For the Scene’s inaugural Student Issue, we wanted to hear from a pretty important contingent of Nashvillians — students themselves. And so we opened up our very first student essay contest to kids from high schools across Davidson County with the offer of a cash prize and this prompt:
It’s no secret that a lot has changed in the past few years. The way we act and interact out in public, at school, and even at home has changed. On the other hand, some experiences, like mowing the lawn or reading a book, might seem exactly the same. That’s why we want to check in and see what life is like right now, from your point of view.
Think of this essay contest as a time capsule full of moments. What moment of your life would you add to this shared record of our moment in time? We are equally interested in moments that are big or small, personal or political, challenging or fun, mundane or new. If an experience matters to you, it will matter to us.
From our diverse pool of entrants, we selected as our winner Mackenzie N. Bransford, a senior at Nashville School of the Arts. Read Mackenzie’s essay below, and below that read essays by our two runners-up — Hume-Fogg junior Isa Cruz and NSA junior Walt Robinson.
Special thanks to the team at The Porch Writers’ Collective for helping us reach out to Nashville high school students: Joseph Kane, Susannah Felts, Katie McDougall and Metro Nashville School Board representative Emily Masters.
The Spadefoot Toad
By Mackenzie N. Bransford, winner
There is a very spherical animal found in deserts during their wet season called the spadefoot toad. He is a small thing, ranging from 1 to 3 inches, and he is decorated along his body with red stripes, hanging against his skin like garlands from the rafters of a home in winter. This little thing can teach us a lot about emotional survival through isolation.
During the pandemic, I felt that I lost somebody inside myself. She died silently, without any funeral. I lost a girl who danced. Who painted her nails, made her bed in the morning, lit candles at night.
I became somebody who stared obsessively into the disastrously dark space that exists between every human and the world around them, the space that bullies people into a survival mindset that intermittently allows all the beautiful little things to bleed away. Trapped by a violent limbo solely of my own creation, everything ceased to be anything.
Color bled from details of life I once loved. Strawberries ceased to taste sweet. Songs I loved began to fade, movies I watched lost moral meaning. If there was a pit inside of me this large, if there was a purgatory on this earth this painful — what was the purpose of interacting with these moments at all? Everything clouded out.
In an attempt to find a natural connection to my smothering emotions that felt so unnatural, I learned about the similarities between humans and the spadefoot toad. During dry desert seasons, he disappears 5 to 10 feet into the ground to obtain moisture from the dirt until the surface becomes habitable. He can stay down there for up to a decade. The world around him dissipates; he understands what he must do to survive.
Humans frequently learn from nature in ways we cannot learn from one another, and the spadefoot toad understands self-preservation more than any human ever will — it’s not a form of death, it’s not proof of inherent impermanence. We mourn the people we were before, we cut our hair and tape strands of it into notebooks. We let our fingernails grow out like tree rings, forcing a state of permanence — as without it there is an all-encompassing sense of loss. Two years of pandemic caused me to consider — we only sink deeper into ourselves. When the world is dry and we need someplace safe to go, the damp caverns of our own hearts embrace us. Maybe the girl who existed in all those details isn’t dead, but rather finding her way toward the surface.
I experienced an isolated adolescence. Because of this, the moments in my life seemed meaningless. But as I begin to shake the dirt from my eyes, moments hit me with a sharp, unflinching force. It makes me realize how, at times, we must allow ourselves to sink. We must allow the surface to become habitable, allowing the ground to take care of us until we can begin our journey back up.
COVID Led Me to Walt
By Walt Robinson, runner-up
I had never felt like I owned my birth name, Charlotte. For me it was my grandmother’s and not mine. However, during quarantine, my dissociation from the name became worse. When a teacher called “Charlotte,” looking for a response from me, my brain treated it as if they had called someone else’s name. It wasn’t on purpose; I simply forgot I was supposed to be her.
Midway through virtual school, there was a click in my brain. I had pondered going by different names a few times throughout my life, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. There was so much anxiety behind the thought that I could be letting people down. That as I walked through the halls, people would give me weird looks. That when teachers called roll, their face would scrunch up in disgust. Why couldn’t I just conform? During virtual school, I could hide behind a computer screen. The things that could cause anxiety were out of sight and, therefore, out of mind. Unfortunately, I hadn’t realized until about halfway into the year, the moment was over. It was no longer the beginning of the year, and emailing my teachers that I would like to go by Walt would be weird. The students and teachers already know me as Charlotte. In my mind the change was too big.
Toward the end of the year, all the students received Google forms asking what classes we wanted to take next year. On the front page, the form asked for your name, preferred name, preferred pronouns, and whether or not the school should call you by your preferred name to your parents. I think my brain fell apart. And then I had to build it back together.
There. That was my opportunity. No judgment. No weird looks. Freedom. And my parents wouldn’t have to know. I could hide from it all, behind my computer screen.
I’m still not sure if I like the things I changed. Did I cut my hair too short? Do I like the clothes I wear now? Do I like this more? Name?
Mercury.
Orion.
And Walt.
Those were my top three. I crossed out Orion once I read more on the mythology behind him. I didn’t want to embody that kind of name. I really couldn’t decide between Mercury and Walt. But I had to choose one. I needed to submit the classes I wanted to take. So I chose Walt, and I’m not sure why. Maybe it was because it was shorter, easier to spell. But I really don’t know why. I don’t know what I would choose if I were given the chance to reevaluate it. But it was better than going by a name I didn’t own.
COVID led me to Walt.
Pink-Sequined Sunflowers
By Isa Cruz, runner-up
“It must be interesting going to school on BROADWAY!” remark the first-church-pew grannies and the suburbian sheltered. After 3 p.m., their judgment — bitter as cold brew in Gulch coffee shops — can be justified. I’ll entertain running jokes for small talk, weave grand stories of that time I saw a half-full growler sitting open on the grates that protect trees from the stank of urine. In some sense, that is Nashville — the gentrifying cheap-beer mecca of country stars that will fade and leave behind no supernova except some racist scandal. Outside the view of news cameras, there I am, overstuffed backpack, walking past it all.
But I can’t be separated from this stage. I’m no cardboard cutout, no paragon of magnet-school excellence detached from my surroundings. The threads of downtown pull tighter, and I watch the scruffy-beard delivery man unload a box of Budweisers as I try to make it to school before the 8 a.m. bell. The pressure-washer water peeling off the glaze of the past night and the sunlight against the belltower remind me that there is an earthiness beneath the unending energy. Broadway is a cycle of neon-light energy and sunlit sleepiness.
In hotel coffee shops (you’ve gotta ask your friends to find the good ones), I find my separate Nashvilles colliding. Ray di Pietro’s camera is on the counter, and he tells me how I should never leave my valuables by an open window in a big city because pedestrians aren’t angels. Ray and a writing friend of mine are discussing her tote bag with my favorite Marxist pin. “Small world!” are the words I use to try to describe the delighted confusion I feel at the human threads pulling us toward the real, the Nashville beyond the bachelorettes. Though one time, a bachelorette did compliment my dress and freshly shaved head, so maybe the pink sequins can be forgiven?
At times this city is unforgiving. Maybe that’s why I tripped down Seventh Avenue while carrying two gallon jugs of distilled water to the school darkroom so I could develop film shots that exposed realness underneath a cowboy-boot-wearin’ facade. Or why strange men wink at me and giggle like middle school fools while on scooters they will leave in the middle of the sidewalk. (Or the bike lane, if they’re especially devilish.)
At the end of the day I remember the apartment I grew up in just off West End Avenue. My father and I sank our knees into the pebbled porch while we dug clumps of clay out of the strip of green out front. After filling the gaping hole in the earth with potting soil, we planted sunflower seeds in little divots of our own making. The plants stretched upward, so fresh, so alive! Past the kitchen window where I first learned to whistle. I like to think that this is Nashville. Where we can fertilize a home for ourselves with the sweat of our foreheads, knocking knees in a communal dream.
Student activists, the Youth Poet Laureate, banned books, our first student essay contest and more
