking is different. And I know it is much harder.
I am asking us to grow up without losing one drop of our fire.
Because here is what I have learned, in my own body, after thirty years of watching this loop run inside myself and inside the women I love. Our righteous rage burns the room down and changes nothing. It feels powerful in the moment, and then we are alone again, and the men we love are further away than they were before we opened our mouths. And the structures we are raging at are still standing.
The flamethrower has not worked. We have thousands of years of evidence.
The awakened feminine — midlife maven, empress, queen, whichever name lands true for you — might.
This is not softening. It is exactitude. The sword we carry when our heart is open is sharper than any flamethrower has ever been, because it cuts cleanly through the specific structure doing the specific harm. And it does not waste itself on the men we love, who are not the structure.
It is time for us to take the raw rage we rightly feel and forge it into sword. To find the sacred beneath the flame.
A note as I begin. I write in the language of women and men because the cultural wound has been enacted along that binary, and because the lineages I work inside —Hermetic, Celtic, Alchemical, Tantric, Magdalene — share a polarity cosmology. These are a few traditions among many. There are cosmologies that do not run on polarity, and humans whose interior experience is not held by these poles. The teaching here is one way of describing reality. It is not the only way. Take what serves and leave what does not.
The fury is real and the fury is holy
We are furious. We have every reason to be.
The Epstein files keep opening and closing and opening again. We have an administration legislating women’s bodies as though women themselves have nothing to contribute to the conversation about their own bodies. There is the daily ordinary violence in homes we will never see, in numbers so staggering that to sit with them is to feel something in our hearts actually break. There is the Motherless website, the Telegram group, the drugged wives, the eyelids held open, the twenty dollars a viewer.
And right now, there is a reckoning that millions of us are walking through at once, where we are saying what the actual fuck is going on and what can I do about it? And we are saying it at full volume.
This is our sacred rage. This is our holy fire. This is, IMHO, exactly what this moment is asking of us.
And…
What I know from my own life is this. We rehearse the maiming sentence in the shower, in the car, in the hour before he comes home from work. We have rehearsed it so many times that some of us have forgotten we could say something else.
And when we deliver it, when we turn toward the men in our lives with that fire at full volume, something happens we need to talk about honestly.
They shut down. They close. They protect.
They go quiet, or defensive, or cold, or away. Sometimes all four in an afternoon.
And we are left holding the fire with no one to hand it to. And we get more furious. And the next time we speak, the fire is hotter. And the next time they hear us, the wall is thicker. Round and round we go, in a loop that has been running in our relationships, our families, our workplaces, our parliaments, for generations.
What the loop has cost us
On the personal level. It means you have spent more nights than you can count alone in the bed next to a man who used to be able to reach you and now cannot. There is a sentence you have wanted to say to him for ten years, and you have not yet found the way to say it that does not blow up the room.
On the relational level. It means your son is fourteen and has already learned to flinch when you walk into the room, because he does not yet know which mother he is getting. It means your father called and you could not pick up the phone.
On the generational level. Your mother was furious her whole life and never had a way to forge it, and she passed it down to you. Your daughter is watching you now. She is learning her whole life from how you handle this.
On the cultural level. Thirty years of feminist anger and the structures are still standing. The men who run the world have learned to wait us out, to weather the storm, to know that maiden rage will burn itself out eventually. The patriarchy, IMHO, would actually like us to keep running this loop. A diffuse rage is a manageable rage.
On the spiritual level. We have not yet become the women we were supposed to become. The priestess in us, the one who knows how to wield fire with precision, has been waiting for us to grow into her, and we have been too busy being the maiden to come and meet her.
That is what the loop has cost us. That is what running it for one more decade would cost the women coming after us.
I am not interested in paying that price again.
The young woman’s rage and the awakened woman’s rage
The young woman’s rage is raw and necessary. It is the scream of the girl who has been silenced, and she had to scream. Nobody gets to tell her not to. I have been that girl. You have been that girl. We all carry her, and we always will.
The awakened woman’s rage is something different. It is still fire. It is still real. It is still dangerous, in the good way. What it is also is aimed. It knows what it wants to illuminate. It can hold itself long enough to ask the question instead of only delivering the verdict. It can speak to the person in front of it as though that person has the capacity to rise.
We have been doing the young woman’s rage for generations. I built a whole life out of it. Some days I still do.
But we have many years of evidence now. The young woman’s rage has not moved the men.
The awakened one might.
Why the frequency matters
When we speak to the men from pure rage, we are not actually speaking to the noble masculine. We are speaking to the defended boy underneath the armour. The boy who learned very young that feeling anything was dangerous, and that being vulnerable was a way to get hurt.
And the defended boy does what defended boys do. He hides. He hits back. He runs. Every time.
The noble masculine, the man we are actually trying to reach, lives underneath that boy. He is the part of him that wants to protect. That wants to build. That wants to be trusted by a woman he respects. That wants, at the deepest level, to be worthy of the love he is being offered.
He cannot be summoned by force. He can only be invited. Not begged. Not bargained with. Not coddled. Invited.
When we speak from the awakened woman in us, that is the frequency he can hear. Not because the words are softer. Because the aim is true.
This is a different frequency entirely. Bodies know the difference.
How we speak to the men now
These are not a formula. These are the practices I am learning, ungracefully, mostly in the middle of my own kitchen.
One. Speak to what you want to see.
The noble masculine will not show up when you are addressing his broken self. You are not making contact with him, because you are not speaking to him. You are speaking to the wound, and the wound will defend itself.
Speak past the wound. I know you are more than this. I am talking to the man I know is in there. Watch what happens. Sometimes nothing. Sometimes a crack of light. Sometimes a whole landslide of relief, because somebody finally saw him.
Two. Voicing, not unloading.
There is a difference between this is how your actions affected me and this is everything wrong with you and your entire gender and the five thousand years of your mistakes. Both might be accurate. Only one is survivable across the table.
When I need to unload, I take it to the sisters, to the page, to the earth, to the scream in the car with the windows up. When I need to voice, I bring it, clean, to the man in front of me.
Three. Refuse the either-or.
Do not let the conversation become either I love you or I am furious with you. Either you are the noble masculine or you are the monster.
Both is the only true answer. You love him and what he did is not okay. You need him and he has failed you. He is capable of more and he is, right now, not meeting you. Stay in your own ground. Speak what is true. Want him to receive it. And do not require that he receive it in order for you to remain whole.
Four. Call him by his real name.
His real name is not men. His real name is not the patriarchy. His real name is the one his own father probably never called him.
When I have spoken to the noble masculine in a man directly, not as flattery, not as manipulation, but as genuine address to the part of him I know is real, I have watched men change in my lifetime. Not all. Some. Enough to be worth doing.
Five. Stop doing it for them.
This is the one I have to keep learning. Ha.
It is not our job to heal him. It is not our job to parent him. It is not our job to carry his unprocessed grief on top of our own. Our job is to stop mistaking his uninitiated self for who he actually is, and to hold the door of initiation open while he decides whether he is going to walk through it.
Some will. Some will not. Both are true. Neither is our responsibility.
What it actually sounds like
Because theory is lovely, but what most of us need is language we can use on a given Tuesday.
What is happening to women right now is real. It is in this house. It is in this bed. It is in this body. And I need you to be the kind of man who can hear that without collapsing, because I am not willing to carry this alone anymore.
I am not asking you to agree with me. I am asking you to be with me while I tell you the truth about how I feel.
When you shut down, I lose you. And when I lose you, I lose the person I was supposed to be building this life with. I do not want to lose you. I want you to stay.
I believe you are capable of more than you are currently doing. That is why I am still in this conversation.
When we speak like this we are still on fire. Still in our truth. Still unwilling to be silenced. And we are speaking to the man we love as though he is capable of rising. Because he is. Most of them are. Most of them have simply never, in their whole lives, been spoken to that way.
The piece I know some of you will push back on
We do have to take responsibility for how we use our words.
I know. I can hear the intake of breath from here. Ha. Stay with me.
This is not because the men deserve our careful packaging. It is not because their feelings are more important than our truth. We have done quite enough of that for one civilisation, thank you.
It is because we are calling ourselves into our truth and power and awakened heart. We must be willing to grow into our maturity too. Because our words carry frequency. Because what we speak into a room we are co-creating, whether we like it or not. Because the wild feminine, unharnessed, does not birth the new world. She burns the old one down, and then the next generation inherits the ashes and has to start again from nothing.
We are not here to leave our children ashes.
We are here to call in the noble masculine. To hold the fire and the invitation at the same time. To be both the sword and the door.
This is maturity. This is what midlife has been preparing us for. This is Saturn in Aries asking us to grow the fuck up without losing one drop of our fire.
And the ones who will not meet us
Some are too committed to the structures that protect them. Some are too afraid of what they would have to feel in order to actually change. Some are already so far inside the broken masculine that there is, in this lifetime, no reaching them.
I am not calling those men home. I am not asking you to.
I am talking about the men who can be reached. The husbands. The brothers. The fathers. The sons. The colleagues. The friends. The ones who have been waiting, some of them for decades, for a woman to speak to the noble masculine in them and mean it.
The ones who will not come, will not come. Our job is not to keep throwing ourselves against their walls. Our job is to stand in our ground, speak our truth, call forward what can be called forward, and walk anyway.
But call him forward, first.
What we do now
For the women.
Find your altar. A corner, a windowsill, a shelf. A candle. A stone. A photograph of the women in your line. Light it before you write a message or have a conversation you know is going to be hard.
Find three women. Make a circle that does not break. This is where the fire that needs to spray goes, so that by the time you arrive at the kitchen counter with the man you love, the fire in your hand is clean. Three women. A kitchen table. Regularity. Start it this week.
Have one clear conversation with one specific man this week. Not all of them. One. The one where the loop is running hot. I want to come back to what you said yesterday because I had a reaction to it and I want to tell you what the reaction was. Try it. See what happens.
Read. Audre Lorde’s The Uses of Anger. Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ Women Who Run with the Wolves. Marion Woodman on the awakened woman. Stand on their shoulders.
For the brave men who might also be reading.
Breathe before you defend. Just one breath. Long enough to ask yourself, am I hearing the wound under the fire. If you can stay in the room thirty seconds longer than your nervous system wants to, something different becomes possible.
Take this piece to another man this week. Not to a woman. To another man. Read it together. The women in your life cannot do the work of initiating other men into the noble masculine. Only you can.
Write back. Not to defend. Not to explain. Just to say I read this and here is what moved in me. Breaking the silence on your side of the conversation is part of how the loop ends.
Back to the practising
I want to come back to where I started.
Because the holy woman’s work does not happen just at the altar in the temple. It happens at the kitchen counter. In the bedroom. In the half-second before the castrating sentence comes out of your mouth, in the breath that lets you say something true and brief instead.
That half-second is the work. That half-second is where the new world is being built. One conversation at a time. One sentence at a time. One woman at a time, choosing the priestess over the maiden, choosing the forge over the spray, choosing twenty true words over a thousand defended ones.
Some days I do this beautifully. Some days I absolutely do not. Ha.
But every day I am practising. Because I am not going to be the woman who passes this loop on to the women coming after me.
We have been the maiden. We have been the castrating queen. We have been the woman with the razor sharp tongue, and we earned every inch of that fire, and I will not let anyone tell you otherwise.
But the world that is trying to be born now does not need the maiden’s fire alone. It needs ours. The forged kind. The aimed kind. The kind that knows the difference between the structure we must dismantle and the man at the kitchen counter. The kind that can hold a flame in one hand and the open door in the other. The kind that can say the true thing in twenty words and let it land.
Let us be those women.
Not because the men deserve it.
Because we know what we are.
We are the holy women of the next era. The fire is in our hands. The altar is beneath it. And the world needs all of us, sword and door at the same time, calling them home.
If this piece moved something in you, send it to one woman who needs it. Send it to one man who is ready to be in this conversation. The work is in the passing.
What struck me most is that this is not really about love. The deeper issue is the human tendency to pour an inner emptiness into a single emotion and expect it to hold the weight of an entire existence.
Because people are not always destroyed by who they love. Sometimes they are destroyed by losing the inner center from which they love.
And that is the invisible fracture the text quietly reveals.
What it calls “panic” is not merely emotional intensity. It is the psychological condition of modern man: unable to wait, unable to sit with uncertainty, turning every feeling into an absolute truth, every longing into an emergency, every wound into an identity.
Perhaps this is where the real crisis of our age begins.
The issue is not love. The real issue is that modern people no longer possess the inner depth required to carry anything fully.
Modernity taught us how to feel, but not how to endure. It taught us desire, but not patience. Visibility, but not inner discipline. Expression, but not containment.
And because of that, people no longer simply experience heartbreak. They collapse into it. A relationship ends, and suddenly their entire sense of self falls apart with it. Because for many people today, love is no longer a connection. It has become a form of existential support.
That is why the line, “Are there no other lovers besides you?” carries such profound wisdom.
It does not belittle pain. It dethrones the ego inside the pain.
Because the most dangerous thing about suffering is not the wound itself. It is the moment the wound becomes identity.
And once that happens, the heart no longer loves. It begins to consume itself.
Perhaps this is why so many people today are exhausted not by the absence of love, but by the absence of measure. Unmeasured emotion initially disguises itself as depth, but over time it corrodes the inner architecture of the soul.
The panicked heart does not love; it clings. It does not wait; it tries to control. It does not listen; it rushes toward conclusions.
And eventually, people stop relating to the person before them and start relating only to their own fears, projections, and unmet needs.
And this is not merely a personal problem. It is a civilizational condition.
Because a culture built on speed cannot teach reverence for waiting. A world addicted to instant gratification cannot produce emotional endurance. Modern people are losing the ability to remain still before uncertainty. They want immediate answers, immediate healing, immediate closeness, immediate certainty.
But the soul is not built instantly.
That is why the deepest power of this piece is not that it speaks about love. It speaks about self-loss.
Because sometimes people lose themselves long before they lose the person they love.
And perhaps true maturity begins here:
Learning how to love someone without abandoning yourself in the process.
Because love itself does not always destroy people. Sometimes it is the panic inside love that destroys them first.
This… “The heart-forward woman in me does not need her feelings to be justified and she does not need a sword in her mouth either.” So true.
There was a time when I was also capable to cutting someone to the quick with a few words. I very consciously let all of that go, not because it lacked power, no. I let it go because it did not bring more kindness into the world.
Yes, I can still stop someone dead in their tracks if I must, but that blade is only brought out in the most dire of circumstances.
I’ve found I respect and like myself more when I know who I am without the anger.