THREAD
1/
A few thoughts ahead of the piece of writing I’m releasing on Friday.
Psychological research links revenge fantasies to unresolved injustice and denied agency. They’re common. In women, they’re more often internalised and read, by others and by women themselves, as personal or moral failure.
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2/
Revenge fantasies shatter the illusion that women are meant to be kind, caring, maternal. These fantasies are messy, uncharitable. Interpreted as proof of damage. So women learn to manage them in private. A good person shouldn’t want to settle the score. She should rise above it. Heal. Forgive. Be bigger. Let it go. Move on.
3/
The problem is that sometimes the mind leans towards revenge for reasons that have nothing at all to do with violent impulse. It can simply be the psyche’s attempt at recalibration. A way of saying something happened that was not fully acknowledged. Something was done without consequence. Something is still sitting in my body as unfinished business.
4/
If you’ve ever had thoughts of revenge and immediately felt disgust, embarrassment, or fear about what it ‘says about you’, it’s worth pausing. Often this is the brain trying to redress power, to account for injustice, to restore a sense of agency where it was denied.
5/5
The more useful question is rarely ‘what’s wrong with me?’ It’s ‘what is this a response to?’ What is it through these fantasies that I am trying to restore?
Because it’s striking how quickly we reach for moral language around women’s anger. How fast we go to ‘unhinged’, ‘bitter’, ‘unstable’, ‘too much’, rather than acknowledge that imagination is often the only place a woman can seek any form of justice at all.
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