Angry in company

The question was posed many times in the past few months: What will we do with all this time when we repeal? Rest, was one of the obvious answers from many: sleep for a week, rest for a month, take a year of just living. These were women who had spent every free moment talking and thinking about the campaign; mothers with ulcers and babies who didn’t sleep, who in spite of it all drove around the towns of Ireland distributing leaflets, recorded video tutorials and messaging workshops while minding sick children, spoke at events with babies in slings and hanging off their breasts; women who have been at this for decades, since before the 8^th amendment was inserted in the first place; students who don’t yet have the right to vote but would rather fail their exams than wait another generation for a chance at bodily autonomy. When we repeal, we rest, they said – for a while at least.

But the announcement was not even out long enough for the tears of relief to have started to dry when the restlessness set in. Where next with this broken world?

Of course, a certain anti-choice spokesperson, who shall remain nameless lest his ego explodes, had us diagnosed within hours. “Your unhappiness will never be fixed by a vote, folks,” he tweeted. “The problem is the 8th amendment was never what was making you angry in the first place. It’s not the schools or the hospitals, or the ban on euthanasia either. No social reform is going to make you people happy. You’re all looking in the wrong place.”

The man’s got a point. I mean, he’s wrong in a million different ways that he won’t even begin to understand, but he’s right: I was angry long before I even knew what the 8th amendment was. Generally speaking, ironically, I’ve always been a reasonably happy, well-grounded person – serious, yes, but happy. Yet I suppose you could say that I have a propensity for anger. It seeks me out, or I grab it with both hands the moment it shows its heated face: on the streets of Chennai in India, where children’s limbs had been amputated to make them more profitable as beggars; when men who admit in court to having sexual intercourse with a woman without her consent (that’s not sex, by the way – it’s the definition of rape, folks) walk free because no one is willing to step up and say that yes, it’s absolutely definitely certain beyond doubt that they are guilty; when single mothers tell me why they’ve given up even trying to get maintenance off their children’s fathers, and people in comment sections on news websites spew vile hatred of these supposed societal leeches; when fellow Swedes put on an impressive show of historical amnesia with regards to the importance of financial redistribution and a solid welfare state for their own cosy quality of life, and suggest that maybe we can’t afford to welcome more refugees after all. I’m a ticking anger bomb watching the world, constantly waiting to go off, continuously magically relit. The nameless anti-choicer gets this.

What he doesn’t get is that, to people like us, there’s no looking in the wrong place. We may have been focused on repeal quite blindly for some time now; that’s how campaigning works. But we don’t suffer from tunnel vision – far from it. Alongside knee-jerk responses like ‘rest’ to that post-repeal question was a list longer than my arm of other places to look: direct provision, housing, homelessness, education equality, separation of church and state – you name it, we saw it. You see, our vision is three-dimensional, and we will attack a flawed society from every angle. Do we see problems everywhere or do we see potential for improvement? Is the glass half-empty or half-full? Anger can be fiercely productive; it doesn’t have to be a negative force.

I’ve come to realise that activists have a lot in common with artists: an affliction of seeing potential everywhere, of not only being unable to ignore the suffering, but knowing that there is another way – and being unable to live with that knowledge without fighting for that better place. We don’t rest while women and children and migrants and queers and homeless people suffer.

I said the day after our victory that it felt like we’d been to war. That we’d won, and I felt immensely grateful and relieved – but we were a wounded army, and we should never have had to go to war in the first place. Roe McDermott hit the nail on the head in the Irish Times when she explained why she wasn’t feeling joy after the referendum, drawing parallels to the #MeToo movement and the fact that abuse victims don’t suddenly heal overnight and celebrate when the abuse stops; instead, “we demand that they acknowledge the depth of the pain that they have inflicted, that they examine the attitudes and misogyny that led them to feel like they had the right to abuse others, that they surrender some of the power that enabled them to do so”.

As women, especially radical women, we can’t win. If we celebrate, we are insensitive, indecent, repulsive and unpleasant. Yet if we’re not happy, a nameless, high-profile anti-choicer calls us “the angriest, craziest people in Ireland”. He wrote: “The movement you are in won’t leave you fulfilled and happy. It will just leave you all angry in company. […] A momentary feeling of togetherness.”

You know, I celebrated. I cried and I danced and I hugged and I drank – the most exhausted, bewildered sort of celebration I’ve ever engaged in – and I felt all those complex, conflicting emotions: the elation and relief, and the rage and hurt over the fact that those attitudes were there in the first place, that much of that entitlement still lingers and will linger for a long time. And the comedown was rough as hell, but this much I know: the togetherness was anything but momentary. It had carried me for months; it had taught me who I am and shown me who I want to be. Of all the lenses through which to experience life, I’d take angry in company any day.