Letter from the Editor
At the end of the summer, I pack all my bags and drive five hours to my college in Ohio, both leaving and coming home. My roommate and I decide there’s only one way to celebrate being back: a party. We give it a middle school theme, joking about how we look towards our past, preteen selves with as much apprehension as we do to our future selves, stuck in this in-between space. “Dress as your middle school alter ego,” we put on the invites. I pull out a neon crop top and completely mismatched skater skirt, then a large flower to clip into my hair just like I really wore every day when I was 12. I tie my hair into low-hanging pigtails, slather Bath and Body Works lip gloss flavored like peach onto my face.
The color, the craziness: an act I put on. Nothing would have matched my internal, middle school self nearly as well as pure black, a hopeless despair that covered everything in dullness, that made me not want to be alive. So I hid behind tight neon pants and bright Aeropostale shirts and huge, fake flower clips because I hoped they would make me seem happy, or at least okay, hoped they would fool everyone and maybe even me, too.
Though I’m no longer that depressed adolescent struggling to fake it, I think about her sometimes. She’s still in me somewhere, a basis upon which I’m built. I think too of the toddler spinning in hula hoops on the beach, the eight-year-old girl reading Matilda in the bathroom when she should be in class, the frazzled high school junior who couldn’t manage her time or emotions, all people I used to be and yet am not, identities intimately familiar and foreign at the same time.
We all have different selves: skins we’ve shed, skins we’re still struggling to shed. We have molds we adopt when they fit what we need, moving in and out like chameleons. Who we are at any given time depends on the situations around us, who we’re near, how comfortable we are. We’re collages of these selves, mosaics stitched together and flashing like string lights.
This is what strikes me most from the pieces in this issue, why I felt so strongly impacted reading each one: they grapple with what it means to have different selves and how none can ever truly capture who we feel we are inside. In Ashley Ward’s “Father of the Year,” we become immersed in Angie’s rich interior life, everything she wishes she could do and be, and watch her fail to fulfill those goals. When her actions don’t align to her desires, when her internal and external selves conflict, she becomes caught in a cycle of guilt that renders her more unable to assert herself onto the world around her. Or, in Kristin Cavalieri’s “Grey Bird,” Aurora struggles to hide her naturally artistic personality to appear “normal” to others, conforming to a bland, strict standard that begins to usurp her uniqueness.
When our selves are so divided, reckoning within us for space, we can lose sight of what makes us us, what distinctions we have between internal and external existence. In Francesca Grace’s poem, she wonders how we even tell what’s real: “Am I awake / Or is this a dream / Or am I awakening into my deepest dreaming sleep?” How do we separate our selves, discard the ones we no longer want, become someone better?
Sometimes, we use them for personal growth, like Aurora finally flying free down her own path. Other times, we turn them into activism and societal change, like Maya Belorusskiy in “A Way to Impact.” We make ourselves appear to the world as we appear to ourselves, change the environments we’re in to accommodate our true voices. We stop wearing bright colors simply to hide our sadness and wear them only when we want to, when we truly feel happy, when we want to remember how much we’ve grown and how much we love where we are and where we’re heading.
Because, ultimately, we can’t hide forever behind disguises, can’t keep chameleon-shifting to avoid conflict. We have to choose ourselves, our real selves, and thank the other discarded versions we once were for leading us here without falling back into them. Like in our cover, Rukaiya Atcha’s “Self Reflection,” our other selves are simply hazy, blurry reflections of something greater, truer, more defined. But we need these self-reflections—these reflections of ourselves and upon ourselves, imitation and introspection—to realize the differences between who we are and who we want to be, to realize what we need, to grow. And we are, in reckoning with our different mosaic parts, growing.
Courtney Felle
Editor-In-Chief
Marriah Talbott-Malone Prose Editor
Maheen Shahbazi Poetry Editor
At the end of the summer, I pack all my bags and drive five hours to my college in Ohio, both leaving and coming home. My roommate and I decide there’s only one way to celebrate being back: a party. We give it a middle school theme, joking about how we look towards our past, preteen selves with as much apprehension as we do to our future selves, stuck in this in-between space. “Dress as your middle school alter ego,” we put on the invites. I pull out a neon crop top and completely mismatched skater skirt, then a large flower to clip into my hair just like I really wore every day when I was 12. I tie my hair into low-hanging pigtails, slather Bath and Body Works lip gloss flavored like peach onto my face.
The color, the craziness: an act I put on. Nothing would have matched my internal, middle school self nearly as well as pure black, a hopeless despair that covered everything in dullness, that made me not want to be alive. So I hid behind tight neon pants and bright Aeropostale shirts and huge, fake flower clips because I hoped they would make me seem happy, or at least okay, hoped they would fool everyone and maybe even me, too.
Though I’m no longer that depressed adolescent struggling to fake it, I think about her sometimes. She’s still in me somewhere, a basis upon which I’m built. I think too of the toddler spinning in hula hoops on the beach, the eight-year-old girl reading Matilda in the bathroom when she should be in class, the frazzled high school junior who couldn’t manage her time or emotions, all people I used to be and yet am not, identities intimately familiar and foreign at the same time.
We all have different selves: skins we’ve shed, skins we’re still struggling to shed. We have molds we adopt when they fit what we need, moving in and out like chameleons. Who we are at any given time depends on the situations around us, who we’re near, how comfortable we are. We’re collages of these selves, mosaics stitched together and flashing like string lights.
This is what strikes me most from the pieces in this issue, why I felt so strongly impacted reading each one: they grapple with what it means to have different selves and how none can ever truly capture who we feel we are inside. In Ashley Ward’s “Father of the Year,” we become immersed in Angie’s rich interior life, everything she wishes she could do and be, and watch her fail to fulfill those goals. When her actions don’t align to her desires, when her internal and external selves conflict, she becomes caught in a cycle of guilt that renders her more unable to assert herself onto the world around her. Or, in Kristin Cavalieri’s “Grey Bird,” Aurora struggles to hide her naturally artistic personality to appear “normal” to others, conforming to a bland, strict standard that begins to usurp her uniqueness.
When our selves are so divided, reckoning within us for space, we can lose sight of what makes us us, what distinctions we have between internal and external existence. In Francesca Grace’s poem, she wonders how we even tell what’s real: “Am I awake / Or is this a dream / Or am I awakening into my deepest dreaming sleep?” How do we separate our selves, discard the ones we no longer want, become someone better?
Sometimes, we use them for personal growth, like Aurora finally flying free down her own path. Other times, we turn them into activism and societal change, like Maya Belorusskiy in “A Way to Impact.” We make ourselves appear to the world as we appear to ourselves, change the environments we’re in to accommodate our true voices. We stop wearing bright colors simply to hide our sadness and wear them only when we want to, when we truly feel happy, when we want to remember how much we’ve grown and how much we love where we are and where we’re heading.
Because, ultimately, we can’t hide forever behind disguises, can’t keep chameleon-shifting to avoid conflict. We have to choose ourselves, our real selves, and thank the other discarded versions we once were for leading us here without falling back into them. Like in our cover, Rukaiya Atcha’s “Self Reflection,” our other selves are simply hazy, blurry reflections of something greater, truer, more defined. But we need these self-reflections—these reflections of ourselves and upon ourselves, imitation and introspection—to realize the differences between who we are and who we want to be, to realize what we need, to grow. And we are, in reckoning with our different mosaic parts, growing.
Courtney Felle
Editor-In-Chief
Marriah Talbott-Malone Prose Editor
Maheen Shahbazi Poetry Editor