The Tiles Break, Then the Ball Falls.

9 October, 01:38 AM

I am writing here from underneath my blanket while my mother sleeps next to me. I am writing after having a full and a half breakdown under this same blanket in silent-scream mode. But just because it was silent doesn't mean it was just mental. It was all ... mental, psychological, physical, too too physical, emotional, too many tears and sobs. What happened? Well I could start from the inception of my league and lineage but that would be a long story and I really don't know or remember a lot of details. I could start from my time when the streak of bad luck started in my life but you can read the thousand versions of that closet theatre play here in any post on this weblog. I will start with where I last left. Things were becoming cool between me and my mother. We were talking, working, cooking, etc… discussing what went wrong with my sister towards me because I didn't even say anything during that conversation. Anyway…

Last night I saw an email that was sent to me in the late evening post-work hours. HR had sent me my new contract with no salary upgrade, so I frantically started job search, thinking of ways to respond and/or send questions. I spent a really long time applying for a lot of jobs, late into the night. I had the dinner that my mother and I prepared pretty half-heartedly and my mind was occupied with too much anxiety. I slept really late. I wrote a draft email that I thought I would send HR with some questions.

This morning, Oct 8th, I was chatting with my mother. She was supposed to go to the doctor. And conversations went by. I brought my tea to my room, to my table and started working. Then I heard some noises. I saw my sister was ranting to my mother and crying. I couldn't make much of what she was saying but I figured it out. She was talking about the last time my mother had gone on a vacation. Was it last year? Or the year before? And our father's behaviour during that time. She might have said something about me but I didn't hear directly. Since the environment was tight and breathless. And her attitude towards me. And how she was increasing her voice to make me listen. And then..

My brain just slipped like a ball into the mud and rolled away. I started having a breakdown. Which kept breaking and breaking. You know like those tile breaking games. You keep breaking them. And they keep falling. You think there is an end. But there is no end. It's a pitless rock bottom. What an oxymoron? That’s the right literary device, right? I don’t know and I'm too tired and cramped up to check… In the abyss-like breakdown, I ended up sending that mail to HR that I had drafted. As the day passed by, I had locked myself in the room to break down into pieces perpetually while working. Not eating. Not responding to anyone. And I didn't want my mother to enter and see me and ask me any questions. Although, she doesn’t really ask much when she sees me cry. We don’t have that culture in our family. We turn our face and leave. The only time we understand concepts like privacy and space. Anyway… I was still in the breakdown mode when the HR replied. It was a bit late in the afternoon. It was after a meeting with my teammates for a presentation where I kept suggesting a solution but they didn't hear. Sometimes, I wonder why I even try? Anyway, the HR response was okay. More of a saving-their-own-ass-in-a-shady-contract kinda response than actually answering-our-queries-while-we-non-consentingly-and-obliviously-meander-in-their-murky-waters-of-shady-contract response. But, I responded by thanking them for their response “clarifying” everything and said that based on this understanding, I will be sending the signed contract. Great, now I have to go out, take a printout of this, sign it, scan it, and send it to them. I was breaking down again and again. The familial violence and the stagnant, shitty, shady workplace with toxic and abusive coworkers who have become “department heads” / “managers” and managers who have suddenly become “associate directors”. Pair them with a vapid job market and a vile society out there. It all constrained me and closed in on me at once. I felt as if someone was holding me down in a small, small room. Technically, physically I was safe. But, my whole body has been feeling unsafe and insecure. Shivering and panicking. For what? Nothing. I don't know. There is no reason. Or maybe there are too many reasons. Just waiting for something to happen. Just that crawling feeling. Like something is going to happen. Like something bad is going to happen. Like how you violently tap the screen of your phone anticipating something will happen in that tile breaking game but it just keeps breaking perpetually. You kind of wish you literally ‘burst’ into tears and flow away forever. Like if you break down as hard as possible, something will happen and it will all come to a sudden end. Just collapse forever. But it doesn't. Rather, the day, the evil, devil day just passes by. 

I didn't eat much. In the middle of the day, I bathed and ate some puffed rice and took medicine for the empty gaseous stomach and riling headache after the HR responded. I thought the bath and some meagre food and medicines will help me keep a sane mind while I continue to break down and apply for jobs and work. I didn't drink evening tea. Just some peach fizz and water. Water was important. 

Finally, at night, my mother came and told me to check her phone and her bank statement to verify if the money she was trying to send to someone did go or not as the app said the payment failed. During that time, thank god(?), my face was okay and I wasn't actively breaking down. I fixed it and she asked if I was going to have dinner. I think my body couldn't say no. I had dinner and while eating dinner, I found this show on YouTube that occupied my mind throughout the dinner and after that I could eat at the dinner table and was able to just… be without falling down crying. It only kept me occupied till my mother came to bed and fell asleep. After I finished it, and tried watching some suggested shows of the same person, I couldn't. I kept my phone away as it was at 2%. Then, my body vomited out the rest of my anxiety, worries, sadness, depression, and other psychological waste by way of making me break down again and again. So, that's why… a full and a half violent breakdown under the blanket in silent mode. Then I went to the bathroom, cleaned up. Changed and had some water. Then I went to bed and wrote this.

I feel so… alone. And, I feel so… responsible for this loneliness. I know I made this, I mothered this, I raised this. It's mine. My burden to carry. Never did I think it would cause me this pain when I was sculpting it. Never did my thoughts about this loneliness crystallise into a proper understanding of what shape it would take in my life and how it would mould my life. But, I feel so urgently unsafe and insecure. All the taunts, jibes, mockeries, shames, humiliation, degradation, hurtful behaviours, their unapologetic and intentional hypocrisies, their mean voices, their abusive actions just seep into my intrusive thoughts and keep amalgamizing into something vitriolic and monstrous inside my head and force me into that small, small room where someone was holding me down.

10 October, 21:23 PM

What happened yesterday, Oct 9th? My memory is a bit fuzzy but let me jog my memory? I woke up. Um, how did I wake up? I don’t remember. I cannot remember. I remember breaking down in bits and pieces here and there. I think my mother came to wake me up but I was a bit awake. But, I didn’t respond to her. Then, I woke up. I remember making my own breakfast too late while keeping an eye on work if something came up. I think I didn’t have much work. I did complete my timesheets which took some time. But, I was deliberating whether to go out and finish that contract thing. I didn’t. I still haven’t. All I remember is a memory of an old web series that hit me from the show I was watching last night. So, I looked it up. It was taken into some app. Previously, it was available for free on YouTube. I started watching. I didn’t mention this yesterday but the evening before yesterday, while I was helping my mother in cooking dinner, I noticed my laptop’s hinge is broken because of which the keyboard deck keeps moving up when I lift the lid. So, this particular bit became a device in my recurring MDD-driven intrusive thoughts that have been fueling my breakdowns since yesterday. I fell asleep, I think, by completing that show. The first season was a bomb of nostalgia. The last season was a bore. In the beginning of last season, my free tier came to an end, so I paid for the first level of the subscription tier for a month which came with ads but allowed you to watch for unlimited minutes. Cheap with lots of ads. Late capitalism with enshittification. I felt like a baby. You know, how a baby cries and then you distract it with some toy or a trick.

Anyway, today, I did not do much work. There is an event tomorrow towards which many people are working. So, the whole day was quite lazy. I am working on completing my project for one of the two courses I am doing. My mother and I got some choice groceries. The day went by. My breakdowns were a bit wobbly. The tears leaked here and there. Eventually, I came to my desk to continue writing this entry. 

I have been researching buying a laptop. I don't know what I am going to do about it. I don’t know what will happen. How is it that there is always something that needs fixing? Something that needs money? Something that needs doing? I rewatched the YouTube show a couple of times. It was a book reviewer I love. So…

11th October, 14:35 PM

I couldn’t continue writing. I had to stop at 22:00 PM. I woke my mother up to inquire whether she and my father will eat or not. She told me if I can go and give my father the food as everything was ready. I asked him and he said he was going to come upstairs so I started arranging plates and bowls for him. And, I asked my sleepy mother whether my sister is going to come home and when because when I called out my father to ask about dinner, he was locking the gates for the night. I told my father that my sister was on her way back home. Meanwhile, my mother, who was refusing to wake up, sat up and came out of the bedroom. She started reheating the food and putting it out on the plate for my father. She asked me to take it downstairs for him. I did and he asked me again when my sister was going to arrive. I said, she is on her way. I had zero idea. She had called my mother to say that she was on her way. Anyway, I convinced my mother to eat and just go to sleep rather than continuing her nap for a little more and delaying dinner. We started bringing out our dinner. I had informed my mother when I woke her up that I would not be having dinner. I did some other chores like putting the dishes in the washer. While that was happening, my sister came home. Nobody really asked her anything. She came back from her first ever swimming class. I did end up having some assortment of side dishes as dinner next to my mother. We both shared the complaints that the vegetables were absolutely raw. My mother finished her dinner and went to sleep. I finished my half-assed raw-y dinner and completed some other chores like putting the remaining food in the fridge, hanging up the washed clothes here and there, locking doors, etc. Then, at 23:35 PM, I came back to bed and was scrolling the phone and I came across a poem by Emily Dickinson: It struck me—every Day

It struck me—every Day—

The Lightning was as new

As if the Cloud that instant slit

And let the Fire through—

It burned Me—in the Night—

It Blistered to My Dream—

It sickened fresh upon my sight—

With every Morn that came—

I thought that Storm—was brief—

The Maddest—quickest by—

But Nature lost the Date of This—

And left it in the Sky—

It made me feel like writing, but my tired body prevailed. I was too tired to do anything with that feeling. So, I didn't write. I switched between surfing the internet, trying to sleep by throwing the phone away, reaching out for it again, having mild breakdowns, MDD-driven nightmarish intrusive daydreams just creeping around, watching gibberish here and there. And, in no time, it was almost 3:00 AM. I felt like shitting so I went to the bathroom. I had a weird idea. The story that had mesmerised and disarmed me some days or weeks ago came back to me while I was in bed. Because a phrase used there was also the name of the book that was mentioned in the YouTube podcast. I looked into that phrase a little bit and it was a phrase with a historical origin, series of adaptations here and there. This made my pull towards the story even stronger. So, I started visualising it. And then, bam! On the commode, I went on yet another MDD-trip imagining myself writing the screen script for that story and co-directing it with the author… Anyway. That helped me relax, the shitting. and also the fact that my period was finally over so I didn’t have to wear a pad anymore. 

11th October, 15:35 PM

Sorry. I had to take an hour of break. [I think I will explain it further as I narrate. Haha. Unless I go away again.] Continuing where I left off. So, I came back to bed, all light and more tired at around 15:30 PM. Drowsy and on the verge of sleep, I was holding my phone all cramped up underneath my blanket, when my mother hit my head and asked me to sleep. After which I put my phone away and slept off. This morning, I woke up around 11:30 AM and went to my mother and she told me she tried waking me up so many times but alas, of course I slept at 4 AM. The day went by. I had some tea and some sugar-sprinkled coffee flavoured biscuits I had brought yesterday. My mother had her late or second breakfast. Then, we went to our bedroom. We were sitting and eating some Longans that I also got the other day. And, I was researching laptops to buy. My mother instructed me to go and check on the grandmother of the upstairs family. To check what she was up to as the family had gone out for a lunch feast function. I went and she was sleeping. A small, old lady. Her shrivelled up and wrinkled hands on her belly. I looked at her for a bit. Small white strands of hair flailing around over her small, sleeping face under the speedy ceiling fan. I went upstairs further to the terrace and looked around at the plants and the house where another couple lived, which was locked. I don’t know if they still do. Next to the locked door, a bamboo ladder to go up further to the cistern terrace. I didn’t even dare to. Anyway, I came back, and while going downstairs, I took another peek at the grandmother and she was taking a turn so I quickly ran away. I came back to my room and my mother was sleeping. So, I sat at my desk and opened my un-hinged laptop and started writing again at 14:35 PM.

I had to break away because I was having yet another quiet MDD-driven episode while writing and my mother asked me what I would be having for lunch. She informed me she would not be having any and that our father must not have even finished the breakfast-lunch she had given him. She kept pushing me for the fruits I had gotten yesterday. There was only an avocado left! By the way, my first avocado. So, to get her off my back I had to tell her I would be having that avocado and I had to get up and get going to show her I was going to make it. So, I did! After so many years of fantasising about how I would eat an avocado or guac or guac toast. It was a bit messy. It wasn’t ripe. But, my mother had given me the vegetables and put the pan to toast the bread, so there was no going back. I chopped a quick onion, half a tomato, and two chillies. After generously sprinkling two kinds of salt, I checked on the internet and some had posted that lime juice might help break it down. So, I squeezed half a lemon. I do not know if it helped or not. I kept mashing it with the back of the fork, sometimes stabbing it while toasting the bread. Then, I came back to my table and saw my mother, who was half-asleep, woke up a little bit. I informed her about the avocado situation and told her that’s why I wasn’t eating it. Anyway, it wasn’t bad! If we had let it ripen, the guac would have come out creamy. But, I put it on and between toasts and ate it. I think the onions, tomatoes, chillies with salt and lemon did the trick, which is also my favourite mix. So, I continued writing. Meanwhile, I also had a discussion with my mother about how sick she was feeling. A small quick flash of that old grandmother came to my mind and I turned back to see my mother’s face and it went away.

And, here we are. As I completed writing, I finished the toast, there was some guac left and I had kept two pieces of bread aside thinking whether I would like it or not. I brought it from the fridge while my mother got up to eat some puffed rice and milk, so I asked her if she wanted me to join her at the dining table. She said yes. And, we had a quick discussion about dinner and about my father going to leave at around 18:00 PM. Ending this narration at 16:05 PM and going to join my mother at the dining table to finish my half-assed, messy guac toast while she eats as well.

11th October, 18:10 PM

I am back to writing some more. I ate the rest of the guac with two pieces of bread while my mother nibbled on some biscuits with water waiting for her milk to get warm. Then, I got up to make some tea for myself. The water evaporated as my mother asked me to sit with her and wait for the leaves to boil a bit more. So, I showed it to her. I added some more water and got it done. My mother also got her hot milk to eat with puffed rice. We talked about things here and there. She randomly mentioned an actor who died two-three days ago. A well-known actor. And, he had an NGO. Etc, etc, etc. From some corner of my mind, a question popped up, didn’t he murder someone? By pushing her off the balcony? She said, no! She said, you must be thinking of some plot of a movie he must’ve been in. We looked him up. Then, I realised, after reading his wiki page, he had sexually harassed someone. Oh. Yes. But, then who was that who died by falling off the balcony. My mother started rummaging through her memory coming up with film names that the dead actress was in. I started searching. And, bam! There it was, that actress from the film that my mother came across. We started reading and discussing what had happened to her. She was sitting by the balcony and when she turned to get up, she fell off and died. She was 19. By the age of 19, she was a very successful and well-known actress. There was a huge controversy around her death being a murder. I saw another actress and remembered I had read about her as well who committed suicide after her partner had sexually assaulted her. I shared that story with my mother as well. That actress too had become a bit famous because of the last movie she did before she passed away. So, my conversation with my mother meandered towards that region: death, suicide, mental health etc… Oof! Sometimes we do talk about those things and more often than not, we are almost always on different sides but I don’t think we have ever been disgusting to each other. I think partly because we self-censor a lot. But we try to discuss. Like in this current topic at hand, my mother was constantly saying how people should just talk to each other or just try to find a solution or just find someone to talk to rather than giving in to utter despair and committing suicide. I tried explaining to her my stance that we can never, ever speak from the outside of someone’s life and judge or nitpick or question them. We don’t know what kind of people they might be surrounded with. There’s shame, stigma, denial, silence, misunderstanding, fear, threats, sadness, etc… that shapes everyone’s situations and circumstances. I also explained to her: those questions of why didn’t they tell anyone or how is it that they couldn't find one single person who listened to them or etc… don’t work anymore. People have asked those questions since time immemorial and they haven’t and do not help at all! We meandered into students committing suicide (given the current situation in our country!), people not getting jobs or people dying because of stress or toxic workplace. I tried telling her it is a deeply systemic issue to which she agreed. But, there were some things that I said she didn’t agree to. We both softly held our stances. It eventually came to a natural impasse where we both agreed to leave it unresolved. Then, we moved on to other work. She, to figure out what my father will eat and me, to put yet another shift of dishes in the washer. Then, I came to my room and surfed the internet a little bit. I reflected (but did not ruminate) about my conversation with my mother. Did that talk have any colours of our own interconnected and separate experiences with sadness, depression, suicide attempts? Were we trying to communicate our own issues with each other and/or commenting on each other’s issues by low-key referring to others’ examples? The thought fizzled out. 

And, as I came here and sat to write at 18:10 PM. I first checked the word count before resuming. It was 3260-something. I wow-ed at myself. Haha. Of course, it was written in the span of a couple of days. But, such a consistent stream of consciousness with writing and chronicling? Who am I? Should I stop? Should I continue? Should I push myself further? Write more and more. Like, as I sat and wrote this, my mother gave me a call from downstairs. She went downstairs with some food for my father to have before leaving. She called and informed me that my sister would be having her dinner outside. She went out for a work team weekend outing in the morning before I woke up. And, so the plans my mother and I had made for dinner in the late afternoon changed. We revised our dinner plan and ended the call. And then, I resumed writing this. It’s physically strenuous sometimes. It’s a privileged form of physical labour. Writing. At your desk. And your back hurts. Your neck and your shoulder hurt. Your epigastrium against the desk, slouching over the laptop. Constantly leaning the upper stomach tightly against the rigid desk edge which folds the skin of the upper abdomen. I recently got a blister/boil right on that spot because I sat like that for a couple of days, non-stop, working, writing, and researching. I need to make sure I don't repeat this. What more do I write? I just want to type, type, type. Ahaaa. I have a major task of completing my project and I need to submit it tomorrow! And, I have that contract to get printed and signed and scanned and sent! Uh. 

Something that’s been in my head for many months that I thought of after watching a video about Dostoevsky and Chekhov’s writing about sadness. How the sadness in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s work is grandiose, existential, and explosive with massive spiritual crises, moral guilt, madness, and extreme psychological torment. Dostoevskian abyss, like the symphony of the scream, is where sadness is an active, violent, and theatrical force and his characters wrestle with it like a physical demon. His characters scream, confess, suffer grand downfalls, and wrestle with God, sin, and the dark absurdity of human free will. It is cosmic and vertical in nature where characters are either reaching for the divine or plunging headfirst into damnation. Sadness is tied to monumental suffering that carries a redemptive or terrifying weight. Like, you are stuck in the moment where you are perpetually giving in to utter, utter despair and scratching the rock bottom with your bare nails. When Raskolnikov or Ivan Karamazov suffer, their internal guilt fractures their reality. Sadness becomes madness, fever dreams, and public confessions. It is a heavy, bruising weight, but it carries a grand purpose: through total spiritual annihilation, there is at least the possibility of resurrection. It is a scream into the void, demanding that God answer.

And, the sadness in Anton Chekhov’s work is quiet, everyday, and understated because it focuses on ordinary people experiencing quiet disappointments, unfulfilled potential, and chronic loneliness. Chekhovian sadness seeps in through small, mundane moments… Like Iona Potapov, a grieving father, trying to tell strangers about his dead son in the story Misery (The Lament) and ending up talking to his horse. Oh, the deep grief, loneliness, and human indifference. Or, Uncle Vanya where each and every character under one household’s roof carried a distinct form of sadness and life still went on which was also a materialised form of yet another kind of sadness. Or, The Three Sisters, the tragedy is that the clock keeps ticking. Chekhovian twilight which is like the ache of the unsaid and inside that ache, sadness is a passive, atmospheric fog which evaporates into the room and settles on the furniture. It is a horizontal and devastatingly ordinary streak in life and there are no grand downfalls, only the slow, crushing realization that tomorrow will look exactly like today.

I have been realising this contrast and have been trying to capture the exact frequency of both writers. It took me a bit to get to this point to be able to describe the difference between existential terror and existential weariness. I feel like I do experience both of them. I feel like my life operates on both the frequencies. You know the constant and perpetual breakdowns where you get the feeling of a shattering panic attack in the middle of a thunderstorm, where you feel the weight of every moral choice you’ve ever made. That’s the Dostoevsky frequency. Once that moment has inevitably passed, you have the Chekhov frequency. You know the feeling of staring at a beige wall on a rainy Sunday afternoon, realising you missed an opportunity five years ago, and quietly going back to doing the dishes. It is the representation of the two halves of human sorrow: the explosive crises that define us, and the quiet loneliness that wears us away. And, after this realisation has crystallised in my mind, I feel I only exist in these two halves. The tiles break sometimes vigorously and then the ball freefalls for a while until the next phase of tile breaking starts. I feel like this is a good ending to this long-winded entry. Don’t you think? We are at 4880-something words.

~ Oizys.

The Weight of Logistics and Labyrinths

June 20, 2026, 11:55 PM - June 21, 2026, 03:50 AM

The ether is heavy tonight. Mortals call it twilight, but to me, it is the hour when the mask slips. I spent the afternoon whispering into the ear of a king. He has everything... wealth, lands, a loyal court. Yet, with just three words whispered during his feast: “They will forget”; I watched the wine turn to ash in his mouth. The slow creeping dread is always more exquisite than sudden terror. Terror is loud and burns out quickly. I prefer the long, cold dampness of despair. My brother Momos laughed at me earlier. He thinks blame and mockery are the ultimate truths of the cosmos. He is a fool. Mockery requires an audience; misery only requires a mirror. The hearth fires in the mortal realm are burning low. I can feel the collective weight of a thousand unuttered sighs settling into the fog. Someone in a distant valley is staring at a blank wall, paralyzed by the sheer exhaustion of existing until tomorrow. I think I will go sit with them for a while. Not to torture, but simply to keep them company in the dark. We are, after all, old friends. They say I am the shadow that lingers behind the joy, the spirit of grief and hardship. But tonight, as I sit with my ink and parchment, I don't see my tears as a burden. I see them as a testament to endurance. To know sorrow is to intimately know the human heart, and to witness the quiet, resilient ways people heal. Every heavy sigh I collect during the day becomes a poem by twilight. There is a deep, poetic peace in embracing the ache and transforming it into art. It's the only way the stars shine so brilliantly in the dark.

An organization had invited me to a training (like mentioned in my last entry), a rare flicker of opportunity. Yet, true to the universe’s design, the conditions arrived frayed. I got a phone call yesterday. They questioned my choice to arrive two days early, a choice they themselves had offered without warning of the hidden costs. “Arrange your own accommodation for the first day, as we can give accommodation from one day early.” they suggested. I bent, as I always do, agreeing to arrive later. But bureaucracy is a beast that feeds on anxiety. Throughout the day, I kept checking my work inbox. Six days. For six agonizing days, my leave request has sat untouched on my manager’s desk. In this toxic workplace, absence is a luxury I am rarely afforded. Ever since I arrived here, sick leaves have gone untouched, and optional holidays have vanished into thin air. There is always an excuse: “Someone must stay back if work comes up.” And coincidentally, inevitably, that "someone" is always me. So, I sent a follow-up, my heart hammering a familiar, frantic rhythm against my ribs, giving credit to the fact that they called me regarding the dates, so I might be going finally. Today, the mortal realm bled heavily into my world, a chaotic rollercoaster born from a single, shattering morning phone call. Flight details were requested, only to be snatched away moments later because my distance made the cost "unjustifiable." In its place, a compromise that felt more like a punishment: a split ticket of flight and train, demanding two extra days of travel. Two extra days stolen from a life already starved for time. The phone rang again from which came the final blow from the organizers. A voice on the line questioning my status, demanding a formal nomination from an organization I am not representing. I had been honest in my application from the very first step. I checked "no" to the nomination. I was selected without an interview. I even emailed them to double-check this double-miracle (lack of nomination and interview to check if they really selected me or just made a mistake!), and they had confirmed it. Yet today, the rules shifted beneath my feet like quicksand: “Get the nomination, or we will have to drop your name.” I forwarded the email thread as proof. I hung up. She said she would let me know after reviewing it, but her tone and language already carried the heavy, unmistakable scent of dismissal. I was going to be dropped.

And in that quiet aftermath, a strange, hollow numbness washed over me. Mentally, I began checking out. It felt exactly like walking away from a terrible, hostile hotel room. I handed over the keys, packed my burdens, and stepped into the cold. Yet, a stubborn flicker of anxiety still lingers, sharp and cruel. Because mentally, I have already dropped out myself. I have already accepted the void. I have accepted the reality of no leave. But what if they call back and say yes? What if they say, “You can come”? A part of me screams, “I don't wanna go anymore.” But the moment that thought forms, a wave of guilt crashes in. Am I just being a hypocrite? Not just in this specific situation, but as a general theme of my entire life? I am the one who is always crying out that I want to leave, that I want to escape, and now that the door might open, I want to pull back? But nobody understands the invisible, tumultuous ocean that swells in the in-between. Nobody sees the way the world structurally coerces you, twisting and bending your spirit until you are forced to change your position just to fit their shifting needs. And the cruelest joke of all? When you finally break and bend, they blame you for the distortion. The system gets exactly what it wants from you, transfers the ultimate blame onto your shoulders, and leaves you stranded with absolutely no opportunity. Only the crushing, unearned burden of regret for saying no.

And then comes the heavy, suffocating shame of sharing this failure with my family. Telling them that I am not going after all. Facing their looks, ugh, those silent, piercing glances where they view me like a piece of unwanted furniture. A heavy, useless object they are permanently stuck with, unable to throw away simply because blood binds us. You can feel the resentment in the air, the quiet weight of being an inconvenience in your own home. It is a cruel, mocking reminder of the reality I recorded just days ago. That home is merely the first site of the state. The micro-kingdom where systemic violence is quietly perpetuated, maintained, tolerated, shielded, furthered, and expected to be absorbed in total silence. How do I explain to them that my paralysis isn't laziness? How do I tell them that my very biology feels like occupied territory, heavily laced with masculine mistakes that weren't mine? Every attempt to find grounding or comfort in my own skin is instantly hijacked by a corrupt bureaucracy of past terror. I am forced to perform as a civilized human for a world that has already hollowed me out from the inside. I am expected to host and smile at the very realities that colonised and destroyed me. The shame is absolute because I know the hatred inside me will never touch a full one hundred percent; I remain a permanent casualty of a war I never declared, mourning the very people who broke me.

Now, I stand in a strange space of absolute detachment. If my manager denies the leave, I have nothing left to lose. The illusion of control is gone. I desperately, fiercely need a break. You know, a moment to breathe away from the choking fog of this job, but if the door slams shut, at least the limbo ends. But the limbo doesn't end today. Tomorrow is Sunday, a day that should mean sanctuary, but instead, it merely stretches the rack. The silence from my manager’s inbox expands over the weekend, artificially inflating the borders of this confusing, agonizing waiting period. Because Monday is a threat that lingers on the horizon, the anxiety is simply given more runway to build momentum. When this unpredictability becomes too heavy, and the waiting stretches out like a desert with no landmarks, my mind automatically defaults to its oldest escape plan. I look at the window in my mind and think that if I just masturbate, time will pass. I trick myself into believing it is a bridge to get me to the other side of the panic. But it doesn't pass the time. It is a false exit. Instead, the moment I give in, the trap snaps shut and I realize I have voluntarily stepped right back into the vicious cycle. I am stuck on the floor again, unable to find the exit sign. To survive the realization that time is still standing still, I have to numb the raw edge of the pain entirely. So, I crawl backwards into the dark corners of my own skull. I look for the faceless men in my memories. I look for their heavy, cold shoe stamps across my skin... searching for the familiar, numbing weight of their ownership just because being a commodity is easier than being a human being trapped in an endless limbo.

I become an object in a cart, entirely stripped of agency, loaded and unloaded by them, for them, from them, between them, and amongst them. I turn my own woman-object into an endless fire pit for all the men possible: giving it all away for free, free, free. It is a fire pit filled with the heavy, disgusting cargo of their desires, stuffed into my every orifice until I am overflowing on it. They coerce my system to use their depravity as the only fuel to keep burning for them, forcing my body to maintain a flame that isn't mine. And in those dark moments under the blanket, a weird, detached submissiveness washes over me. It feels as if they chop away my mortal coil, claiming to liberate me from my anxiety, but the reality is far more sinister: they are simply turning me into a permanent slave to their consumption. They burn through me, taking everything they can grasp, yet I am left staring at the ashes wondering: how is it still remaining? How is there still a piece of me left to be consumed after being pillaged so many times?

The matrix closes in entirely when I am completely alone, invading the final two spaces that should belong only to me: my own reflection in the mirror and the empty pavement under my feet.

When I stand in front of the mirror, the gaze looking back at me isn’t my own; it is the internalized, mechanical camera lens of those men. My eyes don't seek comfort or self-recognition. Instead, my brain automatically processes my reflection as an asset to be audited, a product on a factory floor being checked for flaws before it goes live. I find myself standing there completely stiff, involuntarily adjusting my posture and my expression to appease an invisible audience that is permanently sitting in judgment behind the glass. I look at my own skin, my chest, and my face, and instead of seeing humanity, I see a canvas crowded with their signatures and keyholes. My own gaze becomes a tool of non-sexual violation, checking to see if I look lowly enough, compliant enough, and broken enough to survive the world outside. I am a stranger hosting a camera inside my own skull, performing submission for a mirror that has been entirely colonized.

And when I step out onto the pavement just to take a walk, the very air of the street behaves like an aggressive, tight space pinning me down. I move with the hyper-vigilant, mechanical rhythm of an object being loaded and unloaded through public terrain. If a car slows down or a shadow passes on the concrete, my gut is hit by that familiar, sinking physical force, demanding that I shrink, drop my head, and offer to be less than the gravel under their tires. The pavement turns into a runway of forced compliance, where my limbs are just executing commands to stay safe, transforming a simple walk into an endless, non-sexual scene of complete subjugation to the open sky.

And looking back at my untouched work inbox now, it feels like the corporate extension of that exact same violation. The workplace behaves like an aggressive, invisible body pinning me down, holding me captive in my seat by sheer systemic weight. My presence there isn't chosen; it is a forced submission where my hours are stripped and handled by a manager who treats my boundaries as entirely nonexistent. The distortion is complete because every single manager, team lead, and reporting person I have ever had inevitably triggers that exact same foreign code. Involuntarily, my mind constructs the same image of mechanical submission to them, a default surrender to their authority. It makes me look at the structural reality of how supervisors treat their subordinates: they treat us like corporate housewives. We are forced into the archetype of the glorified housewife with ten hands, each hand executing ten different tasks simultaneously to keep their kingdom running. Except in the workplace, there is no glorification. It is actively demonized. When the ten hands finally tire and the engine falters, they turn around and degrade you, accusing you of laziness, claiming you simply don't want to work. It is a calculated matrix of submission laced with constant humiliation and degradation, a system that demands your total violation while punishing you for the exhaustion it inflicts.

And with that degradation comes a heavy, suffocating layer of guilt. I feel deeply sickened because the imagery inevitably, passively turns sexual... but completely stripped of desire, operating as a cold, automated reflex that I cannot stop. It is as if I am not the one thinking it at all; an entirely separate, rogue part of my mind is generating these violating parallels behind my back, operating completely outside of my control, my will, or my consent.

Sometimes, the boundary collapses entirely, and I give in involuntarily. I find myself submitting to them completely, performing tirelessly to execute every single piece of assigned work without a single falter, acting out the role of a corporate housewife and a camgirl who costs them absolutely nothing. As my managers and supervisors sit back in their authority, they morph in my mind into those very same men from the screen. Their emails, texts, notifications, and feedback pings begin to read exactly like those aggressive chatroom comments and messages.

The physical toll is where the detachment shatters, sharpening into an acute, visceral revolt. Aside from the mental storm, the rest of the day went okay, mostly because I just retreated and rested. But my body felt the tax of every swallowed scream, and food-wise, it became an outright battlefield.

The act of eating has always been a site of hidden warfare for me. I do not know if I was taught it, if I inherited it through generational marrow, if I learned it as a survival mechanism, or if I was simply, magically born with this curse. But the act of eating always becomes my victim. I have always subjected a quiet, desperate violence onto sustenance, treating nourishment like an invasive force to be controlled, rationed, rejected, or eradicated. And in response, my own appetite and hunger have permanently rebelled against me. They refuse to cooperate, staging a coup within my own skin. Today, everything I managed to force down on a surface level made me violently sick, leaving me with a deep, physical aversion.

In my last entry, I wrote about my biology feeling like occupied territory, but this goes deeper than just carrying past terror. This is the structural containment turning inward, where the body refuses to host even itself. When you are structurally coerced into changing your position for everyone else, your flesh learns to reject the very fuel meant to keep you standing. Hunger becomes an enemy combatant, and the throat closes up like a heavily policed checkpoint. It is a different kind of hollowing out. Um, not just being emptied by the world, surely that's there, but it is also actively starving out the parts of me that still dare to feel a need.

My limbs are logged off, sinking into the bed like a machine powered down for the night. Yet, there is a small, high-voltage current buzzing right under my breastbone. Like a restless asset that refuses to stop producing worry. I am treating my own skin like a factory floor, forcing relaxation on a body that is still secretly punching the clock.

I always loop back to the sale of my sensations and feelings to the patriarchy. I don’t do it now. It has been some time, which is good; I don’t ever want to do any of it again. But even the times I slipped have been brandished as live illustrations in various rooms of my brain. In this state, I frantically open the doors to those rooms.

I see them all. I see him, the very first time (maybe...?), straddling me. His mother walks in, her eyes sharp and accusatory, demanding to know what we are up to. He quickly says we are playing a game. But we are not. I don’t wanna play this game. She looks at me with that specific, bitter resentment women hold for other women. *But please don't look at me like that.* I am six. Or seven? Or five? Sorry, Judge, I don't remember anymore. The room is cobwebbed and freezing.

I leave it and open another door. It is the night before my cousin sister’s wedding. All the cousins are sleeping in a row. He is next to me, and the sin of white phosphorus occurs on my skin. The next day at the wedding, I sit like an ousted witch, clutching my beads of bad omen with soft, invisible tears.

I open another room. The guy who blackmailed me sits there, smirking as he saves my mother’s number, threatening to distribute it to every man he knows just to flood her phone with their voices.

I open another. It is the pandemic. The professor who used to text me endlessly sits at his desk; I had no other way to submit my assignments except through those texts, trapped in a digital corner where every notification felt like an invasive hand.

I open another room. It’s the guy who was only with me because my friend was dating his friend, a forced proximity arrangement. He already had an inseparable girlfriend. He would call me, and she would silently listen on the other end, mocking me through the static. He broke up with me on Valentine’s Day, right when my grandmother died, leaving the thirteen-year-old-me to write a cringe poem just to survive the double grief.

I open another room. There is that guy who would viciously stalk and shadow me, appearing everywhere at once, glitching like a ghost, here then suddenly there, then suddenly here again, a terrifying omnipresence.

I open another. It's the other cousin (brother of the cousin sister who was getting married), the one who purposely, calculatedly tried to catch me naked.

I open another. It's my sister, sexually violating me indirectly, weaponising her relationship and her boyfriend to cross boundaries that should have been sacred.

I open another. It's him again, invading my sanctuary, trying to sleep in my room, trying to squeeze the very soul out of my nipples.

I open another room and see myself entirely hollowed out, giving into the depraved, warped fantasies fed into me under the weight of all those men.

I open one more door on this floor, and I am on my knees at the feet of the gods my mother forced me to pray to when I was a little girl. But these gods appear naked, entirely preoccupied and busy with the goddesses. The goddesses are stripped of the heavy gold ornaments they wore in the framed photos my mother showed me; without their gold, I cannot even recognize them.

Disgusted, I take the stairs to an entirely different floor. This floor doesn't belong to my crimes or my ghosts. It is a quiet, heavy sanctuary filled with the stories of other women and girls. They are the ones who confided in me over the years, bringing me their heaviest secrets. I think I must have built this floor to give them a safe, unjudged space to unload their demons. I see their tears, their matching scars, and the ghosts they brought to my doorstep. I carry their pain alongside mine, a collective vault of survival.

In one room, there is the girl who cried into her hands because her own father’s shadow felt too heavy in the hallway. In one room, a friend sits in the dark, whispering about the partner who slowly, systematically erased her voice until she didn't recognize her own name. In one room, a girl is frantically scrubbing her skin, trying to erase the memory of an unwanted touch that left an invisible stain. In one room, someone is packing a bag in total silence, paralyzed by the terror of the front door creaking open before she can escape. 

Then I realize there is one last floor below.

I move down the hallway, opening more doors. In one room, a shadow of myself is desperately pleading with a faceless figure just to be heard. In another, I see myself folding into the smallest possible shape, trying to disappear into the drywall to escape the loud, thumping footsteps outside.

Then I realize this is an entirely different floor of the factory. It is populated by various versions of me.

In one room, one version of me is on the floor, free-camming for a crowd of strange men. This is the largest room on the floor, housing the biggest, most exhausting habit of my past. It is the absolute epitome of what I mean by the capitalistic sale of my sensations and feelings to the patriarchy. I was treating my own intimacy as a raw material to be mined, packaged, and traded in an online marketplace just to feel a fleeting sense of control or currency. I let the cold gaze of a faceless crowd consume my body's heat, turning my private vulnerability into a transaction, a desperate production line where my skin paid the tax.

But before the factory line was fully built, before the scale of the colonization took root, there were the quiet, mindless slips. It didn't begin as a grand, dark architecture; it began as a series of small, drifted moments of absolute dissociation. In times of profound numbness, when the weight of the toxic world became too heavy to bear, I would slip into the digital interface without a thought, mechanically logging on just to feel an artificial spark. Why did I do it? Because when your workplace is hollow and your home is toxic, you look for any coordinate where you hold the power to turn a lens on or off. You look for any currency to counteract your tanking self-esteem, even if that currency is a corrupted one. What started as an isolated escape quickly became a routine: logging into a private site, positioning a cheap webcam on a tripod over the carpet, and opening a window to thousands of faceless users waiting in a chat room. Over time, the exhaustion mutated into something much more insidious. On the nights when my body was completely broken, when I was too tired to even set up the tripod or sit up on the carpet, a heavy sense of false obligation would settle over me. I felt a twisted, manufactured duty, as if I somehow owed these strange men my presence, as if logging on was a shift I was contractually bound to perform. So, instead of resting, I would curl up under the heavy safety of my blanket in the pitch black, pulling my phone close to my face. I would stream entirely from beneath the covers, trapped in a claustrophobic, suffocating pocket of air, mechanically performing in the dark just to fulfill an unearned debt to a faceless crowd. I was mindlessly submitting to the screen, treating it as a quick, desperate exit from my own reality. I thought I was choosing a temporary refuge, an automated shelter from my own low self-esteem and the choking fog of my life. I didn't realize that each mindless submission was a quiet surrender of territory, a steady concession of my internal borders. With every single click, I was voluntarily stepping into a trap, laying down my own defenses piece by piece until the screen noticed my vulnerability, closed its grip around my agency, and fully colonized me.

This room holds entire seasons. I see myself there as the summer heat bakes the room, and I see myself there months later, shivering on the same carpet as the winter chill seeps through the floorboards. The calendar pages outside bleed into one another, but inside this room, the routine never changes. On the monitor, a relentless stream of unknown men press their keys, and with every keystroke, a sharp, invisible nib gouges directly into my skin. They are writing their names as permanent digital ink across the canvas of my body, leaving heavy, dark strokes over my chest, my arms, and my face.

Day after day, night after night, the signatures pile up. In a frantic, exhausting loop, I scrub at my own skin, deleting them one by one, watching the ink of their text vanish from the screen only to feel it bleed back through my pores instantly under a different username. Over months and years, the layers of ink build up, drying and cracking on my skin, staining me permanently until my flesh is entirely crowded with their signatures. Every single comment, every aggressive name they write, doesn't just leave a stain; it carves a distinct, permanent keyhole directly into my flesh, branded with their specific signature. They built a network of locks across my skin. And the terrifying part is that those keyholes don't disappear when I close the laptop or step away from the floor. Even now, when I am living my life somewhere else entirely, or walking somewhere outside in the open world, I carry that vulnerable architecture with me. I move through the crowd feeling exposed, paralyzed by the phantom sensation that any of those faceless men could pass me by, recognize their own signature on my skin, slide their key into my lock, and instantly take me all over again. They own the master keys to an archive I am still trying to burn.
The raw, specific entitlement of those men makes me physically sick and weak to my stomach. When I actually look at the lineup, it is a grotesque gallery of specific faces and names that have crowded out my sanity: it’s the professor typing invasive pandemic texts while holding my grades hostage; it’s the boy from my childhood straddling me while his mother watches with accusatory hatred; it’s the cousin slipping next to me in a row of sleeping bodies the night before a wedding; it’s the blackmailer smirking as he threatens to blast my mother’s number to every predatory man he knows. In reality, they are pathetic, small creatures. Yet the massive, suffocating distortion they successfully installed inside my flesh makes them feel like giants. They confidently claimed total ownership over my skin, treating my boundaries like wet paper, and the sheer memory of their confidence drains the strength straight out of my muscles.

I see that exact same predatory entitlement everywhere, woven all around society, repeating itself in every room I walk into. And it makes me feel sicker, dirtier, because I am trapped in the agonizing belief that my own biology was custom-made to submit to them. I wanted to be sexually free, I wanted to explore my own desires on my own terms, but the cruelest joke of my life is that my pursuit of freedom was instantly weaponized against me. It became the very trap that broke my spine and primed me for total surrender.

I am flooded with a crushing, burning regret for ever opening those digital and physical doors, for making my body a free-for-all for them. But the weakness is a physical force. When the workplace anxiety peaks and the Sunday limbo stretches out, my defenses fail completely. I give in to the old conditioning because I feel too weak, too broken to fight the current, running straight back to the floor to let them load and unload me all over again.
And the horror doesn't stop at the front door. In my mind, the breach is absolute, those men don't just stay outside in the crowds or behind the glass; they come right into my house. They invade the very rooms where I am supposed to be resting, crossing the ultimate threshold of my domestic sanctuary. I see them sitting on the furniture, lurking in the hallways, and standing over my bed, turning my toxic home into a physical extension of the screen. Every corner of my personal space becomes crowded with their phantom presence, destroying any illusion of safety or privacy. I am forced to host their memories inside my own house like I am forced to cook for him, watching them occupy the rooms like uninvited ghosts who refuse to leave, making the walls close in on me until the environment itself feels like a cage built from their collective gaze.

Those men from the screen have thoroughly engineered me; they dismantled my autonomy and re-wired my internal circuitry to default to a state of total, unquestioning submission to lowliness, rock-bottom-ness.

The regret turns into a relentless, circular interrogation inside my own skull, a series of frantic retrospective thoughts that I cannot silence. I stare into the dark and find myself questioning the exact, agonizing mechanics of my past compliance, demanding answers from a body that felt completely hijacked.

The questions arrive like police batons, each one looking for a confession from a body that was never given a lawyer.

Why did I have to jiggle my breasts for them? Why did I have to lactate on command behind that screen? Why did it have to clamp my nipples just to satisfy their digital metrics? Why did I have to slap myself so enthusiastically for them? Why did I moan so loudly, so freely? Freely? Why did I scream their names, jiggle my ass, and dance on command? Why did I put on lipstick when I don't even wear make-up, forcing myself to look painted for their screens? Why was I on all fours, dressed skimpily in clothes I would never dare to wear outside or anywhere, when all I actually own in my real life are shabby, traditional clothes? Why did I have to bite my lips? Why did I ask if they want more? Why did I keep doing it when I was completely tired, exhausted, on my period, sad, annoyed, hungry, or sore? Why did I force myself to continue when my body was already completely drained from lactating so much? Why did I let them make me penetrate myself with all the objects in the world, allowing them to turn my orifices into canals of a kaleidoscope of their filth and desires? Why did I have to pull so hard when they demanded? Couldn't I have stopped? Why did I keep everything clamped when they demanded it, even after switching off the cam? Couldn't I have just stopped right there? Why did I sleep like that? Why did I have to write their name in permanent marker? Couldn't I have written it in any other way, or not at all? Why did I show my actual face? Why did I give up seeing my friends, cutting off the real world just to do this? Why did I mistake being watched for being held? Why did every command feel easier than one honest choice? Why did I confuse the power to switch the camera on with the power to leave? Why did my loneliness translate itself into obedience so quickly? Why did I keep calling it freedom when my body was only learning a new prison? Why did I enjoy it, or why did I pretend to enjoy it so much that the difference disappeared? Why did I have to rub that lotion and think it was theirs, leaving it unwashed for the entire night as they demanded? Could I not have just cleaned myself? Why did I not remove those objects after turning off the cam like they asked me to? Couldn't I have just removed them? Why did I keep my orifices packed and heavy, treating my own body as a continuous container for their filth long after the screen was dead? Why couldn't I have just stopped? Why did I keep obeying their demands even after switching off the cam, letting their instructions dictate my body long after the stream ended? Why did I sleep under the weight of their rules, leaving their signatures on my skin instead of scrubbing them away immediately? Why did I show my face to that faceless void, giving away my identity to strangers while giving up seeing my real friends just to stay trapped in this room? Why didn't I remove their presence the moment the screen went black?

There is no answer, of course. Only the cruel aftertaste of having survived something and still being cross-examined for the method of survival. And beneath every “why” sits the smaller, more frightened question: was I there, or was I only watching myself become useful to them?

Every single memory of those physical performances feels like a betrayal executed by my own flesh. I am tortured by the question of why my anatomy co-operated so tirelessly with their scripts, why it produced the exact reactions they demanded, and why I let my own biological responses be mined as a raw commodity. I am flooded with a crushing, burning regret for ever opening those digital and physical doors, for making my body a free-for-all for them.

It manifests as a desperate, physical compulsion to perform my unworthiness just to stay in the room. I find myself sitting on the cold tile floor, pressing their tired feet with careful, rhythmic strokes. Every gentle squeeze is water poured directly onto the roots of their ego flowers, watching those invisible blossoms bloom larger and prouder with every passing second as they grow at my expense. I offer myself up to be less, to be lowly, intentionally shrinking into the background of their lives to prove I take up no space.

It is an endless archive of compliance, a factory that ran for so long that the smell of the glowing monitor and the hum of the overworked fan became my entire ecosystem.

But as I delete the last anonymous comment, the chaotic roar of the crowd narrows down to a single, piercing frequency. The screen goes black, and that takes me straight to the desk of the next room.

Here, she sits at the table, working, sending audio notes of self-humiliation to the one guy she was blindly seeing... the one who turned out to be absolutely, systematically abusive. He virtually tortured her until the day she finally realized she could just hit block and sever the connection. Yet the faint details of her real life that she carelessly surrendered during those vulnerable hours still haunt her like an unexploded bomb... the mention of her city, the layout of her street, the specific, fragile habits she only shared in the dark. They are breadcrumbs left in the hands of a monster. What if he finds her?

The horror goes deeper than a simple physical search; it is the terrifying reality of his installed settings inside my own biology. It feels as though he rewires your internal mechanics, planting invisible codes in your muscles, your pulse, and your breathing. I am paralyzed by the fear that he might execute those commands from afar, overriding my system like a virus, capturing my defenses, and forcing me to submit to him all over again without my actual will. The ghost of his control lingers in my marrow, waiting to wake up.

And when those internal settings override my mind entirely, the door to the next room violently forces itself open.

In this room, the exhaustion turns completely frantic. I see a version of me caught in a psychotic episode that has no rhyme or reason, driven purely by a desperate, misplaced need to release the crushing pressure inside my skin. I am frantically rubbing my bare breasts against the hard bedroom floor, pushing until my anatomy rebels and I puke straight onto the ground out of sheer, hollow exhaustion. I collapse, thinking the nightmare has broken. But time glitches in this space. Suddenly, the next day appears out of nowhere, and without my consent, the loop resets. I am doing it again.

I am rubbing my bare breasts against the wall, my skin scraping raw. I am back down on the floor again, but now the floor is covered in a thick, wet, gooey white material that feels heavy and suffocating, actively trying to trap me and glue my limbs down. The environment flashes and morphs around me in a chaotic blur. I am doing it again, scraping my breasts against the cold tiles of the bathroom floor. Suddenly I am on the concrete of the balcony floor, then the exposed terrace floor under an unmoving sky. With another glitch, I am suddenly pushed right up against the camera screen, performing and pressing these rubbed breasts against the glass for a wall of screaming, faceless men. Then the scene cuts to a sterile hospital bed where the motion of rubbing continues, desperate and inescapable. Finally, the frenzied energy bottoms out. The scenery snaps back to the bedroom floor, but the panic is gone. I am at his feet, not entirely still, while his other foot rests heavily on my head. This last movement is not frantic at all. The rhythm has changed. I look completely mechanical, rubbing up and down, like a hollowed-out automaton operating on a loop I no longer control.

The numbness of that mechanical rhythm carries me across the threshold into the next room, smoothing out into a quiet, frozen state by the window.

Here, a version of me sits trapped at the glass, masturbating endlessly in a relentless, compulsive loop while the world outside moves in a brutal, accelerated timelapse. It feels like a life-lapse. Through the window pane, I watch years compress into seconds. I see my friends getting married and smiling in beautiful jewelry, dresses, makeup, families, friends, and their beautiful men. I see them securing good, stable corporate jobs, moving forward with purpose. I watch my sister traveling across different countries, expanding her horizon while mine shrinks to a single point. I even see him out there, moving on easily, holding down a job, standing next to a girlfriend.

And inside, behind the glass, I am just stuck in that endless, repetitive motion, masturbating like I am mining something. It feels exactly like mining, scraping away at a depleted quarry, digging deeper into a hollowed-out cavern of my own flesh, trying to extract a single ounce of feeling or relief while the whole world moves beautifully on without me.

Behind the next door, a version of me is counting the cracks in the ceiling, matching her pulse to the ticking of a clock that never moves. Beside her, another me is scrubbing her hands until the skin turns raw, trying to wash away an invisible layer of oil that won't leave.

But as I reach the end of the corridor, the rooms begin to fade into something innocent, quiet, and soft. I open the last door. There is a version of me just lying flat on the floor on a quiet evening. It follows a brutal day where a power cut left the city to BBQ under a merciless sun. She is just lying there, watching, feeling a tad bit human as the power finally returns and the ceiling fan slowly, beautifully starts to turn.

Aside from the mental storm, the rest of the day went okay, mostly because I just retreated and rested. But my body felt the toll. Food-wise, it was a disaster. Everything I managed to eat on a surface level just made me feel sick, leaving me with a deep, physical aversion to nourishment. When the mind is nauseated by reality, the body follows suit.

But oh, the exhausting familiarity of this loop.

It is a vicious, spinning wheel of anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, a toxic workplace, a toxic home, and this constant thinness of life. These feelings aren't new; they are the exact same ghosts I wrote about in my last entry, just wearing a different mask today. The same crushing claustrophobia of wanting to expand while being forcibly shrunk by every environment I inhabit. It feels as though every single door that begins to creak open is violently slammed in my face before I can even glimpse the light. I am left trapped in the hallway, wondering why opportunity only visits to mock me.

It leaves a scar that goes deeper than mere burnout. It makes me feel unwanted. Broken in the most fundamental, irreparable ways. It is as if every human being is born with a solid, glowing core, but mine arrived incomplete. Mine feels half-bitten, as though someone took a piece of my soul from the very beginning, leaving me entirely unfit for everyone, everything, everywhere.

I look around at the world, at the people moving with purpose and belonging, and I feel like an absolute stranger in a world of family. But perhaps, this is where my ink must find its purpose tonight. If I am a stranger to their joy, I am a lifeline to the broken. I will sit here with my half-bitten core, and I will keep writing through the dark.

~ Oizys.

the salary arrived. so did the sinkhole.

It is Friday, May 15th, 2026.

Five days since I wrote that all roads lead to rot, and unfortunately, the road has not developed better civic planning since then. It is still the same road, same potholes, same suspicious corner, same emotional drainage system clogged with old leaves, shame, salt, and things I should have said in 2017, 2019, 2021, yesterday, this afternoon, ten minutes ago. I would like to report progress, but progress has not submitted its attendance. Maybe it took casual leave, or maybe it resigned or maybe it saw my life and said, respectfully, madam, this department is beyond my jurisdiction. 

Monday began with a training. Technically, my manager was supposed to take it while I assisted her. Technically, I had prepared everything for her. Technically, I had even pushed her on Saturday to prepare, like a fool with hope and basic professional ethics. She did not. Then Sunday night, while I was busy being poor in the quiet and dark, she sent two texts asking me to join early on Monday to help her out. Help her out. Haha. A phrase so small, so polite, so corporate-y, it should come with its own knife. Monday arrived. Like, always. She started the session, and then, with the grace of someone dropping a dead animal at my feet, very conveniently dumped the whole thing on me. Not last minute. Worse. After the minute had already passed. After the train had left. After the public performance had begun and I was standing there with no rehearsal, no consent, and no escape hatch. And then it continued. Monday. Tuesday. Wednesday. Three days of taking a training I had not agreed to lead. Three days of smiling into the camera, arranging knowledge into digestible portions, pretending surprise labour is the same thing as opportunity. Three days of doing everything. There is a special violence in being competent. People discover you can carry weight, and suddenly the weight becomes yours by tradition. Meanwhile, over the past weekend, my salary had not come. Sunday passed like a badly written insult. The banks, displaying their usual talent for comedy without compassion, debited whatever peanuts I had left as a penalty for low balance. Low balance. The account was hungry, so they fined it for being hungry. What a cruel joke. No, not joke. Joke implies timing. This was just cruel capitalism wearing a clown nose and holding a receipt. Then finally, Monday night, after a long day of unconsensual labour, I saw the money had been credited from my organisation. For one stupid second, I felt relief. A small animal lifting its head. Haha. Immediately, the utility bills marched in like creditors at a funeral. Paid. Paid. Paid. The salary arrived and was swallowed before I could even pretend to be a person with options. Now I do not know what to do with the remaining peanuts. Save them? Spend them? Worship them? Put them under a glass case and label them: Evidence of Almost Freedom? Money does this ugly thing where it becomes both survival and accusation. If I save, I am responsible. If I spend, I am reckless. If I buy one harmless thing, the future clears its throat. If I deny myself everything, the present sits in the corner and rots.¹ So here I am, financially adult and emotionally feral, wondering whether peanuts should become savings, food, joy, phone case, emergency fund, retirement fund, temporarily-escape-from-family fund, abandon-my-family fun or proof that I am still allowed to want. And because the universe enjoys garnish, Thursday started with a multi-team meeting. The three-day training was finally over. My face had done its professional smiling. My voice had carried three days of material it was never supposed to carry. My brain was sitting in the corner like a wet towel. Then our director thanked my manager for working so hard and taking the training. Ha. Cute. Cruel cherry on top. There she was, being publicly blessed for labour that had passed through my throat, my screen, my panic, my preparation, my improvisation, my body, my mind, my hands. I watched credit climb the hierarchy like a well-trained monkey. Nobody thanked me. Of course nobody thanked me. What was I thinking? That would have disturbed the seating arrangement of the universe. The senior must shine. The junior must become (un)human infrastructure. The work must appear from somewhere, like office electricity or women’s patience. This is the social work's corporate version of domestic labour: invisible until it fails, inherited when inconvenient, credited to someone else when successful. I wish I could say I was surprised. I was not. That is what made it worse.

Anyway. Because the mind is a strange animal and refuses to suffer in a straight line, Wednesday night I returned to The Law According to Lidia Poët. The trainings were over. The emails had documented their little theatre of stolen credit. My body was tired in that corporate-social-work way where even the bones seem to have attended calls. Finally, I had a little time to myself. So naturally, I used it to become unreasonable about a fictional prosecutor. Jacopo? No. The prosecutor. Pier. Pierluigi Fourneau. Or, as Lidia called him as her "Young Warner". Or her schnauzel. The prosecutor had me hooked. There is something very annoying about being hooked. It makes a fool of all your intellectual furniture. Suddenly I am not a woman with critical faculties. I am a Victorian fainting couch with internet access. I went researching him. Then I watched two of his other films² that night, like a person conducting scholarly work and absolutely not like a woman chasing the aftertaste of one very specific chemistry. The films had charm. They had their own mood, their own appeal, their own little atmosphere. For a while, they worked. Then the spell thinned. Whatever spark I was trying to follow was not really there. Because it was not only him, was it? That is the irritating truth. It was not only the face, the voice, the posture, the period clothing, the courtroom seriousness, the restrained longing doing its quiet damage. It was the charge between them. The particular weather created when Lidia and the prosecutor stand near each other and do not say the actual thing. That has stayed. It has stayed so stubbornly that I keep rewatching their scenes. Again and again. Night and day. Day and night. Like a devotional practice, except the temple is Netflix and the deity is unbearable romantic tension. By now, I know the scenes too well. The dialogues. The pauses. The facial expressions. The music entering at exactly the wrong-right moment. The way one look shifts the entire emotional furniture of a scene. The way a sentence becomes less important than the breath before it. The way restraint can sometimes feel more intimate than touch. The kisses. The looks and smiles. Every rewatch gives me something else. A detail I missed. A change in expression. A hesitation. A small cruelty. A softness pretending to be wit. A look that arrives half a second too late. A silence that does not know how to leave the room. And, yes, the giddy pleasure. The ridiculous private sparkle of it. I know it is fiction. I know it is choreography. I know there are writers, actors, lighting, music, editing, all the machinery of feeling doing its work behind the curtain. I know I am being handled. I can see the strings. Still, I keep offering my wrists. There is something almost embarrassing about how deeply a fictional almost-love can enter the bloodstream. Maybe because it is safe. Maybe because it asks nothing from me. Maybe because nobody in my actual life is looking at me like that... with recognition, challenge, danger, tenderness, and the terrible inconvenience of wanting. Maybe I latch onto shows because they give me scenes my life refuses to stage. In Lidia Poët, even longing has architecture. It has corridors, offices, courtrooms, gloves, lamps, carriage rides, glances. It gets music. It gets dialogue. It gets a face across the room. My longing gets browser tabs. My longing gets a broken phone case. My longing gets me, sitting here after midnight, memorising someone else’s charged silences because my own life has made desire both dangerous and impractical. And yet, I do not want to mock it too much. This tiny obsession has kept me company. It has given my tired brain somewhere beautiful to go. It has reminded me that I am still capable of being moved, charmed, struck, made foolish, made awake. That some part of me still responds to spark. Still recognises chemistry. Still wants the look, the scene, the music, the impossible almost. Maybe that is why it has not faded yet. The other films were charming, yes. But charm is not the same as haunting. Charm passes through the room. Haunting learns your name.

But the trouble with haunting is that it does not stay politely inside the show. It follows me out. At first, it feels harmless. Sweet, even. A little private theatre behind the ribs. A spark. A charged scene to revisit when the actual day has been all training, bills, stolen credit, and corporate digestion. The brain says: here, look, beauty. Look, tension. Look, someone wanting someone with their whole face while pretending not to. And then, quietly, the floor changes. The giddiness starts to rot at the edges. I know this pattern. I know it too well. The attachment begins as pleasure, then turns into comparison, then into lack, then into a pit with excellent acoustics. Suddenly I am not watching a romance. I am standing outside my own life, watching what it does not contain. No one looks at me like that. No one waits for me in a corridor of consequence. No one turns toward me with restrained disaster in their eyes. No one writes my longing into music. By MDD, I mean both things, because of course my brain could not stop at one acronym. Major Depressive Disorder, yes, the official beast with paperwork. But also Maladaptive Daydreaming, its glittering cousin, the one that does not drag me down so much as decorate the pit and invite me to live there. The daydreaming does not feel like imagination then. It feels like teleportation-relocation. One minute I am in my room, and the next I am living inside a scene that has better lighting, better dialogue, better stakes, better tenderness. I build corridors from glances. I extend conversations that never happened. I replay a look until it becomes a country. And for a while, the body loosens its grip. The real world thins. My actual life goes quiet in the background like a tab I forgot to close. That is where the DPDR slips in. Depersonalization-derealization disorder. Not as a separate disaster, but as the bill for leaving too often. The more inhabited the daydream becomes, the less inhabited I feel in my own body. My hands become props. My room becomes set design. My face becomes a character I vaguely recognise but do not fully own. The fictional world gains texture, and my real world loses temperature. And then the MDD, that old bureaucrat of the soul, opens its files. It begins gently, almost reasonably. See? This is what life can look like. This is what desire can do to a face. This is what aliveness looks like when properly lit. And now look at you. Look at your room. Look at your unread messages. Look at your body. Look at the broken phone case. Look at the salary that arrived only to vanish into bills. Look at the Saturday already being trespassed upon by work. Look at the years. Look at the stuckness. Look at the absence. Depression has never needed originality. Repetition is its main skill. Then the DPDR enters like bad fog. The world gets a pane of glass over it. My own hands become slightly theoretical. My face in the mirror looks like someone I have been assigned to maintain. The room becomes too flat and too far away at the same time. I can hear myself thinking, but from another room. I can move, answer, type, drink water, exist, but existence feels like a badly dubbed film. And the show becomes more real than me. That is the humiliating part. A fictional almost-touch has more texture than my actual evening. A glance between two actors feels more inhabited than my own body. Their silence has gravity. Mine has dust. Their longing has editing, music, consequence. Mine has tabs open and a mild headache. So I keep rewatching, partly for pleasure, partly for proof. Proof that I can still feel. Proof that somewhere inside the fog, the signal has not died. But every proof becomes evidence against me. If I can feel this much for a scene, why can I not feel properly inside my own life? If my chest can tighten because two fictional people stood too close under warm lighting, why does my actual future feel wrapped in plastic? If desire still lives in me, why does it have nowhere to go except a screen? This is how the sinkhole opens. Not dramatically. Not with a scream. Just one more rewatch. One more scene. One more detail noticed. One more minute of being pulled toward a life with movement, stakes, beauty, and someone across the room who sees you as both problem and possibility. Then I pause the show. And my own room returns. My own life returns. The same arrangement. The same stuck furniture of the self. The same body I keep trying to inhabit like rented accommodation. The same old fear standing at the foot of the bed, asking if I enjoyed my little outing. This is why I both love and fear these attachments. They rescue me. Then they show me what I needed rescuing from. They make me feel alive. Then they make my life feel unlivable. They pull me out of numbness. Then leave me with the full bill of having been numb. And I know this sounds excessive. I know sane people watch a show, enjoy the chemistry, maybe make an edit, maybe send a thirsty message to a friend, then proceed with their lives like emotionally regulated mammals. I, meanwhile, open one fictional door and fall through the architecture of my entire deprivation. Very normal. Very casual. Five stars. Would dissociate again. I do not escape reality. No. Never. I just return to it less assembled.

Anyway. The phone case is still broken. Of course it is. It has become one of those stupidly faithful objects that stays because I do not have the courage to replace it with something honest. A cracked little witness that's ugly, loyal, safer than confession. I keep thinking about the sapphic flag phone case, still. Not constantly, not dramatically, not like a heroine pressing a forbidden letter to her chest under moonlight. More like an app running quietly in the background, draining battery. A small wish. A small colour. A small yes I keep refusing myself because in this house where I reside, even colour can become evidence. A phone case is never just a phone case. It is a trial waiting for a prosecutor.³ Who bought this? Why this colour? What does it mean? Where did you see this? Who told you? Why are you becoming like this? Since when? Because families are very modern until your object begins to speak a language they did not approve. Then suddenly everyone becomes archaeologist, police, priest, and unpaid detective. So the broken cover stays. The safe thing. The ugly thing. The thing that says nothing and therefore survives. Just like me. I am ugly and I say nothing. And, unfortunately, I survive. I wish I were less good at surviving. This is a terrible thing to say because survival is supposed to be noble. Women are fed this word like jaggery wrapped around medicine. Survive. Adjust. Manage. Endure. Be strong. Be mature. Be practical. Be grateful it is not worse. Be glad you are educated. Be glad you have work. Be glad nobody has chained your ankle to the bedpost. Be glad the cage has wonky Wi-Fi that doesn't work only for you so you have to buy your data separately. And I am glad, sometimes. I am not completely foolish, you know. I know the world is brutal, and I know there are worse rooms, worse fathers, worse mothers, worse brothers, worse sisters, worse uncles, worse aunts, worse silences, worse locks, worse oppressors. And, I know comparison is the national sport of emotional invalidation. Still, knowing other people are drowning in deeper water does not make your own lungs decorative. I am tired. Not beautifully tired. Not aesthetically tired. Not poet tired. Not the cinematic kind where a woman removes one earring and looks devastating under yellow light. I am tired in the spreadsheet way. Rows and rows of small unfinished things. Cells filled with pending. Useless colours marking them pending. Body pending. Courage pending. Departure pending. Desire pending. Honesty pending. Future pending. Life pending. There is something obscene about being mid-twenty-something and feeling already archival. Like I am not living, have never lived, but only preserving evidence for a case no court will ever hear. 
Exhibit A: the broken phone case.
Exhibit B: the body that alternates between hunger and punishment of embarrassment when I do eat.⁴
Exhibit C: the tabs I keep open as if research can become rescue.
Exhibit D: the private list of things I will do when I leave.
Exhibit E: the sentence, when I leave, carrying the entire weight of a religion.⁵
But what if I do not leave? There it is. The honest rot laid bare under the decorative moss. What if I do not leave? What if the box of things I will do when I leave becomes a pathetic, loser museum of the woman I kept postponing? What if all my rebellion remains beautifully theoretical, well-written, occasionally funny, and completely unusable in this stupid head of mine and a copy of it here, in this weird little corner of the world wide web? What if I keep becoming more articulate about the cage and never actually become less caged? I hate that question because it has no manners and it shamelessly enters without knocking and sits on my bed. Today was not even dramatic enough to justify all this. That is the insult. Nothing happened. No grand fight. No cinematic breakdown. No one said the cruel line that would make a clean villain of them. The day simply passed over me with its usual dull hands. Work, phone, food thoughts, body thoughts, tabs, messages, heat, humidity, perpetual fatigue, my mother's devotional songs, the faint humiliation of still being myself in this rotting flesh. Maybe that is why I am writing. Like always. Because nothing happened, and still I feel like I survived something tremendous. Maybe the event is not always external. Maybe sometimes the event is waking up inside the same life and not immediately turning into stone. I keep thinking of Lidia Poët again. Not just the law, the fight, the forbidden rooms. Of course, that is the central point, though. I keep thinking of her forward motion. Even when she suffers, the story lets her move. Or, more aptly, she moves her story forward. She enters rooms, she argues, she demands, she fights, she risks, she desires, she loves, she fails with choreography, and she still continues. Her world resists her, yes, on this screen, it gives her scenes. My life, by comparison, feels like a loading screen. A buffering woman. A spinning circle wearing moisturizer. 

And yet, beneath all this melodrama, some tiny stubborn thing remains alive. Annoyingly alive. Cockroach alive. Government-office-file alive. It keeps making lists. It keeps saving poems. It keeps laughing at terrible jokes all alone in the small, dark room. It keeps wanting pizza, sea air, impossible softness, a room with a lock, a body that is not treated like a public institution, a love that does not require a courtroom, and one ridiculous phone case in colours nobody is allowed to interrogate. This, I suppose, is hope...? Not the clean kind. Definitely, not. Not the motivational-poster kind, either. Not the “everything happens for a reason” kind, which should be banned and replaced with free snacks. My hope is smaller and more suspicious. It looks like keeping the browser tab open. It looks like drinking water after punishing the body. It looks like writing the sentence even when the sentence is ugly. It looks like admitting I want things. It looks like not mocking myself immediately after admitting I want things. Okay, fine, it looks like mocking myself only a little. At 20:55 PM, I am still here. Still stuck. Still carrying home inside me like contraband. Still afraid that my life is not a phase but the whole arrangement. Still saving possible selves in invisible carts. Still not buying the phone case. Still wanting it. Maybe that matters. I hope, it matters. Wanting. Even wanting badly. Even wanting secretly. Even wanting in a house where desire must learn to move like a shameful thief. Rot is still here, yes. But maybe rot is not the only thing loyal to me. Maybe want is loyal too. Maybe the little sapphic flag in my head, the one I have not bought, the one I have not allowed to become plastic and visible and stupidly real, is not only fear. Maybe it is also proof that some part of me still knows colour. Still recognises itself. Still presses its face against the shop window of the future and says, very quietly, not yet, but mine. Not yet. But mine.

As I write this, she, my manager, has texted again. After work hours, of course. Respecting time would be too vulgar, too modern, too dangerously close to recognising me as a person. Some work needs to be done ASAP. As she had already promised it. Naturally. ASAP: the social work's corporate mantra of poor planning, passed down from one panicked person [usually the manager] to another [the underdog] until it lands in the lap of whoever [mostly, the underdog, again] has the least authority to refuse. The funny part is, it is not even my job. Not really. But somehow the inconvenience has found my address. Now I will have to either ask the concerned person humiliatingly late at night, as if I am the villain in their Friday, or ask tomorrow, on an off Saturday, and become the tiny unpleasant notification in someone else’s weekend. This is how bad management spreads its shame. Someone does not plan. Someone does not prepare. Someone does not communicate. Then the failure travels downward, wearing urgency as perfume the gives you a migraine the moment it hits your nostrils, until the most junior person is left holding a burning plate and apologising for the smoke. I hate this part most: the forced borrowing of another person’s time. I hate that I must become the messenger of someone else’s chaos. I hate that I must sound polite while carrying a request I do not respect. I hate that my options are either to inconvenience someone else or absorb the inconvenience into my own body, which is apparently where all unclaimed work goes to die. There should be a word for this. Not burnout. Burnout sounds too final, too respectable, like a candle in a poem. This is more like being nibbled. Tiny bites of time. Tiny bites of rest. Tiny bites of Friday evening, Saturday morning, salary, self-respect, appetite, softness, desire. Nothing large enough to make a case. Everything small enough to be dismissed. Just do this once. Just check once. Just ask once. Just join early once. Just help out once. Just manage for today. Just stretch a little. A whole life can be stolen in “just.” And I know what will happen if I say no. Maybe nothing dramatic. Maybe no punishment anyone can screenshot. Just a change in tone. A slight coolness. A note in the invisible ledger. Not a team player. Not proactive. Difficult. Uncooperative. Needs attitude adjustment. The old words wearing office clothes. So I sit here, at 23:25 PM, writing about being stuck while the proof of stuckness arrives in real time. A message on my phone. A task outside my role. An urgency I did not create. A Saturday being quietly dragged toward sacrifice. And me, still deciding whether to obey, delay, soften, apologise, resist, or perform that sophisticated modern dance called “setting boundaries” while standing on a floor made entirely of consequences. Maybe I will reply tomorrow [that being, Monday]. Maybe I will say, “I’ll check this during working hours.” Maybe I will type it bravely and then stare at it like it is a bomb and then erase it. Maybe courage, for tonight, is not sending the message immediately. Maybe survival is letting one ASAP remain slightly less ASAP. Maybe rebellion begins as a notification left unread. Actually, I read it. Or maybe I am romanticising avoidance because I am tired. Both can be true. Most things that keep me alive are morally untidy.

~ Oizys.

¹ This too echoes: “The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save-the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour-your capital. The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life-the greater is the store of your estranged being.” ― Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
² The Mascarpone Collection.
³ Good reference.
⁴ An addendum for Exhibit B: A Hunger Artist by Franz Kafka.
⁵ An addendum for Exhibit E:
When I leave, I will buy the phone case.
When I leave, I will breathe normally.
When I leave, I will decorate myself without fear.
When I leave, I will not explain every harmless thing like it is a crime scene.
When I leave, I will become the version of myself who exists without whispering.