Rage

He is not depressed.

He needs this to be understood. He is not numb, not flattened, not in the directionless gray that clinical depression describes. He is angry. Specifically, precisely, purposefully angry in a way that he has spent years learning to understand and direct and use and not be consumed by.

He is angry because he was abused, in ways he does not fully detail, over years of his childhood, in a house where he was supposed to be safe. He is angry because no one named it while it was happening. He is angry because the systems that should have caught it did not catch it, and the adults who should have seen it chose not to see it, and he spent years managing the aftermath of it without knowing what he was managing. He is angry because he had to learn the name for his own experience from a pamphlet in a waiting room at age twenty-two.

He earned this anger. It is not irrational. It is not a symptom. It is the appropriate response of a person who was wronged before they were old enough to consent to the wronging.

He does not perform the anger. He does not wave it at people who have nothing to do with its source. He does not use it to justify harm or as an excuse for the parts of him that have been difficult to love. He uses it as fuel.

Every morning when he sits at the desk, the anger is part of what gets him there. Not the whole of it — the work itself is the main thing, the love of the work, the commitment to the practice. But underneath those things, when the morning is hard and the night was bad and the body is depleted and every reason to sit down feels insufficient: there is the anger. There is the specific refusal to let the people who hurt him be the ending of the story. He is going to be the ending of the story. He is going to be a whole ending, a large one, a life and a body of work that says: you did not finish me. I finished you.

* * *

September 12, Tuesday.

Someone on his Instagram says his work is self-indulgent. That talking about trauma

publicly is performative. That real strength is silence.

He reads the comment twice.

He closes the app.

He sits at the desk and writes for three hours about everything the commenter got wrong, which is everything. He writes it in the voice he has when he is angry and the anger is clean and directed and the sentences are very precise because the anger, when it is clean, makes the sentences precise.

He reads it back.

He deletes it.

He opens a fresh page.

He writes something different — something that uses the energy of the anger without being an argument, that is addressed to the person who needs to hear the opposite of what the commenter said, that is addressed to the person who is staying silent because they were told real strength is silence and who is suffering inside the silence.

He writes: Silence was never strength. Silence is what they taught you when they needed you to stay quiet about what they were doing. You are allowed to speak. You always were.

He posts that.

In two hours: 107 responses. The kind of responses that tell him the line landed. One is from a teenager who says: I have been silent about what happened to me for three years and I showed this to my mom today.

He reads that one four times.

He does not respond. There is nothing to add. He just reads it four times.

Then he goes back to the desk.

He keeps at it.

* * *

Anger and grief are the same river.

He has spent years figuring this out. The anger is the surface — the white water, the visible fast part that makes noise and can be seen from a distance. Underneath it is something quieter and deeper and slower. The grief. Grief for the childhood that could have been different. Grief for the years spent surviving instead of living, managing instead of trusting. Grief for the parts of himself that did not survive intact — the parts that learned not to ask for help, that learned to perform calm, that learned to carry alone because there was no other option.

He is writing his way to the grief, which takes longer than writing the anger because the grief is harder to approach directly. You have to come at the grief sideways. You have to write around it until you have surrounded it and then it does not have anywhere to go except onto the page.

He is getting closer.

He can feel, in the most recent notebook entries, that the grief is closer to the surface than it has been before. This is either progress or the approach of something very difficult and possibly both.

He keeps writing.

He always keeps writing.

* * *

He writes about the anger in the voice it deserves.

Not the performed-for-the-reader voice, not the voice that is translating the anger into something more digestible. The actual voice. The one that says: this happened to me and it was wrong and I did not choose it and the people who did it have never been held accountable and I am still managing the consequences while they are not and I am

allowed to be angry about this for as long as I need to be.

He writes it and reads it back and thinks: this is too much.

He thinks: no. This is exactly enough. The problem is not that it is too much. The problem is that people are not used to this amount. They are used to the softened version, the version that still cares about the comfort of the reader over the truth of the experience.

He does not care about the comfort of the reader when the reader’s comfort is purchased at the cost of his honesty.

He keeps the voice.

He revises for clarity, not for comfort. He makes the sentences more precise. He makes the argument tighter. He does not soften.

He posts it on a Friday.

The response is — as it always is when he writes at this register — divided. Some people find it too much. Some people write to say: this is exactly what I needed to read today, someone saying the actual thing instead of the comfortable thing.

He reads both kinds.

He responds to neither.

He goes back to the desk.

The writing does not stop.

* * *

He emails his father a link to the Spectrum News segment on his father’s birthday.

He does not say: here is what I said about survival. He does not say: I thought you might like to see this. He does not attach a message at all, just the link, because sometimes the right communication is to simply send the thing and let the thing do its work.

His father watches it. He knows this because his father, who is not on social media and does not own a smartphone, calls from his landline an hour after Vincent sends the email.

His father says: I watched it.

Vincent says: yeah.

His father says: you looked good.

Vincent says: thank you.

His father says: you said true things.

Vincent says: I tried.

His father says: happy birthday to me, huh?

Vincent laughs. It comes out easy. He says: happy birthday.

His father says: come to dinner Sunday.

He goes to dinner on Sunday.

He thinks about this on a Thursday in October, sitting at the desk in the afternoon light. He thinks: the way to thank someone for being there is to keep going. He keeps going partly because the going is what he gives the people who have watched him struggle and stayed anyway.

He writes this in the notebook.

He keeps it.He thinks about what it means to be a writer who publishes.

Not what it means aesthetically or philosophically — he has thought about that extensively and has arrived at positions he holds and will defend. He knows what this means practically. It means time taken from writing. It means doing the things that are not writing because the writing cannot survive without them. He has accepted this. He has not made peace with it, exactly. He has just kept doing both.

The pen is back in his hand.

The pen moves.

He sits back and reads what is on the page.

This is part of the practice too — the pausing, the looking back, the small assessment

that happens in the space between one section and the next. Not yet revision. Something earlier than that. Is it right? Is it true? Is it going where it has to go? He reads it back. The afternoon is moving. The window light is different now. The body has been here a long time. He stands. Rolls his shoulders. Ghost lifts his head from the couch, considers, puts it back down. Vincent returns to the desk. He looks at what is on the page. The work outlasts the wound that made it. That is the whole point. He continues. He is making things that will outlast him, that are already outlasting the moments that required them.

The pen comes up.

The next line comes.

The next line always comes.