Rationalising hatred and dissecting it away from internalised hatred/self-hatred.

I had a short chat with my sister and mother, and as my mother finished braiding my hair, the conversation fell like a stone into my pond of self-hatred, creating ripples. Rationalising hatred and dissecting it away from internalised hatred/self-hatred: that is today’s autopsy. Because not all hatred is self-hatred. Not all fire begins at home inside my body. I decided that I need to write this at last. Out loud, in words, in this secret corner of the internet. Before I fold into myself and assume every sharp thing in me is a reflection yet again. What is the source of this hatehood? How did it become so diversely populated and vibrant within me? It feels less like an emotion and more like a settlement. A small, overworked, crowded, opinionated, armed, militant republic. There are districts to it. There is the hatred that is reactionary, born from betrayal, from watching the same patterns parade themselves under new names. This one wears logic like a pressed shirt. It says: You learned, adapted, and protected yourself. Now, it calls itself a boundary. There is the hatred that is inherited, of course, sediment passed down quietly. Things I was taught to fear before I understood them. Things I absorbed because everyone around me held them as truth. This hatred doesn’t even feel like mine. It feels rented. Or, more like, generational ownership. Then there is the quietest one. The dangerous one. The one that mirrors me. Internalised hatred is intimate. It knows my vocabulary. It knows exactly which insecurities have soft underbellies. It does not shout but builds a narrative that says: Of course, they hate you. Of course, you are disgusting. Of course, they don't want you. Of course, you should leave. Of course, they are better off without you. Of course, they left. Of course, you failed. Of course, you are too much, or not enough, depending on the day. This one disguises itself as realism. And I have been confusing these factions. I have been calling all of it “self-hatred” because it feels morally cleaner to blame myself. If it is all internal, I can fix it. If I am the villain, at least the story is contained. If it is external but just around me right now, I can just leave. But what if some of this hatred is not rot, but resistance like calcified grief? What if some of it is simply anger that was never allowed to graduate into articulation? Unprocessed pain giving birth to hatred while the world around me injures repeatedly and casually like it is a storm that doesn't know it's drowning me, like it is a careless child pulling wings off a fly, like it is a butcher’s knife that has forgotten it is sharp, like it is a machine that crushes, designed to ignore the scream, like it is a cold rain falling on an open wound, like it is a gambler throwing away someone else's life. And somewhere along the line, I decided it was nobler to turn the blade inward than to admit I was wounded outwardly. There is a difference between hating yourself and hating what harmed you. There is a difference between accountability and self-erasure. The problem is that hatred, once housed, does not respect its original blueprint. It spreads. It cross-breeds. It colonises neutral territory. Soon, I cannot tell if I am defending myself or dismantling myself. So I sit with it now. Trying so hard not to romanticise it and blindly justifying cruelty for the sake of surviving artistically. But just to understand its architecture. Where did it begin? Was it born the first time I was dismissed? The first time I was made a spectacle? The first time I learned that softness was a liability? The first time realisation slapped my melanin-heavy cheeks that my mother might prefer my sister more? The first time I finally clocked in that my father hates me for being a daughter, a girl, a woman, a not-son, a not-boy, a not-man. The first time I noticed it wasn’t even cruelty. It was arithmetic. The way affection was portioned. The way my sister’s mistakes were called phases and mine were called character. The way I was corrected in public and praised only in private, because praise was expensive but shame was free. The way my body was discussed was like a project. The way my “tone” mattered more than what I was saying. The way I learned to pre-apologise before speaking, like a tax for existing. The way my father’s silence could feel like a verdict... Or was it quieter... accumulated through a thousand micro-negations? The daily abrasion of being misunderstood, unseen, or inconvenient? Hatred is rarely dramatic in origin. Sometimes it began loudly. More often, it began quietly. It is mundane and thus grows in repetition. And perhaps the most unsettling realisation: Hatred makes me feel powerful inwardly. Moves around inside my body drastically. There is certainty in it. Clarity, which sharpens edges and removes doubt. For a brief moment, it makes the world binary: villain and victim, right and wrong, me and them, me and her, me and him. But it also shrinks the room. Internalised hatred implodes; it hollows me out from within. External hatred explodes; it scorches everything around me. Both leave debris-like residue on my skin like shadow cast, acid-etched scars on my skin, like volcanic soot's dried crust of rust and stains. So today is not about absolving myself. And it is not about condemning myself either. And, definitely, it is not about exorcising it. That would be naive. Today’s exercise is classification. Which hatred is the boundary? Which hatred is protection? Is it my rage toward an abuser, or the "mutinous" hatred used to break free from a co-dependent, stifling relationship? Like a corrupted form of love, fighting to preserve what remains of a wounded attachment? Which is projection? Like struggling with my own repressed anger while accusing others of being "unreasonably hostile"? Like feeling insecure about my status while despising others as "pretentious"? Like allowing the ego to feel superior while avoiding self-awareness? Which is inherited prejudice masquerading as instinct? Like thriving on rigid categorisation? Generational racism, sectarian hatreds, or xenophobia that exists before any personal experience with "the other"? Which is grief wearing armour that never got to mourn? Which is ego bruised and retaliating? Which hatred is the echo of a parent’s disappointment that I accidentally memorised as truth? Which hatred is trauma trying to prevent repetition? Which hatred am I avoiding by staying armoured? Which is the echo of someone else’s contempt that I accidentally memorised? If I can name them, perhaps I can negotiate with them. Perhaps hatred is not a monster but an archive. And it expects me to be an archivist today. And, as we know, archivists do not burn records blindly; they catalogue them. A record of every boundary crossed, every expectation unmet, every version of myself that felt cornered. This one: born of betrayal. This one: born of comparison. This one: born of neglect. This one: borrowed. This one: protective. This one: poisonous. And maybe, just maybe, the goal is not eradication, not to become hatred-free. That feels like a fantasy sold by people who have never been cornered. Maybe the goal is sovereignty to let justified anger mature into boundary, to let grief become mourning instead of mildew, to return inherited prejudice to sender without ceremony, and to hold myself accountable without performing self-execution. Or, maybe it is discernment to let justified anger metabolise into boundary, to let grief dissolve into mourning instead of corrosion, to return inherited hatred to sender, and to finally... finally... stop confusing my own reflection with the shadow cast by others. The republic inside me is loud like a troubled state, all opinionated and armed with memory. But I am learning and realising something quietly radical that I am not its loudest citizen. I am not the militia. I am the one holding the pen. I am the people's legislature, for better or for worse. I decide what gets airtime in my skull. I decide which memory becomes doctrine and which one is allowed to soften. I decide which hatred gets a badge and which one gets disarmed. I can’t stop every riot. But I can stop calling it governance. And perhaps the most merciful thing I can do... not just for others, but for myself, is to stop assuming every sharp edge in me is proof of my monstrosity. Some of it is scar tissue. Some of it is boundary. Some of it is learned cruelty. Some of it is survival. Some of it is the quiet, desperate refusal to be broken again. It is the armour I have built when I had no one else to build it for me. I look in the mirror and see the jagged edges of a past that refused to stay in the past, but I also see the strength that held me together when I were falling apart. Not all fire begins at home. And not all of it needs to keep burning. But this hatred definitely was born out of the home around me that will be extinguished when the home around me is brought down. But tonight, I am not exorcising hatred. I am interviewing for it. And for the first time, it is answering without shouting.

And here is the uncomfortable truth: Some of the hatred inside me has been useful. That is what no one wants to admit. Hatred has been my emergency generator. When love failed, when softness backfired, when politeness was weaponised against me, hatred kept the lights on and cradled me [footnote]. It said: Enough. It said: Remember this. It said: Do not go back there. There is a kind of hatred that is simply clarity after illusion dissolves. The first time I understood that I was not the preferred child, something calcified. Not dramatically. Not in a cinematic thunderstorm. Just quietly. A small reclassification of myself in my own home. I moved from protagonist to peripheral. From adoration to adequate. From daughter to responsibility. And if a father learns to resent the existence of a daughter because she is not a son, the daughter learns to resent her own softness because it feels like evidence. I began to auditorise my own existence: Too loud. Too dark. Too ambitious. Too emotional. Too female. Too present. Too burdensome. Too unnecessary. Too unworthy. And then one day, I woke up fluent in a language no one remembers teaching me: self-contempt. They look at me as if I am foreign, I am secluded, I am away, I am exclusionary. But I need to be precise here. Was that self-hatred born in me? Or was it carefully, precisely, and intentionally installed? Because there is a difference between my body generating a toxin and inhaling one repeatedly until my lungs mistake it for air. Right? Some of my hatred is simply muscle memory. The body remembers dismissal before the mind can rationalise it. The body remembers being compared. The body remembers being corrected for existing. The body remembers the subtle hierarchy of affection. The body remembers the moment my stomach dropped, and I smiled anyway. The body remembers how I learnt to laugh at my own humiliation before anyone else could. Hatred grows in those silences, unlike in screaming matches, but like in the thousand small recalibrations. The time you are interrupted and decide not to finish your sentence. The time you are told you are “overreacting.” The time your anger is reframed as hysteria. The time you realise your sister’s defiance is called strength, and yours is called attitude. The time her anger was called confidence, and mine was called disrespect. The time she could slam doors, and I had to close mine gently, like I was always auditioning for forgiveness. Micro-negations. Daily erosion. The architecture of resentment is built brick by brick, not by explosion. So when I feel hatred rise in me now, I am trying my level best not to panic. Because not all of it is corrosion. Some of it is signal. Sometimes I fail. Sometimes I pass miserably. I teach myself. Hatred toward an abuser is not a pathology. It is the immune system responding to the abuse. It is necessary. Hatred toward a suffocating dynamic is not cruelty. It is oxygen deprivation fighting back. It is necessary. Hatred toward injustice is not moral failure. It is recognition. It is necessary. But internalised hatred is different. It does not protect in an ideal manner. It protects like a patriarch. Like restriction in safety's clothing. It watches me attempt joy and whispers, You don’t deserve that. It watches me succeed and says, They will realise you are a fraud. It watches me rest and mutters, Lazy. It watches me cry and sighs, Pathetic. It watches me eat and calls it indulgence. It watches me want and calls it neediness. It watches me set a boundary and calls it selfishness. This hatred does not face outward. It faces inward like a firing squad. And the insidious part? It feels disciplined, responsible, mature, like it disguises itself as accountability. So, it can secretly dismantle me. Accountability builds me by pointing out the mistake and telling me to fix it. This is not building. This is self-destruction, telling me my whole existence is a mistake. Those are not the same sentences. And I have been collapsing them into one. There is also a projection. You know, the trickster faction in my little militant republic. The one that dresses up insecurity as superiority, calls others arrogant when I feel invisible, labels others “hostile” when I am suppressing rage, and despises pretension because I am terrified of being ordinary. Projection is lazy hatred. It relocates discomfort instead of metabolising it. Inherited hatred is lazier still. It arrives pre-packaged with no research required or personal injury necessary. Just a set of instructions passed down like heirloom cutlery: polish this, use this, never question this. Fear this situation. Distrust that kind of woman. Respect that kind of man. Do not cross that boundary. Stay in your lane. You aren't capable. Some of these instructions are soaked in the history of colonial residue, colourism, sectarian bitterness, and generational shame. Some are born of survival. Some are born of ignorance. All of them demand interrogation. Because if I do not examine them, I will enforce them. And I refuse to become the custodian of someone else’s unprocessed fear. The most destabilising realisation, though, is this: Hatred feels powerful. It sharpens my posture, makes me decisive, simplifies the moral universe into clean lines, and for a moment, it feels like control. But it is control, like a clenched fist is control, like digging nails into palm, like is tension mistaken for strength. When I stay in hatred too long, the room shrinks, my imagination shrinks, my empathy shrinks. My world becomes smaller until it can fit inside one clenched jaw. Even tenderness starts to look suspicious. Even kindness feels like a strategy. My world becomes a series of enemies and threats. 

~ Oizys.

So Farrr... Between the Last Post and the Upcoming Week

The satisfaction in self-destruction is what keeps me from getting out. Last night, right after I finished writing my previous post and went to bed, I saw two emails. I had been selected for two good volunteering positions. I lay there and ruminated myself to sleep. The next day at noon, I replied to both. To one, I said I was interested and willing to take the interview. To the other, I said I would submit the assignment required for the selection process. The first opportunity sent me two suggested interview times. I submitted the required assignment for the second one. I chose the assignment first. It was easier. Safer. Writing feels controllable. Interviews do not. I completed the assignment and submitted it. They replied, acknowledging it and asking when I would be free next week for a call. Then the first organisation emailed again. They had scheduled the later interview slot and sent me the meeting link. It was set for yesterday evening. Yesterday evening came. I opened the interview link. I checked my mic. I checked my camera. I adjusted the lighting. I rehearsed answers in my head. I opened the second email draft and checked their time zone again. I drafted a response suggesting a time. And then I did nothing. I did not join the interview. I did not send the time suggestion. I watched the opportunity sit there and pass. 

Now, as the weekend passes by, I have two things to do as a decent human being: respond to the first organisation with an apology and suggest a time for a call with the second one during the upcoming weekend. But. But the longer I wait, the heavier the emails become. What could have been a simple, human apology now feels like a formal confession. What could have been a quick scheduling reply now feels like I am asking for mercy. Because time turns small tasks into moral failures while silence compounds interest. I tell myself it is already too late. That they have moved on. That responding now would only expose my unreliability. And yet, I know that a two-line email could still exist. A polite apology and a suggested time. Nothing dramatic. Instead, I sit with the discomfort. I open the inbox. I close it. I draft. I delete. I calculate time zones again, as if precision will compensate for the delay. It would take five minutes. It has taken three days.

The absurdity of it is not lost on me. I am not incapable. I am not unaware. I am simply… resistant to the moment of exposure. The moment of admitting: I didn’t show up. And somewhere inside that resistance is the same quiet impulse: the one that would rather lose an opportunity than risk being seen trying. The weekend is still not over. Technically, neither opportunity is either. Well, probably the first opportunity, the greater one, the one that scared me more precisely because it mattered more, is gone. The task starts on Monday. The meeting link expired quietly with no dramatic ending, but just silence. And I tell myself this is a consequence. Natural, predictable consequence. There is a strange clarity that comes after something closes. While it was open, it demanded courage. Now that it is likely gone, it only demands reflection. Reflection is easier. It costs nothing. Really? I wonder if this is the pattern: desire rising to meet fear, and fear winning not by force, but by delay. I imagine what the interview would have been like. Perhaps awkward. Perhaps fine. Perhaps even good. I will never know, and that is the cleanest escape of all... uncertainty protects me from both failure and success. Because success would have required something too: confidence, consistency, visibility, and effort sustained over weeks. Not just one brave evening, but many ordinary ones after it. Losing it before it begins feels sharp, but contained and manageable. A small private disappointment instead of a public unfolding. Still, the second opportunity waits. It has not withdrawn. It has simply asked a question: When are you free? Such an ordinary question. Such an unreasonable weight. The weekend is thinning. The email draft still sits there. And I am left deciding whether I want to preserve the comfort of avoidance or tolerate the discomfort of being seen. It is almost funny how small the action is, and how large it feels. 

I don’t want the week to arrive and confront me with the possibility of never getting out of all the things I am in precisely because of this pattern. Because that would mean admitting it isn’t a circumstance. It isn’t bad luck. It isn’t timing. It is repetition. It is me. Not in a cruel way. Not in a condemning way. Or maybe, it is...? But in the quiet, consistent way, habits shape outcomes while pretending to be temporary. I tell myself I am tired. I tell myself I need more confidence, more preparation, more certainty. I tell myself I will act when I feel ready. But readiness is a horizon. It recedes as I approach it. And what frightens me most is not that I missed an interview. Well, that does too. But, it is also the possibility that I am building a life made of almosts. Almost replied. Almost joined. Almost tried. There is a version of this week where I send the apology, suggest the time, attend the call, stumble through it, and survive. There is another version where I let the silence stretch until it hardens into fact. Both versions begin with the same small act: pressing send. Truth is, the week will arrive regardless. It does not negotiate with my hesitation. It will present itself with its ordinary hours and ask nothing more dramatic than participation. Perhaps the real confrontation is not the week. It is the decision to interrupt the pattern, once, before it convinces me that it is who I am. Because patterns feel permanent until they are interrupted once. And maybe getting out is not a grand escape, a dramatic leap. Maybe it is a five-line email, tolerating the five seconds of exposure between drafting and sending. Maybe the only way out of the pattern is to interrupt it before it finishes the sentence for me. That first interruption is always embarrassingly small and disproportionately terrifying.

Perhaps this is what I meant when I wrote that the satisfaction in self-destruction is what keeps me from getting out. It is the dramatic ruin in the quiet erosion. It is the relief of not having to be evaluated. The comfort of choosing the loss before someone else can hand it to me. The illusion of control in deciding not to show up. There is a strange steadiness in saying, I ended it. Even if what I ended was a possibility. Because trying introduces variables. Other people. Unpredictable outcomes. Success that demands continuity. Failure that demands resilience. Both require exposure. Avoidance requires only silence. And silence is efficient. It protects me from embarrassment. It protects me from rejection. It even protects me from the burden of being capable. But it also keeps everything exactly where it is. So when I say I don’t want the week to arrive and confront me, what I mean is that I don’t want to see the cumulative effect of these small surrenders. I don’t want to stand in front of my own pattern and recognise its architecture. The satisfaction in self-destruction is subtle. It does not feel like violence. It feels like relief. Like postponement. Like choosing the known discomfort over the unknown possibility. And yet, the week will arrive. The inbox will remain. The second opportunity will either close quietly or widen slightly, depending on whether I press send. 

The week is coming either way. The question is whether I will.

I wish I believed in a superpower, like God, or something vast and intervening, so I could console and delude myself by praying for the week never to come. So I could hand over responsibility to something celestial and say: pause it. Delay it. Undo it. Give me one more weekend of suspension. There is comfort in imagining an authority that negotiates with time. That forgives without consequence. That rearranges outcomes in response to whispered bargains. But the week does not answer to prayer. It answers to the rotation of the earth. And perhaps what I am really wishing for is not divine intervention, but relief from agency. Relief from being the one who must choose. Relief from being the one who must press send. If there were a god of small mercies, I would ask not for the week to disappear, but for the courage to meet it without hiding. Since there isn’t... or since I don’t believe there is, the responsibility returns to me.

The week will come. The emails will wait. And the smallest act of faith available to me is not prayer, but participation.

~ Oizys.

February 2026 So Farrr...

Wow. It has been long, yet all it has been is a lot of ruminating, longing, yearning, guilting, depressing, daydreaming, waiting, intruding, and not a lot of change, huh? Since the last update in January. Which makes sense. And at the same time, it does not make sense. Every night I go to sleep daydreaming that things might change drastically tomorrow morning. And the next morning, I wake up with all the heaviness on my eyelids and clutch my painful soul, drag it along the day, daydreaming that things will change when I go to sleep and wake up tomorrow. But they don't. They have never. Maybe sometimes. A tiny little bit. But then, never. As time grows, the regret becomes fervent, and my desperation vehemently whips me, makes me turn back to see... see the time, all the time I passed, all the time that passed me, is just one, big, gaping hollow memory. Memories in a waiting room and nothing else. 

Reading Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice from Dear Sugar by Cheryl Strayed has just aggravated this process and nothing else. And I try to fill this hollowness with more hollowed daydreams, and the hollowness is like self-made quicksand. Rosa Luxemburg said while she was being murdered, “Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.” I feel as though I am stuck in an analysis paralysis like a scholar dissecting a map instead of stepping onto the road, or like a cartographer starving in the territory she already charted, or like a train revving in neutral, or like a courtroom where I am both defendant and judge, and the verdict is perpetually adjourned, or like a lighthouse debating light while ships wreck offshore. And so, to give myself the illusion of moving, I keep distracting myself from myself by talking about myself to myself in all different costumes and scenarios and timelines and settings and contexts and landscapes.

Like Anaïs Nin said, "I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me — the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living." [Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5: 1947-1955]. 

Like born in the shadow of the intergenerational ruins, the lonely child of the charnel house longed to escape the cold, relentless struggles of this mortal coil, prevaricating the indelible toska with flagitious paracosm.

Like Patti Smith once wrote in Woolgathering, “I always imagined I would write a book, if only a small one, that would carry one away, into a realm that could not be measured nor even remembered. I imagined a lot of things. That I would shine. That I'd be good. I'd dwell bareheaded on a summit turning a wheel that would turn the earth undetected, amongst the clouds, I would have some influence; be of some avail.”

But what follows in my mind after this are words of Dostoevsky written to Mikhailovich, "When I look back at the past and think how much time has been wasted in vain, how much time was lost in delusions, in errors, in idleness, in ignorance of how to live, how I did not value time, how often I sinned against my heart and spirit—my heart bleeds. Life is a gift, life is happiness, each minute might have been an age of happiness."

“Might have been.”

I feel like that is the small, closed waiting room I am stuck in, with the anticipatory living and a deferred agency, dosing myself on the fantasy as micro-dopamine, followed by some flagellatory regret as self-punishment with the hyper-reflection mistaken for progress. At the same time, the remnants of past abuse are balled up in my mind like a psychological gridlock ping-pong ball. And the restlessness caused by it is so combustible, causing a psychomotor agitation that breaks my paralysis only to drive me into a chaotic, aimless, and often self-destructive frenzy. The purposelessness in my movements only intensifies the underlying terror of the gridlock, offering no release, only exhaustion, and becomes a frantic, uncontrollable dance with my own self-destruction. 

~ Oizys.

Nobody is here.

Nobody is here.
Nobody is touching me.
Nobody is beating me.
Nobody is hitting me.
Nobody is engulfing my space.
Nobody is screaming at me.
Nobody is manipulating me.
Nobody is scheming behind me.
Nobody is degrading me.
Nobody is humiliating me.
Nobody is hitting the back of my head.
Nobody is looking at me.
Nobody is pushing me.
Nobody is killing me.
Nobody is abusing me.

Nobody is judging me.

Nobody is laughing at me.

Nobody is commenting on me.

Nobody is excluding me.

Nobody is following me.

Nobody is waiting outside the door.

Nobody is standing in the hallway.

Nobody is listening through the wall.

Nobody is reading my messages.

Nobody is checking my phone.

Nobody is tracking my steps.

Nobody is counting my breaths.

Nobody is timing my silence.

Nobody is correcting my tone.

Nobody is policing my body.

Nobody is rewriting my words.

Nobody is twisting my memory.

Nobody is asking what I did to deserve it.

Nobody is telling me I imagined it.

Nobody is warning me to behave.

Nobody is threatening consequences.

Nobody is measuring my usefulness.

Nobody is deciding my worth.

Nobody is shrinking the room.

Nobody is locking the door.

Nobody is holding the key.

Nobody is watching me sleep.

Nobody is rehearsing an excuse.

Nobody is preparing a story.

Nobody is waiting for me to forget.

Nobody is coming.

This is what safety sounds like,
in my half-room.
while I hold myself
and repeat these lines.

STOP! STOP! STOP!

Reminding myself...
That what had happened.
is not happening right now.

And yet it is happening

inside the body.

As the intrusive rumination of the past

occupies my present,

and the intrusive rumination of the present

settles into my future.

No active threat detected.
No incident report filed.
No visible bruising.
No current occupation.

My body disagrees.

Nobody is here...
so why does my spine rehearse surrender?
Nobody is touching me...
so why does my skin still flinch at footsteps?
Nobody is screaming...
so who taught my sleep to duck?
Nobody is manipulating...
so why do I cross-examine my own memory?

Somewhere else,
the same sentence is spoken louder.

As you prepare your breakfast, think of others

   (do not forget the pigeon’s food).

As you conduct your wars, think of others

   (do not forget those who seek peace).

As you pay your water bill, think of others

   (those who are nursed by clouds).

As you return home, to your home, think of others

   (do not forget the people of the camps).

As you sleep and count the stars, think of others

   (those who have nowhere to sleep).

As you liberate yourself in metaphor, think of others

   (those who have lost the right to speak).

As you think of others far away, think of yourself

   (say: “If only I were a candle in the dark”).

- ‘Think of Others,’ Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008)

Nobody is bombing.
Nobody is starving.
Nobody is suppressing.
Nobody is silencing women.
Nobody is legislating bodies.
Nobody is disappearing dissent.

Nobody is burning books.

Nobody is drawing borders.

Nobody is poisoning water.

Nobody is profiting from pain.

Nobody is chaining the gates.

Nobody is selling the future.

Nobody is watching through glass.

Nobody is marking the skin.

Nobody is forgetting the names.

Nobody is looking at the screen.

Nobody is feeling the routine.

Nobody is waking to the screams.

Nobody is shattering the dreams.

Nobody is claiming it was their fault.

Nobody is stopping the assault.

Nobody is holding the empty plate.

Nobody is checking at the gate.

Nobody is seeing the truth unfold.

Nobody is doing as they are told.

Nobody is taking all the blame.

Nobody is calling them by name.

Nobody is turning the page.

Nobody is closing the book.

Nobody is pulling the lever.

Nobody is writing the law.

Nobody is taking the toll.

Nobody is breaking the bread.

Nobody is lighting the fuse.

Nobody is stealing the light.

Nobody is selling the truth.

Nobody is closing the door.

Nobody is stopping the clock.

Nobody is waking the ghost.

Nobody is changing the lock.

Nobody is holding the key.

Nobody is setting it free.

Nobody is signing the orders.

Nobody is counting the bodies.

Nobody is answering for it.

Nobody is responsible.

It is called stability.

It is called order.

It is called protection.

It is always called something else.

Nobody was hurt.
Nobody meant it.
Nobody remembers it that way.

My nervous system does.
The rubble does.
History does.

If not nobody, then who?

Stop saying nobody.

Say:

They were here.

They did it.

They benefited from it.

They are still benefiting.
They are still doing it.
They are still here.

Different house.

Different flag.

Same architecture.

And there was never nobody.
And there was always someone here.
And someone was always signing the orders.
And the absence is someone's uniform.
And I am done pretending absence is peace.
And you knew.

~ Oizys.

—

After-poetry note: This poem-like paraphernalia is about somatic memory, trauma memory, and intergenerational residue that aggravates and furthers harm while preventing present safety; institutional and societal denial of harm; linguistic gaslighting; power and privilege hiding in passive voices; the violence of “stability”; the myth of absence; the interrogatory grammar of the abuser; the accomplice that is “no one”; and the escalation–de-escalation ricochet from personal trauma to collective violence, as well as the tension between private body and public violence. Our bodies, souls, minds, hearts, and nervous systems remember what official language forgets. Sometimes, zooming out from the half-room to the geopolitical scale, we write the “necessary.” So I had to. Even if I can't escape this half-room anytime soon, I don’t know when. I don’t know if I ever will. But the walls are not unnamed, because the silence has fingerprints, and the word “nobody” no longer protects them. I have spent my whole life, until now, learning that survival is not the same as agreement. And I am still here... breathing, witnessing, writing in a corner, reading, thinking, questioning, refusing the passive tense. Even if the door does not open, and a path is never paved, and the body trembles and shakes, and the mouth fumbles, and the feet stumble, and history echoes, wanting us to repeat, I am done rehearsing surrender. I am done bowing. I refuse to echo. And if I cannot leave the half-room, I will name it. And if I cannot dismantle the architecture, I will map it. And if I cannot stop the clock, I will mark the hour. Because even here, even now, someone is here. And that someone is me.