april 19th. 23:37PM.
i am sitting at my table. my mother on the bed. the rain teased us an hour ago and never came, but the windows are open and the wind is generously violent. my mother says she is going to sleep after she closes her phone, which finally brings the devotional music to an end. the room is still the room. the bed is still the bed. the same objects continue their long conspiracy of being familiar. life has been the same for long, long, long.
i want to write so much, but the burden of living so much and yet not being able to live in the way i fantasise, imagine, or sometimes think i deserve, crushes me in these stupid, unheroic intervals. not even all at once. not in operatic crescendos. just steadily. like bad weather that never fully arrives and never fully leaves. i get angry. i get mad in this stale, repetitive way that feels less like fire and more like being slowly pickled in disappointment.
today i got featured on napowrimo for yesterday’s poem. the surprise startled me. it did make me blink and sit up and feel, for a second, as though the membrane between my private effort and the visible world had thinned. but i have not been able to feel happy the way i think i should feel happy. it is humiliating, this inability to perform joy on cue. as if even happiness requires a version of me that is more functional than the one currently available. i do not trust my own responses anymore. i do not know if i am underreacting or if i have already exhausted the feeling elsewhere, in some private rehearsal i cannot access now. that is what irritates me. i had imagined this before. i had rehearsed it in advance the way i rehearse everything: the future compliment, the future recognition, the future version of me receiving it well, graciously, radiantly, with the exact right degree of delight and disbelief. i have fantasised about the event of being seen often enough that when it happened, reality could only arrive already pre-chewed.
and perhaps that is one of the uglier side effects of living so much in anticipation, fantasy, daydream, simulation, imaginary elsewhere: the real thing turns up and finds you strangely unavailable to it. not because you do not care. not because you are ungrateful. but because some part of you already spent the feeling in private.
and where is god in all this. i kept myself godless for years, almost stubbornly, because i could never locate anything in me that felt worthy of being seen by something higher. or perhaps i could not bear the idea of being seen fully. people say god is comfort, structure, witness. i have always felt like an unsupervised consciousness. i feel plath and dickinson combined here.
plath said, 'I need a father. I need a mother. I need some older, wiser being to cry to. I talk to God, but the sky is empty.' and dickinson said, “I feel that the world holds a predominant place in my affections. I do not feel that I could give up all for Christ, were I called to die”. i understand that too well. i have addressed silence often enough to recognise its texture. and yet i am not even faithful to my unbelief. there are moments i want what others seem to have, that collective surrender, that strange, shared certainty in their psychosis, that soft delusion that something is holding them together.
as a child i already felt outside it. as if everyone else had agreed to drink from something; faith, god, meaning, that opium marx talked about and everyone misunderstood, whatever form it took; and i stood there, suspicious, refusing, and therefore permanently excluded. spiritually orphaned is the closest i can get to naming it.
perhaps that orphanhood has never been only spiritual. perhaps it leaked outward into everything else: friendship, love, belonging, the confidence with which other people seem to enter a room, a city, a decade, and assume there will be something there to meet them.
which sounds spoiled. maybe it is spoiled. or maybe it is just what happens when the mind has been overperforming reality for years. a life too often rehearsed becomes difficult to inhabit live. still, i am glad. i think i am glad. i know i am glad. but the gladness arrived in a muted, underwater way. as if it had to swim to me through too much silt. as if the day itself had too many other rooms inside it for joy to occupy the whole house.
ugh. spontaneously i decided to write this although i have been fermenting things to write for days, and have not been able to press the wine, separate the liquid from the skins and seeds and bitter residue. so if this ends up a large load of dumpy gibberish, then so be it. frankly, i have written worse, and with more confidence in this unknown corner of the web's nowhere.
i have been thinking, as usual, obviously, embarrassingly, a lot. in the background: my life, my family, what i eat, what i do, my house, my job, money, class, marriage, womanhood, politics, religion, god, my country, its vulgar brutalities, iran, lebanon, gaza, palestine, people carrying on under bombardment and occupation and grief so enormous that language should be ashamed to approach it, and the victims here too, the daily humiliations and violences and stupid little acceptances by which a country teaches you what kind of suffering counts and what kind does not. and in the foreground, the constant maladaptive daydreaming, the depersonalization, the derealization, the irritating sensation of being both trapped in this life and not entirely present for it.
sometimes i think my consciousness is split into at least three badly managed departments. sometimes it does not even feel like departments. it feels like pieces. like badly handled flesh. as if i have been split into workable sections and none of them remember belonging to the same body. thought in one place, desire in another, action somewhere else entirely, and the self, if there is one, lagging behind like a witness to its own disassembly. one is trying to survive the day in practical terms: eat, work, bathe, answer, reply, produce, appear normal enough. one is continuously writing alternate lives in the background, furnishing them in absurd detail, giving them cities, clothes, books, apartments, lovers, train stations, versions of my face that look more like mine than mine does. and one is simply standing at a distance from both, watching, dissociating, making notes, becoming alien to the whole production.
this is too much consciousness for one mediocre life. that is perhaps an ungracious thing to say, but there it is.
and the house does not help. how could it. every house develops its own emotional climate and ours has been set, for years, to interruption. even when nothing actively dramatic is happening, there is a density to shared life that exhausts me. the bed where my mother lies. the phone music. the walls that have heard too much. the familiar sounds that should by now have become neutral and instead remain overfull with association. sometimes i feel i have never once had an acoustically innocent life. every room comes pre-interpreted.
and i know, i know, many people have less. this is part of what makes complaint so sticky. gratitude and suffocation can coexist so easily they become almost impossible to untangle without sounding either cruel or pathetic. yes, i have shelter. yes, i have food. yes, i have a meagre job in the social sector where i can pretend to help people. yes, today i was featured for a poem i wrote. yes, people were kind. yes, these are not nothing. and yet the architecture of my dissatisfaction remains standing. what is this life, really. what is this thing i am required to inhabit with such obedience. this banal, thin, almost polite arrangement of existence that still manages to feel grotesque from the inside. a life that looks intact from a distance but, up close, is mostly improvisation, fatigue, and the constant ricochet between imagination and a reality that refuses to deepen. i sometimes feel less like a person and more like a mass being carried forward by habit. not even tragic. just sustained. which might be worse. the walls do not collapse just because one window briefly opened.
maybe that is what disorients me most. that something objectively lovely can happen and still not reorganise the underlying misery. recognition is not relocation. praise is not freedom. being read is not the same as being released. a feature on a poetry site does not magically alter the room, the finances, the fatigue, the family structure, the body, the old griefs, the stalled appetites, the private humiliations, the long habit of feeling life happen in the wrong key. nor does it return the time already spent in becoming someone who can endure disappointment elegantly. which is not the same thing as living well, though women are often trained to confuse the two.
still, i do not want to be unfair to joy either. perhaps joy is smaller than i keep demanding it to be. perhaps it is not a flood but a pocket. perhaps it is just the startled little lift i felt when i saw my name there. perhaps it is the fact that i am writing this at all. perhaps it is the mild stupidity of grinning alone for five seconds before the rest of my brain rushed in with its clipboards and critiques.
my mind is such an overstaffed bureaucracy. no feeling gets through without ten departments stamping it.
i think, too, that part of my trouble is that i am always waiting for outer validation to produce an inner transformation it has never once promised. as if being noticed should settle something fundamental. as if praise should put bones where there has been only fog. as if one small external confirmation should finally silence the older internal voices that have spent years saying: not enough, not yet, not really, not you. but of course it does not work like that. old damage is not impressed by public recognition. it has seen too much continuity to be moved by interruption. it does not believe in moments. it believes in patterns. and my patterns have been stubborn, repetitive, embarrassingly durable. it barely looks up from its desk.
and then there is the stranger, more embarrassing layer: what if i have become so attached to longing, frustration, elsewhere, unreality, and disappointment that even good things arrive as interruptions to a familiar self-concept? what if some part of me does not know how to metabolise happiness unless it also gets to remain tragic? horrible thought. plausible thought. there is something indecent about how well i understand my own traps and how little that understanding changes anything. insight without alteration is its own kind of failure. i catalogue myself endlessly and remain the same.
and perhaps beneath all this there is also the quieter, more ordinary grief: that i have long since forgone the ideas of success i once had for myself, or at least loosened my grip on them so much that they now drift around me like old paper in dirty water. not even dramatic ambitions, necessarily. just the basic, vulgar little visions of a life that would feel recognisably mine. some steadiness. some beauty. some movement. some evidence that i had not merely been stored somewhere for safekeeping while the years got on with their work.
the ages of my twenties keep slipping and slipping, each one leaving behind its thin residue of regret, remorse, sorrow, embarrassment, loss. and what have i done with them. really. what have i done. where are my solo trips now. where are my friends. where are the photographs of youth that look like proof instead of invention. where is love, too, or whatever modest adult version of it i might have managed by now; not the operatic kind, not the kind that ruins empires, just the ordinary fact of being chosen regularly, being known in practice, being folded into someone else’s day without ceremony. where is the evidence that i have been accompanied. or perhaps the evidence exists and i am the one who exiled myself from it. which is somehow worse. not to be left, but to become the mechanism of one’s own leaving. where are the train stations, the hotel mirrors, the clothes thrown over chairs in some temporary room in another country, the badly framed self-portraits, the cheap coffee, the expensive mistakes, the accidental intimacies, the evidence that i once moved through the world as if it might answer me back.
where is the recklessness i thought would redeem me. where is the freedom i kept assuming would begin just after this one obstacle, then the next, then the next. where are the evenings that were supposed to accumulate into memory instead of disappearing into fatigue. where is the life that was meant to acquire texture.
now i have no friends, or none that belong to the ordinary daily grammar of living. no place to go. no one to hit up on a whim. no person-shaped escape hatch in the evening. no casual proximity, no easy witness, no warm third place where my body might arrive before my thoughts do. whole weeks pass in which i speak, reply, perform, function, and yet remain fundamentally unaccompanied. there are lonelinesses inflicted by the world, and then there are the ones one manufactures with one’s own frightened hands. mine has too often been the second kind.
and this is not even a clean tragedy in which i was merely abandoned by circumstance. i participated in it. perhaps i enforced it.
i think often of the days when i did have friends, or at least the ordinary shape of friendship was still available to me. the last day i met them was the day before napowrimo 2023 began. we went to the bazaar. we shopped for the next day’s farewell. we ate, laughed, twirled, took pictures, played with dogs, drank cool drinks against the heat, gossiped, worried aloud about the future in that half-serious way young people do when they still imagine the future will arrive as an event and not just accumulate around them by stealth. then i came back home and something in me closed like a fist. i never picked up their calls again. i never went to the farewell. rather, with my closed fist, i wrote this poem: napowrimo 2023, day 1, latibulating.
please, if there is any god, do not ask me after i die why i became the enforcer of that cruel abandonment. i have no answer except that perhaps it was the only language i knew. retreat before being reached. vanish before being witnessed too closely. make distance first and call it necessity later.
a year later things had changed for them, as things do. different cities. finished courses. jobs. movement. lives beginning in visible ways. and i was still in my room, stuck in that viscous interval where time passes but nothing seems to convert into forward motion. i joined instagram after a long absence and one friend asked to meet. i declined like a thief. even now that comparison feels exact: furtive, ashamed, already acting as if i had stolen something i could not return.
since then two years have passed. so many napowrimos. i do not reach out. once in a while i like their stories; sometimes they like mine. these tiny, polite digital survivals of something i once held in my hands. what did i do. why did i do it. how does a person turn living, laughing companionship into this thin, haunted afterlife of mutual viewing and almost nothing else.
i helped do this. i withdrew. i disappeared. i made myself the instrument of the loss. i am the co-conspirator of this specific, shame-soaked, ordinary, and brutal (in exactly the right way) loneliness.
there is a particular humiliation in having once imagined adulthood as a widening and finding instead that it can narrow so quietly you barely hear the walls move. one day you realise you do not have a circle, or a scene, or even a dependable corner to disappear into. you just have your own mind, overused to the point of damage, and the stale little routes between work, home, obligation, and the internet.
sometimes i think what devastates me is not even the absence of grandeur, but the absence of density. the terrible thinness of it. the way whole years can pass and leave so little behind except a few exhausted routines, some unfinished drafts, screenshots, browser tabs, receipts, messages half-answered, clothes re-worn into anonymity, and a face in the mirror that looks as if it has been waiting for someone else’s life to start.
it is not that nothing has happened. it is that so much of what has happened feels unusable. untransformed. it has not become story, or memory, or wisdom, or even proper damage. it just lies there in me like badly stored material. the unlived and the half-lived rotting side by side.
i had once imagined my twenties as something feverish, excessive, full of departure. not glamorous, necessarily, but alive. intellectually alive, sexually alive, erotically alive, geographically alive, aesthetically alive, morally alive, politically alive, some kind of alive that would leave marks and make stories. instead there has been so much suspension. so much delay. so much ricochet between endurance and fantasy. so much waiting in one room while the mind drags the body across continents it cannot afford.
and this too is difficult to confess without sounding ridiculous, because many lives are narrower than mine, harsher than mine, poorer than mine, more violently constrained than mine. i know that. i know it with shame. but comparison does not erase the private knowledge of waste. it does not soothe the vulgar panic of realising that youth is not an abstract resource. it is being spent whether i am using it well or not. it is horrifying how possible it is to waste a life without ever doing anything visibly dramatic enough to call waste.
sometimes i want to gather up all the vanished versions of myself... the one who would travel more, love more, read more, risk more, earn more, become more, leave more, refuse more; and line them against the wall like unclaimed luggage. look at them properly. apologise, perhaps. or accuse them. or accuse myself. i do not know which would be more accurate. maybe execute them forever.
what a thin thing a life can become while still remaining unbearably heavy.
and then there is politics, which would be easier to survive if it remained outside the house. but it does not. there is the politics of the world, of the country, of the city, of the street, and then the quieter politics of the home: what is repeated, what is excused, what begins to sound normal, what kind of hardness enters the language and stays. i can feel the moral weather changing around me. i move in one direction by instinct, by study, by injury, by refusal, and they move in another by fear, fatigue, resentment, habit, ambition, television, history. no one announces the split. it just keeps widening in the room.
it is strange to watch the people you belong to become less and less inhabitable to your mind. strange to hear familiar voices begin to carry values that make your skin recoil in private while your face stays neutral. strange to understand that love does not prevent estrangement; it only makes it slower, and more humiliating. even at home there is this creeping sense that the map is being redrawn while i am still inside it.
and what unsettles me most is not merely that they are changing, or revealing themselves more fully, or settling more comfortably into positions i cannot inhabit. it is that i am not outside this. i am not some clean witness standing at a moral distance, taking notes. i am made in part by the same house, the same air, the same repetitions, the same evasions, the same selective tendernesses and sanctioned cruelties. whatever i reject in them, i have had to locate first in myself: in reflexes, in fears, in silences, in the speed with which i excuse what should not be excused, in the cowardices that wear the mask of practicality. i come from them. i live among them. i am materially entangled with them. their language has passed through me. their permissions made me possible. their limitations deformed me. i am trying to refuse what formed me while still eating in the same house.
that is what makes it so exhausting. proximity is not innocence. dependence is not innocence. love is not innocence. i can feel my own complicities peeling away slowly, and not cleanly, and certainly not nobly. there is no dramatic purification in it. only the long, embarrassing work of noticing where i still benefit, where i still keep quiet, where i still choose peace in the room over truth, where i still let comfort be purchased by someone else’s greater vulnerability.
sometimes i think the family is the first state one belongs to, the smallest nation with its own border controls, censored histories, authorised griefs, acceptable enemies, myths of itself, and penalties for dissent. and like any state, it asks for loyalty long after loyalty has become morally expensive. it asks to be understood gently, in context, with compassion for its wounds, while it goes on reproducing wounds of its own. to step even slightly out of line feels at once necessary and treacherous.
i do not know what to do with the guilt of this. guilt that i have not done enough. guilt that i cannot seem to do enough. guilt that my refusals are so often interior, private, unspectacular. guilt that i am still here. guilt that i still need what i critique. guilt that i am trying to unlearn entire moral arrangements while remaining materially sheltered by them. there is something unbearable about needing refuge in the same structure whose values you are trying to survive.
and beyond the house, the scale of the world makes a mockery of individual conscience. what am i supposed to do with all this helplessness. what does one person do with a mind full of cities burning, people starved, children bombed, neighbours brutalised, hatreds normalised, and one’s own body still trapped in the petty logistics of earning, eating, commuting, replying, enduring. there are days when politics feels less like conviction and more like a permanent injury to perception. once you have seen certain things clearly, how do you return to the small, obedient choreography of ordinary life without feeling obscene.
and yet i do return to it. i brush my teeth. i answer emails. i eat dinner. i sit in rooms where opinions pass like contaminated air and say less than i mean because i am tired, because i am outnumbered, because i am dependent, because i do not know how to turn private correctness into public force. this, too, becomes part of the guilt: not only that the world is wrong, but that i remain so administratively continuous within it.
perhaps one of the hardest humiliations of adulthood is learning that moral seriousness does not automatically produce effective power. you can see clearly, feel deeply, refuse inwardly, and still remain terribly limited in what you can alter by nightfall. i cannot save the world from this room. i cannot save anyone at scale. the radius of my action remains humiliatingly small.
so the task, if there is one, may be smaller and less flattering than i once imagined: to reduce the amount of falsehood, consent, and deadness passing through my own life. to speak more accurately. to refuse certain languages. not to laugh at what should not be normalised. to help specific people in specific ways when i can. to send money when i can. to read seriously. to write seriously. to keep some moral clarity intact when the room would prefer mush. not to surrender my mind entirely just because fatigue makes surrender feel reasonable.
it sounds paltry. perhaps it is paltry. but limitation is not innocence, and helplessness is not permission.
what if i cannot leave the house. what if i cannot save anyone. what if the radius of my action remains humiliatingly small. i do not know how to live with that without either becoming self-forgiving too soon or self-punishing to the point of uselessness. perhaps this is another thing no one prepares you for: that moral life, for many of us, is not heroism but attrition. not grand action but repeated refusals, small accuracies, withheld consent, redistributed money, defended language, maintained clarity, the keeping intact of some inward line even when the outer life remains compromised.
which sounds paltry against the scale of suffering. maybe it is paltry. but perhaps the task was never to save the world from one room. perhaps it is only to reduce the amount of falsehood, consent, and deadness passing through one’s own life. to keep some inward line intact. to refuse certain languages. to resist the convenience of numbness. to help where one can without turning that smallness into an alibi.
but i do not know what else to do except refuse the seductions available to me: numbness, cynicism, self-exoneration, the convenience of saying i am powerless and therefore unaccountable. powerlessness is real. so is the moral laziness that sometimes disguises itself as despair. i am trying to tell the difference.
still, i hate how little it feels like. i hate how the conscience can be so alive while the body remains so constrained. i hate how clearly one can think and how inadequately one can act. i hate that history keeps arriving in the room and finding me underqualified for it.
i do not mean that i want misery. i mean that the psyche grows strange little loyalties. it becomes used to its own weather. one can become so accustomed to being the woman who is almost, nearly, on the verge, not yet, later, someday, elsewhere, that any actual arrival feels suspiciously out of character.
and yet i am tired of being elsewhere in advance. tired of pre-living, pre-grieving, pre-mourning, pre-irritated, pre-annoyed, pre-sad, pre-interpreting, pre-exhausting experience before it has the decency to happen. tired of having so much life take place in fantasy that reality feels like an administrative follow-up. tired of being split between the person at the table, the person in the imagined future, and the person hovering above both with a notebook and a headache.
outside, the rain still has not come. only the wind. all gesture, no event. perhaps that is why it feels fitting tonight.
my mother will sleep soon. the room will darken into its usual arrangement. tomorrow, monday, will arrive with its familiar demands, vulgar and undignified as ever. i will still have to wake up inside the same life. but tonight i wanted to place on record at least this much: that something good happened, and i am trying, in my clumsy, delayed, overthought way, to let it belong to me. even if only partially. even if my mind keeps trying to convert it into theory, guilt, irony, suspicion, or prose.
if i am honest, i am not even waiting for a different life anymore. i am waiting for a different way of being inside this one. because the years are not pausing while i think. they are going. they are going with or without my permission, and i am increasingly frightened by how little of them feels inhabited from the inside. which feels both more possible and more impossible at the same time.
something good happened. i was here for some of it. let that count.
april 20. 01:07AM.
anyway, my mother had fallen asleep. the wind stopped, the heat returned, and that was enough to wake her. she asked me if i planned to sleep now and switch off the lights or if i had to “work more.” the concern, as always, is the light. not my sleep. as long as i switch it off and lie down under the covers, silent and still, she can sleep.
it is strange how easily a life can be reduced to such negotiations. not even conflict. just adjustment. dim the light. lower the sound. occupy less space. become less noticeable. continue.
so i will close this, switch off the light, and lie down like a reasonable person inside a life that continues tomorrow whether i feel ready for it or not.
i had planned, earlier in the day, to write a blog on my other, more politically articulate alter-alter ego account about the recent happenings, something sharp, something properly argued, something that would at least pretend to meet the scale of what is unfolding outside. i had also planned to wash my hair, take a proper bath, reset the body in some minimal, dignified way, which, if i am being honest, i have not done in two days now. i think two. maybe more. time has a way of blurring when the days repeat themselves this closely.
instead i am here, still sitting at the table, thinking in long, unusable sentences.
perhaps i will simply go into my covers and rot quietly with my unwashed hair and unwritten thoughts. that seems, in a strange way, the most socially efficient option. it will invite no comments, require no explanations, cause no disturbance. i can fit myself back into the expected shape of the night without insisting on being noticed, without the small chaos of sitting here, writing, keeping the light on, existing too visibly.
or perhaps i will get up, walk to the bathroom, stand under water, do the small necessary labour of tending to a body that i keep postponing. both options feel disproportionately heavy. the journey from this table to my bed is, tonight, longer than it should be. not physically. just in the way a mind can stretch a few steps into something like resistance.
let’s see which version of me gets up.
~ Oizys.