Scraping the Skin of My Soul

June 18, 2026, 11:50 PM - June 19, 2026, 1:55 AM

As I lie on bed, tired and spent from working all day, I am trying to mold the heavy, exhausting weight in my chest into something beautiful, or at least something tangible. True to the spirit of my weblog deity, Oizys, the blank page feels like a faux-pas invitation, just like a mirror reflecting my own soul's quiet desolation. 

The name "Oizys" has been heavy on my mind since a long time. For those who don't know, she is the ancient Greek goddess of misery, grief, misfortune, and anxiety. The emotions that often feel too familiar to me when staring at a blank page. Tonight like many, many nights, I realized (yet again!) that writing under the moniker oizyswrites is all about finding the courage to sit with wallowed darkness. The world expects us to constantly perform happiness and productivity while generations are being genocided, women are being raped, children are being killed, but my poetry and thoughts need a space of addressal. In the quiet of this weblog-room, the agony of heartbreak and the slow, heavy landscape of grief do not feel like things I need to hide. Instead, they become very lines of text we need, in such times, to document the horrors of human projects on itself, the disgust it subject onto itself. Turning raw pain into structured words is the only way I know how to process the bargaining, the anger, and the (hopefully!) ultimate path toward acceptance.

I am writing on the weblog after almost a month. Work engulfed me. Choked me. It kept me strapped onto a chair, all while the act of searching for a new job tortures me daily. Meanwhile, I surprisingly got the opportunity to go to another part of the country for a week. I don't know how. I don't know if my manager will approve my leave. I might send a follow-up tomorrow morning, but I am scared to send it because she might say no. I haven't received the tickets though. I just don't know. What if they send them and the manager says no to the leave? What if they don't, and the manager says yes? Or worst of all: they say no and the manager says no, resulting in absolutely no change in this life.

I remember before getting this opportunity, I was scratching the skin of my soul to the absolute T because of being stuck. It is not a new theme in my weblog; it is what my whole weblog and my whole life is about. You can read any post, any poem. All I do here is cry and crib and complain about that! Now, I am scratching the skin of my soul to the T because of anxiety. Anxiety of whether I will go or not. Anxiety of how I will go.

I am paralyzed by the anxiety of how I will figure out how to perform like a civilized human, making tiny decisions throughout the day just to function and participate in society. Every small interaction feels like an insurmountable hurdle when you are hollowed out from the inside. This panic connects right back into the perpetual and inevitable depression of coercing my mind into the realization that I will never truly leave this hole of my life. The scenery might shift for a week, but the cage remains the same. The dread of returning to the absolute stagnation of my reality poisons the trip before it even begins, anchoring me to the realization that escape is just an illusion. 

Sometimes I look at the state of the world and think nothing will change. Just like my life. Nothing will change. I am settled down like dust underneath the bed storage and remain archived for no one to excavate me and my shabby little story in this shabby little room, in this shabby little city, in this shabby little life. 

I look at my mother and my father and my sister, and it always reaffirms the thought I have so often enumerated: that home is the first site of the state. Look, even Marx and Engels corroborate this. In these times, where politicians make the population descend into madness in the name of religion and god, and the people go dancing around with their swords of hatred and xenophobia killing their own, my home simply mirrors the macrocosm. My mother has a newfound obsession with religion, god, and particularly godmen who claim to connect people to the divine through their sermons. But to me, their sermons sound exactly like my father's voice. It is the exact same voice that is permanently lodged in an attic of my brain, a sound that shudders me every time it echoes in the quiet of the night, demanding absolute submission. It is the very same tone politicians use while spreading hatred and inciting violence, all while decorating themselves as the ultimate devotees of truthfulness and divinity. 

And then there is the systemic corruption that every failed state tolerates at its core. I look at the aunt who occasionally visits and steals from us. The parasitic tier of the family apparatus. Her husband feeds greedily on my father’s economy, draining our resources while mocking us from the very table we fund. And her son, the ultimate manifestation of this lawless, violent state, raped me. He took what he wanted by sheer force again and again and again, an act of absolute sovereignty over my bodily borders, while the rest of the family landscape simply absorbed the shockwaves and kept functioning. It is the perfect microcosm of the nation-state: the corrupt are fed, the violent are shielded, the perpetrators walk free and laugh, while the victim is expected to quietly host the very people who colonised and destroyed her. 

These elements of my familial nation-state drive me to absolute craziness. My brain has been engineered, piece by piece, in the crucible of these intimate, everyday, daily tiny violences. The occupation is total; it has crossed the border from the living room into my very biology. When I touch myself, trying desperately to excavate and release some soft, untouched part of me to feel pleasure, the state apparatus of my memory overrides my will. All I feel forced to think about is how, on those nights, I laid entirely silently and didn't fight. I have zero autonomy over this thing of a body that I shamelessly and shamefully have to call me. Unfortunately, my flesh, my skin, my muscles, and my bones have been heavily laced with his masculine mistakes. 

His masculine mistakes were merely the beginning of my introduction to this world, and the rest of society simply built upon the case. Even the non-sexual masculine mistakes (of his, of family, of bosses, of the state) have dictatorially contributed to the ultimate sexual and non-sexual devastation of this body of me. The patriarchal occupation has bent my mind into shapes I barely recognize; it shows up crookedly in my deepest thoughts and my creative writings. Sometimes I try to worldbuild, to escape, but the rot follows me there too. Recently, I found myself trying to write a world where a goddess existed solely as a toilet for her devotees. It terrifies me to see how deeply my mindset has been colonized, how sickeningly the subconscious replicates the dirt it has been forced to swallow, turning sacred, sovereign spaces into sites of collective waste. His and their masculine mistakes lay on my body’s skin like "white" phosphorus. It clings to me, a chemical burn that never cools, keeping me "wet" and burning against my will and consent constantly. It is an unceasing, physical reminder of a war I never declared, a perpetual state of arson committed against my own flesh. But even as the phosphorus eats away at the surface, even as it forces my biology to react to horror rather than desire, it cannot entirely consume the infrastructure beneath. The skin burns, the muscles ache under the weight of their ownership, but the core remains stubbornly, painfully conscious; trapped in a permanent ceasefire that offers no peace, only the survival of the casualty.

There are moments I lose and give in, collapsing under the sheer weight of it all, just like all marginalized and occupied people eventually (temporarily!) do when the siege is too long. I record those losing battles underneath this blanket, which is ironically the safest location in my life right now, making the painfulness of his and their domination and rape-bond feel astoundingly, dizzyingly deep. I record them in a state of absolute shambles, collapsed in the position of all fours, weakeningly, gapingly, leakingly, wide open: all lost and all given up, but still desperately trying to fight for some shred of honour. And, then followed immediately by an endless bucket of guilt, shame, and regret. These heavy emotions in the bucket are mixed carelessly with the phantom memories of their "white" phosphorus spilled all over my body. They coerce me, they force me (and god, if any, please trust me when I say this) to feel a submissively, lowly, toilet-goddessly kind of "okay" with bathing in that bucket's toxic content. It is the survival mechanism of a broken captive: when you cannot wash the acid off your skin, your mind breaks itself down until the burning feels normal, until the waste feels like your natural element. It is a psychological surrender forced by a violence so total that it rewrites your basic instincts, leaving you drowning in the very filth they dumped on you, whispering to yourself that it is fine just so your heart doesn't stop beating entirely. Slapped into smiling while you beg for sleep to sedate you forever and pray for sun to not rise ever.

They coerce me every single time I try to reclaim my own skin. They force me to submit to his and their permanent ownership every time I try to belong to my own body. He and his and their rapist doings remain lodged between me and my flesh like a thin, impenetrable film. I never get to touch myself for myself, by myself. 

When I look at my own vagina, it does not feel like a private, sacred part of my own anatomy; instead, it feels like a heavily militarized border zone, a site of forced entry where my sovereignty was permanently revoked. Every time I try to touch myself there, the memory acts like a hostile border guard, demanding to see my clearance papers, forcing me to submit to an inspection I never consented to, turning my own flesh into an occupied territory that belongs to the regime of his memory.

My breasts and my skin should belong to my own quiet sensuality, but under the law of this familal-capitalistic-patriarchal-nation-state, they feel like natural resources that were seized and mined by an occupying force. When I touch them, the sensation is instantly hijacked by a corrupt bureaucracy of guilt, as if my own nerve endings have been wired to serve his mistaken masculine blueprint rather than my own joy, leaving me feeling like a scary tenant paying rent to live inside my own chest. My nipples stand up as his trained patriarchal bodyguards, completely automated by past terror, reacting on his past commands as if they are still answerable to the dictator's whistle rather than my own touch. They respond to the ghost of his presence, entirely divorced from my own autonomy. They lactate on his past commands, leaking a phantom grief that belongs entirely to the ghost of his presence, completely divorced from my own autonomy and my own will. They supply like his demand never ended when he first expressed it into the bowl of this corrupted familial state, forever branding my breasts with his merciless fingers night after night. It is the exact same violent mechanism nation-states use when they force political prisoners to write confessions for orchestrated crimes that the state itself facilitated. My body is coerced into producing the evidence of its own violation, signing a declaration of submission written in phantom milk, forced to confess to a shame I never chose.

Trying to find pleasure in my own clitoris feels like trying to light a small fire of resistance in a city under a total, permanent blackout. The moment a spark of warmth begins, the memory of those silent nights drops down like a sudden police raid, enforcing a curfew on my own arousal, forcing the nerve center of my anatomy to surrender to his historical ownership before I can ever experience it for myself.

My thighs are that old, ancient rug which a woman made while she killed herself by hurting her fingers so many times. They carry the heavy, embedded pain of his and their constant poking, like sharp, deliberate needles piercing an already exhausted tapestry. They are the bruised ground where the occupying forces set up camp, leaving behind deep, structural indentations that refuse to smooth out, holding the physical memory of weight and containment long after the hands have left.

And my orgasms? They are the ultimate dissidents of this regime. On the rare occasions they occur, reached only after mangling through decades of struggles, shames, denials, lowliness, loneliness, and the heavy, deafening weight of too many silences, they do not feel like ecstasy. They arrive in the quietest darkness as a soft, deeply melancholic surrender. It is like a quiet candle lit by a civilian hiding in a basement while the bombs fall overhead; a fragile, momentary release that immediately dissolves back into pain. There is no joy in this release; it is merely the involuntary weeping of an exhausted nervous system under a totalitarian rule, a quiet leak in the structural containment of my grief that leaves me feeling more hollowed out than before the spark began. 

My face, I think, is the worst victim of this regime. It survived the sittings, the slappings, and the literal steppings of his and their wrath, becoming a literal canvas of their domestic enforcement. Yet, it keeps showing up every single day, because where else do you put a face if not over your shoulders? You cannot archive a face under the bed storage; you cannot hide the frontline of your own trauma when you have to walk out into the world. It stands as a public monument to a private, morally bankrupt war, forced to smile, forced to perform "civilized", "democratic" participation, carrying the scars of the regime while pretending to be entirely blank.

It is the ultimate victory of the familial nation-state: the territory has been so thoroughly conquered and defiled that even in the quietest, most private moments of attempted self-sovereignty, the flag of the oppressor is still planted firmly in my skin, ruling over the ruins of my autonomy. 

Meanwhile, my sister plays the part of the willful, apolitical "good citizen." She comfortably ignores the violence of the nation-state, using her well-to-do IT job and sharp, corporate skills to gaslight and manipulate anyone who dares to question her apolitical stance, charging heavily at those who actually choose to stand up. 

And yet, the most agonizing part of this familial state is that total, clean hatred is a luxury I am never allowed to possess. It never reaches a full one hundred percent. I look at my aunt who steals and eats and snatches, but I cannot fully hate her. I see the way her husband and son treat her; how they bodyshame her, humiliate her, and degrade her while she labors and labors to the absolute bone, to the point of forgetting literacy just to survive them.

It is the same with my mother. She is the one who, at one point, beat me so severely that I ended up in a hospital bed, but I cannot hate her. Oh, my mother. I see the cycles that broke her before she broke me. And my sister, who has violated me in so many different ways that the hurt feels forcibly inscribed into the very core of my soul, even with her, the hatred fails to fill the room. I watch how she struggles, how much she achieves, and the immense shame she was subjected to, only to rise again and again.

For my father, the hatred almost touches a hundred percent. It stays right on the edge, heavy and solid, until there are fleeting moments where even that crumbles. I had a direct conversation with him a couple of days ago. Our first real words after more than a year of absolute silence (the remnants of which are still scattered in my posts from last year during Women’s Day). In those brief, fragile moments of addressal, the monstrous illusion of the dictator slips, leaving behind just another broken piece of the structure. I am trapped in a perpetual state of mourning for the people who hurt me, because I know they are prisoners of the same burning house.

And me? Haha. I am the hopeless, useless, senseless social worker. The one who supposedly knows nothing about the struggles of the real, wide world. I am the one who pretends to save the world when she knows she can't do shit. She can't even save herself. She is just like the social sector she works in. A fraud, a liar, a cheater, a performative band-aid stuck onto a gaping, infected wound, masking systemic rot with pretty, bureaucratic words while changing absolutely nothing.

It is strange how writing poetry, or even just writing, can feel like bargaining with your own sadness. I sat by the window for hours, working and watching the sun char the world, all while a tiny part of me trying to find the exact words for the way an absence can fill an entire room. Every sentence I scratch out on this screen tonight feels like a direct conversation with personified, bodily grief. I am learning that acceptance doesn't mean the pain vanishes; it just means you finally stop fighting the dark and learn how to sit still within it.

I am done. And no, I am not going for the death route here. Please, if that were a route I would go down, I would have by now. But no. That requires a certain amount of courage, and I just don't have it. I am just so incredibly tired. I look at the world moving on, ahead, forward, whatever, while people die, and I feel like that is the exact trajectory of my life. Moving on, ahead, forward, whatever, while each second, each minute, each hour, each day, each week, each minute, each year (and, soon, each decade...?) is a piece of rotten fruit, dropped and used as manure for the soil of a future that will never actually come and happen. It is like the concept of "world peace". It never comes. It never happens. Never, ever.

But hey, that doesn't mean I don't believe in liberation or freedom. People who have fought hard and long have attained it, and their progenies are keeping it up. I feel shameless and shameful to say that maybe I am just not that progeny, so I don't have it in me to fight. And yes, I know it sounds like a cop-out. But I try. I try so much. I absolutely hate when people assume I don't try and offer me superficial advice to "just keep pushing." It feels like a direct disacknowledgement (and I don't even care if that is a real word right now, I am too tired to check while typing on my phone in the pitch dark while mosquitoes feast on my arm) of my very existence. To tell me to try harder is to erase the sheer volume of energy it takes for me to simply breathe through the stagnation. It completely ignores the fact that just staying alive in this hole, while my soul feels scraped raw, is the maximum capacity of my strength. I am not lazy, please don't call me that. Please listen to me and understand that I am depleted, and demanding more of me is just another layer of the world's cruelty. 

I apologize for writing a lot when the words finally show up! It makes zero sense to empty every decade of thought onto the page when the block finally breaks. How dare I take up this much space? How dare I disrupt the neat, polite silence expected of me by dumping years of systemic garbage onto a clean screen all at once? I should have rationed my despair, parceled it out into digestible, market-friendly updates instead of forcing a lifetime of structural rot into a single, suffocating night. But the valve broke, and mother Oizys doesn't care about brevity. 

My ink feels thick tonight, mirroring the thoughts running through my head. I used to think that writing about melancholy was a weakness, but I have come to believe that it takes profound strength to dissect your own vulnerabilities. My scrawled lines are messy, and the ink bleeding through the paper, but for a few minutes, the agonizing ache of lost life and unattained freedom feels a little more manageable when trapped inside a meter and rhyme. Every messy scrawl on this page is a step toward making sense of the chaos inside.

I am ending the night feeling a strange sense of comfort. The sadness, by bleeding it onto this paper, is no longer has a tight grip on my chest. I will leave these words here to dry. So, mother Oizys lies beside me, but tonight, the pen gave me a shield. 

~ Oizys.