Poor Little Sick Girls by Ione Gamble

Author:Ione Gamble [Gamble, Ione]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780349702407
Publisher: Little,Brown
Published: 2022-05-26T00:00:00+00:00

In more ways than one, the first part of my life has felt like a horror film. I haven’t spent these years being chased around town by serial killers in masks, haunted by ghosts in my bedroom or watching on as my friends murder our classmates with reckless abandon. But as my health declined, I became less and less in control of my own body. I couldn’t predict whether a juice drink would cause me to vomit uncontrollably for hours on end, or if the churning pain in my stomach would stop me dead in my tracks halfway down the street. A feeling similar to the moment just before an on-screen jump scare would course through my veins, a bodily instinct that warns us to be scared of what will happen next, the moment I could feel the onset of a flare-up.

My rotting insides were becoming impossible to hide, as my skin morphed into a grim shade of grey, I could barely walk without twisting an ankle, and my eyes were set in hollows of deep blue that told the world just how sleep-deprived I really was. As I came to more closely resemble a corpse bride than a woman blooming into adulthood, I slowly realised that I was becoming the thing that I had always feared: I was a gross girl.

We’ve all been horrified by our own bodies at various points in our lives. My own personal realisation of just how disgusting our physical forms really are came from my diagnosis with Crohn’s disease, but deep down I knew long before my body started malfunctioning that being prim and proper was never part of my destiny. I would argue that a gross, horrible girl lives inside all of us. We all downplay the satisfaction of squeezing a huge spot, pretending that the pop of a yellow head absolutely repulses us. We pretend to have never skipped a shower, and that our hair definitely hasn’t been greasy for the second day in a row. We all profess to have absolutely never picked our noses or pulled at a scab just for the hell of it. But for me, my own disgusting body became impossible to ignore. I was condemned to spending my life consumed by a fear of never achieving acceptability, leaving me with no other choice than to embrace the fact that gross girls not only have more fun, they’re the ones that get shit done.

Horror films are as much of a teenage rite of passage as puberty itself. As our bodies rebel, so do we; our first experience of sneaking into the cinema underage – or, now, streaming a slasher film on Netflix – often coincides with the confusing sense of horror and accomplishment of our first menstruation. As a teenager, I would spend hours at the weekend sifting through charity-shop VHS bargain bins. I didn’t grow up pre-DVD – I am firmly a product of the internet age – so my reasoning for seeking out this now-ancient tech wasn’t necessity or nostalgia.

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