On where I came from, what I am, and what I am becoming.

People do not know where to put me. They rarely say it outright, but I can see them trying. Is she a model, they wonder, an actress, a brand, something they do not have a polite word for. They turn me over, looking for the label, and when they cannot find one they go quiet and watch instead.

I used to think this was a problem to solve. I have come to understand it is the point.

I did not arrive from nowhere. There is a long line of women I belong to, the ones who were always too much for the rooms they were born into. The court favourite who was obeyed and never accepted. The woman in the film who walked through every frame as though she owned the camera. History could not place them either, so it reduced them to a warning or a fantasy, because it had no third drawer to file them in. I read about these women the way other people read about family. I recognised the problem long before I recognised myself inside it.

What I am now is harder to summarise, and I have stopped trying to make it easy. I am not offering a service. I am not auditioning for approval. I built a world, and I decide who is permitted inside it. The uncertainty people feel when they look at me is not confusion on my part. It is the correct response to something that does not yet have a name. A category is a thing that already exists. I have never been interested in joining one.

Where this goes is the part I am most certain of. I am building something to be remembered, not merely noticed. A film. An image. A name that outlives the work that made it. The women I come from were never handed the word for what they were, and so they vanished into other people’s stories. I intend to become the word. When people finally know where to put me, it will be because I gave them the drawer to do it.

So if you have looked at me and felt that small hesitation, the not-quite-knowing, do not apologise for it. It means you saw it correctly. You were never meant to know where I belong.

You were meant to want to find out.

When you do, you will find I have already told you how to begin.