What if this isn’t a girl who hates the person who bought her the dress, but hates wearing dresses because she looks different and people notice? And she doesn’t know what to do with her arms and legs. Who finds having her hair brushed isn’t anger at the person brushing it, but the sensation of each hair being pulled like spikes from her scalp.

What if it’s not the shoes, she loves the shoes, but they pinch and grip, and she doesn’t want her grandmother upset and disappointed with her, and she feels this deeply: the way she’s made the people who love her feel. And actually, these, all these feelings, are the last straw, and now she will be remembered for ruining everyone’s day.

So now this girl doesn’t want to be spoken about, laughed at even, so she will do anything to be liked and loved by other people. She will learn to hide those words; those looks that hurt to the pit of her stomach.

She will learn that feeling she calls “homesickness” isn’t just a cry for home, but for safety and comfort when she feels more alone than she knew possible to feel, even when she is with people.

Can feelings kill a person? These are not signals to herself to find kindness and compassion, to soothe herself, no. Instead, they are a call to be better, mantras that she must do better, could do better, must try harder.

One day, she will be much older, in a place that to all the outside world, the onlookers looks just how it should. But she will see that photo again many years later, of that girl in those red shoes and unbrushed hair and want to do something quite different. She sees it quite differently now.

Because this day, when she looks at this little girl, she is much older, and now she has found that photo because she is packing up and picking through the aftermath of a lifetime of settling for scraps, who learned to build such big walls to survive and protect herself from things much more than she ever should have had to. She has lived in a place that others all nod at with approval, but do not know that this is a stone castle that is hard, cold, and very lonely.

She will learn the familiar in laying alone in the dark, believing this is what she deserved, convincing herself it’s all her. Others tell her this is a fine and okay life, and so she builds more walls and tells herself again this is her and she just needs to try harder. She will hear the walls speak, convincingly, their truth, and she will believe it over her own spectral self.

Until one day she will get up and leave, as quietly and amenably as possible, after all, her life really does depend on it. She will do this to the shock of all those around her: “What? I don’t believe it,” even, “What have you done?” Because she has managed the biggest, longest, most convincing act she’s ever done and she stayed just because, well, it was what others wanted all along. “Don’t make a fuss.”

But that photo of the girl with the fire, the passion, the unbrushed hair now says something else to her. It says: “Don’t wait. Fight. Be free.” Be what you always were and you will survive this.

Because she was never meant to survive in that castle.

She was meant to burn it down.

Could Try Harder by Eliza Fricker available to order from all good bookstores now.

Published May 2026