Page 121 of You've Got Hate Mail
The more I talk, the madder I get.
And the madder I get, the more I talk, calling out all of the people who flooded my work email with hate letters and the people in the comment sections of the most popular reposts of my live video that I couldn’t get taken down everywhere.
Also, the madder I get, the more agitated The Cluckinator gets.
I hope all of her clucks are her shouting out at whoever was so bad in her life that she had to run away from them.
My dam has burst, and all of the things I’ve held back—not just in the past month, but all of my life—come pouring out of me.
“And you,” I yell at the camera. “My family. Not a single damn one of you has asked me how I am.Not a fucking one. It’s all about your own reputations and how my sisters would never and that I should grow up and that I’ve never done a single good thing in my life and that I don’t deserve to be loved.”
That one—that one breaks me.
But for the first time since I got here, I’m not mad at myself.
I’m furious with the world.
If Pip had had my job fifty-something years ago, if she’d been through this same thing, there wouldn’t have been an internet for everyone to share her most mortifying moment.
And the rage I feel at my own family—familyshouldbe about love and acceptance and forgiveness, not shame and guilt and control.
For the first time in my life, I’m saying it out loud.
Baring my soul the way I’ve bared my skin.
“Why’s my beaver so terrible, Aurora? You’re a fuckingdoctor. You’ve studied anatomy. You should knowwe all have beavers.We’re all born through a beaver.”
My voice echoes in the underground chamber while the barrels in the industrial racks watch.
The Cluckinator bagocks like she just laid an egg.
“And Belle. You made me a punching bag growing up, always blaming me for taking your role as the baby, as if that was my choice. And youstill fucking do it. And Dad. Joke’s on you, you fucking wine snob. I’m living my best life in a winery—a full damn winery, not just that cellar you’re always bragging about—with people who are kind and compassionate and the kind of family you’ll never be to me.”
I spin, holding the phone away from me to best get as much of my naked body as possible in the frame while also capturing the rows of dusty wine barrels running the length of this room and my chicken doing her chicken waddle as she turns with me.
Tears are dripping down my face, butgod, it feels so good to finally say it out loud.
I don’t want to be a victim.
I don’t want to blame my problems on other people.
But I am who I am—I amhowI am—because of the lessons that were ingrained in me as a child.
The lessons that I’m too much trouble and not enough accomplishment. That I’m in the way. That I take too much space.
That I’m a burden.
“You’re all no better than the people telling me to stick a hot poker up my vagina and that they want to smack my ass and that I need to find God, who, news flash,gave me my beaver,” I shriek at the camera.
I wonder if I’ll ever have the courage to say these things to their faces.
But I don’t think I need to.
This—this isn’t for them.
It’s for me.
It’s for me to fully name how I’ve felt so that I can let it go and move on.
