So Much of Whatever-the-fuck Has Happened So Far

07th March 2026, 3:33 PM-5:16 PM

I have been pushing and dragging and coercing and compelling myself to write this. Write here. Come here and write. Open the incognito and log in to my alter self and write here. Every part of my being was begging me. Finally, I collapsed, and I am here. Let's see what we have been through... Apart from my very own excruciating and wretched existence, the Gaza genocide and Palestinian ethnic cleansing continue; Rafah continues to be erased; Iranians continue to protest, now bombs dropping over their head, being embroiled in the rock-and-hard-space-that's-perpetually-closing-in of the American, white supremacist, Zionist entity's age-old playbook; the world, we, shamelessly go on. How?

I actually had neck and shoulder pain, which started as a crick and snowballed into a full-blown, seized-up anchor dragging my entire head down like a molten lava lamp in my trapezius with its rusty hinge that refuses to turn. That tiny, angry knot of wire tightening with every turn, with its parasitic, icy dagger embedded between my shoulder blades. That concrete collar of bodily misery started from Mid-February and lasted till the end of February and beginning of March, which mutually took place over a weekend, which was last weekend. During the chokehold of the concrete collar, as you know, I kept spiralling over my inaction and inability to act. Apart from that, my period did not seem to come. My female reproductive system teased me with all the prior events, such as extremely localised bodily pain across the body, mass hysteria amongst all my selves, a ritualistic pimple on my chin that erupts and oozes out its volcanic lava puss, the stress of just wondering and calculating and understanding the "why" behind the lateness and hoping it is not pregnancy (AS IF!) and the existential, sadistic and masturbatory urge to remove my existence from the world. With that, the mounting pressure of my wretched hair just detaching everywhere, just quiet, traitorous shedding with its violent, silent secession. They say it is just a cycle, just the telogen phase, just a bit of extra stress. But it feels like a slow-motion unravelling, a quiet abandonment of myself, one wretched thread at a time. Finally, the day before yesterday, my uterine lining mustered up its courage to come out; it decided to break its own walls and march into the light with its fanfare of a sharp, uncompromising announcement that the kingdom was shifting. Obviously, the sense of relief did not settle right in, but eventually it did. 

The first week of March has been impounding, just seizing. It is a reservoir of heavy, trapped air. The mornings are deceptive, crisp and brittle as glass, only to break by noon into a thick, humid stillness that feels like a hand clamped over the throat of the year. It has acted like a dam built too quickly, holding back the remaining, bitter chill of February while the sudden, aggressive sun of spring tries to burst through. There is always this air that feels thick with unfinished business. Every breeze is heavy, burdened with the scents of dust and the first hint of rain-thirsty earth. It is an impatient waiting, a tension in the atmosphere that refuses to let the week be light.

So, on Tuesday, with a solid 90 minutes to spare, I was suddenly tapped to lead a funding presentation that we were researching and writing on; I’m still not 100% sure if she is my manager or my manager's manager, given the chaotic chain of command. I scrambled to pull it together based on a few hurried pointers. Then, the showstopper: I’m in the middle of presenting, and she starts firing off texts, demanding I completely pivot my approach on the fly. As I was busy actually presenting the last-minute material, I couldn't exactly check my phone, right? She eventually intervened, snatching the reins entirely. The kicker is what is still annoying me. After the smoke cleared, I was actually given feedback for the work, the very work I wasn't technically supposed to be doing, but took over in a panic because I was asked to, and I am an independent team player who knows how to work in a fast-paced environment, and I am a coward who fears being a spoilsport so I just took it and did not question just the way I took the feedback and did not voice all of this. It's safe to say it was a total, chaotic botch-up. With the contract renewal looming and no other prospects, I wish to escape into a daydream of illusory summer and betray my existence.

08th March 2026, 3:52 PM-4:07 PM

This is how I am coping. I close my eyes, and the grey room disintegrates, replaced by a sun-drenched, humming yellow. It is an illicit summer, a forgery of a season that exists only within the hollows of my mind, designed specifically to betray the dull, ticking reality of my existence. Here, the air is lazy; it doesn't move. It lazily hangs like a thick, balmy blanket smelling of jasmine and impending thunder. The sky is too blue, a vibrant, unrealistic hue that never fades into grey. I am sitting by a river that sings in a pitch higher than human ears should hear, the water a liquid sapphire that never grows cold. I have forgotten my name. That is the point. I have forgotten the chores, the ticking clock, the weight of responsibility. I have traded them for the sensation of white-hot sand between my toes and the taste of salt on my lips, even though I am nowhere near the sea. In this daydream, I am a creature of leisure, a ghost inhabiting a perfectly manicured afternoon. The sun is a radiant orb that paints the landscape in golden, impossible light. Trees sway in a wind that only carries the scent of honey, a constant, soothing rustle that whispers, stay, stay, stay. I feel a profound, treacherous joy in this betrayal. I am turning my back on the "real" world, leaving it to crumble behind me while I bask in a sun that never sets. The longer I stay, the more the illusion becomes my only truth—a fleeting, brilliant, dishonest paradise. Tick. Tock. A phone rings somewhere in the distance. The sun flickers. The yellow fades. I open my eyes, and the room is grey again. I am here. But a part of me, a very happy part, has stayed in the sun.

But this Limerence is the fire inside, a fever-dream muse that consumes as it creates. It is the architect of a million unsent letters, the sculptor of a fantasy world so vivid it makes reality seem a shade of dull grey. It is the relentless, humming hum of a mind that takes an ordinary face and paints it with the brushstrokes of perfection, turning a passing glance into a symphony of longing. It is the terrifying, beautiful addiction to a ‘what-if’ that feels more real than ‘what-is,’ fueling a desperate need to turn pain into poetry and longing into art. To be in its grip is to be a ghost in your own life, haunting the memory of someone who barely knows you, transforming the agony of unrequited hope into the highest, most feverish form of human obsession.

In the intoxicating quiet of the morning, the Limerent Object (LO) crystallises my current being, transforming the amorphous haze of my existence into a sharp, brilliant image of desire. It is a moment of profound, involuntary fixation; a crystallisation where all extraneous noise fades, and the world is reduced to a single, mesmerising point of focus. My thoughts do not just wander; they orbit, fueled by the agonising, sweet uncertainty of whether this intense longing is returned. I feel my own identity beginning to fracture, or rather, to harden around the idea of them, absorbing their imagined essence into the marrow of my daily routine. In this state, I do not just see them; I perceive a curated, pedestaled version of themselves that acts as a mirror for my deepest, unfulfilled longings. It is a creative, albeit reckless, construction of a soulmate, an obsession that dictates my moods, turning the mundane into a thrilling scavenger hunt for signs of reciprocation, while the reality of the person remains comfortably distant, safe from the imperfections of everyday life. This crystallisation is the peak of the fever dream, a beautiful, fragile structure that feels more real than my own skin.

I am suspended in that precise, terrifying moment where the fantasy hardens into crystal, a statue of my own making, frozen at the absolute apex of admiration and despair. I sometimes wish the end to come as a LO: not with the slow, grey decay of fading affection, but with the sharp, crystalline brilliance of a final, consuming obsession. To be at this peak, crystallised LO is to exist in a state of exquisite agony, where every passing thought of them brings both a blinding, heavenly light and a cold, sharp, paralysing ache. To be imagined, idealised, and then gently surrendered to the void, a snapshot in a mind that no longer needs to possess me to love me. It would be a departure untainted by mundanity, a sudden, breath-stealing crystallisation where the pain of separation becomes, for one fleeting moment, a beautifully suspended, untouchable form of longing. I am in the centre of the web I spun, unable to move, unwilling to shatter the sculpture, yet drowning in the weight of its perfection. Sometimes, I whisper a secret wish for the end to come, not out of malice, but from a desperate longing to be released from this "high" that is slowly turning my reality into a ghost. I crave the crash, the slow, agonising, but necessary return to the grey earth, just to feel the blood flowing in my limbs again, rather than this still, breathless, manufactured bliss. Alas, a perfect ending, frozen in time and bathed in the bittersweet euphoria of never truly knowing how it ends.

So, more often than not, I am thrust into the grey reality. The air here is toxic, thick with the damp rot of a thousand unfulfilled promises, yet it is the only air my lungs know how to process. Every day I wake up with the frantic, desperate thought of running; of tearing away from this stagnant, suffocating existence and finding a place where the light doesn't feel like a spotlight of judgment. But then comes the paralysing paralysis, the cold realisation that I am like a deep-sea creature hauled to the surface; my survival depends on the very pressure that is crushing me. I have become part of this crumbling, familiar architecture, and to leave is to evaporate. I am trapped not by locks or bars, but by the terrifying certainty that I cannot breathe anywhere else. It is like being a tree that has grown its roots deep into rocky soil, choking on its limitations but unable to rip itself free without dying in the process. I dream of the open air, of standing in fertile ground, but my very essence has adapted to this arid, unforgiving space. I wither in the thought of transplanting, knowing I am destined to thrive only in this cage I call home. Or when the cage door is open, it has been for years, but I remain perched on the cold metal bar. To fly out is to face a sky I don't understand, a wind that might snap my wings. The familiar, suffocating safety of this cage is better than the unknown, fatal freedom outside. So I sing the same sad tune, waiting for a liberation I am too afraid to embrace. And, other times, I feel like a creature of the deep, stranded on a rocky, dry beach. My survival depends on the very pressure that used to crush me. The idea of navigating the vast, open ocean again is more terrifying than the loneliness of this sand. I will continue to crawl along this shore, wishing for the sea, but terrified to jump back in.

08th March 2026, 7:00 PM

So, when will this end? The hours have stretched into a relentless, grey continuum, a slow-moving river where every tick of the clock is a heavy stone sinking to the bottom of my endurance. I find myself standing in a dense fog of uncertainty, straining to see a horizon that refuses to take shape, wondering if this suffocating weight is destined to become the new, permanent shape of things. Every fibre of my being screams for the release of "next," for the sharp, clean break of a new chapter, yet I am anchored in this "now," watching the candle of my patience burn down to the wick. "When will this end?" is no longer a question I ask aloud; it is the rhythm of my breath, a silent, desperate prayer that the storm will finally break and leave behind not just wreckage, but a sky cleared for something new.

Oh, it is Happy International Women's Day. 

09th March 2026, 12:20 PM

“And this urge to run away from what I love is a sort of sadism I no longer pretend to understand.”

― Martha Gellhorn, Selected Letters

“Sometimes, when I lie awake at night, I wonder whether I've lived at all. Is it the same for everybody? Do some people have a greater talent for living than others or do some people never live, but just exist?”

― Autumn Sonata, Charlotte Andergast

“I wept and wept. I had come to believe that if I really wanted something badly enough, the very act of my wanting it was an assurance that I would not get it.”

— Audre Lorde, from “Zami: A New Spelling of my Name,” published c. 1982

“What is the source of our first suffering? It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak....it was born in the moments when we accumulated silent things within us.”

― Gaston Bachelard

“Things were somehow so good that they were in danger of becoming very bad because what is fully mature is very close to rotting”

― Clarice Lispector, A Hora da Estrela

To have spent my life holding my hands in tightly hidden fists. To try to understand what it would mean, now, to hold them open. I have always felt ashamed at being witnessed in the act of wanting something I could not have.

― So We Must Meet Apart, By Gabrielle Bates & Jennifer S. Cheng

Raja, I wish I knew

the cause of that malady.

For years I could not accept

the place I was in.

I felt I should be somewhere else.

A city, trees, human voices

lacked the quality of presence.

I would live by the hope of moving on.

Somewhere else there was a city of real presence,

of real trees and voices and friendship and love.

― "To Raja Rao" by Czesɫaw Miɫosz

“The worst part about anything that’s self-destructive is that it’s so intimate. You become so close with your addictions and illnesses that leaving them behind is like killing the part of yourself that taught you how to survive.”

― Lacey L.

“I’ve noticed before that if you go too long without anyone seeing you, really seeing you, it’s easy to start wondering if you’re really there.”

— Maggie Mitchell, Pretty Is

“I never tried to be anything other than a dreamer. I never paid any attention to people who told me to go out and live. I belonged always to whatever was far from me and to whatever I could never be. Anything that was not mine, however base, always seemed to be full of poetry. The only thing I ever loved was pure nothingness.”

― Fernando Pessoa

“I am obsessed at nights with the idea of my own worthlessness, and if it were only to turn a light on to save my life I think I would not do it. These are the last footprints of a headache I suppose. Do you ever feel that? — like an old weed in a stream. What do you feel, lying in bed?”

― Virginia Woolf, from a letter to Vita Sackville-West dated 18 August 1929

“But then what of me remains here? 

A sense of tiredness.

I was always tired.

There was never a time I was not tired.

Not when life had its claws in me, or when I escaped from it.

I did not live with intent, I only lived.

But that’s over.”

― Yu Miri's Tokyo Ueno Station

“Some people turn sad awfully young. No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I’m one of them.”

― Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

 

~ Oizys. 

Faultlines of Writlurk

She wakes from the dirt,
claws at the bones of this rotting empire.
No soft hands here.
These hands,
they pry the sky open like a mouth, make it spit its secrets.
and count the threads of broken promises.
And, the truth that lies buried
Beneath the pavement, forgotten, rotting.
On your streets that are your mouths that swallow hope whole
The world spins around her like a butcher's wheel—
but she doesn't look away.
Doesn’t blink.
You tell her to smile,
but she shreds that too,
a map to nowhere in her teeth,
a galaxy of blood.
You call it history—
but it's just the dust in her throat
and the light that flickers when she breathes.
Don't ask her to dance with you.
The floor is on fire and her boots are made of revolution.
She does not bow,
she stands
and the earth cracks beneath her.
You see her?
Good.
But your eyes—
they are not enough.
The moon?
Her reflection,
a mirror to the fractured silence she shouts from.
Watch her rise.
You can't drown what was never meant to stay under.
The cage rattles.
She sings,
and you call it: chaos!
It’s not chaos.
It’s creation.
You hear her?
No?
Good, you’re not supposed to.
She speaks in tongues you can’t translate.
She doesn’t need your translation.
You tell her to be quiet,
but her silence?
It’s an inflicted weapon.
You’re afraid of what you cannot hear.
She spits into the sun,
and it flinches.
A flicker of light trying to burn her back
but she wears shadows like a second skin.
You thought she’d fade,
but she tastes the sky and it’s sour,
a memory of men who thought they owned it.
The sky is now a bruise, bloated and waiting to burst.
Her mouth is a graveyard,
her teeth, shards of forgotten gods,
and when she smiles,
it’s not for you.
It’s for the wind that hums like a hungry ghost
sweeping through the ruins of what they thought they built.
You called it civilization—
she calls it a coffin with a velvet lining.
She turns it inside out and wears it like a cape.
Who needs wings when you’ve got roots
that drag the earth with them?
She bleeds ink and fire,
writes in the veins of her mother,
her grandmother,
her great-grandmother,
and each word is a knife that slices through time,
through your idea of time,
through your neat little boxes.
She gnaws on the neck of silence
and swallows the dark whole.
You told her to speak sweetly,
so she carved a tongue from razor blades
and let it taste the salt of their tears.
She wears the pulse of a thousand broken promises
and hums through the ruins of your comfort.
Her breath is made of glass shards
and razor blades dipped in the blood of gods you’ve forgotten.
She doesn't ask for your forgiveness
because she knows better—
you don’t have the hands for it.
She doesn’t make sense.
She never will.
And that’s the part that cuts you the deepest—
she refuses to be understood.
You want her to fit in your neat little boxes,
to wear the labels you’ve stitched into the seams of your own rage.
But she is the thunder
before your storm
and the one that eats your sky.
You don’t see her—
not really.
You never have.
You only see the idea of her,
and the idea of her burns you.
She is not your idea.
She is the nightmare you wake up screaming to,
the one you wish would leave,
but she is already in the walls.
So scream,
scream all you want.
She isn’t listening.
She doesn’t need to.
She is not the one who’s been silent.
You have been.
She is the scar on the horizon where the sun should have risen,
a thousand forgotten cries stitched into her skin like tattoos of violence,
each one a story you never bothered to hear.
Her body—
a map of erasure,
the imprints of every hand that reached
and tore,
twisted,
pulled,
and never let go.
She is the hollow echo
of what was stolen,
the thing you covered with sweet words
while her blood watered the roots of this world.
They called it conquest,
but it was theft.
Every inch of her was mined,
plundered in the name of something holy—
a religion that didn’t see her,
a god that never whispered her name.
Her hands were shackled with the promises of progress,
her mouth gagged with the silence of centuries.
Still, she spoke,
but her voice was a thunder you couldn’t understand,
a crack in the sky where the storms of history rained down.
You marked her,
branded her like cattle,
and called it civilization.
But her scars?
They are pins,
stars on boards etched in blood
that trace the journey of every woman
who was never allowed to breathe without submission.
She is the soil turned to ash
beneath the boots of your armies,
the crushed hands of those who built your temples
and never saw the light.
Her pain was the oil you burned
to light your mansions,
and you drank from the well
of her tears without ever seeing her thirst.
She is the stone you tried to carve
into something you could own,
and when you failed,
you burned her body
and called it the funeral pyre of progress.
You think you erased her.
But her name is the soil you stand on,
the air you breathe,
the pulse you ignore in your chest.
She is the dark beneath the skin of your city,
the rust in the gears of your machines,
the echo that shatters your glass towers
and makes your foundation tremble.
She is the truth you bury in your backyard
while you laugh at your own reflection.
Her revolution doesn’t need a flag.
Her revolution doesn’t need a name.
Her revolution is in the cracks,
the fractures where you never looked,
the silence that grows louder the more you ignore it.
She will rise,
but not from the ashes you think you’ve left behind.
She rises from the things you refuse to see,
from the hands that were never allowed to touch
and the mouths that were forced to swallow their own rage.
And when she opens her eyes,
they will burn brighter than the lies
you built your empire on.
Those lies of yours that hang in the air like smoke,
choking the breath out of the world.
The air smells like burnt paper and broken promises.
She is already here,
and you will never stop her.
She is the skin scraped raw by the weight of forgotten years,
the quiet ache beneath every cry
that was never acknowledged.
She is the broken foundation of your “progress,”
the cracks you erased to keep your structure upright.
Progress by roads that are paved with her stolen teeth.
Her breath is made of all the lost moments,
and when she inhales,
the world shudders in regret.
But you never see her—
you only see the shadow of your own reflection
dancing in the chaos.
You thought she was a whisper.
But her whisper is the sound of walls cracking
under the weight of your good intentions.
Every word she spoke was another bruise
you inflicted in the name of change.
Her body is not your project,
it was never meant to be your territory.
You used her with your systems,
pulled her apart with your rules,
stole the fire from her eyes
and made her bow to your vision.
The laws of your sovereign are chains,
forged in silence, rattling with every step she takes.
You stole from her with your ideals,
and made her work for the dreams of others
who never bothered to ask.
You planted your flag in her soil
and watched her bend
while you stood back and called it progress.

Your progress is nothing but a slow rot,

eating through the skin of the earth.

She is the girl you buried under piles of indifference,
the one you swore to forget,
the one you buried without her story.
But herstory was never meant to be erased.
It is the cry that will break your walls
and turn your structures to dust.
She is the cracks in your perfect image,
the fracture in your narrative,
the one you tried to suppress
and thought you could silence
with every promise you never kept.
She doesn’t need your forgiveness,
she doesn’t need your pity.
She’s already swallowed your excuses
and spit out your blame.
She wears the skin of every woman
who was told to shrink,
to stay still,
to fall into line,
to stay quiet under your gaze.
But her skin is not fragile anymore—
it is the shield made from every setback,
every slap,
every taunt,
every prejudice,
it's thick with rage
you thought would break her,
the shield that turns every hurt
into something stronger.
You tried to bury her with your silence,
but she is the echo that rattles your walls.
She is the cry that follows you in your sleep
and tugs at your breath.
You thought you quieted her,
but every lock you put on her voice
only made her words bolder,
like a warning you couldn’t ignore.
Her fire is the storm you never anticipated,
the wave you never prepared for,
the light that will expose everything you’ve hidden.
She will not be the calm after the storm—
she will the storm now.
She will become the spark that lights the match
and burns away the things you thought would last,
you proudly built on her backs,
your property.
your world.
You cannot control her,
you cannot erase her,
you cannot make her forget.
She is the truth coded deep
in the fabric of your structure,
and when she decrypts,
it won’t be with your permission,
it won’t be with your consent.
It will be with the power
of every person
who has ever been held back,
ever been forgotten,
ever been silenced
and told to be still.
But she will not be still.
She will never be still again.
Her rage is not a roar—
it is the flicker of a dying candle
just before the flame gives out.
It is the last breath you take
before the tide pulls you under
and you realize
she was never drowning.
She was always the water.

- Oizys.

Some thoughts: Okay, happy International Women's Day. Things are still bad, in a simmering stage after a lava explosion. It might get worse, who knows... At home, I am talking about. Of course. I kept thinking about writing something, a poem maybe, for today. But, I was unable to track down a theme, a particular focal point to nail it. So, I went on with the wonky flow of my mind. And, this is it. My goal is the journey of fight. And, I am merely picking this day up to depict it. Throughout this journey, every fighter's battle is to impart the truth, the absolute truth that the way human life instils autonomy in you as a form of dignity in civilized society, the same way, that same human life instils that same level of autonomy in her as a form of dignity in civilized society. And, the struggle is of some people unable to swallow this pill. We have the date marked, celebrations organized but is your mindset aligned? That would be the question to ponder. When you ponder, you'll realize that if it has already aligned there would've been no need of marking such dates, celebrating such days. Since it is not, people glorify it to reach audience, seek people's support. Make it pink and pulpy and shiny. The gore is yet to touch you because you sit your rosy bubble of life. Such is the inequality in life.

International Women's Day, Maught, and Post-Rage Melancholy

04/05/2025

There is a Scottish word, maught. It means might. My father told us today over tea and some puffed rice. His organisation is giving its female employees an amount to spend on Women's Day, 8th of March. I often think, what will I do? What will I get on Women's Day as a woman? Even though I took a long journey to accept I have become a woman. Being a woman has become important to me more than ever. And I have grown closer to my mother. Is it a result of the former? Or is the former the result of this new closeness? Who knows which came first? I find it tautological. As mother and daughter, our talk, by and large, revolves around food. Not the surface-level dinner-table conversation. The hunger, the cooking, the process, the lack, the glut. We both are vegetarians in a family where some others are overt non-vegetarians. And some, covert. The hunger is so vicious, stuck in our chests forever. The cooking has bound us forever in the little soaked kitchen. Outside of which, we have no escape, so we cling on to each other. I often think how much strength she must have conjured up over the years to cook while keeping her hunger shut. How many scraps she must have had to gather to pay her debts to the glut. All while burdened with the responsibility of plenty. The lack that isn't lacking. The glut that isn’t gluttony. Because in a world that offers too much but never has enough—that is what being a woman is like. Could it be that Eve came out of her mother's rib after a long-drawn hunger stuck in there, a vortex is born? And Adam was angry.  He was angry because, after all, how could he, the first man, fall short of a rib? And so, he cursed her. Out of malicious frustration—a sort of tragic possessiveness. He cursed her to give birth from her belly, not from her ribs. And the rib was forever lost, buried under layers of flesh and blood, tangled up in a woman’s womb.  The belly, hopeless belly, on its knees, has to cradle, not the freedom of glut, but of the burden Adam chose to place. And that is, in all likelihood, why I took so long to accept being a woman. The world will never let us be (just) women. It will never free us from the weight of what it means to be womanly. Womanly—to be both a source of life and a symbol of sacrifice. A force of nature wrapped in skin. Cursed to be both tender and unbreakable? I wish this Woman's Day, not for a token of privilege, but for the space to be—unburdened, no qualifiers. Some space to lay this hollow one-rib-less chest bare. Let out this vortex of layers of glut and hunger without feeling like a culprit who released a poison in the city. Give up the echo of cursed expectations dragging me back into the kitchen of my ancestresses.

05/05/2025

I fell asleep writing all of this last night, cramped up in a corner. And woke up in my own pool of blood. The excruciating pain was no stranger, but its hellish outburst today was especially of Mark. It ended up being so bad, I gave into the despair and fell into medication. Oh, the magic of medication. It lets you live, numbly and dizzyingly and drowsily.

06/07/2025

The day was almost good. I don't think I ever had a second day of my periods without any pain. We all have a first. It was so good that it all felt like a dream. An illusion. Or, one of my fantasies. Retrospectively, I prayed it should have been one of those days. Because what followed this lack of pain left a scar so deep, broke a chasm so hard. There is no point of return. The lack of pain brought the flurrying rage that was simmered by being unheard, spat at, humiliated, and disrespected. The rage burst in nerves and defiled my silence. Silence that was embedded in every bit of my woman, my mother's woman, my sister's woman. That look on his face, his voice, and his manipulation churned my stomach and accelerated my bile. The audacity, the gall of him, declaring that I had no right. We had no right. It is the singularity and open-endedness in his statement that forced us to lay our odium bare for him. It is the threat of us having no right but also, in the same breath, the accusation of us being the upper hand. It is the threat of burning us down but also, in the same breath, an accusation of us doubling down on him. It is the threat of stripping us of anything we have but also, in the same breath, the accusation of us taking everything away from us. It is the threat of being a disenfranchised daughter in his life but also, in the same breath, an accusation of never having been enough, of never having measured up to some invisible standard he sets, an expectation that seems to shift and bend with his moods. It is the threat of erasing us, yet the accusation of us trying to erase him, as if we are both the victim and the villain in the same twisted dance. It is the threat of silence, the absence of warmth or presence, yet the accusation that we seek to silence him, to remove his voice from the narrative of our lives, as if we ever had the power to begin with. The evening branded a paradox on us, mother and daughters—we are disempowered, never allowed to fully exist in the way we wish—neither here nor there, neither fully seen nor fully free. The whole night, each breath felt like we were swimming in the tension of impossible expectations, and each blink towards sleep felt like a betrayal, no matter which side we turned.

See, the thing about a woman speaking up is it changes every card on the table. In this time or era, if she endures and silently complains while sobbing and enduring some more, you will still have the whole room to acknowledge her, patronise her, guide her, and make her endure some more. But if she speaks up. Oh. The entire room shifts and turns, and suddenly she is the problem. She is the disruption. She is the threat to the carefully curated peace, the one who dares to unravel the illusion of compliance, of quiet suffering. In her voice, they hear not the plea for understanding but a challenge to the status quo, a defiance that makes them uncomfortable, makes them question their own complicity. She becomes the loud, the aggressive, the unreasonable, the one who can never be satisfied. And yet, in her silence, she is expected to be grateful for the crumbs of acknowledgement, to be content with the scraps of respect that are given to her, as though her worth is only validated in her suffering, in her submission. But when she speaks, when she stands tall, she is no longer the meek recipient of pity. She becomes the one who demands, who claims what is rightfully hers. The room no longer welcomes her voice but fears it, for it exposes the cracks in their own carefully built narratives. And in this fear, they try to silence her, not because she is wrong, but because her truth is too loud, too raw, and too real for them to ignore.

Standing up for yourself as a woman is a double-edged sword. On one side, it’s an act of liberation, a reclaiming of your voice, your autonomy, your power. It’s the breaking of chains, the finally vomiting out of the ancient rage that binds you to expectations, to roles, to histories written by others. It’s the moment when you decide that your worth isn’t up for negotiation and that you won’t be silenced any longer. In standing up, you are showing the world that you will no longer be defined by its narrow and shrewd ways, but by the expansive nature of your own truth. But on the other side, that same act of standing up is almost always like a knife pointed towards your own belly. You are stamped as "too much," "too loud," "too demanding"—as though your assertiveness is an affront to the world. It’s a tightrope walk because the very qualities that are celebrated in them are seen as threatening in us. The same strength that would earn them admiration might lead to our vilification. The same self-assurance that’s revered in others might be twisted into accusations of arrogance, aggression, or selfishness when it comes from you. It’s exhausting, this delicate act. To be strong, but not too strong. To be independent, but not isolated. To speak your truth, but not be twistedly perceived as a threat. And even when you walk this razor-thin line, you’re left wondering: If I’m punished for being myself, is it worth standing tall at all?

My mother's words brought a balm for these cut-inflicting thoughts. She said this was long overdue. She was shocked; I could scream in front of him. She remarked, My screams were just like his, and that would be his rude awakening. She also said this might bring forth a change. She has always been a hopeful realist. And, I think, that is what kept her going through all those days and all those nights, all those slaps and all those screams. But my stomach keeps churning. I keep thinking, what if it gets worse? Because, perhaps, that's how life has been for me. Whenever something bad happens, it is followed by some more horrible happenings and then some more with the seven circles of hell freezing over me.

I lay on my bed in a dark and hot room beside my mother. I searched for her palm while I was splitting into two. One, desperate for comfort, for the familiar warmth of her hand, yearning for the simple reassurance that she would hold me steady, grounding me in a world that felt like it was crumbling. That part of me, still a child in many ways, wanted to sink into the softness of her presence, to feel protected from the chaos swirling both inside and outside of me. Scared, shivering, and feverish child me. The other, sharp and restless, like a larva coming out of a cocoon, itching to break free, was fighting against everything she endured—against the silence we had both learnt to endure, against the passive submission that had become a second skin. This part of me felt suffocated by the unspoken, trapped in the weight of expectations that came with being her daughter, being a woman, being expected to keep things together even when I was falling apart. It was as though my very being was being torn between the need for her and the need to escape with her, to break free from the cycle of quiet acceptance that had defined my life. Our lives. I reached for her hand, and for a fleeting moment, her warmth was unsettlingly welcome—but even then, the internal conflict raged within me. In that touch, I felt the comfort of familiarity and the pain of knowing that, just like her, I might one day come to accept the very things I was rebelling against now.

Anyway, happy International Women's Day in advance for us. Could there be a more poetic ending than this?

- Oizys.

[The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love by bell hooks]