I'm a Fan: A Novel

by Sheena Patel

I fit into spaces which already exist and contort myself to fit a shape which has been allocated for me.

dick from someone who doesn’t care if you live or die

Even though he is cheating on his wife and I am cheating on my boyfriend and that means neither of us is trustworthy, he is already in love with someone outside of this equilibrium of entanglements and feels no loyalty to me, which then also reveals I expect special treatment from him of some kind, a selflessness no one in this web is giving anyone else.

I’m a fan and because of this, I can be cut out.

It is the only way to live a life, to regard anyone coming close as the enemy, as someone who is guaranteed to take from you, tokenise you, treat you as lesser because you are different.

He renders me dead or alive with the flare of his attention. He is like this with all of us. He is a void and there is no way to fill it.

I don’t know why I need him to be loyal to someone, perhaps so I can say to myself that he could be capable of it with me one day.

How can he know me when he’s so committed to misunderstanding me.

We are all of us engaged in a collective self-harm by trying to love him, seeking to be loved by him.

first of all i didn’t miss the red flags i looked at them and thought yeah that’s sexy

I thought time stretched out forever, I thought I had the rest of my life to make this decision but I realise I am on a clock and it runs differently for me. I am female. There was never much time and I’ve wasted so much already.

What is the line between being vulnerable and prostrating yourself for a system that won’t recognise you? The onus is never on the system to adjust its hardness, it’s on you to shape-shift and acquiesce.

Do I weaponise my own pain and cause harm to myself by revelling in that pain, nurturing it, putting myself in danger to encourage it and then working it over by verbalising it for display, to show society, I am a human being and I feel pain just like you.

Our human imaginations are funnelled to think along the narrow lines of the algorithm—if you liked that you’ll love this.

Are the cravings for a fanbase an expression of how politically powerless we really feel? Or is it something else entirely? Though we insist we are Socialist and Marxist in our ideals, is social media and our pursuit for fame within this structure not the purest expression of individualistic, Thatcherite neo-colonial politics where we transform into scripted individual brands, launching ourselves like start-up companies while masquerading as being ‘in service’ to our ‘communities’ by ‘taking up space’ as if by being true to ourselves, we’re doing everyone else a massive favour?

We are saddened by the knowledge that nothing really collectively changes but reassured by the thought that it did for me on an individual level, as we backstroke across the vast placid sea of righteous superiority.

How does performing vulnerability and being performative to win the stamp of authority that whiteness brings, warp our private, most secret self?

I can sense the perversion of his cruelty held in his wonder of my tears.

I want to be fucked and my boyfriend wants to make love.

I need his maternal care but it is this care which closes in on me.

my chest feels full of planets having a party

Having a plethora of women suits him just fine. There are no codes, there is only the tyranny of ruthless selfishness wrought by weak and inflated egos.

He says this to me occasionally, peering at a future from a safe distance but leaves me squinting toward the horizon unsure if the shimmer is water or a mirage.

The woman I am obsessed with lives in an abundant mindset.

The comments under this post all express urgent, alarmed concern for the sacrificed dishcloth and I think white people are wild for how they will have an acute empathy for anything bar actual melanated human beings.

i might look innocent but i screenshot a lot

Perhaps I too selectively glorify the good old days, just different days to the ones that are being glorified now. Now there is the throbbing pulse of fascism, of monolithic thinking, of the fear of immigrants, of a culture, mean-spirited and backward-looking, of a government wanting to reimagine the country as a floating tax haven, of worshipping only money, gutted and cultureless, unfettered by a population who has any critical thought only ultimate fandom, where holding politicians to account is repackaged as hate, hate is repackaged as love and the love is one-sided and slanting.

when you miss your man that’s not your man but can’t trip cos he ain’t your man but he is your man

He is connecting with other people, just not with me.

The unattainability of what she chooses to surround herself with seemingly rubs off on her.

I wonder why no one questions her on the nepotism she benefits from, I see it all as one system, this self-congratulatory circle of back-patting and unaccountability, a circle of whiteness that commends their open-mindedness but the kind of open-mindedness that looks just like them, a hall of mirrors in a closed room.

It takes me a long time to realise that when the man I want to be with tells me he likes being seen with me in public what he means is, he enjoys what my skin colour says about him to other people.

I see my relationship with him in capitalist terms, like I’m playing the stock market.

If only we could all be buffered from exploitatively neoliberal regimes by family money and luxuriously austere domestic settings.

I want them to be aghast at the destruction this will wreak on the cultural landscape, I want a hungry press, hungry for me, rather than jumping for scraps of attention like some rabid dog scrabbling around in the pit of my stomach desperate for someone to listen to what I have to say.

It is very Victorian, to have all of this sexual energy pent up, to be chaste, or it’s tantric, it never climaxes, it’s actually the most boring affair by virtue of having none of its hallmarks.

We do not have sex for connection, we have sex for release.

I want to succeed where all the other women failed, and it is not so much to win him as it is to defeat everyone else.

I fantasise and fall in love with a version of him I’m not sure exists outside of my imagination. He is constantly failing in comparison to this person I know he could be. If he could only stop being exactly who he is, we could be happy.

I realise after ripping her book from somewhere so deep from google the bots must have commended my IP address for the commitment I showed to finding it, that she is a whirling, hysterical princess in the same way I am. I expect people to do things for me in the same way she does, she cannot leave her parents the same way I can’t, she can’t have the man I want to be with the same as me. I’m her bitter and twisted sister.

I am wearing an outfit that is trying too hard because I am constantly auditioning for the part of his girlfriend and he is wearing an outfit that isn’t trying at all because he wants everyone to leave him alone.

Her lack of awareness of being a white woman borne of a white man in a country baked in the violence of European colonialism, dictating values that were and are already being practiced by Indigenous people before they were forcibly disinherited, is the way in which liberalism separates itself from the systems of racism and genocide and from the structures that organise the way the world benefits particular groups over others.

What is defined as ‘real’ has become abstracted—fuelling a disassociated state where we destroy without considering the consequences.

Perhaps what I want is knowing I can have tomatoes at any time of the year because I know how to cook four things very well and this ingredient is the staple to all of them because I work long hours and I don’t want to have to look up how to cook new things in accordance with yet more restrictions on my choice when I have so little control over my life anyway.

The man I want to be with and his wife become a warning sign for the kind of life I could be in for. I could turn out to be the man I want to be with in all the ways I don’t want to be, living a dishonest life, sneaking in affairs and my boyfriend turning a blind eye to keep me.

Now that they’ve broken up, the woman I am obsessed with’s ex-boyfriend has taken to posting a series of nature photos on his grid. Hobbies you are obsessive about when you are on your own. When staying in seems like a kind of accusation.

How is she to run two businesses if the truth is, she doesn’t actually run them at all?

Wanting to be an artist and being one are different. Perhaps I am just like everyone else and my disappointment is desiring to be special but not being special at all. Perhaps my life’s purpose is to square myself with this.

Being with him is a hack for what I have to slog to achieve myself. He is collectively recognised as special and if other people see he sees me as special, I become special and other people will confer his specialness on to me.

There is a dragon which consumes me, breathing fire, burning everything and all of him into a crisp. I am a pit of self-loathing. He plunges care and love into me but it only makes me hate him even more. Both of us pretend this part of our relationship is a bad dream.