crossfire
an introduction of sorts
I have repeated moments of being rocked by shame when it comes to my sexuality. It’s like a dazzling spell of sickness, and I need to vomit up certain things to feel like myself again. A heartburn. You see, I go from moments of crazed self-confidence to abrupt crashes where I find myself wallowing in a cave of ugly self pity and self hatred. I feel so undesired and unattractive that I gaslight myself into darkness. A recent lover, just last month made me feel like his failures were my fault. He couldn’t keep it up and didn’t make me cum so he tried to blame anything but himself. He couldn’t entertain the possibility of taking accountability for his own mental health, and his misogynist and pathetic aversion to condoms. But the seeds of doubt were sewn. We all wonder if we’re good in bed, we all fear it’s us that’s the problem. I know former lovers think of me when they fuck their wives (nb. this isn't an assumption). They are the spoils of my adventures. So I cauterise the wound, I sew myself up with the marrow of a stronger self. I do not give anyone the space to shame me.
Why am I so adamant about writing about sex? I think about the comedy plays I’ve written, entire auditoriums rocking with laughter from tales of disastrous and silly one night stands. Erotic poems bleed out of me like vines; my crude honesty bursts out of me, wilfully. I have to do it. I have to write stories of the flesh.
I think it’s ownership. So easily and so often others have sought out to make my story theirs. Fifteen years ago, former colleagues became so cruelly obsessed with one of my relationships that they made my life hell. I was slut-shamed into a deep depression, my relationship burnt to cinders. Recently, I bumped into one of these former colleagues (I had actually forgotten she existed such was her lasting imprint on my psyche), and she was still dying for more information about that particular relationship from all those years ago, she was still rotten with judgement about it, still so stuck in a muddied past that wasn’t even hers. As I walked away from her I thought to myself, “I am the most interesting thing to ever happen to you.”
My writing is also a way of releasing myself from the shackles of Catholic shame daubed on me like an Ash Wednesday cross. I was brought up between the crossfire of south London and Ireland, and between the 20th and 21st centuries, what was going to become of a girl born into that? I turned thirteen six weeks into the new century, missing being a teenager in the 1990s and the 20th century by a mere six weeks. We had been dragged up on ladette culture, Eurotrash, So Graham Norton, early access to online porn, early reality tv, soap opera huns, the threat of the Millennium Bug, 9/11, and the deification of former villain Princess Diana, all while we ate our Weetabix and figured out how a tampon worked.
The godly damnation and abstinence of my all-girls convent school weaved itself into the very fabric of our uniforms. We were told not to “prostitute ourselves” by rolling up our school skirts. Those of us who were tall didn’t really need to roll them up. We’d be told to “think about the male teachers walking behind us.” Because god forbid a child in school uniform titillates a male teacher in his fifties. On our daily pilgrimages to school, cars slowed down and creepy men would wolf whistle, craning their necks out of a rolled down window, begging us to get in their cars and to suck their dicks. I remember being told about one Science teachers who got an erection in the middle of a class. The other girls said he always had a thing for one particular pupil. We were kids, completely sexualised and desexualised in one fell swoop. It was always our fault for making the men aroused; they can’t control themselves. The blame was always with us, the schoolgirls. Yet, at the same I was made to feel so unattractive and so completely undesirable by my peers. Any notion of my sexuality had to be burnt away like a tumour. I was not someone any one would ever fancy. People told me this and I believed them. So when I eventually escaped the shackles of my all-girls school, entered a mixed sixth form and got a boyfriend, I didn’t know what to do, I also couldn’t believe it. One day we went on a romantic walk in Catford, along the River Ravensbourne which cuts a concrete encased stream of litter from a Catford industrial estate down to a Sydenham industrial estate. He told me he loved me and pulled me in for a kiss, what should’ve been my first kiss. I didn’t know how to respond to this affection, I didn’t know how to use my pounding teenage desire. His lips were also peeling with a crust of winter dryness. So I recoiled away, ran away home and broke up with him. A few weeks later I would have my first kiss drunk on Smirnoff Ices at a house party party in deepest, darkest Eltham with a bloke who I would only ever know as Big Rob.
As a younger teen, I used to write Harry Potter erotica for strangers on the internet and for my school friends Sooz and Ciara. I had never even kissed anyone, what did I know? I was semi-popular online. It was the turn of the century and the beginning of the internet, so obviously not much competition. It was my first taste of writing for an audience and receiving positive feedback were the biggest thrills of my teenage years. I did this from age 13 until about aged 17, when the real life kisses began to outweigh those of my imagination. I’m happy to say, I wrote the queerest, gayest, campest stuff that would make JKR absolutely die, and I’m so glad I did. Her recent apparent fanatical radicalisation into fascism being obviously, utterly absurd and dangerous. But my fan fiction writing gave me solace, a safe anctuary, and helped me develop a survival technique. Not only could I explore different writing mediums, but I could explore my sexuality, sensually and safely through the written word. It made me a better writer and gave me some of the only happy memories I have of being a teenager.
Eventually I made it to art school, and all my projects were explorations of my sexuality. I tried to tell the story of my sexuality through immersive theatre projects (we accidentally set fire to a church altar if you needed proof of my Catholic rage) and in another my best friend the artist Emma O’Rourke (I demand you check her out) took kitchen-sink style photographs of me in knicker pink lingerie in the 1960s kitchen of the flat we shared. I ended up posting them to my older boyfriend at the time. He never mentioned them. This was before camera phones were invented, and made sending nudes de rigour. I saw myself as sexually progressive, not desperate to be seen as intellectually and artistically sexual by my worldly, older boyfriend. By my second year of my degree, I was working with audio and performance. I recorded stories on an old cassette tape of how people lost their virginity. I played it crackling with the static of 2009 to a small audience of fellow art students and my tutor. I loved it. I don’t think my tutor did. I think that could make a fun podcast now.
In my final year of art school I wrote my first play based on Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and the death of Sylvia Plath. An exploration of my worst nightmare aged 23; Female domestication, unpaid unequal female labour, being a wife, a possession. I wrote my dissertation about female sexuality in television, and wrote at length about Sex and the City, Mad Men and Desperate Housewives. I said the next decade would change everything for women. It was 2010, maybe it did?
Now, it’s August 2022. We’ve just collectively experienced two years of quiet. Two years of locked up contemplation, of out of focus communication. Two years of mental exploration and two years where I have tried to write about other things, tried to put my focus elsewhere. It didn’t work, I wrote a whole novel about the loss of innocence, womanhood, desperation, fame, being a working class artist, struggling at art school, cruel men, and the elitism of theatre. I’m editing it now, it feels like baking without instructions. I sort of know what I’m doing, I know what the outcome will be once I taste it, once I see it. But mostly I’m just experimenting, doing classes, hoping for the best and ultimately putting the work in.
I suppose it’s the same with my life outside of writing and art. I am experimenting, hoping for the best and putting the work in. I’m trying to go about it with glazed doughnut optimism. Allowing myself to feel fried, soggy and crushed if needs be, but I letting myself be bright, shining, sweet and utterly decadent too.
A few years ago, days after my play Gangbang had caused fits of laughter at the Southwark Playhouse. I was back at work in my theatre bar and a male colleague said “Remind me that we can never fuck, because I don’t want to end up in one of your stories.” But, not everyone gets to be part of the story. Some people are erased, a chapter of my life cut out. They don’t deserve the permanence of my scripture.
But, I’m not going to just write about sexuality and encounters here. I’m going to write about pop culture too. Maybe I’ll finally write that piece about the costumes in Mad Men, even though it ended years ago. Sex and the City (and its various sequels) will always give me material (I’m a scholar of it don’t ya know). My wonderful friend Lizzie has demanded I start a Sex and the City podcast entitled ‘Carrie on Carrie’ where I interview my friends about Sex and the City. Maybe I’ll write about having endometriosis? But of course I’ll write fiction, and poems just for your eyes. Who knows where my typing and scribbles will take me? But I hope you’ll stick with me for the journey. I need an safe outlet, I need sanctuary where I can focus, and endlessly practice my so-called “very strong authorial voice”. Once upon a time when I was doing a post-grad at Oxford, a tutor who gifted me with a first on my essay on American Psycho, complimented me by saying “you’re a Bloomsbury type hipster.” I like to think it meant he got me, (despite not being a hipster as hipsters aren’t artists, and I suppose that word is also quite dated?) but I know exactly who I am, and I will happily pour my entire authentic self into my art.
A few days ago I hit exactly thirty-five-and-a-half. I am exactly half way through the journey of my thirties. In a few minutes, I’ll leave my office and walk through the Bloomsbury streets in the steaming heat of this year’s rare August rain. I’ll leap over puddles freckled with the drought dead leaves of London Plane trees, as much as I’ll leap into the blissful unknown of the rest of my thirties. It’s time to write it all down for everyone to see.
Carrie x
I am here for all of this Carrie!