Since I want to post something but am too lazy today to write new stuff, here's a paper - a "literacy narrative" - that I wrote for one of my graduate seminars two years ago. It turned out to be one of my better pieces that semester, and I didn't even have to dissect a 600-page novel! Well, maybe that's why it was better. Also I was writing what I knew, which is the way to go, so they say.

 Enjoy! 

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I have a confession to make.

When I was five years old, I plagiarized my first book.  It was entitled The Caterpillar Who Turned Into a Butterfly, and I even copied the illustrations.  This would not have been quite so scandalous if I hadn’t presented the finished manuscript to my kindergarten teacher and passed it off as my own work.  I was a bright kid who could already read and write before starting school, so she believed me.  To this day, she still does not know my dark secret—please don’t tell her.   

After Caterpillar, there were others, a veritable slew of storybooks to which I affixed my name, crediting myself as both writer and illustrator (I in fact traced the drawings more often than not).  I knew that someone else had written these books, but I hadn’t yet grasped the concept of the “creative process” and thought that aping other writers and artists—well, the end result was the same, wasn’t it?  If anything, I bet I worked harder.

Eventually—thank God—I figured out what it meant to be creative, more or less, and I began coming up with my own stuff, thereby nipping in the bud the life of crime that surely awaited me had I not cleaned up my act.  Admittedly, my first series of stories featured a character stolen from a children’s literary journal: a girl slightly older than myself (I was in second grade at the time) had written about the birth of a two-headed calf on her family’s farm, and I couldn’t ignore the storm of dramatic plotlines that began building in my mind as I read about this freakishly beguiling character—I firmly believed that the wee bovine gem deserved better than the banal narrative about double bottle-feedings to which the farm girl had confined it.  I had to rescue it—rescue her, rather; her name was Esmeralda. 

So I did.  I renamed her Estimania (whole-cloth copying was no longer my M.O., after all; yet a rose by any other name, to my mind, was fair game) and began sending her on exciting adventures around the farmyard and beyond.  And of course, in her new fictive realm, Estimania could talk.  Out of both mouths, naturally.

But why stop with a talking two-headed calf?  My storytelling flair, kindled though it may have been by illicit sparks, was rapidly developing as I churned out story after page-long story—no one character could keep up.  I moved on to longer stories with bigger casts and more complicated plots.  Outside of school, when I wasn’t reading, I was writing.  I could not get through a novel without writing something of my own.  Books about talking animals, such as Charlotte’s Web and The Wind in the Willows, inspired me to continue doing what I’d begun with Estimania.  For some reason, it was so much easier for me to examine human hopes and foibles through the eyes of personified critters, and I stuck with what worked all through grade school. 

It certainly did seem to work: I won my age group’s Young Author’s Contest three years running, first in third grade with Claws’n’Clues (a murder mystery set within a humanoid wolf clan), then in fourth grade with King (a fictionalized biography of my dad’s beloved childhood dog), and finally in fifth grade with Shyrak, the Hunted (a more “realistic” narrative account of a grizzly bear’s life-and-death struggles in the wild).  Then, the contest judges asked me, admittedly in as nice a way as possible, to stop entering my stories.  At first I was crushed—why punish me for throwing my heart and soul into my craft?  I won simply because I absolutely loved what I was doing!—but was quickly pacified when the judges offered me the position of “junior” judge for the following year.

But the junior-judgeship was not to be mine; one of my classmates (a boy whose mom happened to be one of the adult judges) got the post instead.  However, I was too distracted by my tween troubles to take notice.  It had occurred to me, almost overnight, that the world was not quite as sunshiney and me-centered as I’d so long believed—amazing, yes, that my Freudian oral phase managed to last all those years, but when the end hit, it hit hard. 

I pitched face-first into my adolescence.  Acne, gawkiness, buckteeth, braces … it was not pretty.  My writing career was now a foregone conclusion; it was all I could do simply to stay afloat in the treacherous ocean that was middle school.  I played sports, I followed the fashion trends of Seventeen magazine, I listened to Green Day and Weezer and the Cranberries, and when all else failed, I made myself invisible.  Actually, invisibility was my Plan A, and the rest was back-up.  All in all my strategy was a success; I was surely one of the most unremarkable kids in school, at least in terms of star power.

Academically, though, I was still up there.  And this turned out to be my saving grace (or so I thought at the time)—I was picked by the Illinois Math and Science Academy in Aurora to tour their school on a designated Junior Scholar day during my seventh and eighth grade years, and after the first visit, I knew this place was where I belonged.  Acceptance to IMSA became my mission for the next three years.  I even entered the Young Author’s Contest again in eighth grade so I could put it on my application, though when I won this time, it was over far fewer submissions—junior high kids are, after all, too cool to spend their free time writing stories.  (This time around, in case you’re curious, I tried my hand at science fiction; the protagonist was an emotionless extraterrestrial who suddenly found himself able to “feel” things after sucking the life force from a human being.  Hey, it beat the honorable-mention story about Mormonism.)

And I got into IMSA, and I moved up to Aurora, and I was happy … But then things changed, and I didn’t write anything worth reading for a while.

***

When I did write again—really sat down and threw my heart into it like in the old days—I was a junior in college, a recent convert from bio-major to rhetoric-major.  The story was something I’d never before attempted, a first-person, present-tense “account” of one fifteen-year-old girl’s ten-day experience in an adolescent mental-health unit. 

Given in her own voice, the narrative was by turns exhilarating and terrifying, a patchwork of vibrant scenes filled with colors and spectacular people who were not really there.  Lurking at the edges were shadowy figures visible only to the reader—despair, shame, madness.  Doctors, orderlies, patients, and parents were all shafts of reality cast down into a feverish world so that readers would not become hopelessly lost, though for the questing hero—as she saw herself—this world was more real than that from which she had so suddenly departed. 

And as she was forcibly brought back to earth with powerful drugs, the readers sank with her into an ever-cloudier delirium, though their descent was mercifully staggered with brief doctors’ notes about the hero’s “real” condition.  The readers knew she was sick; she knew she was not, right up to the point when she could no longer stay awake for more than two hours at a time.  

The narrative ended with her discharge from the hospital; the readers left the hero in a heap, a vapid shell of her former ecstatic self.  A tragic ending.  But the story continued for many years.  

By the time I got this down on paper at age 21, I had come a long way.  I’d even begun to think of reasons why it all had happened to me.  Surely, when someone “breaks down”—even for a little while—it is so she can build herself again.  But whatever the circumstantial catalysts of my illness—being away from home, living full-time with peers, learning mind-boggling things from the most innovative teachers I’d ever had, eating too little, sleeping too little, all of the above—there was no doubt I was ill, and the road back from my own personal hell would prove grueling, to say the least. 

Sure, I had a clean slate when I arrived home from the hospital; in fact, the drugs had all but taken me back to square one when it came to academic capacity.  But the mouth-drying, muscle-stiffening side-effects ensured that my days at school—mere half-days at first—were agony.  Two months after my return to school in my hometown (a return to IMSA was, of course, out of the question), I could still barely write a sentence, partly due to my impaired manual dexterity and partly because I found it so difficult to corral my own murky thoughts, both thanks to my medications.  And as far as I was able to comprehend what had befallen me, I was heartbroken.  If I couldn’t write, where was I?  Who was I, now?

I had no choice but to muddle through, with or without any solid sense of self.  The drugs kept changing over the two years following my hospital stay, down to no drugs at one point—but that was only until a second “manic” episode set in and the doctors could diagnose me as having bipolar disorder.  From then on, I was being treated for a specific illness rather than for my symptoms, and the going slowly began to get easier.  But I wasn’t writing anymore, certainly not with the passion I’d once taken for granted.  I was afraid to find out just how much I had lost.

Until, that is, I succumbed to my university’s evil plan to “weed out” those biology majors who just didn’t have what it took to pursue a career in the life sciences—my half-hearted hope of becoming a veterinarian was, I must admit, not difficult to snuff with “C-“ after “C-“ in chemistry and calculus. University life had not, oddly enough, made any real ripples in my re-forged mental stability (it probably didn’t hurt that I stayed in my room glued to my TV when I wasn’t studying) but my facts-and-figures classes were kicking the tar out of me. So, I decided to face down my crisis of self-confidence and give writing another try.  

It was like slipping back into a pair of favorite woolen socks that I’d thought were long ago devoured by the washing machine.  I still had it.  I could still fashion characters and create little worlds, I could still tell a story.  Yet, it felt different.  I found a lot more of myself leaking into the people on the page (yes, people—I’d graduated from animals and aliens) and the problems were more palpable, more…real.  My creative writings no longer needed the element of fantasy—the real world was bizarre, thrilling, and cruel enough as it was.  Since I’d been ill, I’d noticed the world around me as though for the first time.  Everything had been inverted and violently shaken—my plans for success had been dashed—I had no choice but to sit back and simply watch the pieces settle.  Flat-out failure had given me a new outlook. 

It also prepared me for future trials.  Such as the peer review workshop of my memoir Ten Days.  The class had read it over the previous week in preparation, and when I arrived at the classroom, I was met with a silence that was nearly unbearable.  But I was prepared—I’d known when I sat down to record my hospital experience that it was going to be tough for me to write and awkward for my classmates to workshop.  I wasn’t going to let that stop me from telling the most important story I’d ever told.  And I was ready for the questions that would come—ready, that is, to address these questions; even I did not know how to answer all the hows and certainly not the whys.  But I could say that yes, this did happen to me, and I’m a better person for it­.  Not to mention a better writer.