Why Vampires, Mirabai?

I think the first vampire thing I ever consumed was the Jimmy Neutron halloween special, which had a vampire in it and sufficiently terrified me. I was six and I became convinced that my cause of death would be vampire and it would be soon. I asked my dad about vampires and got a book from the library, but the information I learned was not comforting. I didn’t like my odds.

I remember one night, when I refused to go to sleep because I was so scared of vampires. My mother said “Mirabai, don’t you know vampires are made up?” I said, “Just because they’re made up doesn’t mean they’re not real!”. My mother then said “So if I made up a monster right now, named Blorky, who’s yellow and three feet tall and eats brains and is afraid of cheese… would you be afraid of him?” I think she was trying to teach me a lesson about the absurdity of my anxieties or maybe how creativity can be used to overcome fear, but for the next several weeks I was equally terrified of vampires and of Blorky - who I believed were in cahoots.

I eventually got over my fear of vampires by deciding to become one. I asked for a pair of plastic vampire teeth and simply told myself that if I was going to be obsessed with vampires, it had better be out of love rather than fear.