I'm a Fan: A Novel

by Sheena Patel

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

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.

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.

There are no codes, there is only the tyranny of ruthless selfishness wrought by weak and inflated egos.

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.

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.

My people-pleasing, my co-dependency, my lack of boundaries, which on the surface looks so giving, nurturing and self-effacing is actually controlling, ego-driven and emotionally demanding. There is something at the core of me that starts to warp at the fear of impending bankruptcy, grows ugly and distorted every time I slap a hand on the table and roar for what I believe is mine.

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.

At this point I am trying to come across as chill? Like I’m absolutely chill with everything that is happening because it’s chill? As if demanding better behaviour or putting down boundaries would mean that I am not chill? And I want to be a cool gal? So I am without boundaries and watchful instead.

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.

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. Time must remain static so whiteness’ power can be maintained by any means. The object, the story, the person or the plant cannot follow its own orbit or rhythmic evolution because whiteness forces it into subjugation. Whiteness and white people make themselves pervasive yet think of themselves as separate.

He projects his self-loathing on to you and you carry it thinking if you skim off the scum maybe something good will come eventually.

That’s really when you should be thinking about getting out. When you start getting jealous of a dog.

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. It is the same brand which is pushed by populist leaders and has the same tang of denial where the country and its people cannot collectively reckon with its racist and colonial past.