a poem on franz kafka’s metamorphosis:
Who is a woman without a deep feeling of isolation, shame, depersonalization, and the innate pressure to uphold that which is expected of her? Gregor, within Kafkas novella, is a culmination of all that I felt at 16, and personification (or maybe beetle-fication) of the small voice that remains.
We feel shame. Shame in ones form and shame in the nature of ones being. Shame in something that is innately inalterable but still innately shameful. What else is one to do than shut-in and walk about their walls?
A teenage girl often feels like a deformed dung beetle, grotesque, and unnatural in one’s body, slowly learning how to function, slowly becoming dysfunctional. They fight with their family whenever they emerge from isolation, fleeting attempts at meaningful communication or connection. Humans are fearful, then angry, and push away those that are difficult to communicate with. But her surroundings simply wound her into submission and normalcy, until she either complies to the status-quo or the wounds rot and eat her to death.
This shame and isolation culminates to the dehumanization of oneself, to something like a dung beetle, to which no one is able to connect to, only to grit their teeth and bear it, and so they must remain alone. Kafka was never a teenage girl, but I fear I have never felt more seen and devastated in my life, than I did after and during my reading of this book
Taken from my old substack blog, written in the fall of 2024.
Feral in the barrel 