Have you ever laid awake at night, unable to sleep, staring at the walls? 

Maybe you’ve glimpsed a shadow, or a strange shape, that sends your thoughts down a certain illusory path. Maybe some part of you eventually figured those thoughts were inane and you shook yourself out of the stupor. Yet, the feeling continued until you drifted into sleep. You probably forgot it, come morning. 

Maybe the reason you were lying awake before was caused by one of your many late night ponderings of your mental state, wondering if you’re just making it up or if something truly is wrong. Doubted yourself, every step of the way, as it seemed that everyone around you claims that people are making things up left and right, and thought that maybe those feelings are perfectly sane. Maybe everyone feels off for no apparent reason sometimes… 

If you have, then you’ll probably like this story. 

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The Yellow Wallpaper is a short story about a young woman feeling trapped by her situation and own inability to cope with life, which she starts to project onto the wallpaper in her room. I think everyone has seen faces in abstract patterns, art, random objects or even nature, but the narrator of this story (she’s left unnamed) takes it multiple steps further. She pictures a whole story for “the woman in the wallpaper” and we see that from her perspective, she already feels disbelieved by and somewhat ostracized from everyone else, so when she picks up the habit of studying the wallpaper in her room and starts noticing things, nothing about it feels unnatural to her. It’s just an extension of her preexisting circumstances. We the readers see how the woman she sees in the wallpaper can be read as a metaphor for how she feels, but because she doesn’t think that it’s a strange thing to see, she doesn’t question it and doesn’t realize that perhaps the woman is her. 

It’s one of those stories that makes you question everything. It asks, “what if?” What if the woman in the wallpaper was real, and truly trapped? What if the narrator is clinically insane? Or, worst of all, what if we all have the potential to think like this and won’t notice if we do?