After writing about the childhood trauma that caused my selective mutism and my horrific experience with a job training programme for Autistic people, I’m left with this deep rage about everything I went through. Writing those posts made it crystal clear to me how much BS I had to endure from an early age without adequate support from the adults around me.

One thing that’s helping me heal? Screaming.

My vocal coach recently started teaching me vocal distortion (the technical term for the kind of screaming you hear in rock songs). The first couple of times I tried it, something in me was holding me back from fully committing to screaming. I heard a voice in my head telling me, “If you scream, you’ll get in trouble.” It was the same voice that convinced me for years that the only way to stay safe was to be invisible.

But when I finally figured out how to do Zack de la Rocha’s signature “UHH!” (that he does a lot in Rage Against the Machine songs), it felt so liberating. It’s now my favourite vocal exercise.

This made me realise that perhaps the reason why I’m so drawn to screaming in music is because I’ve been repressing my own screams so much that I had to find another outlet for it. In my old journals, I often wrote, “I wish I could scream but I don’t know how.”

It also made me think about how I rarely ever have meltdowns (something that used to make me question if I was really Autistic), but would have full-blown, explosive meltdowns in my dreams. That showed how much I suppressed my rage—the only place I felt safe letting it out was in my sleep.

I recently came across this super relatable quote from Courtney Love:

I didn’t ever really talk until I started hanging out in ’80 or ’81 with the drag queens at the Metropolis [or Met, a gay new wave club] in Portland. I was very, very quiet. So much so that at one point when I was very young I was diagnosed as a probable autistic. And then I started hanging around with bitchy drag queens and with [my friends] Ursula and Robin, and they basically raised me. I found my inner bitch and I ran with her.

Courtney Love

What’s funny is that Courtney Love and Zack de la Rocha are literally the last people I’d ever expect to probably have had selective mutism. As a teen, I consciously identified with “depressed, sensitive artist” types like Kurt Cobain and Thom Yorke. Sadness felt much safer to express than anger. I grew up being seen as a “good, innocent Christian girl,” so anger felt like a forbidden emotion for me to express.

I did feel inexplicably drawn to Courtney Love and Zack de la Rocha at that time too, although I didn’t fully understand why. It was much easier to see myself in Kurt and Thom, who gave me the impression of being introverted, sensitive, and introspective, than it was to see myself in Courtney and Zack, who I saw as angry, fearless, and powerful—words I’d never dare use to describe myself back then. Courtney and Zack had a commanding and confrontational stage presence that I found intimidating as a teen. Their screams felt so raw and visceral to me; they shook me to my core in a way that no other artists could. But now I can see that they represented my shadow; the side of me that I repressed. That was why I was so drawn to their music.

Now, I’m reclaiming my right to scream. To be angry. And above all, to be heard. As Zack de la Rocha says, “Anger is a gift.”

See also: How Rage Against the Machine changed my life