Feb 16, 2021
Kamala Khan, Ms. Marvel, and Me
I’m still drawn to stories about teenage girls’ lives, real or fantastical, and a part of it is trying to glimpse a world I never fully got to walk in.
Gabrielle Bellot is a staff writer for Literary Hub and the Head Instructor at Catapult. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Cut, Gay Magazine, Tin House, Guernica, The Paris Review Daily, them, and many other places. Her essays have been anthologized in Indelible in the Hippocampus (2019), Can We All Be Feminists? (2018), and elsewhere. She holds both an MFA and PhD in Creative Writing from Florida State University. She lives in Queens.
I’m still drawn to stories about teenage girls’ lives, real or fantastical, and a part of it is trying to glimpse a world I never fully got to walk in.
For all the pain, there is also beauty in the margins those outside of them may never understand.
I try to feel my lungs expanding and contracting, just to make sure they still are. There is something soothing, like the indigo of a fading day, in that reminder.
There is hope in the size and power of our protests, hope that our message will truly, finally be heard—but whether it will be understood in the hearts that need it most is a much harder, scarier question.
They suggest that we can get through adversity, that things could always be worse. And sometimes, the best of these stories are genuinely full of love.
I don’t think I cried over his death for a long time. I wondered if something was wrong with me. I hadn’t realized that we have to learn how to cry.
Just as Sendak inverts a stereotypical association of white with youthful ingenuousness, Max inverts the expectations of many a children’s morality tale, for he is allowed to be wild.
