Performative Alientation? SO me, Bunny.
Was it divine intervention that led me to Bunny? Unlikely. I’d bought it months ago—April, perhaps—enticed by its garish, candy-colored cover. It sat on my shelf, waiting. I’d glance at it often, still inexplicably drawn to its synthetic brightness. The cover (and at the time, TikTok) made me buy it—but the timing of my reading felt suspiciously poetic. You see, I had just finished The Secret History and then here is Bunny, another dark academia book- but laced with gore and glitter.
The aesthetic..WOW. Think babydoll bows on bloodied axes. A rosary looped through a velvet spellbook. A haunted girlhood shrine layered in pastel lace, ceramic rabbits, and abused copies of literary greats. Need. I. Say. More.
The protagonist, Samantha, was me..specifically, she was everything I hate about myself. The worst kind of lonely girl—the one who turns isolation into personality, who treats alienation like an identity. She’s an insufferable, self-mythologizing sad girl. She wallows. She rejects kindness and connection, then laments their absence with banal self-pity. I kept thinking: Fuck, she’s awful. And then: Oh fuck. She’s me.
I’m at least honest in my melodrama. But what disturbed me wasn’t her despair—it was the narcissism embedded within it. Her love interests are her own conjured 'creations' riddled with her own insufferable qualities. Basically, she falls for a fantasies of herself. How ridiculous. How self-indulgent. And how humiliating to admit: I’ve had that thought too. If only there were someone like me — someone who understood me the way I understand me...another me..
By the end of it, the real horror was that Samantha's loneliness and petulant bitterness was what drove her to the brink of insanity..
It forced a question I’ve tried to avoid but have been wondering recently: Is my alienation genuine? Or is it a performance I’ve refined over the years? Do I truly believe I’m too strange or serious for most people—or have I just made peace with social difficulty by romanticizing it? I fill my time with books, art, and odd fascinations, draping myself in difference. I say I’m too complex for casual connection. An old soul. But maybe t’s just a shield..a way to preempt rejection..
Bunny enchanted me at first, but its narrative thinned quickly; by the final chapters, I was flipping pages out of obligation. Still, it left a mark. I walked away not thinking about Samantha, but about myself. About how I sometimes wear my sorrow like a rare perfume, obscure and irresistible. How I cling to it for identity, talk about it like it’s a trait, write about it like it’s an art.
I know, like Samantha, deep down I yearn for belonging. God, how I wish I had my own girl-cult. The Bunnies, or someone like the dancers in Suspiria..soft femininity, shared rituals and beautiful violence. I crave female friendship. But I’ve moved through life unable to keep or make many female friends. I maybe attach myself to one, but never a group. Maybe because I always wonder — what if I’m not the Duchess? What if I’m just another girl in the room, unchosen, unadored?
Tomorrow, I’ll indulge in hot Pilates. The rest of the day will be devoted to preparing a Greek-themed dinner—an offering, perhaps, to the gods of pretension. (I am reading Oedipus after all. The Secret History has done something irreversible to my brain.)
I invited a few girls. One might show. Maybe. You see? I make attempts. Pitiful, but real.
My promised leaves for Virginia on Tuesday evening. The week ahead will be mine alone. More solitude. I’ll try to pick up extra shifts for socializing purposes, not financial. I’ll read. I’ll think. I’ll write. But some small voice still whispers: someone save me from this miserable little pity party.