by sof sears, natalie waite, & shirley jackson
MONSTER / GIRL
Was I “schizophrenic,” unstable, incoherent, coming apart like a frayed childhood blanket,
was I a loose cannon, was I mentally ill, was I “hysterical,” was I “increasingly plagued by visions,”
was I detached from “reality,” was I sick, was I unwell, was I an unreliable narrator (because aren’t
all girls unreliable narrators), was I an untrustworthy witness to my own interior life, was I projecting,
was I Freud’s Dora in a blue headband propelled into the 20th century, was I attention-seeking, was
I hungry for his eyes on me and didn’t know how else to elicit that gaze, was I unintelligible, was I a spite-filled resentful daughter, was I reckless, was I a malignancy, was I pathologizable, was I diagnosable, was I a monster or was I just a girl?