meredithritchie

[meredithritchie]

I Went Fucked Up to Noplace

[This is a fiction piece I originally wrote for a writing class and later edited and submitted to a literary contest. I retained the rights to publish it here.]

Mom told me about Noplace when I was seven years old. I was looking for baby photos of myself in an album with faded teddy bears on the cover. There was a Polaroid of Mom when she was middling-pregnant and trying to cover it up. The photo was blurry, but I recognized her baggy sweater. It had a plaited cable knit in a color like moss from some rock sunk ten feet under brown water, and it hung up inside her closet. I had never seen her wear it.

I showed Mom the photo. I said, “where were you?”

And she said, “I wasn’t here.”

In the photo, she was standing in front of a mountain and smiling the way people smile in front of the Statue of Liberty, or the Eiffel Tower. It wasn’t even so much a mountain as a slab of bumpy stone like dry skin criss-crossed with lines.

“Am I in there?” I asked, pointing at that contorted ocean knit.

“Yes,” she said. “You were with me when I went there.”

“Where?” I asked again.

“Noplace.”

“Where is that?”

She went back to cooking pasta and acted like she hadn’t heard me. She did that sometimes. So I took the Polaroid out of its sleeve and pressed it inside The Magician’s Nephew, which Mom read to me at night. I put it right over the picture of Queen Jadis, who I thought was the prettiest lady in the world, except for Mom.

When Mom opened the book, she saw herself in the blurry Polaroid right next to Queen Jadis.

“Can you tell me where Noplace is before we start?” I asked.

She picked up the Polaroid and held it very close to her face for a minute.

“Do you know what a state is, Charley?” she asked.

“I know Idaho, Texas, Missouri-”

“Not a state like the United States, honey. A state of being. Do you know how water turns into steam and ice? Those are states.”

“Okay, I know those.” I didn’t.

“Well, sometimes, when I was younger, I went into a different state, and then I would come back again. That picture was from the very last time it happened.”

I envisioned my mother as steam rising from rice, and then condensing back into water on the lid of a pot. I saw her stiffening into a block of ice and then melting into a puddle on the floor. But in the photo she didn’t look like that.

I nodded like I understood.

“Did I turn into steam when I was inside you?” I asked.

“I didn’t turn into steam, baby. It’s an analogy. I used it to compare myself with something else.”

“Well did I go to a different state with you?”

“I think so,” She looked at nothing for a second, and then set the picture on my desk, out of my reach. “Let’s get back to the book.”

I didn’t ask Mom about Noplace again for a long time. At least, it seemed a long time to me, when I was seven years old and a few months was a reasonable portion of my life. But one day, she was changing my sister’s diaper, and I said to her, “Did Libby go to Noplace with you?”

Her hands stopped at the fastening on Libby’s waist for a moment. “No, honey, Libby never went to Noplace.”

I had seen a commercial on the television, and it was telling me not to do drugs. There were little candy-pills and also tubes like the ones at the doctor’s office, and Casey my best-friend-who-lived-up-the-street told me her big cousin had to go to a place called Rehab because he had done a drug that made him think he was somewhere else. I said to Mom, “Mom, did you have to do something to get to Noplace?”

I had a vague idea that I was not allowed to say “drug” in the house, the same way I couldn’t say “suck it” or “hell.”

“No, it just came to me,” she said, and she pulled my sister’s pants on, picked her up, and walked away so I knew not to ask any more.

I went back to the photo album with teddy bears on it. The Polaroid was still on my desk. There were no other photos of her next to that rock. There was one of her, in the same sweater, outside a cafe with Dad. They both had to-go coffee cups, and it was raining. There was one fleck of water on the camera in the upper left corner, but other than that the image was totally clear. I could see the reflection of neon lights in Dad’s big glasses. I wondered if Dad went with her to Noplace before he died.

On the day I turned eight, Mom bought boxes of cupcakes from the store and I took them to school to share with my class. When she came to pick me up from school, she watched all my classmates leave the school. She drove around the school once, in case I’d gone out the side door. She pulled back up to the front door and waited. I came out of school twenty-two minutes late.

I buckled my seatbelt, and she said, “What took so long? I was about ready to call the school.”

I said, “I went as fast as I could.” That part was true. I’d had half a box of cupcakes left over for Mom and for Libby, so I had rushed to my cubby, and into the hallway. I was the first one out of my classroom, and the only one in the hallway. I started running toward the doors, ready to skid to a “I’m-not-running-I’m-fast-walking” step as soon as a classroom opened. None did. I ran until I was out of breath, and the exit was still at the end of the hall. I clutched the half-box of cupcakes against my chest and looked back, but couldn’t tell which classroom was mine. All the doors were closed. Maybe I hadn’t really heard the final bell. Maybe I was going to get in trouble for leaving early. I tried a door. It was locked. I knocked, and the knock echoed. I stood on my tiptoes to look through the little rectangular window to the classroom, but the window was frosted, and I couldn’t see inside.

I walked down the hallway with my cupcakes for a long time, squinting to see if the exit was getting closer. I looked over my shoulder periodically to see how many classrooms were behind me. I started counting lockers. I got to one hundred and two, and then the bell rang. The bell rang, and suddenly the exit was coming toward me, and I was outside, and Mom’s car was the only one parked in front of the door.

Mom didn’t tell me that day, but I had been going to Noplace for a long time. When I was two months old, she went to my crib in the middle of the night and I wasn’t there. She was all alone and Dad was still working nights, so she went through the house and checked all the rooms. When she came back, she was ready to call the police, but I had returned. I was wide awake in my crib and kicking my legs, and when Dad got back Mom was still wide awake, watching me. He said she must have missed me in the darkness. She knew she didn’t.

Mom was really careful, because I think deep-down, where I’d rested in the curve of her insides, she knew where I’d gone.

The other stories were fuzzy, and maybe things about Noplace always are. One day after leaving me napping on the floor, she found me asleep in the backyard, just as peaceful as if I hadn’t been moved. Sometimes when we played hide and seek, Mom would check a place twice, and find me there the third time. Sometimes she wouldn’t hear me come through the door, but there I was.

Exactly one hundred days after my eighth birthday, which I knew because I counted on my calendar, I looked outside late at night, and couldn’t see the bright star that was always to the west. I waited a very long time in silence, practically holding my breath, but then I blinked, and the star returned.

Instances like that were pervasive in my childhood. They were often hard to put into words. Things went missing and came back, and I often felt that it was myself who had left and returned. I might find myself staring at a wall, look at the clock, and realize it had been several hours since my last memory of doing anything.  I wondered occasionally if I’d been concussed or drugged, if I was sick. I knew plenty of kids who’d taken a ball to the face or tumble off their bike and suddenly had either small cracks or gaping caverns in their mind where no memories resided, as if all the neurons had fled for a more gentrified neighborhood. Each time I went to the doctor for a physical, everything came back normal. I was undersized, had some pollen allergies and was slightly anemic, which Mom said I got from my Dad, but that was all.

When Casey, the oldest of my motley crew of accumulated friends, got her driver’s license, a few of us kids would pile into her little Ford Taurus and drive to get ice cream at ten on a school night and yell secrets because there was nobody around to hear us. That year, my friend Jalen went through three different girlfriends, and they would join us in the car and sit lapsies because there was no other place to sit. Jalen’s twin Aaliyah liked to lean out the window and said, “I fucked Caleb Shafer!” or whichever quarterback it was this week. Matias told us with loud chuckles how he’d gotten away with smoking pot right under his dad’s nose. Casey always knew who was dating who, who was fighting, who was popular, and who was about to drop out of school.

I never told any of them about Noplace.

We were sixteen, and we started going to parties; all of us packed into that beat-up Taurus with rust crowning the fenders. My first drink was honey whiskey, something Casey had stolen from her older brother’s secret place that wasn’t so secret. My second drink was bright pink and came in a bottle with fruit on the front. It tasted like Kool-Aid. That was my third and fifth drink as well, sandwiching a second shot which I never knew the contents of. I have a vague memory of Aaliyah grabbing me by the shoulder and saying, “Oh, Charley, you got yourself fucked up,” and then I was back in Noplace, and she was gone.

I hadn’t gone to Noplace so completely since my eighth birthday. I tried later to chalk it up to being drunk - I was still skinny all over, a lightweight, begging for a final hormonal spurt to make me look half an adult, and I probably weighed a buck-fifteen soaking wet.

I walked over to the kitchen counter, not very steadily. I knew that I was no longer where I had been. The lights were almost all off, and there were no more drinks on the kitchen counter except for a bottle of rosé, unopened. From behind the counter, I could look into the living room and see that the candles on the mantle and end tables were all lit. They cast flickering shadows across the walls, as if trying to replace the people who had been swaying in the room moments before. I thought of Plato’s cave, like any normal teen who is drunk does. The scent of cool Sea Breeze and warm French Vanilla clashed sharply, and I remember it as vividly as if I’d been sober and smelled it yesterday. Sometimes even today I think I catch a whiff of it, but then I turn my head, and it is gone.

The Top 40 hits had gone out, but I could hear wordless jazz playing from another room. I leaned my elbows on the counter and waited. That was all I could do. I’m not sure how long I waited, but the sky outside stayed dark. I put my head down on the counter, and when I looked up it felt like it had only been a moment, but I’d sobered up, and I couldn’t tell if the faint light outside was distant neon or the first light of day.

Somebody said, “Charley,” in the distance.

“Charley?”

“Yeah, Mom?”

I was in the foyer of my house, and Mom was calling from our living room, and I wasn’t in Noplace anymore.

“You’re ten minutes after curfew,” she said, entering the foyer with arms crossed.

“I’m sorry, time got away from me,” I said. I was totally sober. No hangover, just nothing.

“I know Caseys parents don’t want her home this late either,” Mom said. “Did she drop you off?”

Oh fuck.

“No, it was this guy I know from math class. Connor.” There was not anybody in my math class named Connor. “He dropped off Matias too.”

Mom’s eyebrows raised. “This is the first time you’ve got home so late, so we can call it a mistake. But next time you better watch the clock.”

“Sure thing, Mom.” I turned toward the stairs, walked up three, and then turned around and followed her back into the living room. “Can I ask you something?”

“Yeah, honey.”

That night she told me about my liminal childhood, and I told her about my eighth birthday. She told me about the photograph, her last time in Noplace.

“The camera had a timer. I felt like it was my only chance to prove that I had really gone away.”

“To who?”

“Just to me, so I felt like I wasn’t crazy.”

“Did you?”

“I think so. Your dad and I took a trip to the Black Hills the summer after we graduated college. Wanted to get away one more time before we became parents. We were at Mt. Rushmore when I went to Noplace, and I still had the camera around my neck, so I set the timer and took the photo.”

“The mountain in the background, then.”

“Those president faces just vanished,” Mom said. “Left behind the bare mountain. It was really beautiful, I don’t think he photo captured it. Before Rushmore was carved the Native Americans called that mountain Six Grandfathers, and I knew why by looking. I came back as soon as the camera clicked. And somehow I thought, as I waited for the photo, that it wouldn’t work. That it would show those faces behind me.”

“But you didn’t show it to anybody?”

“Looking at it was all I needed. I didn’t realize we still had it until that day you showed it to me, oh, almost ten years ago now. Your father must have put it in that album.”

“Did Dad know?”

“Sort of.”

She never expanded on that. Neither of us ever told Libby, either. It was an intimacy between us, mostly unspoken. Some days I would come home from school and say, “I think Noplace came into the classroom today” and she would say, “Tell me how,” and “It came to me that way once, too.”

[meredithritchie]

Mask of Anonymity: Anonymous Asks as a Teen Outlet

[The following is an article I wrote for a campus submission. I retained the rights to publish it here, as well. It regards my experiences as a fandom blogger.]

“Hi, I’ve been suffering with what is probably depression for years without any help and recently it’s been getting worse,” begins the anonymous message that drops into my inbox one night. It’s a teenager asking me how to keep themself stable until they can get a diagnosis from a pediatrician. I tell them I’m proud of them. I tell them I’m not an expert. I tell them to be kind to themself. I tell them they’re loved.

Since founding my Tumblr blog in April of 2017, these messages have become almost routine. In just a few months of actively posting my fanedits and fanfiction online, I amassed almost five thousand followers.  In this particular fandom, where the most popular bloggers have ten thousand followers, that’s a dramatic amount. Via the blog’s anonymous ask feature (colloquially called “anons”), anyone in the world can drop a question into my inbox without revealing their username, even if they aren’t one of those five thousand. Many if not most of these followers are minors, and some of them are not even of the minimum age to use the site: thirteen. My sister is twelve and loves watching fandom videos on YouTube, and in one year, she will be old enough to make an account with access to my blog and the blogs of all five thousand of my followers. I wonder if she’ll be one of the faceless messages I get in my ask box.

“Could I ask for some advice? It's about gynaecologists and vaginal health while being trans.”

“What I’m wondering is, how did you go about narrowing down lists of colleges to go to?”

“I basically cant[sic] think anymore and it's really hard to do school work because of this. Do you have any advice?”

“How does one stop obsessing over someone, when that person will never be theirs?”

“Hey I really need some help like older sister stuff help”

“I had a breakdown at school today. At least I think that’s what happened because I don’t remember it clearly.”

Some of it is generalized, and some of it is specific, but it all comes from a recognizable place of teen struggle and fear. Sometimes these messages linger in my inbox, as I try to struggle for just the right words. Other times I feel urgency, and dash off a response as quickly as possible. I re-read the post later and wonder if I said the right things, if I said what I meant. I’m not the only one.

Other fandom blogs, some even larger than I am, have turned off anons or closed their ask box entirely because of an influx of personal rants, requests for help, and even suicide notes. While Tumblr’s anon feature is meant to be a place for shy and intimidated users to express themselves in a way that isn’t possible via conventional social media like Facebook and Twitter,  the double anonymity of a hidden screenname offers confidence to say things that are otherwise difficult or even unsayable. When it comes to personal questions and statements, many young people lack a safe location to speak them, and the ask box offers a unique relief. Many teens don’t want to speak to their parents, teachers, or guardians about their sex life, their mental health, or their personal problems. Even Googling answers sparks fear that a teacher will confiscate their phone, or a parent will borrow their laptop, and evidence will be left in view. With a generalized segregation of America by age, most teens also don’t have other adults which they can speak to on a friendly basis, let alone speak to face to face for advice on difficult issues. Often the only adults that young people interact with face-to-face are authority figures like older relatives, teachers, and coaches. In the absence of face-to-face interactions, teens instead turn to the leaders of their fandoms, who often foster online personas  as Fandom Rens, Moms, Uncles, and Sisters. Plenty of older fandom members cultivate this image, though “older” is relative and in a small community these members may be only eighteen or nineteen years old, though they are generally in their twenties and thirties. While many fandoms have a primary userbase of tweens and teens, these senior members often run the most popular blogs and produce the highest quality fanart, fanfiction, and other fan content. During fandom “discourse,” these older members often lead the way and resolve conflict.

“Discourse” in fandom is not like discourse in the academic sense. While academic discourse encompasses many elements of rhetoric and debate, fandom “discourse” is essentially a euphemism for argument, frequently with an ethical element or discussion of “problematic” behavior. This discourse can involve either relationships between real human beings like celebrities and fandom members or the content of any fictional work contained in the fandom canon. The wide umbrella of “discourse” covers everything from discussion of whether a fandom celebrity’s recent comment was racist all the way to whether fanwriting two characters romantically is incestual when both characters are figments of a third character’s imagination. In essence, discourse gets hairy, complicated, and even philosophical. Like real political and social issues and like fandom itself, discourse gives some young people a sense of belonging and also the feeling that they are on the side of right and reason. An individual’s choice to participate in discourse becomes part of their identity.

In this way, fandom becomes what Mary Louise Pratt refers to as a contact zone, “where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other.” Through fanfiction “AUs” (alternate universes) fans of color write white characters as PoC, queer fans write cisgender/heterosexual characters as LGBT+, and neuroatypical fans write neurotypical characters as autistic, depressed, anxious, or otherwise neuroatypical. While alternate universe only emerged as a genre with the rise of the internet, these stories reflect a longer history of the insertion of the subordinate into dominant texts. Pratt refers to a text called The First Chronicle and Good Government, in which a man native to South America uses the language of his colonizers, the Spanish, to talk about the experience of the indigenous people, “in which the subordinated subject single-handedly gives himself authority in the colonizer’s language and verbal repertoire.” Through this text, Pratt touches on what she calls transculturation, a product of the contact zone, in which “members of subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted by a dominant or metropolitan culture.” In the modern world, the dominant culture produces Steve Rogers, a cisgender man, and fandom reinvents him as a transgender man. The dominant culture creates Hermione Granger and Harry Potter, two white children, and fandom reinvents them as black and Indian. The dominant culture offers Legolas and Gimli, both ambiguously straight, and fandom reinvents them as a gay couple. For young marginalized people encountering this kind of contact zone for the first time, fandom becomes a community that is irreplaceable and unique, where they have the ability to express themselves and see themselves in characters.

Between the aspects of community in fandom itself and the discourse which offers a cause and creates both positive and negative relationships, it is hardly surprising that young people turn to fandom elders when they encounter a problem. After watching older fandom members participate in, manage, or even quell discourse, younger fandom members begin to look up to them as people who have all the answers, as leaders of this unique community. The availability of anonymity makes the opportunity even more enticing. A kind older fandom member becomes everyone’s shoulder to cry on, everyone’s outlet, and everyone’s therapist. While this may serve as a resource for plenty of teens, there is always an associated toll taken on the mental wellbeing of the members who serve them. Fandom creators want to help their followers, but may be struggling with their own past or present depression, anxiety, PTSD, eating disorders, body image issues, and attacks on their identity.

Self-proclaimed “Fandom Grandpa” @randomslasher (known in the community as LJ) runs the largest art and writing blog in my fandom and has struggled with a history of anon rants and anon requests both to themself and to their partner Thuri, who also runs a popular blog. As long ago as 2013, LJ posted, “I don’t think I will ever understand people who hide behind a mask of anonymity for the sole purpose of making someone else feel bad. Just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should [emphasis original].” LJ has made additional posts before and since requesting that people abstain from ranting into their inbox, but the issue continues for LJ and other major bloggers who gain new followers every single day. Many of these anonymous messages are never published, as evidenced by posts like this one, which appeared on LJ’s blog in 2018: “Anon i’m sorry to hear that, but that wasn’t a safe ask to send someone without a trigger warning, and i won’t publish it. Try to get help if you can.” The message of the post alone is ominous, and one can only guess at the content of the ask.

The teenage years are known to be a time of struggle, both personal and social. This is significant now more than ever as depression and anxiety rates among teens rise, and many teens experience suicidal ideation, unhealthy relationships with their own bodies, and struggles with their gender and sexuality in addition to the classic problems of teenhood which should be no more serious than asking someone to homecoming, getting a driver’s license, or taking a chemistry exam. However, as student struggles become more severe, especially among marginalized groups, resources to cope with this period is not moving apace, and young people use fandom as a resource to get answers and to express themselves. Older fandom members are suddenly bearing the weight of hundreds of teen struggles, and most of them have no formal training or resources to cope with them.