Burn It Down Page 16

  I’ve been teaching creative writing for twenty years. I don’t know if a story can save us—but it sure as hell can show us what’s worth fighting for.

  I wrote about this on the internet and some dude—it’s always a dude—came into my DMs and said, “Stop making everything so fucking political,” and, rest in peace, I killed him with my brain. You think this is political? This is what happened at work today, Dude. I would love to have written about the incredible class discussion I had with a bunch of brilliant writers about diction and syntax, narrative and reflection, Joan Didion and Toni Morrison, but we didn’t have that discussion because we were walking out of our classroom, standing in the cold, and listening to young people try to save their own lives.

  In retrospect, it was an excellent lesson on Morrison: “No time for despair,” she wrote in The Nation. “No place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear.”

  Two more hours later I was outside of my office, trying to find my keys. The Creative Writing Department at Northwestern is on the basement level of University Hall; our windows butt up against the ceiling and offer an excellent view of people’s legs. My phone buzzed with a text message. I unlocked the door, turned on the lights, and read:

  This is the Northwestern Emergency Notification System. This is not a drill. A person with a gun—

  Outside my window, people were already running.

  Like most teachers—and students, for that matter, starting as early as kindergarten—I have been through civilian active shooter training as designated by the Department of Homeland Security. The script for my particular situation goes like this: turn off the lights, lock the door, and get down—“shelter-in-place,” it’s called. I knew that the space underneath my desk couldn’t be seen from the window or the hall. My office door has this narrow vertical window and on the day I moved in, I stood in every corner of the room to determine lines of visibility. I do this in my classrooms, too. Count exits. Test locks. Identify potential weapons: projector, laptop, chair. What about my body, a shield between my students and a shooter? What if the shooter was a student? When do you shoot a student? When do you take a bullet? Would I take a bullet? Would I cry? Would adrenaline kick in and I’d have that extra strength mothers get when they lift buses off their children?

  I can’t be the only teacher who thinks like this.

  I pretzeled up underneath my desk, put my phone between my thighs, and stared at my inbox. Updates from the university came every twenty minutes: police are responding… stay where you are. Friends started to call as local news posted the story. When CNN picked it up, I texted my mother so she wouldn’t worry, as if it’s possible for a mother not to worry. I watched my students on various social media platforms, many of them reporting what was happening. They are writers, journalists—thorough and precise, poetic and ferocious. I’m sorry the world is like this, I wanted to tell them. I’m proud that you’re trying to make it better, but I couldn’t, I was holding my heartbeat, trying to control my breath the way my yoga teacher taught me, trying to control my thoughts the way my therapist taught me, trying to control my—not fear. This wasn’t fear.

  It was rage.

  Twenty-five years I’d imagined this moment and every time I was panicked, shaking; now, instead, I was white-hot and clenched, my muscles seething. Psychologists have long written about anger as a secondary emotion to fear, but I could give a shit about theory. This was gut-level; my body, my bones. I should not be under a desk. My students should not be stacking chairs against the doors of their classrooms. We should not be teaching children to throw school supplies at an imaginary bad guy with a gun. My high school chemistry teacher should not have had eleven guns. The Parkland shooter should not have had a gun. He was nineteen years old. He’d been expelled for bringing knives to school. His mother had recently died. He made a comment on YouTube that he wanted to be a professional school shooter when he grew up and was reported to the FBI, who didn’t do anything to help; he needed help, we need help, mental health services and anger management counseling and a couple generations worth of education and parenting to dismantle rape culture and toxic masculinity. It will be complicated and near impossible but we will do it because for the love of god we will make a better world, but to do that we need resources, not firearms.

  I’d been under my desk for an hour when I got the message from my son’s elementary school saying the police had put them on lockdown, too. At that point I could’ve exploded University Hall with the sheer force of my fury. I stared at the clock—a boiling kettle, a watched-fucking-pot—for another excruciating hour until an email popped up from Northwestern with the subject heading ALL CLEAR. I didn’t read it, just grabbed my keys and rushed to my kid. There were 3.3 miles between us, Sheridan to Dempster, and a street full of double-parked cars and panicked parents.

  Children are stronger than any of us, and mine in particular is tough as hell. That said, he’d spent two hours imagining that his mother was dead.

  It’s in his body now. His bones.

  “Mom, I have a question,” he said that night. We were in his bed, both of us exhausted. “Was anyone hurt?”

  “No,” I said. Reports were coming in about what had happened and I struggled to explain. “Someone called the university and… they made a joke.”

  “A joke,” he repeated. His eyebrows wrinkled up. “It didn’t feel like a joke.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “It’s complicated,” I said.

  Except it’s not complicated. It’s not complicated at all.

  “Were you—” he started, and I steeled myself for yet another conversation about violence, about our great American experiment. “Were you scared?”

  I told him about the messages I’d gotten from friends. That I thought the people at my job handled it very well and I was grateful. That the young writers I work with were so smart and brave. “So many helpers!” I said for the hundredth time, and I started to say something about kindness, but he was already asleep.

  I lay there for a while, listening to him breathe, thinking how long I’d been afraid of this day.

  I don’t have any more room for fear.

  I am too fucking furious.

  Going to War with Myself

  KEAH BROWN

  I am angry all the time. That’s my secret. I am so angry. I often dream of confronting the people who remind me of my otherness, letting them see just how angry the woman they’re so intent on watching limp can be. The fantasy version of myself prepares for war, fists clenched and heart beating fast. She is unfazed by the idea of consequence. I imagine my body turning red and steam coming out of my ears as I walk toward them. One foot in front of the other as I watch them squirm a little. When we’re finally face-to-face, my normal color returns, but the anger remains. I tap my left hand on my left leg, keeping time as if I am singing a song and not screaming at them to get a life or a semblance of decorum, or that I am a human being.

  When I was in high school, someone asked me through Formspring, the anonymous question platform, “Why are you a cripple?” It read less like a question and more like a statement, a way of saying, “You don’t belong, in case you forgot.” A way to let me know that they saw my disability no matter how desperate I was to appear unaffected by it.

  I hate when people feel the need to remind me that I am other. They speak about my disability in such a negative way that it makes me feel less than human, and angry enough to flip a car or two. My disability, my Blackness, and my womanhood are seen before my humanity, my desires and dreams, if those are seen at all. Navigating that reality daily would make anyone question themselves after a while. I get angry at other people’s ignorance now, but for a very long time my anger was directed at the wrong person: myself. Instead of giving the people who mocked my disability a piece of my mind like they deserved, I turned my barbs and insults inward. I thought that I alone was responsible for the way I existed in the world.
Knowing I couldn’t cure cerebral palsy simply fueled my disdain for myself.

  I was so mortified, ashamed, and filled with anger after that Formspring question, I wanted to reach through my computer, grab the person who asked it, and repeatedly bang their head against my desk until I felt better. What I actually did was refuse to eat for the remainder of the day and cry myself to sleep, convinced I was a freak who didn’t belong.

  I spent hours in front of my mirror picking myself apart piece by piece, chastising myself for the way my voice sounded when I answered questions in class and how red my face got from crying in group therapy. Back then everything I did was worthy of ridicule, everything about me made me angry at myself. For years, I turned my anger into cuts; I made myself bleed because my anger was already red hot whenever I entered the world and someone made a mockery of my being.

  My biggest fear in life was being a burden to my friends and family. I believed that if they knew how angry and sad my body made me, they would be angry at it too. I couldn’t have us all hating me, I couldn’t handle that kind of rejection from people I loved. So, I never said, “Hey, I hate myself because my disability makes me different and undesirable in the eyes of all the boys at school and will likely keep me undesirable for the rest of my life.” I kept the hate and anger to myself.

  Deep down, I knew I couldn’t sustain waking up every single day feeling this way. So, I planned end dates for my life, convinced that everyone who knew me—and the world at large—would be better off. The life I lived was not a life worth living at all. A life of waking up every day and wishing to die, a life spent tearing myself down in the name of what I believed to be honesty. I was so unhappy that getting out of bed each day felt harder than any schoolwork could be. I was alive, sure, but I was not living. So, I prepared to die.

  And then I lost my grandmother. When she died, I realized that it would have broken my grandma’s heart to know how I was breaking my own heart every day with insults, anger, and sadness directed at me alone. Losing her was a wake-up call. I still hated myself, but her loss opened a little crack for the idea that maybe I shouldn’t. After all, someone so lovely, so kind, and so giving loved me, so why couldn’t I do the same?

  Death was never what I truly wanted, I know that now. What I truly wanted was relief from all the pain and hurt the world caused me when it told me I would never be enough. The same pain and hurt I fed back to myself. Despite believing that my family would be better off, I did not really want to leave them. I didn’t want to say goodbye to my mother’s hugs, my sister’s laughter, or my family’s belief in being together in times of sorrow and joy. So, I stayed.

  Eventually, things started going well for me professionally. My writing was published in larger publications like espnW and Teen Vogue. Publishing in these places helped me realize that I wanted to be alive to see things pan out. I put my worth in my work, and I started seeing that I had something to offer the world, a purpose to be here and survive in the face of rejection and mockery.

  I walked into my bathroom one morning, with one sock on and one sock off, wearing pajama pants and an old oversized T-shirt. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, and despite looking like your average groggy and messy-haired morning person, I was shocked to discover that I thought I looked cute. Now, I had had these thoughts before, but they were always fleeting and dismissed immediately. This, however, I could not dismiss. I thought it would fade with time, but it didn’t. The thought woke with me again the next morning, climbing out of bed first and making its presence known before I even reached another mirror. I’d let myself feel purpose and value through my work, and it spread into the rest of my life until I was able to actually see myself—a cute Black woman with a round face, big eyes and a big smile, long fingers and arms, black hair, and big feet. A woman with promise and potential who isn’t like anyone else and who knows now that she doesn’t have to be to matter.

  Of course, feeling cute a couple mornings in a row wasn’t enough to banish the demons of self-hate and self-harm for good, but it helped me gather the courage to fight them head-on. I decided to work at happiness, to unlearn self-hatred. Inspired by that chance moment of appreciating my own reflection, I decided I would learn to love myself by saying four things I liked about myself out loud, every day. “I like my cheeks, I like my eyes, I like my loyalty and my sense of humor.” I said these things as many times as it took to believe them, actively chasing negative thoughts away with positive ones; sitting with my accomplishments and joy, relishing in them. I still say new things now when I need the reminder. And I started taking more pictures of my face, so I could get used to the way it looked when I was genuinely happy.

  I did this every day for a year, and I discovered more about myself than I ever thought possible. I have a cute nose, cute ears, and a loud laugh. I’m pretty good at telling my own stories, both real and imagined, and telling the stories of others. And I have the potential to grow from here.

  As hard as I worked, I still struggled with setbacks and doubts, and I responded by isolating myself from everyone I loved. I’d refuse to discuss bad days or mood changes, because I was ashamed that these negative feelings had returned even momentarily. Whenever I felt myself getting angry at someone for mocking my disability, I felt guilty immediately after, chastising myself for being “weak” in my anger after I spent so long making it a harmful force in my life. To truly be happy, I thought, I had to banish anger from my life completely.

  But denying myself my full range of emotion gave me anxiety, and I realized quickly that this was not sustainable. So, instead of trying to eradicate anger from my life, I began directing it at things I believed needed to be improved—causes I was already passionate about, where my anger could be fuel. My anger, I decided, could be used to call for better representation in media and entertainment for marginalized people. To do this, I started talking about it consistently in the places I knew my voice would be loudest: Twitter and my written work. I made Twitter threads about the effects of harmful representation of people with disabilities, and I have written extensively about not only my life as a disabled Black woman but also some of the hardships the disabled community as a whole faces.

  I am angriest now when I think about the exclusion of disabled people in the conversations about inclusion and diversity, the rights we stand to lose under the current presidential administration, the deaths of disabled people at the hands of caretakers or family members that go mostly unreported. And about the treatment and desertion of Puerto Ricans after Hurricane Maria, the treatment of immigrants, and the growing list of Nazis, racists, transphobes, homophobes, and ableists finding power in today’s America.

  I used to feel mortified by the world’s negative view of my disability and me, by association. Now, I believe in saying “fuck you” to anyone who has a problem with my otherness, differences, or my anger. I am great, I have nothing to be ashamed of. The shame should be theirs; the weight of their own prejudices and discriminatory behavior is no longer mine to bear.

  I know that my anger is beautiful now, because I am beautiful too. Anger is necessary when it propels us toward equality, justice, righting historical wrongs, and action. We marginalized people deserve to be angry with so much at stake, despite the stereotypical and negative connotations behind our anger. I’d be concerned if we weren’t. Now is not the time for rose-colored glasses; now, we fight and use our anger as a tool to remember who and what we are fighting for. Let your anger change the world for the better, because we can’t wait for other people to be angry for us—we would be waiting our entire lives for that. I, for one, am excited to burn it all down and build it back up to be better than it ever was before.

  So Now What?

  ANNA FITZPATRICK

  The night I was raped was also the night I got stuck in an elevator, a piece of symbolism so trite that I rolled my eyes when I realized it the next day. I had ridden the elevator several floors up before it stopped, the doors refusing to budge as I jammed the �
��door open” button several times. Nothing was happening. I started to panic, before pushing the ground floor button and returning to the lobby. I was not as trapped as I first thought. Later, my date would explain that the elevators in his condo didn’t go above a certain floor after a certain time of night.

  We’d had a short fling almost two years earlier, predicated entirely on sex. A Tinder match, we had no friends in common and he was the exact opposite of me, which was a large part of the appeal: outgoing, worked in tech, liked sports, no interest in books, out almost every night of the week. He was nice to me except when we fucked, which accounted for the rest of the appeal. I liked it when he was rough with me. We would talk about what was okay and what wasn’t before and after—boundaries, safe words, limits—and at least once he stopped things during because “my head didn’t seem into it.” I told my friends how nice it was to find a partner who seemed to thoroughly understand consent and who could also throw me down.

  Our brief tryst ended amicably; our schedules were different, it was hard to make plans, and we decided it was best to go our separate ways. Because I’m bad at ending things cleanly, we stayed in touch. I was almost always the one who texted him first, usually when I was drunk or couldn’t sleep or was just plain horny. The exchanges happened on Snapchat, where messages could disappear as soon as they were sent. Sometimes we would sext, sometimes he would tell me he was busy. I was aware this gave him the upper hand, but the power dynamic was part of our foreplay. We knew our roles. It was all just a game.

  We hadn’t spoken in months and hadn’t seen each other in over a year. He sent the first text, which was unusual. He was having a bad day, he said. He just wanted to have really rough sex. I understood the impulse, but I wasn’t in the mood. “I’m on, like, day one of my period and am not feeling very sexy,” I said.