Dear
Carmen Maria Machado: Telling Myself Stories
By
Felicia Chen
I remember first
telling myself stories when I was about six years old. Every Friday night, my parents and I would go
to church where I went to my children’s programs. The ride back was only 20 minutes, but my six
year old brain thought we were driving for centuries on end. Hearing all my groaning in the backseat, my parents
had an idea. Their compromise included
only two rules for me: I needed to tell stories for the whole ride back and the
stories must relate to one of the lessons I had learned in church that
day. In return, my parents would give me
a dime for each story I told. In my
mind, using my own words for money sounded like a great deal since I was
planning on complaining the whole ride anyways.
It was a lot harder than
I originally thought: I even had trouble making names for characters and
finding a setting. Finally, I settled on
the name Pebbles for my main character – a creative twist to my favorite cereal
– and Campbell’s as the setting for my courageous protagonist. After a solid 10 minutes of brainstorming, I
started my story with “once upon a time.”
The first time provided the greatest challenge for six year old me as I
mainly said “uh” and “um” for the majority of the story. Despite my failed efforts, my parents still
gave me the dime at the end of the night.
This treasure gave me the encouragement I needed to keep telling stories
every Friday.
This ritual of
storytelling on our rides back from church lasted about three years. By nine years old, I reached the golden age
where I believed my short stories were childish and my newly founded
insecurities flourished. I stopped
telling myself—or anyone—stories for a long time because of my perceived embarrassment. As I cried about my first training bra, I
found myself covering my changing body with baggy clothes and my energetic
words with silence.
Up until a year ago, I
was in the mindset that I forever lived in an age of teenage-hood, that I was
above the stories I used to tell when I was six years old. It was not until Ms. Townsend’s Creative
Writing Workshop last year that I learned to let go of my pride and explore my
creativity to write stories. Every
weekend, I went home and read my stories to my parents with the giddiness that
I felt when I was six years old.
In
my final story for the class, I wrote about my own personal experience with an
emotionally abusive relationship. I
never imagined that I could express regret and sadness for the situation
through writing and storytelling, but I submitted this final draft and left all
of these feelings behind—like I had with him.
With this story, I was finally comfortable to express myself and to use
my voice again.
I consider that story to
be my first one. It gave me the courage
to start over with my life and with that, I earned so much more than just a
dime.
Dear Felicia,
ReplyDeleteI'm so pleased to hear that another class you took with me did you some good, and glad to know you've found a piece of yourself through storytelling again. Your parents' dime-for-a-story system sounds like a brilliant solution for all involved, too! I imagine the rate of inflation means I'd need to up the stakes with my own children... do you suppose 50 cents apiece would do the trick?
Thanks for responding to Carmen!
Best,
TT