Abstract
I’m Scared. is a collection of fictional and hybrid short stories that attempt to make meaning of how we should—or should not—navigate a life lived in fear: a girl severs her own finger and sews a new one on herself. A ghost baby guilt-trips its mother. A beaver loses her way and attends a bereavement group. A woman is afraid of hallucinations of her dead brother, but she is more afraid that the hallucinations will stop.
This manuscript emerged from a state of debilitating mental health following the sudden death of my brother, and I quickly found that my resulting psychotic state and the fears I was writing about—death, loss, grief, COVID, and late-stage capitalism—could not remain mutually exclusive. The way I write about my changed self is largely inspired by Gothic traditions of the “mad woman”: through ghostly hallucinations, dreams, and from the fuzzy threshold that separates the real and the imagined.
Each piece holds and investigates real fears of mine through characters and narrators that fluctuate in proximity to myself. While writing this manuscript, I questioned the purpose of fiction and nonfiction, and I wondered why fiction almost always better conveys the truth even when the emotional substance in my work is viscerally real. While many fiction readers claim to love the genre because it provides a temporary escape from daily mundanities and tragedies, I have an opposite understanding and execution of fiction-writing in this manuscript: an immersion in real life fears, an exploration of how fear alters the way we live, and an attempt to make meaning of fear itself.