Move-out day, April 2022. I had just graduated, just came out, and was sitting on everything the university left behind.
The Photo
This was me in April of 2022. A queer who had come to terms with their gender identity and sexuality. I had just finished my undergraduate degree in Women and Gender Studies. I was accepted into the Oakland University Master of Social Work program. Move-out day was warm, louder than usual, with the sound of drawers slamming, laughter, car doors opening and closing, the thump of heavy furniture landing in the dumpsters behind the dorms. Students emptied out of the buildings and left behind everything they didn’t want to carry into the next version of themselves. They couldn’t take any of it with them. The dorms needed to be emptied. Fully. No exceptions.
I tied on my bandana. Bandanas had become central to my queer identity. I pulled on my old Beckley, West Virginia, jacket, the one I wore every time I went looking through dumpsters. The fabric was stiff, familiar. I laced up my New Balances, slid on a pair of household gardening gloves, and looked at myself once in the mirror. The mustache was deliberate. That was how I wanted to look when I graduated.
I climbed up and into the dumpster behind the apartments and sat down on the pile. It didn’t smell bad yet. Most of it was furniture, half-used bottles of shampoo, unopened food, garbage bags full of fast fashion that hadn’t even frayed. I pulled out a drink and grinned. My wife took the photo. I’m sitting there on top of it all, the sun hitting the side of my face, surrounded by things everyone else had decided they didn’t need. I had just graduated summa cum laude. I was starting a master’s program in the fall. I was exactly where I wanted to be.
I didn’t think of it as a joke. I thought of it as a record. Something I wanted to remember. That moment, that mustache, that pile. That it wasn’t just about what got thrown away. It was about who got to decide what mattered. At that moment, I was deciding what mattered. For most of my life, I had no choice in that. That lack of agency was central to why I was in the dumpster in the first place. While I did not understand that at the time. I understood that it was where I needed to be.
The Difference between Garbage and Trash
Growing up, I was taught that garbage was what was outside the house. Trash was what was inside. Trash was daily. Kitchen scraps. Bathroom waste. The wrapper you crumpled in your hand without looking. It lived with you, quietly accumulating under the sink, beside the toilet, at the foot of the bed. Trash was personal. It had your name on it. Garbage was what happened after. After the bag was tied off. After it was carried outside and stuffed into a Rubbermaid bin that always smelled faintly of rot no matter how often it was sprayed.
This logic did not stop at objects. It extended to people. The language of waste management bled into the language of racism and classism. Trashy people. Ghetto neighborhoods. Dirty immigrants. I heard these things said out loud. I learned early that calling something garbage was never just about sanitation. It was about power. About who had the right to discard and who lived with the consequences.
What I was being taught, even if no one said it outright, was how to identify the disposable. Not just in the kitchen but in the world. The people who mattered and the people who didn’t. The lives you respected and the lives you wrote off. I was being trained, like so many others, to align value with presentation, with polish, with proximity to whiteness, to wealth, to normativity. I was supposed to internalize the difference between the things we clean up after and the things we leave to rot. The things we place in bins behind closed cabinet doors and the things we wheel out onto the sidewalk. But the real garbage was what I buried within myself. My mother made a landfill out of me.
And I carried that garbage. I internalized it, I swallowed it, I absorbed it, and I reproduced it.
The Gospel of the Dumpster
Within the enormous steel bins, filled with excess refuse, there is truth. This truth, small, impossibly thin, and incredibly sharp. It is often found accidently. It is found when you reach for something you think you want and get cut by something you didn’t know was there.
That is what happened to me. For years, I had been diving into dumpsters. Apartment complexes. Machine shops. Colleges. Hardware stores. I was always looking for what others had discarded. But I discovered that there was an excess within me that I could not discard.
The real garbage was inside. Not metaphor. Not abstraction. Garbage as in layered and rotting. Garbage as in unavoidable. I didn’t know what to do with the anger that built up in me each time I was punished for speaking. For deviating. For being too loud. Too sensitive. Too queer. Too much. I didn’t know what to do with the small violences that never left bruises. The daily humiliations that no one apologized for. The way my body learned to brace, even in safety.
That internal garbage never got tied up and taken to the curb. It stayed. I hoarded it. I made space for it. I arranged it neatly behind emotional cabinet doors. I labeled it. I disguised it. I told myself it wasn’t real. That it wasn’t abuse if no one got hit. That it wasn’t trauma if I was still functioning. That it wasn’t worth talking about unless someone else had it worse.
But then I started climbing into dumpsters. And I began to notice the parallels. I wasn’t just finding discarded furniture and broken microwaves. I was finding proof that systems throw things away not because they are useless, but because they are inconvenient. Too heavy. Too obvious. Too hard to fix. I saw that same logic at work in me.
That is the gospel of the dumpster. It is not about poverty. It is not about performance. It is about proximity to truth. About how far you are willing to go to confront what’s been left to rot. What you can no longer rearrange inside yourself. What you can no longer compartmentalize.
I did not climb into the dumpster because I needed what was in there. I climbed in because I needed to face what I wasn’t supposed to see. What I had forced myself to ignore. The weight I was taught to carry without complaint. The versions of myself I had been told to throw out. And I found them there. Not whole. Not clean. But real.
What Cannot Be Taken
The beer I held was unopened and unexpired. It likely belonged to a nineteen-year-old student who could not legally possess it. It could not be taken home. It had to be discarded. Not because it had gone bad. Not because it lacked value. But because there was no way to explain its presence. Its very existence was incriminating. Its presence marked the body that owned it as deviant. So it went into the trash.
That’s what I kept finding in the dumpsters. Not garbage. Not waste. But things that could not be carried into the next version of the self. Things that could not be justified. Notebooks full of writing. Photo albums. Binders with grade reports and doodles. Cheap jewelry that still shined. It wasn’t that these things didn’t matter. It was that for whatever reason, they couldn’t be taken. Therefore they had to be discarded. The home for this excess was a landfill.
Some of it was logistical. The futon didn’t fit in the car. The minifridge had nowhere to go. The clothes no longer fit the gender being claimed. But some of it was something else. Some of it was shame. Memory. Evidence. Proof of an earlier self that no longer had permission to exist. A version of the self that was no longer useful, no longer believable, no longer correct.
And there was power in touching those things. In retrieving them. In pulling someone’s unwanted semester out of a bin and holding it in my hands. It wasn’t about theft. It wasn’t even about need. It was about recognition. That this once mattered to someone. That it still might. That it didn’t deserve to be buried under rotten lettuce and broken tile.
There is an ambiguous grief in watching people move on from themselves. Will they one day come back and search for what they discarded? Or was it a clean break, a final severing made in haste but mistaken for freedom? Sometimes it looks like eagerness, a rush to escape whatever shame was once housed in those objects. As if there are no consequences to exile. But I knew there were. I was living with them. I had done it myself. More than once. Burned notebooks. Smashed plates. Deleted voicemails. Cut people out of pictures. And yet, no matter how much I threw away, the past always found me again.
The dumpsters behind the dorms held that contradiction. The desire to be free of the past, and the impossibility of that freedom. I climbed into them not to escape myself, but to find the pieces I had once tossed. To hold them. To decide for myself whether they were still too heavy. Or whether they could finally be taken with me.
Reclamation through Discard
The surfaces of the dumpster are littered with black plastic bags, filled with half-eaten foods and plastic containers. These bags mix with biodegradable leftovers. Banana peels, coffee grounds, shredded paper. The look the same on the outside, however each bag carries a different sort of time. Some will break down within days. Others filled with plastics will sit intact for decades. Some begin to transform immediately. Others resist. What’s inside the bag determines its future, but from the outside, you can’t always tell what will rot and what will remain.
The landfill of trauma within each of us is no different. Some wounds begin to decompose as soon as we acknowledge them. Others seal off, intact for years, giving no sign of decay. And some begin to rot quietly, releasing toxins long before we’re able to name the source. What festers. What lingers. What refuses to disintegrate. These are not decisions of willpower or virtue. They are conditions of containment. Of pressure. Of oxygen. Of whether the seal was ever broken.
As I dug my hand deep and deeper into the dumpsters, I pulled out different parts of myself. IV needles, expired pills, cigarette butts. Beneath the sea of black plastic bags was an ocean of grief I hadn’t dared to name. I wasn’t looking for those things, not at first. I was looking for furniture, for food, for what could be reused. But recovery has its own scavenger logic. What you think you need and what you actually find are rarely the same. And down in the strata of someone else’s discard, I met my own. The syringe I once threw into the bottom of a McDonald’s bag so no one would see. The pills I flushed or swallowed or saved. The cigarettes I lit out of habit, desperation, ritual. I wasn’t just digging through trash. I was exhuming a version of myself I had tried to bury without ceremony.
There is no clean way to recover what was discarded. Not everything comes back whole. Some things stay sharp. Some things stink. Some things disintegrate the moment you touch them. But there is a deep dignity in the reaching. A refusal to pretend it was never there. And that, too, is reclamation. Not redemption. Not reinvention. Just acknowledgment. Just the simple act of saying: I see it now. I see what I threw away. And I’m willing to touch it again.
Salvation through Salvage
I was not taught to save. I was taught to clean. To wipe it down. To make it disappear. To make it not smell, not stain, not linger. I was taught to keep the door closed. To empty the trash before guests arrived. To make sure no one could see what we had touched, what we had broken, what we had used. Even when it was still useful, if it was ugly, it had to go.
So I learned to hide things. I learned to throw them away before someone asked about them. Feelings. Thoughts. Clothes that fit wrong. Names that felt better. Words that didn’t match the voice I was supposed to use. I didn’t learn to repair. I didn’t learn to tend. I didn’t learn to hold.
But the dumpsters taught me something else. They were full of things no one had taken the time to fix. A chair with one broken leg. A hoodie with a missing drawstring. A cracked frame. A slow toaster. A microwave that still lit up but didn’t spin. And again and again I would pull these things out. I would take them home. I would wipe them down. I would figure out what was wrong. And I would try. Sometimes they worked again. Sometimes they didn’t. But I had tried.
And over time, I realized what I was doing. I wasn’t just collecting things. I was practicing. I was learning to do what had not been done for me. I was learning to hold something broken and not toss it. I was learning to see worth where others only saw weight. I was learning to keep. To carry. To care.
Salvage is not about repair. Not always. Sometimes salvage is just about saying this matters. Sometimes it’s just about saying this still belongs to someone. Sometimes it’s just about refusing to let it rot without witness.
And in doing that, I started to believe I could be witnessed too. That my mess didn’t have to be hidden. That my softness didn’t have to be corrected. That I could take up space. That I could be seen. That I could keep things, even if they were cracked.
Joey Colby Bernert is a clinical social worker, statistician, and MPH candidate at Michigan State University. Their work examines structural vulnerabilities in codified law, behavioral health systems, and gendered institutions, with a focus on post-masculine critique and the lived consequences of policy failure. Bernert’s writing has appeared in Kairos and is forthcoming in Social Work Today and Sociological Images. They live in Michigan with their dog and can often be found at the Troy Public Library.
Check out HFR’s book catalog, publicity list, submission manager, and buy merch from our Spring store. Follow us on Instagram and YouTube. Disclosure: HFR is an affiliate of Bookshop.org and we will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Sales from Bookshop.org help support independent bookstores and small presses.
Heavy Feather Review 