why is it called “trauma bonding” and not “show me the scarfax???”
it's pride, niggas, niggettes, and niggxs; be crimes, do gay
shout out naomi osaka, we osaka hive on this side 🎾
shout out jordan and amelia, got a fire new crib with a pastoral picturesque backyard akin to the caucasian suburban pipe dreams of yesteryear with a little more sazón and a lot more melanin and culture 🐶
shout out leah who is doing her life like a florida driver; in every lane at the same goddamn time! she let me (a non-barber) tape up the back of her head, if you wanna know how she’s wylin!!! but wylin with a purpose, drive, and direction is what matters ⚡️
shout out piers morgan because you wake up every day and choose buffoonery when it comes to anyone with melanin. a whole colonizer circus, so brave ☕️
shout out jess and jacey for letting me chop it up with them about islam for a full hour and change, listen here to that ep of the “pray for us” podcast 🎶
shout out to jacey’s moms: i’ve never met you but you’re remarkable
shout out milly for her new gig (if dunno if i can talk about it but it’s lit) 🥷🏽
shout out karen (two loosies in a row??? gonna be a pack soon, goddamn) for her new gig, another bag secured 🔥
shout out PRIDE MFS WE OUT HERE, IT’S BANG BANG ACE GANG ALL MF DAY NIGGAS, I’M QUEER GET USED TO IT AND IF YOU DON’T BELIEVE ME, I PROBABLY DON’T AND WILL NEVER FUCK WITH YOU 🏳️🌈
shout out dove cameron for adding to the discourse about the line between queerbaiting and queer expression, be you, be true ✊🏾
fuck y’all with the confidence to spit on a 6ft + black millionaire who be in the gym daily. trae, we are not homies for the rest of this series but fuck anyone who is tryna spit on you, foolish behavior
shout out miriam and shelby because it was cool to hang out as representatives of the dirty 330 🌽
shout out taika waititi, rita ora, and tessa thompson for bringing poly rights to the mcu 👀
shout out maria, mi amor, out here modelling, getting offered [redacted], etc…i stan, will continue to stan, thanks for being my sounding board ❤️
shout out the knicks for making it a first-round playoffs, I don’t care if y’all stay in the series, build it up for next year 🏀
big ups twan for the move from atlanta for your new gig this fall, proud of you now and always my g ✊🏾
shout out aundre, I pray you make it back from the vineyard bro, text me, ok 👀
big ups me for a lot of change in my life that i’ll explain on the next letter 🌱
shout out to shakira, you know i love savings, thanks for the furniture tips and always being the lowkey funniest person i know 💰
to [redacted wack ass comic]:
if you want us out here at these protests for jewish people only because you went to blm protests and anti-asian hate protests, just know that this shit ain’t reciprocal; this we’re not send gcal invites to stand up for each other, we’re doing it all the time. clearly you're picking and choosing and keeping score on who shows up for a while and that is able to talk. show up for all of this or don't show up at all, you’re wasting your own time and everybody else’s. you are doing it for you. you are not doing it for la cultura because you’ve been silent for everything else too including your own peoples.
if you actually engaged in black lives matter and its rhetoric (instead of doing so for the length of a tiktok), you would understand that is anti prison and he would also understand that the conditions in gaza are verrrrrrry prison-like. i'm not asking you to even be pro-palestine (tho that would be lit, i highly suggest it). i'm asking you to be anti-what-israel-doing-with-the-name-of-the-jewish-faith-around-the-world-who-disagree-with-the-conditions-over-there. the jews that i bang with can separate their faith from the way it’s wielded by a nation-state that has people older than the settler colonial nation-state itself living there. no disrespect to honk honk culture, but stop being intentionally a clown for the clicks and read a book.
i spent too much time of my life in the “enough category.” black enough, muslim enough, african enough, space jam fan enough, comic enough, enough enough, etc. too much time wasted to be told by cornballs i’m not queer enough smh...queeee? some goofy told me i’m “looking for attention” and i’m like you didn’t know i was queer or ace until 3 min ago and also, my good bitch, i already got three oppression infinity stones why the fuck would i **choose** more?? you hear how goofy you sound in both text and when i told you this to your grill, [redacted] so, mind ya fucking business and i’ll continue to mind mine <———— double entendre.
i really wish the same energy that people had for elon musk hosting a sketch variety show could be applied to literally anything else globally
late-stage heterosexuality and trickle-down justice gonna be the death of us all
i really don't want to see more movies about the girlbossification/llctwitterization of villains, you hear me, mouse house???
seek not only to be understood but to understand
believe in redeemability for yourself and others
create the space for transformation; you cannot hold someone accountable, they have to want it.
if i get hit by a nissan leaf and die, wallah best believe i’m petitioning god to let me run it back
*getting dragged out an amc cinema* admit it, cruella devil is just girlboss michael vick!!!! why are you booing me???
“pepto bismol to these aint shit niggas” is a bar i have heard in a freestyle and it still goes hard
a year after george floyd and y'all niggas really ain’t done shit.
i wish tory lanez and very good go fuck yourself
niggas really out here in free-range, organic, locally sourced prisons
rudy giuliani vs his own doing: bottom 10 anime battles
rip bernie mac, man. the greatest to do it
ted cruz really wakes up every day doesn’t he
the cat in the hat is longer than the caucasian gymnastics playbook but we still get tripped up, how
br*man re*lty, y’all some scammerologists for real (new beef alert)
confession: i have never seen mean girls (this does not mean i don’t deserve rights)
stevie nicks slander will not stand, i won’t have it
abolish the filibuster
applying for an apartment in new york city is the racism olympics, i stg
***this is going to be a new section of the loosies newsletter. i wanted to make sure the loosies and the whole pack were separate. this is where i’ll put my deep dives and opinions. this is personal stuff and as raw and uncut as i’ll be in writing; that real shit coming soon though, keep it locked***
if you really know me, you know that “i may destroy you” is my favorite television program. i've been #michaelahive since chewing gum and i may destroy you made me rethink the way that i want to write tv, film, podcast, shit even text messages. the amount of care that was put into the character work, the narratives, how they intersect, interlock, and interject, and the pure authenticity and raw emotion put into the writing blew me away. i have mad love for donald and issa but michaela really blew me away.
in the spirit of transparency, i wanted to take a moment to reflect on this show a year later and the effect it has had on me by going through some moments and traits imbued in some of the characters that resonated with me heavily. going to drop some trigger warnings for assault in general right here just in case you ain't ready for all that. come back to it when you're ready, however if you do scroll, i’ll
terry - “the early to rise, late to bloom-er”
she wasn't my favorite character at the beginning however she definitely grew on me as the beleaguered best friend racked with guilt who is being run around by somebody who is more on the narcissistic side. i felt for terry as she tried to keep her friend (arabella) safe even though she wasn't being a good friend for her. she was even getting overshadowed by her friend at her own dream...you know how infuriating that shit is irl? but she still showed up for somebody who wasn't even showing up for her which was a testament to how deep the friendship was and ultimately they reconciled.
guilt is a tremendous motivator even from the first episode, terry displayed extreme guilt, feeling that it was her fault for putting arabella in a dangerous situation by leaving and ultimately finding herself in one where she got played by those two pick up artists in italy.
my favorite part of her story is that she couldn't even understand that she had been assaulted until 6 episodes later (which was about 15 months i think in the timeline); i was watching the show with a friend and they told me that one of their friends would watch the show and be like “oh wait that's assault?” realizing that they may have been unwitting victims in the past. i wasn’t quite that person but i understood what it meant because it took me about 10 months to even saw the sentence out loud. i knew that i had been assaulted, i confronted my assaulter, and ultimately she yada yada’d her way out of it (blaming me, “you were into it,” “you know i would never…,” y’all know the type. but it took me a very long time to ever admit out loud what it happened to me cuz i didn't want it to be so true on one side and down the other side, it very much was i was never in a safe space to tell friends and family members and feel heard.
i wish terry and her boo the best, they deserve.
kwame - “the path untaken”
dudes don’t talk about sexual assault. at least not the dudes in my circle; we talk video games, comic books, art, and street shit...but that’s changing. talking about feelings is like pulling teeth for some of my male friends but its safe to say that i be yanking them mfs out they mouths these days. no long talk but, i have a pretty strong policy of “don’t tell til y’all go together” for most of my friends (all genders and inbetween) who tryna chat about their hookups or whatever. we’ve been socialized to believe men are all chauvinists and by and large, a lot are. but sometimes, it feels very chicken and the egg; what came first the patriarchy or the patriarchists?
kwame was raped. point blank. but where could he go? who would listen? when society expects something of you and your lifestyle (gay and black male) seemingly precludes you from respect, dignity, or a safe space to talk about assault, where are you supposed to go? i have been there. i am there. that police station scene...i didn’t close my eyes. i’m more open now but when it happened (and for a year after), my already hyper-vigilance went on x-games mode.
being a black dude, i’ve kept my nose pretty clean but how do you stay clean when you walk through the stench of white supremacist structures, xenophobia, islamophobia, and oblivious “allies” every day? i already have my head on a swivel, my back to a wall, my eyes on the exit, and my business minded but after what i call the “incident” in june 2016, mere months after someone very close to me was raped, i felt like there was absolutely nowhere to go when I was assaulted multiple days in a row at a party. i was surrounded by people who kept the veneer of toxic positivity and the mask of civility on them at all times. i vividly remember the moments i was being assaulted at this party, with every right to yell and scream, stuck in a prison of perception; what will these people think if i yell at her? will they understand? who can i tell? is that a real friend or will they spread my business? watching kwame suffer in silence resonated deeply as a toxic masculine trait, yes, but also, with terry absorbed by arabella (even chastising a suffering kwame for not paying attention while he’s going through his trauma), where is the space to talk about assault for men?
seeing kwame navigate that, looking for peace in the wrong places, making the wrong decisions for the right reasons kept me rapt. kwame was also assaulted twice and while the first was more obvious, the second was insidious because there still is no resolution. kwame elected to move past his trauma, using “exploration of his sexuality” as a bandaid to avoid dealing with men again. on his date with a white woman, nilufer was exoticizing kwame for hours, pressuring him in bed, and finally flipped when, and only when, he called her homophobia out and in turn outed himself. on one side of the coin, he didn’t have to disclose his sexuality and label it for her but on the other side, i understood her feeling of betrayal (even if it did come about because she’s a straight homophobe). she had every right to be upset but is there space to be upset at nilufer not reading kwame’s nonverbal cues that he wasn’t trying to be intimate with her at the beginning?
i’ve been there too. and there isn’t much space at all to call that out. he tried with arabella and she was about to bury him, because of where she was at the time, but still. would you wanna confide in a friend (who earlier locked him in a room with a boy which triggered him) who did all that?
ultimately, seeing kwame land with a nice boy who grounded him with what looked like a bomb ass meal and the first safe space that kwame found since his first assault made me hopeful. i walked around the streets hypervigilant for years, and will continue to. but seeing him settle down, slow down, and be happy in another person’s arms in that last shot, gave me a sense of safety too. i wish the same for him and his boo too.
theo - “the very imperfect victim”
i used to hate her but i think that i actually love theo as a character. terry and the audience expected a huge heel turn from this character because of her history with terry and arabella and their schoolmates. it never came; all that happened was some pretty exploitative racism to get some commission for a job (which is deffo in the shady white woman playbook) but that was in character and tragically her lot in life even from the first scene we see with her when she brings in the lifted gift for her stepdad.
theo comes to us as this sociopathic young woman who is having a super improper (and possibly life-threatening) response to being taken advantage of. coel asks us to weigh racism, tribalism, youth, and sexual assault at the same time in that first theo episode and by god was it a masterclass. the ‘get out’-esque way theo turns on a dime to flip on the boy who violated her consent (and broke her heart) was terrifying, especially as it mirrors the way that many jilted white women have the power to weaponize their pain against black people. theo’s exposure came packaged with a healthy dose of racism and was buttoned off by the way that she gaslit her mother to both open and cap this episode. theo has been through some shit and she also has done some shit so...what bucket does she fall into? there isn’t an answer. if anything it’s the grey area. i personally wouldn’t bang with her but i understood her.
the moment of truth where arabella, crossfaded at the function, tells theo that it was her who told the headmaster that theo was framing that black classmate for rape made me lean forward like “oh this white woman gonna drop the bomb on her.” but it didn’t happen. tv has rules and logic that don’t mimic real life and theo not coming super hard at arabella at any point after this is where real life came in. maybe coel had no intention of exploring this the whole time or had plans that got cut for time but maybe theo, who imo was poised to undo arabella the way that she historically has and could, had no interest in revenge.
that circle that theo ran had dark undertones and theo seemed to be stoking those flames, encouraging people to release their full anger at the meeting, at some points seemingly using arabella’s celebrity and story to get more people to pay for the circle (go back and pay attention). i think i landed at the end of her arc happy she reconnected with some school homies, sad she’s exploiting arabella for commission, and with a feeling of unsettledness that came from an understated but still very nuanced portrait of the imperfect victim. shout out to the token white friend.
social media - “the silent hand”
social media, aka the “me matrix.” constant pressure (internal and ex) to perform your identity or be forgotten, washed away in the flood of millions of other accounts. social media is a part of all of our lives; even my divestment from twitter and instagram is being replaced on some level by this newsletter.
off rip, arabella was a social media sensation; she was doing selfies with randos at the bus stops and everything because of her successful book. but it wasn’t until after the stealthing call out of zain that she became a sensation. trauma is very personal, how you react to it is how you react to it, pressure be damned...but social media is personal. it’s where we go to be personal but when your fame is dictated by your trauma and the response of the public to that trauma, who does that make you become? who you want to be? or what others want you to be? where’s the line?
after her assaults, arabella went to two places: social media and italy. terry was right there but arabella wanted a different gaze on her. italy was a more obvious trauma response: go back to the last moment you felt safe (that was with biagio from episode 3; even if he was a dickhead, he didn’t violate her consent). social media is a more modern response, the overshare machine, the expose bot, the me matrix, the stock market of the attention economy.
arabella went to look for attention and got it. this doesn’t mean she was calling out these people for attention but it came with the righteous act. assault survivors don’t come forward for the celebrity lifestyle and positive attention; can’t name someone who g’d off by calling someone out. but attention comes with the territory; how that attention changed arabella was a huge factor. it caused her to lash out at one of her best friends without hearing him at all, made her alienate terry again (the only one really checking for her), and ultimately, she had to do a systems reboot when she got all the attention she didn’t want/need after a little power trip where she made herself the judge, jury, and executioner for strangers whose stories she didn’t need details for (to be clear this isn’t about zain, fuck zain). but she caught herself. damage had been done, “justice” had been served, but the person who felt the most disconnected was arabella herself.
arabella’s therapist said it best “social media is place for talking but not a great place for listening.” no, that’s it. literally that’s it. that’s why i’m not on it; niggas be chatting shit and saying nothing. or saying a lot with no space for listening. we need both to heal. we need both to transform the world. even the suggestion that arabella should take a break elicited an addict’s response from arabella and that’s how pervasive and normalized social media is in our lives. we say we can quit anytime we want but how many times is that for 45 minutes. overt sometimes, covert others, social media pulled a lot of the strings of arabella’s descent into slight madness and it does so for a lot of us in similar ways irl. we do a lot of talking about relationships on social media but not enough talking about our relationship with it and shout out michaela for saying something.
arabella - a relatable narcissism
arabella is one of my favorite tv characters because let's keep it a stack: she sucks. she is the friend that a lot of us know who is entirely self-absorbed, super fun when she wants to be, and oblivious to the way in which she affects her friends because she is, as previously stated, self-absorbed. but herself absorbedness is entirely justified.
when you've been through something as traumatic as arabella had been through in the first three episodes of ‘I may destroy you,’ you go into survival mode. you look for safe places to show your power. everything feels threatening in the world but the two things that you can trust are you, the people who believe you, and fuck everyone else. but you're not supposed to live in self-absorbedness and hyper-vigilance for your entire life; it is not safe for you physically, mentally, or socially and we saw examples of that in this character throughout the entire season. she was not a good friend, but she was going through her own thing and had multiple different ways of processing trauma, a lack of justice, and discovering her own shortcomings throughout the story.
the scene that broke me the most was when arabella finally admits that she was raped. as someone who had the toxic masculine though process that “nobody could assault me, i'm too strong, i'm too smart,” it took me a while to admit that the things that i did in my own self-preservation (not going out, djing with my back against the wall, dancing with my back against the wall, finding reasons to not be social with even close friends and family members, not knowing who to trust while simultaneously being afraid to advocate for myself, etc) where all traits of somebody who had been through a traumatic event and was explaining away the pain. when arabella put her head into her sweater to sob it took me back to february 2017 (a full9 months after i was assaulted, 11 after someone close to me was) when i finally admitted it to myself and the world. her realization paired with her willingness not to believe it was entirely relatable and while metro police seem to handle assault in a healthy way, it was a reminder to me that the american justice system would never handle assault similarly (see: all the untested rape kits).
while they might have gone through the process of discovering and processing evidence, investigating the crime scene, dna samples, etc, justice did not come from the system. watching the police be competent was probably the most unrealistic thing in my purview of the show which then was righted by the police not finding suspect which is unfortunately the case in millions of stories. while i wish it didn't happen to her, as a writer, i understood the necessity to effectively depict the reality of something so sensitive. the creative gift, also based on reality, that we were handed from that moment on was “okay so now what” and what michaela coel did here, to this day, makes me respect her so much.
what i respect the most is that title. that made us do you know. loaded, we don't know who “i” is, and memorable. I'm sure if you asked multiple people through the “i” is they would probably say different things but I really think that the “i” here is trauma. it could have been have arabella taking down abusers, it could been abusers continuing to harm people, but I think that living in the traumatized victimized state took so much from arabella (of course not more than her abuser) but enough that she was going down a destructive path that would make her her trauma and nothing else. she deserves better and i’m glad she ended her story knowing that.
“the neat little bow”
stories don't end the way that you want them to in real life. the moment that you have a plan, god laughs in your face. you cannot come to a conversation prepared anything but how you feel; everything else is unwritten *cue natasha bedingfield* as a tv writer i was trying to predict the end of the show. i thought that theo was going to call out arabella for defending kwame from nilufer (another black man over a wihite woman, just like in primary school for them) and it was going to end in a giant mess.
and it didn’t. and i’m glad it didn’t.
once arabella knew who had harmed her, she had decisions. how to act? how to react? should she re/act? but ultimately she show us all the ways it could have gone and what arabella (and being the creator, michaela) chose. and that’s what we all should strive for; what works for us.
tv sometimes creates the space for unrealistic endings to storylines because it is by nature the artifice of the art form, but ultimately stories don’t end, they just have more chapters; some characters continue, some leave, some stabilize, some betray. and that’s what i love about IMDY; there is a multiverse of possibilities and i’m supposing seasons upon seasons about the fallout but ultimately, in front of all of us, she chose what worked for her. and for that, she deserves her respect.
no one can tell you what to do with your life, especially not celebrities. watching arabella play out revenge fantasies, empathy fantasies, reclaiming her power through absolute control, etc but choose life away from that was powerful and ultimately, survivors have the right to choose their path. and she helped me pick mine and my traumatized loved ones pick theirs. thank you.