I am a woman of a "certain rage" and I think you might be too 😏

Hello beautiful soul

I’m a woman of a "certain rage" — and it’s one of the biggest reasons I trust myself so deeply now.

Not the kind of rage that burns everything down indiscriminately.
Not the kind that leaks sideways into self-doubt or shame.

The kind of rage that comes after captivity.
After silence.
After being told—explicitly and implicitly—to stay small, stay grateful, stay agreeable.

The kind of rage that wakes you the fuck you up.

Because here’s what I know, deep in my bones:

Women don’t become angry because we’re broken. We become angry because we’ve been paying attention.

Rage is what happens when your body realises it has been living inside systems that were never designed for your safety, your sovereignty, or your truth.

Patriarchy trains women to doubt themselves.
Abuse trains women to override themselves.
Leadership systems train women to perform instead of lead.

And then we’re surprised—shocked, even—when a woman finally says:

No. This doesn’t work for me anymore.

That moment isn’t a failure of femininity. It’s a reclamation of power.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this as the year closes, watching women quietly wake up all around me and I've seen a few posts on social media. 

Not in loud, performative ways.

Christmas is a perfect example.

The planning. The remembering. The emotional labour. The magic. Often carried out by women. And then… we give a man the praise (Santa) and often the men the head of the table.

This isn’t a holiday glitch. It’s DEEP conditioning.

From the time we are very young, we are groomed to centre the experiences of men—their comfort, their anger, their success, and now, their loneliness.

We learn to scan rooms. To anticipate. To soften. To regulate everyone else first.

And over time, an invisible cage forms.

No bars you can point to.
Just a constant negotiation with yourself.

Don’t be too much.
Don’t be angry.
Don’t be ambitious.
Don’t be ungrateful.
Don’t take up space that costs someone else their comfort.

So when something feels wrong—when you’re tired, resentful, restless, quietly furious—you don’t question the structure.

You blame yourself.

You call it insecurity.
Imposter syndrome.
Not confident enough.
Not resilient enough.
Not doing womanhood properly.

That self-blame is the final trick of the system.

Because a woman who believes she is the problem will work endlessly to fix herself—rather than questioning the conditions she’s living under.

And here’s where it gets personal.

Fourteen years ago this year, I stopped drinking alcohol.

At the time, I thought it was because I hated how I felt afterwards.
The shame. The self-loathing. The sense that I’d abandoned myself again.

And that was all true.

But there was another truth underneath it—one I didn’t have language for back then, and one that only fully clicked this past year.

Men are unsafe for women when we are sober and in control. But they are even less safe when we are not.

About a year before I stopped drinking, I was sexually assaulted after I had been drinking. I was alone and asleep at a friends house, but intoxicated, and I was sexually assulted by another house guest who let themselves into my room. 

And on some deep, instinctive level, something in me understood this: I cannot keep myself safe if I am not fully in my body.

So I chose control, I chose presence. 

Not because I wanted to be rigid or joyless buut because my nervous system chose survival.

That decision wasn’t moral.
It wasn’t virtuous.
It was somatic.

I've never regretted choosing to stop drinking, it was the a major positive step towards building the life I wanted. But my point is, our lack of safety with men was a big part of that decision. 

I wish that weren’t true.
But the data, the stories, the lived experiences—including my own—say otherwise.

What we can do is learn to trust ourselves.

Our instincts. Our boundaries. Our no. Our clarity. Our rage.

This is not about living in fear. It’s about living awake.

A woman of a certain rage is not out of control.
She is no longer controllable.

She has seen the cage.
She has named the harm.
She has stopped blaming herself for systems that benefitted from her silence.

And once that happens, you don’t go back.

You lead differently. You choose differently. You stop outsourcing your power.

This is why embodiment matters. This is why leadership must be rooted in the body.

Because leadership that isn’t embodied will always ask women to override themselves for the sake of belonging.

And that cost is too high.

This is the work at the heart of Women Who Lead. The next cohort is coming in February, and I am giving exclusive access to the waitlist to members of this community for just this week. Hop on it here.

At the heart of my work is helping women come home to their power—so they can lead, choose, and live without abandoning themselves.

If something in this stirred you—if you felt heat, recognition, relief—trust that.

You’re not “too much.”
You’re awake.

And if you’re honest with yourself…

...you’re a woman of a certain rage too.  Join the waitlist here. 

Rooting for you always
Ruth x

Ps. There are SO many goodies coming in the Sisterhood community space in the coming months. My offering to you all: 

1. How to blend motherhood with ambition with Marcela Oguntoye
2. You got the job, now is the time to really lead with Clarissa Sowemimo-Coker
3. Yoga with meeeeeeeee, to help you learn how to become fully emdodied and step into all of who you are. 

Hit reply if you would like to join us and I will share the details.