When I was fourteen years old I became obsessed with Manchester Orchestra’s 2013 album, Cope, one of the few albums in the world I can repeatedly listen to every song through without skipping. I am in the backseat of the car, head pressed to the cool window, envisioning my future adulthood, the girl I would grow up to become, feeling an intangible pull to something deep and dark that I worried would never leave me. I am older then, running in the night through my neighborhood, screaming the words along under my breath as it moves in and out in the cold air: And I hope if there is one thing I let go it is the way that we cope.
In 2014, Manchester Orchestra released a second version of the album. Where the first had been anger, electricity, fight, this new version was soft, resigned, forgiving. They titled it Hope. I thought it was the most brilliant pairing I had ever seen—two versions of the same feeling, a flipped coin. The same songs, the same lyrics, a wildly different sound (echoing another dual album I love, The Bravery’s 2008 The Sun and The Moon). I listen to these albums when I am in very different spaces and the lyrics equally change. On the heavy version of Cope, I am drawn by a desire to release at all costs, I will make myself anew, I will let go of the damaging ways I have come to exist. On the Hope version, I pull to different lyrics: And we won’t become a lifeless lope that wanders round and round for sorrow / And I know! / I know! / I know! I know! / I know!
Last night as I was brushing my teeth the heavy version of Cope came on shuffle on my phone. I paused, sinking down to the floor to really listen. Yes, I thought to myself, this is how I feel right now. I am scrolling constantly on the news. I am filled with equal parts rage and fear. I run and run again, looking for a way out. I continually resist the urge to drive my car speeding into the middle of nowhere and never look back upon this place. I seek a way to cope with the world as it is and I come up lacking. I bleach my hair back to its natural color. I buy a new (old) leather jacket. I swim in the frozen river. I use my newly prescribed inhaler, breathe deep in and out. I read books. I read so many books. I am so tired of reading books and sitting in classrooms where we speak abstractly about the world. I crave something tangible, something permanent, a tether that will tie me down, tie me back. I grow bored and restless and afraid.
I used to write. As you might have noticed if you subscribe to this newsletter, I can barely bring myself to write here at all. More than that, I can barely bring myself to write anywhere. Nearly finished novel drafts sit untouched, my journals blank and unopened. A few months into dating my partner of now-multiple years, he remarked to me that I used to write poems about every crush I had but I had never written anything for him. He’s right. You’re real, I said, that’s why I can’t bring myself to write about you. I don’t want to live in a fantasy anymore, I want to see the world up close, I want to live in it. All of that is true but I think there is also something deeper there. I don’t write anything anymore.
The only thing I have ever felt to be true since I was young was that I was a writer. It was an identity I clung to, one that gave me purpose both then and for the future—and I have always been obsessed with envisioning the future. But more than anything, it was an identity I needed. If I am not a writer in the world, then what am I? Untethered, unmoored, adrift. Every risky decision I have ever made, every job I have taken or turned down or sacrificed another for was in service of an identity that somewhere along the way has slipped away from me. I am watching the world unfold in real time and I have nothing to write. I desire to make sense of what is going on around us, to process it the way I always have, but nothing comes. If I am not a writer who am I? The decisions I made in service of how important this identity has felt have let me down. It has been years since I published anything, years since I submitted work of any kind. In truth, these days I am a broke graduate student pursuing a degree for a job that is practically obsolete, a job which I am not sure I would be willing to make the necessary sacrifices for. I am an openly queer Southern woman writing and researching the rural South in a time where it is probably not in my best interest to be doing so. In academic spaces, I am expected to be an expert, but I can hardly begin to speak for these communities. I am so tired of trying to get other people from other places to try to see this region the way I do.
For a long time I attached myself to the identity of Southerner as a way to give my work grounding. I am the type of person who needs to have feet on the ground, who needs to feel a tangible connection to place. I am not well when I am unmoored, when I am disconnected. I held to this identity the same way I held—and still attempt to hold—on to writer: I cling with fervor because I am afraid of who is left if I am not these things. But I am also boxed in by identity, I am limited by my need to define so rigidly who I am, what I study, what I stand for. I want to tell you, readers, everything about me; and yet I also want to give you nothing at all. I want to delete all of my platforms, all of my social media, and finally be free from this constant cycle of sharing and speaking and refusing silence; I want to learn from silence when is the best time to speak. I spill my guts online and say nothing in real life. A year ago, I lost a close friend and said nothing to anyone. I am not in search of sympathy. I wish only to acknowledge that certain things feel more real when they are brought to light. Does everything have to be revealed with such harsh edges? I am thinking again of cope/hope and the power in duality. I’d like to believe that rigidity can cede to softness when it matters, that what hurts and sears and cuts can also function as meaningful breaks, ways to reveal the hard world and then make way for something new entirely. In coping with the world and the South today, I think I have to believe that there can be meaning in these fissures.
Last week, while leading a workshop for a group of young artists on place-based art and rural identity, I asked them a question familiar to Good Folk regulars: what do you believe in? I added an addendum: what do you believe in for the rural South? I find myself repeating my answer like a mantra these days. Perhaps I am still trying to convince myself. I believe that another world is possible. I want to believe that an alternate world is possible here. Southern activists have long been fighting for that world, envisioning that world, challenging other people to begin to see the outlines of that world, too. I will not hope for sorrow. I will find another way, another dream, another yearning with which to cope.
In searching for a poem to give my partner for our recent anniversary, I returned to an older piece of writing from my college years. I have always loved this poem. And clearly I have always been in search of ways to cope with loss.
LOVE POEM In the sidereel I become magnetic. I am the protagonist of this story, I am someone in love. Not carbon, but compact. Compartmentalized. You see only what I want you to see. You do not see. Here are the ways in which I have been a body: whipporwill and stuffed, all my circuits blown. If you are alone now, then you will be alone always. And you know it. Push a hand into the ether, sift for flesh. Dark and dirty. It’s winter, which means the frost is on the ground. Which means we learn to live inside again. Silent, letting only our eyes speak. Who needs words when we get like this, like this? Let’s never speak again, let’s never even look at one another after this night, this night like a bird without wings. If you aren’t happy now, then you never will be. We play music and you teach me how to dance. I dream of wheelchairs and soap smelling of honey. I let the mail pile up in the box. I dig up my roots. I know when the snow melts, you will be gone. I know you better than anyone. I walk along the river, watch the earth freeze. I’ll shoot down the sun before I’ll let you walk out of here alive. I’ll do the unimaginable thing.
This was lovely and poignant “If I am not a writer in the world, then what am I? Untethered, unmoored, adrift.” Many lines resonated.
Really lovely piece. Thank you for sharing!