Where the Anger Rests, the Wonder Begins

Where the Anger Rests, the Wonder Begins

April 15 2025

Shapel Monique LaBorde

Some mornings, I don’t even want to name myself “feminist.”

I’m tired.

The weight of the word sits thick on my tongue, like dried honey—sweet,

but sticky, and slow.

I am tired.

My brain is a mental web paralyzing me to sleep.

I don’t want to connect.

Tired of classrooms that pretend not to see me.

Tired of speech acts that echo in hollow halls where no one listens unless I bleed.

Or someone like me is bleeding, then come on in and save us, theorize us.

Tired of being told my rage is irrational, my hope naïve, my wonder

irrelevant.

And yet, I read Ahmed, and something within me, tender and trembling,

seeks to rise.

Not in defiance, but in recognition.

Recognition that this exhaustion is not an endpoint, but a beginning.

That my fatigue is not failure, but a feminist archive of overextension.

Weary, yes—but still here. Still dreaming.

I am really really tired. I dream of a rest that doesn’t save me or anyone else.

A rest that just is.

Ahmed says emotions move us.

And chile, I been moved.

By grief, by loss, by the haunting ache of holding up too many people with too little help.

But also by hope—the trembling kind.

The kind that whispers to you in the dark after your daughter is asleep and

your body’s sore from too much care and the world’s cruelty:

“There is still joy to be made. Still breath to reclaim.”

I want to rest.

But I also want to rage.

Not because I live in a state of pain, but because I refuse to let the wound

become my name.

Feminism for me is not a badge or a brand,

It’s the rhythm of my grandmother’s hums, the prayer in my daughter’s

defiance,

The spirit in my body that says, “This is wrong, and I will not bow to it.”

I am moved by wonder.

The way Ahmed speaks of it like gospel!

Wonder as the moment you realize the world is not natural, not inevitable.

That it was made, crafted—and therefore can be unmade.

This, to me, is the root of resistance.

Not just anger, hello awe.

Not just critique, but creation.

So I hold onto my anger, not as weight, but as heat.

And I let my wonder do its work, stretching the edges of my imagination.

I am not here to mimic the master’s voice in softer tones.

I am here to reimagine the whole damn soundscape.

Ahmed reminds me that feminism is not about letting go of pain,

But about learning how to move through it without turning it into a throne.

That love is also protest, that discomfort is pedagogy,

That to teach, to mother, to write, to weep—

Can all be acts of resistance, if done with intention.

So yes, I am tired.

But I am also moved.

Still wondering. Still rising.

Still naming this life, this work, this love black feminist.