Why Inked in Gray

I was recently a guest on a podcast. It was the most amazing and nerve-wracking experience, but I loved it. I talked about my time as a social worker, about growing up, and about Inked in Gray. I think no matter how you go into one of these things, you’re always unprepared for something. In this case it was a question I’ve been asked literally hundreds of times. ‘Why Inked in Gray.’

I’ve written paragraph after paragraph, told story after story about why I created Inked in Gray. In truth I had a number of reasons for starting the small press. My most personal reason has always been hardest to say is the one closest to my heart, for reasons that may be all too obvious by the time you’ve finished this post. Quite honestly, I’m still coming to terms with some aspects myself.

Especially the way one moment changed the course of so many lives.

Sometime in 1961, my grandfather died by suicide. I’m told he was on leave between tours in Southeast Asia. Special Forces. Had served over a dozen years in the military.

His death was tragic. It changed a family, a community, and the small world they lived in.

I could talk a little bit about dissenting feelings of war in Southeast Asia in between the Korean war and the Vietnam war. But I’m not going to. You can google it. It’s not pretty.

Nonni grieved the sudden death of her husband that day and for many years afterwards. Even when I came into this world, she always looked as if she was missing a part of her soul. As wise a woman she was, she could never really tell me how to heal. I think we are all still trying to figure that out.

One day Nonni was a military wife. The next she was a single mother with five kids, aged 9 months (my father) to 16 years of age. The ones that could work and make extra money did. But it wasn’t enough.

Tensions grew tight. Grieving while struggling financially wasn’t easy. The kids took their anger out on each other and their mother. They desperately tried to make ends meet, not always in the most ethical of ways. But it was their mom and their family they were fighting for. What would you have done if those opportunities arose?

Grief and desperation can make bad decisions feel like only options. Many were made in attempt to keep food on the table, care for a sick parent, keep a home. Yet despite all the ways they strived to make ends meet, they couldn’t. Nonni lost her house and with it the last shred of connection to her husband and the life they used to have. They moved into Section 8 housing.

My dad learned to drive at 12 so he could do extra jobs on friends’ farms. Soon he was picking up his older brother every time he tried to drown his father’s last moments from his mind. I can relate. Friend or stranger, one’s last moments should be their own, but that is a post for another day.

Their bad choices came back to haunt them. Trouble arrived at their doorstep.

Again, and again, and again.

Our lives were filled with violence. Much of which I don’t remember.

I’m lucky to be alive.

I was separated from my brother before I was one. Told a shit ton of lies. And even as the trouble returned, I was shushed quiet about things that didn’t add up.

Everyone wanted that past to go away, those choices buried under the rug. But they kept coming back, as many things often do.

I thought I was crazy. But I heard what I heard. Threats were made. Genuine fear is something I promise you will never need to see before in order to recognize.

To this day, I am still a light sleeper. Man, my kids hate that. I can sense that Nintendo Switch being turned on at 2am without any sound at all. Every damn time. But, I digress.

Soon the trouble stopped knocking on our door. But just because you stop inviting it over, doesn’t mean it never stops by uninvited. It’s kinda like that homophobic relative that keeps showing up at holiday dinners, but everyone secretly wishes would get the plague and stay home.

Trust me, the plague always spreads before it fizzles out. Just like the consequences of bad decisions.

But we survived. All of us.

Shattered. Changed.

Confused. Angry.

Through it all, not a day goes by when those five kids and their mother missed their beloved person. Never a day went by where they didn’t wish he was here to be the husband and father he wanted to be, but thought he couldn’t.

We survived in his shadow.

To this day, I struggle with accepting everything that happened. We all do. I think the ones left still struggle with how everything ended up so far from where we intended. Our plight, like that of so many others, had fallen between the cracks of a society that had no safety net for its soldiers. Everything spiraled into dysfunction and chaos, which then created a generation raised with trauma, violence, and abuse as normal. A generation who then passed on their flaws to the next generation. My generation. Before we knew it, we’d created a cycle of domestic violence, abuse, and co-dependency.

Much of which I thought was normal, which probably explains a lot of my humor, and why Inked in Gray is so much a passion project for me.

Because domestic violence doesn’t appear out of nowhere. Gangs fill gaps for a reason. Bullies don’t just choose to be assholes. There’s a reason we need drugs to numb the pain. There’s also a reason we decide to escape. There’s a reason we lie to ourselves and others.

One day I’ll have enough guts to tell you what they lied about. The why and the how my life might have ended differently.

But this is for him. For the grandfather I never had. For the community who thought Nonni’s kids were scum when they really just never learned how to stop their own pain. For my older brother, who by rights shouldn’t be here either. But we are. By the grace of the moon, we got lucky. For all the struggle we went through trying to survive in a world that didn’t give a fuck about us.

We did it. Shattered, beaten, one foot in the mud.

They say everyone is fighting a different battle, day in and day out. We sometimes think we know what that battle is. But I don’t think we ever really know the depths of what our friends are dealing with. Those aren’t our shoes. We’re never going to be able to slip our feet into them, save for just a moment.

With Inked in Gray I want to show you, with each story, another pair of shoes. Take you through a story like mine, show you another aspect of our world. Another layer, another family that survived. And maybe one that didn’t. Because not all of us survive long enough to complete our dreams. Because maybe the world would be a little kinder if we thought more about what it felt to live in shoes unlike our own. Maybe we could change things if we had more insight. Change can’t start without a connection, and the more we reach out and take the hand of someone we don’t understand, the closer we become to making powerful change in this world.