A Southern Confession

featured in The Open Letters | by Bran

From Bran💌

Sometimes you cannot name a discomfort until uprooting yourself from your previously comfortable spot, tossing all the pillows, wiggling the furniture around, and re-settling back into your resting place. At times, I have to get up from my office chair and “take a lap” around my house to re-center because it feels like if I don’t move away from the unnamed discomfort, I will explode. I equate it to a waking limb or a pang of irritating pain that will not be silenced until you’re able to locate the source of its radiation. It’s a buzzing in your atoms that cannot be quelled without movement.

That is the feeling that crept in and overtook me over three difficult decades of life in the Deep South. I’ve told stories for ages about how it helped to shape me through its nuanced “lessons”, transactional “charm”, and the trademark slower pace that has such a pretty outer sheen. I assured people that despite the close-knit churches, the sordid history, the commercial wastelands, and the whiteness of it all, it was endearing and hospitable. Southern life was all I knew, so it had to be good.

These are the fields where I caught fireflies and learned to play baseball. Here are the backroads I learned to drive,

the lakes where I learned to fish,

the strip malls and warehouses where my friends and I used to skateboard. Here are the school buildings where I learned to love writing and play trumpet and the parking lots where I cut donuts in my Mustang as a teenager.

This is the place where I learned to walk, talk, shake hands, and kiss girls. I perpetuated the “charm” to help wash over everything unsavory underneath.

I did not experience a typical, two-parent, Southern household growing up. I had a troubled childhood dealing with divorce, depression, and substance abuse, so I cannot speak from the Andy Griffith perspective. However, I have many fond memories of that place and the scenery, and for many years I had an extended family that regularly scheduled functions and holidays together. I’ll likely always be a Southern boy at heart, no matter how far displaced my body becomes. The people can never make the scenery of the South ugly, and my connection to the earth there will endure forever. My energy may someday return to those woodland trails when I’m gone to traverse the same footpaths where I saw magic sparkle in my wife’s eyes. I’ll crave the low country boils, the Memphis-style BBQ, and jambalaya flavors until they meet my lips again. I’ll miss the NOLA buskers, the Gulf Coast sunsets, the Mississippi motorcycle rides, and the Midtown Memphis dives. The hot springs of Arkansas and the lakes of Alabama hold cherished parts of my heart, and I may try to experience those places again before I get too old.

The rub is, I romanticized a life there that nearly killed me. I created a losing game where the end goal was assimilation into a community with which I haven’t identified since I was a teenager. No matter how hard I’ve tried to love the South, it’s never truly understood me and never returned my love in earnest. Over the last decade, more smiles became sneers and more hearts were overcome with hate. The Christian values that once defined Southern hospitality, once recognized the importance of community and empathy were replaced by white

nationalism, anti-community values, and cult-like adherence to misinformation and misunderstanding. An ugly light washed over the scene, and I squinted.

Here is the front porch where I first heard racist epithets.

This is the neighborhood where I learned how to snort pills and binge drink. Just over the hill is the curve where he lost control in my old pickup,

the country roads I practiced drunk driving,

the grave of my grade school friend.

These cold walls hold the concrete cell where I spent lonely, confused nights as a child. This gravel drive leads to the house where I tried to commit suicide.

The slow pace of the South seeps into its culture, infects its businesses, and distorts the “friendly” gestures of its people. It mummifies them alive, and they flock to their Bass Pro Shops-sponsored pyramid befitting a weirdly white, wildly-mulleted Jesus. They do not want forward progress. They do not embrace the changing tides or the evolution of design. Technology to aid in unnecessary constraint or eliminate obsolete human labor as simple as touch-screen kiosks are sneered at, if not outright rejected. Racism is running rampant, and the celebration of MAGA’s undisputable evil is too loud to bear anymore. The farmers of the South sold the rest of the country out to save their own asses, and now they’re all experiencing the same ache. Southern politicians greased the palms of the Waltons, Bezos, and Elon, and now small businesses flicker bright before fading away. Southern Americans are quietly being killed by poisoned water and masked wingnuts cosplaying as authoritarians, and the majority of them could not give less of a fuck. The southeast region is the epicenter of national division and the biggest barrier to progress in this nation, at least from my own personal experience. The confederacy was allowed to survive in the shadows, so we’re currently watching its disgusting visage reappear.

Y’all are the problem, and I wish I could have done more to change it.

If this chaps your ass to read, potential Southern reader, maybe you should do more to prove me wrong. The dissenting, reasonable voices are not loud enough, so I lost faith that they exist.

I know my Southern experience isn’t unique. I also, more deeply than ever, understand that I am not oppressed or marginalized, so whatever negative experience I have had is still contained within my sphere of white, male privilege. That privilege has, however, allowed me to peer deeply into the unkempt home of the Southern patriarch, and it’s beyond time for them to clean house. Things continue getting weirder and louder by the day, and it became glaringly obvious that a change of scenery wasn’t just a desire but a necessity for my little family and I. I came to the heartbreaking conclusion that I cannot personally ever thrive in a place that would see me or people I love banished from it. Everything I ever planted in the South withered. Every bloom I ever experienced was fleeting. I think it’s because too much innocent blood has been spilled on the land. Too many losses piled, and the ground is too full of them.

I buried things in that ground before I left; offerings to the earth where white men before me took everything and gave nothing in return. I prayed over the old blood, the cold bones, and every

moving creature in the soil beneath my feet. I kissed the walls of that house and said my final goodbyes to the woods behind it. I walked through our garden one last time and thanked the flowers, honored the earthworms, spoke to the spiders, and pushed my fingers into the soil that fed me and brought joy to my life one last time. I did my best to cherish the beautiful moments in that town while finally prying its fingers from around my throat. I blessed a space that held my chaos before I left it forever.

If I only gain temporary solace, then I am still grateful. If I only step into another storm, then I will learn new lessons. If I must move and change to survive, then I am following the eons of creatures before me by adapting, evolving, and changing with the environment. If all I leave in the South blossoms without me, then it was meant for me to leave anyway.

So, consider this my confession. This is my reason; my motivation; my change of heart. I needed to change where I house my heart, and this is the echo of my decades long scream into the void:

Farewell, Deep South. I’ve lost whatever complicated love I once had for you.

Following my move from my hometown last year, I was quickly reminded that loss and tumult are not native to any area. They hold keys to every house you call home, and barge through the door when it’s entirely inconvenient for you. Sometimes they stick around a while, and REALLY overstay their welcome. However, my surroundings have me better grounded. New difficulties don’t feel so immediately exhausting or so weighed down with memory and missed intent. My home feels like a hundred-year-old hug, and I’m currently working to deepen my connection with this place, its terrain, and its flora and fauna. The difficulties me and my family have experienced here have still been completely overpowered by the elation, the excitement, and the joy. The city embraces us, and life feels changed for the better.

So, be brave. Take risks. Leave your hometown. Before I bury you in clichés and forget myself… This is what I have truly learned: The world is most beautiful where you feel like blossoming. There is still ugliness and disquiet in most places, but in the intentional stillness we create, it becomes clear that there is so much healing the earth has left to give us. We can help her heal too if we follow the right pathways and connect the right neurons, and hope has to prevail towards those ends. If you let yourself wither from your surroundings, you rob the world of anything you may become. The moves you make don’t have to traverse the country or follow any difficulty or trauma, since sometimes you grow feverishly right where you’re planted. If or when that feels impossible, it’s sometimes necessary to change everything. Toss the pillows. Walk a lap. Upturn the room to find the ghost that’s haunting your house and banish it, at least for the afternoon. If you allow yourself to be more quiet and more still, you will inevitably find yourself more at peace. In that peace is a magic and curiosity that keeps us more zealous for connection and truth.

Listen, ya’ll, I am no soothsayer. I hold no college degree, and the ambiguously impressive-sounding job title I hold is solely due to my close friendship with my boss. I am an

educated redneck still trying to make sense of a life rife with trauma, abuse, and uncertainty. If I told you I am able to consistently put these lessons into good practice, I’d be lying, but putting them into focus and trying to practice them has made a world of difference in my life. I’ve continued to listen to what the universe is saying, but I’ll never fully understand the language. Sometimes, I’ve misinterpreted the lesson, and any number of days pass before my realization is righted. Others, I’m nearly certain no reason exists and no distance is great enough to start anew. Sometimes life just hurts in unique ways untouched by words. However, I am attuned and humble. I am grateful while growing. I am an ever-changing force that defies boundaries,

a Southern soul free from old barriers.

---

About the Author:

Bran is a writer, musician, and self-proclaimed Monster maker, recently transplanted to Pittsburgh from his native Mississippi. A millennial and metalhead at heart, his work is shaped by music, movement, and the chaos of reinvention, bringing together personal reflection and creative energy in equal measure.

Substack ID: Bran

---

Have something to share? Submit your own reflections or stories to be featured in The Open Letters. Send your work to hasifnewsletter@gmail.com. For more details, check out this post: Submit your Essays and get Featured.

Hasif,
Editor-in-Chief, The Open Letters