About Me — Emily Wilcox
27,301 Yahoo emails and none of them from Robert Pattinson, sigh.
“Tell me about yourself,” my date asked. His jawline was sharp, gaze sharper and so I was blunt.
“I’ve got such trapped wind right now.”
Yeah. Yeah. He’s not my date anymore.
What Am I?
There are so many things I could tell you about myself. That’s true of all of us. So where do we begin? How do we choose? What defines our most notable attributes? What makes certain things more worthy of knowing than others? Where is our value derived?
And that got me thinking. A book is valuable not because of a single page, but because of the entire story woven within. Who we are is infused into every single word, every single moment, every single thought and fingerprint and sweat gland. So:
What am I? I’m a writer (more so than I am a human. I wasn’t born, I was printed out). I’m a storyteller and a lunatic. I’m a fast walker, a slow ager, a Medium contributor. I’m hungry, I’ve got two degrees in completely differing subjects and fortunately, I’m absent of any trapped wind right now (mostly).
But above all else, I am exactly what you are. I am a book.
My Storybook Self
I am a book. Not a great book, a first draft of a book, but still a book.
A loud book, really. My font is Times New Roman in bold and italics and I’m a stream of consciousness lacking punctuation or even structure and a whole lot of illustrations because man do I love pretty things like the moon and Robert Pattinson’s jawline and souvenir pencils and planet shaped pin badges and mountainside campsites and decadent libraries and converted camper-vans and shuttered windowsills and dimples and hazel eyes and spaniels and anything derived from space.
My own front cover is just a pair of walking boots, drawn with eyeliner, back-dropped by a high quality image of the cosmos swiped from NASA. My pages are stained with Cadbury’s Wholenut and Leibniz crumbs are accumulating in the spine. Inside is the dedication, the immortalisation of the garganutan gratitude and infinite adoration of the two people that mean the most to me in this whole entire universe (and at least seven others); B̶e̶n̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶J̶e̶r̶r̶y̶ my mom and dad. They are the makers of this book (please don’t ask me how), they are the font that I am, the colours of my book jacket, the binding and page thickness and the publishers. They provided me with the papers to write on and the pen to write with and without them, my story would not exist.
And I, like everybody, am multi-genre — Goodreads wouldn’t even dare to define me. But here’s a brief glimpse at what some of my genres include:
- Robert Pattinson erotica
- Edward Cullen Erotica
- Whatever Robert Pattinson was called in Tenet erotica
- James Acaster erotica
- The entire cast of The Vampire Diaries erotica
My contents page is just a list of every chapter of my life, every good thing, every bad thing, every meal and kiss and Whatsapp message. Some I frequently turn back to, the corners turned down on the pages that are my very favourites:
The two weeks I spent in Disneyland. The time I lobbed myself of a cliff in France. Seeing Brian Cox with my dad. That breakfast bircher in Barcelona with my mom. Doing North America’s longest zip-wires. Kayaking for nine solid hours. Getting an astrophysics degree. Filming a music video in subzero temperatures with . Cookie dough dates with . Reading Twilight. Reading Twilight again. Reading Twilight again. Reading anything, ever. Getting a publishing degree. Walking ten miles with a migraine, throwing up, then zipping right back out to replenish my insides with a footlong Subway in New York. Loving the people I love. Drunken games of Articulate at uni. Hotdogs at my nan’s. Spag bol’s at my other nan’s. Balti pies at football matches. Krispy Kremes in train stations. Hiking five mountains in two days. Writing a full book. Twice. Zoo cafes in Budapest. Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Podcasts and soulmate streams and incessant selfies and movie marathons and sixty chicken nuggets and Biscoff jars and Love Island and the moon and homemade cards and Friends quotes and Community episodes and Rick and Morty characters and my innate, infinite, and interdimensional love for everybody and every thing that has marked any one of my pages, ever. And the rest.
Others pages I’ve glued shut (like that time I grabbed the hand of a strange woman down the yoghurt aisle in Aldi thinking she was my mom. I held it for almost seventeen full seconds before I realised. Fortunately, she did not press charges).
I’ve got bookmarks in the form of supermarket receipts (because man, I love a Big Shop™) and printed out emails (I put the em into email) and pictures of Robert Pattinson’s jawline and scraps of James Acaster’s corduroy blazer and a sticker signed by Yungblud. There’s even one of those little pockets attached to my covers, storage area to stick in all the notes my mom has ever handwritten me (friggin’ loads) and every tenner my dad has ever lent me (friggin’ loads) and a USB of all my cousins drama projects and a printout of every Facebook message to my best pal.
Some of my pages are just posters of the universe or the dessert menu from Wetherspoons. Others are quotes from my favourite book The Loneliest Girl in the Universe and my diagnosis notes for my OCD. I’ve got chapters detailing why I hate my large forehead and why I quite like my hands. There are illustrations of my slightly crooked ring finger and my not-arched-enough feet and my hip bones that are so wide, only one of them experiences daylight savings. There are Corpse Husband lyrics and Cher’s top hits and some of my chapters titles are the names of each of the girls mentioned in Mambo Number 5. My margins are filled with drawings of my house, strips of pastel coloured washi tape and a mint Aero wrapper stuck down. I have paragraphs explaining why Stacy’s Mom has got it going on and printed out tweets from when I flirted with Yazoo milkshakes online. Some sentences are typed out using the electric typewriter beneath my bed and one word that does not feature in my story more than once is penicillin; because I’m allergic.
I’ve got a spin off series set in The Darkest Timeline alongside Evil Abed and Spanish translations and a prequel about me living on the moon, because I just know I did in a past life sometime. There’s fanfic and mirror selfies and Netflix original series adaptations all within my franchise. I’m unsuitable for children but also I am an eternal nine year old popup kids book. I belong on a bedside table near floor to ceiling windows overlooking a glittering European lake with a half eaten jar of white chocolate spread resting on top of me. And a three-legged cat attempting to pat it off.
So you see?
I am a story.
I am the main character. The unreliable narrator. Each word is my inner monologue, my soliloquy, my story-line. I am the David Attenborough voice-over of the documented works of my own existence (we’re both inanely British and we’ve both attended Glastonbury. He slut-drops better than I do).
And this? All this? This isn’t even the first draft of a vague synopsis for my whole entire storybook. Because I am 24 years worth of content, that cannot be crammed into this five minute read (and the rest. My dad will handle any compensation requests). And though that’s a big ol’ chunk of time, in the context of the entire cosmos, it’s a fart in a queue, it’s a fairy-light beside the sun, it’s a full-stop within seventeen libraries. Because we are Ephemeral Entities™, us lot. We are brief and we are beautiful and man are we bloody brilliant. Our stories might be short, but there’s a whole friggin’ category for that right? (I think, I think they’re called short stories?). We are flash fiction, here to make an impact. Because we are timeless tales.
We are a story. You are a story. I am a story. And I’m the writer of every tiny word.
No, literally. Remember; I am a writer. You can find out more about Writerly Wilcox™ here:
Me to you right now, and me to the entire bloody universe*: thank you big time, tiny time and Medium time (get it lol) for reading.
“She makes a bangin’ boiled egg. And trust me, I know the meaning of a bang” — The Cosmos. (The trick is; six minutes in already boiling water. You’ll see).
Oh hey, whilst you’re here: why not put the “em” into your “emails” and lob your name onto my mailing list for weekly em-bellishments on my rose-tinted, crumb-coated lens of life. It’s the equivalent of the reduced section in the supermarket (low value Weird Crap™ that you didn’t know you needed).
