Stitch Bitch

I have a confession to make: I genuinely liked “Stitch Bitch.”

It gave me a down-the-rabbit-hole feeling that is usually only provoked by visual works. This story, in all of its nonsensical wonder, made me look at the way that I produce words and stories in an entirely different way.

That being said, it was an exhausting read. In linear stories I can orient myself with a few simple clues from the text but in her “hypertext story,” I was never entirely sure what words were the ones that would string together the most meaningful sentence so I had to pay attention to all of them. Reading “Stitch Bitch” left my brain a little dizzy as it was SO dense with its ridiculous amount of superfluous words. Because of this, I can see how so many people wanted nothing more than to rip the story to literal shreds. Our brains aren’t used to this kind of story, it doesn’t go Point A to Point B and that’s incredibly frustrating.

But despite its frustrations and non-linear motion, I found that Stitch Bitch held some value for me. On the second page, Jackson said something that resonated deeply with me, “…if it’s in your head it’s yours to express.” I am hyper-critical of the things that I produce because of the intrinsic and extrinsic pressure to be great. Perhaps I need to let go of this notion of “being great” and just let the things that I want to express be. At the end of the day, its flaws may be the thing that make it great.