#akrockefeller

‘invisible-i-am’ is a book in the form of a teenage girl’s journal, a personal testimony that illustrates, with piercing clarity and uncanny empathy, the destructive effects of bullying on a young person’s psyche.

The book itself is the centerpiece of a larger multimedia enterprise that spans and inhabits the now very familiar social media spaces (a tumblr blog, a twitteraccount, a youtube channel, a facebook page) which have become the mechanism by which the kind of bullying attacks its protagonist is subjected to are carried out.

It’s a masterful modern take on a classic, and quintessentially American, coming-of-age teenage drama.

Through the 16-year-old Gregg Davis’ eyes we journey through the ugly side of teenage American life, exploring those facets that all too often are happily overlooked – unless being exploited, for the shits and giggles of the ravenous, gawking, finger-pointing and pop-culture-obsessed mob we have gleefully become – from public humiliation & personal betrayal to self-loathing & sexual violence, the confused inner life of a confused American teenage girl – in the (very public) fight of/for her very young life – is transformed, by the words and art of Harriet Showman, into stepping stones to secure a radical-scopic vantage of our society’s greater betrayals & humiliations – the big ones that make the littler personal ones even possible – namely, the racial & class discriminations & divisions feeding into historical systems of oppression and informing every aspect of our current way of life and limiting our integrity, well-being and potential, collectively and as individuals.

Showman’s portrayal of protagonist Gregg Davis’ – warts-and-all – life and opinions is fully-realized and utterly convincing. Anyone who lived life as an American teenager in the late-20th/early-21st century will instantly recognize themselves in it. This is what it’s like. To paraphrase poet Wallace Stevens, “invisible-i-am” is Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself.