Red behind the eyes

On anger and place.

Jan 11, 2022

Hi Folks,

Today I want to talk about anger. Lately it seems to linger behind everything, sneaking up in small moments and overwhelming me. I have been thinking about anger for the last year as I embodied a character who feels it deeply: first, that she is unable to leave the place she is from, and then that she feels she has to at all. In many ways, I am that character.

Recently I saw a TikTok of a girl living in Charlotte, North Carolina and she asked viewers why they would ever want to live anywhere else. I grew up in the Charlotte suburbs, and I feel strange when I go back to the city, as if I am watching a new version— and one that feels hardly reminiscent of the place before— emerge. Charlotte has begun to feel like any other city in America. It is certainly not unique. It is landlocked and sprawling, full of traffic and shopping malls, inequality and the structured experience of luxury. When my mom and I moved away and down to the coast, we often used to remark on our lives there, asking what we did at all for fun. It seemed difficult to conjure up an image. I knew what the comments on this girl’s post would say. And yet they still made me feel anger all over my body. The commenters on the post were never going to let this girl be happy; they were always going to make her feel bad about enjoying the place she found herself. Even if it isn’t perfect, even if you know there are problems— why is it considered so shameful to simply like where you are? Why are we all, always, so conditioned that our lives won’t begin until we leave?

The casual move from “I can think of reasons I wouldn’t want to live in that city” to “who would ever want to live in the South at all” is a slippery slope, and one that is seen so often. Trust me when I say that I grow up knowing more than anyone what it is like to hate where you are from. I lost my accent young, bled it out of my voice early because I was convinced I would never return, and more than that, I wanted no trace of the places that made me on my body. I did not want to look like where I came from, nor did I want to sound like it. Most of all, I wanted to be a blank canvas, ready for whatever new place I found myself in to make me. I never put down roots or built meaningful connections or allowed a place to feel like home because I did not think it ever would be. I wanted, most of all, to be elsewhere, nearly all of the time.

I read through all the comments on that post and all I could feel was that same familiar anger. I feel it all the time now: anytime I think of the fact that I am happier with my life here, which exists now on a much smaller scale than it did, and yet I am constantly questioned about my choice to be here; whenever I talk to my students and their dreams consist only of leaving the state, of getting out; when I see how deeply these places have changed in my lifetime, how they will never be the way I remember them; the way that everyone elsewhere seems to want to have an opinion of the South and yet almost all of the top ten places people are moving to in America exist in the region. I am angry when I think of the psychological damage I have inflicted on myself by buying into the myth that I could never be somebody here, somebody in the sense that my life had value and meaning and made an impact on the world around me. That if I came back I was sacrificing the opportunity to do something great, that great things only happened to people who left. That, as a queer woman, I would never get to be myself in my home, even though the greatest population of LGBTQ+ identifying individuals are here. I did not have stories that showed me what my life could look like here. The only stories I had were either rooted in the traditions of a South I would never agree with, or they were of loss. I think I will be unlearning this lesson, and feeling this anger, for the rest of my life.

There is no doubt in my mind that if you can get out into the world, you should. That we should all at one point find ourselves the minority culture in the room, that we should surround ourselves with a variety of lived experiences. I am lucky to have had opportunities to live elsewhere, all the way around the globe. And it was while I was elsewhere that I began to understand that the only place I really wanted to be was home, and that not only did I not have one, I didn’t even know what it could look like for me. What would it mean to be myself in the places that made me? What would it look like to show up openly and with love? To stop critiquing and instead start listening?

When I began to write about the South, I realized I did not want to write about it in retrospect. I did not want to look at it from far away. I want to see it up close, even if it makes me angry. It is an anger that I will have to learn to live with, and then do something with. This week I will teach my students about anger and what to do with it, and I will read them these words from Maya Angelou, which sum it up better than I can ever say: “You should be angry. You must not be bitter. Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. It doesn’t do anything to the object of its displeasure. So use that anger. You write it. You paint it. You dance it. You march it. You vote it. You do everything about it. You talk it. Never stop talking it.”

I guess all of this is just my way of talking it. Of turning it into something. Of seeing it up close. Behind my eyes all goes red. And I am still here.

GOOD FOLK

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