Sacred Rage and the Need for Each Other

Lately, I’ve been thinking about sacred rage.

Not the kind of rage that consumes us, but the kind that emerges when something precious is being threatened. The kind that reminds us we are paying attention, and that what is happening matters.

Living as a queer, disabled person in a conservative state means there is never a shortage of things to be angry about. New legislation appears. Rights are debated in public as if they are abstract ideas rather than lived realities. Access to healthcare, support, and basic safety becomes harder to hold onto. And often, the people who say they care about us grow quiet when speaking up might cost them something.

It can be exhausting to live inside that cycle, especially when it repeats over and over again.

For a long time, I thought anger was something I needed to get rid of. Something to soften, manage, or turn into something more socially acceptable. But over time, I’ve started to understand anger differently. I see it as information. It shows me where something matters, where a boundary has been crossed, and where harm is happening in real time. Sometimes rage is simply grief refusing to disappear.

This feels especially true for those of us whose lives are constantly treated as political arguments instead of human experiences. Whether it is disability, queerness, gender, or any other marginalized identity, there is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from having to repeatedly explain your right to exist. Over time, that exhaustion doesn’t just stay in the mind. It settles into the body alongside grief, fear, and disappointment.

One of the things I keep returning to is how important community care and peer support spaces are in the middle of all of this. Oppression isolates people. It makes it easy to believe you are alone in what you are carrying, or that your responses are somehow too much. Being in spaces where other people understand without needing everything explained can interrupt that isolation in a way nothing else really does.

In those spaces, something shifts. Our experiences stop being personal failures or individual burdens and start being recognized as shared realities. We remember we are not the only ones holding this kind of weight. We remember that we are not meant to carry it alone.

These days, I am less interested in turning every feeling into action and more interested in staying connected to what matters. Sometimes sacred rage becomes advocacy. Sometimes it becomes art or writing. Sometimes it becomes a boundary. Sometimes it becomes rest. And sometimes it simply becomes the honesty of saying, “This is hard, and I need other people to witness that with me.” All of those are valid responses.

What gives me hope is not the idea that things will automatically resolve themselves. What gives me hope is witnessing people continue to care for one another in the middle of everything. I see people building mutual aid and peer support spaces, sharing resources, showing up for each other, and making room for honesty that isn’t always welcome elsewhere.

Perhaps that is what sacred rage is pointing toward. Not endless outrage, but a deeper commitment to connection, care, and truth-telling. A refusal to disappear ourselves or each other. A reminder that our grief deserves witness, our anger makes sense, and our lives are worth protecting.