This passage from Anna Burns’ Milkman always makes me think of how young girls search for cover at adolescence and how the masks we devise alter what they were intended to protect:
So it was a delicate and ongoing process not to reveal I had their measure or that my 'I don't know' really meant 'Heel! Home! Get out! Get out!' which meant I had to call upon a back-up manoeuvre at once stepping up to the mark. It didn't however, just do that. Initially it came into its own and proved itself of invaluable assistance to me. Then, and outside of expectation, and without the least warning, it began to take over proceedings, overturning my 'I don't know' as first initiative and implementing alternate strategies which belatedly I realised were incidental against my gossipy neighbours and more in the main against myself. I was attacking myself and it was my face, the expression on my face -- one I had intended as temporary, as provisional, which surely and truly I believed could be nothing but provisional. I'd assumed that how my face looked, how I was making it look, how I presented it outwardly, was down to me, under the control of me, the 'I am' deep in the council chamber. I thought this real me was in there, in charge, hidden from them, but directing from the undergrowth. Thought too, I'd chosen a subordinate to assist me and not some rebel to turn tables and override me. That though, was what happened and it happened first with the face. It got stuck...
Never did it occur to them that my powers of acuity and deception might have exceeded their own powers of acuity and deception. People can be extraordinarily slipshod whenever already they have made up their minds. When it came to it, although I didn't betray I was emotionally or intellectually charged, that didn't mean I thought I was no so. Of course I believed myself sentient. Of course I knew I was angry. Of course I knew I was frightened, that I had no doubt my body, to me, was brimming with a natural reaction. At first I could feel this reaction which confirmed I was alive, that I was in there, inside my body, experiencing this under-the-surface turbulence. Thing was though, before I'd gained the understanding of what was happening, my seemingly flattened approach to life became less a pretence and more and more real as time went on. At first an emotional numbness set in. Then my head, which initially had reassured with, 'Excellent. Well done. Successfully am I fooling them in that they do not know who I am or what I'm thinking or what I'm feeling,' now began itself to doubt I was even there. 'Just a minute,' it said. 'Where is our reaction? we were having a privately expressed reaction but now we're not having it. Where is it?' Thus my feelings stopped expressing. Then they stopped existing. And now this numbance from nowhere had come so far on in its development that along with others in the area finding me inaccessible, I, too, came to find me inaccessible. My inner world, it seemed, had gone away.
Have you ever thought of writing fiction?
I think you wrote some Harry Potter fan fiction as a teenager? But has it ever appealed to you as an adult?
A favourite book of mine.