The Skin Breaks As The Closet Keeps Acquiring Closets

August 17, 2026, 14:00 PM.

The last entry ended abruptly. Not artistically abruptly, no matter how much I try to poeticise it. And, not even the kind of abruptness one manufactures and later calls an ending because the blank underneath it looks deliberate enough. I wanted to continue because, of course, I had more things to say. But alter[real]ego had me strangled by then, and eventually I did what I almost always do when I am being strangled by something that only half-exists: I stopped. Which is also how most of my daydreams end.

Rarely does the revolution succeed. Rarely does the play receive its thunderous applause, rarely does the imaginary interview reach the devastating sentence I had apparently been building towards for forty-five minutes, rarely do I finish explaining myself to whichever phantom tribunal I have summoned for that day's proceedings. Instead: Mother calls. My sister says something. Manager pings. Father shouts. A door opens. Someone asks where the charger is.Somebody needs something completely reasonable from me. And an entire civilisation disappears.

It is humiliating how little reality is required to defeat fantasy, no catastrophe, no history arriving at the doorstep with blood on its shirt. Just someone saying my name from the other room. Maybe that is why the last entry ending where it did now seems appropriate. My writing has started resembling my daydreaming in form too: elaborate private architecture continually demolished by the banal. Half a room. Half an argument. Half a revolution. Half a self.

A lot has happened since July 22.

This sentence irritates me because every diary ever written after a period of silence probably contains some variation of it. A lot has happened. Meaning: a lot happened and I did not possess the discipline to convert any of it into language while it was happening. And I did think about writing.Constantly, actually. 

Something would happen and immediately another thing would grow around it in my head. A metaphor, usually a weird one. Something involving diseased water, peeled skin, insects, puppet strings, mildew, an organ kept alive outside the body. I would think, I should write that down. Sometimes I would imagine the paragraph so completely that apparently my brain considered the labour finished and saw no reason to involve my hands. Then work. Then daydreaming. Then procrastination. Then work because I procrastinated. Then daydreaming because work had made me miserable. Then procrastination because the daydreaming had consumed the time in which I was supposed to work. A wonderfully self-sustaining ecosystem.

I keep wanting to describe myself as incapacitated, because incapacitated sounds almost medical. Dramatically mechanical, even. One imagines a machine with an important wire cut. It absolves the machine of having to explain itself. But perhaps I am not incapacitated. Ofcourse, I am not. Perhaps I am a stagnant pond desperately inventing diagnoses for why it does not flow.

There were days when I wondered whether I should keep this thing going at all. The blog, I mean. Although "this thing" could comfortably contain several other things too. What is the purpose? I write and then I delay publishing what I write. I think and then I daydream about having thought. I become briefly convinced that writing itself is a political act and then become suspicious that I have only found an unusually flattering description for sitting alone in a room.

The closet drama keeps acquiring closets.

I have spent an unhealthy amount of time in the last few weeks crawling through corners of the far-left internet. "Crawling" is the correct verb because "reading" suggests that I approached any of this like a normal person. I did not. I found one thing, which produced fifty-five tabs, which produced a name, which produced an accusation, which produced a document, which produced another name, which produced fifteen people calling the first person a revisionist and six people calling the fifteen people revisionists and somebody, somewhere, inevitably, calling everybody involved state agents. I had lived a vulgarously sheltered life. Vulgarous is probably not a word. It can be one here. I should put it in my dictionary.

Sheltered not merely in the ordinary sense of having been protected from particular kinds of suffering, although yes, that too. Sheltered in the more embarrassing epistemological sense. My reality had been so tiny and so thoroughly furnished by my own interiority that I sometimes mistook what failed to enter it for what did not exist. There is a particular violence in discovering that reality has been radical without your permission. I want to say familiarising myself with it has been skin-breaking. Not eye-opening. I hate eye-opening. Eyes open every morning and accomplish remarkably little. Skin-breaking. As though the membrane separating the world I understood from the world that had been there all along did not expand politely but split.

And somewhere in these nooks and corners I found things brewing [or appearing to brew; the internet is exceptionally good at making both those conditions look identical] that may be organic, may be infiltrated, may be theatre, may be paranoia reproducing itself through screenshots, may be state interference, may be several of these things at once. I don't know.

This is important: I don't know.

The temptation of this particular rabbit hole is that every absence of proof can begin to feel like proof of sophistication. If something cannot be verified, perhaps that means it has been hidden. If someone contradicts themselves, perhaps they are an operative. If they are too consistent, perhaps they have been trained. Soon uncertainty itself starts wearing a trench coat. Still, some of what I found disturbed me enough that I could not simply close the tabs and return unchanged to my tiny republic of invented conversations. 

There was this guy I used to follow some time ago. He would go on and on about things I could barely understand then. Theory, organisations, betrayals, lines, deviations, histories inside histories. I eventually stopped paying attention. Partly because I genuinely did not understand him. Partly because understanding requires sustained attention, and sustained attention has never stood much of a chance against my own private cinema plus whatever minor interruption reality sends to collect me. My mother called. My sister spoke. Life happened in millimetres. And whatever he was talking about disappeared behind it.

Somehow I found him again when I reactivated my Instagram account. This time I began digging into who he actually was, or at least who the internet claimed he was. Then why certain people called him a revisionist. Then what revisionist meant in the mouths of those particular people, because apparently even accusations have dialects. Then who was accusing whom and from which organisation and according to which historical split and why a disagreement from several decades ago was still alive enough to bite people in 2026. And because rabbit holes reproduce sexually, this led me back to a girl I used to follow too, who made similar content. I started digging into her. Then into the people around her.Then into inconsistencies. Then coincidences.Then posts that looked different after I had learned other things. And now I have a theory. Which I do not trust. That last part may be more important than the theory. She might be connected to something deliberate. She might not be. What I am looking at might be a state operation, might contain one somewhere inside it, might merely have acquired the aesthetics of one after being passed through enough suspicious people, or might be nothing more sinister than the ordinary incoherence of human beings online. There is something terrifying about acquiring a political vocabulary capable of explaining hidden structures, because eventually the vocabulary itself begins asking to explain everything. A hammer discovers nails just like a psychoanalytic patient discovers mothers just like a newly radicalised idiot discovers psy-ops. So now I am trying to learn the difference between becoming less naïve and becoming impossible to convince. I do not yet know where that border is.

Maybe that is what has changed most since the last entry. The private theatre has not disappeared. I still lose hours inside it and I still become someone else with better sentences and better courage and a life conveniently arranged into scenes. But reality has become harder to keep outside the theatre. It keeps entering through the emergency exit. Mother calling. Sister talking.Work accumulating. A massacre or multiple on a screen while I doomscroll to almost-death. A document written decades before I was born.Some stranger's political accusation. A name. Another name. History refusing to remain history. Perhaps interruption was never the opposite of the daydream. It was reality trying, however thinly and banally, to get in.

And perhaps this is what skin-breaking actually does: it does not merely familiarise me with the brutality outside, but it also makes me hyperfamiliar with the wreckage inside which is my broken will, and my almost comically un-goal-oriented life, and the humiliating distance between everything I can now name and everything I can actually do. It is one thing to realise that the world requires repair. It is another to realise that I cannot even seem to get out of my miseritorial cot. Miseritorial. Another word that probably does not exist. A cot that has somehow become both misery and territory. Repair the world? I cannot even reliably leave the house.

Sometimes getting out of this house, this town, this state, going somewhere else and attempting to carve out a shape of myself that I can miserably fit inside feels revolutionary enough. Not revolutionary in the heroic sense. No banners, masses, halts, seizure of anything. Just the extremely pathetic revolution of acquiring a room somewhere else and discovering whether I exist differently when certain walls are no longer around me. I have spoken fervently before about home as a miniature site through which the logic of the state remains alive: authority, obedience, surveillance, punishment, dependence, the regulation of movement, the endless production of permission. I still believe there is something there. But the unpleasant consequence of learning how to intellectualise your conditions is that eventually you become extremely articulate about your cage. You can identify its architecture, trace its genealogy, point to the bars and explain which historical process manufactured the metal. You can write a very convincing paragraph about why the lock exists. And you are still inside it. Maybe that is worse? Ignorance at least allows suffering to remain shapeless. But, once suffering acquires vocabulary, it develops edges. You can walk around it, measure it, compare it against theory, qualify it, find precedents, give it footnotes, and locate yourself beautifully inside structures of domination and understand, with increasing precision, why you have become the person lying motionless in bed. And then what?

Knowledge is supposed to contain some emancipatory promise, right? Naming the thing is supposed to weaken it. Consciousness is supposed to be the beginning of action. But consciousness without access to action can curdle into something else entirely. Fatalism, maybe. A very educated despair. There is a peculiar cruelty in being able to explain the machinery that is crushing you while having no access to the lever that stops it. Worse: sometimes I suspect the explanation itself begins functioning as a substitute for reaching for the lever. Intellectualisation becomes another private theatre. Instead of daydreaming about becoming somebody else, I analyse why I cannot become somebody else. The fantasy has simply gone to university. So the skin breaks and underneath it I do not discover revolutionary muscle. I discover another skin. Then another. And somewhere beneath all of them, apparently, a person who is very tired.

This is where I become frightened of despair not merely as a feeling but as a position. A place one can begin living in. Because despair is strangely comfortable once it manages to convince you that it is realism. It tells you that you have finally stopped being naïve. That hope is bourgeois sentimentality. That aspiration is merely insufficient analysis. That because the structures are enormous and you are small, immobility is the only intellectually respectable response. 

And then you stay in bed. Perpetually giving in starts masquerading as having understood. 

I don't want that. I don't want to become so familiar with the impossibility of things that impossibility becomes the only thing I am capable of recognising. Perhaps this is another border I have to learn: the one between political clarity and fatalism. Between understanding constraint and worshipping it. Between knowing that individual will cannot repair a world and deciding, therefore, that my own will is of no use whatsoever. Because right now even the smallest imaginable escape feels obscenely large. Leave the house. Leave the town.Leave the state. Find somewhere else. Just somewhere else. Earn enough.Survive enough. Become enough of a shape that I can occupy my own life without constantly spilling out of it.

I keep calling these small things because history has made me ashamed of their scale. Somewhere people are organising under conditions I can barely comprehend, people are resisting things vastly more brutal than the domestic claustrophobia I keep converting into prose, and here I am imagining geographical relocation as revolution. But, I hope, scales do not cancel one another. Maybe, getting out is not the revolution. But, I hope, it is simply mine. And, I hope, the danger is not that I have mistaken leaving for liberation. The danger is that I understand perfectly well that leaving will not liberate me completely, and use that knowledge as another reason never to leave.

And then there are the things I had apparently already encountered. This might be the strangest part. Long before this recent political burrowing, I had written about political prisoners. I remember reading about one man in particular [born into an English family, studying Chinese, eventually becoming intensely involved in Maoist politics, went to the University I desperately wanted to go to] and finding his life interesting enough to preserve somewhere in this little archive of mine. I had read the words. I had looked up the history. Presumably I had understood the sentences individually. And yet I don't think I understood them. There are things you meet years before you arrive at them.

You see a person, a word, an event, an ideology and you register it. Maybe you even become temporarily fascinated by it. Then life drags you down five hundred unrelated roads and the thing sits somewhere in the sediment of your head, apparently dead, until one afternoon another tiny piece of information falls on top of it at precisely the correct angle and suddenly the whole buried structure lights up.

Oh.

That is what that meant. I have been having a lot of these ohs lately. Even embarrassingly basic words. Bourgeoisie, for instance. Obviously I knew the word. I could have given you a definition. I had encountered it in books and essays and political arguments, probably nodded solemnly at it dozens of times throughout school and college. But knowing the dictionary arrangement of a word and having the thing it names become perceptible in the world are completely different experiences. For weeks I have been flailing around the far-left internet with what I now realise was often a very surface-level understanding... grabbing terminology with both hands while half of it leaked through my fingers. And then today I watched one video and something clicked. Of course, not everything. I don't think understanding usually arrives like lightning anyway. And that is another fantasy I have inherited: that knowledge, first, enters as revelation, one spectacular and momentary intellectual orgasm after which you are Changed Forever™. I think, most understanding is much more boring than that. Somebody tells you something once and you don't get it. Then you encounter it again six months later and still don't get it. Then you read three pages about something apparently unrelated.Then somebody uses the same word differently. Then you watch a badly edited video at an inconvenient hour. Then five years of miscellaneous information quietly move half an inch inside your skull and suddenly something that had been sitting in front of you all along develops depth. And, comprehension is less an opening eye than erosion. Relentless contact wearing away whatever prevented the thing from entering.

Which means those political prisoners I once read about have begun returning to me differently too. Their imprisonment is no longer merely an interesting historical cruelty I can put in a paragraph and mourn from a safe chronological distance. Once you begin understanding even a little more about what people were organising against, what states believed they threatened, what ideological traditions they belonged to, what kinds of movements existed around them... the biography rearranges itself. Details I had previously treated as trivia acquire political gravity. And this should be satisfying. You know... Sometimes it is. For approximately thirty seconds I get the tiny stupid pleasure of: wow, I understood something. Then, almost immediately, the pleasure rots.

Because every new piece of understanding also reveals the acreage of what I do not understand. How far behind am I? That question has been following almost every intellectual excitement lately. Not merely behind other people [which is already an efficient way of poisoning curiosity] but behind history itself. Behind words I have apparently been using without having really inhabited them. Behind people who reached these questions years or decades before I knew there was a question. Behind my own previous self, even, who occasionally stumbled across something important, looked directly at it, wrote it down, and then wandered away because she did not yet possess whatever neighbouring pieces would have made it intelligible.

It is a strange humiliation: discovering evidence that reality had been trying to teach you things before you were capable of being taught. And that is why understanding rarely feels purely happy to me.Every oh contains another sentence underneath it: How did you not see this before? And then another: What are you looking directly at now that will take you another five years to see?

~ Oizys.