Created By : Michaela Cole
Why is rape still a stigma despite the 21st century making leaps and bounds in terms of the noise we create of the abhorrent act? Why do we still put a veil on the reputation of the woman when she is raped? What is rape exactly? How do we categorize it? Does every rape victim go through the same emotions after? Michaela Cole lends her boisterous voice to a pertinent act of violence in our lives. Not all of us go through it, which is why it becomes important to understand how to lend support to someone who is struggling with trauma while its not apparent in the utmost dramatic ways.
We are used to see distraught rape victims, poring forth their version of life, how the abandon killed them, thinking about the agony in the form of outbursts and wails. Arabella is shell-shocked, she can’t even remember who raped her, what happened in those few hours that has changed her life. There is a semblance of violation & a face to attached to it but there is no trace of a DNA or a ted bundy esque face to go describe the artist. A blooming writer of “Chronicles of a fed-up millennial” finds herself in the midst of a struggle she can voice out, but she can’t grieve. There is awareness of loss. A loss of lost too.
The protagonist is staring into an abyss she doesn’t know why. You commiserate with her, empathize with her, you feel helpless because this shouldn’t have happened to her but the larger narrative which unfolds through flashback years of characters here, nobody knew what hit them & the age doesn’t matter when it comes to rape. A teenager is equally traumatized as a career-oriented focused individual who likes to have some fun with drugs & alcohol. Moral compass seems to shift in reasoning for the act. The series hits the hammer on the nail when consenting adults have conflicted ideas of consent. How we define boundaries, who understands them & how safe are people meeting strangers through an app.
Liberation comes with a price tag. Our generation pays it through anxiety & muted sadness. The claustrophobia of victimhood is terrifying, it shows up when you least expect it in the form of the locking of a door knob or the familiarity of a face cut. Man-made horrors aren’t self-inflicting, they are punctuated pestilences on our dour skin of conscience. There is more on the mind than we let out in the open no matter how much we try. But there is hope in the form of friends, in the form of acquaintances, in the form of justice groups at times, who will try to set us back on the path of glory, one that we never imagine with reprobate speed breaks.
Empty glances into oblivions are good for display pictures on Instagram, in reality they are just apparitions sucking our soul out. Sadness has no timeline, it appears when it can like the alarm notification on a morning you thought was a holiday, the only difference being, you can’t shut it down. Sadness isn’t lack of happiness, it’s persistence of unease and distaste. You grow an appetite for gloom and melancholy as if this were your destiny, Arabella along with the other characters try to fight it with all their might, they win once & lose a million times, but the one is all the hope they need. I may destroy you is about the glimmer of hope we find around us.
