You may've been waiting for this, (I don't know I may be self-agrandizing) but I live to dissapoint.
On August 4th of this year, after over a decade of delays, Stephenie Meyer’s Midnight Sun was finally released. People lined up outside of bookstores, downloaded audio books, and curled up on their quarantine worn couches to start the same story they’d been told years before, but this time narrated by a moody, anxiety ridden, eternal seventeen-year old boy.
Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga was one of the most culturally significant phenoms of the late 2000s and early 2010s, but if you aren’t familiar with it, let me catch you up. Bella – main girl. Edward – vampire she wants to be her boyfriend. Forks – where they live. Midnight Sun – Twilight, the first book in the series, but from vampire boyfriend’s perspective.
Originally Meyer was working on Midnight Sun as far back as 2007 but stopped writing in August of 2008 when the first twelve chapters of her manuscript were leaked online. She refused to point fingers, going so far as to say she didn’t think the manuscript was released with any malicious intent. Still, she was so hurt by the incident that she said it would likely take her several years to pick the project up again.
Apparently, several years is, you know, at least ten.
The point is, Twilight fans have been waiting, itching, and begging, for this novel for well over a decade and in this, the year of our lord two thousand and twenty, the year that in every other respect has been a total shit show, we, the Twihards, the ridiculed and spit upon, were blessed.
So why haven’t I read Midnight Sun yet?
Yeah, I haven’t read it yet.
I am, arguably, Stephenie Meyer’s biggest fan. I have seen the Twilight movies upwards of twenty times, each. The Host is my favorite book. I have a shrine of Twilight memorabilia in my bedroom. I own three copies of each of the Twilight books, hardback, paperback, and the white editions. I started a book club with a few of my friends last January, the sole purpose of which was rereading the saga. I forced my roommate to spend weeks, weeks, of quarantine trying to put together a puzzle of Robert Pattinson as Edward Cullen’s face with me. In the end we were unsuccessful, there were just too many shades of black and too many similar shapes, but I made her try. I love Stephenie Meyer’s body of work, and I adore Twilight.
So, what the actual hell is wrong with me?
I’ve been carrying my crisp, never opened, copy of Midnight Sun around with me in my backpack for months now, waiting, hoping, and praying for the moment I’ll be struck with the insatiable urge to read. Such a moment hasn’t come and I’m starting to worry that it won’t.
It could be that I’m distracted. The world has been busy, what with a pandemic, protests against police brutality, a monumental election, and most recently a literal siege on the country’s capitol. I’ve been busy, being promoted to cake decorator, getting a cat, returning to a management position at the Spanish Fork Cinemark, and writing a new novel. But the election is over, my novel is written, and I know better than anyone that it would only take me a day and a half to actually read the stupid book. A book that I’ve been waiting for, I remind you, for well over a decade.
So why am I writing this essay instead of reading it?
I want to say I don’t know, that I can’t come up with any one reason I haven’t started reading, but I do. It’s on the tip of my tongue, pushing up against my teeth. It’s thick and stuffy, drying out and scratching up my mouth. It’s tight in my chest and taught in my lungs. It doesn’t fit in easy phrases or clean statements. And it’s not going to make any damn sense.
I think… I think I’m scared. I think I’m scared to love like that again.
I’ve been in therapy since I was fourteen and in the last six years or so years my therapists (plural, meaning more than one of them) have really gotten hung up on this whole vulnerability thing. I’ve been assigned the task of watching Brene Brown’s TED Talk at least three times. When my voice starts to crack or my eyes start to tear up my therapist will scoot his chair closer to mine and after I finish my sentence ask me “where is that emotion coming from?” When I open up about some sort of strain or stress I’m undergoing he always suggests that I share my feelings with a friend.
I don’t like Brene Brown’s TED talk all that much. I want to throw hands when my therapists scoots closer and have to bite back snide remarks when he asks me why I’m crying. And I never share my feelings with a friend.
Almost never anyway.
A few months ago I did. And again a few weeks after that.
I’m being worn down.
It kind of makes me angry that these techniques have started to work. I know, objectively, that vulnerability is good. I also know it’s uncomfortable and feels like weakness.
In war sad frontlines, poorly defended cities, and unmanned forts are also called vulnerable. Specifically, vulnerable to attack.
Can you think of anything more vulnerable to attack than a twelve-year-old girl?
A twelve year old girl is awkward, anxious, and exploitable. Physically – she’s likely just gone through a growth spurt, leaving her feeling gangly and long. She’s not used to her own size and is probably as coordinated as Bambi on ice. Her boobs are almost certainly different sizes, and whether she’s started her period or not she feels like a freak, because simultaneously everyone, and no one, else has. Mentally – she’s preparing for, or has entered, what adults are calling “real school”. She’s getting letter grades now, trying to maintain a 4.0, and taking classes from several different teachers who all have widely varying expectations. And even though she barely understands it, counselors are asking her to make plans for things like college and career, but they won’t let her play outside anymore. Emotionally – well at twelve-years-old she’s about to discover that the entire world hates her.
After Zayn Malik left One Direction in 2014, Directioners were distraught. Of course, about five minutes after they started grieving, the jokes started rolling in. It was amid this upheaval of ridicule that beloved Young Adult and Children’s Author Shannon Hale tweeted “No human is more hated than the preteen/teen girl. Whatever she loves is openly and eagerly mocked.”
I, of course, already knew that. But it still made me cry to see it written in words.
I was in sixth grade the first time I read Twilight. I was anxious and awkward and exploitable. I was vulnerable to attack.
And, holy hell, was I attacked.
I have heard every criticism of Twilight that has ever been raised. I have listened, in silence, as something I loved was ripped to pieces and ridiculed for all that it was. Worse, I have stood by as I was demeaned and belittled. My intelligence, my taste, even my emotional and mental wellbeing have been called into question and proclaimed non-existent because I liked a book where a girl met a pretty boy, who just so happened to be a vampire, and they fell in love.
That silence and that criticism took their toll.
The teen girl is powerful, but she’s vilified. Books and movies are written for her, music produced and performed, but all of it is “bad”. It’s the media that clogs that mainstream, that’s poisoning the artform. It’s what’s “popular”.
And so, the world hates teen girls, and teen girls learn to hate the world.
But first they hate themselves.
I mean, you must be wrong to love yourself when no one else does, right?
I turned twenty-five a month ago. I’m not a teen girl anymore, not even close. But… well…
So, this is a bit convoluted, but this one time my great grandma Fern was showing my grandpa and grandma photos of herself from back when she was eighteen or nineteen years old and she came upon a photo of herself and several friends standing in front of a car. The picture was taken just before or after a road trip they’d all taken to California, and everyone was smiling with their arms wrapped around one another. It was one of Fern’s fondest memories.
Then, the way my grandpa tells it, she pointed at herself in the picture and said, “I’m still that girl on the inside.”
Every time I go to change my profile picture, or make a new account on a dating app, I have to remind myself that it’s been seven years since I was in High School and I can’t pick the picture from my senior trip where I’m cradling my friend’s pet pineapple. I never learned how to cook. Several of my closest friends have been my closest friends since I was thirteen. I have a Disney Princess poster on my wall. Fall Out Boy is my favorite band. My favorite books are still Twilight.
The last day of eighth grade my friends and I went around with our digital cameras and took dozens upon dozens of pictures that we posted to Facebook almost immediately after getting home. When I see a photo of myself from that day, wearing the red Mickey Mouse jacket I wore every single day that year, I’m shaken. I can see myself in every single one of those pictures. I’m right there, front and center. Try as I might I couldn’t hide who I was back then, I just didn’t know how. I felt small and worthless and unwanted, but I was loud and brash and unavoidable anyway.
I don’t wear that hoodie anymore, and I’m a lot more liberal now, but I’m still that girl on the inside. I’m still bitterly defensive, prone to obsession, and more than a little anxious. I’m still vulnerable to attack.
I never grew up.
But do any of us? On the inside?
And that’s why I haven’t read Midnight Sun yet – because I’m afraid to be the girl I am on the inside on the outside. I’m afraid to get excited about something I’ll be ridiculed for. I’m afraid to be a teenage girl again.
It’s okay to be nostalgic, for me to be attached to Twilight in this dusty way because it was such an important part of my childhood, but it’s not okay for me to love it with vitality. It’s not okay to revert. It’s not okay to relapse.
So Midnight Sun sits in my backpack, collecting lint, waiting for the day I’m ready – ready to be that girl on the outside again.