A Story by Carrie-Lynne Davis
This is a story about me. I write stories. Let me tell you
about them. The first story I ever wrote with the conscious notion that I was,
in fact, writing a story for other people to read, was a long time ago, in the
beginnings of elementary school. In the second grade, I was quiet, sad, and
unkempt, you know, one of those ratty-haired girls who sat in the corner, cried
after recess, and smelled a little bit like cat pee. My teacher, an old French
lady named Mrs. LeClair, held me in class after the bell rang to talk about my
writing. She told me that she had a “secret assignment” for me, and gave me a
blank book with a blank cover. I was to fill the pages. So I wrote a story.
This story was called “The Vampire, by Carrie-Lynne Davis,” and it was about a
Dad who got a new job. His new job was being a Vampire, and he had to suck
people's blood! The Dad didn't mind doing his job, he was very good at it, and
it didn't much bother him that people were dying under his fangs. That is,
until he came home to his family and they smelled oh-so-good! His wife had
cooked him a GINORMOUS meatloaf with mashed potatoes and gravy and green beans
and everything! And the two nice daughters had colored him pictures of cats and
houses and happy families at school and they showed him. And he said they were
good, even though he couldn't pay any attention because the smell of blood was
so, so, so wonderful to him. At dinner he couldn't eat. He just wanted blood.
When everyone went to sleep, the Dad couldn't help himself, and he drank his
wife's blood. It was so delicious! Then, he went to his daughters' bedroom and
sucked their blood. It was also delicious! But then, the Dad was covered in
their blood and he started crying, because he was all alone. The Dad realized
then that he didn't wanna be a vampire anymore. He was sad that he killed his
family, and he missed them very much, so he bit into his own hand and drank all
of his blood. It tasted like the best thing he's ever tasted in his whole life.
The Dad died, and he and his family lived happily ever after in heaven!
“The Vampire”, so riddled with obvious signs of depression and family troubles,
won me a place in the gifted program at my school. I was excused from class in
the middle of the day with the other artsy-farts in my grade and we were all
put in a room with grown-up chairs and treated like we had something to say. We
were given attention, and I loved it. Going to school, getting good grades in
school, being creative in school, became a way for me to not only express the inner
sadness I felt as a child, but gave me the attention that I sorely lacked at
home. How well I did in school became a measure by which I could determine my
own value. I was very fortunate that this occurred, because even as a nine
year-old, before I learned that creative expression was a way to deal with the
chaos in my life, waking up, getting dressed, and going to school was a
terribly overwhelming process that seemed entirely futile. Childhood depression
is serious and troubling, particularly when undiagnosed, because the child may
develop into adolescence and adulthood without a sense of what the world is
like (or could be) free of the tangled, black veil that is depression. Without
therapy or some sort of guidance, they may not acquire the tools needed to live
a functional life despite the illness. Thus, creativity has allowed me to live.
I hear similar stories from a good bulk of my other writing-major friends, a
lot of whom have mental illness of some sort, particularly forms of depression.
Why do we sad artists commit ourselves to writing? Why do we spend so much
money on a degree that promises nothing? We write because we have to—it's
become not merely a way to tell stories, but a way to deal with life itself.
Writing, like any form of creative expression, can be a tool for artists to
sort out, understand, and articulate the complex inner turmoil that depression
brews, which can then allow the afflicted to develop skills to better handle
it.
The notion of writing as a coping mechanism can be either supported or denied
based on first experiences with writing. Deborah Brandt, in “Remembering
Writing, Remembering Reading,” interviewed four hundred people about such
experiences and found that most memories of writing were characterized by
“loneliness, secrecy, and resistance” (461), whereas reading was considered
more of a family activity and was therefore not only more memorable, but
defined by moments of joy, interactivity, and social bonding. My own first
experiences with writing were very private—it was something I could have all to
myself, so I could be as honest as I wanted. My first journal was a cute little
Winnie the Pooh diary with one of those impossible locks and a baby key. In it,
I practiced writing my name, drew pictures of my family, and recounted my day.
Since then, I have kept journals for nearly every year of my life; I found one
from the sixth grade the other day while rummaging through old boxes under my
bed. Here's the first entry:
Carrie-Lynne Davis, age 11.
I have chosen to write my feelings. Today is January 7th, 2001. I am sad. I know that sound
so childish, but that is the only word I can describe myself. I'm sitting on my
porch, on the third floor Pine Street
apartment. The rent is ridiculius, its on a bad street, and most of our
neighbors have children that smoke, drink beer or have been in jail.
Mom says the sky is a polluted light and color show, with dark blue clouds in
its whole surrounding. She asked me and Tonya if we thought that was normal,
and I said no.
I have never lived in a house in my life. I would like to though.
Anyway. I have (think) I have a hard time expressing my feelings, so I have
decided to keep a diary of whats going on, what I think, and what (especially)
I feel.
I remember how serious everything had seemed when I was eleven. It was the
beginning of my intense relationship with reading. The sixth grade. Overweight,
bespectacled, unpopular. Mrs. St. Andre wrote “Minutes Marathon” on the
chalkboard. This was a contest, she said, a reading contest for everyone in the
elementary school. You'd read books and log the amount of minutes you spent
reading in a log. At the end of the quarter, whoever won would receive an award
and get a limo ride with the principal. Big deal, a lot of 'em thought, but my
eyes widened and I decided that this was an opportunity to kick some ass in the
only way I felt that I could—escaping into imaginary worlds and timing myself
while doing it. Reading was not an
experience characterized by joy or family-togetherness or leisure, like Brandt,
in her article, suggested it was for most individuals. It was a competitive
obsession, something I must do to win and beat all those other kids and be the
best there ever was! I'd show those fuckers, and give 'em the peace sign out
the window of the limo as we'd drive away from the school. That year, my
desperation for attention and notoriety pushed me to read works that were far
beyond my comprehension—Orwell, Huxley, Vonnegut, Salinger—new concepts, ideas,
philosophies unfolded before me and I barely knew how to interpret any of it. I
won the Minutes Marathon and I got my damned limo ride.
My award hung on the wall over my bed in a frame that my mother bought because,
she said, she was proud of me. Winning was something that would garner me
attention from my parents, my peers, and most importantly, my teachers. Richard
Rodriguez, in his literacy autobiography, “Hunger of Memory,” writes that as he
became more successful in school, academic activities like writing and reading
became all the more distanced from his family. His teachers, rather than his
parents, became the adult figures he was fervent to impress, and succeeding
academically became his primary focus. My experience very much mirrors his—my
mother, who, throughout my childhood, suffered from intense bouts of major
depression, was often as uninterested in reading my writing as she was in
brushing her hair, paying bills, or doing the dishes. I would, however, find
new audiences. Inspired by Louis Sachar’s Wayside
School books and Marcia Thornton
Jones’ Bailey School Kids, both popular series at my elementary school, I
discovered the joy of character development and reader identification. I
started writing stories for my classmates about my classmates, and I’d print out
copies for each person to read their own dialogue with each other. From grades five to seven, my teachers would take breaks
in the class to have everyone read my stories, which satisfied my yearning for
notice as well as my need for creative expression. Pleasing my classmates and
showing off my narratives forced me to observe how each one of them were
characters—I studied them and figuratively made caricatures out of their
behaviors. Taking note of individual and group reactions, I would tweak
characters based on how it appeared the classmates thought of themselves and of
each other. The most difficult aspect of this process was watching me in
relation to others, thus identifying my own character.
This would come to be a consistent struggle throughout my adolescence and even
now, as an adult. I was a watcher, an observer, a writer, and a learner,
undoubtedly an active participant in school, yet I was still
socially-withdrawn, self-loathing, publicly crippled by fleeting attacks of
anxiety. How could I feel as if I knew so much about people and the way they
interact, yet know nothing about how I could or should interact with them? In
high school I started joining after-school clubs and if I was interested in
something that didn’t exist, I’d create them in hopes that other like-minded
people would come together and I could discover people to befriend. Founder and
President of the Art Club. Founder and President of the Spanish Club. Arts
Editor of the school newspaper. Vice President of the Environmental Club. Young
Writers. Collage Magazine. I fostered friendships through activities, goals,
group-activities. It was all very academic, but school was the only arena
through which I could express myself.
My friends became the artists, the fuck-ups, the druggies, the screamers, the
passive dreamers. We felt we had something to say but not the words to say it;
we wrote bad poetry on napkins at the diner and played shows in basements and
spread graffiti under the Androscoggin bridge because we were too young and too
angry to know how to fix the mess we were about to march into. We felt our
parents selfish and drunk and sad, our teachers rigid and unwilling to teach us
what really mattered. We found solace in the loneliness of each other. We sat
in circles with nothing to say but always talking. We cried in bed, or the
shower. Some of us were fast food workers, some of us were chained to cubicles,
and some of us would just lie in bed and wait for the time to pass.
The ashes of our adolescence scattered over America.
Danica became a morphine addict in Portland, Oregon.
Ellis, in a manic frenzy, was kicked out of Evergreen from trying to incite a
violent transgendered revolution on campus in Washington.
Courtney grew sick of watching herself snort amphetamines off a dirty mirror in
her art school dorm room in Boston.
They all came back, and the rest never left, except for me. I fell in love with
these characters and now I tell stories about them. I write about a beautiful
woman who falls in love with a beautiful God called Morpheus. He sings her to
sleep and makes everything feel okay. I write about people forever in
transition and the violent struggle to remain in the center of a seemingly
binary spectrum. I write about a quiet girl who grew older too quickly in the cold,
how she stays warm in her fishnets because there’s nothing colder than being
alone and absent the sweet-sticky drip of the night, the fast-talking friends,
the wide eyes, and the frenzied laughs. I write about a father, too, who’d
always suck the red out of wine glasses and hide until he goes to work, whose
wife called him once an emotional vampire. I write about these people. And now
I write about myself.
