This TED Talk features writer and activist Soraya Chimali, recorded live at TED Women 2018.

So sometimes I get angry, and it took me many years to be able to say just those words.

In my work, sometimes my body thrums, I'm so enraged.

But no matter how justified my anger has been,

throughout my life,

I've always been led to understand

that my anger is an exaggeration,

a misrepresentation,

that it will make me rude and unlikable.

Mainly as a girl, I learned, as a girl,

that anger as an emotion better left entirely unvoiced.

Think about my mother for a minute.

When I was 15, I came home from school one day,

and she was standing on a long veranda outside of our kitchen,

holding a giant stack of plates.

Imagine how dumbfounded I was

when she started to throw them like frisbees

into the hot, humid air.

When every single plate had shattered into thousands of pieces on the hill below,

she walked back in, and she said to me cheerfully,

how was your day?

Now, you can see how a child would look at an incident like this

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