As a girl, I would daydream about becoming a writer, one of those beautifully pained ones, damaged in all the wrong ways to produce all the right kinds of writing. A recluse, but viscerally open in my words. I imagined a life lived in quiet, curated chaos, my suffering arranged neatly on a page, bleeding eloquently between the lines. As I grew, and walked through those horrible, throat-scratching phases of life, that vision felt almost prophetic. And now, in a phase that is; comparatively... better (I do not know how long this is going to last, so I am both backhandedly excited and jittery about it), I feel divided. A part of me constantly fears that I can no longer write (or extract any pleasure from writing) the way I used to when I was destructively sad. Back then, every act of surrendering to despair was followed by a strange, guilty pleasure: I would create thick, messy, overloaded fodder for my daydream-writer’s mental masturbation. And now? Now I feel... clean. Functional. There’s no storm surge behind my ribs, no dramatic collapse mid-sentence. The pain is quieter now, less cinematic. And maybe that’s the problem. I catch myself mourning the drama. The girl who used to stay up until dawn writing about aching bones and rusted hope. The one who found poetry in self-destruction, who thought art was supposed to cost you everything. Now that I'm not hurting the same way, I wonder: what do I write about? Where do I even begin? And worse... do I even want to begin? Or do I just want to want it, to chase that memory of myself: bruised, brilliant, burning with something worth saying?
See, it is not like there are no things to write about. There’s the debilitating existential crisis. The preemptive guilt. The predicted regret of not having done enough with my life while I actively rot in my room, let my fears marinate me. The oddest family dynamic that I should be running away from. The fact that I have zero friends right now. The fact that I am so far behind the person I once imagined myself to become. The fact that everyone else’s success just bursts my bubble of imagination and makes me want to want what they have, even if that’s not actually what I want. The longing for some safety. Some love. Someone believing in me in a way I don’t have to audition for. But when I sit down to write about it, it’s like the words are coated in plastic wrap. I can see them, I feel them, but they’re just out of reach, suffocated before they’re born. Like they don’t want to perform unless I’m on the verge of collapse. I hate how romantic I’ve made my own despair. How I still hold it like a badge, like an old lover I secretly hope to run into, hoping he’ll beg me to come back. There’s something disgusting about that... this yearning for the suffering that once made me a better writer (I am not even sure about this, I am just judging on the basis of the pleasure I derived from writing like that), or at least felt like it did. Because when I was sad, truly, blisteringly sad, the writing came easy. Not necessarily good, but easy. It poured. It oozed. It didn’t ask permission. Now? I write like I’m applying for a visa. Nervous, apologetic, trying to convince the page that I’m worthy. And that makes me furiously annoyed. I want to write like I’m about to die again. Like I am scratching the rock bottom with my nails while they are banging the door angrily and if they break the door, it is the end of me. I want to write like I did when my loneliness was so loud, it echoed back in language.
But maybe I don’t deserve that kind of writing anymore. Maybe contentment; or whatever this beige numbness is; has sterilized me. Maybe I’ve become the worst thing a writer can be: stable. And not the steady, solid kind. The lukewarm, inoffensive, clear-soup kind. I feel like a retired war poet who now writes newsletters for an insurance company. (While war still goes on in the world...) There’s still pain, yes. But it’s cluttered now. Bureaucratized. More filing cabinet than forest fire.
Just to entertain the other aspect of it... Parts of me, the shivering, crying, begging-it-to-stop, silently-resisting, hungrily-snatched, deprived-of-orientation inner childgirl, doesn’t want any of it to come back. “Please, no,” she screams from some old, blood-crusted corner of my gut. Not the beautiful pain. Not the poetic breakdowns. Not the nightly mental carnage I used to repurpose into prose. She doesn’t care if it made ‘good writing.’ She just wants quiet. Softness. To be held without agenda. Then there is the animal. (You remember about it.) It hasn’t left. It just slinks behind my ribcage now, quieter, sneakier. It keeps reliving the scenarios... the real ones, the fictionalized ones, the ones it borrowed from somewhere and convinced me were mine. It flashes them across my inner screen like a cursed film projector.. “Look. Look. LOOK.” Even as I fold laundry. Even as I reply to a harmless Slack message. Even as I blink like a normal person on a normal day. And real-time me? She’s busy fighting it. Fending it off with little swords made of routine and distraction... emails, dishes, walking to the store and pretending to care about avocados. It’s a silent battle. No medals. No victory laps. Just me, quietly losing and pretending that’s not what’s happening. Sometimes I think that maybe the animal and the childgirl are the same being.
Just fractured... before and after. One begging me not to open the door. The other already halfway inside. Because really, what is the animal if not the child who wasn't rescued? What is rage, obsession, reliving, but grief that's grown claws? The childgirl weeps, starves, curls in on herself, begs for it all to stop. But she wasn’t saved. She stayed there. Alone with all the teeth and shadows and silence. And at some point, something inside her snapped its neck in a different direction. And that’s when the animal was born. Not out of strength, not really. But out of necessity. Out of adaptation. Like a body that grows armor instead of skin. Like a scream that, after being ignored long enough, learns to growl instead. The animal is the childgirl, but post-mutation. She’s what happens when tenderness gets no witness. When the crying goes unanswered. When touch never comes. So she learned how to tear. How to replay. How to haunt me with the scenes that broke her because she still believes that maybe this time, someone will stop them. That someone... me, I guess, will finally barge in and pull her out of the burning room. But I don't. I just sit there, frozen. Watching the fire. Again and again and again. And so she keeps looping it. And the child keeps sobbing. And I keep being both.
And trust me when I say, I want things to get better. Even better... I want to leave. I want to be better. Build friendships. Have love. Have a kind heart with zero smokes out of it, no fire alarms going off inside my skull every time someone touches my arm a second too long. I want the safety I was too young to know I was missing. But. Of course... but. A part of me starts preemptively longing. Pre-grieving. Because if (and when) I get better, if the childgirl is finally wrapped in something warmer than silence, if the animal is gently put down, if I stop bleeding through my words and start living through them, then what? What am I? Just a… well-adjusted adult with hydration goals and a therapy budget? A “nice girl” with manageable emotions, a skincare routine, and no diary full of nuclear fallout? Will I wear linen? Say “I’m doing great, actually” and mean it? And will that version of me still be me? Or just a polite ghost of everything I had to destroy to get there? See, I don’t know who I am without the ache. Without the underground tunnels. Without the wild-eyed obsession with making art out of damage. If I’m not built from ruin, am I still real? Or do I just become a bland survivor with nothing left to say? Do I become… boring? Because pain was my proof of depth. Sadness was my flex. I made my suffering look good. Sculpted it. Dressed it in metaphor. Made it palatable enough to pass as poetry. So what happens when I’m no longer starving for rescue? When I’m no longer burning at both ends just to stay warm? Do I fade? Do I vanish?
Or worse... do I go on, ordinary?
So I keep spiraling... not in self-pity, not even in despair, but in this slow, maddening unpeeling of self. Because maybe, just maybe, I’ve spent so long romanticizing the pain, feeding off its drama, curating its aesthetics, that I don’t know how to write from anywhere else. I don’t know how to be from anywhere else. It’s not even martyrdom. It’s muscle memory. My spine remembers collapsing. My lungs remember the scream I never let out. My mouth still twitches in the shape of a confession, even when there's nothing left to say. And here’s the cruel punchline: I do want to be better. Not performatively better. Not Instagram-inspirational better. Actually better. Whole. Boring. Soft. Holding hands with someone who loves me in the daylight. But. Look, I know... once I get better, it does not absolve my past. It does not dissolve my wounds. It does not disinfect my trauma. It doesn’t work like that. It’s like this: Take a bowl. Pour a lump of porridge. Then scoop in some thick, grey sludge. That’s the trauma. Then another layer of porridge. That’s time. That’s healing. That’s therapy and chamomile tea and moving cities and "forgiving your father" (ugh..) and trying again. But the sludge? It never goes away. It’s caked in. It seeps. And no matter how much one heals, it stays suspended there... unappetizing, invisible from the surface, but there. Living with you. Inside you. Even if I go in excavating like a scavenger, teeth bared, fingernails cracked, I would still find myself lathered in the sludgy porridge of... what else? Life. This life. My life. Messy. Uneven. Undone. And maybe that’s what it is. Maybe healing isn’t cleansing. Maybe it’s just learning to live with the texture. The occasional bite of sludge. The weird mouthfeel of memory. The taste of something that doesn’t go away but no longer poisons you on contact. Maybe that’s enough. Maybe that’s survival. Maybe that’s me.
I don’t know. It’s Sunday. Midnight. I’m all clean after my everything-bath. I’m moisturized from top to bottom like a well-oiled emotional wreck. My mother is softly snoring beside me. And I just had this... itch to write before I slept... only to wake up to Monday. So...
- Oizys.
Sunday, August 3, 2025
If I’m no longer broken, who am I allowed to be?
Monday, July 28, 2025
somewhere between dread and disassociation
Handala has been boarded. Not just boarded like some passive cargo tagged and tracked. They was detained. Ripped from the static silence of resistance and tossed into the theater of criminality. The humanitarians, the ones with powdered milk and bandages in their bags, not bullets, captured like criminals. Because mercy now wears a keffiyeh and that’s apparently enough reason to shoot at it. They had baby formula. Not rocket launchers. Not funding for some ominous shadow group. Not slogans. Not smoke. Just cans of powdered life. And somehow that still made them dangerous. I saw it. With some twenty thousand people on YouTube live stream. They entered and disconnected the camera. I don't know how to be okay in a world that finds feeding infants controversial. I don’t know how to be okay at all, honestly. The war isn’t just on borders or skies or the flesh of children. It is gnawing at my ability to think. Like I’m walking around with this concrete in my chest. All cracked and set wrong. And some days I feel like my bones are just scaffolding for grief. There’s blood behind every grocery bill. There’s a grave hiding in the silence between two news notifications. And I keep refreshing. Refreshing like it’s a slot machine. Like maybe, maybe this time, it won’t be worse. The guilt has become a resident spirit. It laces my tea, it creaks in my joints, it blinks with me. Not survivor’s guilt... no, that’s too neat a phrase. This is witness guilt. This is I-saw-it-and-did-nothing guilt. This is my WiFi is stronger than their cries guilt. Starvation has a sound, and it isn't a stomach growl. It’s quieter. It’s a whisper of a mother trying to breastfeed air. It’s a child playing pretend with an empty bowl. It’s the dull clink of a spoon stirring nothing. This isn’t poetry. This isn’t politics. This is human rot, dressed up in policy papers and signed by cowards in air-conditioned offices. This is a planet leaking blood and everyone is walking around with towels over their eyes, pretending it’s raining.
And me? I sit here at 2:41 a.m., half-dressed in sorrow, half-numb in the blue light of my laptop screen, and I try to write. Because maybe if I write it down, the silence won’t swallow me whole. Because maybe if I write it down, I won't forget how this felt... this rage, this ache, this need to scream at a wall. Maybe one day someone will read this and understand that we lived through hell. And some of us tried, even if all we could do was write.
Sometimes I feel like my skin has started to forget softness. Like I’ve been bracing for bad news for so long my muscles have forgotten how to unclench. Even joy feels... slippery. Like holding water in trembling hands. I catch a moment of laughter and then feel guilty for it, like I should apologize to someone, maybe to the rubble, maybe to the mothers, maybe to no one, maybe to myself. I watch people post sunrise photos and recipes for lemon pasta, and I envy them; not for their peace, but for their ability to live like the world isn't actively disintegrating. Meanwhile, I’m standing in the middle of a mental marketplace where grief is sold wholesale and I can’t seem to stop buying more of it.
I’ve been reaching out to people. To help. To do something. I send messages, I fill forms, I research places and names and how to make a dent. Not just rent, really! And then I freeze. Their replies, short, kind, overwhelmed, sit like unopened verdicts in my inbox. My hands hover over the keyboard like they’re waiting for divine instruction. I don’t know why I’m so scared. It’s not danger, it’s not doubt. It’s something else... paralysis with guilt trailing it like a shadow. Some days, mighty words spill out of me, like I’m anointed with rage and clarity. And some nights, I just cry. And cry. And cry. Until my pillow starts to feel like a confession box. Until I forget what started it in the first place. Some days I read everything. Every report. Every account. Every number turned body turned absence. I want to document every single instance of violence, as if memory alone can become a kind of justice. And some nights, I delude myself with detachment. Scroll past. Skip. Silence the tabs. But the guilt... it waits. It waits like a needle under the skin, like a whisper behind every distraction. And what about this body? This soul? This place I live in? How do I mourn a world outside while sitting at the brink of my own implosion: abuse, homelessness, indignity, the slow rot of a life that isn’t screaming but still very much burning? Is this what it means to be a witness? To hold the horrors of many in your hands while your own house collapses? To consume war and suffering like some forbidden fruit, and still have to sweep your own broken glass before bed? Is this the morality of international law? This... this organized silence in the face of genocide? This paperworked apathy? Is there morality at all? Is there God? God, I hope there is. Not for salvation, not for peace. But just so we can blame him. So someone bigger than us can finally be held accountable. Because I am tired of us being the only ones carrying this weight. We, the poets, the empaths, the overthinkers, the weepers in the middle of the night, we are not equipped for this. And yet we continue, with open hearts and choked throats, writing, screaming, breaking in private, like it’s a ritual we’ve inherited. Because we have to. Because if not we, then who? We have to continue. We have to write. We have to document. We have to witness. We have to warn the future from now. I don’t know what tomorrow brings.
I haven’t been able to write. Not really. Not honestly. Not like me. Every time I try, it feels like I’m carving thoughts out of stone. They’re stuck in this purgatory between too much and nothing at all. There are nights I stare at the ceiling so long I start to believe it's staring back. Nights where I replay conversations I never had, where I imagine packing a bag and just leaving, no note, no final message, just the echo of absence.
And then there’s the uselessness of my own life. This sticky, cloying sense that I’m just floating. Consuming suffering with a side of tea, writing about starvation on a ulcerative stomach. What does that make me? I feel it every time I scroll: this choking mixture of rage and shame, a storm of helplessness masquerading as thoughtfulness. I do feel. I do care. I do try. But it never feels like enough. Like I’m a luxury item in a collapsing world, something with no real function, just existing, while they bleed out in live time. It doesn’t just anger me. It paralyzes me. Like my limbs are politically detained by privilege. Like my intentions are being held hostage by my own comfort. I want to break things. I want to scream at the walls of this world. But all I do is (try to) write. And that feels both holy and humiliating. I keep thinking: How is my life any more than theirs? What exactly is this disparity, if not just the grotesque choreography of luck? If one twist of fate had rotated the globe just a little differently, would I be the one begging for powdered milk? Would I be the nameless headline, the blurred face, the collateral grief? What is this but not... not earned. not deserved. not fair. not anything except lottery. And I sit with that like it’s a rotting fruit on my desk, too sacred to throw away, too spoiled to eat. And then there’s law. This fictive, sweetened structure that was never built for us. International law: the soft fiction handed down by empires in suits, declaring genocide illegal while watching it livestreamed. It’s a performance. It’s a spell spoken in Geneva accents, meant to soothe, not to solve. Because this law has always been a master's tool. And master's tools don’t dismantle master's homes. They reinforce them. They polish them. They make them palatable for the press releases and digestible for diplomats. Every resolution, every declaration, every tribunal: it’s theater. Meanwhile, the child under the rubble has no concept of legality. They know only dust, and blood, and the taste of abandonment. The courtrooms are clean. The victims are not. The law says, “Never again,” while the master mutters, “Again, and again, and again.” This isn’t a system. It’s a mythology. A religion of paper and pretenders. And the worst part? It tricks you into thinking something might happen, that maybe this time, justice might be heavier than bureaucracy. But it never is. Because the war-criminals write the war-manuals. Because the red lines are drawn in erasable ink. And me? I’m here psychoanalyzing the collapse, writing long, desperate, quiet essays in a forgotten blog like I’m documenting a dream that nobody else had. But it wasn’t a dream. It was a siege. It is a siege.
My blog has become a ghost town. Even the drafts feel haunted. All half-thoughts and jagged phrases and metaphors that die halfway through the sentence. And I wonder if I’ve become one of those people who used to write. But maybe this, tonight, maybe this is my way back in. Not with something polished or profound. Just this broken, aching thing that looks like a diary entry but is actually a quiet scream wrapped in metaphors, tied with shaking hands. I don't know what tomorrow brings. But I know I’ll carry it, like always. With sarcasm, with softness, with rage, with resilience, with the stubborn hope that writing still matters, even if no one reads it but me. And I don’t want to forget. I don’t want to forgive. I don’t want to move on, or heal, or process. I want to hold this open wound to the face of the world and scream: LOOK. THIS IS WHO WE ARE. And maybe that’s enough. Or maybe it’s just ink on a screen, doomed to drown in the algorithm. But I wrote it. So it exists. And maybe that’s something.
And then there are the rituals. Retweet. Repost. Share. Email this MP, sign this petition, add this flag emoji, read this long-form article that makes you weep on the train. Make a carousel post on Instagram. Talk about it. Talk about talking about it. Buy from this fund. Boycott this brand. Wear a keffiyeh, enunciate the name of the oppressed right this time. It all feels like putting out a house fire with a scented candle sometimes. Like bringing one peony to a mass grave and whispering, “Sorry.” It is activism written in erasable ink. It is screaming into pillows and calling it strategy. It is the performance of caring in a world that punishes care the moment it gets inconvenient. Soft activism. It's the religion of the internet age, right now. Sometimes, I feel like it is a way to feel like we are doing something while doing exactly what the system wants: keeping things cute, clean, bloodless. We do it because we need to. Sometimes, it is exactly what we need to do. Because the alternative, silence, feels worse. It is worse. But... even this begins to rot. Even this begins to taste like ash. Because the likes don't bring back the dead. The infographics don’t stop the siege. And no one, no one, has ever been freed by an algorithm. And, it all starts to feel like yet another master's tool. And yet we do it. We have to. Because what else is there? But maybe, maybe we scream louder. Maybe we abandon the polite language of peace. Maybe we stop worrying about being palatable. Maybe we say it: This is genocide. This is imperialism. This is manufactured famine. This is the organized, systematic theft of life. This is settler colonialism. This is apartheid. This is Western-funded and media-laundered and law-proofed evil. And you don’t have to “understand both sides” when one side is bombing hospitals. You don’t have to play devil’s advocate when the devil is in uniform and speaking at the UN. You don’t have to explain why children don't deserve to die. You just have to scream it until the walls crack from the truth. Let it be messy. Let it be ugly. Let it be unfiltered. Because soft words have softened the crimes. And now the world needs blunt force honesty. Let our writing be jagged. Let it cut. Let it tear through the algorithms and the apathy. Let it unsettle dinner parties and crack the glass of newsroom neutrality. Let it say what we’ve been made to feel ashamed of saying: This is not complex. This is not complicated. This is calculated cruelty. And if they call us radical, so be it. If they call us emotional, let them. If they call us too loud, we’ll be louder. Because silence is a privilege we can't afford. Because words, as useless as they may feel, are the last weapon we haven’t sold off. So scream. Write. Repeat. Until they hear us. Until they can't pretend they didn't. And if we burn our voices out in the process? Then we burn knowing we didn’t whisper through the fire.
This headline is what I keep reading: clinical in its delivery, apocalyptic in its content. Every atrocity imaginable. Not poetic hyperbole. Not activist rhetoric. Just a list. A cold, factual catalogue of suffering so extreme it short-circuits the brain. This is not even a whole summation of all other headlines I have screenshotted. Or wrote in the back of my notebook. These are some I screenshotted to add here. Not just Israel, Gaza, Palestine. But so many others.
Genocide. Ecocide. Mass infanticide. Sexual violence as strategy. Aid workers, executed. Children, sniped, like pests. Hospitals, bombed, not accidentally, but with intention. With coordinates. With absolute, godless precision.
And the “global North,” the “free world,” the alleged torchbearers of human rights fund this. With taxes. With silence. With the polite clearing of throats in UN press rooms. “We are funding an endless nightmare and it should haunt us forever.” Yes. Let it haunt us. Let it sit in our teeth and fester under our tongues and pulse in our temples when we try to sleep. Because this is not just their tragedy. It is our crime, too. The ghost of every bombed child follows the supply chain all the way back to our wallets. And somehow, we’re still expected to play sane. Still expected to go to work. Still expected to go to brunch, pay the rent and “move on” and “hope for peace.” As if peace is a wish. As if peace is a polite dinner guest and not something ripped from the mouths of the murdered. I don’t know how to be okay. I don’t think I want to be okay. I want to remain cracked. I want to stay furious. I want to hold this grief like a relic and never let it be cleaned or catalogued or cremated. Because that would be the final violence: to look away, to compartmentalize, to make peace with it. This isn’t a “situation.” This isn’t a “conflict.” This is the textbook definition of evil. With receipts. With video. With global indifference as its PR team. And no amount of strategic wording, peace talks, or photo-ops can wash the blood off these hands. The blood is in the ink. The blood is in the laws. The blood is in the silence. So I will write. And scream. And cry. And fail. And try again. Because writing is all I have left that feels real. And maybe... maybe... if we scream loud enough, one day the world will finally hear us and say, "Never again" and actually mean it.
If you have reached till here, please:
1. PCRF - Palestine Children’s Relief Fund
2. Medical Aid for Palestine
3. Gaza Mutual Aid Collective
4. Rammun Foundation
5. Gaza Funds
6. Grassroots Gaza غــزة الشعبية
- Oizys.
Monday, July 14, 2025
A paper temple of grief, rage, and resistant breath.
So much has happened since the last time I cracked open this blank page and tried to make sense of myself. So much I’ve tried to write down, over and over, only to watch the words curdle before they could settle into shape. Things have been… let’s just say a series of sharp objects tossed into a bag and shaken violently. Bad. Then worse. Then something passable for bearable. I took an overnight trip, one of those half-baked spiritual getaways where you're supposed to cry near some river and come back cleansed, but I just ended up sitting on cold stone, asking God things I didn’t want honest answers to. I prayed anyway, even though I’ve long suspected God is a landlord: absent, entitled, and slow to return your calls unless you’re paying in suffering. And yet I see people with everything; land, language, lineage; clutching gods like heirlooms while the rest of us are just trying to earn a fraction of their peace. Holiness, it seems, is hereditary. Even the divine feels gated. The privilege in faith. Of those born with sanctified ceilings. But for the longest time, I was... almost apathetic. Not angry. Just bored. Lukewarm toward the idea of God, like a song you’ve heard too many times at too many funerals. I would think, if I believed God existed, then what? And my next thought would always be, So what? It reminds me of something I read on Tumblr years ago, buried under a screenshot of someone’s mom trying to evangelize through text message:
I’ve been applying to jobs like someone trying to fish with no bait. I send out resume after resume like folded notes in class, hoping someone reads them and scribbles back. Nothing. Ghost town. Radio silence. The job market is a rigged roulette table dressed up as meritocracy. I keep spinning the wheel, pretending the house doesn’t always win. And somewhere, men in glass towers still sell optimism like stock tips. They say “just pivot” like it’s a dance move, like it’s not my rent, my visa, my body on the line. There are people out there who call this a ‘skills gap,’ as if the system didn’t design the gap to be unbridgeable unless you’re born already standing on the other side. I don’t know if it’s me or the universe doing that thing again where it forgets I exist for a while. June came with its claws: PMS waited until the last minute, then pulled me under like a riptide. I nearly slipped back into the old skin: the one that lives inside a mattress, stares at the ceiling for 17 hours straight, and dreams about choking on bedsheets. I didn’t. Not entirely. But I could hear it. That beast in my mind, all teeth and whispers, even in sleep. Especially in sleep. It doesn’t growl. It doesn’t chase. It just sits. Patient. Like it knows I’ll come crawling back when the motivation runs out. It sharpens its claws on my confidence, folds my ambition into tiny paper cuts. It doesn't scream... it hums. A lullaby of all the things I’ll never be.
I’m crawling back up. Slowly. With elbows scraped and some dignity left in a jar somewhere.
I’ve also been circling around this prompt from ismatu.gwendolyn like a crow watching a carcass it’s not ready to pick apart.
(1) What is truth? [give it one sentence]
(2) Who or what do you trust to tell you what’s true about your greater world?
(3) What do your trusted sources tell you about
what is true at this particular moment?
(4) What is the narrative of truth from sources outside of those you trust?
So here goes, finally, some truth. Truth is a blade... clean, merciless, and incapable of affection.
I have tried living with it. I have tried making sense of being cut by it while it drew blood in my own life. While it unspooled a memory. While it did not save me. While it humiliated me. When someone told me the “truth” and it didn’t set me free, it just left me raw and exposed. I have tried writing that. Let truth walk in, not as a concept, but as a character. Maybe she wore stilettos. Maybe she smelled like smoke. Maybe she said my name in a voice I hated. But I could not. Because truth doesn’t arrive gently. She drags her heels on the tile, knocks once, then bursts in. She doesn’t sit. She paces. She tells you the thing you already feared and says it with no ceremony. She leaves the door open when she goes. That’s what makes her unbearable, she doesn’t care what’s left in her wake.
I trust books more than people. I trust strange poets and angry women with smudged eyeliner who say things out loud even when their hands shake. I trust people who admit they’re guessing. And I trust silence, sometimes, because it doesn’t pretend to be wise. The ghosts and saints in the bathroom stalls, in late-night forum threads, in a moment where I felt saved by someone else's unapologetic rage. With no names or gloriously unnamed, just outlined against neon lights. There was a woman once in a public library bathroom, her eyeliner looked like she'd cried it on purpose. She told me the thing I’d been afraid to name. Not to be kind, but because she needed someone to hear it too. She smelled like peppermint and gasoline. I remember thinking she was what prayer must look like if God were ever truly tired.
But what about the truth I feel about myself? The kind I can’t intellectualize or explain away. The most truth I feel about myself lives in a song—one that reminds me of a dark, windy evening. I was 13. Or 14? There had been a flood. Or was it a cyclone? I was lying on the floor. There was no electricity. All the windows were open. Everything smelled like damp stone and wet grief. A boy thought I was someone else. Another kept ignoring me for exactly who I was. I didn’t speak. Not out loud. But I still feel like I’ve been speaking from that floor ever since. Every time the wind picks up, I hear it again... the part of me that learned how to disappear without going anywhere.
And I’m not 13 or 14 anymore. The twenties have slipped halfway through my hands like wet clay, and I still haven’t figured out what shape I’m supposed to be. I locked the bedroom door some years ago and haven’t really left. Not in the ways that matter. Not in the ways that stay. And I fear... god, I fear... that I’ll never be able to. That the beast in my mind will outlive every plan, every dream, every miracle I try to make from this damage. That all my glittering fantasies, my imaginations of getting big, of becoming someone will be eaten alive by that quiet, cunning thing that lives inside me and only opens its eyes when I’m trying to sleep. It will mock me forever. Flick me hard enough to wet my eyes but never hard enough to scream. It will make me vomit out my spineless courage, laugh while I try to clean it up. It will hold up all my waste: my half-finished poems, my deleted applications, my never-sent messages, and ask, “Was this it? Is this what you were going to become?” I worry sometimes that I am not a survivor. Just a soft, slow implosion in progress. That I’ll never make anything out of this damage. Just with it. That I’ll keep stitching wreckage into art and calling it healing.
Maybe it was born from centuries of hush. Maybe the beast is colonial hangover and generational anxiety and unpaid therapy bills wrapped in a shawl and called strength. The beast with ancestors lacerations in the existing skin where the blood of inner torment leaks out and feeds the systems that taught silence to women, especially brown ones.
Diane Nguyen: Because if I don't, that means that all the damage I got isn't good damage, it's just damage. I have gotten nothing out of it, and all those years I was miserable was for nothing. I could've been happy this whole time and written books about girl detectives and been cheerful and popular and had good parents, is that what you're saying? What was it all for? [Source]
I too once started writing a short story about a girl who never spoke, but could taste lies on her tongue. I stopped midway through because I got scared it was too strange, too soft, too much like me. It still sits in my drafts, unnamed. I don’t open it. I pretend it ended where I left it. Like it chose silence over rejection. And then, one night, I stumbled across a reel. A man said, quietly “I guess I’ll talk about my biggest regret in life… I threw away a museum.” And it hit me so hard I almost forgot how to breathe. Because I knew. I knew what he meant. That this unfinished life I keep trying to build and rebuild isn’t just a mess, it's a museum. A museum of almosts. A museum of drafts and detours and detachment. And one day, I might walk through it, alone, and realize I didn’t lose it to fate or bad luck. I lost it to fear. I curated a gallery of empty frames because I was too scared to hang the damn art. Too scared to finish. Too scared to start. Too scared to be bad. Too scared to be seen. And now I wonder if that’s the legacy of this beast inside me: not just pain, but incompleteness. A life made of corridors that never open into rooms. And the haunting knowledge that I was the one who locked the doors. That one day, I will look back and realize I preserved my life in the waiting room more than I lived it in the present. And one day, people with full lives; messy, radiant, loud, living lives; will meander past. They’ll stroll by this museum of emptiness without pausing. Without noticing the walls once trembled from the weight of unsaid things. It will become so benign, so forgettable, so dust-covered and quiet, it will be like it never even meant to exist. Not a tragedy. Not a warning. Just an absence so ordinary it blends into the skyline. Maybe that’s the cruelest kind of erasure, the kind that doesn’t even need effort. Maybe that’s what regret is: a museum without visitors.
The world doesn’t mourn what doesn’t become profitable. It forgets slow creators. It buries us under headlines of unicorns and 30-under-30s until we start thinking our quiet is a crime. Maybe truth was never supposed to be healing. Maybe it was meant to be dangerous. That’s why they fear ours because it doesn’t sell anything. It just stands there, wounded and whole.
Anyway. These trusted sources tell me that everything is falling apart, not in a dramatic apocalypse way, but in the slow, invisible kind of rot, the kind that happens behind walls before a house caves in. The foundation’s cracked because the blueprint was never meant to shelter us. It was built by men who assumed someone else would scrub the floors, bear the weight, serve the tea, stay quiet. And here we are... exhausted, holding up ceilings that were never meant to hold us. The house. The rot. The inevitable collapse. My house still stands, and I, in it. But the wallpaper peels. It smells wrong in the mornings, like something sweet has died in the vents. I keep opening windows and pretending fresh air is enough. The landlord says it’s just age. I don’t have the energy to argue that it’s grief.
They say we’re all pretending not to notice how deeply exhausted we are. They say we’re told to be resilient, as if we’re not already bruised from how long we’ve had to hold everything together. Outside of this circle of trust, the narrative is slick and manicured. The world is fine. Growth is inevitable. Everyone just needs to hustle harder. Trust the system. Everything will be okay. It’s a lie wrapped in QR codes and hashtags and mental health webinars hosted by the same corporations that break you down. I once watched a CEO in a turtleneck talk about work-life balance while sipping a turmeric latte named after a Sanskrit word he couldn’t pronounce. That’s when I knew: they’re not trying to fix us. They’re trying to pacify us. I know better now. The truth rarely comes in bold fonts or corporate slides. “Self-care isn’t selfish,” says the carousel post by a billion-dollar wellness brand. Meanwhile, my non-profit pays only 50% of my salary, no insurance, nothing to cover therapy. The only affordable ‘care’ is staying very, very still and hoping my feelings expire quietly. They weaponize wellness, market our survival instincts back to us with pastel fonts and lavender-scented lies. I don’t need a mindfulness app. I need rent control. I need healthcare. I need for rest not to be treated as a privilege or an act of rebellion. I need systems that don’t treat burnout like a personal failure.
Capitalism doesn’t break you in one clean blow. It erodes you with coffee-stained teeth, dry eyes, polite smiles in Zoom meetings, pretending your value isn’t shrinking by the hour. Maybe that’s why they want us too tired to write. Maybe that’s why they flood the world with noise, so we forget how radical silence can be when it’s filled with our own words. They don't want our grief documented. They want it internalized, made polite, made private. But I’ve stopped being polite about it.
It slinks in during the third hour of insomnia. It tastes like metal and sounds like something breaking underwater. I don’t always want it. But I want to be someone who can carry it, even when it’s heavy. Even when I’d rather drop it and run. Maybe that’s what writing this is. Lugging the truth to the page, letting it sit there and stink up the room. Letting it breathe. Letting it be. This writing is a physical labor. Grotesque. Viscous. Cathartic. Writing is not (just) a performance, it’s a purging for me. Letting the words bleed. Writing it feels like butchering something that once lived inside me, pulling sinew and cartilage out through my throat, hoping the mess makes sense on paper. Truth has a smell. A sound. An aftertaste. Truth stinks like copper and mold. It clings to the curtains. I can’t always breathe after I write, but I can finally sleep.
They told me rage was unbecoming. So I stitched it into essays. Let it leak through margins. I wrote like someone trying to dislocate a bone on purpose just to prove it still existed. Like I was testing if my pain still made a sound. My sadness kept waxing. My truth kept howling. Always nearly full, always on the verge of spilling. And somehow, I kept writing: half-mad, half-moon, never empty. And maybe that’s all I’ll leave behind. Not a masterpiece. Just a trail of blood on the page that says: I was here. I didn't quit. I wrote it anyway. Maybe God didn’t show up because She was too busy writing Her own diary entry. Maybe She’s tired too. Maybe She’s in a room somewhere, sobbing over us like unfinished drafts. Or maybe not. Maybe She’s the one whispering: write it anyway. I am kidding, there is no God. Or maybe truth is the only god left: feral, ungoverned, hiding in backrooms and diaries, still refusing to kneel. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? That’s what humans do. We find something unmanageable; love, fire, death, rain; and we crown it. We build temples to what we can’t tame. We call it divine when it doesn’t listen back. We put it on a pedestal and weaponize it against anyone who dares to question. Maybe that’s what we’ll do to truth too. Put it in a museum. Etch it on stone. Forget how much it once hurt to hold.
- Oizys.
Thursday, June 26, 2025
Clothes, Curves, and Conformity
There is a myth I swallowed young, that somewhere out there were correct clothes. A sacred wardrobe of items that would finally make sense of my shape, my limbs, my mutinous meat. The right jeans. The right color palette. The right neckline for my "body type": a term that always made me feel like a specimen, something clinical, a frog being cut open in a biology class of the soul. But I could never figure it out. Not once. Not when I was skinny. Not when I grew. Not when I tried to mimic the girls on Tumblr with collarbones like wings and thigh gaps like exits. Not when I shifted to soft, womaned flesh and tried to summon power from silhouettes I didn’t believe in. Every outfit felt like a costume. Every mirror, a jury. What is the correct way to dress a loopy lump of shame? No one ever told me. They just told me when I got it wrong. The fitting room is not a space. It is a crucible. A small, fluorescent-lit cathedral where women go to flagellate their flesh in polyester and denim. I have cried in more dressing rooms than churches. Not because the clothes didn’t fit but because I didn’t.
Too big here. Too tight there.
Too visible. Too real. Too me.
Then came adulthood like an unwanted bloom, unplanned inheritance, grotesque in its naturalness, a body softening, widening, shifting into its own story. I did not consent to it, but I also did not fight hard enough to stop it. I grew. My body curved unapologetically, softly, stubbornly. There’s a quiet betrayal in realizing your bones have decided on curves without your permission. Your body, like a tree trunk, adding rings. No amount of running or regretting could smooth the new lines, the roundness that erupted like rebellion. Suddenly, my body was no longer an illusion I could control, it was an entity, with its own gravitational pull, its own hunger. What is the correct dress for a body that betrays the very myth of static femininity? The world offers rules. Silhouettes for apple shapes. Tips for minimizing arms. Ways to look thinner, taller, flatter, smaller. The implication: you are not correct. But here’s a trick to fake it. And the worst part? I tried. I really tried. I starved. I cinched. I flattered. I punished. I bought the shaping underwear and the “investment pieces.” And still, the clothes wore me like a costume of failure.
Even now, I walk through shops with the caution of a ghost. I don’t browse. I haunt. The clothes hang, smug and confident, whispering "Not for you. Not like that." The mannequins are calm. They know how to wear themselves. I never did. I still don’t know what my "style" is. I know what hides me best on bad days. I know what fabrics make me itch with self-disgust. I know which tops I’ve thrown into laundry baskets like surrender flags after a single wear. But style? That elusive, shimmering self-expression? I’ve been looking for it like a lost twin in a crowd. Clothing, in my youth, was not protection nor expression, it was performance. A fabric theatre of denial. I wore loose cotton like armor, denim like penance. Everything I chose was curated not to show what I had, but to pretend I had nothing. Breasts? A betrayal. Hips? A crime scene. The more I shrank, the more they smiled. And so, I starved myself on praise, measuring my worth in waistbands, hiding my shame in layers. Fashion, they told me, was freedom, but for girls like me, it was a cage with silk bars.
I watched myself thicken like a story too long to be trimmed. The mirror began to mock me. Not for what I was, but for what I no longer was: thin, praised, easy to dress. Clothing, once the tool of invisibility, now became confrontation. Nothing fit, everything hugged. My shape shouted. And society does not like loud bodies.
To conform, I would have to contort. To be desirable, I would have to disappear again. It is to nod along as they hand you the corset and the caution tape and the spreadsheet of acceptable appearances. But how do you un-grow? How do you unsay your own biology? I found myself in fitting rooms turned confessionals, whispering apologies to my reflection. The seams of societal expectation dug into my skin like teeth. But conformity comes at a cost. And it’s not just money or modesty or comfort. It is selfhood. To be palatable is to be partially erased. And I don’t want to live as an acceptable excerpt of myself.
But here’s the quiet revolution: I got tired of the performance. I started dressing for sensation, not surveillance. For softness, not strategy. I wore things that clung, not to hide, but to hug. To remind me that my body is not a sin to be forgiven, but a geography to be lived in. My thighs speak of miles walked. My belly tells tales of laughter and full meals and survival. My arms hold: not just objects or others, but me. Clothes are no longer a sentence. They are punctuation. They help me say what I want or choose to say nothing at all. In the end, conformity is a costume. One that itches, pinches, shrinks. But I no longer audition. Let the world try to fit me into its ready-to-wear ideology. I’ll be in the corner, wearing poetry, dressing for a truth too full-bodied to be zipped up. So now, sometimes, on good days, I wear things that do not make sense to anyone but me. A skirt that rides up. A crop top on soft flesh. A dress that hugs my belly like a secret. I do not always feel brave. But I do feel mine. There are still days I whisper apologies to my reflection. Still mornings when nothing feels like the right second skin. But increasingly, I remember this: there is no correct way to be clothed. There is only this strange, flawed, magnificent act of dressing the truth. Some days, I want to be invisible. Others, I want to dress like a reckoning. But now, I choose.
The body is not a problem to be solved, nor a mannequin to be corrected. It is an unfinished poem. A sentence that changes meaning depending on where you stand. Clothes are not the solution. But they are part of the metaphor. They do not define me but they can translate something I can’t yet speak. And I am learning to wear myself in full. No more "correct clothes." Only the sacred act of claiming the skin I’m in with seams that stretch and shirts that rebel, and a mirror that, some days, finally nods back.
Wednesday, June 25, 2025
My room, lit only by the war on screen.
I don’t know what’s harder to swallow, the numbers or the numbness. Every headline feels like a punch. Every image is a wound. Iran. Gaza, Palestine. The Big Bro, always lurking like the puppeteer who claims it’s just pulling "strings of diplomacy." The Holy Land bleeds. Again. But this isn’t prophecy. This is policy: carefully executed, morally bankrupt, and widely televised. They treat Gaza like a prison and call it policy. Hospitals in the north Gaza are bombed, children die beneath rubble. Israel calls it “precision.” The Pentagon calls it “unfortunate.” Weapons are sent, drones are flown. But, real weapons are the narratives, ancient and modern, soaked in saviourship and oil. The U.S. vetoes ceasefire at the UN. Again. “Humanitarian pause,” they say, as if grief has a time slot. (Does it?) I sit with this grief like it’s a visitor in my chest. Not mine, but also unmistakably mine. Not from the place, not of the people, but I feel it. Empathy has made me a thief of other people’s sorrow and I'm not sure if that makes me human, or just haunted. Psychologically, I can’t unsee the pattern: childhood trauma scaled up to national identity, hunger of retaliation masquerading as self-defense, and the repetition compulsion Freud warned about; nations reenacting their origin on children. The Gazan child in the shelter. The mother clutching a limb that used to be her son. The Iranian protester hanged for dissent while Western leaders dine with his executioners. The West who still believes brown suffering is either a burden or a backdrop. The American drone, circling above like God: unconsensually omnipresent, necessarily indifferent, tragically flawed. And then there's the theatre: settler hypocrisy wrapped in human rights hashtags. Israel proclaims solidarity with Iranian women, cheering their bravery in the streets of Tehran while bombing Evin political prison where those same women’s futures are locked away. They mourn [read: use] Mahsa Amini in English, but their bombs speak in another tongue: occupation, not liberation. It’s like watching a pyromaniac campaign for fire safety. Justice, when spoken by an occupier, is a lie rehearsed for the camera. The only thing more permanent than Israeli settlements are the lies they’re built on. They do not want Iranian women free, they want Iran broken. Just like they do not want Palestinians safe, they want Palestine silent. You can’t preach emancipation while holding a smoking gun over someone else’s daughter.
We are a species addicted to binaries. Freedom fighter vs. terrorist. Democracy vs. dictatorship. But the psyche doesn’t work in binaries. It works in shadows. And those shadows are now weaponized. And behind those shadows are older ghosts. Colonialism didn’t die (it just rebranded). Mandates became states. Settlers became citizens. Victims became “threats.” The maps we fight over were drawn by imperial hands and the blood never dried. Settler colonialism is not just land theft. It’s soul erasure. It’s building identity through the erasure of another. It’s why Palestine is framed as a security threat and never a site of mourning. And the erasure isn’t just in bombs. It’s in borders redrawn quietly on school maps. In names replaced, not with bullets, but with bureaucracy. It’s when you search for Palestine on a map and it autocompletes to "Israel." It’s when centuries of poetry are overwritten with concrete zoning laws. It’s when a language is spoken softer each year until even memory mispronounces itself. Genocide doesn’t always scream. Sometimes, it edits. Sometimes it resizes a people into footnotes and dropdown menus. Sometimes it just changes a place’s name until the survivors forget how to go home.
It’s why even Gazan hunger is politicized like their bodies are insurgent. Capitalism sells it all back to us as spectacle. Bombs drop, and defense stocks rise. A child’s death becomes content. The grief economy thrives, algorithm-fed, advertiser-approved. We’re not watching war. We’re consuming it.
And what about nukes? The glowing god in the room. The crown jewel of deterrence. The ultimate flex no one wants to actually use, but must keep polishing. We watch them posture over buttons they’ll never press, because they know the market dies the second they do. No banks. No CEOs. No headlines. No hashtags. No "freedom." No "democracy." No saviors. Just radioactive dust and the sudden absence of war profiteers. They edge toward annihilation like horny apocalypse salesmen, selling fear in billion-dollar contracts, knowing full well the end won’t leave anything behind not even a body to bury the dead. And maybe I’m wrong. But if I am, it doesn’t matter. Because there won’t be a judge to correct me. No tribunal. No camera crew. No reparations. Just silence. And maybe a mushroom cloud standing where memory used to live. Nuclear war isn’t strategy. It’s suicide in a suit.
They say the land is holy but it drinks blood like wine. They crucify the innocent and call it national security. They pray with one hand and reload with the other. Even God must be exhausted from being used this way. This is not prophecy unfolding. This is profit orchestrated. They might air-drop aid an hour after air-dropping bombs. They want to keep them hungry just not starve them to death. Not yet. Because, lines drawn in dust now dictate who deserves to live. And, Europe will send statements, maybe a bit of aid. Condemnations, not consequences. And, UN, a body built on the graves of war, now a hospice for dying resolutions. Countries too busy shaking hands and selling drones. I never accepted the narrative of this war being a one of faiths. It’s a war of father wounds. Of power misused and myths abused. We’ve mistaken vengeance for justice. We’ve built national identities out of unhealed grief.
I sometimes fear words like freedom, equality, rights, justice, dignity have no meaning for the survivors of war. They sound like museum artifacts... polished, untouchable, behind glass. Or worse, like cruel jokes told in boardrooms by men in suits who’ve never buried a child. To the survivor, justice isn't a courtroom. It’s the dream of waking up to silence instead of sirens. Freedom isn’t a flag. It’s walking to school without stepping over rubble. Dignity is not theoretical. It’s not having to dig your brother out of concrete with your bare hands while the world debates the semantics of genocide. What does equality mean to the girl born in Rafah, whose life expectancy is shorter than the flight time of an Israeli drone? What do human rights mean to a boy in Tehran who tweets the truth once and ends up on a noose list? Israel says it stands with Iranian women. Then bombs a political prison where their futures are held in cages. It tweets about justice while shooting journalists. It speaks the language of emancipation with a boot on someone else’s neck. This isn’t solidarity. It’s settler supremacy with a PR strategy. Every time a drone circles overhead, it brings more than death... it brings psychological residue, the kind no ceasefire can scrub. It teaches children that the sky cannot be trusted. It turns the sun into a trigger. In some places, war is not an event. It’s an inheritance. Babies are born into rubble and raised by grief-stricken ghosts. These words, in the mouths of politicians, sound like broken teeth. They’ve been chewed and spat out so many times that even the letters feel hollow. I want to believe in them. I do. But I also want the people who speak them to bleed a little truth when they do. Because to the survivor, language is dangerous. Every promise becomes propaganda. Every speech a funeral in disguise. And I wonder... when they do these things, do they even think about the future? Or do they think about it too much, just not with us in it? Maybe that’s the cruelty. Maybe it’s not that they’re short-sighted. It’s that they’ve already imagined a world where the broken don’t belong. Where the bombed don’t rebuild. Where the children pulled from rubble are never meant to grow old. This isn’t collateral damage. It’s future-editing: a quiet genocide of memory, of lineage, of hope. This is not about ending a war. This is about erasing the people who might write its history. Because to erase a people, you don’t just kill their present. You kill their possibility. But it’s more than even that. Erasure doesn’t always wear a uniform. Sometimes, it shows up as silence where song once lived. It’s in the coffee shops that never reopen, the bookstores that never reprint, the newspaper headlines that will never again be written in a mother tongue. Genocide is not only murder; it’s theft of texture. It’s the vanishing of the neighborhood soundscape: a child arguing in dialect, a grandmother yelling from a balcony, a political debate at a lunch table, between flavors that no longer exist. The future isn’t just made of time. It’s made of language, habit, ritual. And when those go, it doesn’t matter if a few people survive. Survival without culture is not life; it’s exile in your own bones. They talk of peace. But what peace can grow from scorched syntax? You don’t need to burn every body to end a people. You just need to erase the places they gathered. War erases most completely culture, culture cultivated with time and labor of love, culture in its mundane, unremarkable, daily form. War doesn't just kill bodies, it annihilates possibility. So maybe justice isn’t a word anymore. Maybe it’s a scar. Maybe dignity is the silence after the last scream. Maybe rights are only real when they’re not negotiated over coffee between diplomats. And maybe, just maybe, the only honest word left is survival. War is not just violent, it is surgical, structural, strategic. When we talk about war, we’re not just talking about geopolitics, we’re talking about future birthdays, graduations, weddings that will never happen. The moral dead. The evil imagines itself victorious. We are just debris in its path.
And then there are those who say nothing. Who change the channel. Who ask for “context” only when the bodies aren't white. Those who measure outrage in proximity as if humanity were a postcode. Those who deny what they see because acknowledging it would cost them comfort. Because truth has a price, and they’ve already spent their empathy elsewhere. Silence isn’t neutral. Silence is permission. And denial? Denial is the luxury of those whose walls are not shaking. Every time someone shrugs and scrolls past a dead child, every time they say, “It’s complicated”, they are choosing the side of the sky with the drones. History will not forget the bombs. But it won’t forgive the silence either. (Desmond Tutu: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”)
Sometimes I fantasize about global group therapy with a longing for collective reckoning. Everyone sits down. No cameras. No flags. No fucking weapons. Just stories. Just pain. Just truth. We listen. We rage. We cry. And maybe; just maybe; we interrupt the script. But here I am. Watching another livestream of suffering I can’t stop. Sharing a post that feels like screaming into space. We cry in stories, we rage in comment sections, and think it counts. We’re pixel-deep in empathy. But pixels don’t rebuild cities. Lighting a candle for people I’ll never meet and wondering if light even reaches where the drones go. Maybe healing isn’t light. Maybe it’s just surviving long enough to remember how to sing. Maybe the future still has space for the people they tried to erase. War makes poets out of the powerless. And I am tired; tired; of writing elegies. (But, am I going to stop... I do not think so. I wish this was fiction. I wish I was being dramatic. I wish I could log off and find the world softer, smaller, safer. Which is a privilege in itself, wishing that. But I can't. And maybe that’s why I write. Not because I believe it will change anything but because if I don’t speak, the silence will grow teeth.)
You’re reading this on a charged device. I am writing this on another one. My manager pings me on the background from hers. Somewhere, these batteries came from a mine. Somewhere, that mine displaced a village. How many borders did your silence cross today? Don’t tell me you’re tired. Tired is a boy pulling his sister from rubble with his bare hands. This body carries headlines it didn’t ask for. This skin remembers explosions the news already forgot. I keep thinking of how they said "never again." But never again for whom? Apparently not for Palestinians. Not for Iranians. Genocide, we learn, is a matter of branding. If the dead wear the wrong flag, they are statistics, not even stories. And the bombs are smarter than the men who justify them. The only intelligence they have is artificial. If this exhausted you, good. If it made you uncomfortable, good. That means your humanity isn’t lost yet.
- Oizys.
The morning-after pill.
Alas, I woke up. It’s bright. Moving. Running. The world, I mean. The world runs like nothing cracked inside it last night. Like no one begged the dark to take them. The begging of last night is present now only as remnants of vomit in my mouth: acidic, shameful, a reminder that even the body wants to purge the soul sometimes. The light pierces in through the curtain like a blade. Not warm, not gentle. It hurts. It feels like punishment. Like the universe saying, “Get up. I dare you.” Which L-pill do I take to kill this light? Lorazepam? Lies? Love? Or maybe just a long look at the ceiling until it swallows me? My limbs feel nailed to the bed by invisible grief. I stare at the ceiling like it might offer me some explanation. It doesn’t. It just stares back, white and unmoved. The room smells like stale tears and bitter spit. Time has no shape here. It just drips down the walls like condensation in a place long forgotten. My phone lights up. A message from someone asking how I am. I want to reply: "Rotting, you?" But I type “fine” and throw it to the floor like it’s radioactive. There’s a dull ache behind my eyes. A fatigue that isn’t physical. It’s spiritual. Existential. The kind that doesn’t go away with sleep but only with oblivion. I pull the blanket over my head like a shield. I don’t want to fight the light today. I don’t want to be brave. I don’t want to be seen surviving. I want stillness. Not healing. Not hope. Just stillness. Just for one day, I want the world to stop spinning and let me lie here without expectation, without movement, without the need to pretend I’m okay. But it won't. And neither will I. Because the cruelest part of it all is this: I woke up. Again. (I could not do it...)
- Oizys.
Tuesday, June 24, 2025
I wish everything would just end right now.
I wish everything would just end right now. At this moment. I wish this. I pray this. I beg this. I hope this. I write this. I ache this. This animal inside me has decapitated my will to "somehow still go on" that I had meticulously and desperately conjured up from the ruins of all my other breakdowns. It tore through the fragile scaffolding I had built with late-night poems, unsent messages, and half-meant affirmations. It laughed in the face of my progress, spat on my healing, and left me: bleeding, breathless, bewildered. There’s a ringing in my ears again. A silence so loud it scrapes at the back of my skull. I feel like I am drowning in my own body. Not water. Not thoughts. Just the heaviness of being. If I could unzip this skin, if I could silence this mind, if I could stop this heart from always hoping when it knows better… I would. Tonight, I am just a prayer that won’t be answered. I whisper into the dark like it’s a god. Like maybe it’s listening. But the dark doesn’t answer. It never does. It only presses itself closer to me, like a lover who doesn’t love back. I keep blinking, not out of fatigue but out of hope that when I open my eyes again, I will be somewhere else.
Nowhere. Anything but here. My chest feels like a locked room where something is screaming behind the walls: something ancient, something breaking its own throat trying to be heard. I am tired of being alive with an asterisk. Alive, but unraveling. Alive, but begging for pause. Alive, but not wanting to be. I try to name what hurts, but there is no language for this. Only metaphors. Only howling. It’s not sadness. It’s not grief. It’s not even despair. It’s erosion. It’s a soul that has been weathered down to pulp. It’s a scream that has grown so old, it has learned how to sit still. I don't want comfort. I don't want to be told "it will pass." I want this to end. I want me to end. Or maybe not end. Just disappear. Melt into the air like fog and never reassemble. I want to be unreadable. Untouched. Unremembered. I want to stop being a burden made of skin. I don’t know if this is a cry for help. I think it’s just a cry. Maybe, a cry for an end. A full stop. Help implies something can be done. This... This is beyond rescue. This is the quiet crumpling of something that was never really whole. And still. And still. I breathe. Why?
Please. Whoever, whatever, if anything listens... please. End it. End me. I am not asking anymore. I am not praying. I am begging. On mental knees. With my soul in my hands, bleeding through the cracks of my fingers. Please: do what I cannot. Finish what I cannot. Take this body off my back. Take this mind, this cruel, looping, echo chamber that feeds on its own decay. Take this constant throb of being awake in a life I did not consent to. I scream in silence so it won’t scare anyone. I cry with my spine so no one hears it. I am so polite in my suffering, and I don’t know why. Why am I trying to be graceful when I’m dying on the inside every goddamn day? There is no poetry left in this. No beauty. No tragic allure. It’s just exhaustion so complete it has turned into a static hum across everything. I keep waiting for someone, some force, some cosmic mercy, to finally notice me. To finally say, “Okay. That’s enough. You can go now.” But no one comes. No one ever does. The universe has ghosted me. Even death won’t answer my texts. And I don’t have the courage to do it myself. I am too much of a coward to leave. And too broken to stay. So what is this in-between? What do you call this purgatory of the living? Do you hear me? Whoever you are; god, void, fate, accident: I am done. Please. Please. Please. Unmake me.
No one is coming. I know this. I’ve always known. There is no divine ear bent toward me. No fate circling my name with concern. No shadowy mercy slipping through the cracks of this night to grant me release. Nothing will stop this. Not tonight. Not tomorrow. Not ever. The sun will rise, like it always does. It will crawl over my windowsill, indifferent, steady and peel the night off me like an unwanted second skin. It will urge me to get up. Put on my face. Move my limbs. Pretend. Again. And I will. Because I always do. Because I am too afraid not to. But right now... This night, this moment, this silence that presses like a hand over my mouth. It seduces me. It tells me I can break here. Fully. Quietly. Without consequence. It whispers that I can disassemble myself, limb by limb, thought by thought, and scatter the pieces across this bed like a ritual no one will ever witness. It tells me to stop trying. To stop pretending there’s light at the end of anything. And so I lie still, letting it hold me. Letting the ache touch bone. Letting the despair seep into the last dry parts of me that still hoped. I daydream, not of better things, not of healing but of letting go. Completely. No fight. No drama. No blood. Just… silence. A vanishing. And maybe that’s the closest I’ll ever get. To peace. To nothing. To rest. But the clock ticks. And I know the sun is coming. And I know I will rise. But not because I want to. Only because the world refuses to let me stay gone. And maybe... maybe that’s the real cruelty.
But, I wish everything would just end right now. At this moment. I wish this. I pray this. I beg this. I hope this. I write this. I ache this. (Can I do this...?)
- Oizys.
Monday, June 23, 2025
Black on her hands // God is not in the chat
So, I got my keyboard repaired this weekend. The weekend itself has been quite glazy; soft-edged, slippery, like I wasn’t fully inside it. The animal has been clawing within me again. Overthinking. Over-psychoanalyzing. Everything. Everyone. Myself most of all.
I came across ismatu.gwendolyn’s idea: journaling the news. Oh, the news. I pick it up now like a bruised fruit I can’t eat. It sits in my hand, leaking. And I scroll. Israel bombs Iranian nuclear sites. Children die unnamed in Gaza. Boats sink with people no one will ever rescue or remember. Another leader rises. Another lie is swallowed whole. The planet warms. The people rage. The screens glow. And I just sit here. People are calling me. Messaging me. Emailing me. I have a meeting at 2. But I’m numb. So numb and uncaring when I am also, somehow, desperate for a job. For stability. For hope. Why? I try to figure it out, but I don’t know why. Maybe the horror is too big. Maybe the ambition feels fake next to missiles and mass graves. Maybe I’ve read too much news and not enough poetry. Maybe it’s all real. Maybe none of it is. The disconnect is dizzying. I open LinkedIn in one tab and watch war footage in the other. I update my CV while a death toll ticks up in real time. How am I supposed to care about bullet points when actual bullets are flying? How do I write a cover letter when the world’s on fire and no one’s coming with water? I think maybe this is why we all feel stuck. Not because we’re lazy or lost, but because the scale of suffering has made desire feel embarrassing. How dare I want good pasta or a great job or peace of mind when a mother across the border is digging her child out of rubble? And yet. I still want those things. I still check my email. I still attend the meeting. I still click “Apply.” Because what else is there? I’m not uncaring. I’m just… overwhelmed. And I don’t know if I’m numbed by tragedy or by powerlessness. Or if I’ve fused the two into a single feeling I don’t know how to name. But I’ll keep journaling. Not because it helps... But because it’s the only thing I know how to do. I keep refreshing the news. I scroll like it’s prayer: repetitive, empty, desperate. And in between, I ask the question I’ve been avoiding for months: What kind of future are we building toward? A future where we livestream war crimes and meme them before the blood is dry? Where billionaires play gods and actual gods stay silent? Where no one knows what truth is: only what trends? Are we building anything at all? Or just endlessly rearranging the rubble, calling it progress? I keep thinking: where is "god" in all this? The one they say watches everything. Is he watching now? Is he numb like me? Did he leave the room the moment we created the concept of “collateral damage”? Or maybe he’s still here, just quiet, buried under bureaucracy and drone strikes and funeral hashtags. And what are humans even? We are creatures who can cry over a fictional death in a show, and scroll past real dead children with dry eyes. We are capable of invention, of tenderness, of art and somehow also this: rape as a weapon of war. propaganda as morning news. people dying in the desert while rich men argue about fuel prices. What does that make us? Are we monsters pretending to be angels? Or angels slowly choosing to become monsters because it’s easier? And yet... And yet I see someone pull a cat out of rubble. I see strangers share their food in refugee lines. I see musicians play under the sound of bombs. I see love letters written on broken walls. So maybe we're not one thing. Maybe humans are the only creature both divine and disastrous: godlike in our dreams, but cursed by our choices. We want heaven. We build hell. We pray in the ruins. And me? I just sit here. Still scrolling. Still typing. Still trying to thread together headlines and heartbreak into something that makes sense. Still hoping there’s a shape to this chaos. Still believing, maybe foolishly, that writing it down is a way of staying human.
- Oizys
Friday, June 20, 2025
Job hunting is a full-time job that doesn’t pay
I am sitting with my laptop, 47 tabs open, 3 different browsers, reading another “dynamic self-starter” requirement. I’ve been applying to so many jobs lately; obsessively, exhaustingly, methodically; and the silence in return has been deafening. Negligible callbacks. No feedback. Just form rejections or, more often, nothing at all. Every application feels like bottling lightning with a cover letter. I keep rewriting my story to fit a box someone else built. I keep telling myself, “You’re not lazy. You’re in limbo. And limbo is a battlefield.” What does one even do to get a job anymore? Apply? Network? Manifest? Beg? Burn sage?
As a certified daydreamer, I sometimes stumble upon a job listing that feels like it was written for me, like the universe whispered it into existence. And I let myself believe.
I imagine the version of me who gets it: cool, confident, caffeinated. I reshape my identity around the role. I draft mental tweets about the work I’ll do.
And then? Silence. Not even a polite no. Just the usual ghosting. Rejection doesn’t just hurt my chances. It hijacks my identity. I start asking not “Am I good enough?” but “Am I anything at all?”
I do this monthly, by the way. Like a ritual. Spot the dream job, fall in love, get ghosted. Repeat.
And in this sacred cycle of self-inflicted heartbreak, I haunt the LinkedIn profiles of people who did get those positions. I compare and contrast their every achievement, line by line. I zoom into their credentials, the photos, the internships, the polished summary paragraphs.
I make mental notes of where they went right... and where I must’ve gone wrong. It’s not envy, exactly. It’s more like academic grief. A post-mortem of opportunities that slipped away.
What is a job? A paycheck? A place to put your brain on weekdays? A badge of worth? Why does it feel like I’m chasing a ghost version of myself in a blazer and imposter syndrome?
There’s no safety net. Just this quiet panic under my skin. Hopes and dreams feel like they’re flying farther away from me each day. Some mornings, it feels like my competency is slowly leaking out of my soul.
But... The waiting, the rejection emails with no feedback. Talk about interviews that felt like interrogations. Or worse, hope-laced silences. And then I scroll through another “I’m thrilled to announce…” post on LinkedIn, with a sad, lumpy blob of jealousy rising in my throat like bad tea. I want to be happy for people (and I usually am!) but some days it stings. I feel like I’m getting erased while the algorithm cheers someone else on.
That exhaustion from LinkedIn (LinkedIn is an unnecessary evil, by the way!) trenches or getting ghosted by HR has been teaching me so much. I’m learning that job hunting is less about skills and more about performance. How well can you mask exhaustion with enthusiasm? How many times can you pitch yourself before you forget who you’re selling? How long before “professional” starts meaning “emotionally numbed but high-functioning”? There’s this impossible bind. Be ambitious, but don’t burn out. Work hard, but rest. Hustle, but heal. I feel like I'm always choosing between being well and being seen. And if I dare to pause, it feels like the world moves on without me. Reading most job descriptions now feels like reading aspirational fiction. I don’t even need to feel guilty about not reading books anymore.
Sometimes, I feel like my real dream job is the one where I wouldn't need LinkedIn. A role where I could show up as myself, not a clickable summary. Where I’m not forced to compress my soul into a headline. No “culture fit,” no personal brand. I don’t want my life to be reduced to KPIs and key deliverables. I want work that lets me breathe. Just real work with real meaning, without having to turn myself into a walking pitch deck. I’m not asking for ease. I’m asking for respect. And honestly? Rest shouldn’t feel like a rebellion.
I keep hoping side projects count (even anonymized poetry that nobody knows about!). But, my question is: why is “the right job” feeling like I am applying to be someone else? the right job should feel like recognition, not reinvention, right? This is exactly the marrow of the modern job hunt: we are not just searching for work, you’re clawing for dignity in a system that doesn’t even remember we exist. The modern job market isn’t built for poets or dreamers. It isn’t built for thinkers. Or for care. It was built for efficiency theatre, the kind that rewards polish over potential and pedigree over passion. No, it’s not a meritocracy. It’s a visibility contest: loud, relentless, and deeply unfair. It favors the glossy, the networked, the already-known. And those of us who are real? Who bring depth and devotion? We’re made to feel like we’re “too much” or “not enough,” never the right shape for the job-shaped hole.
Some days, I feel like I’m grieving the version of myself who could’ve done so much, if only the world had noticed. If only systems weren’t so rigged. If only potential mattered more than packaging. I’m not loud. I’m not always "on." I don’t speak in bullet points or market myself like a brand. But I show up, I think deeply, I care hard. It’s just that no one seems to notice unless you shout. And, as usual, shouting doesn’t come naturally to me.
I don’t know what the dream job is anymore. I’m still looking. I’ll keep applying, yes. But I’m done apologizing. The job is not to chase jobs. The job is to build a life. Job applications are a tool. Not the temple. I’ve decided to stop shrinking to fit. I’m done editing my soul to sound more like synergy. Whoever hires me next doesn’t just get my labor. They get my loyalty, my integrity, my fire. And, I've decided to interview jobs as much as they interview me. Until then, I’ll keep writing. I’ll keep dreaming. And I’ll keep becoming the version of me that doesn’t need to be picked to matter.
Here's the context behind the urgency: I just switched jobs this year. I ran; ran; from a soul-sucking, peanut-paying corporate job that drained the joy out of everything. I thought I had made it out. I joined the social sector. First month? Euphoric. I felt like I could breathe again. But then... the cracks. Salaries delayed. People started leaving. Then the firings began. The office turned into a ghost town. And I’m stuck again: overworked, underpaid, overwhelmed. And it’s scary. Burnout isn’t a side effect anymore, it’s the entire atmosphere. I’m tired before I even start my day. Rest feels illegal. Rest feels like laziness. Rest feels like losing. We’ve normalized being stretched thin like it's ambition, but really, we’re just running on hope fumes and broken sleep. And honestly? The grief of working in the nonprofit world hits different. It’s heartbreaking. It’s lonely when you didn’t come from a utopia-coded progressive uni or have the ‘right kind’ of pedigree. Trying to find a fair-paying nonprofit job feels like breaking into a club where the bouncer keeps telling you your vibe is too real. Meanwhile, the cause is real, the stakes are real but the support? Nowhere to be found. It’s wild how even purpose-driven spaces expect you to martyr your sanity for pennies. I thought nonprofit meant values-first, but it feels like capitalism wearing an empathy costume. The mission is noble, but the machinery is broken. And I’m caught in the cogs.
I think part of the problem is that I never really had a “dream job” in the first place. Not in school. Not in college. I was too busy studying, trying to survive, or writing lonely poetry in the margins of my notebooks. I didn’t dream of corner offices or five-year plans. I didn’t grow up dreaming of a title or a salary. I dreamt of being seen. Of not feeling invisible. Of not being lonely. Of doing something that didn’t make me feel like a background character in my own life. Of having a life that made sense. We were sold a linear fantasy, but the world zigzagged. The real dream isn’t a job title, it’s dignity, it’s meaning, it’s waking up without dread clawing at your chest. The right job shouldn’t make you shapeshift; it should recognize you already are the shape. It should feel like resonance, not reinvention.
Sometimes I feel haunted by a future that was built for me by other people. As kids, we’re spoon-fed this shiny, linear story: study hard, get good marks, pick a respectable job, climb ladders, get promotions, buy property, smile in family WhatsApp groups. The “good life.” But I don’t think I ever wanted that future. Not really. While everyone else was dreaming of MBA programs and big company perks, I was secretly imagining that some rich, mysterious publishing house would stumble across my lonely little blog and offer me a book deal. I dreamed of writing barefoot in cafés in Scotland. Of giving readings in bookstores that smelled like old paper and ambition. Of wandering around the UK on a budget and a prayer, soaking up rainy streets and secondhand stories. I didn’t want a career. I wanted a life I could feel inside my body. But then came the expectations. The "be practical" warnings. The polite discouragement dressed as love. Slowly, I started shelving those dreams, one by one, to make room for a future that felt safe. Probable. Professional. Predictable. And now I sit here, years later, wondering if those dreams are still waiting for me somewhere, or if I buried them too well. Maybe that’s why job hunting feels so violent. It’s not just work I’m chasing, it’s a life I never gave myself permission to want.
Maybe that’s why the job search feels so personal. It’s not just about getting paid. It’s about asking, “Is there a place in the world for someone like me?” And when the answer is silence… it stings deeper than we let on.
Everyone says “impact over income” until the rent’s due. They still follow the same tired meritocracy myths. Fancy degrees and elite circles? Still the key to the door. Passion? Lived experience? Grit? Not on the job description. It’s not about values. It’s about proximity to prestige.
Sometimes, I put in so much efforts while applying for jobs. I’ve sent my soul with my resume... and they still ghost me like I sent them spam. (Also, no. I don't want to write a 500-word highly-tailored cover letter for your excel job. It's a job application, not an odyssey. I am NOT a culture fit and that's a compliment!) But, they all feel like a silent scream in a crowded room. I feel like people make a huge fuss about ATS or AI or AI ATS or whatever. Like, I can say: “I have 7+ years of experience in breathing,” and still will make the ATS (or, won't... I don't know!). And, those entry-level roles requiring 10 years or the unpaid trial projects? We all joke to cope, but that laughter is doing the heavy lifting of grief because beneath that is fatigue. And fear. And a constant rewriting of our self-worth. The job search itself is unpaid labor. Emotional labor. Cognitive labor. Soul labor. Sometimes, I apply to a ton of jobs, diligently, completely. I burn through tabs and tweak resumes until I can't see straight. Then I pause. I wait. I tell myself, “Let the responses come.” But they don’t. And while I rest, the listings keep moving, the deadlines pass, and I miss out on those. I sit there with nothing but silence (and shame...). And slowly, I just… give up. Not forever, but enough to feel like a failure in limbo.
We call it “looking” but really we’re building a full-time brand campaign for ourselves, for free! No one sees the spreadsheets. The follow-ups. The cover letters that take pieces of our souls from us. No one counts the time spent watching hope slip through algorithmic cracks.
There are moments where I’m pumped, eyes wide, heart racing, excitedly applying to jobs that feel right. The kind of roles that make me whisper, “Maybe this one. Maybe finally.” But that hope? It gets shattered. By a nonresponse. Or a generic, polite rejection. Or just my own self-doubt, circling back like an unpaid intern whispering, “Who do you think you are?” The crash after the high is brutal. Like sending love letters into the void and getting echoes back in Times New Roman.
I am not desperate. I am discerning. And that’s my new job title. Sometimes, I even feel guilty for thinking about what kind of job would suit me. Like I should just be grateful for whatever comes my way. Everyone says, “Just be grateful someone’s hiring.” But grateful for what? For burnout? For unpaid test assignments? For having to beg for dignity in exchange for labor? Gratitude without boundaries is exploitation. And, I’m bound by family expectations, by society’s timelines, by this blurry, unpredictable future. I’m scared to dream too specifically, too selfishly. And then there’s that cold jealousy towards people whose jobs make sense, whose paths look linear. It’s not that I want their life. I just want mine to stop feeling like a question mark.
I keep wondering: if I’m doing everything “right,” why does everything feel so wrong? Why do so many brilliant, kind, competent people end up in the waiting room of their own lives? And why does getting a job feel like being picked for a secret society, not a role? So many like me are stuck in a waiting room to live our lives. Just sitting there, waiting for a “good job,” a well-paying one, or any escape hatch far from home. We tell ourselves: once that job comes, then we’ll start our life. Until then? Our careers feel reserved for the frosted-glass club chilling at the top, while we pace below, carrying portfolios and hope like offerings. You can be both highly skilled and unemployed. But, where do the unchosen go? And what about goals? What are they? What are mine? Aspirations? Needs? Life? What even is the plan anymore?
If you’re out there job-searching too, still reshaping yourself for job listings, still whispering "maybe this one": You're not alone, this post is for you. You’re not failing. You’re enduring in a system designed to wear you down. It’s not that you’re not trying hard enough. It’s that the effort has become unsustainable. And you’re still standing. Still sending hope notes into the void. Still dreaming despite the ache. You're not lazy. You're not lost. You're just in limbo. And limbo is a battlefield.
Okay, I have to go and write a six-page research note for a job application, formatted to impossible perfection because nothing says overqualified, underpaid, and barely surviving capitalism like being expected to smile in Arial 11.
- Oizys, currently emailing cover letters into the abyss.