What Used TO BE Brown

What will I discover?

It’s a mystery to unearth, similar to John and the bricks.

Written by Sevyn Michaela-Rose Collage by Bryn Renèe Mayo

The layout of the brick flooring on my patio is in the pattern of a double basket-weave. Pairs of parallel bricks lay vertically, and then horizontally, and so on. I never thought much about bricks or how they could be arranged for aesthetics until now. These bricks are the foundation of my patio. Sturdy. Dependable. I run my fingers across the worndown clay, feeling the soil that rises between each one. I wonder to myself how long they’ve been here. Who placed them into the ground? What were their names? Why this pattern? After some research on the double basket-weave pattern, I found that it was a common choice among bricklayers during the 1950’s—the decade this condo was built—because the layout process is quick, efficient.

When I first moved into the Winston Churchill Condominium complex, the bricks on my patio were covered with weeds and earth—something they had in common with Mr. Churchill. I spent a week pulling up Ivy and Spiny Sowthistle, shoveling the dirt, and hosing down the bricks. What used to be brown became a wine-colored red. What used to be hidden became seen. Among the patio ruins, I found all kinds of items that I assumed were left by previous tenants. Old flowerpots, dead herbs, a not-so-yellow tennis ball.

and used a butter knife to loosen it. Wooden stairs unfolded from a darkness that smelled of musty lumber and, ignoring the creaking steps, I climbed into it. There were more items than I expected. The hanging lightbulb illuminated two broken side tables, a small run-down bed frame, and a dozen cardboard boxes—all framed by wooden planks and rockwool insulation.

With the flashlight on my phone, I sifted through the boxes. A lot of the items seemed like junk. Old receipts from Kroger, broken dishes, crumpled pieces of paper with no writing on them. I feared that all I might learn about this tenant was that they went to Kroger, were clumsy in the kitchen, and suffered from writer’s block. And then I pulled out a wedding invitation dated for 2006 and addressed to a man named John. Underneath that, I found a printed-out email from a friend inviting the same John to perform at a music venue in Atlanta. So, the tenant’s name was John. After that, I found a ruler that I took and used for my design classes. It was only a ruler, but it made me feel connected to this stranger. Among some of the crumpled-up paper, there was a handmade bracelet along with a love note from a woman named Sarah, and a poster for Bonnaroo’s lineup from 2005. Lastly, I found a thank-you note from the couple who got married; John performed at their ceremony. So not only did John go to Kroger, lead a clumsy hand in the kitchen, and suffer from writer’s block, but he was a musician with a current or ex-lover named Sarah.

I went through a breakup most recently; leaving someone you still love feels violent. I imagine it’s like pulling off my own flesh. To remedy this, I listen to James Taylor and read scripture. Things I’ve been doing for a long time, yet they feel more alive to me now. There were also a lot of firsts at this condo. I grew my first tomato plant here. I rescued a stray kitten here. I decided to be a writer here.

When I move out of the Winston Churchill Condominium complex, I wonder what I might leave behind for the next tenant to find? I imagine they would discover a few stray coffee beans in the kitchen. Surely one of my gold earrings or a dog toy. Maybe they’ll locate the polaroid of me and my ex-boyfriend that I misplaced just like I found Sarah’s love note to John. I wouldn’t be surprised if they found scraps of scribbled paper in my closet—all unfinished poems or daily schedules broken down hour-by-hour. And on the patio, maybe a garden gnome or two.

As I traveled inside the two-story condo, I wondered what else I could find. There could’ve been an endless number of tenants that came before me; I was renting the place after all. Inside a kitchen drawer rolled around two glass lightbulbs and a black pen. I found a dent in the dining room wall as if someone had bumped a piece of furniture into it. A can of white paint and leftover window blinds sat in the closet. And the only thing left in my room was a wooden birdhouse on my window ledge.

Inevitably, I opened the white-painted attic door in the ceiling tucked away on the second level of the condo. The door itself lacked a handle or string to pull, so as a result, I stood on a chair surrounded by their sister, best friend, and a crowd of beautiful strangers, Narcisse thought, “This is the direction I want to take one day. I don’t know how I’m going to do it. I don’t know when I’m going to do it, but one day.” of that phrase—every body, every person, every identity, and definitely queer-forward, because I also was just really tired of this heteronormative type of storyline that kept repeating, appealing to the white male gaze.”

I’ve been walking among the bricks on my patio for over a year now. I’m sure they’ve seen my feet change over the days. I learned how to live on my own here—I paid bills on time, cooked Cacio e Pepe, adopted my own dog and named her Stevie. Mornings have been filled with coffee, quiet thoughts, and poetry about the ocean. Nights among friends have been illuminated by the hanging string lights outside. I discovered moving plays by Henrik Ibsen, how to successfully escape the bites of mosquitos, and how to be okay with solitude amidst a quarantine.

These bricks are the foundation of my patio. Today, I sit under my beige umbrella surrounded by five-foot-tall hedges, Stevie laying at my feet. A church bell rings, and the breeze blows, and I think about the continuation of life. The seasons and the changes and how time prevails. If someone had told me when I first moved into this condo that I would undergo a quarantine, adopt Stevie, and break up with someone I thought I would marry, I wouldn’t have believed them. The sun rises just to set, and the bricks on my patio have seen this almost twenty-five thousand times. There must be some kind of wisdom that comes with this. I run my feet over the grooves of the bricks. I want to ask them to share with me all they’ve seen and all they know. How many more sunrises and sunsets will I see? Who will still be there with me to watch them? What will I learn? What will I discover? It’s a mystery to unearth, similar to John and the bricks. Who used to be a stranger became a living, breathing life. What used to be brown became a wine-colored red. I’m not sure what will become of my tomorrow. All I know is that I must look for it.

She is hot pink protesting, rainbow flag wielding, civil rights marching for civility’s sake. She is a child of tradition, running around barefoot and skipping over abandoned tree roots in her Sunday best. She is drunk on ideas of progress and liberalism and open-mindedness. And you are her gay, Black best friend. You are looking for home in her fickle arms.

That responsibility also runs deeper than advocating for bodies that resemble their full figure. Narcisse has a wide, round nose, lines carved into the dough-like softness of their cheeks. Despite these features that another Black person would recognize as familiar, Narcisse’s skin is pale as sun-bleached sand. They’re white-passing. Their earliest memory is of an old white woman following a two-year-old Narcisse and their darkskinned father around the local Piggly Wiggly, threatening to call the cops. “Where’d you snatch that child from?” she demanded.

The queer environment in Savannah is still a work in progress,” says Anita Narcisse, “because Savannah is very like gay [masculine] forward, like [cisgender] gay [masculine] forward.”

Born and raised in Savannah, Narcisse, also known by their stage name Rita D’LaVane, is the founder and executive producer of Savannah Sweet Tease, a queer and BIPOC-forward burlesque performance troupe. They also work at Club One—Savannah’s only gay bar.

This may come as a surprise, especially with Savannah being considered a queer-friendly city. “People like to say s**t all the time like, ‘Oh, Savannah is very queer-friendly, most of the bars are queer-friendly,’” says Narcisse, a non-binary, femme-presenting, trans person. Narcisse runs their thick fingers through their dirty blonde pixie cut. “I’m like, ‘First of all, I can tell you right now I don’t feel safe in most of the bars downtown, not just as a queer person but the fact that I have tits and was born with this biology.’”

For Narcisse, Club One is a safe haven in the midst of Savannah’s saturated nightlife not only because of its inclusivity but because it was after passing beneath that brick building’s blue awning that Narcisse discovered themself for the first time. On Narcisse’s sixteenth birthday, they rushed to get their hands on a fake ID. Not long after, their sister invited them and their best friend out to Club One to see her roommate perform as part of the cabaret. Narcisse jumped at the chance to see drag up close, because it was 1998, and drag and queer subjects, in general, were only whispered about in the presence of trusted company.

“So, I went to the drag show and it pretty much changed my life. What it taught me is that I didn’t necessarily have to be a man to be a pretty woman,” Narcisse says. Having come from a dance background and a Southern life full of pageants, seeing the drag performance solidified their future. It was sitting in that club,

Ihad a chance to experience my first drag show, not in Savannah, but tucked away in a corner of Chicago’s grand Grant Park during Lollapalooza 2021. It was the first drag show in all the festival’s thirty years. Performers of every size, color, and gender expression strutted down the small stage to the immaculate mix of top pop hits by DJ Cash Era, a Black, queer, Chicago-native. Miss Toto, the host, was armed with a mini white Moncler, bodacious humor, and muscles that effortlessly propelled her through splits and flips.

Tenderoni, 2021’s Drag Queen of the Year, popped out with the sharpest dance moves and pinkest fishnet tights as they pumped a cutout vaccine sign in the air while “Shots” by LMFAO played. Ramona Slick—a blonde bombshell in a slime-inspired neon pink and lime green number sashayed to Marina’s “Venus Flytrap.” Nico—a tall, slender devil in bright red flexed their long pointy-fingered gloves before yanking them off and setting off silver glitter bombs. When Nico blew a silver confetti canon as their performance finale, my hands rose to the air as tears fell from my eyes. The joy was euphoric, cathartic, a dream far removed from the reality of the pain my queerness had caused me up to that point.

Narcisse internalized this and other experiences, processing their privilege of passing as both white and a woman, using it to advocate for those whose power is systemically threatened or diminished. “I also understand how hard it is for black and brown people to be visible and vocal at the same time because of the threat of violence,” Narcisse says. “And people don’t realize how much of a real thing that is in the South. People think that Savannah itself is just this bubble in south Georgia where everybody loves each other. That’s some bulls**t.”

In 2013, Narcisse made their own dream come true and Savannah Sweet Tease was born. The burlesque troupe dominates the performance scene, being voted Savannah’s Best Performance Troupe every year from 2014 to 2020. “Gender is not what one is but rather what one does,” wrote American philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler. So, if we liken gender expression to performance, Narcisse would be leading the highly dramatized version of that, and they take their responsibility as an experience creator very seriously.

“Right off the bat, I knew that I wanted Sweet Tease to be something for everybody,” Narcisse says, “like, everybody in every sense

One reason people may perceive Savannah as this liberal glass box could be the dominating presence of the Savannah College of Art and Design. Each year, thousands of young creatives are drawn to the city, eager to dive headfirst into their newfound freedom. One of these young creatives was Atlanta-native Chrush Graves.

In 2014, when Graves graduated high school and got accepted into SCAD, they moved to Savannah and never looked back. With an awkwardly lean but lithe figure, and skin the color of rich hickory, Graves had a lot of growing to do. The softly sculpted angles of their face—thick lips, and a wide nose that curves and slopes into a flat cone—read masculine, traits they had trouble accepting. It wouldn’t be until age twenty-one that they realized their gender identity rested more comfortably in the grey area.

Luckily, Graves found a place in Sweet Tease where all the walls and siding were lovingly painted in shades of gray. “When I first moved to Savannah, I was trying to find clubs to go to that were eighteen-plus friendly, and I heard about them through Club One,” Graves says.

Source: GALLUP

Dazzled by the extravagant performances, glittering personalities, and dramatic makeup, Graves thought, “Wow, I want to do this.” After a coworker who was already in Sweet Tease showed them the ropes, Graves won first runner-up at a pageant later that same year. Directly after, they joined Sweet Tease on tour as the stagehand, merch person, and sound person, learning how to costume, choreograph, and promote shows along the way. “And ever since then I’ve just been in it to win it,” Graves says.

Outside of Sweet Tease, though, Graves describes the queer environment as “strange.” Because SCAD students are young and dipping their toes into the gay pond, the queer community is one big game of musical chairs. “It was hard to find a group, or if there was a group, one that I fit in with,” Graves says, “I would usually just have like one to three queer friends at a time.”

I had a similar experience at SCAD, always being surrounded by queerness in the loosest definition of the term, but never with a solid group. It wasn’t until my junior year that I would explore how I fit into that wide, everchanging term.

While clubs may be the problem, they are also actively working to be the solution. “I’ve seen events that are brunch burlesque or brunch drag, where people can go [out] . . . and not drink,” Graves says. Dry brunch festivities also allow for anyone of any age to attend and find comfort in a community they might have never found otherwise.

Even Narcisse regrets how limited their outreach to youth is, aware of the inherent conflict of their more mature occupation. “And that’s something that I do miss because I do feel like it’s important that the youth become aware of how the world actually is,” Narcisse says. “If you’re Black and you’re queer, you’re taught from a young age how to mask your identity.”

Masking your identity is exhausting, terrifying, but it’s necessary to stay safe. The threat of homelessness looms heavy over the city’s Black queer youth, especially when women’s shelters only accept cisgender women with children. Narcisse cries, “What happens to people who are vulnerable, who are getting sexually assaulted, who don’t have a shelter to go to? Who is advocating for them? Who’s giving them counseling? Who’s giving them resources? Where’s the outreach?”

It wasn’t until I settled in the “just right” chair of bisexual that I joined the game. Luckily, I didn’t play too long, and now have a reliable circle to support me through every bout of bi panic.

If the queer community is a game of musical chairs, imagine playing after one-too-many vodka cranberries. Savannah’s main attraction is its bustling nightlife. Born from a history of having to hide under the honeyed haze of intoxication, sporadic spotlights, and blaring music, the queer community’s ties to that nightlife run deep. “I feel like there are a lot of spaces that aren’t open for people under the age of eighteen,” Graves says. “And sometimes people just don’t want the nightlife scene and just want to hang out with people during the day while sober.”

After my first and only night out, a drunk girl throwing up two feet away from me, catcalls, and leering eyes, I can’t help but agree.

Before reaching out, you have to reach in. After unwillingly coming out to my parents during my junior year, it was only in the aftermath that I could process how lucky I am. I had to get my own phone and I cannot visit home, but I have my own apartment, my own job, my own life. I am but a chopped branch that will grow roots elsewhere. I’m choosing to grow those roots in Savannah, messy and complicated as it may be. It’s where I first found myself for myself; it’s where I found the power in admitting what I want without worrying if it made those around me comfortable.

“It starts out very small, but as you put yourself out there and be vulnerable with the community and with yourself, you find your community and your family,” Graves says. “It’s like a game of telephone but ends up like a big family tree.”

Approaching my eighteenth birthday, I anxiously asked my parents if I could get a tattoo. I remember worrying about what they would think: Would they care how big it was? Would it matter what it depicted? Or would they throw the whole idea of it out and tell me I could never get one under their roof—no ifs, ands, or buts? Thankfully, they didn’t mind the idea of tattoos, and soon after, I began expressing myself through body modifications. More and more, body modification is becoming a way for people to express themselves. Through piercings, tattoos, body hair, hair color, and so much more, people do it to better outwardly express and feel like the truest version of themselves as they do on the inside.

As someone with numerous tattoos and a few piercings, I began this project to allow “modified” individuals, like myself, to be normalized and accepted. I also wanted this series to aid in setting a new standard and celebrate these modifications as a form of each individual’s self-expression of their identity, rather than condemning them for it.

There are many reasons why people physically alter their bodies. They might want to preserve a work of art on their body forever or attach a memory to themselves. Perhaps they just want a fun and reckless decision to look back on and laugh at, or simply explore who they are. Whatever the reason, it all comes down to them wanting to feel confident in their skin and expressing who they are however they choose.

Attending art school, it’s more than a little difficult to find someone who doesn’t express themselves in some way or another. Being here, and becoming a result of my surroundings, has helped me truly appreciate the beauty of every individual for simply expressing themselves in their own way. I know a few people whose norm is to have outrageous hair colors—which they change every few months. The thought of them not doing so seems unnatural to me. I also have friends who, since the first day I met them, have had dozens of piercings. When they show me old pictures from before they got their piercings, it feels almost as if I no longer recognize them with something so distinguishable absent. Others I know have built quite the tattoo collection since we became friends, and I can see how much happier and confident they are because of it.

Everything I’ve mentioned is more than just a body modification, it’s a way for people to represent—and embody—their inner self.

It’s almost unfathomable to imagine the people I know without these modifications as it’s so tied to their identity. The thought of them facing challenges throughout their personal or work lives in order to conform to more conservative ideals can be quite upsetting. Despite modified individuals being accepted and celebrated amongst so many of their unmodified counterparts, there continues to be lingering disdain from older generations, more conservative people, and certain employers.

Nearly anyone who’s gotten a piercing, tattoo, or dyed their hair (in a conventional or unconventional color) has had at least one person remark:

“Good luck getting a job!”

“You know you’ll have to take that out in the future, right?”

“Is that your last one?”

“You’re gonna have those in your wedding pictures!”

These comments can be quite challenging to deal with and often hurt—especially if they target a modification you’re proud of, one close to your identity. It creates a wholly unnecessary form of conflict.

Just like all major decisions, one must weigh the pros and cons. I cannot speak for anyone except myself, but as I acquired more tattoos and piercings, I’ve always considered the possible consequences. For example, my piercings are pretty mundane. But if necessary I’m comfortable with taking them out. And when it comes to tattoos, I’m very careful about the placement and subject matter. I contemplate the permanence of my decision.

By choosing to modify our bodies, other modified individuals and I know it may reduce the chance of employment in some fields. It could mean not getting hired or having to wear certain clothing to cover them up. It could also introduce judgment personally or publicly. Some lifestyles and career paths have room for tolerance and others don’t. Regardless, one should be aware of the possible, if unjust, repercussions of modifying their body. It is simply a price we must pay for wanting to express ourselves authentically—which is something I hope to bring more awareness to.

Through my and my peers’ experiences with expressing our identities through body modifications, my goal was to portray these physical adornments with accuracy to the individual. These are fun, sometimes little things that make us feel more like ourselves and we should be allowed to have them without judgment. In hopes of strictly showing the modification, I removed each participant’s face. As a result, it allows the viewer to interpret the images in a more straightforward yet abstracted sense so no judgments or negative associations can be levied at the person. By adding vibrant colors and a playful take on a taboo topic, it allows the viewer to experience such a controversial topic from a more lighthearted perspective than they normally would.

Progress and change are still needed from society at large for the normalization of body modifications to continue, but day after day it’s becoming more abundant. And I know efforts to bring awareness won’t be needed for much longer—so I hope.

Welcome to the Lodge of Sorrows,” says Ryan Graveface. He stands in front of an open door, then gestures for me to walk in. It’s late summer. The low country humidity looms over us, the sun sweltering. Inside the Lodge is a recording studio, a screen-printing workshop, and a vacant space which will soon be a concert venue. The floors are covered with storage boxes. His recording studio is decorated with amplifiers, several synthesizers, as well as what appears to be a small Hammond organ.

The Lodge of Sorrows is one of Ryan’s latest projects. “I think it’s the best name I’ve ever come up with,” he says, “because it’s so indicative of how I feel about this f**king town.”

For thirty years, Ryan has collected true crime memorabilia, roadside oddities, and freak taxidermy. He is the owner of Graveface Records and Curiosities in Savannah, Georgia, the founder of an independent recording label by the same name, as well as the founder and owner of the Graveface Museum. Also, Terror Vision, his outlet for releasing movie soundtracks as well as films on VHS.

He began purchasing true crime collectors’ items in high school. As he puts it, it’s never enough for him to just buy a single piece of memorabilia because he likes it. Ryan Graveface is a selfproclaimed completist—he wants everything. “That’s kind of my thing,” he says. “I don’t typically just buy a thing. I, historically, will buy someone’s estate.”

Written by David Dufour, Illustrated by Emily Bernier

He owns the largest collection of John Wayne Gacy paintings in the country. For the past seven years, Ryan has also conducted his own private research on several Gacy cases. Using what he finds, as well as information given to him by a fellow collector, Randy White, Ryan has been compiling this material into a documentary. The documentary is his way of showing that, despite being “incredibly guilty,” Gacy is in fact innocent of roughly six of the murders that he was executed for. Not only does Ryan hope to re-open Gacy’s investigation, but he also truly believes that his efforts can change history.

Purchasing estates has left him with more than prison artwork, though. Now that he has acquired unheard interview recordings, and formed relationships with collectors who knew Gacy, he holds information that hasn’t been seen in books or documentaries. “I don’t talk theory,” says Ryan. “I’m only speaking of facts. And some of those facts are gonna piss people off.” The last thing he wants is for people to watch the documentary, and then dismiss his found evidence as theories.

Many of his Gacy artifacts have come from Karen Kuzma, Gacy’s younger sister. She and Ryan first met several years ago and have since become close friends.

Over the years, Kuzma has been subjected to harassment from people she assumed to be collectors. “All the people that Karen kind of befriended in the Eighties, Nineties through her brother . . . ya know, people who were writing to Gacy on death row um, they all turned out to be horrible people,” he says, “Not shocking.” Like any celebrity with hangers-on, dishonest true crime fans have used Kuzma to feel a connection to fame.

Ryan Graveface is not a “flipper,” someone who befriends people like Kuzma only to snatch an item and sell it online. He explains that, given the sheer number of Gacy-obsessed folks on the prowl for money, it was crucial for him to earn her trust as a legitimate collector. “When I met Karen, did I know she owned anything cool from her brother that I would eventually put in a museum? No, technically not,” he says. “But did I want to meet her regardless? Yes. I legitimately care about her.”

Ryan believes that his museum is an educational place. What he’s acquired in his almost thirty years as a collector is certainly impressive, yet also provides grounds for him to finally lay infamous rumors to rest. Rumors such as Gacy’s final words, which have been falsely remembered as: “Kiss my ass.” Far from that, his last words were, as Ryan can recalls, “Taking my life won’t bring the victim’s lives back. Say goodbye to my sister.”

The artifacts on display in his museum break through the often shocking, gruesome veneer of true crime collections. Having only been an establishment for over a year, the museum’s collections probe difficult questions, yet there is still a sense of humor in it all. Ryan says that he’s not a fan of the sensationalism that often surrounds true crime artifacts, like the Museum of Death in New Orleans, where shock is the priority and the facts are secondary.

When the Graveface Museum first opened its doors, folks would challenge Ryan on the accuracy, and truthfulness, of his collection. People often think that they understand famous criminals because they’ve listened to a podcast. Occasionally, Ryan would get backlash from true crime fans because they believed their podcasts over him. The connections that he has built through his thirty-plus years of collecting— meeting collectors, becoming lifelong friends with the family members of notorious criminals—is the rift between him and a typical true crime fan. If nothing else, he would like for someone to leave the museum with a philosophical outlook on criminal justice.

It’s rare that he speaks highly of other collectors, unless they’re from the older generation, the “OG” collectors, as Ryan calls them. “The OG guys are all I care about,” he says, “because they’re the guys that used to visit Manson, and Ramirez, and Gacy. They seemingly like me quite a bit.” If you ask him about contemporary collectors, particularly younger ones who are active on social media, he’ll tell you, “People get into collecting now because there’s fashion to it.” On social media, they will pose with whatever new collectible they’ve found. “There’s like a sexy sort of—I’m not being literal; I don’t think it’s sexy—but like they’re trying to be hot,” he says. “Like, ‘Look at all my tattoos and my Gacy painting.’ It’s bizarre on the collector’s end because they’re s**theads that kind of diminish the whole thing that I love doing.” They find collectibles online from Supernaught or Serial Killers Ink, thinking, “Clearly it’s real. The guy says it’s real.” They tend to buy collectibles that are either fake or overpriced. “There is more fake s**t on the market today than I’ve ever seen in my entire life.” He and his friend James Sparks, a criminologist and Gacy’s former art dealer, like to laugh at them.

Later, we meet in a room connected to Graveface Records in Savannah’s Starland neighborhood. Ryan’s been using the space as storage for his horror-themed pinball machines and novelty arcade games, or “coin-op machines,” as he puts it. Walking in I see Ryan, hunched over an old pinball machine, trying to make repairs. The glass covering is off, one hand pulling the pinball lever, the other fooling around with the mechanics inside. Surrounding him are dozens upon dozens of coinop machines—each coated in neon, in blinding primary colors. Some are shaped like race cars with little steering wheels attached. In the corner, an old Pac-Man game sometimes shouts “PacMan!” in a robotic voice.

He pulls the pinball lever back and watches as the ball zips around. The machine reverberates with flashing noises like that of an old casino.

A large window gives a view of the neighborhood, right next to Starland Yard and directly across from a small liquor store.

He glances out the window at the crowds forming near the Yard and describes to me how, exactly, the atmosphere in Starland has drastically shifted. “You see all these white people? Exclusively?,” he asks. “It was not that. It was a very low-income African American neighborhood and I loved it to death.” Before Graveface Records and Curiosities opened its doors, there was nothing like it in Starland or all of Savannah. “The store was such a unique place for about three or four years,” he says, “before all the rich, white developers found it.”

When he first moved to Georgia, he found comradery within the neighborhood. People in town were familiar with Ryan’s previous bands (Black Moth Super Rainbow, the Marshmallow Ghosts, or Dreamend), and would often come into the store asking for autographs. Record releases sold well, and many Savannah folks supported his independent label by attending the shows put on by Graveface artists. It became a popular hangout for residents of Starland. “Moms would shoot the s**t with me while their kids were having a blast,” he tells me. One of the first arcade games Ryan put in the store was simply free entertainment for neighborhood kids. “I was like, ‘I’ve gotta have a free play game in there,’ I don’t know why, I just thought it would be a good idea.”

But things changed, time passed, and people in town slowly became apathetic towards change.

Suddenly, no one was coming to the events. The same energy that surrounded him in earlier years, had somehow vanished. In town, people scarcely bought his own releases in the store. “It used to bother me, like, two years ago man. It actually kind of rocked my world,” he says. “How can people claim they’re looking for something here, and there’s someone providing it?” Of course, Ryan could always pack up and take his oddities elsewhere. “I really feel that I’m the only bit of edginess in this neighborhood. And there’s something to that I like.” He hasn’t given up on Savannah. Although he is actively looking to open a location in Chicago, Savannah needs him.

“I think my businesses are just me,” Ryan says. “They’re not even an extension of me. Like, walking into my store, it feels like home to me. Walking into the museum, feels like home to me. I can’t fathom that it feels like that for most people, but for the few people that perhaps do share that sensibility, we probably could be, like, best friends.”

Ryan still feels that, but, despite relative success, he is an outsider. “I’m lucky to have found enough weirdos that are exactly like me from outside of Savannah to support [the Museum],” he says, “because if I had to rely on Savanniahians solely that would have been out of business the month I opened it.” Aside from internet saboteurs, there are numerous fans of the work Ryan is doing. Over the last year his museum went viral on TikTok, which brought a younger crowd that might otherwise not have heard of him.

Ryan would meet people who had driven hours to see his collection. Often, they’d leave the very same day because Graveface was their only stop. They weren’t staying the night. They weren’t having dinner. They came for the museum. “We created our own tourism,” he says.

Around 2000 was when he set out to create his independent record label. Graveface—the name and concept— came to him in a dream while he was still in high school. After watching Instrument, a documentary that follows the band Fugazi on tour, he felt that starting a label was possible. He wrote emails to the producers at some of his favorite labels (Kranky and Rock Action, to name two). “I said, ‘Do you have any advice for someone starting a label? I own half your releases, I respect the s**t out of you, just fire when ready.’” One response, from Stuart Braithwaite of the band Mogwai, was positive from what he can remember. But a producer at Kranky records simply wrote back, “Do not do it.”

“I responded like, huh, all heartbroken,” he says. “And I was mad. I stopped buying their releases for a while.” He wrote back telling the producer how old he was (still a teenager), where he lived (the Midwest), and what he did for work (managing a Pizza Hut). That same producer from Kranky records wrote back trying to explain himself. As Ryan can recall, he wrote: “I’m not trying to kill your spirit, but if you’re not going to commit to this fully as a concept, that will be punishing to your artists. The reality is, if you’re working forty-to-fifty hours a week for somebody else, that’s forty-to-fifty hours a week that you’re not putting into your artists.”

“I was pissed,” Ryan says. “Now I think it’s maybe the smartest advice anyone’s ever given me.” and says that he—and this is bat s**t crazy—that he talked to his doctor on death row, and he found out that he can donate a specific organ to me.” This inmate arranged to meet with a lawyer so that he could write an affidavit pledging this organ away. “No friend has called to offer me such a thing. My family hasn’t been really even that nice about it,” Ryan says. “Let’s say the transplant never occurs. I will, until I am dead, I will never forget that someone even offered that.” publishing books and, unsurprisingly, he is writing one. He’s working on a “story behind the piece” book, which he started writing during the first week of the COVID-19 pandemic. It will be a collection of stories recalling how exactly Ryan acquired his sprawling collection, as well as some of his “honey holes” around the country where he found them. “A lot of the stories of acquisition are often times more interesting, or equally interesting, to the pieces themselves,” he says.

When he was 15, Ryan began writing letters to serial killers in prison. Of all the inmates Ryan has corresponded with, he is especially close with two of them. One of whom, he says, “killed over thirty people and has admitted to me that he’s soulless.” He wouldn’t tell me their names.

“If they’re willing to be honest–and this guy has been nothing but forthcoming—it’s fascinating,” Ryan says. “Same reason you watch a dumb true crime show, but this is a million times more rewarding. You get to hear all the perversion.” Although he finds their honesty rewarding, he often wonders just what it is that makes him so trustworthy. “I think I’m just real,” he says. “See, the thing is, I actually don’t want something.” If they aren’t honest, or he feels like they’re manipulative, he’ll stop writing to them. “There’s nothing masturbatory in it for me,” he says. But he admits that “you could argue I do want something from them—and I want that honesty.” These letters weren’t written with the intention of grifting personal details from the inmates. They were written in earnest, because Ryan wanted to form genuine connections.

This past May, Ryan learned of new health issues that he would not go into specifics about, although they could be severe. “Uh, so I relayed this, I don’t know why, to this specific serial killer,” he tells me. “And he ended up calling me, maybe two days after I told him what I’m going through,

It might come as no surprise that Ryan feels different from his own family. “No compatibility at all,” he says. “I’m a musician. My dad played drums in high school; I play music for a living. They didn’t collect s**t. They don’t even really have any hobbies. I can’t find any person in my family that’s even remotely relatable.” He laughs it off and assures me that, “they’re nice people, they’re fine.”

Growing up, Ryan was a quick learner, especially when it came to instruments. “I think I was a bit of a loon,” he says. “The performing arts center in my high school allowed me to just do whatever the f**k I wanted.” When he performed at his high school’s recitals, he would often compose his own music. He still has recordings of the piano recitals. “I actually just found that tape, I haven’t heard it in twenty-plus years. I’m not going to do anything with it,” he says. “It’ll be interesting to see where I was versus where I am. Which I think I was better then, because that was all I did. Now I’m talking Gacy all day instead of practicing.”

Like his achievements, Ryan has also begun plotting his wishes for the estate he’ll leave behind. With absolutely no desire to have children, his legacy will primarily be left to his wife, Chloe Manon. Graveface, the label, will be killed off once he dies. He wants no re-pressings. It’ll be over and royalties will be paid to the artists. “That catalogue will go back to the respective artists,” he says. “Chloe will never have to think about it again.” As far as the record store, he explained his desire to see it become an employee-run coop. “Terror Vision I feel the opposite about,” he says. “I actually have a release schedule billed out for years.”

Ryan says he feels lucky to have Chloe, expressing that when he’s no longer around, he knows everything will be left in good hands. “She’s the only person I’ve ever met, not even dated, that I actually think can successfully take over all of this upon my demise.”

Icharted out my life when I was 17 years old,” Ryan says. His scheduled accomplishments are measured in massive strides. They begin around age nineteen, then to twenty-four, twenty-eight, thirty, forty, up to about his mid-sixties. By age forty, which he is now, his plan was to start

I’ll be waiting until you are ready. But, oh, my friend, how lovely it will be when you can finally say my name.

Written by Kaitlynne Rainne, Illustrated by Scarlett Thayer

I’d like to think she came on a specific day, at a specific time, at a moment when the moon aligned itself just right over the expanse of the horizon and the whispering winds deposited her gracefully on my doorstep. But, if I’m honest, her arrival was more of a realization on my behalf. She had been there for years, walking alongside me in subtle steps, shadows of greatness lined up behind mine. Do I think she is great? Learning of her presence certainly was not, but as I look back at the footprints we’ve made together, I can only conclude that she has helped me be great.

W hen I say I did not recognize her, I don’t think I could have even if she walked up to me and introduced herself. Instead, she disguised herself as mature and quiet, controlled calm that seemed impressive for a young child. At eight years old, I sat off to the side, a book in hand, or simply sat away from the rambunctiousness that would let loose on the playground. Sometimes, I miscalculated my luck and joined in on the fun, never failing to fall over and skin my knees. I found myself on the sidelines once again, oblivious to my melancholy companion.

At home, things were, well, things were. I had a roof over my head, food to eat, clothes to wear, and a room I could sleep in. It was normal in the way that things weren’t normal. It was a mask to what was a more deeply rooted mess. An entanglement of sorts that even if I were to try to explain, my words would fail me. But she didn’t.

She stood by my side as the years went by and at night when I’d hug my pillow to my chest and allow the rogue tears to slip down my face, I could have sworn I heard her whisper, “It’s okay. You can cry with me.”

As the years went by, she saw me grow up. She bore witness to the loneliness I felt in the quiet of the night and to the angry mutterings I whispered to no one in particular, all from pure exasperation of being pulled into the middle of another fight.

Out of everyone who knows me, she probably knows me best.

Who was I to do so? Certainly not someone with power to belittle hers. She had an imposing nature, ready to snap in the slightest moment. She held a strength I was envious of. Her eyes held this depth to them. Not in the way blue eyes reminded you of the ocean, rather, it was a depth that if you held her gaze for too long, you’d lose yourself on the way in.

Later that year, as a second semester gave way to summer, I felt her sharp sting once again. This time, she came in the form of betrayal, a loss that tore me apart more than I wanted to let on. It was as though she were making her presence known. “Look at me,” she said. “You can’t ignore me any longer.”

I tried.

During the day, I taught swimming. Keeping up with the children made it easier to forget. Laughing with co-instructors made me feel like I could relate to people again. At night, I would lie awake in bed, headphones on with the volume turned up to a somewhat obnoxious level. I valued my hearing only enough to be cautious of how much it was blaring into my skull.

Okay, now I must be honest, in those moments, I did see a glimpse of her. But as quickly as I felt that sinking feeling settle, I changed the song, turned the TV on, drowned her out with as much background noise as I could handle. In the middle of all the sound, I would pull a book and spend time with words. Anything I could do to give me a reprieve from acknowledging her, I would do. It was a sick game of cat and mouse, although, as for what came later, I do not know who began chasing who. Nor can I say my attempts at ignoring her were any better. In fact, they began to spur her presence on.

Sitting in my sophomore English class on a Tuesday morning, she broke me. I don’t know how. I was listening to music—don’t worry, I had already finished my work. I turned on my laptop, pulled out my headphones, and just vibed. I vibed until I began crying. Sobbing, really. My teacher looked at me with concern and gently took the hall pass from the hook on the wall and gave it to me. “Here,” she said. “Go take a walk. Get some fresh air.”

Iwas around fourteen years old when I saw the first evidence of her presence. Standing in front of the mirror, I tucked my yellow uniform polo into my pants and affixed the school pin onto my left collar. I lifted my head to check my appearance and balked. My eyes had sunken in, there was a deep hollow in them. Not terribly deep, but the kind of depth that required concealer to help me look alive. Just a subtle nod to exhaustion that threatened consumption.

“It’s fine,” I reassured my reflection. “You just need sleep. You’ve been up studying a lot recently.” Nodding, I accepted the explanation and turned around, grabbing the rest of my things to wait in the living room until my parents were ready to leave. I can imagine that she was angry with me for brushing her off as simple exhaustion.

I took it and went straight to the girl’s bathroom, locked myself in the last stall, and cried. It was the first time I had let myself feel the depth of the loss I had suffered. It was the first time I felt her hand on my shoulder. A cold and unsettling melancholy that was simultaneously comforting, so comforting. Things were never the same after I walked out of that stall.

This is the point when my memory becomes hazy, but I know that at every corner, things got worse. I isolated myself from people, a withdrawal that felt like solace. I didn’t have to put on a smile, try harder to learn a genre of pop culture, or even be a fully functioning human. Instead, I opted for sitting in the hallways and I read. Little did I know, history was repeating itself. A girl, on the sidelines, a book in hand, melancholy companion beside her. Only this time I recognized her, and I accepted her companionship.

At home, things were . . . well, things weren’t just “were” anymore. The angry screams became louder, I think a door broke off its hinges at one point. The silence that echoed after, though, was the worst. It was in those unguarded moments I felt myself turning in towards her cold warmth seeking comfort. She welcomed me with open arms. The summer that followed was when I felt her take over without warning. Not in a body snatcher way. It was more of a transitional shift that became louder echoes, echoes never leaving me alone.

“You call yourself worthy?”

“Why would you do that?”

“Who the hell do you think you are?”

“She was right to walk away from you. Everyone else should, too.”

Her whispers kept growing in force. The insults that were flung at me during the day followed me into the night, repeating over and over, until I couldn’t hear anything else but ringing. It felt like she was mocking me. She was screaming now. Sleep became foreign and would sometimes only come after I exhausted myself with tears and, after every time, she would never fail to cocoon me in her embrace—stroking my hair, whispering to me as my eyes drifted shut. We began to share a silence that only came when two people understand each other.

In a world that was black and white, gray painted my vision. It all looked the same. Stifling insanity at its finest. I sought comfort in chaos. My life as I knew became an emotional and mental wreck. It became hard to be anywhere, especially when the effects she was having on me became trademarked as an “attitude.” I’m pretty sure she loved that characterization.

I mastered how to give her the attention she sought. To the point of almost losing myself, I gave her everything until I had nothing left to give. It was then that I lost myself. On most days, I refused to even look in the mirror for longer than necessary because I hated seeing her staring back at me. She was so deeply engrained that I wanted to cut her out of me.

I felt, for a lack of a better way to describe it, weary. And, in a stupid assumption, I believed I could dismiss her, that she would disappear if I tried hard enough to move on. I began a ritual—for every motivational word I wrote I tried to chase her away. She fought back, hard, with vengeance. She began seeking me out in unexpected moments. I didn’t know then, but moving on was the wrong way to approach freeing myself from her.

Graduation came and went, and I found myself boarding a plane that September to go to an art school of all places. I remember looking around my room. Saying goodbye to a space that held so many memories, good and bad. As I walked out, I turned around and whispered, “You’re not following me anymore.”

Yet, she did.

It was a stealthy follow. She lurked in the shadows, not quite knowing what to say but standing in the doorway. I feigned recovery. Telling myself over and over that she was gone but even I saw past my blatant attempt at convincing. She came again, this time, I didn’t bother to shut her out. I let her sit next to me on the floor in the bathroom that Christmas and we simply held a quiet vigil. Words weren’t necessary. I think she took one look at me and felt sorry for me. I was sorry for myself too.

Not two months later, the world shifted and everything I had come to know was snatched out from under my feet. Who was there to catch me when I fell? She was. In the middle of a concrete room, four walls, and an open floor space, she befriended me once again and in lieu of my failed attempts previously, I left her alone. “You’ve got a friend in me,” she said. “But I can never give you peace.” even took over my music taste: the louder the guitar and drums, the better.

I walked until I couldn’t walk anymore. No food, no sleep, I couldn’t think at all over the hum that took a permanent residence in my head. As it came to be, the spring semester gave way to summer, and I found myself moving. A new space, a new environment but I couldn’t even find it in myself to feel that joy. To say it got bad would be a gross understatement. Nights became blurred. The concept of time was thwarted. “What day is it?” I’d asked myself until there was a moment, I thought I’d never ask it again.

That night. I shiver as I recall it. Numb is one of those words that seems too heavy, too final in its interpretations but as my eyes closed that night, the only thing I felt was numb. I couldn’t even feel her anymore. When I woke up the next day, I stood in the shower and when I was done, I sunk to the floor. I felt the flutter of the shower curtain and briefly acknowledged that she was right there sitting on the other side.

“I’m sorry,” she said gently. “I . . . this is not good.”

“Gee, you think?” I asked, sarcasm dripping from my voice.

As we sat in the silence we had become accustomed to, I vaguely realized that there was no way I could move on. There was only such a thing as moving forward. I stood up and walked out. It’d been a while since I’d simply stared at her reflection, but I allowed myself the time to do so.

She looked at me, a soft smile gracing her lips. Slowly, she lifted her hand and held it out. Tentatively, I grasped it.

“It’s okay. I know it has been a while and I know now may not be the best time. But . . . I think it’s time for me to introduce myself. I need you to know me officially,” she said.

“Why? After all these years . . . why now?” I asked, a slight tremor cursing through my body.

“Because it will help us move forward.”

I held her gaze and could see the sincerity behind her stare. Those eyes that threatened to lose me in their depths now seemed to offer nothing but mere reflection. The truth. I held her hand tighter in mine.

“Dearest,” she began in a soft lulling voice, “I am Depression.”

This was during junior year, early senior year of high school. I was sixteen going on seventeen and, in the span of seven years, I had experienced twenty.

I hated her. Even so, I feel like hate was too much of a soft word. I felt repulsed by her. I wanted her gone. I wanted to be gone. Somewhere, anywhere away from her. But where could I freaking go? The world was shut down and I was stuck where I was. Standing with her became more addicting. Again, I don’t want to say that she body-snatched me, but she took up residence inside my soul at this point. We had lunch together, cried together, did homework together. Hell, she

I swallowed at her name. Yes, I had known it but for her to speak it outside of the confinements of my subconscious. For her to speak it so definitively . . . I needed time to adjust. Time to live with the truth of her identity.

From the look she gave me, I knew she understood.

Again, my memories are hazy because I spent the better of that time lying on a couch and getting sucked into a fictional world. But I do know that slowly, I felt her deathly strong grip on me relax. She coaxed me up off the couch when needed. I spent time reflecting with her.

For thirty days, we had this ongoing routine that became easier with each passing minute. And then thirty days became a year.

We’ve now reached an understanding between us. She can’t leave, she can’t simply pack her bags and catch the midnight train, nor can she live to consume me. I have accepted that she’ll always be a part of me. She’ll bear witness to me growing old, hopefully finding love, and, maybe, she’ll be kind enough to leave my children alone. It has been a year since she last hit me and beat me down. In that time, I’ve realized that she is just as much a part of me as I am of her. But she is more than her melancholy beginning. She is a reminder of greatness; of an inner strength I would not have known had it not been for her. Behind this calm face, never-ending chaos is she and she’s more at peace than she thought she could give. I lift my head and look her in the eyes. She smiles at me. She has wrinkles by her eyes that tell stories of weariness, of a life well-lived. She has a soft smile, one of recognition and relief. Relief at finally being known, and acknowledged, and given a promise to be taken care of in a healthy manner. I take a breath and shuffle a little closer, standing toe-to-toe. She extends a hand and I take it, her cold warmth now just simply warmth.

The words don’t come, the gravity of the moment sinking in. She knows my name and I can finally acknowledge hers. She smiles, a little more than before, her eyes glint.

“I told you knowing my name would help,” she quipped in a playful manner. Laughing, I nodded. Who knew that after all these years she’d make me smile?

“Yes,” I agreed. “In knowing each other fully, we can finally give each other peace.”

Exploring personality in light of language—or is it vice-versa?

Written by Julia Gralki, Typography by Urja Dwivedi

Can you do an American accent?” someone asked me. It was a hot summer day in North Carolina and my cross-country team was seeking shelter under the trees. We were getting ready for another meet.

“You mean an American accent in German?” I asked, looking around me to see if anyone was listening in on our conversation.

“No,” they said, “in English.”

My following attempt at an American accent must have seemed a little helpless. I was confused. I had been trying so hard to get rid of my German accent already that I hadn’t expected a question like this to come up.

I had only recently moved to the United States and my speaking contained a lot of stumbling over words, mispronouncing them, and putting them in the wrong places. But it was this moment that pushed me to perfect my pseudo-American accent even further, just to see if it was possible. I was fascinated by the idea of blending in seamlessly, of hiding my accent so perfectly that people wouldn’t be able to tell where I’m from when they heard me speak.

One and a half years later came the day a professor told me that I speak with “no trace of a German accent” and I barely hid my smile. I had finally managed to mask that part of who I am. I had finally left behind the German part of me, the part I no longer wanted to be.

“Your voice is different when you speak English,” a friend said as we switched back to speaking in German from English. We were walking in snow-covered woods during the never-ending coronavirus lockdown in Germany.

She was right. My voice did sound different in English. The moment I flip the switch from German to English, not only does my voice have a different ring to it, but also my personality. It’s like there are two separate rooms in my head—one labeled English, the other gErman

“I miss speaking English,” I told my friend that day. We had been speaking in English for nearly our entire walk.

“Why?” she asked.

“It’s like I’m missing a part of myself,” I said.

Perhaps Charlemagne had it right? Maybe there are two separate personalities inside me? I talk the most in English—I’m more expressive, more confident. Even the sound of my laugh is different. I’m still shy regardless of which language I’m using, but when I speak German I feel more rigid, more conservative, and less talkative.

Research shows that I’m not the only one who feels like a different person depending on the language I speak in. A University of WisconsinMilwaukee study, published in 2008, shows that most Hispanic bilinguals shift personalities along with language. The participants said they felt more assertive when speaking Spanish compared to English. They were also perceived as more extroverted by those around them.

Lina Vasquez, a YouTuber and professional language coach who speaks eight languages, has made similar experiences although she disagrees with this conception of personality. In conversation with Vasquez, I learned that she is not just a polyglot, but that she also grew up in multiple cultures and countries. She was born in Latvia, raised mostly in Australia, and heavily influenced by her stepfather’s Peruvian heritage.

When she started learning Brazilian Portuguese, she noticed that she felt more alive in that language, as it ignited a flame inside her that other languages hadn’t. “A language always comes from the culture,” Vasquez said. “And a culture always transports emotion and feeling.”

The day I boarded a plane to the United States, I changed my phone’s language to English. Almost simultaneously, I switched my brain’s language to English too. I started thinking in that language and I haven’t stopped since. My thoughts flow with more ease and, quite literally, I feel more myself in a language other than my mother tongue.

“We all go through that lifelong questioning of who am I,” Vasquez said. Even as a child, she found herself in between two cultures, not knowing where she truly belonged. “I was never really Australian,” she said. “But then I was never really Latvian as well.”

For Vasquez, the answer to the question “who am I?” has been shaped and expanded by her multi-cultural upbringing. “I wouldn’t be the same person if I hadn’t grown up with all these languages,” she said. “The exposure I had to different cultures influenced my open-mindedness into knowing that the world was bigger than just me and my language. That’s also where my sense of curiosity was definitely fed.”

The eight languages Vasquez speaks are Spanish, English, Portuguese, German, Latvian, French, and Russian. She uses some of these languages in her job as a language coach. She also journals and listens to music in different languages (even in ones she doesn’t speak or understand) and has several languages for meditation and prayer. Vasquez uses meditation not only to practice languages but also as a means of self-development.

“Spending time with yourself inevitably allows you to get to know yourself better and be able to step away from those intrusive thoughts that create fear and anxiety,” Vasquez wrote once in a newsletter to subscribers of her language blog and learning platform.

When she speaks English with me, the words flow with ease and calmness—mixed with a pinch of an Australian-Latvian accent. “I would say both in English and Latvian I feel like myself, probably because I’ve spoken those languages for the longest time,” Vasquez told me. “But what does it even mean to be myself?”

Identity is always changing. Cesar Chavez said that language is a mirror to the character and growth of its speakers. In what I glean from this, language is a reflection of our personality and personality is a reflection of our language. It moves both ways.

Language is also a reflection of our views of the world. While we use language to express our opinions, it also determines how we can express them.

“In Brazilian Portuguese,” Vasquez said, “you have so many different words for somebody who’s your friend, a lover, or someone that you love. So, naturally, there’s more tools to construct oneself in that way.”

The diversity and specificity of words show what values a culture is centered around. In this way, language creates a window through which we look at the world.

Elias Capello, a professor of anthropology at SCAD, agrees that language and our perception of the world are intertwined. “In Russian, ‘blue’ has many different categories,” he said. “There’s a different category for light blue, and there’s a different category for regular blue or royal blue. Whereas in the United States, typically in American English, we just have one category of blue. Later on, people learn the difference between light blue and dark blue.”

Brain scans have shown that people who speak a language that differentiates between categories of blue perceive the color with greater sensitivity. This is not only proof that language shapes our perception of the world, but also that language influences our biological setup. But how much power does language actually have?

Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.

—Benjamin Lee Whorf, Linguist

Benjamin Lee Whorf was an American linguist who studied the relationship between language and our thinking. Our experience of the world is mediated through culture and language. When a culture names an object, it makes the object culturally significant. Like “blue,” some words are named more thoroughly than others. Therefore, the worlds of different cultures are distinct worlds—not just the same world seen through another set of words.

Language has the power to shape the way we think and what we think about. “Based on the language that I speak, different things come to my mind,” Capello said. “For example, if ‘bridge’ is masculine in your main language, you’ll think of bridges as masculine. Whereas if ‘bridge’ is feminine, you’ll see bridges as beautiful and less industrial.”

The fact that language influences our perception of the world also challenges the concept of truth and reality. “Saying what is truth, or what is better than another can only be relative,” Capello said, “because our perception differs based on the language that we engage with.” and talk to my parents in a way that’s almost as if I don’t have my Ph.D.,” Capello said. When he is with his parents, his language is more focused on family values. However, while at SCAD, he said he thinks more about social justice and diversity.

Perhaps language not only shapes the way we see the world, but also the way we think about ourselves. For example, the image I hold of myself in English is more outgoing, more talkative, more creative. My sense of humor is drier in German. I even find myself thinking about political and environmental issues differently in German—all because the linguistic resources my brain has been given are different.

“You might make more sarcastic jokes with your friends than you would with your parents,” he said. “And that’s overexaggerated if your parents speak one language, and you speak another with your friends. So there might be a whole subculture of personality that you engage in, like, maybe you’re more sarcastic, maybe you have a more dry humor.”

Professor Capello’s words ring true for me, too. When I speak or write in English, it feels like an upbeat, active music track. I find more ways to express the person I want to be. I am less concerned about the past. It’s almost as if the language propels me forward. Speaking another language gives me more opportunities. It’s like unlocking the next level of a video game—the language is opening itself up to all its people, culture, and community.

So, am I really a different person when I speak another language?

When Ludwig Wittgenstein spoke this, he meant that the human existence is beyond our understanding and can’t be put into words. But there is always more than one interpretation.

Language limits us in how we think and express ourselves. Yet, at the same time, we get the chance to expand and overstep this limit with each language we learn. It opens the door for a new way of seeing and understanding the world around us.

Switching to a different language is like changing from jazz music to classical music. “You’re going to be dancing in a different way to jazz than if you play classical music. You’re going to move and dance in a different way,” Vasquez said. “I think the different languages I speak allow me to share more of myself, just in a different way.”

“You kind of take on the things from the people around you, from the cultures that you have experienced and lived in, to almost create a new world and a new understanding,” she said.

Capello has similar experiences. When he visits his parents in Louisiana, the contrast between the French Creole he uses at home and the academic English he uses when teaching becomes especially apparent. “I’ll code-switch

When you show up, you want people to perceive you in a certain way,” Capello said. “Because people’s perception of us can shape the identity labels we find.”

When I decided to drop my German accent, it was because I didn’t want the label “German” stuck on me. I wanted to be free in deciding who I share that piece of information with rather than it being revealed by the way I speak.

But speaking without a foreign accent doesn’t make me any less German. It is one thing I will never be able to change about myself. The only thing that changed is the way it’s expressed.

“I think some staples of our personality stay the same,” Capello said. “If you’re an open-minded person, you’re going to be open-minded in every situation. What changes is how that comes across.”

Vasquez agrees. “I wouldn’t say that I’m a different person. I think that as human beings, our brain is naturally trained to stereotype and to put things into boxes,” she said. “So it makes it easy for us to say, ‘I become like this when I speak that language,’ and, ‘I become like that in a different language.’ It’s not like I become someone different. I’m always Lina, but I’m multifaceted.”

Multifaceted—a face made up of many parts. There’s no correct way to show oneself, no singular way to express who we are. Every part of the whole contributes to a completed picture. No one aspect of who I am is more myself than another.

Every part of me is part of the whole

Written by Joel Thatcher

Bill Pilczuk was a long way from his home in Cape May, New Jersey. It was Saturday, January 17, and yet another warm summer evening in Perth, Australia, for the finals of the 1998 Swimming World Championships. Not a single cloud could be spotted in the pale blue sky as the 50-meter freestyle finalists prepared themselves behind the starting blocks. Beneath the waving flags of every nation, Bill sat on a white plastic chair, the same kind that can be found at any local pool, drying his legs behind the block of lane six.

He was the only swimmer not wearing his warm-ups, instead, he wore only his black swimsuit and the towel he carried with him. A pair of clear goggles rested on his tall forehead, over a black cap with an American flag printed on the side. As the announcer called his name, he rose to his feet and gave a shy smile, and something in between a wave and a fist pump to the Americans waving flags in the stands, before he looked back to the ground. Behind the blocks, Bill was the embodiment of the word long His tall form was muscled, but not bulky, and his usually tall smile was replaced by a stoic expression and dead-set eyes under his clear goggles. He slowly exhaled, puffing out the cheeks of his long, oval-shaped face as he eyed the competition.

Two lanes over from him, in lane four, was the top qualifier of the evening: Alexander Popov, “The Russian Rocket.” An absolute titan of a swimmer, Popov had won gold in every international competition he participated in since 1992—a winning streak that included fifteen European, four Olympic, and three World Championship races. To put it simply, he was unbeatable. Although mild-mannered in his day-to-day life, Popov was known for his ruthlessness in the pool, commenting once in an interview with the New York Times that, “If [up-and-coming swimmers] have a little potential, you must get on top of them and kill that enthusiasm right away so they will lose their interest in swimming.” It’s this drive that still causes many today to consider him the greatest sprinter in all of swimming history.

Popov always swam to win, and on that January day in 1998, he had another gold medal in his sight. It was his race to lose. He knew it. The world knew it. And Bill knew it as well. The only question was how much Bill Pilczuk, a still relatively unknown swimmer from New Jersey, was going to make him fight for it.

Growing up in the beach community of Cape May, New Jersey, Bill had also grown up in the water. After learning to “not drown” in the ocean, Bill’s grandmother suggested that he join a local swim team. He swam two years at the Cape May City Swim Team, then transferred over to the Wildwood Crest Dolphins. To Bill, the change was drastic. “They were a professional team compared to the one I was on,” he said.

Bill continued to swim there and for his high school swim team throughout his early years. He swam any event his team needed to score points, but almost never touched the 50-freestyle, which would eventually become his best event in the future.

Most swimmers that reach the international level of competition are noticed in high school. They are child prodigies. They break National Age Group Records. They are given scholarships to NCAA Division I schools.

Bill took a different path.

After high school, Bill knew he wanted to continue swimming but had no idea where. When he graduated, he didn’t have times fast enough to go straight to a Division I program, nor the grades to be eligible to compete in his first year of college. He ended up attending Miami Dade Junior College in Florida for the first two years of his collegiate career. Even at the junior college level, Bill was entering a new world of swimming. “I actually didn’t even know a national championship level existed until I got to junior college,” Bill said. “They were like, ‘You ever been to Nationals?’ And I was like, ‘I don’t know what that is.’”

Never mind the fact that he didn’t know what it was, nor the fact that he was the slowest on the team at the start of the season—after his first year at Miami Dade, Bill placed sixth in the 50-freestyle at Junior College Nationals, then went on to win gold his second year. In fact, he swam fast enough to be noticed by David Marsh, a new coach starting his first year at Auburn University in Alabama, a Division I program. At that point, Bill decided he was ready to move on to the next level and he transferred to Auburn the next year.

Due to complications with the date of his graduation from Miami Dade, Bill was forced to redshirt his first year at Auburn, meaning he wasn’t allowed to compete with the team. In fact, due to NCAA eligibility guidelines, he was barely allowed to train with them either. During each practice, Bill had to hop out of the pool, walk over to where his coach would write the workout on the whiteboard, then return to his own lane to train alone, doing his best to follow his teammates from a distance. But competing or not, Bill was determined to keep training to get faster. Much like when he entered Miami Dade, he realized that he was once again the slowest on the team, eighth, out of all the 50-freestylers. That simply wouldn’t do.

At the start of Bill’s junior year, he was finally allowed to train and compete with the team. He immediately noticed a difference in his training group. “In everything we did, we wanted to beat the guy in front of us,” he said. “Every practice was a competition as opposed to just trying to finish a workout.” And the difference seemed to be working. Although he was only able to qualify for the NCAA National Championships as an alternate, he had moved up to be the fourth fastest on his team by the end of that year.

And so, he continued to train.

In his final year in college, Bill qualified for Nationals in the 50-freestyle and placed fourth in the country, tying down to the hundredth of a second with his teammate and training partner. From where he had begun his swimming career in Cape May, Bill had come a long way. But he wasn’t done.

Along with the remainder of his training group at Auburn, Bill decided to keep swimming to see how far it could take him. “I had a really good breakthrough year,” Bill said, looking back at his first year as a college graduate. “Immediately that summer, I ended up qualifying for the first national team I was on for the Rome World Championships in 1994.”

According to Bill, his success came because he finally stopped growing and his body was able to develop muscle rather than height. “I was a very slow developer. I have a moped license that I found recently, and I was five feet, six inches when I was fifteen years old. So not a very big guy. And I have team pictures where I’m down to the shoulders of my friends, and now they’re at my ears so I don’t think I finished growing until my senior year in college.” As the common saying goes, Bill was a late bloomer.

From the previous page: The Japanese National Team visits Auburn University in 1996. Left-to-Right, Pilczuck (second from left, in plaid) is pictured with Yoav Bruck, Suzu Chiba, and Takashi Yamamoto.

Now realizing his potential, Bill set his eye on the 1996 Olympic Trials. In order to qualify for the Olympics, a swimmer must place in the top two of their event. Bill, once again, qualified for the meet in the 50-freestyle, entering with the goal to place in the top eight.

Bill placed third.

Not only that, but he touched the wall five one-hundredths of a second behind the competition, less than half the time it takes the average human to blink. “Obviously, we always want to make a team,” Bill said, looking back on the race. “It’s in the back of your head. But if you actually did it, it would have been unimaginable because it’s not something you’re actually thinking about.” For him, third place and a personal best time were all he could ask for. “Nobody knows what third place feels like. It was really not that big of an issue for me. It’s more of an issue because it’s an issue for other people. I feel kind of awkward when people are like, ‘Oh, you got third, that’s gotta be disappointing.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, sure.’”

Bill’s not one to stop and consider “what if.” Instead, he chooses to focus on “what now.” When he sets his mind on a goal, he focuses on it to the point of tuning everything else out, so don’t be offended if you text him and it takes a few days for him to respond. And he’s never been one to follow the traditional path, even in his daily life.

Years after his swimming career had ended, Bill began coaching at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Here, he also found himself helping out with a local club team alongside his fellow coach, Joe Witt. One day, the two of them attended a swim clinic hosted in Atlanta with a group of thirty or so other coaches from the southeastern United States. While walking along the deck of the pool, Bill failed to notice the plastic tarp covering the pool to keep the heat in.

“We all heard the splash,” Joe said. “But by the time we all turned to see what was going on, Bill had jumped out of the water so quickly that he was just standing on the edge of the pool, suddenly soaking wet from the waist down.”

Bill told Joe he was going to change but, never one to follow the traditional path, he returned only fifteen minutes later wearing a pair of khaki pants that ended about halfway down his shin.

“Where did you get those?” Joe asked.

“I walked across the street to the cleaners,” Bill said, a smile on his face. “Someone had left these.”

The official blew his whistle, indicating for the swimmers to step on the blocks. Popov was the first to step up while Bill was one of the last. While the rest of the competition stood bent over as they awaited command, Bill stood tall, looking forward as he adjusted his goggles, one final act of defiance against the expected.

At last, the official spoke: “Take your mark.”

Beep.

Bill shot off the blocks. He knew that Popov raced to win. So, what if the Russian couldn’t see him? If Bill were to go out fast enough, the swimmer in the lane between him and Popov would block him from his vision. By the time Popov realized what was going on, it would be too late. And so it went.

Bill slammed his hand into the wall 22.29 seconds later, becoming the world champion.

From the beginning of his swimming career to when he decided to look for pants at a dry cleaner, Bill has always broken away from what was expected. He was no child prodigy. He didn’t get picked up by a Division I school out of high school. Instead, he found his own path. A path that led to him breaking yet another tradition, the tradition of another Popov victory. It’s easy for a swimmer, or a person in any field for that matter, to see what is traditionally done and think to themselves that it’s the only way to be successful. But, in reality, there are many paths available to accomplish a goal. Bill is an example of the power of finding your own route to success.

“It hasn’t been easy for Bill,” David Marsh commented in an interview with SwimNews following Bill’s victory. “It’s been something he’s had to work very hard at. He didn’t have the financial support and raw talent of the typical championship swimmer. If he doesn’t accomplish anything beyond winning a world title, he’s already beaten the odds.”

Back at the World Championships in 1998, many coaches were probably secretly hoping to stumble into the pool themselves because of the heat, but that would have to wait.

Written by Haylee Gemeiner, Illustrated by Mayce Schindler

It’s an early and insignificant morning when I find myself standing, bleary-eyed, in the kitchen of my new apartment—one I can only afford with two roommates and a dreadful retail job. The scent of freshly brewed tea (lukewarm in a “Coffee: Because Adulting Is Hard” mug I received as a gift) is almost strong enough to mask the stench of cigarette smoke left behind by the previous tenant. Almost.

After a restless past few days, I’m there, mug in hand, becoming acutely aware of my surroundings again. Is this the signaling of a new chapter of my life entering its draft stage, or did my Adderall just kick in? Either way, something new is beginning—this scene’s color grading changes, and the world is cast in muted shades of sepia and emerald.

I become fixated on many new things after that. Propagating stolen plant clippings and investing all my time and money into DIY projects I’ll never finish. I’m composting vegetable scraps and giving silly names to neighborhood cats. I’m applying for jobs I don’t qualify for and fleshing out fictional worlds reserved for my maladaptive daydreams. I stay up late to watch TikTok’s or rewatch anime, and I have an overpriced candle that smells like oceanside birch, sparkling waves, and white sage. It’s been burning for days now. I think I’m getting used to the pungent notes of Marlboro wafting from my walls and carpet—the same Marlboro’s my parents used to buy a decade ago for $10 instead of $12.

I see my life as a compilation of eras. Some notable ones would be my emo phase in the eighth grade, and, what followed soon afterward, when my fangirl tendencies evolved from punk bands to s***ty television shows beloved by Tumblr. Or when I auditioned for the school play and contemplated an acting career for a year, then again when I graduated high school and developed a snobby film major mentality. A few months into working towards a film degree I realized I didn’t have the backbone (or the mental stability) to work in the industry, and finally switched to writing. After that, I transferred colleges twice until I finally settled at my third, right at the start of my third year. All good things come in threes, but I don’t think I’ll ever be confident in the choices that led me to where I am today. Or even that they were good ones, for that matter.

After a few months of fixating, of becoming one with my interests at that time, I start to feel an itch. I’m not as satisfied by the things that once interested me anymore and without realizing it, I’m preparing to move on while having nothing to move on to. This limbo has been my most consistent experience, and I default to it routinely.

I’ve become somewhat comfortable in my eternal identity crisis. It wouldn’t be all that profound of me to assert my lacking sense of selfidentity like it makes me special because even the concept of identity can be attributed to the consumerist desire to be seen as unique and individual. In other words, having identity issues seems to be an integral part of the individualistic, American experience. I, and many others, however, struggle because of our inability to ever resolve these issues.

I’m always questioning. Not so much my beliefs, values, and convictions, but my preferences, interests, goals, and likes—they have forever been fleeting. Burdened by my inability to enjoy things casually or for extended periods of time, they are fragile and transient. I’ve become someone who is perpetually unsure. Maybe it’s just that I’m not very in tune with myself or maybe I’m overwhelmed by the illusion of choice, but with something like four seeds of a pomegranate, I am destined to return to the liminal space between chapter breaks and wait for the story to pick up in its next arc. Then, my character can develop, and perhaps even grow.

There is the notion that identity is a balancing act of what characteristics define you, who you want to be, and how you want others to perceive you. I think Erik Erikson failed to consider how a dopamine deficiency might affect this process while outlining his stages of psychosocial development. This last year I went and got tested for, and ultimately diagnosed with, ADHD. As a person who struggles to feel a consistent sense of identity, I’ve never had a more singularly identifying experience such as this.

Horoscopes, MBTI Personality Types, Buzzfeed “Which From Are You?” quizzes—I suppose these were the prerequisites for my recent psych evaluation. I’ve always needed a little help defining myself. During my experience of getting diagnosed with ADHD, I realized that identity issues are a symptom of my mental disorder.

My psychologist explained to me that children with ADHD, especially girls whose presentations are severely understudied and often deviate from the standard, often grow up feeling misunderstood and confused. Like with all neurodivergencies, there are negative associations and perceptions of ADHD. These stigmas familiarize children with shame and inadequacy early on, and such negative emotions and insecurities impact us later in life by making it harder to assess ourselves in adulthood.

I did well in school, I always received good marks, and my teachers would gush about what a pleasure it was to have me in class. I didn’t display the same signs of ADHD as my brother, who was diagnosed at a young age, and so I struggled with it unknowingly. I focused more on not twitching in my seat during a lesson than I did on the material. During tests, I made simple mistakes because I couldn’t slow down—and no matter how many times I read the questions, I couldn’t decipher any meaning. I often resorted to cheating on homework assignments last minute because I was a chronic procrastinator.

I struggled to maintain relationships because, although I cared deeply, I was forgetful when it came to reaching out. I remember feeling hopeless during this time, because no matter what I did I always struggled, and because I couldn’t figure out why, I started to look internally. This undoubtedly impacted the person I grew into.

There is also a widely accepted theory that ADHD stems from a lack of dopamine in the brain. Dopamine, the neurotransmitter responsible for the overall executive function of emotional and physical responses, coordinates our relationships with pleasure and reward. People diagnosed with ADHD often struggle to find the motivation to complete low reward tasks and become paralyzed, or hyper-focused, on something that is more pleasurable instead. Hence the common symptoms of trouble focusing and completing tasks.

Whether it was from growing up feeling hopeless or my brain’s predisposition to erratically chase after anything that provides dopamine (or both), I think it’s safe to say that my identity issues are a symptom of my mental disorder. Thank God. Because I almost blamed it on being a Gemini.

I expect now that my current interests will inevitably fade, and I will be set off wandering again, unsure and searching for nothing. My propagated seedlings will die, and I’ll forget to compost the scraps, and the world of my daydreams will eventually bore me. The weather will change, with colorful sunsets and sunrises mellowing into autumn. I won’t get the jobs I don’t qualify for (not that this will surprise me) but I will be reminded of how mind-numbing retail is.

When I’ll look back at this chapter later in my life, I’ll probably think of dirty fingernails, and sleep deprivation, and smell the smoky birch, waves, and sage, and see the world through the gritty, earth-toned filter for a moment again, but it will be like a dream I can’t quite describe. When I light that candle or make a cup of tea, the dream will be so close, and still barely out of reach.

Approaching these lulls has always made me anxious and wistful. The same way summer in August, Sunday afternoons, and opening your last birthday present makes you feel. I don’t think I’ll ever be rid of that yearning nostalgia—but maybe this time, I’ll find it in me to extend my reach farther towards the dream of what was and bring it back into consciousness again. Maybe I can turn this chapter’s conclusion into a page break instead.