I'm a Fan: A Novel

by Sheena Patel

I am used to hiding parts of myself from my parents, and then hiding parts of myself from my friends, and hiding parts of myself from boys I liked, and hiding parts of myself from the society I belonged to that didn’t like the brown bits of me, and then hiding parts of myself from my family who didn’t like the parts of me that loved drugs and techno and staying out all night and sex and cocks and cunts and come and booze and freedom. I am used to living inside of shame, I am used to being on the outside breathing mist up on the glass begging to be let in. I am absolutely primed for this affair. It is toxic and familiar.

She tells me, when I look at you and your boyfriend, I see your dad and me, it’ll be safe but it’ll be stale.

She is free to believe it is all in the past and no one ever interrogates her because they have the same mindset too. It’s a veritable feedback loop, all of them back-patting their own outlooks.

As a teenager, I needed to be an ogre at home to frighten my parents so they didn’t frighten me.

I am performing all the time, performing being myself, what is myself, who is me.

It leads me to believe with dizzying certainty that when there is a man involved, and a rich one at that—especially with a dick like his—there is no such thing as a sisterhood. It’s every female for herself.

if i was a worm would you still love me

What they say about women having a shelf life, everything they said was true, all the women who I scorned for inhaling the patriarchal ideas of a sell-by date, the ‘ripeness’ of women, the ‘freshness’, my mother who told me to pick carefully, they were right and now I have to make a concerted effort to stem the tsunami of fear at being imprisoned by my gender—which now means not having any control over the meaning of myself.

The fact of his being a man means he is coddled. The world does not demand any self-awareness from him.

The man I want to be with is Daddy in his working life which he populates with men but is Baby in his intimate relationships with women.

Except I’m not anything to him and nothing to myself which is why I stay, and he enjoys all of us, gets something whole out of a multitude of people and I put up with it because a bit of him is better than nothing at all.

unbothered moisturised happy in my lane focused flourishing

normalise saying, for a yt person, after complimenting yt people

This is whiteness. It is everywhere, pervasive, its assumption that it needs to be there to sanitise, to give order by creating a hierarchy. Whiteness on its own is empty, it is forceful in its insistence of its peculiar quality of absence. It refuses to be described in and of itself and instead it needs some other thing to define itself against.

Whiteness is nihilistic, it is the distilled form of the death drive and because it has a cold separation to life, it believes it alone is able to categorise, is the one to get rid of the excess, the one to do the accounts, to formulate the systems that regulate the chaos, to decide who lives or dies—it alone can shoulder this responsibility it made up for itself, so anxiously adrift it is without a purpose.

I used to think his lack of defence for her was because he agreed with me but now I know his silence is there because he is loyal to her but chooses the path of least resistance with me and in the gap I make up my own meaning, which is that he loves me more.

The people he is kindest to are the ones who do not know him. The love he receives from his base gets him used to things being one-sided, he never has to work at anything, never has to work on his insides because so much is projected onto him.

stop teaching men words

Things are truly bad when, at the park, a dog bounds over to where the man I want to be with and I are sitting and he pets and coos over the dog so warmly and indulgently and I sit there un-petted and un-cooed over and I start to feel jealous about the way he is with this animal because he is not this way with me. That’s really when you should be thinking about getting out. When you start getting jealous of a dog.

girls be like are you sure are you sure are you sure are you sure are you sure

This making something useful and whole and healing out of fragments of fabric, out of what is left over and unwanted speaks to so much more than keeping warm.

She uses archaic words, or else long words to describe simple things, like lacustrine, pellucid, provenance, which shows the pedigree of her education but also her total detachment from real life.

The woman I am obsessed with says she is sad and worried about the state of America and I think, it’s a funny thing to feel sad—or feel anything about racism because what a luxury. She is able to disregard that America has always been a white European genocidal project, a settler-colonial state founded upon death and violence. It has never demonstrated the soaring values the American founders myth insists upon. Believing this falsified story, saying, we are capable of more, this isn’t us rather than that bone-tired weariness of, we always said it was this, we always told you but you didn’t believe us when it happened to us but you believe it now it is happening to you—is Exceptionalism.

In his failure to experience and take responsibility for his own sexuality, he seeks to nuke the woman yet simultaneously casts himself as the victim so the woman he is destroying still takes care of him as she is brought down. You collaborate in your own destruction.

It is heterosexuality as misogynistic fascist fervour. Men have all this power and this is the world they have created, where everyone experiences only slivers of snatched joy.

It could be happiness or safety but aren’t they the same thing.