Brave. Rose McGowan

how much rage I would’ve had to stifle back then, because I’ve had to stifle so much now.

      My mother impresses me greatly. I truly think she’s one of the most intelligent people I have ever met. Her mind works at a very fast rpm, like a Ferrari brain. She was/is a beautiful woman, and she was preyed upon. Maybe that, besides an agile mind, was what got handed down to me.

      But I’m grateful for many other things handed down to me from my family. A dissenting punk spirit. A quick, cruel wit, curiosity, love of history, and above all, a love of words. One of the great things that both my mother and my father gave me is this ability to see art everywhere. I fantasize about having tetrachromacy, where you can see over a million colors. I see shapes and patterns in everything. I’m always surprised that when people grow up in a more traditional way, sometimes they don’t seem to be able to see, to really see, the things all around them that are pure art. To me, that is what makes the experience of life. It’s also something that helped me survive.

For all the flaws of my childhood, I consider myself lucky to have been raised with a European sensibility. We had Italy and its history, its architecture, and its art. I think Europe and older cultures have a different sense of rhythm and time. I find the system, especially the system I now know best, the American system, aggressively determined to crush free thought and those it labels “other.” I’m here to tell you that “other” is where it’s at.

      People tell me they’re sorry for how I spent my childhood. That’s cool, I simply tell them I’m sorry for how they live. Growing up behind the proverbial white picket fence frankly seems as dangerous to me, and a different kind of cult, the cult of the mainstream. I’ve known some fucked-up people behind those picket fences. At least with my family it was all right there to see. One of the great benefits of growing up, moving a lot, and continuing to do so as I got older was that I met people who thought differently, and in that way I was raised to view the world from a different perspective. I am grateful for that, if anything.

      I was also bequeathed the one thing that runs strongest in my family: a strong urge to destroy oneself. The phoenix that has to rise because life has turned to ashes. My life has ashed itself numerous times, more times than I can count. But goddamn, all those ashes built a beast.

I know I am not alone in this life ashing thing. So many of us seem to have this preternatural ability to rise because we have no other choice. It’s something that fascinates me about the human spirit. I think our rising is the bravest thing we can do, and I don’t think people give themselves enough credit for it. How many times have we been told we’d be nothing? But we are not nothing, we are phoenixes and we rise. All it takes is some bravery. Turning our lives around is the bravest thing we can do. One step at a time, first we walk, then we run.

      One of the things people don’t realize about cults is that they’re all over: it’s not just wild-haired cult leaders. Of course it was extreme in the Children of God when they began advocating sex with children and the selling of women, viewing them as merchandise and property. But when it comes down to it, this mentality wasn’t far from what I would later experience in Hollywood and the world at large. At least with Children of God, I knew what I was running from. Hollywood and media messaging was a lot more insidious.

      I have patches of memory from the night we escaped the commune. Like a movie scene, it comes in flash images. I remember asking my father where my mother was. No answer. I remember the running. Holding my father’s hand. And the green corn-like plants with their hard stalks whipping my small face. The lightning, thunder, and rain raging in the night sky. Sometimes in the movies, it rains to heighten the drama. Well, this drama was heightened. The rain was pouring.

      Ironic, then, that after Italy, my father would send me to the perpetually rainy American Pacific Northwest as my next home.

AMERICAN GIRL

It was in the bathroom of the plane taking me to America that I remember first really seeing myself in a mirror. I didn’t really know what I was staring at, because I had no attachment to the face I was staring at. I didn’t know that once I got off that plane, I would land in a world of here’s what you can’t do because you’re a girl and here’s why you’re different and fucked because you’re a girl. It was like a pink school uniform for the mind. The first place I was sent was a small town naval base. I went from Florence, Italy, to Gig Harbor, Washington. Or to be more blunt, I essentially went from the cradle of Western civilization to a place with rednecks and jacked-up trucks with big wheels. America was terrifying. Loud. Jarring. I hated the food instantly. I hated how aggressive people were. My brother and I were sent, ahead of my father, to live with my step-grandmother, Dorothy, yet another adult I didn’t know but was supposed to attach to. She was a tall brunette cigarette smoker with a big throaty laugh. She loved America. She talked about it a lot. My first night in the USA was spent in terror of the bear she told me might eat me in the night. The only thing she knew how to cook was boiled tomatoes, and I cried because I missed the food in Italy.

      I was taken to Denny’s, a chain restaurant with frankly terrible food, the worst that American cuisine has to offer. They had a big menu with pictures on it. I was so excited to see spaghetti on the menu, I started speaking excitedly in Italian and waving my hands around. When it arrived, it was a gelatinous blob. I stared at it. Picked it up with a fork, and instead of being normal pasta, it stayed together as one unit. There was also a big lake of lukewarm water underneath the spaghetti blob. I just started crying because I knew my life was never going to be the same again. I had landed in a world of Tater Tots and Cheez Whiz, and there was no going back. Fuck.

      Everything was different. Not just the food, but the land, the trees, the sounds. It rained all the time in this new place. The cars were so big and so loud. The people were so big and so loud. I had never even seen wooden houses. In Italy all the houses had been made of stone. I had never been around Americans. I had never heard music piped in through loudspeakers. My brother and I huddled together when announcements blared out in the supermarket. We’d never seen fluorescent lights. We’d never seen orange cheese.

Dear America, why is your cheese orange? Who decided: “Let’s make this an unnatural shade of orange”? It’s completely arbitrary. My brother and I thought it was hilarious. We’d point our fingers and snicker. But the joke was on us. We were stuck there.

      My first day in my American school I was made to stand in front of the class and lead them in the Pledge of Allegiance. I didn’t know what the Pledge of Allegiance was. I could understand English—I just refused to speak it. I heard the teacher say, “This’ll get the Communist out of her.” I turned to the teacher and uttered just one word: “Fascistas.” Fascists. That’s what the Italians were during the war, you dummy, not Communists.

      Indeed, it seemed the welcome message was unmistakable: You’re different. We must crush the difference out of you.

      There’s a tenacious myth that America glorifies individualism, but trust me, if you are a true individual, you will be persecuted. Schools force-feed you the propaganda version of the world and of history. The bullshit version. So that by the time you graduate you’re chanting along with everyone else: “America, hell yes, white men are number one!” Why? Why do you say America is number one? Because if you actually look at the statistics, around the world America is not in fact number one at anything anymore, except maybe obesity, firearm deaths, the death penalty, and incarceration rates. Oh, and of course, military might and our other big export: American film and television.

This is when reactionaries start yelling about how other countries are worse, so why don’t I go live there, et cetera, et cetera. My view is why not just be better? Why should we continue to feel superior just because other places are worse? That sounds like bad logic to me. We can just be better by thinking differently. Thinking whatever is different about you must be stripped from you is the WRONG way to approach things. Thinking you must be homogenized for everybody else’s comfort level, because God forbid discomfort, is the WRONG way, too. Fuck those ways of thinking. Do not bend yourself