The plates
October 2016. My grandma called. She couldn’t find my dad.
He’d vanished before, so I wasn’t that worried. But something about this time felt different. I started calling hospitals and police stations, mostly going through the motions, sure I’d come up empty. Until a receptionist said the words I didn’t even know I’d been dreading: “He’s here.”
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At the hospital a doctor pulled me aside and said “your father attempted suicide” with the warmth of a meter maid. Dad survived, my brother flew in on the red eye, my mom (his ex) ran logistics like she’d spent years in training for it, and I was back at work within a week, telling everyone it was honestly kind of a blessing. A wake-up call. “No biggie, I’m fine” became my go-to response when people asked me how I was doing.
What I couldn’t tell anyone was that I wasn’t sad. I looked everywhere for sad. What I found was rage. At him, at my grandma for whatever role I’d decided she played in getting him to that day, at every person that told me to go and cry in the fucking shower.
The rage, the grief, needed somewhere to live but I didn’t even think about that. One night I saw an ad for a rage room on Instagram and I got an idea. I drove to a dollar store and bought a stack of ugly plates for six bucks and a Sharpie. On the first plate I wrote HE WAS CHOOSING TO ABANDON US, then I threw it as hard as I could against the wall in the alley behind my house. And fuck did it feel good, so I kept going. I wrote and I smashed until the stack was gone. And then I started using my real dishes (don’t recommend that part). By the time I was out of dishes and things to write on them, I laughed, I cried, and finally some of those stuck feelings moved, just a little.
My dad is still alive. We still mostly don’t talk about that October. But the dollar store knows me now, and I always have a few extra plates on hand.
The practice, if you want to try it
- Buy cheap plates or glasses. Dollar store, thrift store, the uglier the better. Never your own good ones — the point is to lose things you don’t love.
- Take a Sharpie and write the sentence you’re not allowed to say out loud. Full sentences, not single words. “He was choosing to abandon us” breaks better than “abandonment.”
- Pick your smash zone. A metal trash can, a garage floor, a wall with a tarp. And find some safety glasses and closed-toe shoes. I was fine, but I was also probably being an idiot.
- Read the sentence out loud. Once. Then throw.
- One sentence per plate. Keep going until the stack is gone or something in you goes quiet.
- Sweep up. Don’t skip this part. The sweeping is the second half of the ritual. And throw that shit away.
If the rage feels bigger than a stack of plates, that’s information too.