The Bitter Northerner

I spent the darkest part of this winter with Beyoncé’s Lemonade on repeat, desperate for answers on how to make the worst lemons handed to me sweet, or maybe less sour, or maybe not sweet at all. Maybe just how to hold the sour without it eating through my hands. There is something about that album that keeps me coming back when the world feels tilted, when I need someone to say yes, this is real, this is actually happening, you are not imagining the angle of things, and I have felt that, too. 

I kept thinking about the rooms I’ve been in and how they’ve always felt. The rooms I walk into every day expecting level ground. The ones that feel wrong the moment I step inside. The ones where everyone else looks comfortable and I seem to be the only one gripping the doorframe, wondering if the whole building is about to slide into the sea.

There’s this experiment I think about often, and I have been carrying it with me like prayer for months now. Scientists built a room where everything tilted; the walls, the floor, the furniture, and they put people inside that room and asked them to stand up straight. To find their vertical. Most could not do it. Their bodies believed the walls more than they believed themselves. They leaned with the room the way water learns the shape of whatever holds it, and they called the leaning standing. It seems to me that this experiment tells us something we would rather not know. It tells us that people can be made to believe almost anything, if the walls insist on it long enough. It tells us that the body can be taught to betray itself, can be made a stranger to its own knowing. This is a story of my life. This is also the whole of American history in a single thread.

Melissa Harris-Perry took that experiment and made it mean something specific. She was writing about Black women, about what it costs to move through spaces that insist on their own levelness while tilting, always tilting, toward their erasure. I am not a Black woman. I cannot speak to that particular labor and its exhaustion. But, I too know something about crooked rooms. I know something about being told the floor is level when your own body, your own blood, tells you that it is not. And I know something about what it costs to keep standing when the whole architecture of the place is designed to make you fall.

The room is not one room. The room is the house we grew up in. The room is every space we enter against impossible odds, in spite of an impossible life, desperate to finally be seen clearly. The room is also this country. It is the oldest American story. It is every institution that claims neutrality while leaning hard to one side. The room is the lie America tells itself about itself, and the room is also the lie that gets into your bones, gets into your muscles, and your blood, until you start to think that maybe the problem is you, that maybe there is something wrong with your balance. The room is crooked and it is a truth this country has spent its entire existence trying not to know.

To tell you a story about my life and my own crooked rooms, is to also acknowledge that the crooked room never announces itself. There was no sign on the doors as I walked in, no honest voice that welcomed me inside and said we built this to break you. The room just exists, natural, and ordinary, and familiar. The people inside of them smile and learn your name. The room becomes so ordinary, the cruelty becomes so familiar we don’t always recognize it as cruelty. And everyone inside has already learned to lean. They have made their peace with the angles and the tilts, decided that it is simply how things are, and they do not wish to be reminded that they are living at a slant. So when we walk in holding our own sense of up, when our bodies insist on its own true north, I, and so many others, become disoriented, and more importantly, become the problem. We become the one who will not make peace with the tilt, and we become the one who must be explained, must be managed, pathologized, villainized, and blamed for disruption; must be made to understand that the room is actually level, and the fault of that is ours.

The people who built the rooms, who benefit from its angles, who have arranged their comfort on its tilted floor, will never admit what the room is. To admit it would require them to remake not only the room but themselves. They are not willing to do this. It is easier, always easier, to blame it on an inability to lean.

What do we do with our body? our shaking hands? our aching muscles? our body exhausted from the labor of staying upright in a place that was not built for our standing?

We take Beyonces advice and make lemons into Lemonade. More importantly, we tend to the lemonade stand.

The labor is not only the labor of standing. The labor is also the labor of making something. We show up with all the sour fruit of everything handed to us, and we build a stand. 

We get wood, or cardboard, or sticks, or maybe we just stand there with a jug if that’s all we have, and we pour into the cups of the exhausted. The ones that need rest, or a drink, or maybe just evidence that they’re worth offering to.

We make the lemonade anyway, y’all. We offer something sweet to whoever comes next, whoever walks in and feels the tilt and thinks, as I once thought, that “maybe the problem is me”.

Beyoncé calling her album Lemonade, wasn’t really about being clever. She was asking us to bear witness to what it looks like when we reach back through generations, through our grandmother’s hands and our grandmother’s grandmother’s hands, back all those women and queers who found ways to take the bitter parts of this life and make it into something that could sustain themselves, their families, their community, their people.

The lemons are not incidental. The lemons are the whole brutal history, the room and all its angles, the tilt and the fall and the way the fall gets blamed on the one who fell. The lemonade is what we make anyway. It is the transformation, the alchemy, the refusal to let the end of the story be sour.

And the stand is where you make it, it is where you offer it. The stand is the level place you build inside the crooked room, the small territory of truth in a landscape of lies.

This is what I need you to understand: the stand is not for you, or rather, not only for you. The stand is for the one who will walk into that room twenty years from now and feel the floor slope beneath their feet and look around for proof that someone before them did not fall, that someone made something beautiful out of what they were given. 

The tending of the stand is a profound act of love. It is our ancestors holding us up, too. 

I do not say this lightly. I have come to distrust how the word love is deployed because it is so often used to validate that very tilt. But I mean something specific here: you show up, again and again, and you keep the table level, and you offer what you made to whoever needs it. Not because it will save you, because nothing will save you from a room determined to make you fall. But because you have decided that crooked fucking room will not have the last word. You have decided that something sweet will exist in this place, even if you have to make it yourself, even if your hands shake and ache while you stir.

Some, like me,  who have spent their entire lives in crooked rooms learn to build armor. We learn that softness is dangerous, that the room will reach into any opening and take what it finds. So we develop edges, stop walking in open, become what we need to become to survive. 

For many of us, tenderness was something squeezed out early.

The armor is not a flaw, by the way. The armor is the accumulated wisdom of a body that has learned what these spaces cost. But the room has an answer for armor, too. It takes your protection and calls it aggression, takes your survival and calls it hostility, says look at this one, look how defended, clearly the problem begins and ends right here. The room never asks what made the armor necessary. That question would require the room to look at itself, and the room prefers its innocence, prefers not to know.

So here is the trap, and it closes around you so slowly you do not feel it until you are caught: you need the armor to survive the crooked room, but the armor becomes the evidence the room uses to say you do not belong. Your protection becomes your own indictment. Meanwhile, the ones who need no armor, the ones for whom the room was built, they get to be soft. They get to be collegial and a pleasure to work with, all the phrases that really mean they did not remind anyone the floor is crooked. Their ease proves they belong. Your unease proves you never did.

And still, we have always found ways to tend the stand. 

And still, we show up with our lemons and our sugar and our labor and our stubborn, our uncomfortable, our vertical. And we make something sweet, because there will be someone coming through that door after you and they will need a drink, a place to rest their ache, a place to witness the recipe.

Tending the stand becomes a testimony.

What does it mean to trust your own body when everything around you insists your body is wrong? I do not have an easy answer. I do not think there is one. Some rooms are simply just not built for standing straight in. Some rooms were built precisely so that certain people would fall, and the falling would look like their own fault, and the room could go on pretending to be level. You cannot fix rooms like these by learning to lean. You cannot renovate your way out of a crooked foundation. 

People try. They file complaints, serve on committees, write policies, and that work matters. But the room keeps finding new angles, because the lean is the point, the lean is the design. So the room gets fresh paint, a mission statement, a task force. And underneath, the floor still slopes, the walls still lie, the people who notice still get called difficult.

The stands we build are what the room did not count on. The lemonade we offer, made from sour fruit, is what remains. The cup becomes the thing you look for when you walk into a new room and feel the floor tilt:

Is there a stand here? Can I rest there? Can I drink? You can rest here. You can drink. 

You can stand for a moment in the small level space they built and feel what it is like to let someone else’s labor hold you up. And then you build your stand beside theirs, and the room has to contend with two stands now, two glass pitchers of refusal. And someone else comes and builds a third, and this is how it happens. Not through renovation, not through some grand correction of the foundation, but through stand after stand after stand, tended by hands that learned from other hands, until the room is so full of level places that the tilt starts to matter less, until a person can move from one to the next without ever touching the crooked floor.

I center this on lemons and Lemonade because it is also about looking directly at what is crooked and refusing to call it straight. Beyoncé in that parking garage, that yellow dress like a small sun, swinging a baseball bat at everything that tried to make her less than what she is. That is not destruction. That is diagnosis. That is the body saying

I see you, crooked room. I know exactly what you are. And I am not going anywhere. I have cups of water, and fruit, and sugar for those who are like me and need it, too.

And maybe that is all any of us can do. Keep naming the tilt. Keep trusting our bodies. Keep tending the stand, keep making the lemonade, keep leaving something for whoever comes next. The room will call it disruption, will weaponize its discomfort, will find a dozen words to make your standing into a symptom.

 Let it. 

The room was crooked before you got here, and the room will be crooked after you are gone. But the stands remain. The sweetness remains. The proof remains, for whoever needs to find it, that someone before them fell and instead of taking sour lemons and throwing them back, built a place to rest.

That is the labor. That is the tending.

That is the inheritance, and the ancestry, and the lemonade we will leave in 

crooked rooms.

bitterly yours,

cheers to the glorious tending of what is sour,

chase owens