The Women Who Weren’t Allowed to Break
There’s something quietly terrifying about realizing you come from a long line of women who were punished for feeling out loud.
Women who were diagnosed with a mental illness the moment they cracked under the weight of carrying too much for too long.
They didn’t get compassion.
They got a label: hysterical.
My mother was a bold woman. She took zero shit. Her intensity made people nervous and her truth made them defensive… But she couldn’t be silenced.
The only way to control her was to invalidate her truth. So, she was pathologized and treated like an inconvenience instead of a person – and that broke something in her.
There’s no doubt in my mind that my mother was clinically depressed. But knowing how women are dismissed in today’s society, I can’t help but wonder how much of her suffering could’ve been avoided if she hadn’t been gaslit by a culture that didn’t know what to do with righteously frustrated, outspoken women born in the 1940s.
For god’s sake – the concept of hysterical neurosis wasn’t removed from the DSM until 1980!
When Emotion Became a Problem to Fix
Hysteria was the original “Calm down, you’re overreacting.”
You could be grieving, anxious, traumatized, or just done smiling through everyone else’s bullshit – and then boom: diagnosed. Especially if your feelings disrupted a man’s peace or pointed out something uncomfortable… like reality.
The word hysteria comes from hystera, Greek for uterus – because of course it does. They couldn’t find the clitoris, but they were positive that the uterus was traveling through women’s bodies and fucking with their emotions.
You’d think someone might’ve invented empathy, but no. Instead, they invented ways to further silence women.
The “solutions”? Cold baths, forced isolation, and vibrators. Because why offer emotional support when you can just induce an orgasm and hope she shuts up?
Women were exhausted. Doctors were lazy. And the whole system was more interested in silencing emotion than understanding it.
Hysteria was never a disorder. It was a diagnosis of disruption.
The Labels Changed, But the Punishment Didn’t
We might not use the word hysteria anymore, but we still punish emotion and pathologize authenticity. We police tone, volume, timing, and delivery… and we villianize anyone who doesn’t shrink their rage into something digestible. We still ask people – especially women – to silence themselves for our comfort.
Feel, but don’t feel too much. Speak up, but not too loudly. Process your trauma, but only if you do it in a way that doesn’t inconvenience anyone else.
If you cry in public, you’re unstable. If you rage, you’re unhinged. If you grieve too long, you’re exhausting. If you don’t let someone’s bullshit slide, you’re difficult and dramatic.
The label changed, but the message didn’t: Tone it down. Wrap it up. Move along.
We reward emotional suppression and punish people for being visibly human, and then we wonder why people break.
Repress, Smile, Repeat
We live in constant grief – personal, generational, systemic. Sometimes I find myself grieving a world I thought was better than this. And still, we’re expected to smile through it, stay productive, and show up like nothing’s wrong.
Grief isn’t just about death. It’s the relationship that couldn’t be repaired. The slow ache of dreams deferred. The loss of feeling safe in your own body. It’s about pets, jobs, identities, health… The loss of time you can’t get back. The life you imagined but didn’t get. The version of yourself you had to bury. The future that never showed up.
Let’s be honest: we are all grieving something. It’s not always some giant event. Sometimes it’s the slow, daily erosion of hope. The little heartbreaks we’re told not to name. The aspirations we downsize so we can keep showing up while pretending we’re fine.
And it’s not just personal. It’s cultural. We live in a grief-drenched world that pretends grief is reserved for funerals. But grief is everywhere… and repressing your grief to maintain appearances doesn’t make it go away.
Repression Is a Terrible Long-Term Plan
Silence was my father’s superpower. It looked like strength, but it was armor worn by a deeply feeling man who was never given the space to feel out loud safely. My dad always joked, “Suck it up” – But it wasn’t funny. It was survival humor passed down by people who weren’t allowed to process fucking anything.
Years after his passing, I think about his message a lot. I think about how I’ve spent decades trying to manage my reactions so I wouldn’t make other people uncomfortable. How often I’ve swallowed rage, folded sadness into sarcasm, and tried to be “stable” when everything inside me was breaking. I wore resilience like a badge of honor, even when it was killing me.
Repression doesn’t work. It leaks into everything: Your work. Your parenting. Your sleep. Your relationships. Your body. Your sense of worth.
You think you’ve buried it, but it swells beneath the surface. And when it resurfaces, it doesn’t whisper. It explodes.
Sometimes healing isn’t about getting over something, or acting like it never happened to begin with. Sometimes it’s about letting it move through you without needing to turn it into a teachable moment or some self-improvement bullshit.
Sometimes we don’t need more coping strategies – we need permission to feel our feelings without it threatening our safety, stability, or relationships.
Because maybe, just maybe, people wouldn’t react so “hysterically” if they were validated, supported, and safe.
Sit With It. Don’t Rush to Fix It.
What if we stopped trying to reframe pain and hardship as something inspiring?
What if we stopped treating emotion like a character flaw?
Pain demands attention, and shoving it down doesn’t erase it – it just hardens you.
Sometimes the bravest thing you can do is sit in the mess and let it wreck you a little. Not because you’re weak, but because you’re human.
I know what it’s like to want to skip the grief part. To patch things up before they even fully break. But trying to fix emotions too fast only dishonors them. You can’t heal what you won’t name… What you pretend doesn’t exist.
Every time we rush to feel better, we tell our nervous systems that it was wrong to feel in the first place. And if I’ve learned anything, it’s that the body keeps the score.
Sometimes you don’t need to feel better. You just need to feel. Period.
Hysteria evolved. It’s not fainting couches anymore – it’s panic attacks in traffic, dissociation in staff meetings, and losing your shit over a stubbed toe because that’s safer than crying over the thing that’s actually breaking your heart.
And no amount of yoga, journaling, or fake calm will make up for not being seen or understood.
There’s no healing in minimization, but there is healing in someone looking you in the eye and saying, “Yeah. That is a lot.”
Because sometimes, a quiet “Oh f*ck, that sucks” is more validating – and more healing – than some bullshit platitude like, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
Hysteria Isn’t the Problem – Society Is
We weren’t built for this.
Not the isolation. Not the silence. Not the emotional acrobatics required to stay likable in a world that punishes truth.
But here we are – trying to survive a capitalistic, patriarchal culture that values composure and productivity over humanity and connection. A society that treats self-sufficiency like a virtue and community like a weakness… That tells us if we’re struggling, it’s because we didn’t try hard enough – or didn’t smile convincingly while doing it.
Our nervous systems are fried, our bodies are exhausted, and our minds are trying to process the unprocessable.
It’s bullshit. And it’s not sustainable.
We might not call it hysteria anymore, but we still expect people to hide their pain in more professional packaging.
Cry if you must, but do it on your break.
Feel your feelings, but wrap it up before it affects your performance review.
Grieve, but only if you can bounce back in 48 hours and hit your deadline.
Basically – hurry up and get over it. Alone.
American Individualism is a scam. Interdependence is survival.
We heal in connection. We regulate in community. We survive because someone looks us in the eye and says, “You don’t have to hold this alone.”
We need villages. We need soft places to land. We need someone to say, “You’re not crazy. You’re just carrying too damn much.”
We need empathy.
So Yeah – Call Me Hysterical
If being honest about how brutal this world can be makes me “too much,” I’ll take it.
If feeling my feelings makes me “unstable,” fine. I’ll start a support group. There’ll be snacks. And swearing. And crying. And no pretending.
Because I’m not here to be palatable – I’m here to be free.
And if that makes people uncomfortable?
Maybe it means we’re finally getting somewhere.
Stay Curious
❤︎ Hag