The fingers of Arabella Essiedu struggled to find their place on the keyboard. Rather, they reached for her phone and set a timer for one hour, in the pilot of “I May Destroy You.”

Fleeing the dreaded office and its book draft deadlines, the pink-haired writer wandered the streets of London. Once reunited with friends, the three laughed their way to what was supposed to be a fun night.

Arabella remembered singing a Nicki Minaj song at “Karoke Kingdom.” She remembered doing shots around a gambling table, the sound of a toast ringing in her ears. She remembered the sound the shattering of a wine glass made when it hit the floor.

She remembered the strength leaving her knees as her body hit the floor.

But something happened that night that she doesn’t remember. What she ultimately realized becomes the premise of HBO’s hit show “I May Destroy You,” which aired on June 7, 2020.

It earned its writer, director, producer and star, Michaela Coel, her first Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Limited Series. The award was one of nine nominations for the show at the 2021 Emmy Awards on Sept. 19.

The 12-episode series uses the topic of consent to show a survivor’s journey of navigating trauma.

It addresses sexual assault primarily through Arabella’s experience in the pilot, a direct instance of rape. However, it also shines a light on “gray-area” situations that may not be widely recognized as assault.

Coel discussed how the show took the conversation around consent a step further in an interview on “The Daily Show,” released on Aug. 11, 2020.

“I call it a theft of consent because details are purposely hidden from you so that you consent,” Coel said in a recent interview with Trevor Noah, referring to the assault Arabella and her friend Terry experienced. “But if you saw those details, you wouldn’t consent.”

The daughter of Ghanaian parents said that the series is loosely inspired by her own experiences with assault, characterizing Arabella’s journey as “partly reality but partly fiction.”

Arabella similarly uses her experience as the basis for art, according to Slate.

“At a certain point, I May Destroy You reveals itself to be something of a poioumenon, ‘the rhetorical term for a work of art that tells the story of its own making,’” critic Willa Paskin wrote in her 2020 review. “As Arabella’s memory of exactly what happened the night of her assault returns, she doesn’t share it with us directly; instead she fictionalizes it, finally artist enough to take what happened to her and make it her own.”

These complex issues were played out by equally complex characters.

“I really wanted to experiment with how ugly we could make her,” Coel told Noah. “I needed Arabella to see a mirror to herself, right, a true mirror of her amazing qualities but also her really ugly qualities.”

Coel ensured that the characters were imperfect, straying away from a morally binary way of portraying people.

“I’m not saying that anything is wrong or right,” she said. “I’m just putting characters in a frame, and I’m watching them interact … It’s really hard when you can see where both sides are coming from.”

Audience members, including assault survivors, identify with Arabella and her journey to healing.

“Survivors often struggle to remain visible through their trauma which is mostly induced not just by the assault or abuse but also by the lack of support, acknowledgement, or access to justice,” a feminist social media page wrote on Twitter. “The nuances of trauma and consent depicted in ‘I May Destroy You’ are indeed the solidarity and visibility that survivors need.”

Photo by Peabody Awards | Wikimedia Commons