Midlife women feel like screaming

And I know why

Claire Danes as Rachel, unable to stop screaming, in Fleishman Is In Trouble

There’s a scene in Fleishman Is In Trouble (Disney+ UK, Hulu US), where Rachel (played by Claire Danes), too tense for massage, aromatherapy, a facial or anything remotely touchy feely, is persuaded to try scream therapy. To begin with she's blocked. She quite literally has no voice, the one she once had having been silenced over years of keeping it in. So much so she can barely let out a squeak. But once the scream breaks forth and she starts, she can’t stop. She screams out her exhaustion and her frustration. She screams for her fortysomething self, exhausted from endless 18-hour days spent trying to bail the Atlantic with a sieve. She screams for her younger self, who lost the capacity for joy in the face of an endless battle to fit in. She screams and screams and screams: at society for selling her a pup, at her complacent (ex) husband who’s waltzed through life protected by his cloak of privilege, without ever having to try, at herself for buying into the whole ridiculous sham. And above all, she screams because she is all out of spoons. She is a battery on 8% (why is it always 8%?),  a tank on empty. She, like so many other women around her age, is done.

When Fleishman first came out in the States, New York Magazine ran a piece called The ‘Fleishman Is in Trouble’ Effect about all the “New York moms” who were over identifying with Rachel and the narrator Libby (effectively two sides of the over-achieving, running-up-the-down-escalator coin). The piece went viral, in large part because the internet loves to call out the sound of tiny violins. And let’s face it, in this case, you could argue, “the internet” has a point. Having to kill yourself working to afford to pay for exorbitant school fees, two nannies and the right sort of second home in the right Hamptons zip code are the most first world of first world problems. (Or the most Manhattan of Manhattan problems, since Manhattan is as first world as it gets.)

However, I couldn’t get that screaming scene out of my head. When I watched it, I'm not kidding, my head went fuzzy. When I turned the TV off and went to bed I couldn't shake the sensation that something had been lost. Because let’s face it who doesn’t want to scream the place down? 

There was a time, not so long ago, in my late 40s, when if I had started screaming I don’t know how I would have stopped. I don't know if I could  have stopped. Out of exhaustion at doing, doing, doing all the time and trying to be all the things to all the people (a feeling I’m sure is exacerbated by being yelled at on the internet every time you do something it perceives as wrong, which is a particular hazard if you make your living producing content of any kind). Out of frustration at decades of mansplaining and manspreading and manterrupting and continually smashing my head on the glass/class ceiling and endless micro-aggressions and and and... Out of trying and trying and ultimately failing to have a face that fits, to feel like you belong, or at least fool other people you do. And out of decades of keeping that all pent up inside. (And I'm a cis het white woman, so, you know, God knows how much worse it feels if you're not.)

To quote the goddess Carrie Fisher, "resentment is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die". Anger is not quite resentment, of course. But  it seems to me that sitting on decades of unexpressed anger has a similar effect. It’s just hanging there, stewing, waiting to be let out. And, when it isn’t, it curdles, rotting our insides.

This is something that came up again and again when I was researching The Shift. And it wasn’t the preserve of over-privileged city dwelling white women, it was almost everyone I spoke to. Suppressed rage was, it seemed, one of the unifying factors of being a woman in your mid/late-40s. At one point, my book publisher had postcards made up bearing the quote “Never pick a fight with a woman over 40, she is full of rage and sick of everyone’s shit”, and even now, three years later, I still get asked where you can buy them. 

Of the 50 women I spoke to in-depth, more than ten (ie 20%) freely admitted to having taken themselves off somewhere quiet to scream out the injustice, the exhaustion, the inequality, the boredom, the endless unpaid emotional labour. Well, I guess, it’s cheaper than 5-star spa scream therapy and just as effective. And it's certainly cheaper than divorce which seemed to be the alternative for a far greater percentage of those women.

"My anger felt off the scale and uncontrollable when I was around 50 and peri," one self-confessed screamer, Caroline, told me. "I used to drive alone, into the countryside, screaming with rage." Everyone had a rage story. Others told me their fury, "absolutely floored them" and one said she'd had rages, "Throwing things, screaming, like an out-of-body experience. It scared me, because I couldn’t control them."

I guess it's hardly surprising that when you’ve spent a lifetime subconsciously (or otherwise) numbing yourself to your feelings, you’re not sure what to do with them, can't control them, when they suddenly burst forth. 

Adjacent to that, there is another scene that resonated with me almost as much. I can’t remember it verbatim, and the internet isn't making it easy for me to find, but, broadly, Rachel and her ex, Toby, are standing in their swanky kitchen talking about friendship and Toby says, blithely, that friends “just walk into your life”, smiling, his self-satisfied, life-would-be-so-easy-if-you-were-just-more-like-me smile (can you tell I’m not a fan?!). Rachel just stares at him with blank astonishment. For Toby and his friends making friends is that easy, they just toddle into your life and hey presto. For Rachel, life has been one long battle to get people to like her, to let her play with them, to include her in their gang. It's not a battle she's won. She fears one of the reasons she finds it so hard is that other people can smell her desperation, the sheer effort she has to make. Like dogs, I guess. 

She’s probably not wrong. In fact, she’s right. Making friends is like anything else. The harder you find it, the harder it gets. I obviously have a personal interest in this scene. I never found it easy to make friends. Far from it. At school I was too ginger, too swotty, too unsporty, too resting bitch face (yes, even at six) to be coveted friend material and it never really improved thereafter. I soon learnt to fear big groups of girls, to the extent I still cross the road if I see a gang of teenage girls coming towards me, despite the fact I’m now 56 and am utterly invisible to them. Some people are born with the ability to make friends, they find it easy, effortless, fun even. Who knew? Maybe those people are even in a majority! For the rest of us (it's taken me this long to discover I'm not the only one), you can learn it - or learn to fake it at least. But it’s another stresser in a friction-filled life. Something which is meant to be fun but leaves you feeling wanting if you don't come up to society's scratch. It becomes just another thing to fail at.

This is all a circuitous way of saying, I know why Rachel screamed. And I know why, once she found her voice and started screaming, she couldn’t stop. I know why the world is full of fortysomething women (and the rest) screaming. Silently or otherwise. They’re at breaking point. Their pent up fury is bursting through. If only the world would listen it might hear something.

• What makes you feel like screaming?