Instead, Coel wrote three endings, each of them spiraling forward from the gutting final moment of the penultimate episode: after months of staking out the bar where she was attacked in an effort to recover her slippery memories of that fateful night, Arabella identifies her attacker across the crowded room. Yet as she wrote her way through, no single ending proved a fitting container for Arabella’s trauma-no single sequence of events could reconcile it, heal it, make sense of it.
Finding a safe space to re-engage with very traumatic events is helpful, and for me, because I was making a fictional series, this was a safe space for me to do it.” “As my right hand was experiencing trauma, my left was taking notes,” Coel said. All the while, as her case cycled fruitlessly through the legal system, she wrestled with what would become I May Destroy You, turning to writing as a means of emotional exorcism. After calling the police, she shared her experience with her producers at Retort, the now-defunct production company behind Chewing Gum, who funded her therapy at a private clinic until shooting on Chewing Gum concluded. In the hours to follow, fragmented memories of the night dribbled back to her, and she grasped that she had been assaulted. Hours later, she came to at the production office where she had been writing in a fugue state, she hammered out the remainder of her draft. While pulling an all-nighter on a morning deadline, Coel ducked out to meet a friend at a bar, where a stranger spiked her drink and sexually assaulted her.
#I may destroy you theo series
In 2016, Coel’s own journey to hell and back began during the making of Chewing Gum, her award-winning comedy series about an ultra-religious twenty-something hellbent on losing her virginity. Letting go, for her, is allowing herself to go through all of those emotions and all of those stages of grief, accepting that this happened and that she has survived it.” Ultimately no one scenario is really the answer.
I wanted to explore the different ways that a person can engage with a very traumatic situation. In the very beginning, my therapist said, ‘What we need to do now is bring you closure, irrelevant to what happens with the case, because you carry that thing with you.’ This became my objective with Arabella. “When they closed my case, I learned that I would have to find my own closure,” Coel said. How could she find some measure of closure for Arabella when, so often for survivors of sexual assault, closure is a fiction? Her answer came not from legal justice, nor from revenge against her attacker, but from within.