Unexpected Encouragement for Me, a Fat Carrie
BTW I’ve been sewing a Carrie dress since before I knew I was pregnant
Also, I mean Carrie from Carrie. Carrie White, not Carrie Bradshaw. There’s someone out there who can do both and good for her. I can’t do the high fashion or confident (if later proven problematic) takes on all of life. I can do the most-hated outcast and I can almost do telekinesis, by which I mean I get dramatic at all motion-activated doors, lights, sinks and escalators.
This Ends at Prom(and their guests Jazz and Kat of Girl That’s Scary) did a good job articulating the importance Carrie being fat. It’s true. Book Carrie is described in her first scene as both chunky as bovine.
Beloved Writing Daddy — aka Horror Daddy — has well-documented historical problems with describing fat people, especially villainous fat women. Yet, in his debut novel, he centers a fat teen girl as the hero, unfairly maligned for her fatness.
Support me somehow, if you can. I’ve got a memoir in installments behind a paywall on my substack. I’ve got two crowdfunding things for when the memoir, the fiction book and the other things go up next year. If I get at least twenty new supporters, I don’t have to go back to teaching. Nobody wants me to have to go back to teaching. I was very bad at it.
If I haven’t articulated it well, I had a near-death moment last week. Now that I can kind of use words again, I can say that my blood pressure was even lower than usual and “Oh, no, brain no blood! Brain no go? Is this the word for pineapple? I can’t remember pineapple. Save me, Emoji! 🍍 !
After several weeks of doctor visits in which multiple doctors have reassured me, “Naw, you’re not that high risk. You don’t have any of the problems we’ve been worried about. You won’t die like Game of Thrones mom,” it just took one “not enough blood! brain broken! Also arm no feel. Also eye no see,” moment to get me right back to, “Oh no, I need to get my baby a good dragon before I die!”
Constant Readers (That’s what Stephen King fans call ourselves) may have already made the connection that old Sai Daddy also had a brush with death in 1999 and first he wrote Dreamcatcher, then he finished his big time lifetime opus, The Dark Tower. Some people don’t like how either of those stories turned out, but I happily devoured them like blocks of cheddar. Cheddar contains more tryptophan than 🦃 and seems to do wonders for my mood and will to live. Just like books.
I could do a lot worse that write something as creative and entertaining as Dreamcatcher. Even if the doctors get me back to a safe mental space of expecting to survive, why not still finish the books? At least use the sudden motivation to make a lot of progress. I did make progress. I did more than just download apps to help with writing. I actually wrote, organized and edited. I bet I can get more progress than other Daddy GRRM got done during his extra productive lockdown haul. Writing for a year can be called a haul, can’t it?
*My creative rotation involved working in turns on fiction writing, nonfiction writing, game design, sewing and cleaning the house. Also sometimes I have a job and plants.
I haven’t worked on my Carrie dress in a while. Part of it was that it’s been midterms for grad school, but midterms are over now. Also, as few F’s as I gave about my ill-suited MBA before I had something like a stroke, I really DGAF now.
“This Ends at Prom” helped remind me why I wanted to make my Carrie dress in the first place.
*Flashback Time*
This is how my whole memoir project has been. If you haven’t been to memory house, I do it topically. First I start with a prompt object, then I unpack at least one memory, then I usually unpack another, nested memory, and finally try to clean up a little and reframe positively before leaving the memory. I’ve been warned that it’s important have encouraging takeaway from every traumatic memory in order to avoid getting traumatized again. That’s the bare minimum of responsible memory stuff. The proper thing is to have professional help and community support.
Too bad I had such bad experiences in otherwise lovely places. My time serving in Thailand was ruined, as I’ve ranted elsewhere, by the fact that my colleagues thought I looked down on them. Thus, every interaction consisted of them trying to bust me down to size in retaliation. For two years, I never figured out why they hated me so much. It was obvious once I was away from there and able to reflect, but you know how trauma is.
We were gathering downstairs from the weird little hotel where all of us lived. There was a mandatory bowling party we had to go to. I didn’t want to go. I wanted so badly to be excused from having to take a big bus full of people who actively hated me, and then go bowl all day and then take the big bus back.
I waited until the very last minute to go down so I wouldn’t have to try to be friendly to everyone who wasn’t at all friendly to me. Wasn’t? Weren’t? I miss knowing how to use words.
One of the people who hated me the most stood in the middle of the doorway and glared at me.
“How are you?” she said in a tone like, “Go to hell, you garbage pile.”
I stuttered like a person being attacked, considering I was being attacked. I felt, as usual like I was on trial and I needed to come up with an apology for being myself, again.
“Uh, I guess I’m…tired or something.”
“Yes, it’s early,” said the person, which made me angry because it was condescending to be so eager to explain myself to me as though I didn’t understand myself without their help.
“No it’s not,” I sputtered stupidly. It was, after all a work day and we were leaving for the horrible, horrible mandatory fake fun event over an hour later than I usually left to go to the horrible school and work with those horrible people who hated me.
“It’s, uh, late, though,” said my stupid face in meek attempted self-defence.
“No, it’s right on time,” said some jerk, jerkily. As usually, deliberately taking what I obviously meant and throwing it away in favor of their own made-up meaning that allowed them to humiliate me and keep hating me. That jerk gestured at the bus.
I was so angry I wanted to go back inside and be safe from further abuse.
Someone had blocked my way and demanded that I perform a friendly greeting, despite having no friendliness for me. Then, they had forced an unwanted explanation on the greeting I’d been forced to perform instead of accepting it as the required greeting it was. Then, when I responded truthfully to “It’s early” with, “No it’s later than normal,” someone else had forced a whole new meaning just to make me wrong. I hate them. They can burn up.
That’s what it means to be a Carrie. You don’t get to a person, but instead you get to be everyone’s garbage can and they get to dump all their ugly into you while still insisting they are good, nice people. To be a Carrie is also to be a very appealing target for people who enjoy hurting other people but haven’t the courage to risk hurting someone that might either fight back or who might come with consequences.
The Carries are the people who aren’t protected by propriety. I spend most of my time around people who believe themselves to be good and nice. What they really are is [some very mean word that I probably shouldn’t use, then] who are coerced into performing decent behavior by the fear of punishment. Can you tell I’ve taught little kids? Is my moral compass just OCD based around hyperfixations on what I thought was right and wrong? I thought the rule was just don’t cause harm to anyone else if you can help it. If you find out someone is harmed by something, stop doing it. Don’t argue that you’re allowed to do it actually, because you had good intentions and it doesn’t mean the bad thing to you as it does to the person who is harmed by it.
But everyone else is a normal, Carrie abuser. Carrie is the scapegoat. Carrie is the one person everyone else wipes their worst impulses on throws away, pretending it never happened, or it’s ok because Carrie doesn’t matter. Then they punish Carrie for revealing how much they like being horrible.
Is it better to be a Carrie? Is Carrie even a good person? She killed everyone, but only because they abused her to very limit. She just wanted friends, and was punished for no reason. Her violence was in response to having been pre-punished, whereas everyone she [Spoilers!] killed was being punished for a lifetime of being horrible to her. If I was in charge — maybe if any Carrie was in charge — no one would be abused like that. Everyone would be accepted the way I wanted to be accepted.
The nastiest, bloodiest talk of all, UTIs! So long, everyone who draws the line at Pig Blood
Now, as for being a Fat Carrie. I knew I was gaining weight before I found out I was pregnant. I was very late to figuring out I was pregnant in a very Carrie way. After all, Carrie got her period when she was 17.
Partly it was the fact that my Nation of Origin had just overturned the right to abortion. There were some scary rumors that people like me could get sued for having a miscarriage because it might have been on purpose. Also, UTIs. If people want to mock me as a stupid bovine person for not being able to tell my period stopped, I’ll have to describe my horrific UTIs. Especially nasty ones, because some folks out there are as gross as I am and can usually tell the difference between period blood chunks and UTI blood chunks.
You know, shape, smell and where it hurts. Surely, everyone who doesn’t already know is gone by now. Everyone who was willing to read an article about the girl who got a Matilda powers with her menarche and then got dunked with pig’s blood, but wasn’t prepared for this kind of horror. UTI blood chunks are round and smell like pee. Period chunks are stringy and smell like WAP. That cervical mucus was messing everything up, obscuring my scientific observations of my nasty panties. For two months it looked and smelled (and had the timing of) normal period blood.
I thought I was getting fat again because I was still traumatized by my first semester of MBA school, stress eating in fear of more harrassment.
I’ve also had a false pregnancy, caused by the meds I take to grapple with the trauma of being bullied in several different countries, because I’ve always been a Carrie and Carries always get bullied. Don’t they?
I once had three months of endometrium built up, but no cancer and no little people living in the endometrium. I had taken two pregnancy tests that time, and the special clinic gave me a medical supervised pregnancy test and all agreed the tests were negative. We even did an ultrasound to search the enormous forest of endometrium and found no stowaways.
They gave me some meds to unleash the unmanned endometrium and return my weird hormones to something like normal.
So when I didn’t have morning sickness, I had only missed two periods for sure, I had recently upped my dose of the same meds that cause this hormone problem last time, and I had other explanations for weight gain, it wasn’t so dumb of me to believe the same thing as last time was happening. My doctor also didn’t think it was dumb and didn’t do a pregancy test. We went straight to the ultrasound and were all surprised to meet a 16-week stowaway. Far enough along that they could guess it was probably a girl.
This is what I get for badly worded jokes. I tried to say something like if I had four kids I’d start by naming them Carrie and Christine, then when the third was Cujo, people would just say, “Oh, C names, I get it, I guess,” and when the fourth was named The Shining it would be too late to stop me. And another joke for The Shining being guaranteed to be loved a lot by basic film-loving boys.
Carrie is my kid’s joke name the way my sister and I called her first baby Hermione when all the proper adults who said, “No, you cannot name your child that,” weren’t around, and her legal name was something personal and sensible.
Also I have Carrie in my book and I was writing the book before I got pregant.
It’s nice to be reassured as a fat, older Carrie trying to sew my Carrie dress. See, it’s being repurposed from the pink and white silk wedding dress I had started sewing before I ever had a boyfriend. The reasoning was that weddings are super duper expensive, but I could get ten yards of silk in Hangzhou or Chiangmai and save myself thousands of dollars by making my own dress.
I ended up marrying men who were even better at saving money and I got married, divorced and remarried for a lot less than most people spend on a wedding dress or a wedding cake. My first husband was a divorce lawyer, and you’d think I’d get extra screwed over by that, but he was so nice about it that I didn’t notice if he did. In my imagination he fell in love with his colleague who represented me in the divorce because that is a perfect Rom Com. That’s like Random Hearts but happy.
Thus I have this unused pink and white silk. I think I’ll use the white as a lining and make it reversible. The pink turned out to be a perfect match for the film version of the dress. The main issue is that film Carrie is extremely thin and I’m not. I’m also 37.
In my world-building for the sewing of the dress, which I’m entering in an annual sewing contest for my very nice sewing cult (I think all modern subscription-based communities count as cults. Like Medium is a writing cult, and also pretty nice.), it’s an alternate history where Carrie lived and is going to a 20-year High School Reunion. All it takes is, “They didn’t laugh at her. They supported her. They treated her right when she needed it and no one needed to die.”
The boy might have still died from getting slammed in the head with the second bucket, but I don’t care about him. Maybe the two baddies went to jail for his murder. That’s fine. Sue lived and her baby lived, if she wanted. The book established that Carrie’s telekinesis includes remote abortion powers, so that’s still an option.
I think, if I finish my dress before little Carrie is born, my maternity shoot is just going to be my Carrie dress, and maybe I will sew a little baby-size Carrie dress for baby Carrie to immediately poop and vomit all over. Why not. The blood-covered-girl story can expand for other bodily fluids. All babies do at first is redistribute bodily fluids.
