No more to documentaries of undiscovered worlds, of undercover investigations, of unreported people. We are the generation that decided we should be looked at. They call us vain we say we must have got it somewhere, so technically we’re blameless, so we’re monstrous and shameless, look at us while we’re talking to you. We have no problem with self-involvement. We became the generation interested in ourselves. Coel felt it was important to imagine what she would have written, even if the viewer never sees it. In the pilot, like Coel, Arabella comes to after her assault, while working on her manuscript. Even though the show has been marketed as a “consent drama,” the label feels insufficient, maybe a touch misleading, because she is less concerned with political correctness or the failures of the criminal-justice system than with the psychology of the self: How do you become whole again after trauma breaks you open? The way her face flickers from placidity to horror and levity to devastation reflects the mercurial nature of trauma itself. There’s an expansive, long-limbed, genre-casual energy held together by Coel’s performance. Her performance as Arabella, a Twitter-famous writer who is on deadline to finish a draft, feels like truth telling, though the truth of the thing is not in “what happened” but in how it feels. Watching it is like entering a pool of Coel’s consciousness. I May Destroy You is the culmination of her attempt to make sense of the senseless - an epic journey of autofiction that manages to somehow be both of the moment and beyond it. Over the next 24 hours, she slowly began to piece together that the image of a man in her head with a pink shirt and flaring nostrils wasn’t something plucked from the ether but a memory of the night before. She found herself returning to consciousness at the Fremantle Media production office, where she’d been working, her phone smashed, and finished the episode in what she would later learn was a drug-induced fugue state. While pulling an all-nighter drafting its second season in 2016, she took a break to meet up with a friend at a bar Coel’s drink was spiked, and she was sexually assaulted by two men. She broke into TV at 28 with the first season of her fourth-wall-busting, BAFTA-award–winning comedy Chewing Gum, about a girl desperate to lose her virginity. I May Destroy You feels possible only because now, at the age of 32, Coel is in full creative control as its showrunner, director, star, and writer. She realizes she’s still holding on to the hurt of her father’s absence during her childhood, and she releases herself. She calls exes who have wronged her she tells them that whatever happened between them was an inevitable collision, like two intersecting comets, and she releases them. As she imagines her onscreen character, Arabella, she considers her own life and the lives of others. There is no writers’ room she is her own fuel and engine. She wrote 191 drafts of I May Destroy You, her sprawling, 12-episode HBO-BBC series that fictionalizes the story of her sexual assault. “My team acts as if it’s a great takeaway, like, ‘Wow, this food is really interesting! What are these aromas? What’s here?’ ” She takes notes and retreats to another secluded area - often the vacant pied-à-terre of a wealthy benefactor - where she’ll write and cry and expel her guts again. “I go up into a mountain, and I come back with 12 containers of vomit and these are the episodes,” she says. She writes until there is no time left to write. “I open myself up as a vessel for the story to come through.” “I can’t name what that is, because I’m never going to know,” she says. She cries and cries and cries as she writes because it all feels so big - the pain, the ecstasy - and whether you call that thing God or the cosmos or simply inspiration she isn’t sure, but she knows it is holy and precious. She ran to the pulpit, tears streaming down her face, ready to accept Jesus Christ as her personal lord and savior. When she writes, she gets the same feeling she did one Sunday when she was 18 years old and her hand shot into the air during the altar call. “I am fearfully and wonderfully made,” she recites. Her first poem, “Beautiful,” was inspired by Psalm 139, and it’s still as clear as crystal. The Bible is the reason she started writing. Michaela Coel is not a Christian anymore, but the spirit has never left her.
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