you
and
I met
twice we drift
twice the tide came back
the third time we drowned deep completely
not a line, but a spiral turning wider, toward you
I don’t know still where it spirals
but I never mind
each turn, yours
still here
still
yours

if i’m blue, you’re the sky

I’ve never been at a loss for words before, but miracle-boy,
you should know all my metaphors
pale in comparison to your
elusive astral allure
it’s magical, surreal, and unreal,
am I making you up in my head?

because every line I’ve ever written
had an ending, a shape, a place to land
but you keep spilling past the margins,
some galaxy I can’t hold in my hand.

I reach for words like I reach for stars,
close my fist, and find it empty
not because there’s nothing there,
but because there’s far too plenty.

here I am, mid-sentence, undone,
still trying to spell out a boy made of sky
you were never meant to be written,
only stood beneath, and wondered why

e^(iπ) + 1 = 0

here i am, looking up math,
because words weren’t enough to describe you
turns out my vocabulary ran out
hence i went to your world
looking for backup

i stumbled upon this equation
e to the i pi, plus one, equals zero
mathematicians call it beautiful
which, sure, i’ll believe you, nerds,

it’s five numbers that have no business
being in the same sentence.
one’s infinite, one’s imaginary
one doesn’t even exist
outside of someone’s head

and yet you put them together right,
and it works, so perfectly every single time

if you haven’t caught on yet,
this is just a very long way of saying
i think about you the same way

too many contradictions to make sense,
too specific to be a coincidence,
and somehow, when i do the math
(don’t worry, i got the calculator to check for any mistakes, hehehe)
it still comes out even

so no, i couldn’t find the words.
i had to steal someone else’s proof instead
but if a 18th century mathematician
can tell me the universe checks out
i figure i can tell you the same

you’re my favorite equation
i just can’t explain you to anyone else

forelsket

fortune found me on a random friday
it’s like he wandered straight out of my oneiric childhood fairy tales
abracadabra and just like that
he waved the cynicism out of me
fa la la honey i’m forced to curtsy
before the cliches of romance

the only celestial charm-caster
who wields power over my weird heart
I thought he was a man of mythology, a magical creature reality’s yet to see
someone who only exists in the corners of my fleeting fantasises

who is this grand spirit?
he resembles every one of my lilac dreams
drunk on the prelapsarian potions of affection he concocted
I’m high on these euphoric youthful heart-flutters that fill my soul with butterflies

and isn’t it absurd
that i, who swore off every fable,
am now the fool in the folktale,

but darling, if this is a spell,
i don’t want the antidote.
let me be the girl in the story
who found magic
and never once asked
how it worked, only
that it kept working

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uncertainty seems to be the only thing i can be surely certain of. and instability seems to the only stable thing in my life.

my therapist says my anxiety lives in everything i cannot control. she says i keep mistaking control for certainty, certainty for safety, and safety for happiness, as though one inevitably will somehow lead to the next. acceptance of the fact that control is not the goal is apparently supposed to make me feel better. why is that i associate this kind of acceptance with giving up? am i losing? am i not trying hard enough to be all the things i should be? to do all the things i have to do? to want all those things i’m supposed to want?

she says acceptance is supposed to make me feel fine. Fine. Fine! Fine? what the fuck is fine supposed to be? Fine as in no longer afraid? Fine as in finally becoming the sort of person who doesn't need to ask if they're fine? Fine as in being okay with who I am when there's nothing left to achieve? Fine as in simply existing? Is existing really enough? Has it ever been? Or is "fine" just another finish line I'll spend the rest of my life running towards? I want to look in the mirror and, for once, stop asking to be someone else, but it feels impossible.

I can’t breathe.

I can’t sleep.

I can’t eat.

I can’t watch.

I can’t write.

I can’t read.

why?

perhaps I've convinced myself my burdensome existence doesn't deserve sustenance. that food, sleep, joy, rest—they're things to be earned, not given, no.

what would happen if I simply stopped caring. would the world notice? would I notice?

Let’s see—

the sun seems to be rising on every morbid monday morning

time seems to ticking through every tiresome tuesday evening,

the world seems to be winding on its axis every wasteful wednesday noon

all the thursdays are still making me feel uncool

and by friday i have, as always, forgotten how to be a person

the universe, i understand, is indifferent to the minor inconveniences that have you questioning life. it unsettles me. for years, i’ve searched for answers in pursuits that were willing to give me measurements, but never meaning. a huge part of me still does. I search for myself in the email that begins with congratulations, in the conversations that end with i’m so proud of you, in the kind eyes of strangers who believe in me more readily than I believe in myself, and in the little girl with pigtails who tells me she wants to be like me.

for a moment, I become whoever they think I am.

then the moment passes. yesterday’s miracle becomes today's expectation, and today’s dream becomes tommorow’s baseline.

the impossible becomes probable.

the probable becomes expected.

the expected becomes invisible.

maybe i’ve confused evidence with identity.

perhaps i was never chasing the acceptance letter, but chasing the version of myself i imagined would open it, and know how to sit still, content, without needing another.

every acceptance letter arrives, every competition comes with a prize, everybody says oh you’re amazing. everything I wait for eventually arrives. everything but the version of myself that was suppose to be happy on it’s arrival.

the only thing that never gets accepted is me—by me.

she remains oscillating between obsession and indifference, introducing herself by her extremes instead of the centre that keeps calling her back. she lingers at the edges just long enough to believe she lives there. stupidly forgetting that a pendulum belongs to its centre, not to its extremes.

in the process of detaching yourself from sadness, i wonder if you also detach yourself from happiness.

how do i find the gravity that will pull me back to my centre of mass? what is the emotional equivalent of this grand force— or, better yet, its human equivalent?

It’s Me.

Only I can save myself.

the answer is to not care too much.
the answer is to not not care at all.

It is learning to care just enough, so its absence doesn’t ruin you, and its presence still nourishes you.

It's learning that my grades can describe me without defining me, my work can fulfil me without becoming me, and my ambition can propel me without replacing me.

It's learning to trust a father whose absence once knocked your pendulum violently off balance, and choosing to believe that people, too, can maybe, just maybe, find their way back to equilibrium.

It's learning to like a boy—not because you're certain he'll stay, but because some people are worth knowing even if they don't.


For so long, I assumed my path was linear. I imagined the world as a flat, long road stretching towards a finish line that promises ‘becoming’. But horizons are dishonest. Thee closer you get, the further they retreat.

the world was never flat, it was always a sphere. I just kept running around in circles, coming back to the same mistakes, repeating the same patterns, feeling the same fear. mistaking return for stagnation. It took me far too long to realise that I was growing the way a tree does: not upwards all the time, but outwards. trees don’t grow away from themselves. they grow concentrically and every year, the vascular cambium deposits another ring of secondary xylem around the same core.

I am not looping, im lignifying.

I love caring too much. I love reading books that rearrange the furniture in my brain. I love boys who make my pendulum forget which way is centre. I love building things that might outlive me. I love ambition. I love wanting.

I really love running. But I’m exhausted.

Exhausted by the relentless insistence that every step must be productive. That every hobby must become a side hustle. That every passion must be monetised. That every waking moment must justify its existence.

I don’t give a shit if you think I’m falling behind.

I don’t give a shit if you think I’ve stopped trying.

I don’t give a shit if refusing to worship at the altar of the capitalist rat race makes me look lazy, complacent, or unambitious. If you think that, go swim in rat turd for all i care.

I’d rather be the girl who stopped to look at a mountain than the one who sprinted past it just to arrive somewhere five minutes earlier.

I’d rather finish a little later with a head full of poems than finish first with nothing left to wonder about.

Growing up is not becoming.

It’s unbecoming.

peeling away every borrowed definition of success, every inherited ambition, every identity built from applause and expectation, until what remains is small but genuine enough to be honest.

A girl.

A mountain.

A poem.

And, for the first time in a long time,

a centre of mass.

which is funny, because if you've been here a while, you'll know my thoughts on romance used to sound something like: "I'm simply too rational to get swept away by the illogical allure of teenage infatuation." Was I great at being an insufferable, holier-than-thou, pretentious little cynic or whatt.

anyway, the universe, with impeccable comedic timing decided to humble me, as it usually does, and I met someone. I actually, genuinely liked this someone (miracle, i know). Someone liked me back. (An important plot point.) Someone left me. I cried. Someone came back. It was wonderful. Someone left me again.

Long story short: I got dumped.

Yayy!

now, a normal person might spend seventy-two consecutive hours horizontal, skip school, oscillate between being catastrophically physically and emotionally ill, cry until dehydration becomes a genuine concern, become clinically attached to a pillow, create increasingly deranged subfolders in their notes app dedicated exclusively to poetry that should never see the light of day, survive almost entirely on Olivia Rodrigo’s ‘you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love’ played at psychologically concerning volumes, lose their appetite, lose their sleep, convince themselves they’re over it every twenty-six minutes, and eventually become unable to distinguish between the song, the memories of his voice, and their own internal monologue.

but unfortunately, I am not a normal person.

So, alongside all of the above, my brain also decided to write a substack about the linguistics of getting dumped.

Why dumped?

Who looked at the end of a relationship situationship I-don’t-know-what-to-call-it-ship and thought, ahh yes, this bears a striking resemblance to the throwing out kitchen waste.

blame my english language textbook, actually blame him. either wayy, get ready to go to accompany me on a mildly unhinged, emotionally compromised spiral through the etymology of breakups!

The only guide you’ll need to describe your breakup in four different centuries.

1. Jilted

This word can be traced all the way back to the late 1600s and most likely comes from jillet (or gillet), a slang term for a flirtatious, fickle young woman, probably derived from the name Jill. Geez, imagine being so bad at texting back that your name gets grammaticalised into the English language. kinda iconic actually.

The connotations associated with this word though, are far from positive. They are deeply accusatory. If someone has jilted you they haven't merely ended the relationship, they've allegedly led you on, built up your hopes, and then withdrawn their affection on a random whim.

Interestingly, the ngram data reflects this same sense of theatricality. the word quietly potters along for a couple of centuries before suddenly shooting upwards in the mid-to-late 1800s. Of course it does. If there was ever a century that would obsess over a word as gloriously melodramatic as jilted, it was the Victorians. (tangent: apparently in vic society you could genuinely sue someone for breaking off a promise to marry you. yes, a lawsuit for heartbreak).

By the late twentieth century, jilt saw a steady decline, and almost vanished from everyday English before experiencing a sudden revival in the 2000s. I can’t decide whether that’s because hopelessly overdramatic girls like me keep getting dumped and frantically searching for increasingly niche vocabulary to aestheticise our heartbreak online, or because journalists need more colorful words every time a celebrity engagement implodes.

Either way, I have to admit: if this were 1873, I wouldn’t have been dumped. I’d have been jilted. It sounds infinitely cooler. And if I’m going to have my heart broken, I’d at least like the vocabulary to be pretty.

2. Conscious Uncoupling

Coined by therapist Katherine Woodward Thomas and catapulted into the public eye in 2014 when Gwyneth Paltrow used it to announce her separation from Chris Martin, ‘conscious uncoupling’ is a carefully crafted PR campaign that is as drama-free as it gets. not "breakup" (too violent), not "split" (too fractured?), just uncoupling. as simple as that, just two emotionally evolved adults acknowledging that their trajectories no longer align and continuing on their healing journeys.

Honestly? I kind of like it.

More than anything, though, I'm fascinated by what it says about english itself. Words like jilted took centuries to settle into the language, slowly accumulating meaning through novels, gossip, and everyday conversation.

In the digital age, however, mass media and social media have become such powerful agents of language change that phrases like conscious uncoupling can achieve widespread lexical diffusion in a matter of days. It’s amazing how what once required centuries of repeated use can now be accomplished by a single celebrity interview and a chronically online population.

3. Ghosted

Before anyone accuses me of hypocrisy, I should probably preface this section by saying my response time ranges anywhere from three business days to the end of the kali yuga, so if you are one of the people waiting for a reply for me, I’m so sorry… and I intend to get back to you (really). Let’s just get into the linguistics now, shall we?

The noun ghost has haunted English for centuries, but its verbal sense (to silently disappear from someone's life) only began to appear in the mid-2000s before exploding around 2014. The word is a classic example of conversion, the phenomenon where a word changes its grammatical class without actually changing its form. It makes sense, I guess. you can’t really ghost someone on landline or when you are having a face-to-face conversation, both mediums require some kind of acknowledged goodbye. It took asynchronous, opt-out-able communication for the behavior to become common enough, and nameable enough, to need its own word.

It's insane how new technology doesn't just change the way we communicate, but also creates entirely new communicative behaviours that English needs new words for. what makes ghosted even more interesting is that it also immediately spawned a whole family of copycats with the same connotations— benching, zombieing, breadcrumbing, orbiting, all riffing on the same idea of incomplete disappearance.

It's rare to watch a single coinage generate that many structural offspring in under a decade, and it's basically proof that once a word finds the exact right shape for a feeling everyone's secretly been experiencing, it can multiply real quick.

4. Dumped

Ladies and gentlemen, the moment you've all been waiting for. The culprit. The criminal. The lexical villain that sent me down this entire etymological rabbit hole.

I present to you: Dumped.

Going all the way back to Middle English dumpen meaning “to fall suddenly, to thump,” for most of its life dumped had nothing to do with people at all. You dumped rubbish, you dumped ballast off a ship, you dumped surplus stock nobody wanted at a price low enough to tank the market. Every single sense of this word, for centuries, involved getting rid of something heavy, unwanted, and in the way.

In the early twentieth century, however, we started applying it to relationships.

Which I think says something rather depressing about us.

As dating becomes less and less formal, and as courtship turns into casual hooking up, the language we use to describe break-ups is also evolving.

Earlier breakup vocabulary often centred on promises, honour, and courtship. Dumped, by contrast, is from a culture that is blunter, faster, and perhaps a little more disposable. It doesn't describe a relationship ending so much as one person deciding the other is no longer worth carrying.

Jilted assumes there was hope.
Conscious uncoupling assumes there was mutual respect.
Ghosted assumes there was silence.
Dumped assumes there was rubbish.

So, after disappearing down this etymological rabbit hole, I have decided none of these words actually describe what happened to me. I don’t think I was jilted, ghosted, consciously uncoupled, or even dumped.

I think I was just sixteen.

And so was he.

I would hate to reduce the nuances of the experience to a single word. There was too much kindness, too much confusion, too much bad timing, too much growing up, and too much care for any dictionary entry to do it justice.

language, brilliant as it is, can only approximate experience. It can tell us what happened, but rarely fully encompass how it felt. Some stories are too complicated to be compressed into a single lexical term. This is one of them. :)

assailing through the asylum of my
pathetic pathological people-pleasing perfectionism
come conclusion: plath is biblical
to my generation’s girlhood

so the natural nihilistic inclination
to ovens is obviously normal. right?
and perhaps even a prerogative
to disappear forever?

but what if the divine divorces my soul
and god says ‘begone you loser girl’
will I condense into a cosmic crescendo
of unconscious folklore?

glittering glorious genius guy
bid me a tarnishing torturous goodbye
torrential downpour
tempest outpour
her elegiac eyes are solitary and sore

begging for relief from the
emotional bruises that cover my bare soul
the brave-heart in me is broken
and all the best boys are bored

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What did you actually think you’d be by now? What would the little girl with two pigtails, cardboard rainbow fairy wings on her back, stars in her eyes, ink stains on her stubby fingers not from doing the fifty-three long division sums she so hated, but from writing about how much she didn’t want to do them in her favorite purple diary that her mother brought her as a get-better gift when she bruised her knees while skating in her bright red skates. The girl who poured everything into that diary, every complaint, every secret, every dream every story from the fictional worlds she built inside her head, the girl who believed magic was real, the girl who made color-paper puppets with choco bar ice-cream sticks pressed behind them, staging full, dramatic productions for a very high-profile audience of stuffed toys. Say— if that girl saw you now, what would she think?

I’m too young to be this nostalgic. I’ve always been labeled an old soul, always labeled to be mature for her age, sensible, never makes the “wrong choices”. Miss. Most likely to disappoint no one (but herself). Everything I do, I do as if all the people in my life are watching. I’m a circus animal, and everyone around me has a microscope, examining carefully, waiting for me to fall from the tightropes, so they can all make fun of me and laugh till their eyes water. I can’t fall. I won’t. I have to be the golden child, I have to have it all, I have to pretend I have it all figured out.

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Maybe that’s why I keep trying to map out the next fifty years of my life. But it’s always in pencil. I am never sure of anything. I never will be. No one ever is. Right? You just have it to fake it till you make it. Every week the road changes, destinations disappear, twenty-six new pop up, all of them demand to be chosen, but none of them want to stay with me. I’m so busy trying to not think about the roads not taken, I end up losing the one I already have.

Maybe this is why I’ve never liked anyone before, no, not in the true sense. I don’t know what it’s supposed to feel like, or if I have already felt it. I don’t know, because I pushed any possibility of it away. And like any good self-combusting overthinking people-pleaser, I told myself I’d be better off without it. but, I’m only fifteen, and I don’t know what I’m doing. All my friends are either making out with random guys or solving cancer and getting ready to take over the world. But, I, I have absolutely no idea where I am, or where I am going.

I’ve had fleeting crushes before, obsessive ones even, but I would kill myself if I had to actually be with any of them. I only ever did like this one guy, but ofc the ‘sensible’ me wouldn’t do anything ‘immature’ or engage in “useless teenage petulance”. I wonder if I’m so busy trying to not be like everyone else, that I end up becoming no one at all, not even myself. Everybody thinks of me as the golden child, they expect me to turn out perfect, always do the right thing, always make the right choice, be the best, and always always stay in my goody two shoes. But if I don’t want to stay them? I don’t want to change into the black-lipstick-wearing 90s rock- listening rebellion girl either. I don’t want to where gothy victorian boots. For once, I just want to stay barefoot, and maybe feel the earth beneath me, and not feel the pressure to walk on any road.

I just want to stay still, stop running, stop feeling, stop avoiding, stop confronting. I don’t want to pick. I don’t want to second-guess. I just want to be spontaneous. Feel the wind. sixteen will be different, sixteen will be exiting, sixteen will take me back to the bliss I felt when I was six. I’ll dye the ends of my hair the same purple my diary was. and I’ll spend an entire day in my fairy wings wandering in the secret gardens that are mine and only mine.

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the flower wars

The Flower Wars were, well, wars.

But they weren’t fought for land, power, or victory. They were fought for people. More specifically, for bodies that could be taken alive and later offered up in ritual to the sun god Huitzilopochtli, because in Aztec belief: the universe was never really stable to begin with, but rather something perpetually on the edge of collapse, and something that required constant maintenance. The sun itself was not guaranteed to rise each day but had to be sustained, fed and kept in motion in order to maintain the cosmological balance that keeps each one of us alive.

Now, if the world depends on balance and balance depends on the gods and the gods depend on nourishment, then that nourishment has to come from somewhere, and in this case it came from human life, taken and ritualized and offered up on temple pyramids as part of a system that believed, quite seriously, that without this exchange everything would simply stop. Yes, we all would seize to exist.

Flower War (Xochiyaoyotl in Nahuatl) is misleading at first glance, but if you dig a little deeper, you will understand that in aztec thought, flowers were not ornamental but symbolic of rebirth, continuity, and the cyclical nature of existence. So, these wars were not understood, at least by those within the system, as purely violent, senseless or destructive, but as something structured and necessary to sustain the larger cosmological order that we are all a part of.

to grossly and badly oversimply it: if sun dies we die so we make people die so sun doesn’t die so we don’t die.

okay now I’m just going to dump some questions on you, bcs I love spiraling into philosophical existential rabbit holes (hehe)

is it ever actually justifiable to kill a person for the greater good or is that just something we tell ourselves to make difficult choices feel cleaner, and like why does this kind of thought even arise in the first place, why are we so quick to believe that some lives can be exchanged for others as if it’s a calculation and not a loss, and who decides which lives are worth giving up and which ones are worth saving, and is it really about survival or about control over who gets to survive, and if we put it in a thought experiment like the Trolley Problem does it suddenly become easier to accept, and if it does then what does that say about us, because the moment you strip it down it’s still the same idea!? right?

push the trolley down the track?

Picture this: a runaway trolley is speeding down a track toward five people who can’t move. You’re standing next to a lever that can divert it onto another track, where it will kill just one instead.

Yes, I know. We’ve all seen this a million times.

The Trolley Problem has been recycled in every philosophy class, debate club, and mildly existential 2 a.m. conversation with your imaginary boyfriend who somehow has emotional intelligence, critical thinking skills, and loves you to death like in a writes you letters and respects your boundaries way (Okay I’m moving on, this is getting embarrassing.)

The reason we keep coming back to this problem is because the question at the centre of it all is very uncomfortable. What are you supposed to do? Do you pull the lever and actively choose to sacrifice one person to save five, because the numbers matter? Or do you do nothing and let five people die, because at least you didn’t directly cause it?

Let’s hear what famous and actually smart people (who are not me, a pity, i know) have to say about this.

First, we have Philippa Foot. She introduced the trolley problem in her 1967 essay ‘The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of Double Effect’,1 written at a time when philosophers were intensely debating the ethics of life, death, and moral responsibility. The paper focuses on abortion, but more broadly, it asks the question: when, if ever, is it morally acceptable to cause harm while trying to achieve something good?

She argues that there is an important moral difference between intending harm and merely foreseeing it as a side effect. So, diverting the trolley to save five people (while one dies) may be permissible because the death isn’t the goal, but just a consequence.

Next, we have Judith Jarvis Thomson, who took Philippa Foot’s original idea and made it infinitely more uncomfortable. In her 1976 essay Killing, Letting Die, and the Trolley Problem.2

She says that morality isn’t just about saving the most lives, but also about how directly you cause harm and whether you are using someone as a means to an end. So the question here then shifts to agency and responsibility.

Lastly, we have Jeremy Bentham, who takes a far more straightforward approach. His theory of utilitarianism argues that the right action is simply the one that produces the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. So basically he thinks pulling the lever is the correct choice.

Bentham’s view could be a justification for what Thanos essentially believes in, he twists it a lot, but at its core is kinda what he’s thinking ig (oh and bentham is, of course, slightly less purple, significantly less genocidal, and lacks the dramatic chin and infinity gauntlet, tragically so, if you ask me).

so was Thanos wrong?

idk. I mean, it’s not that simple. Because real life isn’t a controlled equation, and suffering doesn’t distribute itself neatly just because you halved a population. Thanos is basically the trolley problem at a massive scale i.e, sacrifice some to save many.

But the key difference is that in the trolley problem, you’re forced to choose. Thanos isn’t. He literally creates the situation and then decides who dies. (does he? actually i don’t know how the whole who disappears and who doesn’t thing works). what I’m trying to say is that there is no way to possibly correctly determine who gets to live and who gets to die. And even attempting to think that you can control that, is obnoxious trait. all you can do is wonder about it, even if the only thing the wondering does is give you a bad headache, encourage ur procrastination attempts to avoid studying for you impending math exam (the epitome of doom), and remind you of ur lack of an imaginary boyfriend to have those 2 a.m. conversations with.

at the end of the day, we're all just standing next to a lever of some kind, aren't we? the aztecs pulled theirs every morning to make sure the sun showed up. thanos pulled his because he ran out of therapy options. and bentham would've pulled it, done the math, and written a very long paper about why he was correct. lol, ig the most honest thing we can do is just stay uncomfortable with it, (at least that’s what im doing) yk, sit with the question and don't pull the lever too fast, or just don’t pull it at all.

yours,
dionee :)))

Like that one time someone called me “ace,” and suddenly there were butterflies rioting in my stomach—because, obviously, the only logical explanation was that they had watched the entirety of Gilmore Girls and said that very thing to channel Logan Huntzberger… all because I had casually mentioned, a million years ago, that I loved Logan. You know. Perfectly rational.

Anyway, if you’re that kind of person (by which I mean someone who can turn a two-second interaction into a full-fledged narrative arc, complete with subtext, symbolism, and a possible future together), then babe, this post is very much for you.

You see, the best medication for a case of good old main-character delusion with a side of romantic overanalysis is watching a rom-com with just the right amount of chaos, charm, and conveniently timed happy endings. And the one I’m about to prescribe to you right now also happens to feature a ridiculously attractive, very young Channing Tatum—so really, what’s the argument against it?

She’s The Man

A modern readaptation of Shakespeare’s twelfth night with a football field, a multi-directional romantic entanglement, and a main character who refuses to shrink herself in a world full of obnoxious men.

I have a special relationship with Twelfth Night, because the first monologue I ever performed, for my very first drama exam, was Viola trying to make sense of the love triangle she was trapped in. So if I had to step back into Viola’s shoes to explain this particular chaos to you, it would go something like this…

The plot of She’s the Man is basically built on one very simple problem—Viola wants to play football but isn’t allowed to because her school doesn’t let girls join the team. So instead of, I don’t know, starting a petition or having a normal breakdown about it, she decides to impersonate her twin brother, enroll in his boarding school, join the boys football team, and inadvertently fall in love with her roommate while helping him get the girl who is in love with her. Identities get mixed up, feelings are all over the place, and no one is in love with the right person at the right time.

Anyway, what makes She’s the Man feel oddly relevant to me right now is that, beneath all the unrealistic-ness and early-2000s absurdity, it taps into something that hasn’t really changed. The need to be taken seriously in spaces that weren’t built for you. The instinct to reshape yourself to fit in. The quiet frustration of knowing you’re capable, but still having to prove it twice as hard.

Viola’s solution is obviously extreme (and borderline unhinged), but the core of it feels familiar. Even now, there’s this constant balancing act between being likable and being competent, between fitting in and standing out, between being too much and somehow still not enough.

And while most of us aren’t faking entire identities to join a football team, the idea of performing versions of ourselves depending on the room we’re in isn’t exactly outdated, and it’s something I find myself doing more often than I would like to admit. But also I don’t want to live like that?? Like some sort of Schrödinger’s douchebag situation where I’m both being myself and not being myself at the same time depending on who’s looking.

I also think this self-editing thing is more natural in women compared to men. Women are taught to shrink themselves, adjust more, and think about ‘log kya kahenge’ from an early age. We’re socially conditioned into believing that in order to survive and be accepted being ‘you’ is not enough. You have to be more. You have to accommodate to everyone’s needs, and you have think about others before you think about yourself.

The question I keep coming back to is whether any version of you that exists in relation to other people is actually the real one, or whether that’s just always going to be a performance of varying degrees? Maybe the whole “authentic self” thing doesn’t really exist and everyone is just doing a more or less coherent impression of themselves depending on the day.

Or maybe what I'm actually looking for isn't the "real me" in some pure, pre-social, uncontaminated form. I'm not sure that person exists, and honestly she sounds kind of feral. What I want is something simpler and harder at the same time: to feel like the gap between who I am when no one's watching and who I am when everyone is watching is small enough that I'm not constantly exhausted by the distance between them.

Maybe I just need to spend more time alone in a room and find out what happens. In complete isolation. With nothing but my own intrusive thoughts. Who am I, when I’m not performing for everyone around me? What happens when the stage lights go off? and the red velvet curtains close? Where does everyone end? and Where do I begin?

I don’t know. But I’ll stare at the ceiling fan, and spiral about it. (aesthetically ofc, because I’m still performing)

byee,
with lots of love,
dione :)

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trestles of the bridges that built me
broken by his unmagic tonic
nucleus accumbens now dysfunctional
causing moody systemic seasonality

the complacencies in his masculinity
missing: brave mythic bronze sword
an aurthuresque upbringing
wouldn’t have led to this mourning

locomotive mechanical rehearsal
of machine-like materialised love
computer please connive for the reversal
of my undying spirit’s undoing

promising profound philosopher
beget to my womb, his unborn seeds
but I am not to be a foolish mother
just a surrogate to his insatiable needs

I pretend to be a damsel in distress
hoping he shows some chivalry
meaningless maiden mistake
mistress would never commit

concern observed for gymnasium
obsession with violent video game
belts down barrels of beer in boxers
forgets said maiden’s (my) name

diagnosis complete
patient shows signs of love fatigue
he’s-just-not-into-you-itis
cure: lots of cats and Sylvia Plath

Goodbye uninterested bot
Bib bab and bob
the door is open. (not)
Bye.

note: ensure to avoid ovens and sleeping pills, and in any circumstances do not put your head in them.

heyylo, here’s the link to the first series if you have not read it already (oh and this month I only have one media medication- the bell jar by sylvia plath, one of my all time favorites):

letter 5

February 2nd, 1968

I was reading The Bell Jar yesterday — my dark, tired, beady eyes searching for something other than my coursework, my frantic, frizzy hair sticking out of my overburdened, overworked head like a distress signal in a warzone. Plath was calling out to me. I found myself standing at the fig tree, weighing all my options with the grace of a paralyzed pigeon.

I cannot pick a single version of myself. I want everything. Brilliance, adventure, admiration, catastrophe, and therefore I suspect I shall end up with nothing but sensible shoes and a steady routine. The figs are plopping one by one to the cold ground while I stand there with dreadful eyesight and even worse decision-making, slowly fading into polite irrelevance.

Indecision, it seems, is the quickest route to indifference.

I want to be a Barbie. She has twenty-seven careers, eternal youth, and not a single nervous breakdown about potential. She becomes an astronaut before breakfast and a ballerina by tea, all without ever worrying she has chosen incorrectly.

I keep wondering if ambition is a blessing or a curse. It fills me with fire, but also with constant dissatisfaction. Nothing feels enough. Not studying. Not resting. Not dreaming. I am always behind the girl I imagine I should be.

And worse still, I worry that one day I will stop imagining altogether. That the hunger will dull into acceptance. That I will wake up content with smallness, and not even mourn the girl who wanted the whole orchard.

Tell me… does the wanting ever quiet down? Or do we simply learn to live with the ache of unrealized selves?

Write soon, before I run away to join a travelling poetry circus or something equally impractical.

Yours in academic despair and philosophical flair,
dione.

letter 6

February 10th, 1968

My dramatic Dione,

I knew it was only a matter of time before Plath got her claws into you. One does not casually stroll past The Bell Jar during exam season without emerging convinced one is either a genius or a tragedy (occasionally both before supper.)

Your fig tree dilemma is terribly familiar. We all stand beneath it at some point, craning our necks, convinced that choosing one fruit means condemning the rest to rot. What no one tells us is that most people spend their lives circling the tree pretending they have chosen wisely while secretly eyeing the others.

As for Barbie. She is an unreasonable standard. Perfect hair, endless youth, and not a single existential crisis? Rubbish. If she were real, she would have already had at least three unsuitable affairs (Adrian, Antony and Stephen; if you let me imagine, hahaha) and one minor breakdown in that Parisian café you love.

The trouble is, she has quietly become the model woman of our generation —expected to be beautiful, brilliant, endlessly adaptable, and preferably smiling while doing it all. One moment a career girl, the next a domestic goddess, and somehow never tired in between.

We are encouraged to “have it all,” which is a very clever way of saying we must do everything at once and look marvelous while collapsing internally. Men, I notice, are allowed one ambition at a time. Women are expected to juggle seven with good posture.

But Darling! Ambition does not vanish. It merely changes costumes. Some days it looks like conquering the world. Other days it looks like surviving it with grace.

The wanting never quiets , but I assure you, it becomes less frightening.

So want wildly, Dione. Want too much. Want everything. It is far better than wanting nothing at all.

Now go study before you fail dramatically and are forced to become a travelling poet for survival rather than romance.

Yours, older in years but not in spirit,
Amara.

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Prescribed Media Medication

1. People we meet on Vacation
   This feel-good rom-com will make you believe in love again. Period. At its core, it’s about emotional restraint versus emotional honesty, and the fear of wanting too much from someone you don’t want to lose. The characters constantly hover between closeness and distance, which makes their relationship feel real rather than idealized. It also subtly challenges the idea that being emotionally expressive is a flaw. It’s gentle, awkward, slow, and full of moments where you realize the right person won’t be overwhelmed by you. Also yes, my faith in men has been restored (well-ish).

   

2. Anne with an E
   oh! A forever favorite. Anne makes me want to live life to the fullest. More than just a period drama, this series is a celebration of feeling deeply. Visually rich and emotionally grounded, the series balances whimsy with realism. It explores belonging, identity, and chosen family with remarkable sensitivity. What makes it enduring is its refusal to dim Anne’s light. It’s comforting, inspiring, and endlessly rewatchable. There’s always more scope for your imagination! (Also, at this point, I think I just have a thing for anyone with the last name Blythe.) (Oh, and please read the books! they are amazingg!)

   

3. Jab we met
   You can never talk too much, and this movie proves it. It will always sit comfortably in my top five Bollywood films. Beneath its humour and charm, the film quietly addresses loneliness, self-worth, and emotional honesty. The contrast between Geet and Aditya highlights how being expressive is often misunderstood but deeply necessary. Comforting, funny, and emotionally affirming, it’s a film that celebrates loud joy and reminds us that warmth doesn’t need to be toned down to be loved. (also can we talk about how amazing and timeless Geet’s wardrobe is)

   

End of Report.

heyy, so I thought I’d start a new series and write about the themes I diagnose myself (it’s literally just me taking out pages from my diary entries and typing them onto substack in the middle of the night) with every month (dunno how long it’ll last, hehe, we both know about my commitment issues.), and I rly don’t want to lose my sanity to exams, so it’s an attempt to ensure i keep writing through hell. anyway, hope you enjoy!

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and so I scroll, and scroll, and scroll—reading notes instead of watching reels, saving essays instead of pinning recipes, pretending that this performance of productivity is something nobler than what it is. But when in truth, I’m just another person trying to feel less lonely through the glow of a screen.

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dear loneliness and love,

I feel so lonely. all my friends are caught up in these seemingly effortless relationships, and I have always told myself I didn’t need that kind of distraction, that high school infatuation was trivial. but the fucking truth is that i’m jealous. and maybe even scared. i’m terrified of the possibility that I will never find someone who truly sees me. I’m terrified of not finding him. do I really need him?

I have seen too many failed marriages, too many love stories bound by expectation rather than understanding, relationships crumbling under the weight of unspoken resentments, compromise masquerading as devotion, and the relentless pressure to perform happiness. my own parents are a living paradox: mentally divorced, living separate lives, constantly at war, yet performing together for the sake of me and my sister.

and that’s why I convinced myself I didn’t need anyone. but maybe that was only self-preservation. the idea of love that is perpetuated in almost every single thing I read, write, listen, and watch exists everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Everywhere I look, I see it; nowhere I go, it eludes me. both inevitable and elusive, a horizon I can see but never reach.

I wonder if love is always this contradiction.

Is the search for connection doomed to confront its own impossibility, or is it precisely in that impossibility that we find meaning?

in the search for connection, i reacquainted with a old friend. we were never that close, he is on the other side of the world, both literally, and figuratively. But over the past few weeks, as we’ve talked more, it’s been unexpectedly refreshing to see the world through his eyes. In one conversation, he spoke of his girlfriend. He has never been the romantic type, always busying himself with building a robot or tinkering with some engineering marvel he cannot shut up about.

but when he spoke of her, I could feel the magical awe in his voice. I could feel the way he lingered on her presence, the heat-felt thoughtfulness, the luminous devotion that made his usual rigidity seem tender and alive. he was entirely enchanted by her, and it was so beautiful, that for a moment, it felt like the universe had quietly paused just to let me watch love bloom. in that fragile, fleeting pause, it felt impossible not to believe, for a little while, that it could all happen to me too, maybe?

he was not superficial, he was genuinely passionately utterly besotted by her. he loved her faults and her scars just as much as he loved her smiles and sparks, and oh it restored my 1 percent faith left in men.

If you think about it materially, love is pointless. its a mathematical equation of convenience and compatibility. I got this from watching The Materialists. love is seldom practical. It doesn’t plan or reason. You’re wise and pragmatic until feelings quietly slip in and you find yourself swept up by the beautiful chaos of attraction.

i do not know if i will ever experience this nonsensical, unpredictable, impractical, messy, inexplicable, magical, luminous feeling. but I sure do hope so. if you are out there somewhere i am waiting, and I’m okay with waiting until I find you. the universe is so magnanimous, and I am but a speck lost in this vast cosmic ocean. just know that I love you, mind-numbingly, heart-wrenchingly and with all my soul. I cannot wait to meet you.

i do not long for your beauty made of surfaces or skin. What I ache for is the nakedness of your mind. the intricate scaffolding of your thoughts, the constellations of your beliefs, the untamed wilderness of your imagination. I want to open your world like a book and read every line. I want to wander your ideas, feed on your brilliance, and let our minds spill into each other until we are both changed.

and if I never find you, if you remain only a silhouette in the distance or a figment of my most beautiful dreams, that’s alright too. I will have loved you in my imagining. I will have built a sepulture of hope for you inside my chest and lit candles for you in the quiet corners of my days.

when i was scrolling i found

(if you are “the one”)

dear exploration and fascination,

i guess, what I truly long for now is not just love, but the kind of wonder that fills the soul with the light of a thousand suns, the fascination that seizes you when you discover something new, when you stumble upon a truth that makes your heart race and your mind expand. I want to be wanderlust every time I open a book, every time I step into the streets, the gardens, the universe outside, every time I let myself roam through the worlds hidden in my pages of my school books.

After exam season, my mind feels wrung out like a cloth; the joy of learning replaced by the panic of performing. You rush me, bind me, expect so much in so little time, until my inner child, the one who used to ask “why” a hundred times a day, feels like she is fading, gasping for space to play.

I will become a vagabond. I will wander untethered, letting my feet trace the curves of the earth and my eyes drink in the light that slips between leaves, the tremor of waves, the quiet architecture of mountains. I will drown, willingly, in an ocean of bliss and wonder, surrendering to the discovery of nature’s deepest decrees.

In this immersion, I will remember what it is to be alive, to be small yet infinite, to be endlessly curious without suffocation or shackles.

stay stuck
stay grounded
pray for liberation
pray for peace

reach higher
be bigger
it’s not enough
you’re not worth it

I see leafless sticks
I see drying radicals
lack of potential
lack of opportunity

I see rigid shoulders
I see silent fathers
I see armor-hearts
I see buried weeping

don’t bend
don’t break
carry the weight
swallow the rage

provide more
feel less
it’s never enough
you’re not man enough

I see painted faces
I see shrinking voices
I see careful steps
I see measured laughter

smile wider
speak softer
take up less space
be grateful for crumbs

I see us both
prisoners of the same mythology
he in his fortress of silence
she in her tower of glass

I see us both
feeding the same hungry machine
his blood, her breath
his strength, her softness

I see us both
children of the same lie
that we are opposite
when we are mirrors

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Nothing escapes this machinery of commodification — not joy, not pain, not even silence.

And still, I remain unsold. So, I’ll try again harder and harder, and fall back into the same cycle.

I am a hamster running forever on the hamster wheel they call life.

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Dearest Amara,

Your last editorial has been my sole source of entertainment in what has otherwise been a season of yawns. I must congratulate you, as always, on your talent for leaving me secret messages hidden throughout the issue. I did wonder if your closing remark on “the allure of the unsuitable” was meant for my eyes in particular. If so, consider me suitably chastened, though not entirely reformed.

You will, I suspect, be amused to learn that our mutual acquaintance— she of the lavender perfume and excessive guffaws — has set her heart upon Antony Mercier. Yes, that Antony. I cannot fault her enthusiasm, though I might question her discernment; he is handsome enough, in that polished, untroubled way that speaks of little imagination, and I fear she mistakes this for depth.

But then, you and I both know how the mind conspires to dress a dull man in all the finery of our own invention. We have done it often enough ourselves, and with far less excuse.

I shall keep you informed of developments, though I suspect there will be few worth the ink. Still, these small dramas make the winter that is about to fall more bearable, do they not? Write soon, and tell me if your own romantic misadventures continue— I know they will.

Yours, with all the warmth the season allows,
dione.


letter 2

June 4th, 1967

My ever anxious Dione,

You are ridiculous. Do you think I don’t hear the flutter beneath your words when you write of Antony Mercier? Spare me the pretense of “our mutual acquaintance”. It is your own heart you are describing, and you are terrified because it beats against your better judgment. How delicious and delusional!

Let me tell you something. Bad choices in men are my native tongue. If there were a degree for it, I would have long since graduated with honors and been asked back as a visiting professor. They are never worthy, Dione, and yet, we continue to long for them? We don’t fall for men because they are worthy. We fall for them because we crave the exquisite disaster of it.

Antony may be polished and dull, as you say, but dullness is a mirror: you will fill it with your own color until you cannot tell where he ends and you begin. Is that not what we always do? I’ve lost track of the number of unsuitable somebodies I’ve crowned genius, only to wake up beside them and realize they were merely men. Ordinary, flawed, faintly boring men. And yet I return, again and again, to that altar.

So, my darling, I will not warn you away. I will not scold. Fall, if you must. Learn what I already know, that desire rarely concerns itself with sense. And if! when you find yourself heartbroken, you will be in the best of company. Mine.

Until then, keep writing to me of these small catastrophes. They are far more amusing than my mundane ‘adventures’.

Yours in perpetual pointless love,
Amara.

letter 3

June 10th, 1967

Amara,

Alright. Fine. You’ve caught me. I don’t know what spell you’ve worked but, yes. Yes, it’s happening. I think of him more than I mean to. I hear his laugh when he isn’t near, I turn at the sound of a voice that isn’t his, and I feel ridiculous even writing this to you. What is wrong with me? This can’t be happening. Not to me. I like him. There, I’ve said it. I am ruined!!

Because really, Antony is intolerable. Perfect men like him ought to be banished from this world; they make the rest of us look like footnotes. His every word lands like it was pre-polished by Shakespeare. His theories are unfairly brilliant, as if Aristotle himself gave him lessons. And don’t get me started on the hair! it should be studied by sculptors as a muse.

Naturally, I detest him. Which is to say, of course, I am utterly besotted. If this continues, you’ll find me scribbling “Mrs. Mercier” in the margins of my schoolbooks like some tragic heroine of a cheap novel. (Heaven spare me that indignity.)

I believe you now, though I wish I didn’t. What frightens me is not that I want him, but that I want him despite knowing better. Does that make me weak? I’m only human, you know? I thought I was immune to this kind of unraveling. And yet here I am, writing to you with shaking hands. Stupidly.

So tell me, Amara! What hope has a mere mortal like me against such Olympian flawlessness? I’m convinced the only cure is exile, or perhaps a sensible slap.

Yours (helplessly),
dione.

letter 4

June 18th, 1967

Dearest Dione,

I laughed so loudly at your last letter that the concierge knocked to see if I’d finally lost my mind. Perhaps I have, but it is not for Antony Mercier. No, my undoing was named Adrian last week: dark hair, soft voice, the sort of man who looks good but is hollow on the inside. Empty. Naturally, I mistook that stare for devotion, when in fact it was only vanity. He liked imagining himself the kind of man who could tame me. I let him try for three nights.

By the fourth, I was already bored. He spoke too often of his career, too little of anything magical. When he kissed me goodbye, I realized with something like relief that I felt nothing. Isn’t that always the way? One mistake collapses into another, and we convince ourselves it was passion when really it was only the thrill of being temporarily seen.

So, darling, do not torment yourself about Antony. If you find yourself liking him, then like him. Better to scorch yourself once in earnest than die of perpetual hesitation. Besides, I’ve always believed that unsuitable men make the best material for our letters. When we are old and respectable, who will want to read about the sensible choices we never made?

Write soon, my Dione. And if Antony proves to be a bore or a whore, we shall simply invent for him a more interesting character than he deserves. That, after all, is our specialty.

lovingly yours,
Amara.

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they tried to water me down
it didn’t work
sprayed the fire extinguisher
only to relight the spark

I ran I ran I ran

away away away

to some far far
far far land

set the entire
coal-black path on fire

I screamed I screamed I screamed

Louder Louder Louder

than ever ever ever

voices echoed through the
entire fuming city

that burning girl
oh she’s a witch

KILL HER KILL HER

that monster
weird creature

DIE DIE DIE

stabbed myself
a hundred wounds
blood didn’t spill
they couldn’t kill

drank poison
jumped over the horizon

not a single bruise
despite hanging from the noose

I cried I cried I cried

but the tears didn’t stop the fire

fly fly fly away o hammers, wrentches, screws, bolts and springs, clock gears slow time down, stop me from breaking apart, stop stop stop stop stop stupid stupid stupid stupid run run run run run run run run run

i can;t rest. i try so hard to, but i cant, you keep pulling me back to the stars and sky and for a fleeting moment its all clear, but i have it taken away from me agian, i cant bear this i miss you, where do you disappear, i dont want to unravel, i put me in the asylum again, my body shivers as they treat me with shocks, my brain refuses to make peace with reality, wanted potential, unpicked apples.

flower pots and yellow drifting alternates potions spells magic, moon sun stars

bye.

sorry

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But even as I say I want to stop, there's this voice screaming that stopping means failing, means becoming irrelevant, means watching everyone else sprint past me while I'm left behind with nothing to show for myself. I'm caught between two impossible truths: I cannot keep going like this, and I cannot stop going like this. Every time I try to rest, guilt floods in like water through a cracked dam. What if I miss something important? What if someone asks me about current events and I have nothing intelligent to say? What if I'm not becoming who I'm supposed to be?

I've turned my own existence into a performance, and I don't even know who the audience is anymore. Maybe it's my future self, judging me for wasting time. Maybe it's society, expecting me to have opinions on everything from climate policy to foreign affairs to the latest social justice movement. Maybe it's all the successful people I follow online who seem to effortlessly balance activism and achievement and authenticity.

I genuinely care about these things—the wars, the forests, the injustices—but I've made caring into another task on my endless to-do list. I've commodified my own compassion, turned empathy into content consumption. I scroll through tragedy after tragedy, collecting outrage, feeling morally obligated to bear witness to every form of suffering while somehow also optimizing my productivity and maintaining my mental health and building meaningful relationships and discovering my passion.

I want to walk instead of run, but I've forgotten how to move without purpose, how to exist without improving. Every moment feels like it should be productive, educational, transformative. Even my desire to slow down has become another goal to achieve, another way I'm failing at being the right kind of person.

I'm tired of being a project. I'm tired of my own potential hanging over me like a sword. I want to be ordinary, to breathe without it meaning anything, to have days that don't contribute to my personal brand or my future success or my intellectual development. I want to exist without justifying my existence.

But how do you unlearn the need to be everything when everything around you insists that being enough is not enough?

There is something so profoundly messed up about the modern human condition, particularly for young women like me who've inherited impossible expectations. I’m caught in a cruel paradox— desperately wanting to escape the pressure to be everything while simultaneously feeling compelled to keep reaching for it all.

I consume information madly! My media consumption cycle is toxic. I’m trying to fill a void that can't actually be filled through information. Its like, each article, each piece of content promises that if you just know enough, care enough, have the right take on everything, you'll finally belong, finally matter. But the more you consume, the more inadequate you feel, because the goal posts keep moving. There's always another crisis to understand, another perspective to consider, another version of yourself you should be becoming.

I want to stop performing competence, stop performing optimization, stop performing the role of the girl who has it all figured out. I DON’T HAVE ANYTHING FIGURED OUTT! WHY CAN’T THAT BE NORMALIZEDDDDDD?

How do I exist authentically in a world that commodifies the idea of authenticity itself?

Shifting to this new ward in the asylum is SOOO HARDDD. I just feel so, so, so, so dumb. I was never great at physics. All it ever did was trigger existential crises. Like—what even is the universe? What are all these forces? Why do they exist? Who decided there should be laws? Who decides how energy functions? How are we able to see? How do we feel? And how, oh how, do we percive?

So I always start with physics, and end up in philosophy. That’s just how I am, I guess.

When I was a child, I used to say I wanted to become an astronaut. I think everyone has that dream at some point. And then I came to high school. And the way I was taught the universe — in numbers and formulas and long mechanical paragraphs — made me stop dreaming. The pressure to understand, to explain, to solve hypothetical numericals about very real, very magical things... it broke something. It made the universe feel like homework.

I want to fall in love with the universe again. I want to fall in love with learning. I want to fall in love with the wind and the way it dances between trees. With the birds that sing for no reason. With the sun that shows up without fail, and the stars that are somehow always burning, even when we’re not looking.

I want to fall in love with existence. I want to fall in love with life.

I don’t know where I’m going with this rant. I just know I’m extremely confused about what I’m going to do after I leave the asylum in two years. I don’t know what kind of treatments I want to take. I don’t know whether I’ll go to a new asylum in a new country, or stay back here because the world feels terrifying and fragile and unfair. Will there be a world war? Will I still believe in love? Will the world survive long enough for me to?

Everything is uncertain. Everything is unpredictable. And I think I’m going slightly insane.

Anyway. That’s the end of my short midnight spiral. Bye. I hope I made sense. Someone knock some sense into me, please.

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guyss, please tell me what to do with life, i cannot figure it out for the life of me!!!!! seriously how did you pick that one thing to do for the rest of your livesss