Good morning!

Treats for all this morning, assuming all of you have felt angry and wanted to act on it before.

Firstly, though, maybe you have already read this article by Jia Tolentino about the how and the why of there being so many fewer deeply personal first person essays on the internet than there were. Like all Jia Tolentino pieces, it’s well written and engaging, but if you don’t have time to click right now, here’s the net net:

What happened? To answer that, it helps to consider what gave rise to the personal essay’s ubiquity in the first place. Around 2008, several factors converged. In preceding years, private blogs and social platforms—LiveJournal, Blogspot, Facebook—trained people to write about their personal lives at length and in public. As Silvia Killingsworth, who was previously the managing editor of The New Yorker and took over the Awl and the Hairpin last year, put it to me, “People love to talk about themselves, and they were given a platform and no rules.”

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/jia-tolentino/the-personal-essay-boom-is-over

That said, here’s a really superb example of the personal essay genre – it’s an exciting story about a horrible accident, and a court case, but it’s also a cultural history of anger, particularly (of course) women’s anger:

Anger can quietly highlight how the spectacle of a scene simply requires your removal from it, or it can stir you from a temporary state of suspension. At Old City Hall that day the damp lethargy I’d been content to live in like some swamp creature dissipated, and anger shot up in me like flares out of fog. I’d found it.

http://hazlitt.net/longreads/anger-ally

Finally, a problem page answer, which is also a personal essay in its own way, and is not even about getting in touch with anger but about getting in touch with “a bit nettled”. This is important too! Who would want to feel a bit nettled constantly!

Would you really keep giving money to a personal trainer you hated, who did not listen to you, who doesn’t help you with your goals? I am fainting at this thought. It seems to me a lot of people go through life like this because it’s just the kind of person they “are” to not “make a fuss.” Per above, you can be whatever you want. Even if you’ve been that person all your life, you can be not that person tomorrow. The world will not end.

https://thehairpin.com/ask-a-swole-woman-should-i-get-someone-to-teach-me-to-lift-6642da944dd6?source=collection_home---4------9-----------

Have a lovely weekend,

Alex x.