Issue 3: What would you create if you created from a place of rage?

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welcome

Dear Collective,

I am an angry person, and I have been for a long time, but I was never able to recognize anger for what it was. It was too scary to face, so I shoved it down and down and down even more. If you’ve watched The Sopranos, you’ll know that the show’s thesis at the beginning of the show was as follows: “Depression is anger turned inwards.”

I’ve always had a low level of depression and still do to this day. But as I’ve grown, I’ve come to realize that a great deal of that depression came from all of the repressed anger that I’ve dealt with my entire life. Anger at having to be polite at all times. Anger at the perfectionism I was supposed to uphold. And later, much later, anger at the fact that I as a black woman couldn’t communicate my feelings about being black in America to my white parents.

Lately, the latter is what has been excavating itself from my soul. That what I couldn’t articulate for so long but knew deep inside, was that I wasn’t cared for in the way I should have been. That my understanding of myself and place in the world were withheld from me. That my parents didn’t do the work required to raise a black child, a black daughter.

Because after hearing my entire life, “we don’t see color,” “it [the color of my skin] never made any difference to us,” I was confused. From a very young age, the youngest I can remember was in pre-school, I have hidden racist incidents that happened to me from my parents. Because intuitively, I think I knew that they weren’t safe people to talk to.

As I’ve been excavating, I’ve been thinking something that feels like a deep truth. I think race mattered a lot to my parents, and they, like a lot of liberal white Americans couldn’t admit that they might be part of the problem. Would they have expected the perfection that was required of me if I was a white child—a little white girl with “The Bluest Eyes?”

As I’ve come to all of these revelations, the anger at my parents and the sadness for my younger self have been the dominant emotions. And I realize that the anger is a real and valid part of me. It deserves to be heard. And the younger version of myself deserves to be held. That I, as the grown woman that I am, can hold both of these extreme emotions at the same time. Because what are we if not souls on a journey to experience humanity in all its imperfection?

Thank you for joining me on this journey of self-exploration of rage. It means the world to me.

-Bethany

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The Final Beach Trip

by Bethany Rose Morris

Parker

I sat in the back seat on the passenger’s side of my family’s beat-up Chevy 98 Suburban like I had for my entire life, listening to “Cat’s in the Cradle” like I had my entire life. This was the last trip to Mustang Island, ten hours away from our rural Texas town, that my family and I would take before I went off to college at Clemson, all the way in Georgia. It’s funny because most parents would be mad at the distance between them and their kids.

But my parents were angry because I wasn’t going to their alma mater, Princeton. They’d been angry at me for a while at that point. I leaned my head against the dust and bug-spotted window and watched as we passed through the land that had, in a way, raised me. The cracked land. The mesquite. The oil rigs drilling into the ground were comforting to me, like the song on the radio used to be. My parents used to sing this song all the time, but their disappointment in me was louder than any nostalgic oldie could cover up.

Dad

This goddamn song was haunting me. I kept hearing it every place I went. The grocery store—”Cat’s in the Cradle.” The gym—”Cat’s in the Cradle.” The fucking baseball game—Cat’s in the motherfucking Cradle. I tightened my hands on the wheel until my knuckles were white, even though I usually love this drive. Who was I kidding? I knew why this song was haunting me. I failed Parker, just like the piece of shit dad in the song. I worked too much—always missing her basketball games, her award ceremonies, her prom, all of her core memories, I fucking missed them, and now I’m paying the price.

I promised myself that I wouldn’t become my father. And I did. Now Parker, my only child and daughter, the valedictorian of her class, was going to Clemson and doing the exact opposite of what we’ve wanted for her since she was a baby. I couldn’t blame her. When I was her age, all I wanted to do was to get out from underneath my dad’s roof and prove to him that I was my own man. That I didn’t want his approval anymore. That I was done doing what he wanted. I just prayed that one day she would find her way back to us, to me.

Mom

I reached over to touch my husband of fifteen years and partner of twenty-four years’ leg. I knew what this song meant to him. He thinks that he failed Parker for not being there for her. And maybe that’s true, but you know who was there for her? Me. Every stupid class play, every painful children’s choir performance, every godawful PTA meeting with those Bible-thumping, bottle-blonde-having women, I showed up. And still Parker didn’t reach out and take the advantages that were handed to her.

If I were her in her shoes, I would’ve wept with gratitude at the schools she got to go to. The competitions she got to compete in. The college interviews that she was able to get because her father and I worked our ever-loving asses off to provide a life that was different for her than the one we had. What was so wrong with the life that I built, despite all the odds stacked against me, that Parker couldn’t wait to turn her back to it? Because apparently, the life we gave to her, the life I would have killed to have, wasn’t good enough for her.

Parker

As the desert passed by and “Cat’s in the Cradle” came to a close, I thought about what living in Georgia would mean for me. When we went to visit, I felt immediately at home, even though it was nothing like what I had grown up around. The trees were taller and older and wiser. The landscape was green. The air was wet. But despite my excitement for what was to come, I was stuck in the backseat like always, imagining the times when this song used to come on and we all used to sing along with it.

Closing

Thank you once again for being along for this journey to uncover our true selves. As we begin to discover who we truly are and who we truly want to be, there’s an unspoken grief that comes with the life that you’re leaving behind. The grief of not being able to take everyone with you because they no longer understand the version of you that is emerging. In some respects, this is a death. But on the other side of death is rebirth, an invitation to start anew as the character you want to play for the next season of your life. The business owner. The singer. The painter. The mogul. And maybe even the soon-to-be college student.

Wide Awake, Now What?

-Bethany