Let’s Talk It Out- A Note From The Author

I’ve been a writer forever. Ever since I was old enough to wield a pen I have been scribbling on scraps of paper, desperately trying to capture my thoughts before they would drift away from me. When I was in middle school, I discovered poetry. I discovered what it was like to artistically paint my emotions on a page.

I specifically remember getting in trouble in my high school creative writing class because my work was not “school appropriate,” and I was sent to the guidance counselor more than once, my pen had a knack for getting me scolded. I was a deeply sensitive child with an absent father and a mother who truly didn’t understand me, so I had a tendency to write every single thing I was feeling down on whatever paper I could find. Writing has always been core to who I am as a person, though after being scolded in school, I became far more reclusive with my work and rejected even the notion of allowing anyone else to lay eyes on it.

Long story short, I divorced my ex-husband in 2021 and left a decade long marriage with only four medium-sized moving boxes. One of those boxes was filled to the brim with just my journals, which contained entries, a staggering amount of poetry, and general doodles. Those journals sat in my basement for nearly four years after my divorce before I rediscovered them. Upon looking through them I realized that I had a chronological tale of what it was like to grow up closeted in the rural Midwest.

We have so much work to do for LGBTQIA+ equality, not only in protecting our recent equality under the law for future generations of LGBTQIA+ people, but also in correcting the social stigma in many parts of the country. I realized that my story is so similar to many members of our community and that my tale could serve as a beacon of hope for the downtrodden and weary kid whose scenic view from their bedroom window contains nothing more than acres upon acres of cornfields.

Let’s Talk It Out was a healing journey for me, rereading, editing, rewriting. It was a maddening, emotional gut punch that allowed me to fully process those emotions that I repressed for so long into my adulthood. My sincere hope is this collection of my work shall serve as a reminder to the younger “different” kid, that there is nothing wrong with who they are, and even if it’s not safe to come out right now, it’s ok to accept and truly love themselves not despite what anyone else says, but regardless of anyone else’s opinion.
-Haylee Morgan