My story was not accepted by the editor, which makes sense because it wasn’t very good. It was well written. Had a message. Said something. But see, I keep writing the same story and expecting something important to happen. 

It never does. The editor is always unsatisfied and I’m always bruised by their indifference because the story they’re rejecting is mine. I keep writing my story, and it keeps not changing anything. 

I thought if I wrote it down, if I got it all in one place and showed someone. If they then told me it was good. That I was okay after all. I would feel, I dunno, better? Justified? Legible–that’s closer. 

I wanted people to read my story–to see me and understand. For them to then tell me that it–I–am good. Talented? Special? Understandable? Understandable. That they see me, really, and they get it. They see me and they think it’s good. 

Someone once told me that the reason we write is to prove we exist. Corny, maybe, but it’s true. It’s about our intentions though, right? I can prove I exist without trying again and again to make myself understood. 

The best writing is hardly ever read. I really believe that. The stuff we put out into the world runs through the filter of what we believe is good. About ourselves. About what we create. Even if it’s very subtle, almost unnoticeable, it is changed. Trying to make ourselves likable and understood makes for bad writing. Proving to ourselves we exist though–that’s important writing.

Like I said, my story was well written. Beautifully written, actually. It just doesn’t change anything. 

And I’d really like to change something.

I’m worried I’ll never go gray. My grandfather died with a full head of dark brown hair–completely natural. He was reading a book when his heart stopped, I wish I knew which. He died the day before Valentine’s day which, as a child, is significant. 

I slept on the floor of my grandmother’s living room that night, and in the morning, I peeled the paper off crayons. I broke them into tiny pieces, and put them in heart-shaped muffin tins. I baked them and they melted into brand new, rainbow-colored, heart shaped crayons. They were valentines for my third grade classmates. I wanted them to know I cared about them enough to do this, even though this very strange thing–death–had happened so close to me. 

The last time I saw him he gave me flowers–I had just performed in a figure skating show. We kept the flowers–dried, preserved in oil, and saved in a jar. Dried flowers in oil are surprisingly beautiful, and appropriately morbid. We have them still.

My grandfather was my mother’s closest friend. They fought like siblings and he taught her how to exist in a world that wasn’t always kind. In exchange, she taught him how not to be an alcoholic. 

His name was Gene. Every Saturday, he’d have a story to tell at dinner–we’d call it his Story of the Week. He’d tell some far reaching, long-winded story about driving through the blizzard of the century with a former senator and an olympic athlete and a near death skid across the highway. When he was done my grandma would always say, “believe that and he’ll tell you another one.”

They met in college, in Texas. Their wedding photos are so beautiful you’d know they were in love in a second. 

I’ve been to Texas exactly once. It seemed, as a child, to exist as one, unending and completely flat interstate, whereon there was no speed limit and increasingly confusing billboards. 

We went, in part, to see my grandfather’s sister. She lived, and lives still, with her husband and son on the end of a dirt road off a dirt road, (not an exaggeration.) They raise longhorns on acres and acres of the most beautiful, rolling hills I’ve ever seen. 

I imagine that my grandfather grew up somewhere like this–used to this insane, completely isolated beauty. 

He preferred me to my sister–an uncommon trait in my family. I was anxious and challenging and sad in a way that upset most people, but my grandfather loved me most. I miss him terribly–even now.

I really would have liked to know him, and for him to know me now–still anxious and challenging and sad in a way that upsets most people–but strong and happy and trying. Childishly, I’d like for him to know me now, and still like me most.

I think of him a lot this time of year–how he never went gray, but that I’d really like to. I’m hoping that’s how we’re different.

I work at coffee shops for the same reasons I smoke—it’s hard to quit, and it’s something to do with my hands. Thing is, once you realize you don’t have to pay for coffee anymore, there’s really no drive to job hunt.

To be clear, I’m not serious. I won’t work at coffee shops forever. But damn, free coffee is so nice and fuck—the under baked, definitely salmonella flavored cookies. I’m not giving those up without intervention.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this one customer, a regular, who we lovingly call “Safari Grandma.” She’s very sweet and she has a cute dog and she always gets a large breve latte. Usually, a cup of hot half n half is unforgivable—you’re asking to shit yourself—but Safari Grandma seems like she can handle it. Safari Grandma seems stronger than the others.

She wears a bucket hat and two, bright white pigtails. She’s cool. 

Working at a busy coffee shop is like, a constant reminder of the person I don’t want to be. People are rude, disrespectful, flippant, CREEPY—but then there’s the Safari Grandmas. See, the number of interactions I have with complete strangers in a day is overwhelming if I think about it for too long. It is also fucking fascinating to see the way people interact with someone they’ll (a lot of the time) never see again, but that they need something from.

People are tired and absent and irritable. They haven’t had coffee whatever whatever. But not always.

I think of all the coffee shops I’ve been to, in cities I’ve visited and weird small towns I’ve stopped in and airports I’ve been stuck in. I want to know what they call their regulars and what they talk about when it’s slow and if any of them cry or write essays or call someone on their break. 

Every single interaction we have is bananas, man. I’m in Nashville because I went from New York to a hospital in Denver, fell in love with Colorado, moved to Boulder to study poetry, published writing on the internet, and fell in love with someone who lives in Nashville after they found me through this writing. 

Our paths cross because of insane as hell, completely random circumstance, and it’s cool to confront interactions with that understanding—even and especially transactional ones. Like this wild fuckin game of odds that spat you both out right there. It’s how I make it through service industry jobs, and it’s  why I ask “how’s it going?” and like, actually wait for an answer. 

Whatever brought Safari grandma to Nashville circa 2023, it must’ve been good. She’s the fuckin coolest. 

I know this isn’t a hot take, or very interesting, but like. Human interaction isn’t ever just transactional. There’s always more to it. 

Something like that. Whatever. Gn. 

Whenever I’m hurting so badly that I start to believe it’s not worth it, I remember the Denver skyline at night. It sounds like cliche bullshit, but that’s fine with me. It works almost every time. 

Here’s why: 

I was flown to Denver with my mom on December 3 2018. A few days prior, I was released from psychiatric care on the condition that I seek treatment as soon as possible. My body had stopped functioning correctly, and I wasn’t able to put up any kind of fight. My body was failing, and I couldn’t protect it or stop it or really even feel it. 

During those few days, I finished out the semester–early. I was ostensibly a junior in college with a 4.0 and for some reason that was still important to me.

Then, for three days I stayed up all night, pacing around my room–I was unable to walk in view of my family or friends because they’d worry I’d topple over. I stayed up all night with nothing in my head but a very clear and simple directive–get through the night. There was something incredibly comforting about that kind of certainty.

I don’t remember what airline we flew, but I know we stopped in Boston for a bit. I remember we saw John Kerry. I know someone met us at the airport with a wheelchair, which I insisted was overkill. And I remember being driven to the hospital. 

It’s at this point I need to talk about my mom. My mom who, through absolutely everything, was strong in a way that almost made me religious. (It didn’t–hail satan forever.) She is the reason I didn’t croak at 21 years old, and that kind of pressure is more than anyone should ever have to hold. She shaped my beliefs around parenting–having kids–raising a family–in the really hard years of my disorder. It is hard, and it never, ever gets easy. 

Eventually, my mom flew back to New York, and I started to learn how to eat again. A few times a day, I was wheeled outside for fresh air and absolutely no cigarette. During my first night alone in Denver, a CNA, and god I wish I could remember her name, wheeled me outside. I told her I’d never been to Denver, and asked what the skyline looked like. She said she’d show me.

She told me not to tell anyone, then wheeled me to the top of the hospital’s parking garage. I had mixed feelings about the idea of her yeeting me over the edge, but when I decided we were cool, we sat together and watched the skyline and I cried a ton. She let me. There’s something very cool about the way the Denver skyline kinda pops up out of the desert. I wasn’t used to that kind of openness. It was hopeful for me, then. Still is. 

Shout out to Denver Health. That fucking hospital rules. 

When I transferred from the hospital to a residential facility, I fell on my ass really thoroughly. I was struggling to finish meals, to accept help, to understand what I needed to do to recover–I was, and I have witnesses to corroborate, nuts. 

I snuck in jumping jacks in my room–hid food under the table–all sorts of insane shit. This dumbass disordered behavior didn’t stop until I saw Denver at night again. 

I was sitting on the balcony with two BHCs (behavioral babysitters) on one of our allotted fresh air breaks. It was the last of the night, and it was dark and cold but clear. We could see the skyline in its entirety. I was listening to the two BHC’s talk about what they were going to do when they got off work. They seemed like friends–like they hung out when they weren’t on shift. They were talking about if they were going out, and where. What shows they were in the middle of watching. Potential dates and some kind of karaoke contest. They were happy, and I dunno, something clicked for me. 

I realized that I could have that life. That I could think and talk about my life like it wasn’t a tragedy. I could have friends in a new city and I could go out with them and I could have this whole life that didn’t hurt all the time. There they were next to me, and there was the city, and all I had to do was figure out a way to recover. I could have that. 

And I did. I never went back home. I stayed in Colorado after treatment, finished school, made friends–fell in love on the internet. I had that life. And I still do. Every night when I get ready for bed, I’m so fucking grateful that I don’t have to worry about pacing till morning. I can just go to sleep. 

Dear reader, right now I’m hurting. I don’t know exactly why, but the thoughts that fed my disorder are sneaking back in. I’m afraid, but I also trust myself to find a way through it. Here’s why:

One of the BHCs I had overheard that night ended up going to grad school at the same university that I did. I didn’t know until my very last day of classes, when I walked into the hallway and saw her standing there. 

I wanted to cry, but there were too many people around. I was absolutely overwhelmed, but managed to tell her, “I’m graduating next week.” She smiled and asked, “What are you doing to celebrate?” 

I told her about my plans for that night, and she told me hers. I was happy.

I’m getting better at telling stories, in part because he wants to hear me tell them. It’s funny, the memories that come back once you start to look. 

The mortifications come first–more specifically, the time I got so drunk in a Manhattan hotel that I invited an Australian couple back to my hotel room. It’s not nearly as sexy as it sounds–I just thought they might like to meet my friends. I then ate a family-sized bag of m&ms, and passed out in front of the toilet. I missed the first half of the show we were in the city to see. 

Looking back, it’s less of a mortification and more like a kind of innocent, tender stupidity. It’s funny the things you’re able to forgive when someone wants to know you, in earnest. 

After the mortifications come nostalgia. This one hurts the most.

Riding my bike with my parents to get ice cream on summer afternoons–my mom picking me up from school in her old, purple van. For some reason, childhood memories feel like guilt, and so nostalgia rips through me. I rush past this one.

After nostalgia, heartbreak. After heartbreak, moments of profound realization–life, death, etc. And after that, mundanity. 

I tell him about a bug I saw on the stoop of my apartment. I tell him about the kind of tea the coffee shop I work at sells. I tell him how I like to cook my eggs and how I like to season them. I tell him about the song I heard on the radio four times at work that day. I tell him that the smell of dryer sheets makes me gag. I tell him that it takes me a long time to wake up in the morning. I tell him to let me take my time. I tell him that my cat threw up. I tell him I’m depressed. I tell him that I went back to the place where I told a joke so funny he fell in love with me. I told him it wasn’t as good without him. I tell him this because it matters more than any of the rest of it. 

I tell him that asking someone to take a walk is the most romantic gesture I can think of. Wanting to be next to someone for an undetermined amount of time–asking someone to be next to you. To walk next to you. 

Mundanity is the peak of intimacy. I tell him this and he listens.

Apathy is an ulcer. By the time I noticed what I’d lost, I had already allowed the numbness to leak out and wear away at my body’s lining. I was eating myself–trying to take in enough to understand what it was that people saw in me and fled from. 

Emotional erosion is funny. It’s like staring at the ground where a car crash could have been–maybe was. Might eventually be. Never looking away. 

I was 18 when I began to contemplate death in earnest. There is no logic that could fight the desire to stop existing once it settles in my stomach–no way to kick up enough dust to dislodge it–no amount of effort I could use to chisel it out. 

At 25, I think a lot about a woman named Jamie who I met as a kid. She had curly, graying hair and I can somehow remember every detail of her face. I remember she used to quote Samuel Beckette relentlessly, “I can’t go on, I go on.” 

The full quote is actually, “You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” But I’ve always liked the way she said it. “I go on” instead of “I’ll go on.” It’s much better in the present tense–we don’t need to survive the future quite so urgently. 

Jamie told me a story about going dancing, how she felt for the first time in her life what she called, “uncaused joy.” Happy–she just felt happy. Without reason or rationale. She had gray hair when she realized what it was to feel happy. 

I remember going dancing for the first time. Not in a club or at a bar–in a dance hall. I was 20, maybe. I went swing dancing with a friend. I was thinking of Jamie.

Nobody was watching me, and everyone was holding me. That’s dancing, I guess, if done correctly. You’re all just moving together. 

It is a profoundly, almost insultingly simple feeling, uncaused joy. And it is the best of all of us.

I’m writing a novel. I’m saying this so that even if I have to type it up and mail it out myself, I’ll finish it. It’s fiction, so a departure from what I’m used to, which is something like confession.

Whenever I think of confession now, I think of Fleabag and that goddamn priest. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, please for the love of god, Google is free.

Fucking, “Kneel.” God, Phoebe Waller-Bridge. I won’t say she’s been influential to my writing because I think that’s a hacky thing to say and something I’d never live up to. I will say, though, that she’s figured out something I’ve been reaching for.

She was able to show the complexity of wanting to be perceived, honestly, as being powerful, and for that power and conviction to be, at its root, sensitivity. Softness. Understanding.

Here’s the first taste of what is trying to be a novel. To borrow or to keep.

1.

Mark Twain was buried in Elmira, New York, but nobody really asks why. The hills, maybe–they seem close enough to pyramids. He sleeps in the center of Woodlawn Cemetery, under a simple stone with a simple inscription. Nevermind the signs and advertisements staked into the ground between the other, less important bodies: This way to Mark Twain. He wanted a simple stone, and he got one. 

Twain’s ashes are buried with his wife’s, mixed and without distinction. For this, I sincerely hope they were in love.

I feel stretched out here–distorted–like a kind of slowing down. Nobody’s moving. We’re all crouched low with our ears to the grass, listening for the dead writer to say something important. 

It’s romantic so long I don’t think about it. And it is really very easy not to think about it.

He’s a musician. Skinny, tall, shaggy blonde hair. The kind of sunken eyes that mean he forgets to eat for days and the red, cracked lips of a guy who says he could quit smoking pot whenever he wants but doesn’t because it takes the edge off his dad not calling. 

He’s a friend of a friend. A roommate of a friend, actually, which made our relationship one of supreme convenience for the both of us. 

I’m 21 in Elmira, spending the summer here. It’s an attempt to change something about myself–something broken, probably clinically. I think the answer is somewhere in this boy with the eyes and the lips. This musician.

At night he gets high and climbs out onto the roof through his bedroom window. I follow him if he asks me to, and I feel grateful. We’d look out into the dark and he’d say something like, “I love you.” And I would say something like, “Really?” To which he’d respond, “I think so.” I’d known him less than a month. I search his eyes for sincerity but find them glazed and flat. I look away. 

I am deliriously happy here.

My friend–the musician’s roommate–throws a party. I wear a dark blue dress with white polka dots. He wears a dark brown blazer with a shirt unbuttoned. He looks so beautiful that I have trouble standing near him–scared he might see me too clearly.

A girl arrives–a friend of the musician. Her hair is long and curled at the ends and she is so thin that her knees jut out like razor blades. The musician greets her, smiles and hugs her briefly. She hands him something, and he takes it, laughing. It’s a belt. 

Alone in his room later that night, I ask him about this, carefully–not wanting to know, really, but feeling it necessary to ask in case I was meant to take it as some kind of hint. He says, “Her dog peed on me, and I had to change.” He laughed. “It’s a funny story.” 

This was good enough for me. 

He plays guitar with the utmost mediocrity, having mastered the kind of overtly masculine sadness that disguises itself as innocence. It reminds me of Bright Eyes–Lua over and over and over and I want to be skinny like a model. That’s what he wants too. 

One of these nights, he starts playing me a song about someone–a girl. He says he’s just written it. Me, I think. I am deliriously happy here. 

He starts to sing and I’m reminded of how it tastes to throw up clear liquor. It’s about a girl with blonde hair–unrequited, unbending bullshit. I smile when he’s finished. My hair is so dark it’s almost black.

“That was incredible.” I say. I feel like laughing. 

I think it’s okay that we’re both pretending. I think maybe this is as close as I’ll get.

Another of these nights, he asks me what I want to do. “No idea.” I say, sitting up and trying to look more awake than I am. I am comfortable where our pretending goes uninterrupted. “Maybe we walk around Woodlawn?” 

He holds my hand and we walk together. We talk easily–look happy. Absolutely nothing is at stake. 

We follow the signs to Mark Twain. It isn’t my first time to see him, but it is my first time here with someone else. I notice how much better it feels–the conversation keeps me separated from the bodies in a comfortable, almost victorious way. 

I want them to sit up and look at me–me who is talking and moving and pretending. Look at me. Look how he’s holding my hand. 

Samuel Clemens is Twain’s given name, and I think I like this most about him. A second, secret name, and his first failed attempt at anonymity. He’s buried in the Langdon-Clemens plot with his wife (Sir name, Langdon) next to her family. 

Among the Langdon stones is my favorite–a sister of Twain’s wife, I believe. Her stone reads, “After life’s fitful fever, she sleeps well.” I’m reading it again and again in my mind. The musician drops my hand and moves closer to Twain–away from her. 

“It’s Shakespear.” I say, still reading the stone. No response. 

“Hamlet,” I continue. “They changed the pronouns, but it’s Shakespear.” I almost stop, but I don’t bother to–nothing is at stake, “Funny how there’s this prolific writer in her family, and on her gravestone she quotes Shakespear.” 

“Funny.” He says, further from me now. “Funny.” I say again. 

“What would you have chosen?” He asks from somewhere above Twain. 

I read the stone again, “I won’t be buried.” 

“No?” he asks, “Cremated, then?”

“Mummified.” I say because I know he isn’t listening. 

These hills seem close enough to pyramids.

–

That’s all for now.

Love.

I’m moving, dear reader, and I’m about to be incredibly broke. I’ve been thinking about how the hell I’m going to make money when what I really want is to be a weird artist, and I started thinking about the value of art. 

Value is a funny way to measure art. Talking about conceptual art as if it holds no “value” is wrong in several ways and correct in a couple more. Let me explain. 

There’s this phenomenon happening on the social internet, as there always seems to be, where an artist, very talented in a very specific, hyper-realistic style of figure drawing or painting, posts a timelapse of their work from start to finish. We, the viewer, are stunned by how true to life the figure looks–how the eyes look wet or the cheeks look soft. It’s just like a photo, we say, and we watch, impressed by this single human’s ability to replicate life exactly as it is. 

This is not a new phenomenon–we’ve been looking at perfectly drawn figures and swooning forever. But it’s…interesting.. to me that now we can film the entire process, speed it up so it lasts less than a minute, and share it with millions of people on an app algorithmically designed to show you things you will react to. 

The glorification of hyper-realism we’re seeing right now is fascinating to me, not because I am a fan of the kind of exact replication of form that seems to stun people, but because this shift to labor-intensive, exacting, time consuming, rigid art making makes perfect sense in the context of our current, waveringly democratic reality.   

Surprise! Fascists hate conceptual, abstract, and expressionist art. 

The link between the hatred of modern, expressionist art and fascism is one explored much further by much more qualified people. My favorite of these explorations is on youtube—it’s by Jacob Geller, called “Who’s Afraid of Modern Art.” He explains in the video that hating modern, expressionist art doesn’t make you a fascist (so don’t hate me if it’s not your thing) but the rigid adherence to aesthetic perfection is an idea propagated by these fuckers. 

Endlessly striving for some fucked up idea of perfection is a pillar of white supremacy, and a barrier to entry into a world outside the joyless one most of us inhabit in good old late stage capitalism. We cannot make perfect, exacting figures, so we don’t make art. We don’t have the time to paint a visibly soft, perfectly real cheek, so we don’t make art. We watch a process video on tiktok and the end result looks more real than our goddamn reflection, and so we don’t make art. 

People hate Rothko. Still, after all this time and all the papers studying people’s psychological responses to the colors he uses–people still think he’s full of shit. Fine, that’s fine. People can have specific tastes in art without it being fascist, obviously. What isn’t fine is the flatness of hyper-realism and the way it exists in our attention right now. 

When the art we make doesn’t contribute to its own commodification, it is seen as having no value economically. When what is most commonly commodified is hyper-realism, our less exact, less time consuming, or more wildly imagined art is seen as less valuable. So, in this way, yeah. Conceptual art can be economically valueless. 

When we cannot commit one hundred percent of ourselves to our art because we have to go to work and we have to take care of our families or we don’t want to make art that way, we aren’t going to become pros at hyperrealistic drawing–we aren’t going to be able to commodify what we make like the tiktok, virals or whoever. 

As an artist who has made exactly zero dollars from my art, I’m okay with this. Thing is, my absolutely economically valueless art still has value. Not only is it a rebellious act to spend my time making something “valueless” , it is also a practice in fighting the kind of idealized perfection I was talking about earlier. 

More than any of this commodification shit, it is important to recognize that we’ve been making provocative, ugly, confusing, weird, seemingly unimpressive, or seemingly disturbed art in response to global hardship since the first World War. Surrealism, right? So while hyper-realism is having its day, what’s brewing is (hopefully) something really fucking weird. 

Make fucked up art. Even if it gives you nothing back.

More on this to come.

I love you. 

A

Catholicism as it was shown to me, which is how it is most commonly practiced, is immensely lonely. This is, of course, on purpose. For all the singing in churches and hand shaking and bread sharing, there is a startling lack of community.

I remember sitting in the basement of St. Mary’s church as a child. I remember the face of the woman speaking, reading–the verses she’d chosen. It was the end of the world, explained to us through scripture. 

She said this would not be the end of everything–that the rapture was actually a softer thing. It was a normal kind of heartbreak, to die. It seemed to her more acceptable for a child to talk about the end as it is prescribed to them, individually than some kind of apocalyptic shock. So in the stinky, mold-covered church basement, we talked about our own, inevitable deaths. Leaving out collective suffering entirely, she thought, would spare us some kind of pain. 

Have you ever tried to read about the rapture? It’s from the Latin raptus “a carrying off, abduction, snatching away; rape.” The plan as it’s written is this: there will be signs (earthquakes, the sun will be darkened and the moon won’t reflect its light, stars will fall from the sky, and heavenly bodies will be shaken.) They seemed to have covered all possible forms of apocalypse which is, if you ask mek, a cop out. Regardless, the dead who believed in God will rise and all current believers will fly up and meet God “in the sky.” Non believers and sinners will suffer the wrath of God here on Earth. 

I went looking for some rapture verses (for some light, saturday afternoon reading) and came across a few hardcore, stonecold lines:

“I tell you, on that night two people will be in one bed; one will be taken and the other left. Two women will be grinding grain together; one will be taken and the other left.” 

“Where, Lord?” they asked. 

He replied, “Where there is a dead body, there the vultures will gather.”

I mean, the belief system propagated by christianity, and explained through the idea of a rapture, is that other people will suffer, but they will deserve it. 

The thing about “the god argument” is that it lacks logic–it’s more of an internalized superiority. Much like the “rise and grind” ultra-capitalist mindset of conservative Americans, it seems that the christian belief is that what a person deserves–their worth–is dependent on how strictly they devote themselves to the rules and expectations as they are set before them. 

Just work harder. Just don’t get pregnant. Just deliver a child. See where I’m going with this?

They missed the part about Jesus being like, fully a savior, and instead focused on the part about being saved. And I get it, who wouldn’t want an out like that? But see, who else do we know who has internalized superiority and buried guilt.

Exactly. 

We know how white people act when given uninterrupted power for hundreds of years, but the question we’re living in is what the hell do we do to combat it? How do we salvage something so, incredibly fucked?

Community, I think. We see people in pain and we help. We boost the voices of people with marginalized identities, relentlessly. This is how we challenge supremacist thinking. This is not a hot take, but an important one. Why I’m choosing to make it is that, funny enough, it’s exactly what the big guy preached in the first place. Help thy neighbor, and all that. 

My last post was about anger, and I don’t take any of that back. Anger is at the root of revolutionary action. I don’t think, however, that compassion and anger are opposites. When working in tandem, anger and compassion make change–look at what’s happening in Iran.

I think in my recent anger I may have, for a moment, forgotten that you need both. 

I love you. Please forgive the preachy self-importance.

X. A 

I don’t want to be angry–I’ll start there. It isn’t enjoyable to know you’ve been unjustly treated, or that the circumstances of your life are beyond your control. This doesn’t feel good. That’s where I’ll start–by saying that I get absolutely no pleasure from anger. It isn’t a choice I’m making, or a way around really feeling the heaviness of this moment in our global history. I don’t want to be angry, but I am. 

I think a mistake a lot of people make, especially when talking about women, is that anger is the first emotion on the scene–that anger comes first, then the real emotions show up, i.e. sadness, grief, guilt–whatever else is more pleasant to feel. And let’s be real, sadness is SO MUCH more pleasant to feel than anger. Sadness doesn’t ask for anything–I can lay in my bed and feel the weight on my chest and let the waves come, all without feeling the need to act. Sadness is painful, but passive, and anger’s a bitch. It forces a response. 

For a lot of us, anger is a mark of unlovability. The belief that an angry woman is an unlovable woman–that an angry woman is the opposite of the “cool girl”–that an angry woman loses to the effortless one, every time, is a dangerous one. 

To talk about the “cool girl” is necessarily to talk about anger. The Cool Girl doesn’t get angry. The Cool Girl is unbothered–not jaded–but she’s easy in the same way. She is smooth enough to take whatever she’s given without it feeling unjustified. She cannot get angry, because The Cool Girl has no boundaries that can be crossed. She will not feel the need to act out of protection for herself, because no part of her is vulnerable to attack. 

I don’t mean the “bitch” or “mean girl” trope. I don’t mean she’s withholding or cold or stuck up. All of which, by the way, are exactly the same kind of garbage identifiers as “cool girl.” 

What I actually mean is, like, she is unbothered. She doesn’t feel the need to respond with force when she is affected by force. She isn’t angry–this is what I mean. 

Right now, I am curious about her opposite–She is the logical conclusion of a world forcing itself inside her. She is responding to an unjust situation with action. This is what I mean when I talk about an angry woman. 

I have always been proud of the fact that the hard things that have happened to me have not made me hard. I was placed, against my will,  in an underfunded, completely unsanitary psychiatric facility in upstate New York. I was then, a few months later, certified by the state of Colorado to remain in eating disorder treatment for 6 months, where I lost the ability to be under my own power. I was asked to be in a huge amount of mental and physical pain every day, for 6 months–unable to do the things that make life even remotely enjoyable. I have been assaulted. I have been abused. I have withstood a tremendous amount of pain, and I have always been proud that this didn’t make me a callous person. 

I was proud of the fact that I wasn’t angry. 

Recently though, I’ve been unable to contain a substantial amount of anger. I have been more outwardly angry than I’ve been in my entire life, and the people I work with are starting to notice. “Allison is spewing more angry, marxist propaganda” (this was a good one honestly) and “Allison, why are you always so angry?” 

 I was starting to worry, dear reader, that I’d lost my resilience to hard things–that they made me a huge, uncaring bitch after all. 

What I’ve realized lately, dear, sweet reader, is that this isn’t true. I am angry that the patriarchal fucking circle jerk of headass world leaders have lead us “this close to armageddon.” I am angry that we are watching our planet become dangerously uninhabitable while doing next to nothing to stop it. I am angry that I worked three consecutive jobs, with little more than a week between them, during a global pandemic, and still have no savings. I am angry that I can’t get an abortion in the state where I live because religious extemists sit in the highest court in our country. I am angry that we elected a narcissistic, baby, sociopath in 2016, and didn’t riot in the streets. I am angry that people are so beaten down by the circumstances of their lives that they blindly follow this sociopath. I am angry that black and brown people are killed just for existing. I am angry that the minimum wage in Tennessee is $7.25. I am angry that I cannot walk home at night because I am afraid. I am angry that over a million people have died of COVID in this country, and we still don’t care about each other.

We are all angry, and that is a whole goddamn lot of anger not to let out. It is nearly impossible to be The Cool Girl in these trying times, trust me. It is nearly impossible to not be notably, visibly angry–and often. 

But see, I was looking at it wrong. We are angry because hard experiences didn’t make us callous. We are angry because we still fucking care about the circumstances of our lives. The anger is the resilience–it isn’t a bad thing to be angry often, or loudly, or “at the wrong time.” It is not a bad thing to be angry, and it isn’t useless either. It’s quite literally all we have to fight with. 

I don’t know. It doesn’t feel good, and I’m not choosing it, but I’m glad I’m angry. Fuck The Cool Girl. It’s angry girl autumn, or something like that. Whatever. Be pissed, it doesn’t make you unlovable. 

It’s obvious, maybe, but I needed to hear myself say this.

Love you,

A