The Cutprice Guignol

(trigger warning for discussions of self-harm and suicide)

When you’re a teenager, adolescence feels like an eternity.

And not just that the bad hair, cheap make-up, and roiling angst feel as though they’re going on for decades: no, when you’re a teenager, there doesn’t feel like a way out of the place you’re in now. The only other life you know is childhood, and you can’t go back there – adulthood feels impossibly distant, until it suddenly isn’t. Adolescence, for many people, feels impossibly eternal, like there could never be anything different than this.

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Bit of an old trigger warning for self-harm right here, if that kind of thing bothers you.

I don’t think it’s a particularly bold statement to say that we look for ourselves in the fiction we enjoy. There’s something about seeing yourself reflected in a story that feels grounding – someone experienced something similar to something you experienced, and they found it profound and important enough to build a story around. A lot of the reason I consume so much media, and certainly the reason that I write (hello you can read about my upcoming debut novel Rape Jokes here thank you bye), is because I’m looking for bits of myself reflected in the stories other people tell and want to do that for other people when I put expose little chunks of myself to the world at large. We define ourselves with stories, the ones we tell and the ones we consume, and that’s become all the more potent in the last few years as the stories that reach mainstream media become more diverse, the topics wider than ever before.

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