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

07th March 2026, 3:33 PM-5:16 PM

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

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

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

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

08th March 2026, 3:52 PM-4:07 PM

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

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

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

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

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

08th March 2026, 7:00 PM

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

Oh, it is Happy International Women's Day. 

09th March 2026, 12:20 PM

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

― Martha Gellhorn, Selected Letters

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

― Autumn Sonata, Charlotte Andergast

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

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

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

― Gaston Bachelard

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

― Clarice Lispector, A Hora da Estrela

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

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

Raja, I wish I knew

the cause of that malady.

For years I could not accept

the place I was in.

I felt I should be somewhere else.

A city, trees, human voices

lacked the quality of presence.

I would live by the hope of moving on.

Somewhere else there was a city of real presence,

of real trees and voices and friendship and love.

― "To Raja Rao" by Czesɫaw Miɫosz

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

― Lacey L.

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

— Maggie Mitchell, Pretty Is

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

― Fernando Pessoa

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

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

“But then what of me remains here? 

A sense of tiredness.

I was always tired.

There was never a time I was not tired.

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

I did not live with intent, I only lived.

But that’s over.”

― Yu Miri's Tokyo Ueno Station

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

― Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

 

~ Oizys. 

Rationalising hatred and dissecting it away from internalised hatred/self-hatred.

I had a short chat with my sister and mother, and as my mother finished braiding my hair, the conversation fell like a stone into my pond of self-hatred, creating ripples. Rationalising hatred and dissecting it away from internalised hatred/self-hatred: that is today’s autopsy. Because not all hatred is self-hatred. Not all fire begins at home inside my body. I decided that I need to write this at last. Out loud, in words, in this secret corner of the internet. Before I fold into myself and assume every sharp thing in me is a reflection yet again. What is the source of this hatehood? How did it become so diversely populated and vibrant within me? It feels less like an emotion and more like a settlement. A small, overworked, crowded, opinionated, armed, militant republic. There are districts to it. There is the hatred that is reactionary, born from betrayal, from watching the same patterns parade themselves under new names. This one wears logic like a pressed shirt. It says: You learned, adapted, and protected yourself. Now, it calls itself a boundary. There is the hatred that is inherited, of course, sediment passed down quietly. Things I was taught to fear before I understood them. Things I absorbed because everyone around me held them as truth. This hatred doesn’t even feel like mine. It feels rented. Or, more like, generational ownership. Then there is the quietest one. The dangerous one. The one that mirrors me. Internalised hatred is intimate. It knows my vocabulary. It knows exactly which insecurities have soft underbellies. It does not shout but builds a narrative that says: Of course, they hate you. Of course, you are disgusting. Of course, they don't want you. Of course, you should leave. Of course, they are better off without you. Of course, they left. Of course, you failed. Of course, you are too much, or not enough, depending on the day. This one disguises itself as realism. And I have been confusing these factions. I have been calling all of it “self-hatred” because it feels morally cleaner to blame myself. If it is all internal, I can fix it. If I am the villain, at least the story is contained. If it is external but just around me right now, I can just leave. But what if some of this hatred is not rot, but resistance like calcified grief? What if some of it is simply anger that was never allowed to graduate into articulation? Unprocessed pain giving birth to hatred while the world around me injures repeatedly and casually like it is a storm that doesn't know it's drowning me, like it is a careless child pulling wings off a fly, like it is a butcher’s knife that has forgotten it is sharp, like it is a machine that crushes, designed to ignore the scream, like it is a cold rain falling on an open wound, like it is a gambler throwing away someone else's life. And somewhere along the line, I decided it was nobler to turn the blade inward than to admit I was wounded outwardly. There is a difference between hating yourself and hating what harmed you. There is a difference between accountability and self-erasure. The problem is that hatred, once housed, does not respect its original blueprint. It spreads. It cross-breeds. It colonises neutral territory. Soon, I cannot tell if I am defending myself or dismantling myself. So I sit with it now. Trying so hard not to romanticise it and blindly justifying cruelty for the sake of surviving artistically. But just to understand its architecture. Where did it begin? Was it born the first time I was dismissed? The first time I was made a spectacle? The first time I learned that softness was a liability? The first time realisation slapped my melanin-heavy cheeks that my mother might prefer my sister more? The first time I finally clocked in that my father hates me for being a daughter, a girl, a woman, a not-son, a not-boy, a not-man. The first time I noticed it wasn’t even cruelty. It was arithmetic. The way affection was portioned. The way my sister’s mistakes were called phases and mine were called character. The way I was corrected in public and praised only in private, because praise was expensive but shame was free. The way my body was discussed was like a project. The way my “tone” mattered more than what I was saying. The way I learned to pre-apologise before speaking, like a tax for existing. The way my father’s silence could feel like a verdict... Or was it quieter... accumulated through a thousand micro-negations? The daily abrasion of being misunderstood, unseen, or inconvenient? Hatred is rarely dramatic in origin. Sometimes it began loudly. More often, it began quietly. It is mundane and thus grows in repetition. And perhaps the most unsettling realisation: Hatred makes me feel powerful inwardly. Moves around inside my body drastically. There is certainty in it. Clarity, which sharpens edges and removes doubt. For a brief moment, it makes the world binary: villain and victim, right and wrong, me and them, me and her, me and him. But it also shrinks the room. Internalised hatred implodes; it hollows me out from within. External hatred explodes; it scorches everything around me. Both leave debris-like residue on my skin like shadow cast, acid-etched scars on my skin, like volcanic soot's dried crust of rust and stains. So today is not about absolving myself. And it is not about condemning myself either. And, definitely, it is not about exorcising it. That would be naive. Today’s exercise is classification. Which hatred is the boundary? Which hatred is protection? Is it my rage toward an abuser, or the "mutinous" hatred used to break free from a co-dependent, stifling relationship? Like a corrupted form of love, fighting to preserve what remains of a wounded attachment? Which is projection? Like struggling with my own repressed anger while accusing others of being "unreasonably hostile"? Like feeling insecure about my status while despising others as "pretentious"? Like allowing the ego to feel superior while avoiding self-awareness? Which is inherited prejudice masquerading as instinct? Like thriving on rigid categorisation? Generational racism, sectarian hatreds, or xenophobia that exists before any personal experience with "the other"? Which is grief wearing armour that never got to mourn? Which is ego bruised and retaliating? Which hatred is the echo of a parent’s disappointment that I accidentally memorised as truth? Which hatred is trauma trying to prevent repetition? Which hatred am I avoiding by staying armoured? Which is the echo of someone else’s contempt that I accidentally memorised? If I can name them, perhaps I can negotiate with them. Perhaps hatred is not a monster but an archive. And it expects me to be an archivist today. And, as we know, archivists do not burn records blindly; they catalogue them. A record of every boundary crossed, every expectation unmet, every version of myself that felt cornered. This one: born of betrayal. This one: born of comparison. This one: born of neglect. This one: borrowed. This one: protective. This one: poisonous. And maybe, just maybe, the goal is not eradication, not to become hatred-free. That feels like a fantasy sold by people who have never been cornered. Maybe the goal is sovereignty to let justified anger mature into boundary, to let grief become mourning instead of mildew, to return inherited prejudice to sender without ceremony, and to hold myself accountable without performing self-execution. Or, maybe it is discernment to let justified anger metabolise into boundary, to let grief dissolve into mourning instead of corrosion, to return inherited hatred to sender, and to finally... finally... stop confusing my own reflection with the shadow cast by others. The republic inside me is loud like a troubled state, all opinionated and armed with memory. But I am learning and realising something quietly radical that I am not its loudest citizen. I am not the militia. I am the one holding the pen. I am the people's legislature, for better or for worse. I decide what gets airtime in my skull. I decide which memory becomes doctrine and which one is allowed to soften. I decide which hatred gets a badge and which one gets disarmed. I can’t stop every riot. But I can stop calling it governance. And perhaps the most merciful thing I can do... not just for others, but for myself, is to stop assuming every sharp edge in me is proof of my monstrosity. Some of it is scar tissue. Some of it is boundary. Some of it is learned cruelty. Some of it is survival. Some of it is the quiet, desperate refusal to be broken again. It is the armour I have built when I had no one else to build it for me. I look in the mirror and see the jagged edges of a past that refused to stay in the past, but I also see the strength that held me together when I were falling apart. Not all fire begins at home. And not all of it needs to keep burning. But this hatred definitely was born out of the home around me that will be extinguished when the home around me is brought down. But tonight, I am not exorcising hatred. I am interviewing for it. And for the first time, it is answering without shouting.

And here is the uncomfortable truth: Some of the hatred inside me has been useful. That is what no one wants to admit. Hatred has been my emergency generator. When love failed, when softness backfired, when politeness was weaponised against me, hatred kept the lights on and cradled me [footnote]. It said: Enough. It said: Remember this. It said: Do not go back there. There is a kind of hatred that is simply clarity after illusion dissolves. The first time I understood that I was not the preferred child, something calcified. Not dramatically. Not in a cinematic thunderstorm. Just quietly. A small reclassification of myself in my own home. I moved from protagonist to peripheral. From adoration to adequate. From daughter to responsibility. And if a father learns to resent the existence of a daughter because she is not a son, the daughter learns to resent her own softness because it feels like evidence. I began to auditorise my own existence: Too loud. Too dark. Too ambitious. Too emotional. Too female. Too present. Too burdensome. Too unnecessary. Too unworthy. And then one day, I woke up fluent in a language no one remembers teaching me: self-contempt. They look at me as if I am foreign, I am secluded, I am away, I am exclusionary. But I need to be precise here. Was that self-hatred born in me? Or was it carefully, precisely, and intentionally installed? Because there is a difference between my body generating a toxin and inhaling one repeatedly until my lungs mistake it for air. Right? Some of my hatred is simply muscle memory. The body remembers dismissal before the mind can rationalise it. The body remembers being compared. The body remembers being corrected for existing. The body remembers the subtle hierarchy of affection. The body remembers the moment my stomach dropped, and I smiled anyway. The body remembers how I learnt to laugh at my own humiliation before anyone else could. Hatred grows in those silences, unlike in screaming matches, but like in the thousand small recalibrations. The time you are interrupted and decide not to finish your sentence. The time you are told you are “overreacting.” The time your anger is reframed as hysteria. The time you realise your sister’s defiance is called strength, and yours is called attitude. The time her anger was called confidence, and mine was called disrespect. The time she could slam doors, and I had to close mine gently, like I was always auditioning for forgiveness. Micro-negations. Daily erosion. The architecture of resentment is built brick by brick, not by explosion. So when I feel hatred rise in me now, I am trying my level best not to panic. Because not all of it is corrosion. Some of it is signal. Sometimes I fail. Sometimes I pass miserably. I teach myself. Hatred toward an abuser is not a pathology. It is the immune system responding to the abuse. It is necessary. Hatred toward a suffocating dynamic is not cruelty. It is oxygen deprivation fighting back. It is necessary. Hatred toward injustice is not moral failure. It is recognition. It is necessary. But internalised hatred is different. It does not protect in an ideal manner. It protects like a patriarch. Like restriction in safety's clothing. It watches me attempt joy and whispers, You don’t deserve that. It watches me succeed and says, They will realise you are a fraud. It watches me rest and mutters, Lazy. It watches me cry and sighs, Pathetic. It watches me eat and calls it indulgence. It watches me want and calls it neediness. It watches me set a boundary and calls it selfishness. This hatred does not face outward. It faces inward like a firing squad. And the insidious part? It feels disciplined, responsible, mature, like it disguises itself as accountability. So, it can secretly dismantle me. Accountability builds me by pointing out the mistake and telling me to fix it. This is not building. This is self-destruction, telling me my whole existence is a mistake. Those are not the same sentences. And I have been collapsing them into one. There is also a projection. You know, the trickster faction in my little militant republic. The one that dresses up insecurity as superiority, calls others arrogant when I feel invisible, labels others “hostile” when I am suppressing rage, and despises pretension because I am terrified of being ordinary. Projection is lazy hatred. It relocates discomfort instead of metabolising it. Inherited hatred is lazier still. It arrives pre-packaged with no research required or personal injury necessary. Just a set of instructions passed down like heirloom cutlery: polish this, use this, never question this. Fear this situation. Distrust that kind of woman. Respect that kind of man. Do not cross that boundary. Stay in your lane. You aren't capable. Some of these instructions are soaked in the history of colonial residue, colourism, sectarian bitterness, and generational shame. Some are born of survival. Some are born of ignorance. All of them demand interrogation. Because if I do not examine them, I will enforce them. And I refuse to become the custodian of someone else’s unprocessed fear. The most destabilising realisation, though, is this: Hatred feels powerful. It sharpens my posture, makes me decisive, simplifies the moral universe into clean lines, and for a moment, it feels like control. But it is control, like a clenched fist is control, like digging nails into palm, like is tension mistaken for strength. When I stay in hatred too long, the room shrinks, my imagination shrinks, my empathy shrinks. My world becomes smaller until it can fit inside one clenched jaw. Even tenderness starts to look suspicious. Even kindness feels like a strategy. My world becomes a series of enemies and threats. 

~ Oizys.