How ‘I May Destroy You’ challenged my perception of acceptance, consent and sexuality

“If you don’t tell it, it’s erased,” said Michaela Coel in her British GQ interview earlier this week. Coel, a 33-year old Black British actor, screenwriter, and singer, has been discussing her emotionally-powerful series, How I May Destroy You, which she wrote and created based on her own sexual assault.

It also makes for a rather rare screen viewing showcasing the lives of Black British community in London — a city I consider my soul-home and hope to live in someday. And so when she talked about on being able to create a show showcasing her own life, simple yet powerful, not unlike her achingly beautiful series, I was left reflecting on what it meant to me.

And just like the title of the show, I was left wondering — will it destroy me?

The answer is simple too: it did but it also didn’t.

Over a dreary weekend, overcome with exhaustion and existential crisis, I psyched myself up to watch the show that had been doing the rounds in my circle. You know one of those shows that are recommended on WhatsApp with vague lines like “you have to watch it”, or “it killed me”. I read up on it, but I realised I had to mentally prepare myself to be in a space to be able to absorb the show the way it’s meant to be — unfiltered.

It was hauntingly emotional — a show so powerful that it can either consume you, or discomfort you — and I mean both in the nicest way possible. It makes for a difficult viewing; it throws you into uncomfortable territories of consent. Necessary but uncomfortable, and that’s when I knew I had been sucked into the universe so skillfully crafted by Coel, or rather recreated with splashes of fiction.

The show’s opening follows Arabella Essiedu (played by Coel), and her rather ordinary life of a young woman navigating London, with her creative career intact. She’s a semi-famous Twitter-influencer, from a working-class family, commissioned to write her second book by an elite publishing house.

It’s your classic average millennial life, but that’s just the prologue.

The show’s strength lies in throwing spotlight on the nuances of dating, and its honest conversations on consent, and pleasure by mapping it out in every episode — sometimes pushing the line, and sometimes redrawing it.

Coel sets up the backdrop, and its context. As a viewer, you sort of have your feet planted in two realities, safely in the comfort of your home, and the one that exists out of it, or on the screen.

We see racism, sexism and homophobia when it comes to sexual experiences and consent. But the show isn’t a PSA.

It simply urges you to ask those uncomfortable questions. Or at the very least, have a conversation about it.

“The show is about everything,” Coel had said in her interview with Trevor Noah. It is everything. It’s Coel’s own reflection of the non-binary perception of consent packaged in a comedy-drama series for us.

It’s nuanced, it’s dramatic, it’s emotional, and it’s equally angering. But mostly, it made me question the boundaries of pleasure and consent, not just as a woman but also as a viewer following Arabella’s journey.

Coel sensitively draws out Arabella’s recovery, or rather coming to terms with her drug-induced sexual assault after a night-out with her friends — not so different from her own life. The ‘night’ shows up in flashbacks, which sets the non-linear tone of the show. We go back, and forth. We know as much as Arabella in the show does. We’re her, as we see the night manifest in her — attaching itself onto her skin and consequently mine.

Because she’s the ‘victim’. She’s the survivor. She’s the saviour. She’s the conflict. She’s everything. But she’s also me — it’s disorienting.

In the second episode, when Arabella finally accepts she’s been assaulted, she breaks down in front of the investigating officers in a small room — hiding her face in her jumper as her friend gently embraces her. It’s emotional and raw, while I sob my eyes out. And then we see her casually acknowledge her assault in the next frame.

You experience your first whiplash.

And that’s the show’s strength. We see a woman, coping up with her sexual assault, but who is also comfortable in being sexual. She’s simply rebuilding her life — trying to finish the draft of her book, going to therapy, using social media to create a safe space while sharing her own experience. We see Arabella become a version of herself that the MeToo movement asks of us women — speak up, and speak louder. But in Arabella, we see the fragility of her influence as it also tears her apart slowly— from her friends, her work, and even herself.

Then there’s the night when it all happened. I want to know why, and why her. I wanted answers. I wanted to understand how it’ll change her dynamics with her closest friends. There’s Terry Pratchard, and Kwame, her bestfriends, who themselves struggle to toe the lines of consent in their own lives. Here we experience our first brush with subverted politics in sexuality, as Kwame struggles to report his own assault, as a gay man. But then there’s Terry’s celebrated threesome, her one-way ticket to sexual liberation — that left a bitter taste as I reached the end of the show.

We also see glimpses of Arabella’s relationship with her long-distance lover, Biagio, a drug-dealer based in Italy. I couldn’t connect to it, but perhaps that’s another way Coel wanted us to reflect on how we perceive a healthy partnership. Where do we perceive ‘our’ value in that companionship? Arabella is smart, self-assured yet she can’t seem to shake off her attachment to Biago’s indifference. She keeps finding herself being pulled towards him, even though he repeatedly gaslights her — he is, after all, a decent guy. It’s immersive, and I physically couldn’t look away.

But there’s the underlying theme of representation too. The show, in its story, doesn’t overtly claim to be ‘diverse’. It’s created by a Black woman with a predominantly black cast because that’s the story as it is. It shows us a side of London that we barely see, a side reserved to make aesthetically pleasing indie videos.

I May Destroy You is simply showing us the lives of thousands of Black immigrants who’ve been a part of the social fabric of London for generations, without making that the central theme- they’re poor, they’re privileged, they’re cool, they date, they work, and they mess up. They’re them, as it is.

Coel, is, justifiably, just telling the story of her own.

But it’s the show’s finale that gives you the final whiplash. Will I finally get closure? Will Arabella get closure? By then, I’d been so deeply involved in the show, that I realised healing doesn’t always necessarily need a conclusive one — it’s the fraught concept of self-acceptance, unceasing support group, going to therapy (if one can even afford that), and the penultimate question of inherent self-worth that we attach with our bodies. And so when we’re stripped of that worth, forcibly, or by coercion, the filter of self-worth takes the first hit.

Coel, in an interview with Vulture, said that she wondered about Arabella trying to come back after almost losing herself. Through the story, Coel was able to not only give Arabella some solace, but for herself too.

“What does closure look like? It’s not that it ends. For me, I look at the last four years and I feel this overwhelming sense of euphoria and pain,” she said.

The show, in its emotionally explorative theme, told me that my worth, can be rebuilt over time, if not completely fixed — it’s in that imperfect reality one can continue to live.

The undercurrents, which become jaded and worn out over time, can be contained. It’s not necessarily a happy ending, it’s more of an acceptance ending.

And perhaps that was the closure I needed from the show.