september 8th-10th. somewhere in a managerial chat window, i escaped

08th September. 

9:10 am.

i woke up earlier than usual today morning. why? did i fall asleep early last night without committing the usual, ritualistic, daydreaming with the phone in my hands trying to unsuccessfully hide it from my mother and then silently wither away into some distressed sleep after some rigid, stiff, pseudo-masturbatory vomit? maybe. maybe not.

anyway.

i woke up. i did the morning necessaries. and by the time, i reached the tea cup on the dining table against that hideous dining wall with hideous tiles of even more hideous tiles, the animosity between the mother and daughters had dissipated and the general family gelling had dawned. discussions about the day, everyone's work, timings, when will everyone be in or out.

actually. 

it may have dissipated yesterday maybe when my sister asked me to accompany her to the doctor and while returning back home we bought some grapes. and after we came back, we sat together, mother and daughters, on the same dining table discussing the hilarious incompetence of the doctor. my father came up. i froze and remained shriveled all while he was having a discussion with mother and sister which they found hilarious but i had long stopped laughing.

anyway. he left. mother and the daughters continued their discussion. but what had dissipated between us somehow found some place in me. after we all retired to our rooms, my mother tried continuing the innocent talk but what had been conserved within me in that small place was germinating, so i put an end to the questions of "oh is that coworker joining?", "oh have you decided which laptop to buy?" by saying i have no time. as she left the room, my frustration took a leap over my conscience and my hand slapped the mouse as it had been acting up because i had worked too much the whole day on the laptop. not that i wanted to intentionally produce a sound and give it to my anger publicly for my mother to hear, but there was a small moment where i did think if she heard.

that horrible little second after making a noise in anger. not guilt fully. but, something meaner. the consciousness of being heard.

while i finished my work, she had finished her dinner and was about to retire. and i replaced her at the dining table while she went to sleep. when i finished my dinner which did calm my frustration a bit, my mother had fallen asleep. i was supposed to work. but, i couldn't resist my body wanting to plop down and get buried under covers like a quiet, peaceful, hidden dead body done with the little life it had to live for the day.

morning! 

as i woke up, my mother pleasantly greeted me. funny how families regenerate overnight. some tiny domestic lizard-tail phenomenon. cut something off in the evening and by tea time the next morning there is conversation again. nobody says sorry. nobody says we are okay now. somebody asks what time you will leave. somebody complains about traffic. tea is poured. resurrection accomplished. 

after our morning discussion i came across a video where a man was talking about how to write, i couldn't focus and absorb it. so, i came back to my half-room and i watched the video. in between my fingers involuntarily would pause the video as my bouts of daydreaming would command them to. a sentence. pause. another face in my head. pause. some imaginary room. some imaginary conversation. some version of myself who apparently has all the time in the world. then back to the man explaining writing. but i ended up completing the whole video and i wrote two lines in my notebook before starting this blog. the steps, he suggested, were: observe, react, narrate. very simple. suspiciously simple. 

9:10 pm.

so, i opened a new draft to write my next blog post. but, alas! work, too much work that i ended up making a to-do list in a spreadsheet. everyone's coming and going, lunch, an unusual afternoon sleep strayed me away from writing. of course. observe, react, narrate, nap.

in the evening, as everyone's coming back was approaching, i stumbled upon a story and i read it. i will be honest, it had been a bit since i read something that gave me this experience. first, the writing was such that my understanding of the story coagulated with my emotions as i read it. i flew through the story without feeling myself flying through it. there was none of that labour i sometimes feel while reading where i can hear my own brain dragging sentences behind it. this one entered softer. somewhere beneath language perhaps. by the time i understood that something in me had been affected, it had already occupied the place. maybe it resembled some of my heavily ruminated daydreamings so it coalesced inside me, sort of?

yes. maybe.

there are stories which feel familiar because you recognise what happens in them. this one felt familiar in a more humiliating way. i recognised the weather of it. that is probably what broke something open. the quiet. the waiting. two people trying to occupy some tiny pocket of existence while everything around them keeps acquiring weight. language becoming insufficient and then becoming too much. words from one tongue bleeding into another until even speech stops behaving like a proper border. i liked that. or perhaps liked is too cheerful a word. i understood it bodily.

there was rain in the story, or the feeling of rain even when there wasn't rain. translucent fabric. dampness hanging on things. concrete. water caught somewhere. tiny insects of water on surfaces. that sort of atmosphere where the city is not openly screaming yet but something has started rotting inside its mouth. nothing needs to explode. sometimes a place only needs to become harder to breathe in. that is sufficient. the people inside it shrink accordingly. curfews. parapets. rooms. closed doors. distances which could technically be crossed but which have become morally, politically, spiritually kilometres long. and meanwhile two people are still trying to look at each other.

awful. beautiful also. but awful. because the separation was not some giant wall you could point toward and say, there. enemy. obstacle. tragedy. it lived everywhere smaller... in vocabulary, in a pause before saying a word, in whose language arrives first or gets lost first when someone is frightened, in memory losing its original pronunciation, in the body understanding danger before the mouth has assembled a sentence for it, in a city slowly becoming suspicious of the people living inside it. that got to me. especially the language. because what a miserable thing, to have the outside world insist upon clean divisions while the inside of you remains badly mixed. i think, badly is unfair. beautifully contaminated. languages getting tangled under pressure because the body does not care for ideological neatness. memory certainly doesn't. love even less. and i think that is where the daydreaming recognised its relative.

mine also likes impossible little enclosures. two people somewhere they should not be. in one room. maybe a stairwell. big a terrace. crowded train compartment. some city imagined badly from photographs. some temporary place carved out of the world where outside rules become muffled for an hour. then somebody has to leave. there is always leaving. or almost leaving. or the threat of leaving sitting in the room before anyone says it. the slow burn and build up always builds up to that leaving. sometimes i think my daydreams have spent years rebuilding the same doomed country under different names, same border, same ache, but different wallpaper. and this story had wandered too near it.

so when i finished, i had a soft release of cry that came out of that. not sobbing or even cinematic. some leaking like eyes doing their small mutiny. it felt like a scream with no sound. and it spruced and sprung up my daydreaming that i had not dreamt for a while now. suddenly those old inner rooms had electricity again. faces returned. voices. those stupid scenes i have repeated enough times that they probably have grooves in my brain now. and because the story had put that slow grief into me, the daydreamings also came back altered slightly. wetter somehow. quieter. less concerned with dramatic rescue. more with people sitting beside each other while the world makes their sitting beside each other progressively harder. this is probably embarrassing to write. good.

anyway.

one after the other people came and interrupted and one of my classes started. so, i had to tape down my cries. there is something so degrading about having to schedule emotion around institutional obligations. cry until 7:28. class at 7:30. camera off. mic muted. yes ma'am. present. i tried crying it out a bit before it started. tried pushing the feeling out quickly like one can evacuate water from a sink before someone comes to inspect the kitchen. it didn't work. feelings apparently dislike deadlines. so some of it remained. behind my eyes. inside my throat. somewhere down the sternum maybe. and there it sat while the class began and somebody spoke and slides moved and words appeared and i took notes like a person whose body had not five minutes ago been trying to grieve a fictional life because it had confused it with several unlived ones of her own. which is perhaps the whole problem. fiction does this dirty work sometimes. it finds the thing you have spent months disguising from yourself and gives it different names, different city, different people, different weather. you relax because technically none of it belongs to you. and then some tiny sentence moves. and there you are. caught!

09th September. 

10:20 am.

i tried writing more yesterday but there's just so much work. i will try to write more today but i don't think i will be able to. 

11:30 am.

i woke up early again today because i had a class. and, today, as well, there is so much work while completing side projects and searching for new jobs. all while this new story has engined my daydreaming, this particular daydreaming that's engulfing my sentience and taking all my time. making me cry while i try to stimulate with myself but i end up throwing my phone away and burying myself deep under covers burrowing into those daydreamings. i wish death would trick me into this and lap me up with its tongue and take me away forever.

not even violently. please.

something almost animal about it.

some large indifferent thing finding me half-asleep and already folded enough and carrying me elsewhere before i have the time to become afraid of being carried. maybe that is the fantasy beneath so many fantasies. not being brave enough to leave but being removed. being exempted from the act of departure. because then departure requires decision. and decision requires a self! and my self has been outsourced to so many imagined people lately. one of them says something. the other looks away. there is some rain somewhere. and a room with a weak yellow light. someone's shirt clinging damp to their back. some language failing at the exact moment it is required. then i am gone for twenty minutes. forty. an hour. work tab still open. spreadsheet still open. messages accumulating. emails waiting. real people asking real questions from the other side of the screen. and i resent them for interrupting something that does not exist. this sounds deranged when written plainly.

perhaps because it is.

i have always known maladaptive daydreaming steals time but sometimes stealing sounds too active, too theatrical. lately it feels more like seepage. my time just leaks somewhere. no burglary. no broken lock. i look up and the morning is dented. then afternoon. then night. and what exactly have i been doing? working, yes. reading, yes. replying to people. attending classes. applying for things. maybe eating. but between all these things there are these soft collapses where my brain slips into another architecture and comes back carrying grief from people who were never born. the body apparently cannot tell. it cries anyway. it tightens anyway. it gets aroused anyway, which is another humiliation. oh, the humiliation in arousal. sometimes i begin with the crude bodily intention of trying to stimulate myself and within minutes it mutates into something else entirely. no sex really. or sex has become some poor doorway through which loneliness, fantasy, shame, tenderness, possession, fear, all rush in without tickets. then the phone feels disgusting in my hand. i throw it away. turn over. pull the covers up and disappear into scenes i have already watched from inside myself a hundred times. same people. same almost-touch. same leaving. always leaving. perhaps that is why the story infected this particular daydreaming so efficiently. it gave atmosphere to something i had already built badly. suddenly my old scenes had weather. damp walls. political unease. mixed language. tired streets. a city which could punish two people simply by making every ordinary meeting difficult.

excellent.

as though my brain needed production design. and i keep returning to the imagined tenderness of people who cannot safely remain in tenderness for very long. why? i don't know. maybe permanence disgusts the mechanism somehow. if they could simply be together, then what would i do with them? send them grocery shopping? make them discuss electricity bills? perhaps yearning requires obstruction to stay alive. perhaps my brain has understood this and become a corrupt little municipality issuing permits for suffering. no uncomplicated intimacy approved within city limits. there must be a border, a family, a language, a war, a train leaving at 6. somebody married to somebody else. somebody dying. somebody unable to say the word. 

something. 

there is always some fucking checkpoint. and outside these scenes, i am supposed to procure employment. this is almost funny. my contract ends at the end of this month and every day i open job portals like a minor ritual of self-threat. scroll. save. maybe apply. close. reopen. read description. experience small spiritual death at "fast-paced environment". continue. side projects. courses. capstones. workshop draft. volunteer work. current work. future work. imaginary life. all fighting for the same badly maintained acreage inside my head. 

i think perhaps this is why i wanted to write this at 11:30 in the morning. not because anything has happened. nothing happened. that is always the stupid part. nothing happened and i am exhausted by events. inside me whole cities have been evacuated before lunch. outside, someone has asked me to update a spreadsheet.

11th September.

12:03 AM.

the whole day went by.

morning started early again today. i did some work. and i blocked those people who were having an online dispute about who is a better revolutionary by using expletives. it got a bit disgusting, my stomach revolted. there is only so much revolutionary machismo one can witness before the revolution begins resembling several men yelling outside a tea stall except now everyone has read marx and has access to quote-tweets.

maybe that is unfair. anyway, blocked.

my manager texted me early and asked if i could lead a project in my city.

i was filling up my appraisal form trying to boast as much as possible with my inferiority complex. an interesting clerical exercise. please describe your accomplishments while every molecule inside you submits supporting documentation proving you are mediocre.

i had to sit with that text. but i am thinking why i did not panic much. i did sit and think and eventually lied that i have left my state altogether for personal issues. left my state! look at her. apparently somewhere in some managerial chat window i have achieved geographic mobility. it stayed a bit with me but then it did not make me shiver, make me jittery, angry, crazy, puke. (__) there was also the disgusting embarrassment of the lie itself. how quickly it came. almost practical. somewhere inside me there is apparently an emergency bureaucrat constantly prepared with documentation for a life i am not living. yes, she has left the state. yes, personal reasons. thank you for understanding.

meanwhile she is going to come to the same city and same state. there is something pathetic and a little delicious about lying that i have escaped. for a few seconds there, in somebody else's understanding of me, i had. the daydreaming kept me occupied. i had some rice for brunch and my daydreamings engulfed me into a sweet sleep and i missed a meeting! actually missed it. not metaphorically. not spiritually. calendar meeting. people. work. gone. i woke up with that horrible post-sleep displacement where the room has become darker and the phone contains evidence that time continued without your permission.

i feel like quitting this job and not telling anyone at home. will they notice? can i procure another job immediately? if i pretend to work they might not notice. right? right? i can wake up. open laptop. sit at table. stare seriously at something. type intermittently. attend imaginary meetings perhaps. tell mother yes work is a lot today. complain strategically once or twice. everybody already understands work through closed doors and laptop screens anyway. perhaps employment itself has become sufficiently theatrical that unemployment can impersonate it for a while. and i can give job hunting full day might end up finding something? maybe. maybe i would wake up with a purpose then. job portals from morning till afternoon. applications. cover letters. tests. follow-ups. rejection emails arriving like automated condolences. 

still.

movement.

i want to leave. this job. this circumstance that has trapped me in this job with this family in this country. sometimes these things collapse into each other so badly that i cannot tell which one i am actually trying to flee. the job becomes the family because the family is why losing the job terrifies me. the family becomes the country because leaving one seems to require somehow leaving the other. the country becomes the job because every vacancy reminds me what passports, cities, salaries, qualifications, caste-class-family geography, all the invisible little border police of one's life permit and do not permit. and then there is me in the centre behaving as if the correct linkedin listing will solve the architecture. 

maybe i don't even want another job. i want another consequence on another morning by another table. a life where leaving one workplace does not threaten to expose every other dependency underneath it. but unfortunately one cannot search for "complete alteration of circumstance, immediate joining" on a job portal. or maybe one can? 

location: remote. 

so after ignoring all the piling up work that mounts on me, i daydreamt and daydreamt and reached the end of day. the strange thing about daydreaming for hours is that afterward i feel simultaneously over-lived and unused. inside, so much happened. outside, nothing got done. someone was held. someone left. somebody cried against a shoulder that does not exist. there were conversations with excellent timing. i said things without stuttering. somebody understood them correctly. whole emotional governments rose and collapsed. 

then i look at my laptop. thirty-seven unread messages. 4 unfinished tasks. spreadsheet. reality has terrible production value. 

no dinner did i have. took a shower and sat down to finally write. this blog post is becoming the only proof i have that the day occurred at all. because otherwise what happened today? i lied that i had left. then spent the day proving i hadn't.

~ oizys.

september 7th. 1:40 AM - 4:05AM. sunday night - monday morning.

september 7th. 1:40 AM - 4:05AM. sunday night - monday morning.

i try to write and fail. i set in my mind to start a blog post one day covering whatever has happened and then the distance between my set mind and unwilling body becomes larger and larger. fueled by disgusting, dangerous intrusive thoughts; disheveling, deranged maladaptive daydreaming; daunting reality; destructive environments; dull work; and my little, thin, disappointing life choices hitting me from all ways everyday. i keep thinking i will write when my head becomes a little quieter. a stupid bargain. my head has apparently interpreted 'quiet' as an unconstitutional demand. since i was twelve. or ten.

so far, since my last weblog update, nothing big has happened. i have been swamped with work, one coworker with her only true achievement of weaponized incompetence has been a menace trying to maneuver me. an old colleague has come back who would put the former colleague's maneuvers to shame. recently they collaborated to frustrate me to oblivion for a simple task of nomenclature i asked their support for. nomenclature. naming things. apparently we have reached a point in my working life where the naming of things can become a small bureaucratic war. maybe adam had it easy. one of my other coworkers has moved on to another project and we don't talk anymore. no bad blood though. so, i miss her companionship and camaraderie a lot. my manager is... well a manager. present in the metaphysical sense, i suppose. emails exist. meetings occur. managerial substances move through the atmosphere. nothing particularly useful comes out of this weather system. her habit of not paying attention to issues that i escalate and then over-dumping it on me last-minute has been aggravating me.

this coupled with my mother trying to persuade me to apply for jobs my father wants me to apply for and pushing me everyday while i try my best to survive. a job tab open. another job tab open. some examination. some vacancy. some thing father heard about from someone somewhere and therefore it must now become a possibility i am morally obliged to want. i sometimes think half my life has been other people arriving at my door carrying futures for me and becoming offended when i don't immediately crawl inside them.

meanwhile, i have been exploring the depths and scepters of communist-socialist history from USSR, Cuba, Congo, and then whichever country/person/party/split/revolution one footnote throws me into next. because, naturally, one cannot simply read one thing. one thing has a name inside it and the name has a history and the history has a disagreement and the disagreement has fourteen people who despised each other over the correct route towards liberation and suddenly it is 2 a.m. it all started with watching some photographs, speeches, and interviews of fidel castro and che guevara. its so random. my interest was randomly piqued about their friendship. so many people of who only i knew their names and now after reading more and more, i have been gaining so much understanding of the world functioning, society, human oppression, the bizarre plumbing underneath things i had previously accepted as just... things. why certain states like the u.s., israel, france, britain behave[d] the way they did. why certain countries like afghanistan, iran, congo, palestine became laboratories for everybody else's "ideology" and greed. why a person i had once stored in my head as [NAME FROM HISTORY] apparently spent their entire life walking through an argument which has outlived them. how land, labour, money, empire, class, female body, and violence keep appearing in each other's family photographs. 

and there are all these embarrassing little recognitions. 
oh. 
ohhh. 
wait. 
that is what that was? 
and, the more i read and understand, the more there is to know. 

i knew things, obviously. or knew the school books' embalmed versions of things. names in paragraphs. revolutions reduced to dates, countries made into shapes on maps, dead people flattened into two ideological sentences which could be underlined before an exam. and now. now they keep acquiring organs. motives. failures. uglinesses. contradictions. enemies who had enemies who later became friends with somebody's enemies. sometimes i feel terribly stupid. sometimes i feel like i have found a trapdoor underneath the world and instead of climbing through it properly i am crouching there with forty tabs open. 

and then there are things i come across which don't leave me alone afterward. i keep thinking about the letter ayatollah ruhollah khomeini sent to mikhail gorbachev. what a strange historical object to encounter at 1 or 2 or whatever a.m. on a laptop. khomeini writing to the leader of the soviet union in 1989, basically looking at the ideological illness of the USSR while it was still standing and telling gorbachev that whatever he was searching for could not be solved by turning westward and that the problem went deeper, into materialism itself, and then inviting him to look towards islam. there is something almost eerie to me about letters sent towards collapsing things by people who do not yet know exactly what shape the collapse will take. or perhaps they know a shape. i mean, people knew the shape of the collapse of ussr will take. everyone thinks they know the shape. a letter travelling from tehran to moscow. gorbachev receiving it. me finding it nearly four decades later because i apparently cannot read normally anymore.

and samantha smith. oh samantha smith. a ten-year-old schoolgirl from maine becoming frightened of nuclear war and doing the remarkably uncomplicated thing adults somehow make impossible: she wrote to yuri andropov and asked him, essentially, are you going to have a war? why? do you want to conquer us? and he wrote back. then invited her to the soviet union. and she went. eleven years old and she went. her courage, oh. i don't mean courage in that inflated quotation-image way people use the word after somebody has already become safely historical. i mean physically. a little girl getting on a plane and going to the country she had been taught enough fear about to write its leader asking whether he planned to destroy hers. walking around there. meeting soviet children. seeing them as children. allowing herself to find out something by going near it. i think perhaps this is why she keeps needling me. because i have spent so much of my life frightened from stationary positions. i research. i imagine. i rehearse. i construct the entire geography of danger and escape inside my skull and then continue sitting exactly where i was sitting. samantha just wrote the fucking letter. then she went. there is also something unbearable about knowing how enormous the machinery around her was. reagan. andropov. nuclear arsenals. propaganda. governments manufacturing each other into monsters large enough to justify more weapons. then this child entering the thing with the embarrassing question adults had buried beneath strategy: if neither of you says you want war then why are you preparing so enthusiastically for one?

children are humiliating like that. sometimes they accidentally uncover the entire fraud because nobody has taught them yet which ridiculous premise everybody has agreed not to question. maybe, because children have no dignity?

and then, years later, the ussr ends. not even necessarily the grand geopolitical collapse as it usually gets presented to us with flags lowering and maps changing colour and commentators declaring the end of eras. i mean the actual strange administrative lastness of it. here's the transcript hosted on .su. the supreme soviet. december 26, 1991. people sitting in a room and having to conduct a meeting while the state to which the meeting belongs is disappearing. imagine having an agenda for the end of your country. there is something so sickly human about bureaucracy surviving until the final second. a. t. alimzhanov is presiding. there are speeches. formal language. the soviet flag over the kremlin has already been lowered. the first and last president of the ussr has resigned. this enormous political project which contained generations of struggle, revolution, liberation, belief, terror, sacrifice, bureaucracy, war, childhoods, songs, queues, science, prisons, apartments, dead people, living people, millions upon millions of ordinary breakfasts has arrived somehow inside parliamentary procedure. and near the end alimzhanov wishes them a happy coming new year. says they will meet again, if not there then somewhere else. somewhere else. god. then he asks deputy nosov if he wants to speak. nosov does. "dear comrades!" and he says their decisions are illegal and invalid. that only the congress of people's deputies of the ussr has the right to decide them. (noise in the room.) that parenthesis. i just cannot get over nosov'slast cry and the parenthesis. a whole country has reached its grammatical ending and somebody responsible for producing the transcript has to put the noise somewhere, so history receives nosov's last cry and (noise in the room.) then the presiding officer essentially says the meeting is closed. all good. all good! and that is it. how does anything end like this? perhaps everything does and afterward we manufacture the ceremony. i don't know why i assumed the death of a state would know it was the death of a state while it was happening. maybe i expected history to possess better dramatic instincts. thunder. somebody saying the correct final sentence. an orchestra somewhere understanding its cue. but there they were discussing procedure, objecting to legality, exchanging new year wishes. people still had somewhere to go afterward, presumably. coats to put on. somebody must have been hungry. somebody perhaps had plans for new year's. the ussr ceased to exist and everybody still had to get home.

this is the kind of thing that has been happening to my brain lately. history has become less historical the more history i read. which is inconvenient. i used to think time made events solid. now everything seems terribly porous. countries look permanent until suddenly you are reading the transcript of their final meeting. ideologies look like enormous impersonal nouns until you find somebody's letter. the cold war becomes arrows on a map until an eleven-year-old girl goes to summer camp. and people become names until you look too long. then they become people again. terrible development for someone already prone to thinking about everything past the point of usefulness.

which, actually—

there was some new development around the people i was lurking around while i was flailing around the far-left internet and that kept some rooms of my mind occupied and took me in a ride to make me understand more and more of this weird political-internet underbelly i wrote about in the previous weblog. the suspected things, the people, people around those people, organisations, affiliations, accusations, who-followed-whom-before-who-unfollowed-whom, ideological genealogy being performed through instagram stories like some deranged family tree. i am saying development because i don't know what other word accommodates something simultaneously happening outside me and inside my already over-chewed suspicions. and of course every new thing made old things look slightly different. this is the irritating thing about learning. the furniture moves when you aren't looking.

something i dismissed three weeks ago develops a second head because now i know one additional name. somebody's old sentence becomes stranger. a photograph becomes worth staring at. a coincidence becomes either less coincidental or embarrassingly more ordinary. i go back. read again. search again. find another document. now i am staring at the internet like an auntie peeping from behind a curtain except the neighbourhood feud is ideological and half the neighbours may or may not be imaginary.

anyway.

while i have been doing all this extremely important work of becoming a poorly trained online archivist of everybody else's political lives, my own life has been throwing forms at me.

i have been selected for two more courses which i am attending, studying, working, giving exams, preparing capstone projects for every week, an old colleague has returned with a volunteer opportunity to help his organisation and a workshop from which i was rejected has come back to give me a place and expects me to submit a draft within upcoming days. rejection apparently has an appeals court. i don't think i felt any happiness though. not in an ungrateful manner. just exhausted manner. and, so much at once and i just remember my work contract ends the end of this month and i don't know if i want to survive. because surviving means facing the fact that i didn't procure any other work/contract. because surviving means i have to continue here. because surviving means i have to continue taking this humiliation while being a silent casualty of weaponized incompetence of others and ignored management with no one to take my side. because surviving means also facing the fact whether they will increase my fee or not, because the last time they did not increase at all.

and money is such a humiliatingly material thing. i can philosophise myself into dust but rent, salary, fees, contracts, loans, deposits, groceries, bills after bills after bills, bank accounts, applications... they remain stupidly solid and grow bigger. you cannot existential-angst your way into financial security. extremely inconsiderate of capitalism. no?

this month started with my father's birthday. i did not remember that it was until my father sent pictures of his office celebrating and my mother's & sister's wishes followed. mine didn't. i don't know what to do with this sentence so i will leave it there.

the week ended with a scuffle between my mother and my sister over some food my sister and i decided to order on friday night. saturday morning, well i woke up at 3 pm, it was an off day. i felt disgruntled with my mother too so we did not speak much. by the night, i had become sick. the whole day, intrusive thoughts of various unwanted worries and shame-laden memories, voices of abuser people kept assaulting me mentally and at late evening, as i sat to have my first meal of the day, dinner, after a shower, i got my period. perfect timing from the uterus. applause. although i should have predicted but i never learn. shame on me. i tried my best to not throw up and combust due to my headache. and today, my sister left to spend the night at her friend's house and said she will come back tomorrow. my mother was asleep when she left, so she had told me and asked me to pass it on, the message, as she had heard that my mother and i had majorly started speaking while i prepared my lunch. after which mother went to sleep. it was in the late evening when i told my mother and apologized that it had slipped my mind or else i would have said it sooner. she was sitting up and she sat for a minute. i think she wanted to share a look with me to start a conversation. but i delivered the message and quickly turned my head. she left the room. i did not have dinner tonight.

*

anddddd... i finally sit down to write.

some of my old existential angst and dread-like thoughts came back to me as a pang. i think they did the final push and made me start penning. maybe, nowadays, writing begins for me only when something becomes sufficiently unbearable that even maladaptive daydreaming cannot digest it anymore. then my fingers are handed the leftovers. 

i am still stuck in this room, on this chair, on this table, this laptop, this job, this city, this state, this country, this part of the world, this family, this community, this lineage that has made me such a misfit for itself and made sure i will carry this misfit-ness everywhere, in me, if i ever go. sometimes i wonder, if i can, ever? ...go? there has been so much going in my head for a person who has barely gone anywhere. sometimes i think, by now, we can all agree here, i have mistaken thinking about escape for escape itself. researching places. imagining rooms. imagining work. imagining myself walking in streets where nobody knows whose daughter i am. rehearsing the grocery shops. the window. a kettle. some ugly rented mattress. freedom apparently furnished in my head by a kettle. then i return, although i never left, and the chair is still underneath me.

i feel like folding into a crumpled paper, shrivel up to into non-existence. what ever is this life and where did i go so wrong in it? will there be a trial for this? for this cage that i have somehow domesticated myself for? will there be a judge, jury, executioner? what is the punishment for this? or do people who keep withdrawing into themselves eventually become so small in the world's eye that there is nobody left to even pronounce them missing? is that the punishment? if one keeps closing the door, then another door behind it, then another, does the world eventually accept the architecture and stop knocking? how long can somebody hide inside their own boundaries before everybody outside learns to walk around the shape where they used to be? is this how one gets forgotten? slowly enough to be alive for it? is this death?

i think... that is what scares me. disappearance has always sounded to me like an interesting event. somebody leaves. or, somebody dies. or maybe, somebody is lost. there should be a before and an after. but, i guess, there are disappearances which happen quite administratively. incrementally. nobody files anything. you answer fewer messages. your friendships become old chats you scroll through once in six months. coworkers move to other projects. somebody stops telling you something because last time you didn't answer properly. family learns which subjects will receive silence. you stop going out. people stop asking. and then one afternoon you discover the world has very politely adjusted to your absence while you were still technically occupying it. horrible. absolutely horrible. and abhorrent. isn't it?

i try to find life in me somewhere. i feel like i have sucked all my blood dry looking for life within me but alas, i feel i have died within this body. within it, many rooms. and i lied somewhere no one can find me. i keep searching for the dead body perpetually. lost. maybe that is why i keep writing rooms? room inside room inside room. closet acquiring closets. the miseritorial cot. this stupid chair. the same table. the house. the country. oh, this country. sometimes i don't know whether these are metaphors anymore. maybe i have been describing one architecture from different distances. zoom in: skull. zoom out: bedroom. zoom out: family. zoom out: community. state. country. world. somewhere between these scales a very small thing is lying down pretending to research communist history.

me, hello.

maybe i keep acquiring vocabulary because words can enter places my body cannot. ussr. cuba. congo. revolution. exile. struggle. bourgeoisie. liberation. organisation. all these enormous travelling words entering a room where their reader cannot even travel to the next city without first negotiating ten invisible borders. ridiculous arrangement. i know. and still i read.

this must mean something, i suppose. or i want it to. or i am just making it up for the sake of giving this miserable excuse of a blog update a closure. i feel there is still apparently some small scavenger inside the corpse collecting things. a name. a paragraph. an opportunity. another course. a workshop which rejected me and then returned. a volunteer project. some half-written weblog. maybe this creature is life. maybe life is giving it too prestigious a title. perhaps it is simply habit with a pulse.

i don't know. this is important.

sometimes i think of all the versions of me my daydreaming has manufactured and feel embarrassed that they have lived more than i have. they travelled. spoke. argued. loved people. left people. stood on stages. wrote books. had apartments. had political courage. had courage-courage. did revolutions. loved. built. they knew where to place their hands. they knew what to say when humiliated. they did not turn their head when their mother wanted to look at them. they knew when to speak up to their fathers. what a population. and here is their exhausted country of origin. i sit. the problem with imagining so many lives is that eventually your own begins looking like the rejected draft. annotations everywhere. [move.] [say something.] [apply.] [leave.] [eat.] [answer mother.] [finish work.] [become a person here.] and i keep ignoring editorial suggestions from reality. today's was: eat dinner. ignored that one too. i don't know where i am going with this. nowhere, presumably. geographically consistent with the rest of my life. haha! but perhaps i wanted a record that these days happened because days which happen entirely inside one room begin losing their borders. saturday becomes sunday because sleep said so. august becomes september because the computer corner changed numbers. father's birthday happens through photographs sent to a phone. somebody leaves a project and disappears. a contract approaches its end. blood arrives. mother leaves the room. sister goes to her friend's house. history happens magnificently elsewhere and time here passes through notifications.

and i am frightened that one day i will look back and discover i spent years waiting for my life to become sufficiently life-like before participating in it. what qualification does a life require before i agree that it has begun? another job? another city? another room? money? permission? courage? love? acceptance? when? how? why? me? when? i have asked when so many times that the word has become furniture too. perhaps that is what i am doing tonight. inventory. in this sad little store of mine called life.

chair: one.
table: one.
laptop: one.
body: allegedly one.
life: whereabouts unknown.

~ oizys.

The Skin Breaks As The Closet Keeps Acquiring Closets

August 17, 2026, 14:00 PM.

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

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

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

A lot has happened since July 22.

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

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

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

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

The closet drama keeps acquiring closets.

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

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

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

This is important: I don't know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh.

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

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

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

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

~ Oizys.

'The' Closet Drama

July 22, 2026. 11:20 PM

What’s a closet drama? Well. It is a play you read. Yes, that’s it. It is meant to be read by one solitary reader. Academics believe that women writers who couldn’t use their ‘voice’ employed this form of art/writing to put forth their political stances. One very well-known practitioner of this form is Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle-on-Tyne (1623–1673), who explored this tool and came to be known as one of the best-known women playwrights.¹

How did I get to know about this? Well, the past few days have been engulfed by maladaptive daydreaming about being a playwright² because the nonprofit organization I work for is doing an event, and it has plays. And yesterday, my manager asked me to conceptualize some endings for a last-minute new play in the line-up.³ She told me today that my endings were nice and hoped the director of the play [also, my big boss] would go for the first one. I liked the last one better, which was co-developed by another co-worker and me. 

Anyway, this set of daydreaming about being a playwright transitioned well from the last set about the mysterious video editor. I was searching for him recently to look up his recent work, and I found out he has been working for this very courageous, anti-establishment, subversive stand-up comedian. My daydreamings faded into him. I have been thinking a lot about his life. You know how the more you trace a person’s life backwards, going as far back as possible to pinpoint at what point they got induced with so much courage to make the choices they make. And you feel that cyclical force between their choices and courage that makes your cowardly brain a little bit cartoonishly dizzy. And when the machine of maladaptive daydreaming takes a break, the interval is occupied by its frenemy, comparison, which just makes you falter until the machine resumes.

Anyway. Whilst this has been happening in my head, the world is burning [still],⁴ and my country has been waking up. My country has been going to the streets. I am anyway a slow person in all aspects, as opposed to this exponentially advancing era. And if you are someone who, after a lot of dopamine struggles, has forgone the tech tools of this era, like Instagram,⁵ then you will understand that I could not grasp the intensity and the importance of this movement happening on the streets around me. But I will never expect, of course, that people condone my [self-?]isolatory cowardice. Why should they... all while they use their bodies on physical sites of fascism to dismantle all the structures of oppression? 

While I am stickied in my half-room, waiting for [more than a month] something to hit me so I could fantasize about becoming the next great literary mogul after I word-vomit in my unindexed Blogspot blog. I am no Emily Dickinson. Although I do have a trunk with some books. And I keep my writings hidden. But not in the trunk.⁶

Anyway. I feel it is impossible for me to be complicit in all of this because I am not morally bankrupt, of course. But my cowardice keeps me from turning my site of complicity into a site of solidarity.⁷ And I also wholly acknowledge that it is not an excuse in a state of fascism. In a state of fascism, if you dwindle around and do not resist, then you are a state apparatus, whether you like it or not.

I tried staying away from everything and just mindlessly slaving away for a morally bankrupt nonprofit that is organizing an event by creatively censoring its feminist politics for a morally bankrupt funder. They are dancing, singing, clapping, speechifying, performing, discussing, panelling. All while, in the city they are organizing it in, people are being arrested, detained, killed, molested, pelleted, beaten. 

By the way, this is the same event I was “invited to” very late, and I didn’t go.⁸ What if I had gone there? Would I have gotten anything done at work, all while being very much aware of the paralyzing ability my awareness has? I mean, any social situation can neuter the social animal in me. Just imagine, just collapsing and flailing. Did I make a better decision by not going? But what if I had gone, and that experience could have thrust me into something entirely different? 

Anyway, these questions do not matter. I mean, they do. But only for intangible feelings like regret, which only materializes to stagnate. 

While I dwell on these useless, mindless debates in passing, and the maladaptive daydreamings run in the background, subsuming my mind and body by nibbling on real life, real life still leaks in. Mother still knocks, and the inner hellish self-doubt–self-surveillance machinery in me keeps looking back at the door while the maladaptive daydreamings ushers me in.

I always draw lines to connect the home being a mini-state, the micro-oppressive bricks that keep institutional fascism alive and kicking. Is it wrong for me to draw parallels between my mother’s sudden descent into religious madness—all while, whenever she talks to me, she cribs about days passing, nights wearing down, and each date being a cross she has to bear—and the collective descent into religious madness in the society around me, as welfare is steadily dismantled while the fascists suckle on shards of democracy and dissent, and the hairy godmen dance around half-naked with sermons full of hatred, misogyny, hypercapitalism, and communal poison.

~ Oizys.

—

¹ Margaret Cavendish was a prolific poet, playwright, philosopher, fiction writer, and essayist who published under her own name. Her works include Poems, and Fancies and the closet drama The Convent of Pleasure.
² One idea that’s been permeating my brain revolves around the dowry-box trunk that my mother brought when she was married off to my father. That is where I store my books. Consider this a pre-emptive footnote 6 reference.
³ Yet again, the banality of my MDD hit me with a sock full of coins because I could not think of anything on my own.
⁴ Iran war latest: Tehran reacts after Trump's power plant warning - as president 'honours' killed troops // Israel is building a miles-long earthen barrier inside Gaza, entrenching its division
⁵ Am I the only one who feels like I am looking at stale, old self-brain-vomit when I go back to Instagram? It has become unscrollable for me.
⁶ For those who don’t know: Emily Dickinson’s profession as a poet was unknown to almost everyone during her life, and the poems we devour today were published posthumously. After her death, her sister Lavinia discovered hundreds of poems, including hand-sewn fascicles and loose sheets kept in a locked chest, with no instructions about what should be done with them. And she was a very productive poet during the Civil War in the United States. So, you get my overall reference. Also, a footnote 2 reference.
⁷ A reference to the previous blog where I quoted Nat Raha. What a hypocrite I am.
⁸ A reference to the previous blog: they asked me so late and tried to spin it as my fault, but I did not allow them.

Somewhere Between the Breach and the Body — Soft Rot / The Price of Pretending

April 15, 2025 11:41PM - April 18, 2025 13:51PM

Soft Rot

Hi. I don’t really know how to start this, except to say that I’m tired. Not just "didn’t get enough sleep" tired — more like soul-tired. The kind of tired where you sit in silence and hope something inside of you wakes back up.

Lately, I’ve been pretending a lot. Smiling at the right times, saying “I’m good!” when people ask, answering emails like I’m a machine instead of a person. And I don’t even think I realized how much I was pretending until I sat down just now and started typing. The mask is heavy, you know? It’s real heavy.

There’s this low hum of fear under everything lately — like I’m waiting for something to break, or maybe it already has and I’m just the last to notice. I keep asking myself, Is this just what being an adult is? Constantly holding it together with duct tape and good intentions?

And also, here’s the weirdest part: underneath all of that, I still have hope. I don’t even know where it’s coming from. I just… I want more. I want rest. I want to feel like I’m allowed to fall apart without the whole world crashing down with me. I want to believe that it’s okay to not be okay, and that not being okay doesn’t make me weak, or dramatic, or broken.

I’m writing this, I think, because I need to hear it from myself. That I’m still here. That I’m still trying. That showing up — even in this messy, trembling, unsure way — still counts.

Some days, I feel like I’m doing everything just enough to not fall behind. I’m replying to things. I’m showing up. I’m getting dressed most days. But I’m also zoning out mid-conversation, forgetting what I walked into the room for, and crying during toothpaste commercials.

Which, okay — maybe the dog did get adopted and that’s objectively beautiful; but also maybe I’m not okay.

I keep thinking about how everyone’s out there doing things. Running businesses. Raising kids. Writing books. Taking trips. Posting photos with glowing skin and open windows and plates of food that don’t look like cereal at 9 p.m. I’m here trying to remember if I paid that one bill or if that weird noise in my car is a metaphor.¹

There’s this version of me I keep hoping I’ll “get back to.” The one who was energized. Clear-headed. Motivated. The one who didn’t second-guess every decision or feel like the ground might just disappear under her feet some days. But maybe that version is gone. Or maybe she was never really real, just a highlight reel stitched together from better lighting and fewer breakdowns.

I think that’s the scariest part: not knowing what’s normal anymore. Like, is it normal to be this overwhelmed by existing? Is it normal to feel like you’re too much and not enough in the same breath? Is it normal to look in the mirror and not recognize the person blinking back?

And still. Still. I want to believe in softness. In resilience. In mornings that start slow and coffee that tastes like hope. I want to believe I’m allowed to be this version of me — unfiltered, unraveled, unsure — and still be worthy of love. Of belonging. Of good things.²

Because maybe surviving is enough. Maybe telling the truth is enough. Maybe this — this messy, footnote-riddled post — is the most honest thing I’ve done all month.

I used to think if I could just figure it out — the right system, the right routine, the right number of steps in my skincare — then everything would click. That peace was some kind of prize you won after optimizing your calendar and drinking enough water.

Spoiler: I am very hydrated and still feel like a disaster.

I think I’m grieving something I can’t quite name. Not a person. Not a place. But maybe a version of the future I thought I’d be living by now. The imagined life I kept dragging behind me like a blueprint I forgot how to read.

Is it normal to outgrow your own dreams?

Sometimes I catch myself fantasizing about starting over. Just—poof. New city. New name. No unread emails. No mental clutter. Just wide-open mornings and a sense of possibility. But then I realize: I’d still be me. I’d still bring my overthinking, my fears, my stuff.

So maybe it’s not the location that needs to change. Maybe it’s the way I talk to myself.

I don’t know how to be gentle with me. I know how to push through. I know how to carry things. I know how to be “fine.” But gentleness? Grace? That’s a language I’m still learning. And damn, it’s hard.³

And yet. I'm here, aren't I? Still choosing to try. Still showing up in this small, quiet way — by putting words to a feeling I’d much rather bury. That counts for something. I think it has to count for something.

I want to believe it does.⁴ 

I used to think I had to earn rest. Like I needed to cross some invisible finish line before I could sit down and breathe. But the finish line kept moving. Every time I got close, it shifted a little farther away, whispering, just one more thing. And I believed it. I kept running. 

Even when my body said stop. Even when my mind was unraveling like a thread pulled too tight. Even when all I wanted was to lie on the floor and feel something that didn’t hurt. I’ve gotten really good at disappearing without anyone noticing. Smiling with my eyes empty. Responding quickly so no one worries. Posting something light so people assume I’m fine. But inside, it’s loud. It’s chaos.

And I’m so tired of hiding in plain sight.

Somewhere along the way, I picked up this idea that I’m only lovable when I’m useful. That my worth is measured in output, or helpfulness, or how easy I am to be around. I don’t even know where that started. But it’s sunk deep. Like a root wrapped around my ribs. I want to start unlearning it. Slowly. Gently. Like peeling back armor that used to keep me safe, but now just keeps me small.

I want to ask for help without apologizing. I want to rest without guilt. I want to take up space — not with noise or hustle, but with presence. With breath. With truth. I don’t want to perform my way through life anymore. I want to live it. Even if it’s messy. Even if it’s slow. Even if some days, all I do is survive.

That still counts. I still count.⁵

And maybe — just maybe — someone out there needed to hear this. Maybe someone else is sitting in the dark, holding their breath, wondering if anyone sees them.

I do. I see you. I’m right here too.

Okay. Here it is.

I think I’m afraid that if I stop performing, if I stop being useful, pleasant, agreeable, people will leave. Not in a dramatic, movie-ending kind of way. Just slowly. Quietly. Like a room emptying out. Like silence settling in. Dust sitting down. I’m scared of being forgotten. Of being too much. Of not being enough. Of being nothing at all. All at the same time. How?

And it’s not just a fear, it’s a pattern. I’ve watched it happen. I’ve watched people drift when I wasn’t their favorite version of me. I’ve felt love shrink when I stopped shape-shifting. When I dared to say “I’m not okay.” It’s made me so good at editing myself down to the version that takes up the least amount of space.

That’s the rot. The belief that I am only valuable when I’m convenient. That love is earned by performance. That my pain is a burden. That honesty is too loud. That needs are too messy. That my real self is too much to hold. And because of that, I’ve taught myself to pre-abandon. I back away first. I detach. I ghost my own needs. I lower my expectations so no one else has to. I rehearse being left so the real thing doesn’t hurt as much.

But spoiler: it still hurts.

And what no one tells you about this kind of survival is that it works. It works. You stay safe. You stay small. You avoid disappointment. But you also start to disappear. You start forgetting what you even sound like when you’re not trying to please.

And now I don’t always recognize myself. Not in the mirror. Not in my voice. Not in the way I move through the world with carefulness instead of conviction. I want to burn the script I’ve been handed — the one that says “Be palatable. Be useful. Be fine.”

I want to write a new one that says:

Be honest. Be human. Be here. Even if they leave. Even if it’s messy. Even if I’m scared the whole time.⁶

The hardest part is knowing that I’ve done this to myself, too. Not just other people. Me. I’ve abandoned me. Over and over. Silenced myself when I needed to scream. Belittled my pain because someone else had it worse. Laughed when I wanted to cry. Said “it’s fine” so many times that the words feel like poison now. I’ve become fluent in self-betrayal. I know how to invalidate my own feelings before anyone else gets the chance. I know how to say “I don’t need anything” even when I am starving for care. I know how to ghost the parts of me that are inconvenient — the messy parts, the loud parts, the hurting parts — and pretend I am whole.

But I’m not whole. I’m cracked in places I can’t reach. And some days it feels like I’m rotting from the inside out — not in a melodramatic way, but in a quiet, invisible way. Like mold growing under the wallpaper. Like something you don’t notice until it’s everywhere. I’m scared that if people saw the real me — the whole, unedited, unfiltered me — they’d walk away. 

Not out of cruelty. Just confusion. Discomfort. Like, “oh, I didn’t know you were that sad.” And what do you even say to that?

Neither did I.⁷

There’s no redemption arc here. Not today. There’s no tidy wrap-up, no clarity, no sudden sunrise. There’s just this. The raw, unfinished truth of it all:

I am not okay. And I’m done pretending I am.

Sometimes I catch myself fantasizing about subtraction — not in a minimalist Pinterest-board kind of way, but in a desperate please-make-it-quiet way. I want fewer tabs open, fewer expectations, fewer demands to be on. I crave space. I crave silence that feels like peace instead of loneliness. I want to do less and feel more. More rooms to enter into with less sneers, less taunts, less sighs. But here’s the catch: at the very moment I’m craving less, I need more (of something else). More reassurance. More softness. More love without performance. More care I don’t have to earn. And isn’t that the paradox? I’m shrinking everything down just to make room for what I’m scared to ask for.⁸

There was a time when I loved being alone. It felt like freedom. A choice. Now it feels more like absence. Like everyone else left the party and I’m still cleaning up, unsure if they’ll come back or if they were ever really here for me in the first place. I don’t know when solitude turned into exile, but I miss the version of me that found comfort in her own company.⁹

I’m tired of being congratulated for coping. For pushing through. For showing up when I’m crumbling inside. There’s this strange praise people give — “Wow, you’re handling so much!”¹⁰ — and it always feels like a compliment wrapped around a cry for help. Like I’m being rewarded for performing wellness while actively falling apart. I don’t want to be resilient today. I want to be soft. Fragile. Unremarkable. I want to exist without being strong all the time.

There’s a fire under this fog. I don’t show it often — it doesn’t look pretty in Instagram captions or Zoom meetings. But it’s there. A deep, guttural frustration at how much I’ve had to endure while smiling. How much I’ve sacrificed for the sake of “not making things harder for anyone else.”¹¹

And I am angry. Angry that I was told to be nice instead of honest. Angry that burnout is treated like a badge instead of a warning sign. Angry that asking for less is seen as laziness and wanting more is seen as greed. And yet — even in the middle of this emotional graveyard — something keeps blooming. It’s not loud. It’s not dramatic. It’s more like a flicker. A whisper. That maybe tomorrow could feel different. That maybe I’m not beyond repair. That maybe something good could still find me, even now. Even here. Hope isn’t a clean thing. Nor soft.¹² It’s messy and suspicious and often shows up in disguise. But it’s here. And I’m learning to let it stay.

I don’t know what version of me will read this months or years from now. I don’t know if she’ll still be tired, done, waiting for the end or if she’ll be lighter, freer, whole or if she'll be she anymore in ways I can’t imagine yet. But I hope she’s proud of me. Of this. Of the trying. Of the truth. I hope she looks back and whispers, “You didn’t give up. Even when it would’ve been easier.”¹³ There you go, that's the hope. The cyclical hope. Hoping for misery (of the future) to disappear while stewing in misery (of the present). Could there be a more Miseria ending?

The Price of Pretending

And now, there’s this new weight — not just emotional, but economic. A slow, creeping violence that wears a suit and calls itself a delay. My salary’s late. Again. And again.¹⁴ And what begins as frustration calcifies into fear. Into guilt. Into the shame of needing what you’ve earned and being made to feel like asking for it is rude. Aggressive. Ungrateful.

Every email I draft to HR feels like an apology. Every sentence is padded in “just checking in” and “kindly requesting” and “if you could please.”¹⁵ As if I’m not fighting for my own livelihood but begging for crumbs. My fingertips are laced with guilt ink, trembling between professionalism and desperation.¹⁶

This is economic abuse with a polite face.¹⁷ It doesn’t scream. It doesn’t hit. But it erodes. Quietly. It makes you question your worth. It makes you doubt your right to stability. It forces you to live in a suspended state — a constant limbo of waiting, adjusting, shrinking.

It’s rapid and vapid, this cycle—when you work in the social sector, giving everything, day and night, for the good of society… and then, when you ask for what you’re owed—what you’ve earned—you’re made to feel like you’re committing a crime. Why?

Why is it that when we advocate for survivor-centric approaches, trauma-informed care, and rights-based systems,¹⁸ our work is praised, published, applauded, and passed around like sacred scripture? But when we demand the same principles within our own organizations—when we say, "treat us like humans, too"—suddenly we’re “ganging up”?

What else are we supposed to do? We have no money. All we have is each other.¹⁹ If we raise our voices together, it’s called rebellion. If we stay silent, it’s compliance.²⁰ Is suffering a requirement to prove our commitment? Is living in pain and overdrafts the currency we pay to access institutional empathy?

Or worse—is our pain their business model?²¹
Is our exhaustion the raw material they polish into reports and pitch decks for donors? Do our trauma-informed designs only matter when they’re outward-facing, never inward-lived?²²

Because it’s starting to feel like we’re not just holding space for others’ pain—we’re being bled for it. Wrung dry for "the cause," while we teach self-care we can't afford, and preach boundaries we’re punished for having.

Home? That sweet, supposed safety net? It turns into a trap the second I crack. The moment I fall apart, I know it’ll snap back and chew me whole — the judgments, the side-eyes, the suffocating “we’ve all had it worse” silence. So I swallow my truth and I budget in fear.

This isn’t just one bad month. This is a pattern that’s so familiar it feels etched in my DNA.²³ Things fall apart. They always do. They get so, so bad. And then maybe—maybe—they start to rise. But I’m tired of surviving the bad. This time, I don’t have the strength to carry the fall again. I want out.

I daydream about running away. Just leaving. Starting over somewhere with clean air and no emails and mornings that don’t begin in dread. I imagine it so vividly it hurts. And then I tuck the fantasy away like a bruise I can’t show. Another scar. No wound. No blood. Just absence.

Footnotes:

¹ It’s probably both. The sound is coming from the dashboard and my fear of failure. Cool cool cool.

² That part was hard to write. My fingers hesitated. But I’m leaving it in. Because I think someone else needs to hear it too.

³ My default setting is “Do better.” The idea of saying “You’re doing your best” makes me want to cry, which probably means I need to hear it more.

⁴ If you’re reading this and nodding along — hi. You’re not alone. I don’t know you, but I’m rooting for you like it’s my full-time job.

⁵ If you only brushed your teeth and scrolled aimlessly today, that’s still something. You’re still here. You’re still trying. That is not small.

⁶ What if the people who leave were never really holding me to begin with? What if the ones who stay — even when I’m raw and real and ruined — are the only ones who matter?

⁷ Grief isn’t always loud. Sometimes it’s just not answering texts and forgetting how to be excited about anything.

⁸ Also, I’m not talking about Marie Kondo “sparking joy” minimalism. I mean the kind of minimalism where your nervous system stops playing the Jaws theme during every group chat notification.

⁹ There’s a difference between being alone and being forgotten. One feels like peace. The other feels like being erased in real time.

¹⁰ Yes, I showered. No, that doesn’t mean I’m emotionally stable. It just means I couldn’t handle one more thing smelling bad today.

¹¹ I want to punch the air every time someone says, “Just take a bubble bath.” Like yes, L, let me exfoliate my generational trauma.

¹² Hope is stubborn. Like a dandelion pushing through concrete. And I hate it for making me believe things could get better. But I also need it. Desperately.

¹³ Also, future-you is gonna be so grateful you kept these words. Even the messy ones. Especially the messy ones. She’s gonna look back and whisper, “Damn. Look at you. Still showing up.”

¹⁴ Yes, I’m aware rent doesn’t accept “emotional satisfaction” as payment. I checked. Repeatedly.

¹⁵ "Just follow up again?” Sure. Let me rephrase my trauma in Excel-friendly language one more time.

¹⁶ The only thing worse than writing a “salary delay” email is re-reading it to make sure I sound grateful enough to not be blacklisted.

¹⁷ If you're wondering what economic abuse looks like in nonprofits, it's often wearing a kurta, quoting Paulo Freire, and ghosting your invoice.

¹⁸ It's funny how “dignity” is always in the mission statement, just never in the payroll cycle.

¹⁹ For a sector built on empathy, we really know how to professionally gaslight our own.

²⁰ HR: “We hear you.”
Me: cool, can you pay me though?

²¹ They say “we’re all a family here.” If this is a family, it’s the kind that eats its young.

²² The real irony? Our trauma-informed workshops have better care models than our actual HR policies.

²³ I want a world where being paid on time isn’t seen as a privilege, but as the bare minimum.

P.S.: This footnote idea taken as an inspiration from Emily Moran Barwick. You can read her post, Hi. I'm Terrified, Creatively Constipated, and Existentially Angsty as Fuck. And I'm Judging Every Word of This Post. And It's Not What I Want It to Be. It is amazing, so amazing, that you will never come back to my blog. 

P.P.S.: If you made it this far, congratulations. You’ve survived my nervous system’s entire PowerPoint presentation. And, I know what you're thinking: "Honestly, this could’ve been an email. To your therapist. But here we are."

- Oizys.

Tonight, Like Some Nights

As I have grown closer to my mother, we have these fleeting, intense, packed-with-emotions conversations sometimes. It is so deep and one with the soul that it almost makes me nostalgic about a connection I never thought I hoped for. But almost every conversation is also followed by a nagging sadness because almost every conversation is about the familial adversities that we both are stuck in. The empathy is underlayer with the longing for a conversation about a moment of happiness that feels elusive to the bones. Every talk is an act of writing a sad poem on a dry night of loo. Every exchange feels like staring at own's wretched existence in the mirror. Every story of the past shared liquifies my insides. Curdles my gut. And, I can't help but shake one constant thought. The thought of living with these experiences for the rest of my life. Stuck to my skin like the sweat in the desert afternoon. Embedded in every benign act of randomly eating a bucket of ice cream in the middle of a lonely night. And yet, there’s a strange warmth in it. A bittersweetness that swells and contracts in my chest, like a storm that never fully breaks. It’s a warmth that lingers long after the conversation is over, like the trace of a smile you’re not sure you saw, but you feel it in the air. It’s as if we’ve both unlocked a door to a place we never thought we could reach, a place where pain and tenderness intertwine. Where silence is a soft hum, the only sound that resonates when the words fall away.

But then—always then—there’s the guilt, too. Guilt for even daring to feel anything close to peace in the same breath as the ache. Guilt for wishing, in some quiet corner of my mind, that the pain could be less. That we could just talk about anything else. But it is, and it isn’t, that simple. Each word spoken feels like it’s steeped in the years we both carry, wrapped tightly around our ribs, squeezing us from the inside. Each silence, too, is like a stretched thread of memory that won’t snap. And I wonder, sometimes, whether the weight will ever stop pressing on us, or if it’s simply become a part of us, like a shadow.

I catch myself wanting to say something comforting, something that will dissolve the tension in the room. But what words are there? What words exist to undo a lifetime of bruises that run deeper than skin? What soft promises can replace the unspoken fears that tether us together, even as we try to walk in opposite directions? Every conversation with her feels like a tug of war-between the present and the past. And I feel the pull. Oh, how I feel the pull.

But it’s the waiting, isn’t it? The waiting that gnaws. The waiting for some definitive moment when the storm breaks, when the clarity we crave lands like a rainstorm that washes the dust away. But it never does. So, we keep dancing with the storm. We move through the chaos. And we are the storm. I think about it—about the incessant thirst for something we can’t quite name. Maybe that’s it. The words never come because there’s no language for the longing to break free, to just once exist in a moment untouched by all that was before, by all that drips from the walls of our memories.

Instead, we speak, again and again, of the same old things. And each time, it’s like trying to catch the wind in my hands—slipping through, shifting with the seasons, always just out of reach.

There is a force. A force that has no name, but it is. It’s the thing that winds itself into the very fabric of every conversation, every glance shared, every quiet moment between us. It’s a cold current that runs through the veins of our shared history, like a curse that was passed down, unbidden and unwelcome. It has shaped our minds, our hearts, and our movements before we even understood what it was. And when I look at my mother, I do not simply see the woman who gave birth to me. No. She sees the extension of that force—woven into the lines of my mother’s face, pressed deep into her tired shoulders, sewn into the sorrowful arch of her hands. It’s a genetic inheritance. A chromosome etched with scars of a life lived under something: something larger, something oppressive, something that has crushed womanhood into a form so unrecognizable that even she no longer knows what it is to be her—the her that was once unburdened, free of a history that collapsed on itself.

And I, oh, how I long to see the woman—the woman—that my mother could have been, could have still been, if not for the weight of the world that was handed down to her, piece by piece until there was nothing left but the hollow shell of a woman. I wonder if my mother ever knew what it was like to laugh without caution, to love without the worry of breaking, to be soft without the fear of being broken. But those are questions that are always too much. Those are questions that cannot be asked, because who would answer them? Who would dare to speak of a womanhood that was forcibly twisted, torn apart, and remade into something survivalist—something that could only exist through sacrifice and silence?

I try. I try to find even the slightest trace of it—my mother’s womanhood—as if it were a secret hidden beneath the surface of a story never fully told. I look for cracks in the armour of my mother’s exterior, hoping that the essence of her—the one that was never allowed to blossom—would somehow slip through like water trickling through the tiniest fissure in a dam. I want to catch a glimpse of it. Just once. To feel the pulse of womanhood that is hers too, buried somewhere deep within my dear mother.

But the cracks are few, and those that do appear are thin and fragile, fading almost as soon as they appear. I chase them, hands trembling, desperate to catch something—anything—that will prove that my mother’s womanhood still exists somewhere inside her. Maybe in the way she hums while commanding, in the way, her eyes soften when they talk of their lost loved ones, or perhaps in the brief moments when she forgets to hide her tears. I hope that if I hold on long enough, I can peel back the layers of resignation and see it—just for a fleeting second. But what I see instead is a woman who no longer knows how to be anything other than what life has made her.

And so I fight it. I fight the thought. The thought of becoming her mother. The thought of inheriting the very same fate—the same shadow that hovers over our lives like a distant storm. I try not to think of it, but the pull is always there. I am always one breath away from it, one step from falling into that same cycle of survival, of becoming a woman who is nothing more than a reflection of what has been done to her, who is nothing more than a version of what she was told to be, and nothing else.

And yet—there is a relationship. A refusal to be shaped by the same hands that shaped my mother. But the fear is there, too, gnawing at me, making me wonder if all my attempts to break free will only result in me becoming the very thing I dread. It’s a haunting, and it will not let me go.

Nights like tonight are when the weight of it all becomes so heavy, so palpable, that the air itself feels thick with the tension of unspoken things. I lie awake, the moonlight spilling through the window, but the shadows still stretch long and narrow across my thoughts. I wonder—sometimes desperately—whether there is a place where the echoes of my mother’s life will fade, where I will not always hear the whisper of that same cold current running through my veins, always reminding me that the past is never truly past. I wonder if there’s a way to sever it—to cut the thread that binds me to a history she can neither escape nor fully embrace.

And yet, there is no escaping it. No severing the cord, because it exists in my skin, my bones, my breath. It exists in the subtle ways I hold my hands, the way my voice quivers when I speak of things I cannot forget, the way I stiffen when the world presses too hard. My mother’s history is my history now, inextricable, woven into the very fabric of my being, like an ancient song that I was born knowing the words to, even though I never asked to learn them. And so, there are moments, too, when I am not fighting against it—when she is not running—but instead, I am simply sitting in it. Silent, still, like the calm before a storm that never fully breaks.

There are days when the weight of that inheritance feels like a blanket that has been folded too tightly, too many times until it is impossible to shake it free. But then, there are the moments in between—the flickers of something soft, something tender—that remind her that she is not simply defined by the past. There are the cracks that reveal something else, something deeper than the scars of survival. There are the glimmers of light in my mother’s eyes when she speaks and the days before all the sorrow before the world had taken what it could and left them both with what remained. There is the warmth of her hand on my arm when the words fail us both, and we simply sit together in silence, not because we have nothing to say but because there is nothing more to be said. And in that silence, there is a tenderness, a recognition of shared grief, of something that can never be untangled from the knots of their lives.

And in those moments, I allow myself to soften just a little. To stop fighting for a future that doesn’t bear the same weight. To breathe, just for a moment, in the space between our shared silences. I let myself feel it—the warmth, the tenderness, the connection that exists between us, even when the storm is raging. For all the heaviness of our history, there is something undeniably real in this bond we share. Something fragile and beautiful, like the way a broken flower still manages to bloom.

But even as I allow myself this brief release, I know that the storm is never far behind. The weight of my mother’s life, my own inherited burdens, will sit there, just beneath the surface, like a tide that is constantly pulling at her. It will always tug at my edges, shape my thoughts, and seep into my dreams. And yet, I know—somewhere deep inside—that there is strength in this, too. Strength in the knowing that I carry both the pain and the possibility of something more, something beyond the confines of the past. There is strength in surviving, in standing firm against the pull of history, even if it feels like a losing battle some days.

Because there is something within me that refuses to be extinguished. Some stubborn flicker of hope, of defiance, that whispers even when everything else is quiet: you are not your mother. You are not just the sum of all the wounds that came before you. You are more than this.

But then, the pull comes again. The pull of that force. The pull of my mother’s history, my mother’s pain, my mother’s unspoken stories. The pull of becoming the woman who has survived everything, who has lived under the weight of the world’s cruelty and kept going. The pull of becoming the woman who holds it all inside, who carries the scars of every battle fought and lost, but still stands—still stands, even when everything else falls away.

I see it sometimes, in the curve of my own reflection. I see the trace of it in the way my fingers curl around the edges of my mother’s hand, the way her eyes flicker with a sadness I cannot name. I feels it, too, in the way my own shoulders have begun to curve under the weight of things I was never meant to carry. And I wonder, as I stares into the mirror of her own existence, whether this is my fate—to be forever caught between the echoes of the past and the desperate desire to escape it. To be forever searching for something that is both mine and not mine—something that I long to touch, to understand, to claim as my own.

But there is also something else—a quiet resilience, a soft, unwavering light—that refuses to be drowned by the weight of history. Something that whispers, even when everything else is heavy, that the storm will pass, even if it never fully breaks. Even if the words never come. Even if the past never lets go. You are still here.

And so, the dance continues. The storm swells, recedes, and swells again. I am caught between the past and the present, between the woman my mother was and the woman I am becoming. She is both at once—torn, pulled, stretched across time and space. But in my chest, there is a small, stubborn beat of something more—a reminder that even in the darkest of storms, there is always something worth holding on to. Even if that something is just the quiet belief that one day, the storm will finally, somehow, break.

And when it does, I will be there. I will be standing—undone, maybe, but also whole in a way that is my own.

On nights like tonight (and the past few nights passed), when the room is thick with the smell of aging walls and the soft hum of the world outside, I lie beside her mother, both of us caught in the stillness of a moment we don’t dare break. The air is heavy, like it knows something that neither of us can name. My eyes trace the outline of my mother’s face in the half-light, the way the lines have deepened over time, carved into her skin by years of carrying burdens no one should have to bear. And in those moments, in the weight of her gaze, the force—the unnamed force—seems to pulse, like a shadow cast long before their time.

I can feel it in the silence between them, like the ghost of a conversation that never fully formed. It wraps around us both, thickening the space until it’s almost suffocating, as if the past is pulling at them from all sides, refusing to let go. I try to breathe through it, but the weight of it—the inherited weight—presses against my ribs. It’s there, lodged in the creases of my chest, the way my mother’s exhaustion is so clearly her own now. The way the longing for something—anything—more, something other than this, grows with each passing night.

And I wish, then. I wish with a desperation that rattles my bones, that some tide would come—some great, merciless wave that would crash down on us both, sweeping away all the pain, all the history, all the things that bind us so tightly to each other. I wish for the force to be undone, for the unspoken bond to unravel, to dissolve into the night like sand slipping between fingers. I wish for an end. An end to the weight, to the heavy silence that we have both carried so long, the unbroken chain of survival and sacrifice that has kept us locked in this shared grief.

What would it be like to finally breathe free of this? To feel the warmth of the sun without the shadow of the past creeping over it? To live in a world where the past no longer demands so much of them—where the force does not wind its way into their every word, every glance, every touch?

But there is no tide, no great wave that will sweep it all away. I know that as soon as the thought forms, the impossible nature of it settles over me like a shroud. No tide will come to erase the weight. No wave will cleanse them of what has been handed down, generation to generation. They are bound to it, always.

And yet, there are nights like tonight when the longing for that impossible freedom is so fierce it burns—when I lie here beside my mother, not daring to speak, not daring to disturb the fragile quiet between us, and I ache for a life for me and my mother untouched by the force that binds us both. I ache for a future that isn’t a continuation of the past, for a world where I do not have to carry this same burden, the same history. But even as the ache swells within my chest, I knows that the past cannot be undone. The force cannot be undone.

It is a tide, in a way, but one that pulls us both under. One that keeps them from ever truly breathing free. And in that quiet, as the night stretches on, I lie there beside my mother who is softly snoring, feeling her exhaustion, the weight of it all pressing against my chest, the way the past is never far, always so close. And I wonder, just for a moment, if this is what it means to be tethered to something larger than yourself, something that stretches back through time, binding you to it in ways you cannot escape.

The force is not just a shadow, not just an inheritance. It is a stronghold—a prison built into the very bones of who we are. And on some nights like tonight, as I lie beside my mother, I feel the walls closing in, and I wish—just once—that it could all stop. That the weight could be lifted, even for a moment. That we could stand in the quiet, not as survivors of what has been done to them, but as women, as people, untethered from the past.

But there is no escape. There is no breaking the cycle. The force is too deeply embedded, too entrenched in the soil of their shared existence. And yet, even in the face of that, I keeps breathing, keep fighting, keep hoping that one day—maybe one day—it will be different. That the storm will pass. That the unspoken weight will be lifted, if only for a brief moment, so that they can feel the sun on their faces without the shadow of what has come before.

But tonight is not that night. Tonight, the force presses down on us both, and we lie here together, bound by the silence, the weight, and the yearning for something more that neither of us knows how to name. And in the quiet, I am left with the single, relentless thought: Will it ever end?

But even in that thought, there is a flicker. A faint, stubborn hope that refuses to go out.

But hope is an elusive evil, a trickster that dances just out of reach, teasing me with promises it cannot keep. It feasts on the wretchedness of our mother-daughter dance, gnawing at the edges of our connection, as if it were something to be grasped, something worth chasing. But the more I reach for it, the more it slips away, like sand caught between trembling fingers. It is not the kind of hope that heals or redeems—it is a shadow, an illusion that feeds off our shared suffering, luring us both into a cycle of longing for something that cannot exist. Not in this world. Not in the confines of this life that they are bound to, this life shaped and twisted by the hands of a patriarchal system that has never allowed us to simply be.

For in this system, hope is not a gift—it is a weapon. A tool of manipulation, wielded by the outside world, the masculinistic forces that shape everything from our identities to our realities. Hope tells us, “You can be more. You can rise above. You can transcend.” But these are lies. Hope whispers that freedom is possible, that we can one day escape the weight of our inherited history, escape the clutches of the force that defines our relationship. But in the end, it is only a mirage, a false promise that leaves us empty. The system that birthed us, that shaped us, that has taught us the art of survival in silence, does not offer hope. It offers compliance. It offers endurance, as though endurance were the greatest form of victory.

I see this, even in the quiet moments of connection with my mother. Hope, in its purest form, is the ultimate form of betrayal for women like us. For it teaches us to keep longing, to keep wishing, to keep fighting for a world that will never be ours. A world built on the backs of women like my mother, like me—women who have been reduced to nothing more than vessels of survival, vessels that carry the weight of the world on their shoulders, without ever being allowed to let it down.

The force that binds us, the one that has shaped our lives and our relationship, is no accident. It is the byproduct of a world that has systematically stolen from us—not just our bodies, but our stories, our futures, our right to exist without the burden of the past. And in that world, hope is merely a tool used to keep us shackled, to make us believe that something better is coming, that the tides will change, that there will be light after the storm.

But every time I dare to hope, I feel the weight of that truth pressing on my chest like a hand that will not lift. I feel my mother’s history coil around my own—every step my mother took in her shoes now feels like my own, every ache, every loss, every piece of my womanhood torn away to fit into a mold that was never meant to hold me. Hope, then, becomes a cruel reminder of what we can never have. It is a yearning for a future that the world will never grant us.

And yet, there are moments—those fragile, fleeting moments—when hope creeps back in. Like a soft breath against the skin, a whisper of a promise that maybe, just maybe, they are wrong. That maybe the world will change. That maybe I will not carry the same weight, will not be bound in the same ways. Maybe—just maybe—there could be a place for me, for my mother, outside the prison of this society. But I know better now. I know the game. I know that hope is not a ladder out of this pit—it is the very thing that keeps me falling deeper.

For the patriarchal world we live in will not release us. It does not want us to rise, to stand in our womanhood unapologetically. It only wants us to bend, to bow, to endure. And so, hope becomes a tool of compliance. A whisper that tells us that if we just try harder, if we hold on just a little longer, then we will be free. But I know better. There is no freedom in hope. There is only the weight of the chains that it keeps hidden in its promises.

The force that binds us will not be undone by a dream of something better. It will not be swayed by desire or longing. It is the product of generations of women who have been forced to bend to the will of the world, who have been conditioned to survive without ever being allowed to live.

And still, I lie beside my mother, the force pressing against my chest, the weight of the past always there, always close. And in that moment, there is no hope. Only the pull of a reality that cannot be escaped. Only the realization that we are both part of a machine, a system that is too large to defeat, too entrenched to dismantle. But even as the realization settles in, there is something else—something that stirs deep within me.

It is not hope, but something else—something that cannot be named. A quiet, soft, blurry fire, a defiance that burns even in the face of all the forces stacked against them. It is the last piece of our womanhood, the last piece of ourselves that the world has not yet stolen. And though it may not change anything in the world, it is enough. Enough to stand here, beside my mother, in the quiet, and know that we are still here.

Still alive. Still fighting, even if we are not yet free.

And perhaps that is the one truth the system, the force cannot take from us: the persistence of our existence, in spite of everything, is our resistance.

- Oizys.

P.S. - I know this entry is ridiculously long and intellectually redundant. The night is long too, and it won’t pass. So, I did not stop until my eyes dried up, and until my bile rose, and until the hands gave up.