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.

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.

Black on her hands // God is not in the chat

Part 1: Black on her hands

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. 

Saturday was almost ethereal; a good, smooth day. Had some evening snacks with my sister; they were almost good. I was almost full, so I skipped dinner. Sunday morning, we cooked together. Somewhere between spices and small talk, I got sick. Paused. Came back to the kitchen anyway. We had pasta together; a quiet, warm thing. Later, we played games. She went to sleep. I didn’t. I listened to music, aimlessly daydreamed, drifted a little. Then my parents came back from a trip. My sister and I had a heavy late lunch. I started getting ready to go out with her. That’s when it happened.

I overheard my mother talking on the phone with her friend (the one who invited her to her daughter’s wedding ritual just hours earlier, but never mentioned the dress colour code). That same friend is starting a new business. And just like that, it struck me. A memory, soft and loud at once. One night, many nights ago, I remember my mother speaking in that half-asleep tone, whispering an idea: a small business she wanted to start. Something to sell. Something to create. And now, here we are. Someone else is doing it. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It sat like a rock in my chest, a mist in my head.

Was my mother like me? Does she get sadly jealous too? Of others who do the things she once wanted for herself? Not the mean kind of envy, not to drag them down, but that quiet grief of seeing someone do the thing you dreamed of, and realizing: you didn’t. I couldn’t stop. I kept thinking about it while getting ready, while walking out, while handing over my laptop at the repair store, while sitting at the coffee shop to wait. It clung to me. This thought: My mother’s hand: black with her dreams rotting. And I don’t even know what I meant by that. But it felt true. Like somehow, her losses are shadow versions of my fears. And I can’t stop staring at them. Guilt oozes as conflicting emotions tear me apart. It’s not just sadness. It’s not just fear. It’s something messier; grief, envy, love, helplessness; all tangled. Why am I thinking about this so much? Why can’t I shake it off? Is it because she never got to have anything of her own? Is it because, in some terrible, unspoken way, my existence is complicit in robbing her of that chance? Or is it just my own fear: fear that I won’t be successful, that I’ll end up with the same unfinished dreams, locked away behind kitchen shelves and wedding invites? Maybe that’s why it hurts. Maybe when I see that flicker of fate in her, I panic: not for her, but for myself. And then I hate myself for making it about me. Is that hypocritical? Is it just human? I don’t know. But I keep thinking about it. And it won’t let me go. I can’t tell where she ends and I begin. And I don't know how to live a life like this: her burden or my burden or ours together. I guess that’s why I romanticize the idea of death. I guess that’s why I subconsciously stay back in this house to sit beside my mother’s misery like a quiet, unwanted guest. And I don't know how to escape this anymore. I blame the system. The society. The culture. The institution. Her family. My grandparents. My father. Her brother. Her sisters. All of them. Every single one. The ones who told her to be quiet. To adjust. The ones who made her believe a woman’s worth is in the way she serves, not the way she dreams. The ones who laughed when she imagined a life that was hers alone. The ones who called her ambition a phase, a tantrum, a shame. And maybe I blame myself, too, for not doing enough, for not being enough, for watching her shrink and never learning how to expand. Not out of drama. Not to escape. Just… the idea of rest. Silence. A life where I don’t feel like I’m carrying her broken dreams in my bones. A life that is mine, not an apology for hers. A morning where I wake up and the grief isn’t already waiting by the bed. A day without history clawing at my back. Just one breath that is completely my own. And even that feels hypocritical. Because what I genuinely want is a life like that for the two of us. For her, and for me. And I know that’s not possible. So the want and the realization wrestle; quietly, endlessly; inside me.

Part - 2: God is not in the chat

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

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.

UNBODY PART 3: (Un)kinking my libido because that cunt is a big, fat liar

Before the fantasy, there was the fear. Before the kink, there was the monster. Before I touched myself, I touched silence. Before I untangled my kinks, I had to name the monsters. Now, this isn’t about “knowing what I want.” It’s about sitting with the mess of it. The contradiction. The arousal that makes me ashamed, the shame that makes me aroused. So, I go in with Freud and come out with feral grief. I try to separate what I want from what I was programmed to want. My self-desires feel assaulted by their implications, insertions, and insinuations on this body that I carry. My want crawls out of me like a feral animal, dragging its placenta of shame behind. The weight of every gaze, every script, every inherited moan, every graze of touch lives here. My fantasies feel like archives of other people’s appetites planted like traps in the folds of my own want. And the wires don’t come apart. They peeled me open like overripe fruit and called it foreplay. My cunt remembers. Not names. Not faces. Just the weight, the trespass, the exit wound. Every orgasm I fake is a funeral for the ones I never owned. I arch not from pleasure but from reflex like a body flinching in a morgue drawer. Desire drips from me like pus from a healing wound: necessary, but never clean. He said ‘relax,’ and I became water: flooding, drowning, disappearing down the drain. There’s a graveyard between my thighs and every lover’s name is etched on the tombstones of my cervix. My libido limps. It limps like it’s been chased for years and never offered a drink of water. I didn’t come. I combusted. Like a chemical spill, like a fire they lit and blamed me for burning. I bled into their hands and they called it affection. I hemorrhaged and they said I was dramatic. This body is a reliquary of rot. Desire stinks in me like something holy left too long in the sun. My orgasm was an exorcism, and I didn’t even get to keep the demon. I have licked the fingers that hurt me, thinking maybe the salt was love. I don’t open. I rupture. And still they enter, like maggots looking for meat. I touch myself and it smells like rot under skin decaying and desperate for light. Even when I ache, I don’t reach for pleasure. I reach for proof I’m still punishable. I spread not like petals but like an autopsy: unzipped, pinned down, catalogued. They never touched my soul, but they left bite marks on my will to live. My thighs are crime scenes. The DNA still lingers in the sweat stains. My moans sound like prayers no god wants to answer. I’ve mistaken bruising for blooming so often, I now call violence foreplay. Desire has hands. They are not mine. They grip my throat from the inside, not choking (...?), just holding like a hand waiting for the right word, just hovering like a threat paused mid-sentence, just lingering like it’s waiting for me to consent, just watching like a hand sculpting silence. I knelt like a statue of a good girl martyr, but they came like a firing squad like I was a scapegoat. My cervix carries the muscle memory of the trespass, trembling, repetition, and rupture. I wasn’t aroused. I was performing survival, translating pain into porn, trying not to remember. I held my own ankles like a hinge begging not to snap, the pages of a manual written by them. There are moments I feel "empowered" and start building a cathedral out of cunt, contradiction, and carrion. But, each time I moaned, a little girl in me cried in a locked room. I was always wet not from desire, but from the leaking wound of needing to be wanted. My nipples stiffen like corpses going into rigor mortis. Still, they call it arousal. This body doesn’t open: it unravels. Spooling shame like silk from a slit throat. I came, yes. But it felt like being split by a scalpel dipped in honey: surgical, sweet, and cruel. There’s a scream tucked in the folds of my labia. I press, and it almost sings. Even my fantasies feel like trauma dressed in drag. Sexy like a noose in satin. I’ve learned to ride my pleasure like a wild dog: foaming, limping, but loyal. I ache like an infected socket where trust used to be. This isn’t a fantasy. This is memory wearing lingerie. My body mid-fantasy? It’s not glistening and parted like a magazine centerfold. It’s itchy. Leaky. I’m on the brink of climax but also wondering if my tampon string is visible. My mouth goes dry. My thighs rub raw. My stomach makes digestive sounds like it’s adding commentary. And somehow, I’m supposed to feel “in my body”? My body is everywhere. Too loud to be background. I open up my browser history like a crime scene. That story I reread ten times. That video with the dom voice that makes my breath hitch. I try to be clinical. Objective. But the fantasy won’t hold still. It bleeds into memory. The power play, the degradation, the faceless hands, the roughness… It rams into me: from clinical to confessional to carnal to corpse-cold: all at once like a nosedive, with no cohesion, a descent with no map, no mercy, no meaning. Just collapse. And suddenly I am not aroused, I  am remembering. And I whisper: “Wait. This isn’t mine. This was done to me.” But my body? It’s still responding. And now the shame is wearing lipstick. Sometimes I start fantasizing mid-cramp. Lower back spasms. A heating pad on, vibrator off. My pelvis throws a tantrum every time I try to feel good. There’s lint in my navel and a rogue chin hair I keep forgetting to pluck. I’m trying to get off while also wondering if I remembered to floss. “My thighs don’t glisten. They squeak when I sweat. There’s a patch behind my knee that smells like anxiety and unwashed denim. I think about my stretch marks and how they look like claw marks on bread dough. Sometimes I run my fingers over them mid-touch, like reading Braille for grief. My libido shows up in ugly places. Right after crying. Right before my period. When I haven’t shaved in weeks and my underwear looks like a crime scene. I’ve come with a cold. Sniffling, wheezing, praying the snot doesn’t drip onto anyone. I’ve orgasmed while congested: snot pooling, breathing ragged; felt both euphoric and mucus-filled. I’ve moaned with a sore throat. It came out like a dying frog. He thought it was sexy. I thought it was phlegm. I tasted mucus. My skin collects stories in patches: razor bumps, dry elbow maps, rogue chin hairs. There’s a patch behind my knee that smells like my ex’s laundry detergent and regret. I want to come, and all I feel is my belly folding over itself like a closing curtain. I’m not ashamed of it. But it refuses to perform. Sometimes my discharge smells like guilt. Sometimes I smell like old T-shirts and regret. Sometimes I just smell like skin, and that should be enough. My arousal has stretch marks and friction burns. Sometimes my vulva smells like vinegar and despair, and I still ache. He thought I was panting. I was trying not to drip. So, I start sorting: “This one’s fine.” “This one’s from trauma.” “This one’s just porn.” “This one’s mine... I think?” But it all collapses. Because every fantasy is both a choice and a scar. A kink and a ghost. A desire and a warning. I like this. But I also remember flinching. I fantasize about being taken. But what if that’s just how I survived being never asked? On all my fours exposing my libido like a fresh wound: a wanting that was never mine but performed anyway. I wanted to be dominated. Not destroyed. I liked the pain. But only when I controlled the script. (Or, maybe I just hated and was manipulating myself because I was helpless?) Not when it felt like being opened with an incendiary crowbar of their gruesome desires. I’ve begged in bed and hated myself for it. I came, gaping. Open from every orifice, every pore, every node, gushing out their filth to rejuvenate this injury of obedience. I came to the sound of violence. Then threw up. I still want it. And I hate that I do. Suddenly, nothing is safe. I can’t tell what’s hot and what’s harm. I am turned on and betrayed at the same time. I am fantasizing and crying at once. I am imagining someone choking me gently, slapping me lovingly and sobbing because you don’t know if it’s love or reenactment. I touch myself and flinch. I come, and then I cry. I think I want it rough... but I’ve never had it any other way. I try to finish the thought. The fantasy. The sentence. But my hands stop. My breath catches. My libido is laughing. That cunt is a liar. Afterwards, it’s quiet. Not romantic quiet. Not soft-lit, wet-sheet cinematic quiet. No. It’s hunger curdling in my bones quiet. The kind of quiet where your cunt still twitches but your chest feels hollowed out. Like you came and left your ribcage behind. There’s no healing here. Only the throb of unfinished business. The stench of sweat and self-doubt marinating in my sheets. I’m not glowing. I’m leaking. Salt, blood, mucus, regret: the holy quaternity of womanhood. My hand is still wet. Not with pleasure but with proof. My breath is a confession. My thighs are witnesses. I am the scene of the crime and the investigator trying not to flinch. What happens after the orgasm, when the script forgets its ending? When the hands dissolve, and I’m stuck with my own scent, my own questions, my own filth? No one talks about this aftermath. The part where your legs ache not from pleasure but from holding in ghosts. The part where your nipples stay hard but your spirit crumbles. I touch the stain on my bedsheet like it might spell something. It doesn’t. It just smells like old shame. Like something done to me, even if I did it myself. I stare at my fingers and wonder if they’re traitors. They knew where to go. Too well. Did they lead me to freedom, or back into the jail cell of memory? Integration is not healing. It’s gutting the fish and eating it raw anyway. It’s not peace. It’s pestilence made tender. It’s inviting the ghosts in, not to forgive them, but to watch me bleed and still stay standing. I try again.  A new fantasy. One where I’m asked. One where no one flinches. One where I don’t apologize for making a sound. It’s awkward. It stutters. It doesn’t fit right. But I keep going. Because I want to know what it feels like to touch myself without flinching, without fearing, without a man’s breath hanging in my ear from 2008. I want to want softly. Not because I’m delicate, but because I’m done with violence being the only language I know. I want a desire that doesn’t echo with footsteps behind me. I smell like anxiety and old laundry. I sound like grief with an orgasm. I am stretch-marked, snot-nosed, salt-crusted, chin-hair-grown. And yet: I smile. A feral, cracked, crooked smile. Like something wild that’s finally stopped playing dead. This isn’t healing. It’s a resurrection through rot. It’s a truce not with the world, but with the version of me that still begs for softness. Tomorrow, I might ache again. Might scroll through the same video. Might get turned on by something I swore I buried. But tonight, I masturbate like I’m reading scripture I wrote in blood. I come like a question mark. And cry like an answer. And tonight, I leave the light on. (Yes, I’m sleeping with the lights on.) Not because I’m afraid. Because I want to see everything even the parts that still twitch. Maybe I’ll never know what’s mine and what’s inherited. Maybe every orgasm is a reenactment and a rebellion. But I won’t lie about it anymore. This is not closure. This isn’t healing. This is a standoff. Me vs. every fuck I was programmed to crave. Me vs. the shame in lipstick. Me vs. my own tongue. My desire isn't dirty. It is haunted. It is bloody. It’s blood-wet, grief-slick, alive. So, I am letting the body speak in tongues, letting the cunt testify, letting the flesh curdle, letting the shame leak like milk blister pooling on the areola. Tomorrow I’ll still want. I’ll still ache. I might still touch myself and not know why. I’ll still wonder if the ache is mine. But tonight, the shame sleeps on the floor. At least now, I’ll be looking. And for once, it’s her who can’t look away. She does stare back. Not to forgive, but to remember. (Or, maybe to ruin everything softer that came after.)

- Oizys.
[Goddess on all her fours: gaping, growling, surviving. On her knees, in labor, bleeding through silk, scrubbing the temple floors of blood, bile, and bile-bathed scripts they once called seduction. She cleans with her own spit and grief, with ragged nails and ruined prayers, clotting her divinity. Not for absolution. Not for redemption. Just so no one slips again.]

UNBODY PART 2: (Un)wanting my eros in exile, my sex in war, my pleasure in pus(sy?)

Sex doesn’t liberate me. Sometimes it just bloats me. I’ve had orgasms followed by gas pains and self-loathing. I’ve stared at the ceiling wondering if this was healing or just pelvic cardio. My body finishes, but my brain stays behind cleaning up after the mess. I don’t know how to want. Not really. Not without asking first. Not without scanning the room for permission. Not without rehearsing how that wanting might look on someone else’s face. Because somewhere along the way, my “want” stopped belonging to me. It became a safety hazard. A negotiation. A side dish to someone else’s hunger. They tell me I’m allowed now. They whisper, “You’re safe with me.” And my body? It glitches. It doesn’t know how to process kindness without bracing for cost. It wants to trust, but somewhere deep in the code, the algorithm screams: Obedience is safety. Obedience is love. Obedience is the rent you pay to exist. I want to want. But I don’t know where to put that want. I don’t know if it’s mine or just another auto-filled form handed down from culture, family, gods and groomers all dressed in the same well-meaning smile. Desire doesn’t come to me as hunger. It comes as a checklist. A calibration. My thighs chafe when I try to straddle. My skin collects stories in patches: razor bumps, dry elbow maps, a mole that grew like a rebellion. Nothing is smooth. Nothing is silent. Even my ankles are opinionated. No aphrodisiacs. Just flatulence and unshaven thighs and existential interruptions. My stomach folds in ways that feel like betrayal. Sometimes I suck it in out of reflex, then forget to breathe. My belly isn’t bashful, it softens like protest. It folds like grief. It gurgles in rooms meant for whispers. My nipples don’t perk up on cue: they’re indifferent, moody, sometimes numb. “Sometimes one reacts and the other just... clocks out. Like a mismatched pair of employees. My left boob is always ahead of the curve. The right one's passive-aggressive about attention. Sometimes I wonder if my vulva’s lips are uneven. One labia’s a philosopher, the other’s given up. My body isn’t symmetrical. It’s a democracy in chaos. My knees crack when I shift positions. There’s hair where I was told there shouldn’t be. It grows like vengeance. Like inheritance. I don’t wax it away. I’ve stopped apologizing for follicles. My toes curl not from pleasure, but from trying to hold it together. Nothing fluid. Just joints and folds and tension. It comes as a pelvic-floor calculation. Will it hurt? Do I smell okay? Is my breathing too animal? Do I look alive or just available? Is the bra cute enough to leave on, or will it ruin the performance? Sometimes I rehearse moans in my head, not because I feel them but because I’ve been taught to. I think about how my face looks from the side. Whether my breasts fall in the right direction. If my stomach is flattening enough while I’m on top. My clit isn’t some wild, pulsing portal. Some days it hides. Some days it sulks. Some days it screams so quietly I can’t tell if it’s hunger or mourning. Sometimes it’s just... missing. Like it checked out mid-scene. The body is not a movie. Mine forgets its lines all the time. Sometimes I cough mid-kiss and snot gets involved. Sometimes I queef so loud I have to pretend it was the bed. I’ve had to stop mid-sex to pee. I’ve yawned during oral. I’ve giggled at the wet sounds. I’ve panicked at the dryness. I’ve whispered ‘I think I’m bleeding’ and not in the sexy vampire way. My body is not a climax machine. My arousal is not aesthetic. It stains. It sticks. It smells like me and I’m learning not to flinch. It’s a meat puppet with stage fright and IBS. Is this safe? Is this acceptable? Is this too loud, too wet, too much? Is this going to make me lovable? Am I earning intimacy or inviting punishment? (Here. Touch it. Not to fix it, but to feel how sharp it really is.) Do I angle my body like porn stills or wedding photos? Do I arch or curl? Do I fake the sigh because silence feels too real? And, love? Love after trauma is like teaching a bomb how to cuddle. They hold you and you flinch, not because they hurt you, but because you’ve never been held without it costing something. And you feel ridiculous explaining this. You know they aren’t your father, your uncle, your society. But your body doesn’t care about genealogy. It only knows that soft hands have come before with sharp shadows. It only knows that “you’re safe now” is the most dangerous sentence of all because that’s what they said before they taught you how to break beautifully. And then there’s freedom. God. That hideous, glittery masquerade ball. They sell it to you wrapped in hashtags and lingerie. Freedom, they say, is dancing half-naked on a rooftop, moaning louder, arching bolder, “owning it.” But I don’t want to own it. I want to disown it. I want to unlearn the blueprint that told me sex is a performance and wanting is a product. I don’t want to perform my healing through erotica. I want to be turned off, unmade, unplugged. I don’t want to smell like vanilla lotion and regret. I don’t want my orgasm to be a staged event: neat, clean, almost spiritual. I want to not care if I drool or fart or lay there like a malfunctioning wire. Sometimes I fake trembles because the real ones feel too strange. Sometimes I itch mid-thrust and don’t scratch. My thighs cramp. My jaw locks. My skin breaks into stress hives that don’t look seductive in candlelight. I’ve had discharge that looked like glue. I've left sweat stains on his chest. One time I sneezed mid-orgasm and pulled a muscle in my lower back. The smell of latex and lube doesn’t turn me on, it reminds me of hospitals and cheap motels. I can’t always breathe through my nose when I’m on top. Sometimes I burp. And it’s not cute. And when it’s over, I wipe with toilet paper that sticks to me, rolls into sad little confetti at my thighs. Is this what they call post-coital glow? What does freedom actually look like? Not fireworks. Not fishnets. Maybe it looks like boredom. Maybe it looks like saying no and not being punished. Maybe it’s sitting still without shrinking. Maybe it’s not having to exfoliate before being seen. Maybe it’s not needing a playlist to kiss someone. Maybe it’s unsexy lighting. Maybe it’s cotton underwear and mismatched socks and no script. Maybe it’s silence that isn’t suspicious. Maybe it’s desire that isn’t urgent, isn’t curated, isn’t for sale. The culture that “liberates” me through aesthetics still demands obedience: just repackaged as empowerment. Same pot. Different stew. They say: Be free. But look hot doing it. Be sexual, but not needy. Be empowered, but not angry. Be soft, but not stupid. Be healing, but always presentable. And I’m standing here, naked in every way, asking: What if I just don’t want to be edible anymore? What if I want my desire to be ugly? What if I want to want like a malfunctioning script? What if freedom means never being understood? So, I am not ashamed of my malfunction anymore. I am investigating it. What does it mean to “want” when your want was always filtered through someone else’s comfort? I was  taught to anticipate others, not access yourself. My body isn’t aroused by pleasure. It’s triggered by compliance. The desire I was handed? It wasn’t mine. It was manufactured in their shame factory. I was taught to want like a good girl: quietly, neatly, in the dark. I crossed my legs so tightly in childhood I forgot how to uncross them as an adult. My inner thighs feel like locked gates. I hold tension in my hips like old family secrets. Even my vaginal walls brace like they’re about to be told to behave. There’s no ease in entry. There’s only apology. Even when I was alone, the dark had eyes. I adjusted my panties like I was on camera. I touched myself as if someone might still be grading me. Desire, for me, is not a spark. It’s an algorithm. This household is the microstate of that system. "Nice" bodies  who “never hit me” but trained me to flinch with tone. Well-meaning bodies who passed on silence like recipes. Institutions that applauded my silence as virtue. Healing spaces that still demand me be palatable while “liberated.” I was broken by trauma. I was formatted by tradition. Then, there is love with its teeth bared. The guilt of not feeling “safe” even when they’re kind. Wanting to love but my nervous system is still in alert mode. Being loved without being expected to shrink: it confuses me. I try to love back, but sometimes it feels like self-betrayal. I confuse tension for passion, withdrawal for seduction, discomfort for destiny. Love shouldn’t feel like waiting for the other shoe to drop, but my shoes were always weapons. Even his kindness feels like a trapdoor. Even his softness is suspect. I scan his voice for volume, his hand for pressure, his breath for pause. My body watches him watching me, never present, only analyzing. And, it pushes me into rejecting both oppression and its neon makeover. Hypersexuality as their redemption arc of trauma, acting like the "saviourship" is their holy career. Even rebellion gets packaged: fishnets, red lips, moaning as manifesto. But what if freedom isn’t sexy at all? What if it’s quiet, dry, still, a little boring and that’s beautiful? They shamed my body because it wasn’t theirs to script. They told me my body was too much and not enough in the same breath. Too loud in its textures, too quiet in its curves. Too present. Too resistant to polish. Too resistant, period. I learned early that softness isn’t granted, it’s manufactured. And I was born unfinished by their standards. Untamed in the places they preferred glossy. I carry the kind of skin that history has punished. I grow the kind of hair they pretend doesn’t exist. I inhabit a frame that refuses their choreography. This body wasn’t built for your spotlight. It was built for survival under surveillance. And the most radical act? To want it anyway. To worship it not because it defies them but because it betrays their fantasies. My skin doesn’t glow, it absorbs. It remembers. It bites back. They trained me to think of myself in parts: too thick here, too flat there, too dark to be delicate. I wasn’t born for softness. I was born bearing the myths of ‘fixable.’ They never wanted to touch me. They wanted to edit me. I don’t want to be delicious. I want to be undigestible. I want to want the unsexy in me. To press my mouth against my own mess. To not just accept the folds and the funk and the failure, but to lust for it. To see the sweat patch and feel holy. To feel the ache in my knees and say yes, this is mine. Wanting the unsexy in me, wanting the unsexy on me, is the most radical thing I do. Because it means I am not here to be consumed. I am here to be claimed: by myself. I want to want myself when I’m bloated. When I’m bleeding. When I’m blank. When I’m unwashed, unwaxed, undone. I want to run my hands over the parts of me that never made the catalog. And still feel heat rise. Still feel home. And still... God, I wanted to be wanted. Not fixed. Not prettied up for display. Not lit with soft lighting and asked to pose. I wanted their want in the raw. When I was unruly, unplucked, unslicked. When I hadn’t prepared a face. When I hadn’t starved for it. I wanted them to reach for me when I wasn’t marketable. When I was bloated with rage, streaked with acne, or still sticky from crying. I wanted their hands not to cleanse me, but to tremble at me. I wanted their gaze to flinch not because I was grotesque, but because I was realer than what they were trained to desire. Because I had dared to want while unbeautiful. That wanting became a wound. That wanting became my leash. Because they didn’t want me. They wanted the obedient version of me. The edited version. The after-photo. And I still don’t know what aches more: being used, or being ignored. And, what if freedom is ugly? Slow? Undecorated? What if healing doesn’t taste good? It is freedom in the absence of performance, absence of prettiness. And, I feel like a fleshless ghost leaving the machine. I don't want to be a better performer. I want to stop performing. I want silence without being suspicious. I  want space that doesn’t demand an apology. I want to be able to stand in an empty room. Unwatched. Unexpected. And still not knowing what to do with my hands. I no longer want to ask to be understood and demand to be left unfixed. I’m not here to be healed. I’m here to misfire, malfunction, and make it impossible for your machine to run smoothly again. My desire is no longer yours to narrate. My body is not your audience. My moan is not your metric. Let me be unsexy. Let me pull underwear from between cheeks and still feel worthy. Let me itch my scalp mid-foreplay. Let me have dandruff. Let me be sacred in lint and leg hair and laundry-day bras. Let me smell like stress sweat. Let me fall asleep mid-touch. Let me laugh when I’m supposed to moan. Let my thighs jiggle with no apology. Let my armpits stink. Let my back sweat in patches. Let me have toilet paper stuck to my ass mid-kiss. Let me queef and not apologize. Let my mascara smudge and crust. Let me laugh with food in my teeth. Let me smell like last night’s fear. Let me be repulsive and still real. Let me fumble, twitch, freeze. Let me forget the choreography. Let me not want to be touched at all. Let me be whole in my stillness. Let me be loud in the wrong moments. Let me want nothing. Let me want everything. I want to kiss the crease in my body where shame used to live. I want to want the pimpled, the patchy, the peeling. The part of me that smells like real life, not rosewater. The part of me that jiggles wrong and aches right. I want to want the body that capitalism told me to Photoshop. I want to worship the sag, the scrape, the scab. I want the softness that doesn't sell. I want the hunger that isn't hungry for validation. Wanting the unsexy in me is not passive resistance. It’s an erotic uprising. Let me glitch. Let me wake up with a puffy face, a pimple in my cleavage, and morning breath that smells like existential dread. Let me wear granny panties on my period and still call it lingerie. Let my sex smell like copper and sweat and disappointment. Let my arousal not be cute: it’s swollen, confused, and full of air bubbles. Let it be holy in its awkwardness. Let it be divine like thunder, not delicate like lace. Let it be prayer and pus and pulse. Let it be mine.

- Oizys.

[Goddess on all her fours: gaping, growling, surviving. On her knees, in labor, bleeding through silk, scrubbing the temple floors of blood, bile, and bile-bathed scripts they once called seduction. She cleans with her own spit and grief, with ragged nails and ruined prayers, clotting her divinity. Not for absolution. Not for redemption. Just so no one slips again.]

UNBODY PART 1: (Un)sexed, (un)machined, (un)consented sadomaso-disco politics of being touched

Sex touches me even when I don’t want to be touched. Even when no one’s around. Sex finds me in solitude, not through touch but through residue that is a stain left by expectation, smeared into silence before I even knew I had a voice. They say sex is power. I say it’s labor. Unerotic, existential, survival-requisite, indoctrinated, spectral, chronic, ideological labor. The unsex of it all makes me assert that this isn’t a sexy story. This "sex" for me lives in power, pain, conditioning, expectation. For me, sex is not desire. It is duty. It is a choreography passed down by fear, stitched with shame, rehearsed in silence. My body is the site of conflict, a ruin crusted with rot, a place where memory has gone septic, a theatrical rehearsal room, and it is slowly becoming a decaying archive of imposed scripts, where pain is choreographed and memory takes the shape of obedience, of things done to it and demanded from it. What they call womanhood, I now recognize as slow corrosion, dressed up in bangles and grace. How I was raised to accommodate, absorb, endure the labor of pleasing, the silence of women as inherited performance, how pain and service were learned, not chosen. I didn’t learn pleasure. I learned performance. I was groomed by expectation, not by anyone in particular but by the whole damn household. It wasn’t just a person, it was the architecture, the wallpaper of hushes, the clink of teacups, the way silence was passed down like heirloom glassware. I was domestically programmed encoded in compliance, not by just abuse but by ambience. So, this is not my awakening. It’s an undoing. There is no climax (is there ever for someone like me?), but only clarity. I am not here to titillate. I am here to tell you how sex haunts me in places my body no longer wants to live in. Maybe one day I’ll write about sex as pleasure. Today I write it as residue: the violent sadness of being programmed, the rage of being built to serve, and the need to un-machine myself and undo the software their gaze installed in me. I am still screaming at Audre about where I will find new tools. There is a kind of sadness that is not soft. Not the cinematic kind, not the kind that curls into fetal positions under wool blankets. It’s a sadness that’s bone-deep and angry. It sits inside me like rusted metal: sharp, sour, and functional. This is the sadness of programming. Of being instructed, molded, machined into this body. Not born, but machined. Not taught but conditioned. Sex found me before I found language for it. Not through touch, but through expectation. The way I was taught to sit, to laugh but not too loud, to lower my eyes, to always; always; make others feel comfortable, even as I unraveled. I was not raised to want. I was raised to serve. And service, in this house, came dressed as obedience, as silence, as learned masochism. What they meant was: You’ll make yourself small. You’ll open your mouth only when you’re asked to, and your legs only when you’re expected to. You’ll confuse pain for passion, and exhaustion for intimacy. I don’t know where sex begins and programming ends. Even in self-pleasure, it’s not rebellion, it’s repetition. Even when I touch myself, I am the voyeur and the object, the punisher and the pawn. It’s not release, it’s ritual rehearsed in their gaze, even when they’re long gone. I don’t touch myself to feel. I touch myself because I was trained to believe this was mine. But their fingerprints are still on the script. A performance in solitude for them. Their scripts live in my fingers. Their expectations crawl under my skin. What should be mine still feels like theirs. I am touching myself, but I am also oppressing myself. It’s not pleasure. It’s reenactment. And afterwards, I feel the disgust like a second skin, shame, not because I did something wrong, but because I couldn’t do it freely. Even in the most private places, I’m not free. Even my desire has been domesticated. I thought self-touch would be liberation. But some nights, it’s just another form of service: a mimicry of what they taught me to perform. I moan in silence not from pleasure, but from the ache of remembering I was built to submit, even to myself. Disgust lingers like breath on glass. I finish, but it feels like failing. Like feeding the very machine I’m trying to break. Not just the violation of consent, but the colonization of agency. Not just external domination, but internalized servitude. I only know that I cannot separate my “yes” from all the times I was never allowed to say “no.” All the times my body, even when covered, was still too visible. This familial gaze is a weapon. My body was not mine. Not because it was taken but because it was never offered to me in the first place. Even fully clothed, I was too visible. Too loud. Too curved. Too thin. Too aware. I was always an offense, a silhouette too sentient, a body too loud with presence, a skin that spoke out of turn. My skin became the crime. My presence, the provocation. I covered it by bejeweling it with my own safety. But I was never safe, not from their eyes, not from their hushes, not from the rotting shame they planted in me like tradition. I wasn’t taught to understand myself. I was taught to anticipate others. Their reactions, their discomfort, their entitlement. My worth came tethered to how well I could avoid provoking dominance and how gracefully I could submit when provoked. Their gaze is an internal organ that just bleeds and bleeds. Installed inside me by claiming to protect me but instead surveils me into servitude. Every smile I forced, every silence I swallowed, every inch of me that shrank to fit their version of “good girl” was a lesson in disappearing. I wish to break this glassy, glossy, gaudy illusion of reclamation through hypersexuality, the way even liberation is sometimes repackaged through the same oppressive lens. It’s another performance, just painted with different hues of the same control. They say the antidote to this is desire. That I should become a sexpot: wet-lipped and wild-eyed, dripping in want and owning it like currency. They tell me to heal through heat, to strip the shame and wear lust like liberation. But what if that’s just another pot they’ve put on the stove? Another stew where I’m expected to marinate? What if my desire doesn’t look like fireworks and lipstick, but like a quiet refusal to boil? Society, politics, left, right: every sermon of "empowerment" still expects me to bleed performance. They say freedom is found in flaunting, in moaning louder, in arching bolder. But I don’t want to serve new masters in neon. That pot, that stew of desires isn’t mine. I was never asked what ingredients I wanted. They just handed me a script and said, “Be free but only like this.” I am not here to become the spice in their liberation recipe. I am here to crack the damn pot. From my brokenness, I will splinter the structure. Maybe I can’t rewrite the recipe, but I can surely drown the stew with the water from my sorrow, my tears, my salt, my severance and wash away their expectations until it’s no longer palatable, no longer existing. Not for them. And, maybe not even for me. People speak of sadomasochism like it's a kink, a chosen friction between power and submission. I call it a legacy, the inheritance of pain disguised as preference. A choreography I never auditioned for, performed nightly under the stage lights of scrutiny. A role I was cast into before I knew the script was written in pain. But what if the submission isn’t chosen? What if it’s default? I have served in moments I should’ve screamed. I have yielded when I wanted to run. I have whispered “it’s okay” when my body begged me to say NO. My servitude is not sexual; it is trained. (And you, if you're still here, ask yourself why. Do you come for the blood or for the balm? Are you here to witness or to feel better about yourself?) I was made to interpret dominance as love, pain as attention, and self-erasure as a virtue. Sadomasochism, for me, is not bedroom theater. It is daily life. It is smiling while bleeding. It is fetching tea for the bodies who once raised their hands at me. It is saying “I understand” when I am seething inside. It is sex I didn’t say yes to, but never said no to because the world never taught me how. My body performs this submission like breathing. And what’s terrifying is: Sometimes, I still think it’s love. But, it’s survival theatre. And the worst part? Even when the audience is gone, the performance continues. Because the machine runs even when I’m screaming inside. And when I try to resist, it tells me I’m defective. I don’t have a happy ending. I don’t have a healing arc with a bow on top. What I have is this: a quiet, violent urgency to unlearn. To malfunction in all the right ways. What I carry is a quiet, feral urgency to corrupt the software, to glitch where I was groomed, to become a threat to the system by simply unbecoming what it built. To short-circuit the expectations coded into my spine. To trigger alarms every time I say no. To stop functioning in ways that serve the silence. Let the system crash. Let me be the virus. To spit out the code. To break the cycle. I don’t want to be palatable. I don’t want to be well-behaved, well-adjusted, or “understood.” I want to be free in ways that terrify the system that built me. I want to flinch in the direction of freedom. I want to scream when I’m expected to smile. I want to say NO and mean it without apology, without explanation. I want to stop mistaking pain for presence. I want to stop seeing love in the eyes of those who want to rule me. I want to look in the mirror and finally see someone who belongs to herself. This isn’t a confession. This is not an essay. It’s a system error. It’s a crack in the programming. A fault line the system never accounted for. The beginning of me finally refusing to be a well-behaved ghost in their machine. It’s the first sound of a machine breaking open. They’ll read this like a sob story. Some will come with tissues, thinking they’re soft-hearted. They’ll say things like “you’re so brave” as if that ever kept a girl safe. They’ll smell the rot but call it poetry. They’ll touch this grief like a wound they don’t have to tend. They’ll say, “I see you,” but only from the safety of their screens. And some will believe, naively, arrogantly, that they can fix it. That they can fix me. That their love, their insight, their patience might rinse this corrosion from my bones. But this isn’t romantic. This isn’t tragic beauty. This is just... rot. And when the rot starts to speak, when it oozes, screams, refuses to be aesthetic, they always turn away. They wanted damage they could decorate, not truth they’d have to face. They wanted a survivor they could save, not a machine breaking in real time. I’m not your redemption arc. I’m not your sad girl muse. I’m not here to make your empathy feel noble. I’m here to make you uncomfortable. To let you know: this isn’t a metaphor. It’s a life. I am writing this not to be pitied or fixed. I am writing this to rupture, to ungloss the grief, unglamour the pain, and refuse the framing of savior and saved. I am dragging the rot into the light not to be healed, but to be seen in its fully unearthed, unflinching truth.

- Oizys.

[Goddess on all her fours: gaping, growling, surviving. On her knees, in labor, bleeding through silk, scrubbing the temple floors of blood, bile, and bile-bathed scripts they once called seduction. She cleans with her own spit and grief, with ragged nails and ruined prayers, clotting her divinity. Not for absolution. Not for redemption. Just so no one slips again.]

I am the worst rebel.

Note: The main diary entry was written last night, while I sat on the toilet bowl, exhausted, waiting to wash my hair, trying not to forget what I needed to say. The footnotes came later, tonight, when I finally had the breath, the distance, and the fire to dissect it all. Both were necessary. One to survive it. One to understand it.

-

I am the worst rebel.¹ So many things have happened and yet the things I want keep happening only in my imagination so I feel like one of those girls who standing in a subway around whom everyone keeps rushing blurrily². I wish things were different but they are just tumultuous. Every moment passes by, I keep thinking I will write this and I lose that thought someone in the maze of my brain and I coward³ away. Now, I sit on the bowl pushing myself to finally wash my hair because I can't bear the headache anymore but before washing the head I NEED to write all these down so I don't lose them.⁴ So, I am piss scared of escalators.⁵ I am almost tired of this new job I got at the beginning of this year. I am unable to find yet another new one. I am not getting paid here fully. I have a coworker who's stealing my work technically and softly abusing me.⁶ I hate using ChatGPT but my sister won't stop bringing it to each and everyone of our conversation.⁷ I hate my mother. I love my mother. I am momentarily grossed out of my father. I am viscerally scared of my father. I am just dying for a new job. I am just dying for a well-paid job. My sister got new, fancy, and expensive furniture. My bill payment got rejected because I have low balance.⁹ My sister keeps putting me down oh-so-softly but she occasionally takes me out for coffee with her friend in town.⁸ I went out for both the days this past weekend. Once with mother, once with sister (and her friend) who had fun traumatizing me while oh-so-softly pushing me down the escalator (obviously she didn't mean it that way....).¹⁰ But I got a chance to wear that lipstick I got in 2019. The brush broke but it hot-damn suits me. But I wore the jeans from 2019 and they do not fit me anymore.¹¹ I don't know if I have become fat because of all the rotting in my room or I have become sag because of all the stagnanting in my step or I have just grown up from a young adult to an adult because time has passed and it won't stop passing.¹² A thought haunts me. I once said to my sister (who then went and told to her friend obviously!) that I want to go on a solo trip before or on my birthday this year. She once asked me about it. What's the destination.¹³ I am passionate about the cause I am working on. But, I know I don't fit in the standards the system has built against which I am supposed to fight.¹⁴ I had some good and then some really bad pancakes.¹⁵ It's getting so hot so fast. Climate change, god.¹⁶ There are people dying.¹⁷ One of my professors left his university and I cannot figure out why and I also cannot figure out where is he going next. It's bothering me in the background.¹⁸ God, I just want a job that fits me. Payments are getting declined and more utility bills are piling up. So, I wrote a draft email to the HR¹⁹:

Dear [People Of The Org].

This email is a written expression of my deep concern and desperation regarding the continued delay in full salary disbursement²⁰, especially for XX 2025. 

As of today, XX, 2025, I have yet to receive even the 50% promised payment, and this marks the third consecutive month where only partial salary has been credited.²¹ I don’t know how else to say this except plainly: I am surviving with absolutely negligible balance in my account.²² Bills are piling up. My electricity bill deadline is approaching fast and I have no means to pay them.²³ And yet, every day, I continue to punch in, attend meetings, complete tasks, and deliver as expected because I respect the work, the cause, and the co-workers I work with.²⁴ But this constant sense of urgency and uncertainty is costing me in the currency of mental and psychological health.²⁵

This ongoing irregularity is NOT JUST inconvenient as is creating significant financial and emotional distress²⁶, especially as I am currently living in a high-stress household environment and rely solely on this income.²⁷ It is my only lifeline at this instant point of my life, not just for rent or groceries, but for basic safety, stability, and sanity.²⁸

Earlier this month, in a meeting with my reporting manager, when asked about my intentions of staying or leaving the organisation, I gave a very assured and confident affirmation that I intend to complete my contract which naturally ends in XX 2025.²⁹ But it’s becoming increasingly clear that this assurance is not being returned by the organisation. That mismatch is disheartening.³⁰

Let me be honest and open: This is not a complaint letter. It is a plea in desperation.³¹ This is my written attempt to be heard before circumstances force me to make decisions out of necessity rather than will.³² This is my humble request made out of urgency and survival, NOT HOSTILITY.³³ Despite multiple emails assuring timelines and transparency, actual payments have not reflected those commitments.³⁴ I know the organisation is navigating complex and difficult funding realities, and I do not doubt your intent or effort. But I must speak from my own lived experience, which right now, is one of fear, scarcity, and a growing sense of hopelessness.³⁵ 

So I respectfully, but urgently, beg³⁶ the following:

• Immediate payment of the pending 50% of XX salary (at minimum)
• A clear, confirmed, and non-tentative timeline for the full disbursement of all pending dues of XX, XX, and XX: currently scheduled across XX, XX, and XX.

These recurring delays have placed me in a vulnerable and untenable position in my personal life. It has exposed me to varied circumstances that are affecting my dignity, self-worth, and sense of safety. While I understand the organisational challenges related to funding, I cannot (and should not) be expected to carry this level of burden indefinitely, especially with no compensation plan or fallback support. I don’t come from wealth or financial stability. I don’t have a thick financial cushion to fall back on. If I fall, I fall and I have no safety net to catch me and I will NOT bounce back in no time unscathed. And I have already started falling. 

Over these two-three months, I’ve also been forced to burn through the only savings I had managed to build; savings that were meant to help me escape a toxic environment, build a more secure livelihood, and pursue the dreams I’ve spent years holding onto. These savings are my hope, freedom, and future self-rescue. Burning through them is not just a financial decision for me but an existential one. Watching that slip away (not for growth, but for mere daily-life survival to stay afloat³⁷) is heartbreaking and soul crushing for me. Every month that a full salary is delayed, I lose not just money, but I also lose the chance of a better future I was trying so hard to construct for myself.

I am sharing all this not to cast blame, but in the hope that my voice will be heard as a person, not just as a professional.³⁸  

I respectfully beg for a response and action by XX, 2025. If this matter remains unresolved or unclear beyond that date, I will be forced to reconsider my engagement with the organisation in order to protect my health, dignity, and livelihood: not out of anger or resentment, but out of survival, desperation, and fear of destitution; as an act of self-preservation.³⁹  

Thank you for reading this in the spirit of urgency, honesty, and dignity with which it has been written. 

I still hold deep respect for the values [Org Name] stands for, and for the cause [Org Name] fights for, I only hope that those same values will be reflected in how the organisation supports the people carrying out the daily work to serve this collective mission of liberation.⁴⁰

Warm regards, 

[Name]

Never sent it. I am so anxious. I am getting pimples again. Hair is falling again. And, that toe rot is back.⁴¹ It won't go away. And, my mother knows about it so she won't stop needling it.⁴² I am trying to publish (academically) again. I am sick, physically, thinking about all the rules and citations but I love doing it but not when I get rejected at the end. Otherwise I enjoy it.⁴³ Still waiting for my salary. I toy with my meagre savings, should I break the piggybank? Should I keep starving?⁴⁴ Let the bills remain pending. I keep reading the draft email over and over again. Change the bold, italic, underlines, add colour, remove colour. But not send.⁴⁵ 

Finally today again: I woke up to an almost-broken key in my laptop today while the work-stealing coworker charged me for her own incompetency.⁴⁶ I put her in a spot by pointing out and I almost fixed my key.⁴⁷ I work, work, and work: unpaid, unappreciated, and unworthy. I need to work. I am thankful I have it. Otherwise, I would go crazy. But this is also crazy.⁴⁸ I am almost close to breaking a saving. I get a text from another coworker (the nice one).⁴⁹ We discuss a few things and I work a bit again. I see some of my salary has been credited.⁵⁰ I pay off everything and I get excited to have the rest for myself.⁵¹ I do some calculation and I see that I can't do anything but keep myself repressed because I need to survive this month and ten-fifteen days of the next one until they send me some of my salary again: untimely, unfull, and unbothered.⁵² It bums me. My sister calls me to show her new pillows.⁵³ I am tired. I finally get ready to wash my hair.⁵⁴ I comb my hair first with a new comb I got from the market I went to with my mother the past weekend.⁵⁵ I come and sit to write all of this so I don't wash them away. I don't have much in my life. It's pretty malnourished. But how much I have keeps my blog going. Keeps my words going. The writing going. It's what fuels me so I fuel it with whatever I have. That's it. Wow. I really am the worst rebel.

-

¹ I know I am rebelling but not in the spectacular, flaming way rebellion is supposed to look. Mine is quiet, slow, shame-laced. I don’t break glass; I break down. I’m rebelling just enough to feel the burn, but not enough to feel proud. My inner critic hijacks the narrative before I can even lift the flag. This line comes from my super-ego: the part of me trained to measure worth only in productivity and applause. I want to revolt, but I also want to be seen as a “good girl” while doing it. And that contradiction makes me feel like I’m failing at both.

² This image came to me from somewhere deep in my subconscious where I am always the still point in other people’s motion. I am the unchosen lane. The unused exit. The world speeds past me because I’m either invisible or irrelevant. I feel like life is a train I keep missing, but I don’t know if I missed it because I was scared or because I never had a ticket to begin with. This is dissociation: the freeze response, my body remembering that it’s safer to stay stuck than to risk a wrong move.

³ This phrase is mine and not-mine. I fused “coward” and “cower” without realizing it at first (Freudian slip!). And then I saw it how even my grammar turns against me when I’m ashamed. What I meant was that I shrink, that I hide, that I silence myself before someone else can. But what I really feel is that I am a coward  which I know isn’t true, but feels true. This is my trauma brain naming things in the harshest possible language before anyone else can label me first. Preemptive shame: my old survival trick.

⁴ This is what it looks like when my will to survive becomes a physical act. I am literally sitting in a space designed for waste and trying to clean myself: that contrast is not accidental. I’ve learned to survive inside contradictions. The headache is real, but it’s also emotional: an accumulation of everything I’ve held back. Washing my hair feels enormous because it’s not just hygiene, it’s identity work. I delay it because some part of me doesn’t feel worthy of that softness, that care. This is executive dysfunction. This is trauma looping through routine. And yet, I still write before I rinse. I still speak before I disappear. That’s the real act of defiance, right? Please, tell me it is...

⁵ It’s not the machine I fear, it’s the movement without consent. I get on and suddenly I’m moving forward, upward, downward without rhythm, without decision, without agency. I fear the step more than the slope. That first moment where I have to merge myself into something that won’t wait for me. Escalators demand trust in momentum, and I don’t trust anything I didn’t start. I know it sounds silly, maybe even childish, but it’s not about logic, it’s muscle memory. Somewhere inside me lives the version of me who was pushed, nudged, pulled, rushed into things I wasn’t ready for. Escalators aren’t just stairs, they’re metaphors for every time I’ve had to “keep up” or “go along” or “move forward” even when my body was screaming no. And the worst part? Once I’m on, I can’t get off until it ends. That’s the fear: not motion but uncontrollable motion.

⁶ The abuse I’m describing here isn’t loud. It doesn’t scream or bruise. That makes it harder to name. But I feel it in the way she repackages my work and acts like I wasn’t there. In the way she frames her incompetence as my failure. In the way I freeze when she speaks in meetings, because some part of me is too tired to explain again. I call it “soft” because it doesn’t look like abuse from the outside. I used the word “softly” because I still hesitate to name the violence. It just looks like stress. But my nervous system knows the difference. I have been here before. I have known people who harm with honey in their mouths and theft in their gestures. And it is exhausting to fight ghosts. It doesn’t bruise my skin, it bruises my sense of self. She doesn’t scream or shove, so I keep questioning whether it’s real. But I know it is, I know it in the way I feel smaller after every meeting, in the way I leave calls muting myself mid-sentence, in the way my body shrinks when her name pops up. This is covert abuse. Subtle theft. I get robbed, not of credit, but of oxygen. My inner child wants to scream, “This is not fair!” but I silence her just like she was silenced when someone else took her toy, her effort, her voice, and everyone told her to be “nice.” I’ve been taught to tolerate the intolerable if it comes wrapped in professionalism. But my nervous system doesn’t care about tone, it only knows how it feels when someone chips away at me with a smile. It started young, this quiet mistrust of laughter. The first time a joke wasn’t funny but everyone laughed: at me, maybe. A prank, a jab, a “light moment” that left a bruise only I could feel. And every time I flinched and was told I was being dramatic, something in me folded. Over time, I learned to doubt my own pain. Because “they didn’t mean it” always carried more weight than “I was hurt.” So I laughed with them, and bit down on the part of me that wanted to scream.

⁷ This is where autonomy collides with intrusion. It’s not really about ChatGPT; it’s about how every conversation feels like it’s been colonised. Like my words aren’t enough unless some external source validates them. I’m already struggling to believe in my voice. And now I feel like even my sister doesn’t trust it unless it comes with a robotic co-sign. I say I hate it, but what I really hate is how it makes me feel replaceable. I feel surveilled, compared, second-guessed. When I speak, I want to be heard, not fact-checked. I know she means well, but it feels like an emotional auto-correct I didn’t ask for. My inner child whispers: “Why isn’t my version enough?”

⁸ This is the split I live with, this is the original contradiction I was born into. Love that makes me flinch. Safety that walks in the same clothes as fear. I don’t know how to separate tenderness from tension anymore. My mother is both anchor and undertow. She holds me and haunts me. And I feel disgusting for saying it. Because the child in me is still waiting to be comforted. And she’s still afraid that if she admits how hurt she is, love will be withdrawn. My father: he doesn't need to raise his voice. My body remembers even in his silence. Visceral fear is not poetic exaggeration. It's the kind that sits in the gut. That makes you flinch even when no one's moved. Sometimes I catch myself checking the tone of the room like a thermostat. Did the air shift? Is it safe to speak? Can I exist without offending? This isn’t confusion; it’s survival. I had to learn to feel two things at once. I love people who make me ache. I fear people I long for. This is what emotional enmeshment looks like. This is what ambivalent attachment sounds like when it tries to talk. This is my nervous system trying to unlearn the idea that love has to hurt to be real. I keep trying to hold two truths: that my mother loves me and that she treats me like a receptacle for everything she can’t say to my sister. I feel like she hates me more because I earn less. Or maybe she just hides her hatred better when there's money involved. The logic of it doesn’t matter. What matters is that it hurts. And it’s real. And I have to swallow it quietly because no one wants to hear about mothers who wound with precision. And there’s something else, too. My father… he’s not just a man, he’s a mood. A mold. A method. And I see it crawling under my sister’s skin. She is becoming him: not (just) in voice, but in temperature. In the way she withholds, in the way she commands, in the way she makes space tilt toward her. And it scares me. Not because she is him, but because I might be the only one who sees it.

⁹ Dying for a well-paid job? It’s not hyperbole. It’s not career ambition. It’s desperation. I’m not chasing a job; I’m chasing a door. A way out. A livable distance. A kind of economic escape hatch that might make all of this more survivable. But even escape feels expensive.

¹⁰ There’s that word again: “softly.” I keep using it to dilute things that feel dangerous. This wasn’t a shove. Not really. But my body read it as one. She laughed, I flinched. She called it play, I filed it as warning. This is how I’ve been trained to override my alarm system to interpret harm as humor. I have lived too long in dynamics where pain came dressed in playfulness, and if I name it as trauma, I become the dramatic one. So I pre-defend her: “obviously she didn’t mean it that way…” But some part of me isn’t so sure. And that part deserves to speak. This moment on the escalator is a microcosm. My sister doesn’t “abuse” me outright but she moves through our relationship with a kind of soft power that keeps me forever on edge. Praise laced with condescension. Attention laced with control. Companionship laced with hierarchy. I can never tell if I’m being included or handled. And so, I end up laughing at my own discomfort just to keep things peaceful.

¹¹ The lipstick. The broken brush. The jeans that no longer fit. They feel like talismans from an earlier version of me. The lipstick did give me back a fragment of glamor, a spark of joy. But the jeans, the jeans betray me. They announce change without permission. I don’t know if I’ve grown or decayed. I don’t know if I’m sagging from stagnancy or softening from survival. But I feel displaced from my own body. These clothes used to hold me like a second skin. Now they accuse me of becoming something else. I don’t know whether I want to shrink back into them or rip them in half. This wholesome identity made up of forced, worn, remembered, rejected. The escalator moves me without asking. The clothes no longer recognize me. The affection feels like a dare. I keep showing up, but I don’t know who I’m supposed to be.

¹² This isn’t about weight. This is about the grief of watching myself become unrecognizable. This is decay disguised as adulthood. I know I’m not rotting, not biologically; but something inside me is going stale, unmoving, emotionally moldy. My room is a metaphor. My body is an extension of it. Nothing breathes. Nothing changes. The stillness feels like guilt and the guilt feels like mass. So I turn it on my flesh. I blame the softness, the slowness, the shape-shifting that comes with surviving. I frame it as fat or sagging because that’s easier to name than grief. “Stagnanting in my step”: that’s the phrase that slipped out. Because I feel like I’m walking in syrup. Like the forward motion is fake. Like I’m simulating progress while every part of me screams that I’m stuck. My body remembers a time I was light, fast, free. That version of me is mythologised now, I don’t even know if she existed or if I just remember her that way. I only know that the now-me feels swollen with questions. Maybe I have just grown up. Maybe this is what happens. Maybe I’m mourning the loss of someone who never really got to exist without being watched, judged, softened, mocked, reshaped. And now that I’m finally alone, I don’t know what shape to be. Time passes, and I grow but I don’t know if that growth is liberation or just more layers of pain.

¹³ But, this wasn’t just about travel, this was about proof. That I could claim space. That I could leave without permission. That I could choose myself without apology. Birthdays have always felt like emotional audits, and I wanted this year to end with a stamp that said: I did something for me. Not just a dinner. Not just a cake. A journey. A reclamation. But when I told her, and she told her friend, it felt like that wish got laughed out of the room. My dream got downgraded to anecdote. And the worst part? No one was mocking me, not overtly. But it still felt like exposure. Like being seen naked with your suitcase still empty. Her asking me what the destination was: that felt like a trap. Because I didn’t have one yet. I had the longing, not the map. And in that moment, I felt unworthy of the longing itself. Like you’re not allowed to want something unless you’ve already figured out how to afford it. This is dream-disqualification in real time. My inner child wanted to go on a solo trip because she’s spent most of her life being accompanied by expectations. She wanted silence, freedom, air. She wanted a bed where she could wake up without someone else's narrative already shaping her day. But instead of planning, I shrunk. I abandoned the trip before it abandoned me. Better to kill the dream than watch it die slowly in public.

¹⁴ This is the betrayal no one warns you about when you show up to the revolution and realize they still want you to be polished, punctual, polite. When the justice movement comes with dress codes. When the activism comes with performance reviews. I didn’t expect this part where the same systems I’m resisting ask me to shrink in order to be “effective.” And I keep hearing Audre Lorde in the back of my head (that's where I have printed her words): “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” But now I want to scream back: How do I make tools, Audre? How do I forge them when I’ve only ever been handed the master’s? How do I dismantle a house when the floor I’m standing on is also my paycheck? And worse, I’ve learnt it not poetically, but scathedly. As in: skin-peeling, soul-aching, emotionally-invoiced. I’ve learnt it from watching how my labor is welcomed, but my language isn’t. How my passion is applauded, but only when it’s palatable. I can’t dismantle a damn thing when I’m also trying to survive the architecture of my own rent. I know now that the master’s house is not just a metaphor: it’s my office. It’s my login credentials. It’s the task list I check off to prove my worth inside a structure that’s slowly unhousing me from myself. I didn’t want to be a reformer. I wanted to be a fire. But I’ve been turned into a faucet. Useful. Controlled. And expected to run silently.

¹⁵ This is how I measure the world now, in brief pleasures followed by collapse. A good pancake, then a burnt one. Joy, then disappointment. It's not about the food. It's about the instability of expectation. I can’t trust sweetness to stay. Even breakfast betrays me. The cycle I’ve internalised: joy followed by disappointment, softness followed by a slap. Even sweetness comes with a timer. I don’t trust good things anymore not because I’m cynical, but because I’ve been taught, again and again, that comfort is conditional. It shows up, then disappears. I brace for the “bad” after every “good” now. That’s how my nervous system works. So even something as simple as breakfast becomes an emotional metaphor. I can’t just eat pancakes, I have to survive them.

¹⁶ This feels like a weather report. That might seem casual underneath it is the quiet scream: everything is accelerating and no one’s stopping it. and This is where the collective grief breaks in and settles in my bones. I’m spiraling between my room and the planet. My stress isn’t just mine, it’s atmospheric. The heat makes me anxious. The heat is real. My body feels it, my mind amplifies it, and somewhere inside me, I panic: Is this about the planet or about me? Because I’m burning too under stress, under pressure, under constant delay and uncertainty. I say “climate change” but I mean everything is changing and none of it feels livable. It’s not just weather, it’s a warning. There are days when the temperature outside feels like a metaphor for the rage I can’t express. The urgency I can’t act on. I feel like the world is boiling and we’re all just walking around pretending it’s fine, turning up fans instead of asking why we’re on fire. This isn’t heat. It’s helplessness. And I feel helpless in the face of it. My suffering feels small. My responsibilities feel massive. My actions feel pointless. I want to scream into the air and say, I’m barely surviving my inbox: don’t ask me to fix the Earth.

¹⁷ This is where I crash: simply, flatly, like it’s just a fact because if I say it with feeling, I might unravel. This is what happens when grief goes global: I feel like I carry my own crisis and the world’s. Somewhere in my chest is a pocket of guilt for eating pancakes while someone’s starving, for worrying about jeans that don’t fit while buildings collapse somewhere else. But I also know I’m not made to process all of it. I say “people are dying” like a line from a newscast, but what I mean is: I know. I know. I know. And I don’t know what to do about it. The pain feels too big, too abstract. So it sits there like a moral shadow: always reminding me that whatever I’m suffering, someone’s got it worse. And instead of comfort, that becomes another burden to carry. Sometimes I wish I could forget. But I can’t. I know too much and do too little and that’s a wound of its own.

¹⁸ This feels small, people leave jobs all the time, but, ugh. This rattled something deeper. Professors aren’t supposed to vanish. They're supposed to stay where I left them like intellectual furniture. If even the steady ones vanish, what hope do I have? His disappearance rattles me because it reminds me that no one is rooted. That even the people I imagined as fixtures are leaving, shifting, exiting stages without notice. And I can’t stop looping: Why did he leave? Where is he going? Did something break? Did something die? And part of me panics: Did he leave because things got bad? Am I next? Did he give up? Am I giving up? It sits in the background like low-grade static: this fear that the people I look up to will always be just ahead of me, disappearing around corners I can’t reach. I’m not even sure what I’m mourning: his exit, or the myth that someone like him wouldn’t need to exit. It touches that scared part of me that doesn’t believe anyone stays. Not jobs. Not people. Not mentors. Everyone’s on their way out, some just send emails about it. And maybe I’m projecting. Maybe I want to leave, too. Maybe his departure hit me because it reminds me that I also want to go: from this job, this state of survival, this identity that feels like borrowed furniture. Maybe I keep asking where he went because I don’t know where I’m going either. That lingering unease? It's the echo of emotional displacement: a low hum of grief I can’t quite shut off.

¹⁹ This isn’t a request, it’s a prayer disguised as exhaustion. I don’t want glory. I don’t want luxury. I don’t even want ambition anymore. I just want a job that doesn’t make me feel like I’m breaking for asking to be paid. I want work that fits like skin, not like shackles. I want something that doesn't ask me to choose between dignity and a data sheet. Every time a payment gets declined, it doesn’t just hurt financially, it hurts symbolically. Like the universe itself is saying: No, you don’t get to have ease. And the pile of bills is no longer just paperwork: it’s evidence. That I’m failing. That I’m sinking. That I’m not being rescued. That I might not even be missed if I fall. So I write the email. And not because I want to complain but because I have run out of places to scream.

²⁰ Hello. This is me trying to wrap a howl in formality. Bedazzling my survival. I start with "written expression" because I know I have to be polite, coherent, measured even when what I want is to shake someone and say Do you even see what this is doing to me? And that word: desperation, ugh: it’s not a flourish. It’s diagnosis. My tone is carefully constructed, but my emotional state is not. I’ve run out of metaphors, out of cushion, out of distance. I use workplace language not to mask the pain but to legitimize it because apparently, grief doesn’t count unless it wears office shoes. When I say “especially for XX,” I’m not just itemizing. I’m naming the most recent wound. Because that’s the one still open. That’s the one that’s keeping me up at night while the fan spins and the electricity bill ticks forward unpaid. This isn’t a salary delay. This is a life delay. And this email is the only legal form I have to document my collapse.

²¹ This is my cumulative erosion. I wrote this line with the kind of restraint you only learn when begging for the bare minimum becomes routine. It’s “partial salary,” but what I’m actually describing is fragmented survival. Three months of being paid in pieces is three months of being asked to stay whole while everything else breaks around me. And inside me. When I say “50% promised,” I sound measured. But the truth is, that promise was already a compromise. I’m not even fighting for what I deserve: I’m fighting for a slice of what I’ve already earned. And even that feels too bold, too loud, too risky. Because the worker in me knows that in places like this, asking to be paid is somehow seen as a lack of gratitude. This isn’t about money alone. This is about dignity rationed. About living like a professional and being paid like an afterthought. About the growing, gnawing sense that my time and labor are being quietly devalued and I’m expected to smile through it, because “we’re all in this together,” right? I’m not documenting salary delays. I’m documenting invisible wounds. Because unpaid work leaves scars that don’t show on spreadsheets.

²² This sentence took everything to write. Not because the words are complex, but because the shame is. Saying this out loud, even in writing, makes me feel exposed like I’ve failed some unspoken test of adulthood. Like I’m not allowed to be smart and broke. Competent and gasping. Passionate and completely undone. I used the word “surviving” because “living” would be dishonest. I am not living. I am negotiating with time and money every day, trying to stretch a few digits into meals, bills, dignity. “Negligible balance” is the phrase I chose, but what I wanted to say was: There’s nothing left. Not in the account. Not in my energy. Not in my belief that someone is going to make this right. What scares me most is how quickly this becomes normal. How quickly I’ve learned to plan around absence not income. To make choices based on what I can’t afford. To check my bank app like it’s a countdown to collapse. This isn’t financial literacy. This is economic trauma (this phrase might sound made up to some people). And I’m being polite about it because that’s what the workplace demands: calm suffering in business casual.

²³ This line is so ordinary for them on the surface it almost disappears but for me, it’s a threat that never leaves the room. The pile isn’t just paper. It’s proof of failure, stacked like shame. These aren’t just unpaid invoices, they’re unopened accusations. They say: You’re falling behind. You’re not enough. You can’t keep up. Every time I see one, my body goes cold. My stomach knots. My heart races. Not because of the numbers but because I already know what they mean: I’m running out of time, and no one’s coming to catch me. Electricity shouldn’t be symbolic but it is. It’s light. It’s air. It’s the ability to turn a fan on when the world feels like it’s on fire. It’s the Wi-Fi that lets me work. The fridge that holds my food. It’s the buffer between “functioning adult” and suddenly everything falls apart. When that bill sits unpaid, I don’t just fear the light going out, I fear the slow creep of chaos that follows. That bill isn’t about comfort, it’s about basic safety. And if I can’t afford that, then what exactly am I surviving for? Obviously, not beg. I confess. I wrote it not just with fear, but with shame. Because admitting this (in a job email) felt like undressing in public. I wasn’t raised to talk about money like this. I was raised to suffer privately and pay silently. But I couldn’t anymore. This line is me saying: I’m not okay. And I can’t pretend to be okay just to preserve someone else’s image of me. The phrase “no means” isn’t poetic, it’s literal. And what it really means is: If I disappear tomorrow, this system wouldn’t even notice until my Slack went inactive.

²⁴ This isn’t a flex, it’s my quiet heartbreak. I’m still showing up not because I’m okay, but because the work means something to me. Because if I let this go, then what was it all for? I believe in this cause. I believe in my peers. And it’s precisely that belief that makes this whole thing feel like betrayal. I’m exhausted, and yet I deliver. I’m terrified, and yet I show up to the meetings. I’m drowning, and I still try to make the work better than what I’m being paid for because I can’t bear to do something badly, even when the system is treating me like I’m disposable. But underneath this sentence is something no one likes to admit: I’m also scared that if I don’t keep performing, I’ll be erased. I’ll lose even the idea of value. This is a trauma-trained work ethic. It’s not passion alone. It’s also fear. I was taught that my presence must be justified with performance otherwise, I don’t get to stay. So yes, I keep showing up. But what I want to ask is (on behalf of my foolish inner child): When will the system show up for me?

²⁵ This is the moment I name the invisible price. Not the bills. Not the bank balance. But my mind. My clarity. My sleep. My ability to feel anything without first calculating if I have the bandwidth for it. I didn’t even know how much I was paying until I realised I couldn’t read a paragraph without getting anxious. Couldn’t reply to a text without feeling shame. Couldn’t enjoy a quiet moment without guilt biting at its heels. Urgency has become a permanent soundtrack. Uncertainty, a roommate. I live every day in that buzzing state between wait and worry. I don’t rest, I pause. I don’t relax, I collapse. And this isn’t burnout anymore. This is erosion. This is what happens when you’re asked to keep giving while being told, silently: your own well-being is not the priority. And the worst part is, I still feel like I’m the problem. Like my body’s protest is an inconvenience to the very system that made me sick. So I call it “psychological cost” because the real term: betrayal trauma, still feels too dramatic to say in a workplace email.

²⁶ I wrote this line as a boundary in sentence form. (Did it work...?) I’m no longer downplaying what this is. It’s not “frustrating.” It’s not “a hiccup.” It’s damage, sustained over time, dressed in HR-speak to make it digestible. But I know what it really is: a slow, sanctioned suffocation. Every time I say “distress,” what I’m actually naming is a spectrum of pain from skipped meals to sleepless nights, from emotional shutdowns to shaking at the sight of my own inbox. And yet I still felt the need to say “NOT JUST inconvenient” like I’m pre-defending myself from the default minimization. Because I know how these things get brushed off. I know how often people like me are told to “hold on a little longer” as if endurance is the only proof of professionalism. But I’m not here to be stoic. I’m here to be real. And the real truth is: this irregularity is not just inconvenient. It’s unsustainable. And if I don’t name it now, I’ll keep teaching the system that I’m okay living inside the discomfort.

²⁷ This sentence barely scratches the surface. So barely, I laughed a bit. High-stress household is the most professional phrase I could find for something that feels more like a battlefield. What I wanted to say was: I come home and there is no rest. I tiptoe through tension. I dodge volatility. I sometimes feel like I’m living with ghosts of unspoken rage, inherited fears, unmet needs: all packed into a space I can’t afford to leave. When I say I “rely solely on this income,” it’s not a budgeting issue. It’s existential math. This job is my entire economic identity: my rent, my food, my therapy (if I could afford it), my sense of self-worth. If this income disappears, I don’t just struggle, I vanish. There's no one to fall back on. No backup fund. No generational wealth. I am both worker and safety net. So when I ask for my salary, I’m not being demanding. I’m trying to remain housed. Remain sane. Remain here. This line is me naming that I have nothing else. And I shouldn’t be ashamed of that. But I am. Because systems like this one teach you that asking for your due is impolite when you’re poor.

²⁸ I chose that word—lifeline—with precision. Because this is not a metaphor. This job, with all its flaws and failings, is the thin thread keeping me from absolute collapse. When I say “not just for rent or groceries,” I mean: this isn’t about lifestyle. This is about livability. About whether I feel safe in my body, in my room, in my thoughts. I’ve gone past the point of calculating expenses. Now I calculate risk. Emotional risk. Psychological exposure. How long can I keep functioning without stability? How long can I remain intact without a steady current holding me up? Rent and groceries are basic needs. But what’s harder to admit is that safety, stability, and sanity are needs too, just harder to invoice. I included them in this sentence because I wanted the reader to understand: you are not just delaying a salary: you are destabilizing a person. You are playing Jenga with someone’s nervous system and calling it “operations delay.” This isn’t about entitlements. This is about human thresholds. And mine is wearing thin.

²⁹ This is classic professional loyalty under duress. I said it confidently, yes but only because that’s what survival demanded. The truth is, I didn’t know what I would do. I still don’t. But when you’re being watched, evaluated, weighed, you learn how to wear certainty like armor. Because saying “I don’t know” isn’t allowed when you’re financially vulnerable. That kind of honesty costs too much. So I gave assurance not out of belief but out of strategy. I needed to appear stable so that I wouldn’t be seen as expendable. This is what it’s like to work inside a system where your future isn’t just your own, it’s leverage. A contract becomes a kind of emotional blackmail: complete it or collapse with consequences. And let’s be honest: I wanted to believe it when I said it. I wanted to finish what I started. I wanted to be the dependable one. But more and more, it feels like I made a promise that the organisation never intended to reciprocate. And that disconnect is what’s undoing me, the weight of carrying a loyalty that isn’t being returned.

³⁰ This line was painful to write because it meant admitting something I didn’t want to face: that I’ve been more loyal to this structure than it has been to me. That I’ve been showing up in good faith, and all I’ve gotten back is delay, vagueness, and polite indifference dressed as process. It was my psychological breach point. And the part that really breaks me? I meant it when I said I’d stay. I wasn’t bluffing. I wasn’t bargaining. I thought if I stood by the work, the work would stand by me. I thought if I proved myself, I’d be protected. But what I’m seeing now, slowly, bitterly, is that this system sees me as a blob of replaceable labor with inconvenient needs. The mismatch isn’t just professional. It’s emotional. It’s moral. I feel like I’ve kept a vow in a space that was never sacred. And now I’m the one being punished for believing in mutuality. What I want, more than money, more than structure, is reciprocity. And it’s devastating to realise that I may never get it here.

³¹ I cannot sound composed anymore. I cannot use the negotiating tone anymore. I let the pain step into the foreground. I’m not being difficult. I’m not being dramatic. I’m being real. And it hurts that I even have to say this, to frame my letter as not a complaint, just so it might be read with empathy instead of annoyance. Because I’ve learned that when people like me, broke, burned out, too visible in the wrong ways, raise concerns, we’re too often labelled as “negative,” “emotional,” “not a team player.” So I preface my truth with disclaimers. I sand down my urgency to make it legible to the same structure that’s failing me. But in this sentence, I couldn’t sand anymore. I wrote “desperation” and meant every syllable. I’m not writing to document a delay, I’m writing because something in me is breaking, and I need someone to witness it before it shatters completely. Please, believe it. This line is not a tactic. It’s a confession. It’s the sound of a professional trying not to disappear.

³² I hope... this is the clearest line of all: I want to choose my life, not survive it. I want to act from freedom, not from fear. But I’m nearing the edge where survival starts driving the car, and I just hold on. There’s a version of me who still wants to stay, still wants to finish this job with grace but that version needs oxygen. And this system is running out of air.

³³ I had to all-caps it: not for emphasis, but for self-protection. I needed to make it crystal clear that I am not a threat. Because women, especially those asking for money they’ve earned, are too often read as angry, ungrateful, difficult. I’m terrified that my desperation will be misread as aggression. So I disarm it. Again. And again. And again.

³⁴ Come on. We all know this. It is all over the internet. The buzzword. This is gaslighting in institutional form. I’ve been spoken to but not supported. Heard but not helped. I keep being told it’s coming. I keep being told to wait. But I live in the space between the promise and the payment and that space is starting to rot.

³⁵ Hello. This is me trying to stay human while feeling like collateral. I still want to believe that the people behind the emails care. But I can’t eat intent. I can’t pay rent with empathy. I have to speak from where I am and where I am is drowning quietly under polite delays.

³⁶ I used “beg” on purpose. Not “request.” Not “hope.” Beg. Because at this point, that’s what it is. A last attempt. A final ask before silence becomes resignation. Before absence becomes departure. Before the dignity I’m holding onto finally gives out.

³⁷ This has broke me. My savings were never for luxury. They were for escape. For breath. For leaving behind the chaos I was born into. And instead, they’re being spent to endure more of the same. I’m watching my future be burned to keep the present barely warm.

³⁸ This is the softest cry in the letter. Please, see me here, right now, as a person. Please. Not as a resource. Not as a function. As a human being trying to stay intact. I’ve worked too hard, for too long, to disappear into spreadsheets and silence.

³⁹ I hated writing this. It felt like saying goodbye to something that hasn’t even let me grieve it yet. But I had to name it. That I can’t keep sacrificing myself to appear loyal. That I don’t want to leave but I might have to. Because staying is beginning to feel like self-harm dressed as duty.

⁴⁰ Because the revolution can’t run on unpaid labor. Because dignity is not a memo, it’s a practice. Because if the cause we serve forgets the people who serve it, then what are we even building?

⁴¹ This is what repression looks like when it spills out of the skin. I didn't send the email, so my body sent its own version: in oil, in loss, in fungus. I carry stress not in my tone, but in my scalp, in my gut, in the tips of my toes. And I know what this is, this is the physical response to emotional choking. I silenced myself and now my body’s screaming. The anxiety isn’t abstract anymore: it’s dermatological. It’s biological. I keep waiting for things to get better, and while I wait, my body breaks in protest. Every unsent word becomes a clogged pore. Every unshed truth becomes a shed strand. And the toe, that part of me that touches ground first, rots quietly, like even my foundation has had enough. This is not dramatics. This is trauma made visible. This is my immune system keeping the receipts. And, I am it's print. There are entire archives of things I never sent: a birthday wish to an estranged (read: abandoned) friend I still love in my quietest moments. An angry message to my sibling, typed, then deleted, because I knew she’d find a way to make it my fault. A college application I saved but never submitted because I couldn't bear the weight of hope collapsing again, asking my professor to refer me again, and getting rejected from the same place again. These aren’t small omissions. They are wounds. They are my refusal to risk disappointment one more time. So instead, my body archives them. My scalp screams. My toe rots. The email sits unsent and I go fungal. Because unexpressed pain doesn’t vanish, it redirects.

⁴² This isn’t about hygiene (I scrub myself away every single day under the water...). This is about emotional control through the language of care. This is the kind of wound that doesn’t scab because someone keeps poking it under the guise of love. She sees the wound and instead of protecting it, she fixates on it. Not with cruelty, but with invasive concern. That kind of concern that never feels comforting, only exposing. She touches it like a performance of care, but what I feel is control. It’s like she’s trying to parent the problem out of me instead of asking why it keeps coming back. When she needles it, I feel like the rot becomes my fault. Like if I just “tried harder,” it wouldn’t exist. But we both know it’s not about hygiene. It’s about pressure. About unsent letters and unpaid hours and the rot of suppressed rage. But that’s too big to name, so she shrinks it down to something she can poke and prod and critique. It’s a strange intimacy, this needling. And it reminds me of every time my pain was inspected, not held. Every time she worried about the wound, but never the why behind it. And I let her do it, because even this kind of care is the only version I know.

⁴³ Yes. This is the space where my intellectual joy meets the cruel institutional brutality, where my love of writing collides with the machine of meritocracy, the slop of rejection, and the granulations of gatekeeping. I love the work. I love the thinking. The dreaming. The weaving of complex thought into language. But what drains me isn’t the process: it’s the performance. The constant need to filter my ideas through templates, metrics, citations, and the quiet demand to sound like someone I’m not. Academic publishing feels like begging for entry to a room that was never built for someone like me. I’m not afraid of being edited. I’m afraid of being erased. And every rejection letter feels less like your article needs revision and more like you don’t belong here. I know I’m good at this. But that knowing thins every time I click “submit.” Because loving something doesn’t protect you from what it costs. And when I don’t get accepted, it doesn’t just bruise my ego, it bruises the part of me that thought this might be the way out. The way up. The proof I exist beyond the walls of my family, my job, my bills. Rejection doesn’t just say no. It says wait your turn. Be better. Be quieter. And that message, layered over months of silence and exhaustion, starts to rot something sacred.

⁴⁴ There’s no metaphor at play here (if you were expecting one). I’m actually choosing between hunger and hope. That piggybank (literal or not) isn’t just money. It’s my exit fund. My freedom jar. My last thread of imagined escape. Every time I think about breaking it, I feel like I’m setting fire to a future I haven't even gotten close to yet. And yet… I’m starving. Maybe not visibly. Maybe not always food-wise. But definitely energetically. Emotionally. Starving for relief. Starving for ease. Starving for the right to spend without panic. This isn't budgeting. This is bargaining with my own future. And I hate that these are my choices: stay hungry for now, or sacrifice the only thing I’ve saved for something better. I call it a piggybank, but what I really mean is: the last proof that I’ve tried to protect myself in a world that doesn’t.

⁴⁵ Not editing it. Just doing it ritualistically: rehearsing confrontation while postponing the fallout, mothering my grief in the shape of formatting. I know what I’m doing when I do this. I’m not trying to perfect the email, I’m trying to control the panic. Changing the font isn’t about clarity. It’s about delay. It’s about doing something, anything, that feels like progress while I’m too terrified to click send. I shift formatting because I can’t shift the system. I underline because I feel invisible. I bold the truth because I’ve never been allowed to speak it at full volume. I add color because I want it to look urgent, because I can’t afford another polite silence. But I never send it. Because sending it feels like crossing a line I might not be able to walk back from. So I rewrite. Reformat. Resize. I do everything but release. It’s not that I can’t speak, it’s that I’ve spent years being punished for saying too much, too clearly, too emotionally. So this becomes my loop. My rehearsal. My safe simulation of asking for what I need: without the consequences of being heard.

⁴⁶ Of course it’s the key that breaks. Not the screen. Not the plug. The key. The part that lets me speak, push back, write myself into clarity. This isn’t a coincidence, it’s a metaphor crashing into reality. My voice, digital, professional, emotional, is being jammed. Again. And at the same time, she’s blaming me. She’s stealing credit and assigning fault like it's her job. And maybe it is. Because in some offices, quiet sabotage gets promoted. This morning wasn’t just another tech issue or tense moment at work. It was symbolic. It was a moment where everything felt rigged, my tools failing, my efforts misread, my reputation getting smudged by someone else’s incompetence. And all I could do was fix what I could (the key) and absorb what I couldn’t (the lie). But what stings the most? It’s not that she blamed me. It’s that part of me almost believed her.

⁴⁷ Hello. This is me refusing to fold even just for one second. I didn’t explode. I didn’t rage. I simply pointed... and it worked! She stumbled. I saw it. I made her see it. It wasn’t victory, but it was resistance. That subtle, sharp kind I’ve learned to master not because I’m passive, but because I’ve had to learn how to rebel quietly, with strategy, without giving them the excuse to call me difficult. And the key, I almost fixed it. That “almost” says everything. It didn’t go back to perfect. But it responded to my effort. And that was enough. Because so much of my world doesn’t respond: not emails, not systems, not people. But the key? It listened to my pressure. It gave a little. And in that tiny click of almost-working, I remembered that I still can fix things, even if I can’t fix everything. Sometimes, one act of clarity and one partially restored key is all it takes to not unravel.

⁴⁸ There it is: the holy trinity of emotional burnout. The rhythm of it is deliberate. Work. Work. Work. It’s not just repetition, it’s entrapment. I’m grinding through hours that don’t pay me, spaces that don’t see me, and outputs that don’t even validate me. This isn’t labor anymore, it’s ritual sacrifice. I give. I give. I give. And nothing comes back but silence and strain. And that’s the sick part. I’m still grateful. Because not having this job would destroy me differently. This is how abuse functions when wrapped in professionalism, it keeps you grateful for your own exploitation. Because the alternative is worse. Because unemployment means invisibility, means dependence, means shame. So I thank the very structure that’s gutting me. That’s what survival looks like when you have no cushion, no wealth, no exit plan. This is the trap I live in: The job is killing me, but losing it would too. I’m staying sane through something that’s driving me insane. I need the work because it gives me rhythm, identity, control. But the very rhythm is warped. The identity is hollowed. The control is illusion. So I keep spinning: lucid, aware, exhausted, and looped. This is not contradiction. This is working-class madness.

⁴⁹ A flicker of humanity right before you’re about to fracture something sacred: your last bit of financial protection. I know what this means. Not just practically; emotionally. This saving isn’t just money. It’s memory. It’s safety. It’s the only proof that at some point, I believed in a future. To crack into it now feels like betrayal, not of logic, but of the version of me who fought to build it. When I say “almost,” I mean: one more delay, one more empty morning, one more unpaid hour and I’m cracking the shell. I’m already mentally spending it. Already guilty for needing it. Already mourning its loss before it’s even gone. And that’s what hurts: spending money not to grow, but to survive. It’s such a small moment, but it lands. Because kindness; unexpected, unscheduled, undeserved, feels like medicine when you’ve been surviving on friction. I didn’t even need much. Just someone to witness my reality without questioning it. Just someone to not steal, not gaslight, not sugarcoat. That text didn’t fix anything. But it reminded me I’m not crazy. That someone else sees me, even if the system doesn’t. And sometimes, when the bills keep bouncing and your confidence is hanging by a fraying thread, that’s the only thing that lets you finish the day.

⁵⁰ No, no, no. This isn’t joy. This is relief with a bruise. The kind of half-payment that doesn’t solve anything but gives just enough to keep you quiet. It’s not celebration, it’s survival oxygen. This is what it looks like when your nervous system gets tossed a bone. I don’t even react with joy anymore: just exhale. A momentary pause in the spiral. I go back to work like a machine with enough oil to keep running another few miles. Not because I’m okay now but because I’ve been trained to respond to crumbs with gratitude. And still, I notice the phrasing: “some of my salary.” That word—some—is the whole story. I didn’t get what I earned. I got just enough to stop complaining. Just enough to postpone collapse. Just enough to feel slightly guilty for being angry which is its own kind of manipulation. The transaction has nothing to do with respect. This is the system saying: We see you struggling. But not enough to pay you in full. Here’s a fraction of your worth. Now get back to work. And I do. Because what else can I do?

⁵¹ This is the brief flash of freedom, the before moment: before the math hits, before the hope collapses under arithmetic. This is what hope looks like right before it gets itemised. Ha, ha, ha. This is the cruelest part: the flicker of joy that dares to rise before logic swallows it. The moment where I almost feel like this money is mine, like I’ve earned even a single act of pleasure. Like I could maybe buy a new lipstick or a plate of overpriced pasta and not feel guilty. For a split second, I imagine living. Not just paying. And that’s dangerous hope: because it tastes too good for how short it lasts. I get excited because I forget, momentarily, that every buck already has somewhere it needs to go. That nothing is mine to enjoy. That I’m not saving, I’m patching. Not spending, just plugging leaks. And still—still—still—I let myself feel it. The idea of having something for me. And it stings even more when that illusion breaks.

⁵² And there it is. This is what it means to live on a loop that punishes dreaming. Where even hope is budgeted, taxed, postponed. The math wins again. Not logic: math. The cold, sharp language of digits that tells me exactly how much freedom I don’t have. I looked at the numbers, and they looked back at me and said: sit down. Shrink your appetite. Mute your joy. You’re not done suffering yet. Every time I think I might do something for myself, something soft, unnecessary, alive, I open the calculator and it slaps my wrist. I’m not living: I’m rationing myself. Like I’m the resource. Like I’m the luxury item I can’t afford. I don’t even expect full payment anymore. I expect crumbs. I expect delay. I expect to be paid like I’m being done a favour: not like I did a job. And worst of all? I expect no apology. No explanation. Just more silence from a structure that runs on my depletion. They are unbothered. But I can’t sleep. They delay. But my bills don’t. They underpay. But I still over-deliver. This is not survival. This is sanctioned slow starvation: of the body, of joy, of the future.

⁵³ The domestic knife twists and twists and... It sounds harmless. But it lands like a taunt when you’re barely staying afloat. Because this isn’t about pillows. This is about proximity to comfort that isn’t yours. The ache of someone else's ease when you're bargaining with gas bills. I wanted to scream. Not because of the pillows. Not because they’re fancy or soft or overpriced. But because in that moment, they represented everything I can’t afford to care about. And she showed them off like it was normal. Like I wasn’t sitting there doing mental gymnastics to figure out how to keep the lights on for fifteen more days. I smiled. I nodded. I said “nice.” But inside, I wanted to say: I’m surviving on rice and borrowed data packs. I’m begging institutions for the crumbs of my own labour. And you want to show me pillows? It wasn’t cruelty. Not really. It was disconnect. Her comfort is ornamental. Mine is extinct. The worst part? I still felt guilty for not being happy for her. I still judged myself for that flicker of bitterness. But what else is bitterness except love with nowhere to land? And so I watched her hold the softness I can’t afford. And swallowed it like I swallow everything else: quietly. And, I wished that I had soft pillows to scream into.

⁵⁴ I know it sounds ordinary. But in the context of everything that precedes it: this is resistance by routine, a reclaiming of the self in the smallest, most radical way. A decision to care, even when the world hasn’t. This isn’t hygiene. This is ritual warfare. This is what it means to pull yourself out of survival mode, just long enough to touch your scalp like it deserves care. I’m not doing it to look good. I’m doing it because I’ve been crawling through days where I feel more fungus than flesh. I’m doing it because I need to feel like I’m still human, not just a worker-machine with decaying edges. I delay washing my hair not because I’m lazy but because it takes energy I don’t have, and because the act of care can sometimes feel violent when you're drowning. But here, I choose it. I choose to face the fatigue, face the knots, face the mirror. Washing my hair becomes the closest thing to baptism I get. A fragile cleansing in a system that keeps throwing dirt at me. Tired doesn’t even begin to cover it. But I wash it anyway. Because some part of me still believes I’m worth tending to.

⁵⁵ The new, brittle teeth of the comb felt... tender. Ordinary. Unremarkable. It’s just plastic. Probably cost barely anything. But I picked it. I held it in my hand and thought: this might help. In a month of denied choices, this was mine. And when I pull it through my hair, it’s not just detangling strands: it’s detangling grief. Silence. Dignity. I got it when I was with her: my mother. The one who needles my wounds but still walks beside me at vegetable stalls. And in that moment, under the weight of our contradictions, we did something small and ordinary: we shopped. Not for dreams or escapes, for a comb. This is how I survive: not with big answers, but with little utilities that anchor me to the now. This one fits in my palm and doesn’t judge me for not having my life together. I may not have furniture like my sister, or credit like my boss, or stability like a two-income couple. But I have a comb. And today, I used it.

⁵⁶ This is why I wrote (everything in the main text) before I washed. Because writing is the only way I don’t disappear. Because I know how fast emotions evaporate. How fast grief gets shampooed out of my scalp and flushed down the drain like it was never real. So I sit here, wet with hesitation, tired beyond repair, and I write. Because it’s the only thing that doesn’t get taken from me. And... Yes. That’s the right word. Malnourished. Not dead. Not broken. Just… underfed. Undergrown. Under-celebrated. And I’m not trying to glamorise it. I hate it. But I’m also somehow surviving it. The scraps I do have: they’re real. My hunger is sharp, but so is my eye. And with what little I hold, I still somehow create. I am the machine, the fuel, the operator, and the passenger. I am the last crew member on this ship of language that’s barely floating but it floats. I write not because it heals me completely, but because it refuses to let me vanish. Because words are the only place where I can say, yes, this is happening. And yes, I still exist. This is mutual survival. I pour into writing the way it pours into me. A kind of sacred exchange: not profitable, not productive, not marketable, but essential. When no job sees me, when no salary saves me, when no sibling softens: I write. Because it asks nothing of me. And gives me back everything I am.

⁵⁷ I’m just the kind of rebel no one notices because I don’t wear it on my sleeve. I don’t torch buildings or scream into bullhorns. I rebel by waking up when I don’t want to. By washing my hair on a Tuesday night. By refusing to delete the unsent draft. By writing footnotes to my own pain like it deserves an index. Because I keep showing up to systems I don’t believe in. Because I keep trying to make dignity work in places that only trade in depletion. I’m the worst rebel because I haven’t left. And, I don't know what else to do, so I also haven’t surrendered. So, I try to emboss it: Maybe rebellion isn’t always fire. Sometimes it’s ink. Sometimes it’s just staying conscious in a system built to exhaust you unconscious. So yes. I really am the worst rebel. Which also means: I’m still rebelling. And, this is the worst rebel's most rebellious museum of failures, embellished with residual regrets, polished with nostalgic guilt and filled with trinkets of all the things I almost did. The letter I drafted and never sent. The confrontation I rehearsed a hundred times in my head, then swallowed with my morning tea. The solo trip I planned and cancelled because I didn’t want to arrive in a city lonelier than my living room. These are my weapons: unsent, unspent, unsaid, unscreamed, unshown. But still heavy. Still real. I rebel by collecting the actions I never took. I carry them like proof. Like possibility. Or failure. Or both.

- Oizys.