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.
Sunday, September 6, 2026
september 7th. 1:40 AM - 4:05AM. sunday night - monday morning.
Monday, August 17, 2026
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.
Wednesday, July 22, 2026
'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.
Monday, June 29, 2026
The Loop of Lowly Bargains
To escape this hold, I threw myself into the absolute torture of the job search loop. I applied. I followed up. I scratched at the skin of my soul to pull out professional-pretty words for a temporary position that offers disgustingly low pay. It forces me to move to a massive, hyper-capitalistic city where the starvation wages won’t even cover the rent of a closet. I sent them a list of basic, structural questions about the contract. They didn't answer. They completely ignored the text, bypassed my autonomy, and simply sent back a cold, automated job interview link with multiple calls on a weekend. The absolute frustration of being treated like a blank, faceless line of data makes my blood run hot. Is it my fault, though? Am I the problem? The endless bucket of guilt drops down on me, whispering that I am lazy, that I am a fraud of a social worker who doesn't know how to struggle in the real world. But is it truly a crime to refuse to jump from one burning cage into a slightly larger, more expensive burning cage? Why must the only option for survival be a submissively low surrender to an economy that demands total consumption for zero return?
you are a flicker on a glass screen,
a hand drawing borders for a creative crony king.
then I saw you trade the mogul’s golden lease
for the loud, anti-establishment machinery of peace.
now the track goes cold, the wires disconnect,
I do not know whose house you currently protect.
but I build a middle-station in my head:
a city where I stop before I cross the sea,
a city where I find you on my way back to me.
no romance... just a heavy, tangled weight,
deep, intensely confusing friction at the gate,
where my skin forgets the state.
Lately, the real world has become so loud, so violent, that my mind has engineered its own total blackout. To numb the chemical burn of these daily violences, I have descended completely into a deep, heavy, and extensive state of maladaptive daydreaming. I fade out. It is a violent physical pulling away, a slow-motion detachment where my eyes glaze over, the walls of this shabby room dissolve, and my consciousness is dragged backward into the dark, velvety lining of my own skull. My breathing slows until I am barely a tenant in my chest, completely slipping away from the physical gravity of my life.
I spend hours trapped inside this hyper-fixated illusion, letting the phantom of this stranger sedate my nervous system. I imagine a life mapped out around him. I imagine visiting him in that massive city, a deliberate, quiet layover on my way before leaving the country for work, and again on my way back. There is no neat, romantic paperwork in this dream. Instead, it is defined by a deep, heavy, intensely confusing kind of emotionally-charged relationship, a friction so thick and disorienting that it temporarily drowns out the historical ownership of my body, rewriting my nerve endings in a language the dictators of my past cannot read.
But I have noticed a terrifying, unyielding pattern in these daydreams. The script is always the same. It always starts with me as this alternative person, someone who completely lacks mainstream attention, but who holds a quiet, undiscovered cool. In the early stages of the dream, he is given all the credit for finding me out, for excavating me from the dust beneath the bed storage where the rest of the world left me archived.
But as the relationship unravels, my own reality begins to poison the fiction. In tandem with the daydream, I find myself frantically scouring the actual internet, furiously inspecting his life’s trajectory, his surroundings, his words, his views, analyzing his old videos, and pinning down random dots on the physical map of his world. I hunt for data, but all I find are weapons to use against myself. Those real-world details feed directly into my subconscious, culminating in an absolute, suffocating wave of insecurity. The dream-architecture cannot hold the weight of my damage. I systematically frame the relationship’s end as a tragic, inevitable undoing. A self-inflicted sabotage where I prove to myself that even in my own head, I am unlovable. And with that collapse, the narcotic high of the daydream violently breaks. The illusion shatters, and my physical body comes crashing down onto the mattress, twice as heavy and hollowed out as before.
The domestic surveillance of this familial state only heightens the crash.
A few days ago, I walked into the hallway and caught my mother with her ear clamped tightly against my sister’s bedroom door. Her face was pressed to the wood, a literal apparatus of the family regime. I asked her quietly what she was doing. She didn't even flinch. She just whispered that she was checking who my sister was talking to. In that chilling, micro-second of realization, the architecture of the house shifted. I realized she must be doing the exact same thing to me. She is listening through the plaster, patrolling my borders while I sleep.
Yet, in the thick depth of my mind, I keep forgetting. I slip so deeply into those intense, imaginary worlds that my physical armor completely drops. These moments of raw, vulnerable escape are abruptly shattered when my mother suddenly enters the room.
Lately, though, something even more unsettling has started happening. For some time now, I have noticed she knocks a bit before entering. This tiny, uncharacteristic delay goes completely against the raw, invasive fabric of our society. It feels terrifyingly deliberate. From her perspective, it makes me acutely, agonizingly aware of my own unraveling. It is as if she knows I am losing my mind under this ceiling; she is knocking out of a strange, clinical pity, giving the crazy girl a few seconds to hide her symptoms.
When she stands in the doorway, the whiplash of being dragged back from my mind into the room creates an almost physical terror. All the suppressed, heavy emotions inside me feel like metallic feelings violently springing out of my skin, pulling and tearing against my flesh under the invisible, high-voltage magnets of an MRI machine. I am raw, exposed, and magnetic, trapped in the gaze of the woman who broke me, while my mind desperately tries to crawl back into its hole.
I desperately need a new job. The daily reality of my current workplace is becoming a slow, poisonous chokehold. The entire institution is slipping rapidly into a hyper-nationalistic, capitalistic machine, a loud perpetuator of the oppressive status quo, all while wrapping itself in a deceptive, performative branding as the "Pioneer of change and equality." The sheer hypocrisy of the state apparatus wearing a mask of liberation makes me sicker and sicker with every shift. I am suffocating under their neat, non-profit corporate lies. I need an exit route that pays a decent work-from-home wage, or something that pays well enough to physically launch me far away from my hometown... or better yet, entirely out of this country.
I just want a life. A real life, far away from this non-life, this thin life, this malnourished, degraded, and thoroughly humiliated existence. Please. I wish I believed in gods. This exact moment feels like the kind of heavy, desperate juncture where a human being should be on their knees, weeping and begging a higher power for a clean deliverance. But there is no altar here. Instead, all I see is my mother descending deeper into her own brand of religious madness. She spends her days chasing local godmen, traveling to their crowded talks in the scorching, oppressive summer heat, only to crawl back home entirely sick and dehydrated. Nobody else in this house will take care of her. So the duty falls on me. I am forced to lull her physical pain, to tend to the woman who polices my borders, simply because we share the exact same room and her sickness occupies my air. To lull my own mental pain, to survive the suffocating geometry of this shared bedroom, I turn the static back on. I close my eyes and fantasize about random men who sporadically appear in random online videos, rewriting them into my partners. I drag these digital strangers into my isolation, using their fictional warmth to block out the sound of my mother's religious broadcasts and the terrifyingly slow click of the door handle. I am a captive building empires out of ghosts, praying to a screen because the sky is completely empty.
The terrifying truth is that the further I move forward in life, the deeper I sink into the floorboards of this house. This hole of a waiting room is no longer a temporary pause, I believe. I feel it transforming into a dense, unyielding black hole of my own futile existence. The gravitational pull is total. I can never seem to locate or situate my adult self anywhere in the modern world, because whenever I reach inward to find a coordinate, I am violently dragged back to the exact same origin point. I am forever that lonely, terrified little schoolgirl, trapped between the walls of a deeply traumatic home and the hostile, suffocating desks of a bullying school, with absolutely nowhere else to go. That childgirl’s identity shapes the entire architecture of my adulthood. It dictates the oversized, protective clothes I choose to wear, acting as a soft shield against the world’s gaze. It governs the defensive way I work, the raw, bleeding ink with which I write, and the paranoid loops in which I think. It is the filter for how I feel, how I clumsily exist among others, and how I desperately fail to socialize, pulling my borders tight whenever a stranger gets too close. I am a twenty-five-year-old-plus woman walking through a neat, polite "democracy", but underneath the skin, I am still just that little girl under the desk, waiting for the blows to land, completely unable to find an exit from the day I was broken.
I wish I could want death even. But even that is no longer there; the wish to die has died along with the rest of my vitality. There is an absolute, staggering death of wantingness inside me. I cannot even summon the passion required to desire my own erasure. Desire itself has been completely hollowed out, leaving a flat, calcified plain where the hunger for an end used to burn. It is a terrifyingly quiet state of existence. To be completely devoid of appetite, to look at both life and the void with the exact same unblinking, indifferent eyes. Now, I don't want to end myself; I wish the world would end. I wish the entire hyper-nationalistic, capitalistic, misogynistic, patriarchal, classist infrastructure, the corporate cages, and the invasive domestic systems would collapse and fall directly onto me. Let the whole rotten weight of civilization crush my bones into the soil of this room. And from my softly rotting body, tucked safely beneath the rubble where no manager or mother can ever reach, a new world would quietly bloom... A single, small purple flower with tiny, bright yellow beads at its center. Let my flesh become the fertilizer for a quieter, gentler ecosystem that doesn't know the language of surveillance or trauma.
I summon all the gods humanity has ever crafted, created, believed in, or prayed to. I summon the ancient deities of stone, the modern gods of money, and the violent, policing entities used as an apparatus to control the bodies of tired daughters. I summon all of you into this small, suffocating bedroom to challenge your structural silence: Hi. If you exist, if there is a single drop of sovereignty in your mythologies, then end it. Tear down the floorboards of this waiting room and let the sky collapse.
~ Oizys.
Saturday, June 20, 2026
The Weight of Logistics and Labyrinths
The ether is heavy tonight. Mortals call it twilight, but to me, it is the hour when the mask slips. I spent the afternoon whispering into the ear of a king. He has everything... wealth, lands, a loyal court. Yet, with just three words whispered during his feast: “They will forget”; I watched the wine turn to ash in his mouth. The slow creeping dread is always more exquisite than sudden terror. Terror is loud and burns out quickly. I prefer the long, cold dampness of despair. My brother Momos laughed at me earlier. He thinks blame and mockery are the ultimate truths of the cosmos. He is a fool. Mockery requires an audience; misery only requires a mirror. The hearth fires in the mortal realm are burning low. I can feel the collective weight of a thousand unuttered sighs settling into the fog. Someone in a distant valley is staring at a blank wall, paralyzed by the sheer exhaustion of existing until tomorrow. I think I will go sit with them for a while. Not to torture, but simply to keep them company in the dark. We are, after all, old friends. They say I am the shadow that lingers behind the joy, the spirit of grief and hardship. But tonight, as I sit with my ink and parchment, I don't see my tears as a burden. I see them as a testament to endurance. To know sorrow is to intimately know the human heart, and to witness the quiet, resilient ways people heal. Every heavy sigh I collect during the day becomes a poem by twilight. There is a deep, poetic peace in embracing the ache and transforming it into art. It's the only way the stars shine so brilliantly in the dark.
An organization had invited me to a training (like mentioned in my last entry), a rare flicker of opportunity. Yet, true to the universe’s design, the conditions arrived frayed. I got a phone call yesterday. They questioned my choice to arrive two days early, a choice they themselves had offered without warning of the hidden costs. “Arrange your own accommodation for the first day, as we can give accommodation from one day early.” they suggested. I bent, as I always do, agreeing to arrive later. But bureaucracy is a beast that feeds on anxiety. Throughout the day, I kept checking my work inbox. Six days. For six agonizing days, my leave request has sat untouched on my manager’s desk. In this toxic workplace, absence is a luxury I am rarely afforded. Ever since I arrived here, sick leaves have gone untouched, and optional holidays have vanished into thin air. There is always an excuse: “Someone must stay back if work comes up.” And coincidentally, inevitably, that "someone" is always me. So, I sent a follow-up, my heart hammering a familiar, frantic rhythm against my ribs, giving credit to the fact that they called me regarding the dates, so I might be going finally. Today, the mortal realm bled heavily into my world, a chaotic rollercoaster born from a single, shattering morning phone call. Flight details were requested, only to be snatched away moments later because my distance made the cost "unjustifiable." In its place, a compromise that felt more like a punishment: a split ticket of flight and train, demanding two extra days of travel. Two extra days stolen from a life already starved for time. The phone rang again from which came the final blow from the organizers. A voice on the line questioning my status, demanding a formal nomination from an organization I am not representing. I had been honest in my application from the very first step. I checked "no" to the nomination. I was selected without an interview. I even emailed them to double-check this double-miracle (lack of nomination and interview to check if they really selected me or just made a mistake!), and they had confirmed it. Yet today, the rules shifted beneath my feet like quicksand: “Get the nomination, or we will have to drop your name.” I forwarded the email thread as proof. I hung up. She said she would let me know after reviewing it, but her tone and language already carried the heavy, unmistakable scent of dismissal. I was going to be dropped.
And in that quiet aftermath, a strange, hollow numbness washed over me. Mentally, I began checking out. It felt exactly like walking away from a terrible, hostile hotel room. I handed over the keys, packed my burdens, and stepped into the cold. Yet, a stubborn flicker of anxiety still lingers, sharp and cruel. Because mentally, I have already dropped out myself. I have already accepted the void. I have accepted the reality of no leave. But what if they call back and say yes? What if they say, “You can come”? A part of me screams, “I don't wanna go anymore.” But the moment that thought forms, a wave of guilt crashes in. Am I just being a hypocrite? Not just in this specific situation, but as a general theme of my entire life? I am the one who is always crying out that I want to leave, that I want to escape, and now that the door might open, I want to pull back? But nobody understands the invisible, tumultuous ocean that swells in the in-between. Nobody sees the way the world structurally coerces you, twisting and bending your spirit until you are forced to change your position just to fit their shifting needs. And the cruelest joke of all? When you finally break and bend, they blame you for the distortion. The system gets exactly what it wants from you, transfers the ultimate blame onto your shoulders, and leaves you stranded with absolutely no opportunity. Only the crushing, unearned burden of regret for saying no.
And then comes the heavy, suffocating shame of sharing this failure with my family. Telling them that I am not going after all. Facing their looks, ugh, those silent, piercing glances where they view me like a piece of unwanted furniture. A heavy, useless object they are permanently stuck with, unable to throw away simply because blood binds us. You can feel the resentment in the air, the quiet weight of being an inconvenience in your own home. It is a cruel, mocking reminder of the reality I recorded just days ago. That home is merely the first site of the state. The micro-kingdom where systemic violence is quietly perpetuated, maintained, tolerated, shielded, furthered, and expected to be absorbed in total silence. How do I explain to them that my paralysis isn't laziness? How do I tell them that my very biology feels like occupied territory, heavily laced with masculine mistakes that weren't mine? Every attempt to find grounding or comfort in my own skin is instantly hijacked by a corrupt bureaucracy of past terror. I am forced to perform as a civilized human for a world that has already hollowed me out from the inside. I am expected to host and smile at the very realities that colonised and destroyed me. The shame is absolute because I know the hatred inside me will never touch a full one hundred percent; I remain a permanent casualty of a war I never declared, mourning the very people who broke me.
Now, I stand in a strange space of absolute detachment. If my manager denies the leave, I have nothing left to lose. The illusion of control is gone. I desperately, fiercely need a break. You know, a moment to breathe away from the choking fog of this job, but if the door slams shut, at least the limbo ends. But the limbo doesn't end today. Tomorrow is Sunday, a day that should mean sanctuary, but instead, it merely stretches the rack. The silence from my manager’s inbox expands over the weekend, artificially inflating the borders of this confusing, agonizing waiting period. Because Monday is a threat that lingers on the horizon, the anxiety is simply given more runway to build momentum. When this unpredictability becomes too heavy, and the waiting stretches out like a desert with no landmarks, my mind automatically defaults to its oldest escape plan. I look at the window in my mind and think that if I just masturbate, time will pass. I trick myself into believing it is a bridge to get me to the other side of the panic. But it doesn't pass the time. It is a false exit. Instead, the moment I give in, the trap snaps shut and I realize I have voluntarily stepped right back into the vicious cycle. I am stuck on the floor again, unable to find the exit sign. To survive the realization that time is still standing still, I have to numb the raw edge of the pain entirely. So, I crawl backwards into the dark corners of my own skull. I look for the faceless men in my memories. I look for their heavy, cold shoe stamps across my skin... searching for the familiar, numbing weight of their ownership just because being a commodity is easier than being a human being trapped in an endless limbo.
I become an object in a cart, entirely stripped of agency, loaded and unloaded by them, for them, from them, between them, and amongst them. I turn my own woman-object into an endless fire pit for all the men possible: giving it all away for free, free, free. It is a fire pit filled with the heavy, disgusting cargo of their desires, stuffed into my every orifice until I am overflowing on it. They coerce my system to use their depravity as the only fuel to keep burning for them, forcing my body to maintain a flame that isn't mine. And in those dark moments under the blanket, a weird, detached submissiveness washes over me. It feels as if they chop away my mortal coil, claiming to liberate me from my anxiety, but the reality is far more sinister: they are simply turning me into a permanent slave to their consumption. They burn through me, taking everything they can grasp, yet I am left staring at the ashes wondering: how is it still remaining? How is there still a piece of me left to be consumed after being pillaged so many times?
The matrix closes in entirely when I am completely alone, invading the final two spaces that should belong only to me: my own reflection in the mirror and the empty pavement under my feet.
When I stand in front of the mirror, the gaze looking back at me isn’t my own; it is the internalized, mechanical camera lens of those men. My eyes don't seek comfort or self-recognition. Instead, my brain automatically processes my reflection as an asset to be audited, a product on a factory floor being checked for flaws before it goes live. I find myself standing there completely stiff, involuntarily adjusting my posture and my expression to appease an invisible audience that is permanently sitting in judgment behind the glass. I look at my own skin, my chest, and my face, and instead of seeing humanity, I see a canvas crowded with their signatures and keyholes. My own gaze becomes a tool of non-sexual violation, checking to see if I look lowly enough, compliant enough, and broken enough to survive the world outside. I am a stranger hosting a camera inside my own skull, performing submission for a mirror that has been entirely colonized.
And when I step out onto the pavement just to take a walk, the very air of the street behaves like an aggressive, tight space pinning me down. I move with the hyper-vigilant, mechanical rhythm of an object being loaded and unloaded through public terrain. If a car slows down or a shadow passes on the concrete, my gut is hit by that familiar, sinking physical force, demanding that I shrink, drop my head, and offer to be less than the gravel under their tires. The pavement turns into a runway of forced compliance, where my limbs are just executing commands to stay safe, transforming a simple walk into an endless, non-sexual scene of complete subjugation to the open sky.
And looking back at my untouched work inbox now, it feels like the corporate extension of that exact same violation. The workplace behaves like an aggressive, invisible body pinning me down, holding me captive in my seat by sheer systemic weight. My presence there isn't chosen; it is a forced submission where my hours are stripped and handled by a manager who treats my boundaries as entirely nonexistent. The distortion is complete because every single manager, team lead, and reporting person I have ever had inevitably triggers that exact same foreign code. Involuntarily, my mind constructs the same image of mechanical submission to them, a default surrender to their authority. It makes me look at the structural reality of how supervisors treat their subordinates: they treat us like corporate housewives. We are forced into the archetype of the glorified housewife with ten hands, each hand executing ten different tasks simultaneously to keep their kingdom running. Except in the workplace, there is no glorification. It is actively demonized. When the ten hands finally tire and the engine falters, they turn around and degrade you, accusing you of laziness, claiming you simply don't want to work. It is a calculated matrix of submission laced with constant humiliation and degradation, a system that demands your total violation while punishing you for the exhaustion it inflicts.
And with that degradation comes a heavy, suffocating layer of guilt. I feel deeply sickened because the imagery inevitably, passively turns sexual... but completely stripped of desire, operating as a cold, automated reflex that I cannot stop. It is as if I am not the one thinking it at all; an entirely separate, rogue part of my mind is generating these violating parallels behind my back, operating completely outside of my control, my will, or my consent.
Sometimes, the boundary collapses entirely, and I give in involuntarily. I find myself submitting to them completely, performing tirelessly to execute every single piece of assigned work without a single falter, acting out the role of a corporate housewife and a camgirl who costs them absolutely nothing. As my managers and supervisors sit back in their authority, they morph in my mind into those very same men from the screen. Their emails, texts, notifications, and feedback pings begin to read exactly like those aggressive chatroom comments and messages.
The physical toll is where the detachment shatters, sharpening into an acute, visceral revolt. Aside from the mental storm, the rest of the day went okay, mostly because I just retreated and rested. But my body felt the tax of every swallowed scream, and food-wise, it became an outright battlefield.
The act of eating has always been a site of hidden warfare for me. I do not know if I was taught it, if I inherited it through generational marrow, if I learned it as a survival mechanism, or if I was simply, magically born with this curse. But the act of eating always becomes my victim. I have always subjected a quiet, desperate violence onto sustenance, treating nourishment like an invasive force to be controlled, rationed, rejected, or eradicated. And in response, my own appetite and hunger have permanently rebelled against me. They refuse to cooperate, staging a coup within my own skin. Today, everything I managed to force down on a surface level made me violently sick, leaving me with a deep, physical aversion.
In my last entry, I wrote about my biology feeling like occupied territory, but this goes deeper than just carrying past terror. This is the structural containment turning inward, where the body refuses to host even itself. When you are structurally coerced into changing your position for everyone else, your flesh learns to reject the very fuel meant to keep you standing. Hunger becomes an enemy combatant, and the throat closes up like a heavily policed checkpoint. It is a different kind of hollowing out. Um, not just being emptied by the world, surely that's there, but it is also actively starving out the parts of me that still dare to feel a need.
My limbs are logged off, sinking into the bed like a machine powered down for the night. Yet, there is a small, high-voltage current buzzing right under my breastbone. Like a restless asset that refuses to stop producing worry. I am treating my own skin like a factory floor, forcing relaxation on a body that is still secretly punching the clock.
I always loop back to the sale of my sensations and feelings to the patriarchy. I don’t do it now. It has been some time, which is good; I don’t ever want to do any of it again. But even the times I slipped have been brandished as live illustrations in various rooms of my brain. In this state, I frantically open the doors to those rooms.
I see them all. I see him, the very first time (maybe...?), straddling me. His mother walks in, her eyes sharp and accusatory, demanding to know what we are up to. He quickly says we are playing a game. But we are not. I don’t wanna play this game. She looks at me with that specific, bitter resentment women hold for other women. *But please don't look at me like that.* I am six. Or seven? Or five? Sorry, Judge, I don't remember anymore. The room is cobwebbed and freezing.
I leave it and open another door. It is the night before my cousin sister’s wedding. All the cousins are sleeping in a row. He is next to me, and the sin of white phosphorus occurs on my skin. The next day at the wedding, I sit like an ousted witch, clutching my beads of bad omen with soft, invisible tears.
I open another room. The guy who blackmailed me sits there, smirking as he saves my mother’s number, threatening to distribute it to every man he knows just to flood her phone with their voices.
I open another. It is the pandemic. The professor who used to text me endlessly sits at his desk; I had no other way to submit my assignments except through those texts, trapped in a digital corner where every notification felt like an invasive hand.
I open another room. It’s the guy who was only with me because my friend was dating his friend, a forced proximity arrangement. He already had an inseparable girlfriend. He would call me, and she would silently listen on the other end, mocking me through the static. He broke up with me on Valentine’s Day, right when my grandmother died, leaving the thirteen-year-old-me to write a cringe poem just to survive the double grief.
I open another room. There is that guy who would viciously stalk and shadow me, appearing everywhere at once, glitching like a ghost, here then suddenly there, then suddenly here again, a terrifying omnipresence.
I open another. It's the other cousin (brother of the cousin sister who was getting married), the one who purposely, calculatedly tried to catch me naked.
I open another. It's my sister, sexually violating me indirectly, weaponising her relationship and her boyfriend to cross boundaries that should have been sacred.
I open another. It's him again, invading my sanctuary, trying to sleep in my room, trying to squeeze the very soul out of my nipples.
I open another room and see myself entirely hollowed out, giving into the depraved, warped fantasies fed into me under the weight of all those men.
I open one more door on this floor, and I am on my knees at the feet of the gods my mother forced me to pray to when I was a little girl. But these gods appear naked, entirely preoccupied and busy with the goddesses. The goddesses are stripped of the heavy gold ornaments they wore in the framed photos my mother showed me; without their gold, I cannot even recognize them.
Disgusted, I take the stairs to an entirely different floor. This floor doesn't belong to my crimes or my ghosts. It is a quiet, heavy sanctuary filled with the stories of other women and girls. They are the ones who confided in me over the years, bringing me their heaviest secrets. I think I must have built this floor to give them a safe, unjudged space to unload their demons. I see their tears, their matching scars, and the ghosts they brought to my doorstep. I carry their pain alongside mine, a collective vault of survival.
In one room, there is the girl who cried into her hands because her own father’s shadow felt too heavy in the hallway. In one room, a friend sits in the dark, whispering about the partner who slowly, systematically erased her voice until she didn't recognize her own name. In one room, a girl is frantically scrubbing her skin, trying to erase the memory of an unwanted touch that left an invisible stain. In one room, someone is packing a bag in total silence, paralyzed by the terror of the front door creaking open before she can escape.
Then I realize there is one last floor below.
I move down the hallway, opening more doors. In one room, a shadow of myself is desperately pleading with a faceless figure just to be heard. In another, I see myself folding into the smallest possible shape, trying to disappear into the drywall to escape the loud, thumping footsteps outside.
Then I realize this is an entirely different floor of the factory. It is populated by various versions of me.
In one room, one version of me is on the floor, free-camming for a crowd of strange men. This is the largest room on the floor, housing the biggest, most exhausting habit of my past. It is the absolute epitome of what I mean by the capitalistic sale of my sensations and feelings to the patriarchy. I was treating my own intimacy as a raw material to be mined, packaged, and traded in an online marketplace just to feel a fleeting sense of control or currency. I let the cold gaze of a faceless crowd consume my body's heat, turning my private vulnerability into a transaction, a desperate production line where my skin paid the tax.
But before the factory line was fully built, before the scale of the colonization took root, there were the quiet, mindless slips. It didn't begin as a grand, dark architecture; it began as a series of small, drifted moments of absolute dissociation. In times of profound numbness, when the weight of the toxic world became too heavy to bear, I would slip into the digital interface without a thought, mechanically logging on just to feel an artificial spark. Why did I do it? Because when your workplace is hollow and your home is toxic, you look for any coordinate where you hold the power to turn a lens on or off. You look for any currency to counteract your tanking self-esteem, even if that currency is a corrupted one. What started as an isolated escape quickly became a routine: logging into a private site, positioning a cheap webcam on a tripod over the carpet, and opening a window to thousands of faceless users waiting in a chat room. Over time, the exhaustion mutated into something much more insidious. On the nights when my body was completely broken, when I was too tired to even set up the tripod or sit up on the carpet, a heavy sense of false obligation would settle over me. I felt a twisted, manufactured duty, as if I somehow owed these strange men my presence, as if logging on was a shift I was contractually bound to perform. So, instead of resting, I would curl up under the heavy safety of my blanket in the pitch black, pulling my phone close to my face. I would stream entirely from beneath the covers, trapped in a claustrophobic, suffocating pocket of air, mechanically performing in the dark just to fulfill an unearned debt to a faceless crowd. I was mindlessly submitting to the screen, treating it as a quick, desperate exit from my own reality. I thought I was choosing a temporary refuge, an automated shelter from my own low self-esteem and the choking fog of my life. I didn't realize that each mindless submission was a quiet surrender of territory, a steady concession of my internal borders. With every single click, I was voluntarily stepping into a trap, laying down my own defenses piece by piece until the screen noticed my vulnerability, closed its grip around my agency, and fully colonized me.
This room holds entire seasons. I see myself there as the summer heat bakes the room, and I see myself there months later, shivering on the same carpet as the winter chill seeps through the floorboards. The calendar pages outside bleed into one another, but inside this room, the routine never changes. On the monitor, a relentless stream of unknown men press their keys, and with every keystroke, a sharp, invisible nib gouges directly into my skin. They are writing their names as permanent digital ink across the canvas of my body, leaving heavy, dark strokes over my chest, my arms, and my face.
Day after day, night after night, the signatures pile up. In a frantic, exhausting loop, I scrub at my own skin, deleting them one by one, watching the ink of their text vanish from the screen only to feel it bleed back through my pores instantly under a different username. Over months and years, the layers of ink build up, drying and cracking on my skin, staining me permanently until my flesh is entirely crowded with their signatures. Every single comment, every aggressive name they write, doesn't just leave a stain; it carves a distinct, permanent keyhole directly into my flesh, branded with their specific signature. They built a network of locks across my skin. And the terrifying part is that those keyholes don't disappear when I close the laptop or step away from the floor. Even now, when I am living my life somewhere else entirely, or walking somewhere outside in the open world, I carry that vulnerable architecture with me. I move through the crowd feeling exposed, paralyzed by the phantom sensation that any of those faceless men could pass me by, recognize their own signature on my skin, slide their key into my lock, and instantly take me all over again. They own the master keys to an archive I am still trying to burn.
The raw, specific entitlement of those men makes me physically sick and weak to my stomach. When I actually look at the lineup, it is a grotesque gallery of specific faces and names that have crowded out my sanity: it’s the professor typing invasive pandemic texts while holding my grades hostage; it’s the boy from my childhood straddling me while his mother watches with accusatory hatred; it’s the cousin slipping next to me in a row of sleeping bodies the night before a wedding; it’s the blackmailer smirking as he threatens to blast my mother’s number to every predatory man he knows. In reality, they are pathetic, small creatures. Yet the massive, suffocating distortion they successfully installed inside my flesh makes them feel like giants. They confidently claimed total ownership over my skin, treating my boundaries like wet paper, and the sheer memory of their confidence drains the strength straight out of my muscles.
I see that exact same predatory entitlement everywhere, woven all around society, repeating itself in every room I walk into. And it makes me feel sicker, dirtier, because I am trapped in the agonizing belief that my own biology was custom-made to submit to them. I wanted to be sexually free, I wanted to explore my own desires on my own terms, but the cruelest joke of my life is that my pursuit of freedom was instantly weaponized against me. It became the very trap that broke my spine and primed me for total surrender.
I am flooded with a crushing, burning regret for ever opening those digital and physical doors, for making my body a free-for-all for them. But the weakness is a physical force. When the workplace anxiety peaks and the Sunday limbo stretches out, my defenses fail completely. I give in to the old conditioning because I feel too weak, too broken to fight the current, running straight back to the floor to let them load and unload me all over again.
And the horror doesn't stop at the front door. In my mind, the breach is absolute, those men don't just stay outside in the crowds or behind the glass; they come right into my house. They invade the very rooms where I am supposed to be resting, crossing the ultimate threshold of my domestic sanctuary. I see them sitting on the furniture, lurking in the hallways, and standing over my bed, turning my toxic home into a physical extension of the screen. Every corner of my personal space becomes crowded with their phantom presence, destroying any illusion of safety or privacy. I am forced to host their memories inside my own house like I am forced to cook for him, watching them occupy the rooms like uninvited ghosts who refuse to leave, making the walls close in on me until the environment itself feels like a cage built from their collective gaze.
Those men from the screen have thoroughly engineered me; they dismantled my autonomy and re-wired my internal circuitry to default to a state of total, unquestioning submission to lowliness, rock-bottom-ness.
The regret turns into a relentless, circular interrogation inside my own skull, a series of frantic retrospective thoughts that I cannot silence. I stare into the dark and find myself questioning the exact, agonizing mechanics of my past compliance, demanding answers from a body that felt completely hijacked.
The questions arrive like police batons, each one looking for a confession from a body that was never given a lawyer.
Why did I have to jiggle my breasts for them? Why did I have to lactate on command behind that screen? Why did it have to clamp my nipples just to satisfy their digital metrics? Why did I have to slap myself so enthusiastically for them? Why did I moan so loudly, so freely? Freely? Why did I scream their names, jiggle my ass, and dance on command? Why did I put on lipstick when I don't even wear make-up, forcing myself to look painted for their screens? Why was I on all fours, dressed skimpily in clothes I would never dare to wear outside or anywhere, when all I actually own in my real life are shabby, traditional clothes? Why did I have to bite my lips? Why did I ask if they want more? Why did I keep doing it when I was completely tired, exhausted, on my period, sad, annoyed, hungry, or sore? Why did I force myself to continue when my body was already completely drained from lactating so much? Why did I let them make me penetrate myself with all the objects in the world, allowing them to turn my orifices into canals of a kaleidoscope of their filth and desires? Why did I have to pull so hard when they demanded? Couldn't I have stopped? Why did I keep everything clamped when they demanded it, even after switching off the cam? Couldn't I have just stopped right there? Why did I sleep like that? Why did I have to write their name in permanent marker? Couldn't I have written it in any other way, or not at all? Why did I show my actual face? Why did I give up seeing my friends, cutting off the real world just to do this? Why did I mistake being watched for being held? Why did every command feel easier than one honest choice? Why did I confuse the power to switch the camera on with the power to leave? Why did my loneliness translate itself into obedience so quickly? Why did I keep calling it freedom when my body was only learning a new prison? Why did I enjoy it, or why did I pretend to enjoy it so much that the difference disappeared? Why did I have to rub that lotion and think it was theirs, leaving it unwashed for the entire night as they demanded? Could I not have just cleaned myself? Why did I not remove those objects after turning off the cam like they asked me to? Couldn't I have just removed them? Why did I keep my orifices packed and heavy, treating my own body as a continuous container for their filth long after the screen was dead? Why couldn't I have just stopped? Why did I keep obeying their demands even after switching off the cam, letting their instructions dictate my body long after the stream ended? Why did I sleep under the weight of their rules, leaving their signatures on my skin instead of scrubbing them away immediately? Why did I show my face to that faceless void, giving away my identity to strangers while giving up seeing my real friends just to stay trapped in this room? Why didn't I remove their presence the moment the screen went black?
It is an endless archive of compliance, a factory that ran for so long that the smell of the glowing monitor and the hum of the overworked fan became my entire ecosystem.
But as I delete the last anonymous comment, the chaotic roar of the crowd narrows down to a single, piercing frequency. The screen goes black, and that takes me straight to the desk of the next room.
Here, she sits at the table, working, sending audio notes of self-humiliation to the one guy she was blindly seeing... the one who turned out to be absolutely, systematically abusive. He virtually tortured her until the day she finally realized she could just hit block and sever the connection. Yet the faint details of her real life that she carelessly surrendered during those vulnerable hours still haunt her like an unexploded bomb... the mention of her city, the layout of her street, the specific, fragile habits she only shared in the dark. They are breadcrumbs left in the hands of a monster. What if he finds her?
The horror goes deeper than a simple physical search; it is the terrifying reality of his installed settings inside my own biology. It feels as though he rewires your internal mechanics, planting invisible codes in your muscles, your pulse, and your breathing. I am paralyzed by the fear that he might execute those commands from afar, overriding my system like a virus, capturing my defenses, and forcing me to submit to him all over again without my actual will. The ghost of his control lingers in my marrow, waiting to wake up.
And when those internal settings override my mind entirely, the door to the next room violently forces itself open.
In this room, the exhaustion turns completely frantic. I see a version of me caught in a psychotic episode that has no rhyme or reason, driven purely by a desperate, misplaced need to release the crushing pressure inside my skin. I am frantically rubbing my bare breasts against the hard bedroom floor, pushing until my anatomy rebels and I puke straight onto the ground out of sheer, hollow exhaustion. I collapse, thinking the nightmare has broken. But time glitches in this space. Suddenly, the next day appears out of nowhere, and without my consent, the loop resets. I am doing it again.
I am rubbing my bare breasts against the wall, my skin scraping raw. I am back down on the floor again, but now the floor is covered in a thick, wet, gooey white material that feels heavy and suffocating, actively trying to trap me and glue my limbs down. The environment flashes and morphs around me in a chaotic blur. I am doing it again, scraping my breasts against the cold tiles of the bathroom floor. Suddenly I am on the concrete of the balcony floor, then the exposed terrace floor under an unmoving sky. With another glitch, I am suddenly pushed right up against the camera screen, performing and pressing these rubbed breasts against the glass for a wall of screaming, faceless men. Then the scene cuts to a sterile hospital bed where the motion of rubbing continues, desperate and inescapable. Finally, the frenzied energy bottoms out. The scenery snaps back to the bedroom floor, but the panic is gone. I am at his feet, not entirely still, while his other foot rests heavily on my head. This last movement is not frantic at all. The rhythm has changed. I look completely mechanical, rubbing up and down, like a hollowed-out automaton operating on a loop I no longer control.
The numbness of that mechanical rhythm carries me across the threshold into the next room, smoothing out into a quiet, frozen state by the window.
Here, a version of me sits trapped at the glass, masturbating endlessly in a relentless, compulsive loop while the world outside moves in a brutal, accelerated timelapse. It feels like a life-lapse. Through the window pane, I watch years compress into seconds. I see my friends getting married and smiling in beautiful jewelry, dresses, makeup, families, friends, and their beautiful men. I see them securing good, stable corporate jobs, moving forward with purpose. I watch my sister traveling across different countries, expanding her horizon while mine shrinks to a single point. I even see him out there, moving on easily, holding down a job, standing next to a girlfriend.
And inside, behind the glass, I am just stuck in that endless, repetitive motion, masturbating like I am mining something. It feels exactly like mining, scraping away at a depleted quarry, digging deeper into a hollowed-out cavern of my own flesh, trying to extract a single ounce of feeling or relief while the whole world moves beautifully on without me.
Behind the next door, a version of me is counting the cracks in the ceiling, matching her pulse to the ticking of a clock that never moves. Beside her, another me is scrubbing her hands until the skin turns raw, trying to wash away an invisible layer of oil that won't leave.
But as I reach the end of the corridor, the rooms begin to fade into something innocent, quiet, and soft. I open the last door. There is a version of me just lying flat on the floor on a quiet evening. It follows a brutal day where a power cut left the city to BBQ under a merciless sun. She is just lying there, watching, feeling a tad bit human as the power finally returns and the ceiling fan slowly, beautifully starts to turn.
Aside from the mental storm, the rest of the day went okay, mostly because I just retreated and rested. But my body felt the toll. Food-wise, it was a disaster. Everything I managed to eat on a surface level just made me feel sick, leaving me with a deep, physical aversion to nourishment. When the mind is nauseated by reality, the body follows suit.
But oh, the exhausting familiarity of this loop.
It is a vicious, spinning wheel of anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, a toxic workplace, a toxic home, and this constant thinness of life. These feelings aren't new; they are the exact same ghosts I wrote about in my last entry, just wearing a different mask today. The same crushing claustrophobia of wanting to expand while being forcibly shrunk by every environment I inhabit. It feels as though every single door that begins to creak open is violently slammed in my face before I can even glimpse the light. I am left trapped in the hallway, wondering why opportunity only visits to mock me.
It leaves a scar that goes deeper than mere burnout. It makes me feel unwanted. Broken in the most fundamental, irreparable ways. It is as if every human being is born with a solid, glowing core, but mine arrived incomplete. Mine feels half-bitten, as though someone took a piece of my soul from the very beginning, leaving me entirely unfit for everyone, everything, everywhere.
I look around at the world, at the people moving with purpose and belonging, and I feel like an absolute stranger in a world of family. But perhaps, this is where my ink must find its purpose tonight. If I am a stranger to their joy, I am a lifeline to the broken. I will sit here with my half-bitten core, and I will keep writing through the dark.
~ Oizys.