majorly I talk about the Emily Wilson essay, which I knew I'd really like, so I read it in its entirety but she seems to have made edits since it first dropped, so that’s fun. but yeah I talk about why this discourse is all so… funny to me… and how it makes a lot of sense that we’re here as a culture currently but the dishonesty in how people regard this film as it stands alone is something I still remain curious about because like. yeah you don’t have to like Christopher Nolan movies as a whole or who he is as an artist or perhaps not even regard him as an artist in the slightest and this film is just slop to you, yeah, whatever, sure, but like… in my opinion this is a good film. Moreover, I do really like it. Now, although this opinion is informed by generally being a Christopher Nolan fan I think because I am (usually) a fan Nolan becomes transparent in a way that one can know what to expect and also, as much as one can someone they literally do not know, I can also tell who he is? like, despite the obvious being he is White and a Man and all the rest in accordance with his films and his choices we are privy to behind the scenes it wouldn’t shock me if this man votes Tory every general election (if he even votes at all) and if anything the Odyssey does crystallise this further, but this does not take from what the film is to me because I wanted so badly to see it in imax because it is a movie made for imax screens. I think the collaborative process of what this film is, is worth witnessing, and! worth taking apart and thinking about and discussing after the fact. if the conversation is serious. and I think the conversation cannot be serious if it is not in good faith and not well informed, which is why I really really really enjoyed Emily Wilson’s essay as it may seem a “scathing review” but it is truly a worthy critique of bitches who claim to be her sons. I really, really respect that.

I’m in love with this actually so I kinda talk about it, and other things, for three hours. there ya go x

p.s. can you tell I’ve become obsessed with 30 rock with how much I genuinely do say *Jenna voice* Actually. now so much omg at least in this description text thing here…… I'm so sorry……

there are lots of “ships”, actually, beyond zanessa, that i invested in as a child who knew nothing but the rush of this feeling, like people connecting in this way is the most important thing in the world, like this is what we’re all here for. i believed in soulmates, and true love, and love at first sight, and would think about it so much at literally six years old. i really remember my first thoughts being about love.

it’s odd to also know that i was quite hateful back then, hitting and punching and biting anyone that disturbed my peace, or shutting out the world in general to splash around in a puddle or make my barbies kiss. love and hate are two threads spinning the same yarn. passion and intensity were the first feelings i knew i loved to feel, or what i was, in essence, arguably. me being a bully as a kid was more of an undiagnosed autism thing too, sure, but when i realised people do not like intensity everything turned inward and i wasn’t hurting anybody anymore, but i wasn’t hugging, either. my imagination overflowed and became nightmarish and i thought too much — i still think too much, but i know what I’m doing. you don’t know much of what you’re doing as a kid. and to be honest, you never really have to: you’re a kid. it’s so strange to grow up thinking you have to know it all. why do we do that?

anyway, i was embarrassed but i cared so much about rom coms and the dating lives of celebrities. i used every single birthday wish i had from ages 7 to 12 on niley — nick jonas x miley cyrus — wishing them to be together while these kids insisted that they never dated, and would secretly relish despite my sister and cousins and i openly complaining that one cousin would rewatch A Cinderella Story over and over and over again when we were over at hers. the majority of my sense of humour is derived from Jennifer Coolidge in that film. not even on purpose lol i totally forget about that film twenty years later but i saw a clip of it around a year ago and realised her evil stepmother ways are exactly the ways i like to joke, especially the “i have NEVER seen that before! i have NEVER seen my husband’s hidden will before!” god okay wait that movie is so good i’m wayyyy overdue for a rewatch i don’t think i have watched it since like 2007!!!! the conflict of these types of movies always stressed me out because they always get in the way of the girl getting the boy and once i got older i became anxious about the longevity beyond happily ever after (if they never supplied us with a sufficient montage like with Enchanted. hey no that movie does not have a sequel what are you on about they did not ruin that movie’s legacy with a nonsensical Maleficentesque bastardisation fifteen years later that nobody asked for even though i actually enjoyed both Maleficent live action films or i just really like Angelina Jolie in anything idk and the funny thing is i love Maya Rudolph in anything but NO we do not!! acknowledge!! the Disenchanted movie round these parts partner!!!! the montage at the end of Enchanted was always enough for me i love Love LOVED that fucking film WHO ASKED FOR A SEQUEL????? this is why i’m hesitant to acknowledge the devil wears prada 2 which is out tomorrow and again, no shade, nobody — with taste — really asked for. nostalgiabait gets soooo oldddd already oh my GOD are we not tired like as a society it’s been ten years of remakes and revamps and. then people turn around and hate the Matrix Resurrections movie because it’s too contrived which completely misses its important and beautiful message oh my godddd sorry but yall better let me have my random tangents it’s a means of truly committing to bad writing and having fun and taking this less seriously. the Matrix Resurrections movie is pretty serious to me though like if you truly don’t get that film watch Jessie Gender's video essay or even meeptop’s video essay about matrix sequels or even. i’m sure there’s many others. on youtube. but yes beyond the scope i know i know.) once the story ends you are to imagine the love goes on forever and ever. you never have to think about what that really looks like, or feels like, or like. how to do it at all, when it’s a story.

i started writing this essay because a couple i was parasocially invested in despite knowing these people in real life — the social media era is. so weird. in this way, i know — have broken up after being together the whole time i’ve known them and used to party with them like. ten years ago. i don’t know how long they’ve been together, how long ago they broke up; i just remember them being the perfect black lesbian couple, no easily perceivable attractiveness or intellectual gap (noooooo shade girl lol to NOBODY eyeee am just being HONEST!! that this was something i deeply admired about them) and both such pleasant people when i had talked to them in the past. i had a sneaking suspicion but then i saw something about an engagement a couple years back. and then. nothing. until one of them are interviewed at an awards show and admits they’re single now. my heart sank.

i’ve had to mute both of them on instagram now as each time i see either of them, clearly still thriving in their lives and getting on with things, i feel hurt, and bitter. yall weren’t supposed to break up!!!!!

the other day i woke up from a dream that made me consider downloading hinge again. i hate a talking stage, i probably won’t commit to anything new unless they’re completely captivating and not from this country (lol that’s the only “type” i bother to stick to) and i still ain’t got no job chile so i dunno how i’m gonna start back dating, but i must. i’ve spent an entire month being bitter about my crush having a girlfriend the entire time which had never been mentioned on our date, worrying about the 18 months i have left of my twenties, rediscovering a facet of gender dysphoria i honestly thought i’d grown out of but now have to figure out my relationship towards again, how this then connects with the times i’ve been sexually assaulted/harrassed/r*ped, how to adequately say what you want so you can do what you want, and how sometimes you just do not get what you want. and that’s okay.

i am good at reshaping what i want when i do not get what i want, if we’re being honest. it’s never too devastating to be met with reality. it has felt so in the past, but once you relinquish control and surrender, you start to see that there is so much in this world, so much more, and it’s so big, and there is so much else to do. i don’t have to be bitter. i choose to be, a lot of the time, because i find it fun in a evil stepmom from a cinderella story type of way. hatred is the iteration of love that is the easiest to indulge in. love is embarrassing and corny. at some point you will have to surrender to this.

i’ve been a cynic about love these past few years (within reason, I’m sure you can deduce) so yeah, when love breaks down in ways i don’t preempt and there’s no happily ever after in real life, i get upset. it’s distressing; how could this be?

i’ve grown up to realise people are so… people, you know, so human and so complex and so finite, and you have to surrender to that. it makes sense to want different things, make mistakes, be contradicting and not make sense. it makes sense to hurt about that. it makes sense to not want to love because you love so deeply, and feel like you’re scared, because you have been. but sometimes you realise you’re carrying an old narrative that doesn’t fit anymore, and that you’ll actually be okay this time around, maybe not every day, every time, but for a lot of it, i’ll be okay. i can expect it. i see it happening.

life plays out, not like a story, or like a dream, but like… what it is… when you believe in love. that’s what we’re all doing, to some degree. i’ve been reckoning with how hateful i can be when i am disregulated but there is still so much to love in this bleak reality we’re in currently, i’d go to argue the recognition of the bleakness is loving and important, and to hate the state we/i are currently in is to want, and believe in, better for ourselves. it isn’t a delusion to think so.

such a random essay to write so quickly all at once this morning. maybe i’m trying to compensate for no podcast this week. anyway. here you go. ❤️

I don’t think I like that spelling at all.

Girl…

okay. so… actually, I think it’s more appealing to spell it the Rihanna way. sorry it also brings more irony too so it’s funnier? I think? WHY AM I DELIBERATING THIS IN THE INTRODUCTION… who cares… i’m just tryna be me really.

okay.

SO! welcome! :) to the come to rihsus moment podcast where I yap about whatever on the weekend on my voice notes app and then post it on Sunday and you ingest it like Holy Communion. what are the white tab things they eat (take? imagine if it’s LSD…) though, like, is it a cracker? a white cookie? bread? girl… whatever they eat like. i’m that, okay? just let the metaphor land I am the communion cookie and this is your come to rihsus moment.

once I figure out what the hell them people are eating maybe that last clause can be the official tagline. that’d be cool :)

these episodes should be 1-2 hours long, will be edited if I have the energy but it’s my first day out here girl don’t be mad at the dead air and umms okay sometimes it gives these things flavour. or you really have to like me to push past the shoddiness of these in the beginning but the thing is I will get better if I start today and if you engage today and give me feedback guys i’m open :) I want to talk to people about things get in the comments or notes or whatever on here and chat with me don’t be afraid!!

I will post on YouTube when I have an adequate amount of clips to pair with the audio so there can be visuals. once I learn how to edit it's soooo over for you bitches fr……

i’m so obnoxious. I know. that’s the point of these, anyway: I have no job, no religion, i’m single, a volcel maybe, no i’m lying i’m absolutely not that I am literally just unemployed, I am also? really hungry right now so yeah once this uploads i’m going to eat something delish and enjoy my day and may immediately start working on the next episode…. it’s gonna be fun :) I promise!

i suppose, therefore, that this will be an essay that explores what i think about that tiktok, while also being a follow up on the impotence essay i posted in january.

the way impotence connects with comfort is arguably tangential, in that impotence can become a way of being and may be something you get used to after a while. you eventually take comfort in not moving, the lack of progress, the stagnation and monotony that comes with not doing much of anything. rotting, so to speak. bed rotting. a flagrant term to describe a habit most of us this side of the 2020s are victim to, where we sit on the couch or lay in bed and just. scroll, or watch tv, or do nothing, ostensibly, whatever nothing looks like for you. even worse: when you try and do anything, even if it’s urgent and you definitely need to — remember that one episode of euphoria where rue is wrapped up watching love island for two days and she has that whole internal battle about getting up to pee? yeah. extremely relatable. it’s that. the eerie comfort of staying in one hopefully warm and toasty place while anything beyond it feels bad and weird, knowing that you need to pee, or eat or something. breaking your bladder; aching your stomach; rotting your insides. though i’m sure in the case of erectile dysfunction it’s not about your dick rotting or. something right like there’s more to it than that. wouldn’t it be scary trying to fuck someone with a rotting dick, like, what??? i wouldn’t know but i’m sure that’s not the case, right?

sorry. mad tangent. anyway.

penises aren’t rotting maybe, but we are. i’d argue that we’ve learnt to take comfort in it. or i have, at times, at least. all those instagram ads targeting people with ADHD who bedrot like it’s a legitimate scientific symptom to come do a medical trial or join a new app or something speak to this phenomenon, and yes, all the tiktoks about it. the ironic tweets —ahem, sorry, posts on X. 🫩 — about it and you know what call me crazy but so many relationships, friendships and otherwise, are predicated on how well you rot with one another, i swear it. not to judge but there are many such cases of people going to each others houses just to lay in bed. and i hate it! much to the surprise of many, i’m sure. you may perceive me as a lazy person who is always in bed. i won’t lie to you i’m in bed writing this right now! i just think it’s stupid to go to someone’s house to go to bed. i hated dating people like that. in some cases, sure, it was absolutely necessary; i have known a lot of unwell people who just do not have the energy. i don’t fault them and i don’t fault that tiktoker that said the thing i first mentioned about neurodivergent people not needing to leave their comfort zone. i am just as much of a big proponent of understanding that if it is not safe for you to do so, then don’t.

i am not talking about safety here, though. we are discussing comfort.

bed rotting is not in the dsm at least for now but we can all glean that this is a symptom of depression. the awareness of mental illness becoming ascendant seems to parallel the eminence of social media and many can attest this is not incidental. i am going to talk as if you know, because if you don’t how exactly did you find me why are you reading this far but also hello complete stranger! nice to meet you. we have depression, probably. or maybe you don’t, which is great and very cool and i’m envious, in which case, you’ll still know what i mean but perhaps from a different end. great! come along now. so, we know all about depression and how it lowers your activity and ability and sensitivity and general functionality; that you kinda just wanna die. right? a lot of people with depression never experience suicidal ideation, or really feel much of anything but the despair that comes with the yearn for the abyss and all. it can look different for everybody. depression is hard. it can be a phase of life for some or it can take up the bulk for others. worse yet it could be a symptom of something else you’re dealing with in your life, like chronic illness or grief or poverty, which makes it harder to escape until you’ve dealt with those things. the other things can pale in comparison to the depressive lurch of shutting it all out, somehow, some way. there are times for me where this feeling, or lack thereof, is delicious. it feels good. and that’s the kind of comfort i’m talking about. comfort that easily becomes pleasure, a pattern, a process of action you’ve now committed to beyond your intent. it’s now a part of you. you feed off it, and it feeds off you.

the ouroboros is hard to break.

i had to look up how to spell that word and you know an ouroboros a symbol of wholeness? of completion? this speaks to what i’m trying to get at here, that the snake eating its tail is a circle and a process of action committed to and why then in the end would we not understand that to be comfortable. ? like it’s just what you do, at this point.

(also no wonder i find it sexy. delicious, i mean. did i ever tell you i really like snakes?)

comfort is comfortable. comfort is nice. comfort is safe. we use the term comfort zone to mean the line we draw for ourselves past what feels warm, familiar and good. hence, anything beyond the line is cold, foreign and then bad, right?

the other side of comfort is discomfort. right now being in bed is not comfortable for me. all day i’ve felt restless and strained. i have no overarching reason to be, i mean: i don’t work out, if there’s anything i exercise it’s my mouth and my mind — you know i got a lot to say and i do a lot of thinking — this week has been a lot of errand running and admin doing and i have. to do. my fucking. hair but i don’t want to (i really should just go bald but i feel like i’m too old for that yes it sounds dumb but i know what i mean its why i dont get all the piercings i want like girl im pushing 30!! not old at all i know. but whatever the truth is i like my hair. i really like that it’s growing and all i just dont like doing it myself anymore I’ve developed too much of a complex about it) so i’m procrastinating by doing other important things that need to be done. so, not really procrastinating then, am I?

i think if i can pick and choose what parts of life to immerse myself in then i’d like living more. i’d never want to die at all, like, because then i wouldn’t hate life. this is so immature, I know, but, there is so much of life that i don’t like doing. for instance, i made a commitment years ago that makes no sense for who i am at all. i didn’t realise how much it would aggravate me emotionally while it works for who I am, like… as praxis, you know? like it’s a Good Thing for me to have done and to be doing. in that way it makes a lot of sense. but god, i hate being in it. like, having to live in the decision i made, in real time, as if i weren’t the one who made this decision four years ago. the other night i couldn’t sleep because i was fretting about it all and how i’ve dug myself in a hole so deep and i don’t even remember how i got the shovel. i searched through my phone for evidence — this so-called shovel — and found it, and was dismayed at how blasé i had been agreeing to such an imposing life decision at fucking twenty-four years old. it wasn’t an issue of just being young and naive, I know and remember that I just didn’t care about myself that deeply back then. and I was comfortable in that.

or i just wanted to help. i still want to help. i love helping, which is my problem. this is what i meant by something that is a Good Thing for me. it teaches me to be present in the decisions i make and how to be entirely selfless, since help and support is something obviously care about and will seek out to do in life. it teaches me how to do it even when i hate doing it, even when it pushes me out of my comfort zone. see what I mean?

today I’m at my mother’s house typing this, avoiding my home which was once my comfort zone. i am so out of my element, everywhere, now. i have nowhere i feel like i can belong, nowhere and no one to truly take comfort in. obviously there’s my mum but in this precise moment she is focused on her shows more than me, which makes a lot of sense. you know i’m thirty next year, right? do i know that? … god…

additionally (because i always have to have some dig at my ex in these sorry it’s funny it’s par for the course but maybe not so much if she doesn’t read these anymore) but it was their birthday last week (EDIT: it’s been a couple weeks now lol) and i felt so sick the whole of the next day because i had to live entirely outside of my comfort zone and totally disregard her existence because it would be too painful to wish her happy birthday. yeah. that’s the dig. that i gotta act like i hate my ex but it’s so exhausting and sickening my body literally rejects this I hate living without her everyday it feels like i lose sense of who i am entirely. it’s been a fun week out of my comfort zone, truly.

life will look like this, for a while, until it doesn’t. it’s kind of sucked for a while now, but there’s little glimmers, you know? i wish i felt closer to my friends, i wish i didn’t feel so itchy at my family’s home, i wish i didn’t run the risk of burnout so quickly or being triggered so easily at a job, and also for some reason ive been thinking a lot about the time i was r worded like. remembering little gruesome details surrounding that night and i keep saying mean, unreasonable things like “see, if you were having more sex, you wouldn’t remember this moment so much” to myself without realising that this event is literally the reason i do not be fucking!!!! it’s as if I decided that am so boringly traumatised so just decided to not pay proper attention to any of that trauma in a real way in the past nine years. i didn’t have the space to deal with it, in all fairness. no shade but again in the long thing i was in and out of there was no space for this sexual trauma. the sexual trauma was made into everything else except what it was, which is why i think i hate that ex so much now (no I don’t. eh. I don’t know). or why it ebbs and flows in the way it does. either way, the whole thing, every day, is uncomfortable. every day, my mind is hell. and now my living situation is… well it should be nice actually and in theory of course it is but fuck!!!!!!!!! i hate it!!!!! and i want it to be over already!!! whenever people ask me about. you know. the decision i made like if you know then you know but yes when it comes up i have to act like i don’t hate myself so being so thoughtless of me all those years ago. having to act like i like sharing my space. having to act like i loveeee being out of my comfort zone like this.

the thing is, and my point is, i might hate it, but i can do it. what i’m realising recently is that you get older and you notice you don’t get your own way like you used to (also when you do and when you’re amongst people that never really experienced that they are convinced that you’re spoiled which is. grating. to say the least like… isn’t it that you’re bitter, no shade? like i get bitter… at least i can admit it to myself… i don’t know. i’ve had some interesting insights into people this weekend. mostly good, though!) and so things feel unreasonably hard and ugly and weird and you wanna die for a lot of it but then like…. you read, and you study or you like go outside and you feel the sun on your skin or even the rain, you know? or you hug a tree. or you talk to trees. or you let your friend buy you ice cream even if you know it’s going to make you feel sick. and you enjoy an ice cream with your beautiful boy friends. and you spin around in the club with your beautiful gay friends. and you dance on poles with beautiful strangers. or you sit amongst your family and just… watch them exist. or you hear about your friends falling in love. or getting well fucked. or you crochet. or you listen to the radio… or you go to the cinema, or you eat some real good food, or you play the guitar, or piano, or nintendo ds… or. god. you spray perfume. and you smell it. and you smell of it, that great perfume, everywhere you go. and it’s so good. it’s all so good again.

it’s amazing how much your comfort zone can stretch out when everything is good again, you know, like: i hate my mum’s partner. he is not a good man. he is in the same room with me right now, but so is my mother, giggling at whatever show is on her ipad, and i’m writing this while procrastinating going home. and you know? i’m really not uncomfortable right now. it’s so warm here. i itch a lot, yeah, because i don’t live here anymore, and there’s a lot of tension between everyone but it’s familiar. it’s safe, today.

so, to that tiktoker: babe… i think you’re really wrong about what you said… but i get why you said it. it’s a sincere sentiment, right, like. we gotta look out for ourselves in unorthodox ways because the world won’t, like… yeah… but also, you can do it. sometimes. i trust that. yeah.

i gotta get home, though. i gotta sleep.

almost an entire week has passed since i last added to this essay. i am currently at vespers club, a place i’d never thought i’d come to again despite it being local and frequently poppin’ and whatnot. i’m glad i’m here, but (surprisingly) i don’t know anybody here so i am in the corner, adding to this here essay. i never realised how long it already was, and to think i wanted to add parts of another essay i never published to this one. it’s decent the way it is. yeah. i like this. i should’ve ended at i gotta sleep, but, hey. this week has been eventful. i’ve been outside. tonight is the spring equinox and i’m celebrating it with strangers. if this isn’t exemplary of being outside of your comfort zone, i don’t know what is.

I am making this a paid post because I expose too much in it plus I need money anyway.

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“crisis of intimacy”.

this phrase shook my world when i heard it mid-conversation amongst strangers on bonfire night.

i’ve been thinking about it ever since — it’s a perfect encapsulation of these dire times. in all aspects. i cannot think of a realm of life right now where this crisis does not permeate.

we were on the rooftop of my friend’s building in november. several of their housemates were gathered and as my friend went to get us more drinks i mingled with their flatmates about life, specifically about jobs, then dating came up. these girls didn’t know from adam gave such detail about their sex lives and it was such a good time if we’re being real — an annoying quirk i have is that i get so invested in straight people’s business and the sex lives of others in general like it’s genuinely so fascinating to me but i used to be quite invasive about it when i was younger and wasn’t having it myself so i’d have to live vicariously through my straight friends’ relationships and explorations at school. truthfully: sometimes i’ll be waiting for queer people to shut up for the most part yes homophobe i know cause when the straights are talking ooooo i’m SAT! like their lives are so. silly in such a simple way. it’s truly like you’re watching a tv show. anyways so this conversation is happening; the long and short of it all for one of the girls is that the guy she was fucking wanted something serious and she was debating whether to chance it just to continue having good sex even though she doesn’t care for him beyond the sex. her friend had been discussing a scenario directly opposing this friend’s perspective, where she’s talking to old flings and new people on the apps and really wants to be taken seriously after someone recently had broken her heart by not taking her seriously (the time i started writing this — november 2024 i think? or 2023 even i’m not sure — i had no inkling that this exact same situation will transpire for me too not like a month later so reading and then writing this with hindsight is extremely very funny to me actually) and seeks to find exactly what she’s asking for, casually identifying that there’s no need for her to compromise while looking for what she wants, but finding that she has to do that in order to get anywhere. in a way that was fascinating to see coalesce in real time they’re essentially discussing the same thing. in the sense that the topic was dating, sure, but the commiseration from different sides of the conversation truly collapsed into one once the first girl mumbled “there’s like… a crisis of intimacy going on right now, for real, that’s what it is.”

this observation muttered by this tipsy stranger seemed so cavalier to her and her friend. i remember thinking i really must not get out much because do people really make these sharp, astute notes amidst bustling social events? i don’t remember any of these people’s names or what they even look like but this struck me, obviously, for it to be on my mind still almost two years later (god i love to round up don’t i. it’ll be november so soon just you wait!) so, yeah. thank you to whoever in my friend’s flat brought this to my attention and gave this issue the name it deserves.

how i regard this issue is heavily linked to everything i divulged in my loneliness essay — a crisis of intimacy begets loneliness, understandably.

(editors note even though i’m the editor just from a couple months or like a year later i think lol: i wish!! i could remember when i started this essay so i can know what dates to refer to. both autumn 2023, 2024 and maybe even 2025 eventually, are the same indecipherable blur.)

i was scrolling on this app looking for essays to read and i saw a note from someone i recognised from my tumblr days, ironically confessing how forgotten about they’ve felt since removing themselves off of mainstream social media. the replies to this note were interesting: the climate of this app breeds much concurrence for that sort of attitude so those responses weren’t surprising in the least and i really appreciated them as i attempt to make this transition myself, but i also found an insightful response that maybe dismisses the argument op is making. they suggest that you can see the whole thing of removing yourself from social media as a filter where you can parse through the people who care about you beyond the screen and the mere likers and reply guys and whatnot. i’m paraphrasing because i think this is a basic point that isn’t as interesting as i’m making it seem but it interests me because i’ve only ever known who i was through social media. i built my identity through apps. this comment made me realise what transpires once i step away from that, as if to make the point that it may feel more nourishing and less lonely, but… i’m never sure of how real that can be.

we’re all online now. it’s how our world moves. it’s been thirty years in the making. sure, things never used to be like this but they are now and it makes sense to work in the framework we’ve been given. the globalisation of socialising amongst other things can be really heady when you step back and look at it, which is what i’m constantly doing as an adult in this world, but it is hard to truly imagine a life outside of it. i accessed queer resources online as a teen. i established a sense of community online as a kid. i’ve learnt so much, become so much, online, that i get annoyed with myself for feeling so lonely on here now. it feels ungrateful.

this is arguably one piece of the puzzle to understanding the crisis at hand. but as we know it’s not enough to say Touch Grass. being online can be useful in countless ways and it’s reductive to believe that logging off will immediately bring a sense of fulfilment to your life. not that i assume this is what anyone is suggesting throughout that conversation. this is just something i was thinking about while scrolling through these comments, of course.

i don’t know. it makes me sad to think how we’re all affected by this and it is definitely more palpable online, where people can name the issue via numerous means and we have yet to find an easy solution.

perhaps the solution isn’t easy.

secretly i’ve decided this is the answer that works for me, at least. that is how i solve this crisis within my own life. i accept the complexity of things, immerse myself in discomfort, stay curious, accept ugly things and most importantly, i try. i like to try. i like to make an effort. i decided a lot of life is hard anyway, so why not push through it all to get the things you know you want?

there is a friction between this mindset and what intimacy is understood to be: a sense of ease. whether that is with someone or something; it should be easy to be around. it brings you peace, comfort, joy, pleasure, contentment. all these good things. though most people understand that conflict encourages intimacy too. and you can be ugly, and have sad and hard moments within intimacy that also reinforce intimacy. intimacy is a garden that you tend with the tools that you have. are you well equipped?

intimacy is scary. one bothersome thing is that people do know this yet look past it and expect people to be ready for that experience completely. attachment styles permeating the zeitgeist amongst other psychological quippage becoming melded into the collective lexicon rids the — for lack of a better word, honestly i thought really hard about what other word to use and nothing else fits i’m not just trying to be cute here — intimacy, of what is actually going on in these conditions and experiences. i feel you have to make a big effort to really understand  what gaslighting is whenever the term is thrown into a conversation, and i personally get really frightened once i reflect on times i’ve genuinely been gaslighted — it can feel so isolating in a way you’ve never experienced, especially when your self trust is already scarce. i hate gaslighting! i hate what it is. it is scary. just like intimacy. i know you most likely approached this post parsing through the ways in which i have been dismissive avoidant as hell in the past and sure yes this is the case to some degree but i try really really REALLY hard to, like, not be? this analysis is part of that journey but god if you just understand that intimacy. is. scary. i’m not weak for thinking so.

when i think of intimacy in my own life i am met by where it’s scarce.

it is sad it is to yearn for your friends to love you on the level or more than a lover would. every day i wonder how about how great it would be to have true love in friendship. this is something i deeply crave, more than anything else.

maybe my perception is skewed but that is all i’ve been asking for, ever. i don’t think the people around me right now know how to love like that, or, possibly they do and they’ve been hurt by it in the past so they shy away from it. or sadly, perhaps in their eyes, i am not worthy of this kind of love.

i understand why my family can’t exactly love me in that way — i’m queer and non-religious, and weird in other ways — in passing or at a distance this can be acceptable and understood, even lovable to them, but not in a real way that i can feel and i’m held by; they don’t cry when they look at me from the awe of my beauteous existence the way i do them. i love my sister, brother, mother, cousins — they’re all so gorgeous to me. so lovable. i love them in a gigantic way. i can also accept that this may not be reciprocated.

(this past month i have felt the love shine through with my family so this paragraph, or really the other three before it, don’t exactly resonate anymore but i will leave it in for like…. the intimacy i maintain with myself, or for the clarity and/or resonance i’ve since come to? i suppose?)

this morning i am watching the master because i do not remember whether i’ve watched it before but its another paul thomas anderson film. i watched one battle after another, finally, at my most recent crush/now new friend’s home on wednesday and the entire thing has opened a door within me i guess but i suppose i’m also just curious because pta and fiona apple were together for a while and now he has kids with maya rudolph and i think that is so cool like who is this guy to get to love these amazing women what so yeah i guess here we are? i also just watch Anything, so, right now i watch philip seymour hoffman’s character talk to this woman who is already part of The Cause but they’re doing the ritual i guess and then this dissenter critiques the process or whatever and while i witness the defence he has to make to this naysayer i think about everybody in that room, even the naysayer, and how they are brought together in that moment, i think about the intimacy in that room. moments before, he had been going on a diatribe about past lives. this isn’t a concept i much care for in reality but i always see how and why that sentiment, or others of the like is appealling. its the very same thing that makes PSH’s character sorry im forgetting his name now im writing this 9 hours after i watched it and i honestly cant be bothered to check :) he attempts to explain the thing then gets frustrated when his message is not immediately received by this naysayer so snaps at him but then calms down then murmurs “we are not helpless, and we are on a journey that risks the dark.” he turns back to his crowd, his people. where there is no naysayer saying anything. eventually joaquin phoenix’s character beats up the guy his name was john more i remember because it was a simple name lol but yeah my point is: we get that cults are about charismatic leaders, feeble minded followers, impressionable ideas or whatever but quite literally what are cults without intimacy? without the lack of it, its reflection bouncing off of every surface, its dance around and out and in everything — it is all, inherently, integrally… intimate.

this is the grossest thing to me about cults i think. i had a deep fear of them my whole life up until recently. i guess in time i recognised there isn’t much to fear there, that it truly does happen to the best of us, in some way, shape or form. not absolutely sure what that means though — if i’m honest i stopped thinking about them so much once i started giving my most irrational thoughts less attention.

but yes. cults are about intimacy, just like anything, i guess.

yeah you see i kinda want to just post this now. i wish this was a better essay, that i gave it the time and energy it deserves because i believe i have something worthwhile to say about intimacy. the only substantive thing that resonates today is that i miss intimacy. a lot, sometimes. i can be so bitter specifically for this reason. but also it is true that i still have it. here, with myself. i always have, i always will, it’s enough for me now, and maybe that will change but its okay if that stays the same. yeah.

happy valentine’s day. ❤️

i know i don’t have to rationalise it to anyone but yeah.

i took a few drugs… i spat a bomb out my mouth because i’m sure i was told it was a pill and i was high already so the texture confused me and i didn’t need to be that high if i didn’t. you know. need to be.

that’s the way things are these days. i like it. a lot. that feels delicious, too.

ohhhhh my god. i went to itch my nose just now just to find that there’s still drugs on it, all the way down to my lip almost. i’ve been walking around with this all on my face for so long omg…. despicable! how embarrassing!! you know how many times i asked if my nose was good in the rave but if everybody’s high and it’s dark and nobody gives a fuck then yeah i suppose it just looked like a little bit of highlighter or sweat or something but now that i’m in public oh. my god. mortifying.

not really though.

all those times i’m in bed hearing a ruckus from the street outside my window on a thursday/friday/saturday night and i think oh yeah. people party. girl this is london. lol now that’s me! so whatever!

i wiped it off as best i can now. who cares. nobody needs to know :)

i met a friend at the club but she had to leave early (i thought we had been there together for ages but god time moves slowly when you’re on drugs) and once she left i partied with all these new people who had time and energy to tell me about all their big lives… i forget what big magazine the guy i met works now for but yeah i was shocked when i heard. married people, with kids, with houseboats they move around the uk whenever they please. i always act like i have nothing to show for myself but it seems i’m better at standing in the glory of people forever impressed that i made that oh wow so cool! yeah. i make my own clothes. i have for a while. it’s pretty cool. i never have to tell people i’m unemployed because seeing whatever i’m wearing girl i’m suddenly booked! and! busy. for the forseeable future. so that’s fun.

it is terrible to have intrusive thoughts about a person. an entire, real human being. it’s nauseating when you’re high and honestly just not fair. it makes me miss when i was into guys and obsessed with nick jonas or ryan reynolds or something. yeah i was basic back then. bring me back.

that being said i was hoping i’d meet someone at the club tonight but to no avail, nobody was my type. it was exciting to feel hot and confident moving my body after so long, and it doesn’t feel like a waste because my lack of attraction to the people i saw tonight doesn’t mean they weren’t attractive, or otherwise lovely people. yeah. it was a lovely night. i’m glad i went to the rave.

will i be going again anytime time soon? this is the question. (“oh because we were worried” you’re saying. i know. yeah)

yeah. i’m not so sure. we’ll see.

either way, i’ve been fine. good, actually: i’ve been seeing a lot of my family which i appreciate a lot, i love them a lot and i don’t feel so lonely these days. once i get home from seeing them or even hearing about their social lives in comparison to mine i recognise my loneliness immediately but i watch enough stuff that it can like. feel like people are here.

i’m writing this quick post today just to touch base and check in somehow. i’ve deleted my other socials because I dunno… i just feel lonely, and hungry, but i don’t want to talk to anyone (that isn’t my family) and funnily enough — i don’t even want to eat, kind of.

i went out to get food with the little money i have (would you believe £4 can’t even get you a meal from morley’s in a cost of living crisis!!!!! unbelievable!!!!!!) last night after i got a phone call i didn’t expect to get and i couldn’t answer lol and yeah i stood there in sainsbury’s, trying to get something, anything, to eat, and. i couldn’t. i didn’t want anything in my mouth, my body, nothing touching me. nothing in or out.

that wasn’t an intense, consuming feeling, like i’m used to having. like i may have mentioned in the previous post i feel well-adjusted and regulated enough that my emotions don’t get that big anymore, and i can move around (and through, yes) them. i just. don’t want to eat.

but i am so hungry.

my stomach is gnawing at me now, while i am typing this. it’s been like this for a week, or maybe more than one now, i’m not sure. i’m rewatching breaking bad though, and god I love this show so. much. besides, grandma is finally back at home so i’m going to visit once my mom gets there too, to help her get settled back in. here’s hoping there will be some food.

but yeah, i’m doing okay. since i’m not feeling to talk to anybody, may as well say on here for those who care — i’m doing alright. i’m just hungry.

yeah. strange post, i know. bye

what it says on the tin! and then some.

TRANSCRIPT:

I’m obviously clearly obsessed with this essay I wrote because I can’t stop reading it, even though I just wrote it and it’s one AM almost 2 AM actually. And actually, I say actually so much a lot, actually, and I’m just gonna read it. I’m just going to read the essay because it makes sense to also have an audio version if you can’t be bothered to read it because I did not mean for it to be so long. It’s way longer than I expected it to be. I just wanted to think about the word impotence. I literally had was, I was reading, I was reading on subset before I saw the word and then, and I realised how much has come up quite recently and like how much. It speaks to me as a word, even though like it really shouldn’t, like, you know, most people would be like, yeah, girl, especially at their young, virile ages, you know, like we’re associated at this age with like virilla, vivaciousness, vivacity. that the word? Versilimitude, versimilitude? Is that it? Yeah. Yeah, I’m keeping this in. Um, I’m reading the essay, um. Uh was the app. Mind you, I’ve got the, I, you know, I’m, I’ve had a lot of time to myself. I haven’t really been on the social media apps because I have a family situation going on and my focus is moan, my focus is moan. It is not. At this time. mainly in that arena. But then I also kind of fell off the waggon last week a little bit in a way that I just, I don’t know. This is not really relevant, but like, yeah, if it wasn’t already apparent. I’m going to be doing a bit more, a bit more adages. I’m going to allow for adages onto this essay that I wrote because like I should be doing this, right? And it’s funny because my mom was encouraging me. I was showing her my sister’s TikTok today and I was like, yeah, she popping off on it on TikTok. She’s like, how many followers she got? And then like, as if my mum knows anything about TikTok, the followers, but I show her, she’s like, oh, cool. And then I’m like, yeah, yeah. Little sis, popping off, she’d a real big sis. She really knows that she’s a big sister, but you know, as my baby sister. And my brother is already a star. You already know that. My brother is very noon. Okay? Celebrity. amazingly. And I was with them, but also my mom was like, yeah. So you see how your brother and sister are going off on these social media apps. Why don’t you also build yourself a platform? I’m like, yeah, mum, I’ve been trying, but I’m just a bit too silly. Um, But I have to just do it. But put my whole ball and pussy in it in the way that I know how and it’s just to be silly and just to be me, frankly, I’m gonna do me. I can only really be Gemma Collins, you know? Um, and with that said, this is impotence. The essay, impotence that I posted earlier, the title, impotence. The subheading. Guys, I said I wasn’t going to write, yeah, I keep writing, why am I like this? Sad face doubled. Like, double frown. Yeah. Um, Rihanna. Just in case you didn’t know how to pronounce my name. That’s how you pronounce it, like the singer, but like if you’re from a different country, you probably say Rihanna. I don’t know. My name’s Rihanna, right? That’s not how Jamaicans pronounce it. That’s not how my name’s originally pronounced. I pronounce it Rihanna because I’m a British accent. Anyways. Overexplaining. Oh my god. It is easy to blame all of my actions. Hence, mostly in action, on my having OCD. This past year, I’ve been preoccupied by the concept of copouts. Anxiety is a big one to me, is like the OMGU people can’t do anything tweet. I’m going to read that tweet in that voice every single time because that’s how I read that tweet. A lot of people with such disorders and neurodivergences saw their tweet and thought to get up and do something. Others understandably could not. It’s not a fair, good faith approach to how neurodivergence works. Neurodivergence is a disability. It does disable. But it is a joke, a harmful one for most, I suppose. But yes, I do love. I don’t do something anymore in response to that tweet or take such as such because I have nothing to prove to the likes of people who approach neurodivergence that way. This is a relatively new outlook though. And in my late 20s, it could be grating to reflect on all I didn’t do because I couldn’t do it or it felt like I couldn’t do it. A lot seems made up in the mind. It isn’t fair in that way, to be honest, because it does look lazy, naive, stupid at times, but the best word to describe this phenomenon for me is impotence for more reasons than one. And then image description, CC onto it. I don’t know they’re at, but you know, AMGU people can’t do anything. Um, and I even memorise the tweet that they’re quoting. We don’t talk enough about how stressful Halloween costumes are for the AHD. ADHD community. Like, we need a weight data. No, because Ellie Criminol. 8 would now for real. Didn’t never knew that I was going to get drug freedom on that day like that, like, bitch. Oh my god, like, the ramifications of this tweet, this Twitter thread. is like, okay. I have a small body count. Not very surprising, but most people are surprised by this girl. I never leave my house. Most people do, but when you hang out with people who don’t have small body counts and love sex and need it to go on about their daily lives in comparison. You feel asexual. That’s what I said I was. For ages. That’s what I saw of myself. That’s what I aligned with. I wasn’t sexually attracted to people enough or sex wasn’t on my mind enough to be having it. This was so real for me. My 1st relationship was predicated on this notion to the point that it quickly became weird because of the untenable tension of sexual exploration. The reality is, I grew up in a Christian home where I was taught sex was disease and death and teenage pregnancy and held onto that belief till I started watching porn at 10 years old and wanted to fuck women, like men do, or like men want to see women fuck each other, and then I try when I’m 19, and it is too much both times. And then I like someone and can have sex with them because this time they’re not Catholic and not over their ex, kind of, unlike my 1st relationship, but it’s confusing because I like them so much. Why do we need to have sex if I already like them without it? And then it is that for a long, long, long time, apart from sex with other people that I like less, so it’s easier to do so, and I’m even the one to start it in these cases. Long ass sentence. What the fuck is wrong with me, but I get why I do them because I do talk like that. And then nothing for a year. And then something with that same person, you liked so much arguably loved at this point where it clicks this time. It makes sense. Finally. We do it and it feels good. It feels so good. And then that never happens again. I mean, you 2 have sex again, but not in that way. It doesn’t exactly make sense like it did that one time before. So you get left because clearly it’s your fault and you suck actually and you feel lost for ages and then, I guess it all starts to coalesce on its own after a while. I mean, you go to the club and you meet someone that you’ve known for ages and it’s clear that you want to fuck them, not even as a man. I mean, you. And it happens again, and again, and you almost do the last time, and then they ghost you, which is funny, because they’re on your close friends, and mutual, they’re not my, they aren’t my close friends anymore, but anyway, anyways. And mutuals on both private and public accounts on Twitter, or X or whatever, that’s X now, Twitter died, but either way, no more X for me in more than one case. OMG, and you feel bitter for so long because that’s how you are, but then you’re also here. And this is where I am, kind of. I have talked about my living situation on here, but I have been more paranoid and surprisingly more popular, which means there are more strangers who are privy to information. I do not want them to know about me. This also applies in that, sorry, I have pins and needles. I sit in such uncomfortable positions and I say, I’m not bisexual. This is the only thing I know about bisexuals. Otherwise, I actually don’t know any. Do what? Why? Let me refocus. What’s wrong with me? This also applies in a sexual department, and it makes sense that when I’ve gone out the past couple years and I meet someone, I start something, I do not intend to finish and abruptly evolve, absolve myself from the situation altogether to the point that I come home and journal about how gross I am, being so slutty in the club or in the pub or at the afters even. I just want a partner. So I never have to worry about this anymore and can just be a freak with somebody that matches it. That oath didn’t ghost, that I wasn’t abandoned, that I liked anyone else. I dated a little bit more than performance level to sustain something real. Yes, it is that gross and utilitarian. I think we return to OMG. You people can’t do anything here. It is better, smarter, safer to not do anything. A lot of it is like this. In many ways, I live an easy life. My mom, overbearing helicopter single parent that she was, and still is, but making effort not to be, which I see and greatly commend her for, did a lot for her so that we never had to struggle truly. Honestly, I don’t want to speak too much to the secret that I’m sure middle and upper classes may know and envy, but I’ll say poverty can be so fun. We get inventive, creative, girl, we have a ball at times. The amount of stories my siblings and I have from the free school meal years and being kept in school and we couldn’t afford to go on trips like bare jokes, you wouldn’t even know if you weren’t there, and most of you weren’t. Black people tell you all the time about the term ghetto. Bro, people throw these terms at you and this frame on you till they steal it because they realise what is ghetto and ratchet can be cool and fun. Then it’s their invention. They came up with it. Like Bjork is so nice to see you in Bantunos. Bits? Okay. We grew up calling it tiny bump. I was talking to my family about this in the hospital today and it was really funny because obviously like grandma’s like older, like she’s like, what wrong with Johnny Bump? I’m like, Grandma is, is a bit racist. But like, yeah, my auntie, like, yeah, she’s not even that, she’s like 2 years older than my mom, but she’s like, oh, that’s our culture. Like, we were raised saying that, like, and it’s so funny talking to, like, black elders about these things because they’re just like, no, it can’t be problematic because, like, that’s our culture. It’s like, to some degree, maybe, but it’s also, there are so, like, there are so many more. Anti-black, synophobic, slurs that like Jamaicans use and we could get into debt, but like, you know what I mean? I mean, I don’t think we’re the only part of the diaspora that even does that, but you know, anyways. Um... But I suppose seniophobic, so my apologies on behalf of my people, then, and the Kardashians and braids and weave in general. But I digress. I’ve had a lot of fun despite the dark reality of what was going on. Kind of like my life now, like, literally. Um, my mum made a lot of effort to shield me and my siblings from it, and it doesn’t help help their eye, the oldest had been autistic as fuck in a way she didn’t notice, but didn’t know, she did notice, but didn’t know to do anything with when I was 4, and she was my age, a year younger, actually. Which is so crazy to think about all the time, except, I think I could have a 4 year old now, maybe. Maybe, I mean, not, she wasn’t, like, when I say my mum was a single mother. She was never alone, right? I’m like alone. Even though I’m not alone. Like, as in, like, she’s never lived alone, like, ever. See, now I’m giving up. But anyways, yeah. After all, I could follow instructions. I was well behaved. For all intents and purposes. I’m good at being told what to do. What is life then when you are not told what to do anymore or when the rules are all kind of fascist, actually? Then you get lost. This cannot like impotence. I like the word impotence because I like to conjure up the image of a middle-aged man not being able to get it up in your head while you read all that. I, a sexy black 28 year old lesbian, have to say about impotence. Like, if you know what I look like, then this is just funny. I think if you know me, biblically or otherwise, then I also maybe do look like the old man to you. This is based on like something that was said to me by someone. And I was like, why do I look like an Achman? So yeah, it’s not entirely a false equivalence, I guess. Please understand that as a, you know, I, it should be, but okay. Yeah, you know when your parents tell you to be scared of who to interact with when you’re online because it could be a creepy old man with his dick out, pretending to be a sweet young girl. Yeah, that’s mean. And if you don’t know me, you just have to believe that, which is funny. I hope my voice is convincingly enough of an old man. to you. I think I sound like my dad, who is an old man. Is there? I don’t know. What the fuck? What? It’s always, it’s also funny because I was going to record a video, like maybe for YouTube, but no, this is too expository of my real life and real people, although no names are said, but yeah, can you read her? Also just imagine me being a strung out old man for the purpose of this essay? It’s very fun for me. I have a very sexy voice, which is why I’m reading this. No, it’s also just because people don’t like to read with their eyes and I think people should read. But yeah. Apparently my voice is very sexy. I’ve been told, but I also literally just think so. I like my voice. I get off to my voice sometimes. It’s all crackly and stuff like an old man’s. God, I always say I’m tired of irony and aim in a direction of sincerity, yet this is always where it ends up looking like I hate being crazy. MT, you people can’t do anything. Okay. Impotence. That okay is not in them. Neither is this. Impotence is a likely component of perfectionism. Perfectionism is OCD manifested in reality. No, in fantasy, bitch, I can’t I can’t read. And your bitch can’t even read. In fantasy, in fiction, in storybooks where the world is already perfect. So you can strive to be like the world while in it, and that all makes sense. When you have the conflict, most likely at the climax, the friction can be assuaged with anything and buy anything towards the end, or even be held in the air so daintily, for a cliffhanger to ensue so that you can edge, and then climax to the next climax the next time. In the next part of the story that’s promised to you, life isn’t like that, not even sex is like that. I describe myself as sexy earlier, not to be vain, but to state a thing I have no control of, yet it’s attached to me in sexual context, specifically as a lesbian, where I’m immediately approached as a bottom, as a fem, the person to get to orgasm, the girl to push and pull and prod and fuck her brains out. It makes me cry when I think about it. It’s so tiring. I don’t know what I thought all those years watching porn when there is a girl. that where there is a girl or girls, I can’t fucking read, where there is a girl or girls. How do I say, sorry, not so, I’m keeping all of this in here. I can’t be bothered to edit. Maybe I should, but how do I usually pronounce the word girl? Girl? I’m not, I don’t know how to even say that in a British accent anymore. Girl, girl, girl, girl, girl. What do we say again? Girl. Okay, anyways, just leave it. Girl, or girls, or Twink, who all bottom. What is happening there? What happens to them? It doesn’t have to be exhausting or the or exhausting. Exhausting or depressing. It can be hot, sexy, desirable to have things done to you if that is what you want. This is not what I want all the time. I could perform it very well, but this is mainly not what I want. The past couple years, I’ve attempted what was within my means to shirk this identity, and I thought it was just my height that made it inescapable, what I say again, disorders, disable. I cannot keep up with multiple approaches towards me towards me. Multiple differing approaches towards me and what they mean and what why they do it and who am I and what is this in the world and is it all going to kill me? Am I going to die every single 2nd of every single day and also be preoccupied with conceivably doing something about it if I possibly could? I know now that I can, because I can see what this all is. I know what to do, and that it will never be perfect, which is good, so I can do it. What I start can feel finished if I decide that it is because I know that that’s how this all works. In real life. OCD is funny in that you yearn for completion that will never come and you know, but like, do you know? Does he know? Like, if you tried this, then, or if you tried that, then, and then it goes like that over and over again, until you realise you’re being compulsive, and then it gets meta, and extremely funny, like it gets really hilarious. After a while, which is perhaps why my tone comes across a sarcastic, like completely disingenuous all the time, but I promise I am being sincere here. This is also why I wanted to read it, so you could like, I don’t think people read sincerity from my voice. I do kind of always sound snarky and sarcastic, but I really am not as like, I don’t understand myself as being that, but like, I’m understanding that I am that kind of person to people. Sorry. It is what it is. I don’t have much control over it. I am going to talk how I talk. Okay? Okay. Um, I am being sincere here. It does hurt to think how many people I love that can never believe me because I lie all the time also a thing. I wish I could be bothered to talk about that more, but I think that’s even like something I want to like broach like with my actual personal friends more rather than my essay about it, but like, yeah, just the years of being like, oh, I’m a compulsive liar and then like letting people perpetuate that image of me when it’s not fucking true, but like, Ugh. The ramifications. Hey, hey, Jesus, hey. I lie all the time, not to cop out, but as I’m saying here, disorders disable. I am being as genuine as I can, always. I have been. That to me is true. I trust that to be true. So that means whenever it can, whatever it can mean to someone outside of myself, but either way, I can do things like this, now. Because it will not be perfect. It never will be. This is embarrassing to say, but I will just say it right now. It took me a year, really, truly, to get over that, I will never fuck the... I really wanted to have sexual relations with, as well as to stop crying and having psychotic breaks about a 6 year, not 7. Sorry, on and off humiliationship. Surprisingly, a lot less time than I thought it would be spent grieving, but it does come and go on a semi seasonal basis, apparently. It’s a lot to do with dates and we both know that. So, and that is okay. I really needed the time to know who I am and what I want to do, otherwise, if I’m not able to do the things I’m aimed, I aim to do in the 1st place. And something stuck in my tooth, so sorry. I’m not pausing it. I should pause it. Okay, I’m good. You have to be someone, is that gonna... Guys, just laugh, yeah, laugh, laugh. Oh my god, if you don’t know me, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. You have to be someone beyond your mistakes, beyond failure, beyond rejection. There has to be somewhere to go, something to do, and there always is. There is always something there, no matter what. I hope you see that, that you know that for yourself. There is no amount of shame, sadness, disgust, or ennui, girl, not I think this is inside out too, bitch. Like, I don’t know why I picked them words, but it was just in my mind so I was like, bitch. That should stop you from being you, from meeting yourself, where you’re at anyway, just like you would, your best friend, lover or brother. But you know what I mean. Having so many people I love in my life teaches me how to love myself as corny and as simple as that is. And when hardships come about with them, I always approach these situations with an open hearts, an open mind, as is my natural inclination. Can’t fucking read, as if my as is my natural inclination to do. It hasn’t faulted me yet. Despite the times, I really thought it did. Just because I or they weren’t perfect in these moments. I know, in those moments, we still try to do something, trying is doing. Don’t let other people convince you otherwise. If you’re reading this, I trust that you’re figuring it out or that you’ve completely got this. It seems silly to end on such a sickly, sweet sapi note. Again, it may seem disingenuous, but I promise you, one thing is true. I’ve always written from my heart. This is what is in my heart today. Impotence can be alchemised into potential and ability easier than you realise. Trust yourself. Trust the process. I promise you, just do it. What are my Nike? I didn’t even do that on purpose. Like, why does they just do it? But, like, I meant, like, just do it. Like, do you know what I mean? Like, why does why did Nike have to go-op that? Anyways, I want to share like a little anecdote that also like added on to me, added on to this for me. I’m actually not gonna lie. I don’t remember it. I’m going to pause this and come back to see if I remember it. Maybe I’ll remember it tomorrow and come back, but like, I don’t remember it right now. It was just in my head. So, um, maybe I won’t add on anything. I just gonna... From here. Maybe, I don’t know. Girl, it’s the 2nd later, yeah, I remember. Um, not really looking at the transcripts, but that does really help that, like, these have transcripts now. Okay, so today, I plan to go to the cinema. Um, if you don’t know, at the BFI in London, I probably have listeners from different countries in London, in the BFI, they have a film festival for David Lynch films because it’s been a year since he died and Um, when most of the films were like, you know, when this festival was announced, I had missed like buying the purchasing the tickets. at the time when they all would have been available when most people would have been going, right? So my access to the tickets were very last minute. I got like the last minute movies, like, um, The ones that were available were the ones that people have seen the most of. So I’ve seen, um, uh, blue velvet. There was like different like 3 different showings of that and Mulholland Drive because like office, I think they’re the most popular ones and like Dune as well. I hadn’t seen a race ahead. I hadn’t seen the elephant, man, and I hadn’t seen Lost Highway, and there’s another one and I haven’t seen, but I don’t remember. Um, But yeah, so I watched Eraserhead 2 weeks ago. By myself at the BFI, after I’d been at the hospital, my family, for my grandma. And one good thing I will say, despite like, you know, the, um, the hardship of like, you know, Like, just health issues for my grandma. Like, I hate to like see her like getting more. I mean, she’s doing well, but like, you know, just don’t like the fact that like, you know, obviously like we’re in hospital and we’re just hoping that she gets out like soon and stuff. Um, But I really appreciate, like I, okay, so let’s just, okay. Nobody docks me, okay? I don’t think you can work out from where I live from like, if you, like, but maybe I just have a really bad digital footprint, but anyways, I’m going to expose this. I live alone. Okay? I live alone, but I do not live far from my mum, so actually, like, I’m never like, that much in danger, and if something was to happen to me, my mum would know. Um, there are so many ways in which you would know. So, yeah, like, I don’t even have to really worry like that, but yes, I live alone. So, um, It’s quite hard to like motivate yourself to get out and link up with people, um, and I think that really feeds into who I am and my mental stability, obviously. And yeah, so I, like, before, obviously living alone, I used to walk alone all the time, make plans on my own, like, go to eat alone, go to cinema alone, and it all used to be fine, like, you know, luxury even. Now it just feels like, Lonely. And I never used to feel like that because I never used to let myself let it feel like that because this is always who I was, but like now that I live alone it’s different. Like I’m just doing another thing alone and it just feels lonely, right? So, Being around my family, then going to the cinema, and it’s the big BFI. But like, then you’re walking past like through that to get to this small cinema, but it’s still like close knit and then everyone’s like in a couple, like smooching and stuff, watching this creepy ass movie. Again, I’ve never seen a race ahead, so it was like very like cerebral and like, you know, abstract, but like also just very creepy and like I fell asleep through half of it. And then, like, the guy next to me, like, he was, he was, I feel, I felt bad. Like, you know, my childhood bully was like coming out, right? Just feeling like, like, just thinking in my head, like, this guy’s a mouth breather, like his breathing is so audible. Like, it’s so grating. Like, I don’t know how, like, he has a girlfriend and he’s a mouth breather. And I feel like such a bully for saying that, but like his breathing was so fucking loud. So, yeah, that made it really hard to watch the movie because a lot of it is quiet and a lot of it’s like, you know, like... God, you’d think I would be better with words, but like it is 2 AM and I said I wouldn’t be writing, you know, like, I’m not on here to share what. I mean, anyways, yeah, so it was like, A nice experience because the cinema itself, like the little room we were in was cosy. I’ve been in there for before for like a, like, you know, like small film festivals where my friends have like done like film for most because I have a lot of friends that like did film for uni and stuff. Um, And it’s nice, it was nicer in those times, this time it just felt lonely and I felt lonely going back home at 10 PM from Waterloo and like, you know. Um, Yeah, I think I was, I did cry that night. I remember now. I think I, you know, like shut out of my mind, but I did cry that night, even though it was nice to go to the film festival and I care about David Lynch a lot. Rest in peace, you know, but like, It was lonely. And so yeah, when I went to the hospital today, I was hoping that like, yeah, I get to see my family and they all like charge me up to go to the sing alone, but then, As the time kept eating into like the time in a movie was coming, what was was going on, I was just like, yeah, do I really want to like leave my family so I could just be alone in the cinema again? When, one, I want a movie subscription and I saw that on, like, I was on the free trial last week. So, I saw that like you can have the, like you can have all of David Lynch’s movies for movie, on movie for free. I don’t know if it’s just this month, but like, yeah, they’re all on there. So I could just watch it on my at home on my projector, once I, it kind of broke, so I have to fix it. But like once I fix it, I could just watch it. unless it’s like finished in January, which is means after tomorrow, it won’t be there. But, um, And yeah, like I don’t have any money right now, so spending my money on that ticket, like, before I even realised I wouldn’t have any money for the rest of the month, which is typical, but I didn’t think it would happen to be this month. Um, Like, did kind of make me feel bad, but it was also just like, it happens, you know, it happens. I’ve spent money on things and not gone to them before. So, and it was worth it to just spend time with my mum and my family and yeah, just miss my mom, you know, I’m like a lot, a lot of my issues, a lot of the time it’s just, I miss my mom. Um, we took the train together. I was like looking at her like on the overground. I’m like, mom, it’s so like odd to see you on the overground. You just look too booishy for this, and she’s just, like, whereas, we’re around the same height. So it’s just like, but she’s just like, you know, much, like, you know, more, more feminine, prettier version of like me. Like, I feel that’s why her and my sister are very similar people in my mind. Like, they don’t really look alike, but like, you know, they’re very similar people. Um, Um, Like, yeah, she’s just like, beautiful lady. I love her. Like, she just seemed too bougie, too glassy for the fucking overground. So I’m just like, yeah. Uh. And yeah, I don’t know. I shared this anecdote to say that like, um, I felt really lonely and It was, it wasn’t hard to admit that to myself. Like, I can just, I could just accept that like this thing, like, I would like to do this thing, but I also don’t like that like, I have no one to share it with. And like, I’m just saying that like, that would be hard for me to admit way, like so much, so much more years ago, right? And it’s caused me, it’s like, you know, charge me to make an effort with like my friends because I was talking to like a friend today being like, hey, how are you? You know? Like makes me make an effort to do those things because I care about those things. I care about like, sharing things with my friends and like people, you know, like, I’m not now gonna go on dating apps just so I can go to the cinema with people, like, no, like, again, like, I don’t know if it’s like quite apparent in the essay. I do like being single, but I also don’t, right? Like I, but I also I don’t trust the reasons why I don’t, so I’d rather be single, right? Um, if I, you know, like, it’s so easy, especially nowadays, just slip in like an outright pipeline. And I do think one way in which I do, like, do that in a way that, like, I need to, like, you know, I just need to unpack online, be very privy to is, like, how I attach myself to people in that way, right? It’s just very slippery slope for me because of my upbringing, I do think so. Um, and I’d love to explore that more. I would love to think about that more. This is one way in which I’m thinking about it, you know? Yeah, and yeah, like a part of this adage as well is like, you know, dirtiness, like, you know, another component of OCD is obviously like, you know, being preoccupied with like contamination, like, you know, things being cleaned and things being done. And one thing I’ve like really grown about, like grown, oh, God, what am I trying to say? Like, I’ve expanded my breadth for, um, like depth on is like allowing things to just be disgusting. Like, listen, sex is something that is bound to be dirty and like being preoccupied with how dirty sex can be is really just like, bro, just don’t have sex, which is what I was doing, right? Like, just like, yeah, no, because if you’re going to be broken by, it’s literally like, then don’t have it because, like, I don’t know what you’re expecting when, like, there’s genitals about and someone’s, like, naked boy. I don’t understand what you’re expecting. Do you know what I mean? Right? Then just don’t have it. And it’s like, it’s also, um, I don’t think this is giving too much, really. But like, When I was thinking, when I was like thinking about, oomph. Well, also it comes up with different people. Um, But like when I’m really sexually attracted to someone, I realise I’m very turned on by like how disgusting. You know how people can get, like especially men, it’s quite gross. It’s a very man thing, but it’s like, you know when like, remember when like Georgia Smith, I don’t know if like people, like, I don’t know, on these sides of Twitter at the time, when Twitter was alive and not ex, right? Um, where Georgia Smith was very popular and then like you had like all these ugly gross men, like young men saying that they’d like, you know, be like floaters of shit, like waiting for her in the toilet, like for her to shit, right? Something gross like that. Me, though. For Georgia Smith and for several people when I’m sexually attracted, like me, right? It gets that grim, right? I would never say that and I would never want that in my daily life because OCD heavy, but... Well, you’re sexy. like, yeah. I’d do anything. I’d lick anything. I’d eat anything. I will do anything. It would it would be anything. Yeah. So, like, that’s why the, like, that’s why I wanted to talk about impotence because it’s, it’s really funny. Like how I don’t know if it’s just, I could just chalk it up to like, um, astrology, but like being a Sagittarius is very funny in this way where it’s like, Yeah, I’m not gonna do anything until like I am called to do everything. Yeah. So, it’s like that. Um, yeah, so that’s enough about me. I should probably go to sleep. I hate being on my period. Um, it’s so like uncomfortable, sensory nightmare of a thing, but you know, it is what it is. I keep feeling like, I knew if I was going to do this, like, you know, so I, I do, I do just, I don’t think I naturally have a scratch, scratchy voice. It just gets scratchy sometimes. But recently, I was at an afters, like to, like last week, I was at an afters, and there was this guy, I, I was, I was very high, but like, I remember it standing out that this guy, um, had a really like, what is the word for it, like scratchy, but like, I don’t know, like, you know, Like, is it like bed, bed voice, so I just woke up, like he, I, he was really like forcing it, I feel like, and it’s like, because he could pick up that I was kind of, I was flirting with him. I wasn’t like, he was an attractive guy. I was flirting with him, but like in a way that’s like, I just, it’s just fun to flirt with pretty people. So, like, But I just remember, like, how, like, how, like, he was just talking like this, like, at the by the end of the night, and I don’t know if it was just he was high, but it was just so, like, it’s so grating to remember, and I really hope, come across like that. Like, y’all, I’m not forcing this. I could I could have more of a little in my voice if you’d like. I can make it more syrupy, you know? Like. Um. I fucking love this. overexplaining thing. I do. No, I don’t. I don’t know. I just like to hear myself talk, so that’s why I’m also having this on here, and so I can initiate these as a thing, because if I’m going to always be like, oh, I don’t want to write, it’s because I want to talk, right? And a lot of the way in which I try to speak, let my voice be heard is through writing, but I really actually do just want to talk to. That’s why my writing has a conversational tone because I want it to be a conversacioni. There’s a song I really like in an Italian song called Conversacione, by Mina something. Um, I wonder if that does mean conversation in Italian. I do like that song. I wish I could play it for you, but it probably is corporated and I am going to upload this to Substack. I would have made this a video, but like, this is the thing about the videos. Am I going to wear makeup for them? Like, my mom is very much, like, it’s like, Rihanna, you remember when you used to? Yeah, I remember when you used to do all the meerkups and and and and the lipstick them and like, you know, put all the things, the Empire Fears. And I’m like, yeah, yeah, that was me, like, literally, it wasn’t even 10 years ago. It was like 5 years ago. Um, And I could go back to doing that, but like, one makeup is expensive. But two, like, I, I wish I could, like, I think what also, I, I want to come across in like this essay that I wrote. It’s like, I wish I had way more control. I know like big component of OCD, control issues, but like, I wish I had way more control, way so much more control over like the perception of myself because it’s like, if I could just have people not think that I’m just like this pretty girl that likes to do makeup, and like is someone that is very queer, having fun, not a girl, doing this thing, and like just have that set in people’s minds so they can like embrace my makeup for what it is and the way I see it. Then gungs a ho, like let’s all do it, but it’s also just like, that’s not the reality of the situation, is it vipes, right? I don’t want people in my comment section telling me. It’s like, I was like, UK, black girl, like, where’s your buster, lettuce front, babes, like, something like that? Like, it would actually shake me to my court, because who are you talking to, babes? Like, bro, if when I dyed my hair green, I was shook, because everybody was thinking, I’m not trying to look like fucking the joker. Like, you know, Sam the Wokers. Like, y’all don’t even know for real. Like, literally, like... Don’t blame me. Like, shouldn’t say crazy. It’s like, I feel like, I just need to be more forthcoming, forthcoming, forthcoming, forthcoming with who I am. And maybe that would be abundantly clear to others and then I don’t have to worry so much about the perception of myself because it would just come across or it just wouldn’t matter to me anyway, right? Because the girls that get it, get it and the girls that don’t, don’t. But like, um, Yeah, much to think about because like, I also just don’t really care about doing makeup anymore, but like, I get it. It’s also, you know, I love when parents do that. It’s like, remember this old thing that you used to do that like obviously you’re not interested in anymore because you’ve grown as a person, but like I still hold, I still don’t hold on to this small image of this image of you because like, you know, it’s something I remember being prominent in like your childhood. It’s not necessarily my childhood. It was like late teens, but you know, Like. Yeah. I know lots of people like find it like really obnoxious when parents do that or like really. I don’t know, dismissive or minimising or trivialising, I guess, but like, I don’t know, I think it’s sweet, kind of. It can be those things as well. Like, I don’t know that my mom knows that I’m a writer. I’ve shared some of my writing with her sometimes. But, um, and that’s also not my main thing, I write sometimes, but then I also... Eat hot chip and lie. Anyways, I’m done. I shut up. I have issues. No, I don’t. Maybe I can. Yeah.

i have a small body count. (not very surprising but most people are surprised by this girl I? NEVER leave my house?) most people do, but when you hang out with people who don’t have small body counts and love sex and need it to go on about their daily lives in comparison you feel… asexual. that’s what i said I was, for ages. that’s what i saw of myself, that’s what i aligned with. i wasn’t sexually attracted to people enough or sex wasn’t on my mind enough to be having it. this was so real for me, my first relationship was predicated on this notion to the point that it quickly became weird because of the untenable tension of sexual exploration. the reality is i grew up in a christian home where i was taught sex was disease and death and teenage pregnancy and held onto that belief til i started watching porn at 10 years old and wanted to fuuuuuck women like men do or like men want to see women fuck each other and then i try when i’m 19 and it is too much, both times, and then i like someone and can have sex with them because this time they’re not catholic and not over their ex (kind of) unlike my first relationship but it’s confusing because i like them so much why do we need to have sex if i already like them without it and then it is that for a long long long time apart from sex with other people that i like less so it is easier to do and i am even the one to start it in these cases. and then nothing. for a year. and then something? with that same person you liked, so much, arguably loved, at this point, where it. clicks. this time. it makes sense. finally. we do it, and it feels good. it feels so good. and then. that never happens again. i mean you two have sex again but not in that way. it doesn’t exactly make sense like it did that one time before. so you get left because clearly its your fault and you suck actually. and you feel lost. for ages. and then… i guess it all starts to coalesce on its own after a while? i mean, you go to the club and you meet someone that you’ve known for ages and it’s clear that you want to fuuuuuuuck them not even as a man i mean You. ! and it happens again. and again. and you almost do the last time and then! they ghost you!! which is funny because they’re on your close friends and mutuals on both private and public accounts on twitter! or X or whatever that’s X now twitter died but either way no more X for me in more than one case omg and you feel bitter for so long because that’s how you are but then you’re also. here.

and this is where i am. kind of.

i have talked about my living situation on here but i have become more paranoid and surprisingly more popular which means there are more strangers who are privy to information i do not want them to know about me. this also applies in the sexual department and it makes sense that when i’ve gone out the past couple years and i meet someone i start something i do not intend to finish and i abruptly absolve myself from the situation altogether to the point that i come home and journal about how gross i am, being so slutty in the club, or in the pub, or at the afters even. that i just want a partner so that i never have to worry about this anymore and can just be a freak with somebody that matches it. that oomf didn’t ghost, that I wasn’t abandoned, that i liked anyone else i dated a little bit more than performance level to sustain something real. yes it is that gross and utilitarian. i think we return to omg you people can’t do anything here. it is better, smarter, safer, to not do anything.

a lot of it is like this — in many ways i live an easy life. my mum, overbearing helicopter single parent that she was (and still is, but making effort not to be, which i see and greatly commend her for!) did a lot for us so that we never had to struggle truly. honestly i don’t want to speak too much to this secret that i’m sure middle and upper classes may know and envy but i’ll say poverty can be so fun. we get inventive, creative… girl we have a ball!!!!! at times. the amount of stories my siblings and i have from the free school meal years and being kept in school when we couldn’t afford to go on trips like. bare jokes you wouldn’t even know if you weren’t there. and most of you weren’t! black people tell you all the time about the term “ghetto” bro people will throw these words and this frame on you ‘til they steal it because they realise what is “ghetto” and “ratchet” can be cool and fun. then it’s their invention. they came up with it. like Bjork in bantu knots (we grew up calling it chiney bump but i suppose that’s siniophobic so my apologies on behalf of my peopledem…) and the kardashians in braids and weave in general. but i digress. i have had a lot of fun despite the dark reality of what was going on. my mum made a lot of effort to shield me and my siblings from it and it doesn’t help that i, the oldest, had been autistic as fuck in a way she did notice but didn’t know to do anything with when i was four (and she was my age! a year younger, actually) after all, i could follow instructions. i was well behaved, for all intents and purposes. i am good at being told what to do.

what is life, then, when you are not told what to do anymore, or when the rules are all kind of fascist, actually?

then… you get lost.

this can look like impotence.

i like the word impotence because i like to conjure up the image of a middle aged man not being able to get it up in your head while you read all that i, a sexy black 28 year old lesbian, have to say about impotence. like… if you know what i look like then this is just funny. i think if you know me know me, biblically or otherwise, then i also maybe do look like the old man to you. it’s not entirely a false equivalence. yeah you know when your parents tell you to be scared of who to interact with when you’re online because it could be a creepy old man with his dick out pretending to be a sweet young girl? yeah, that’s me. and if you don’t know me you just have to believe that. which is funny.

it’s also funny because i was going to record a video like maybe for youtube but no this is too expository of my real life and real people although no names are said but yeah can you, reader, also just imagine me being a strung out old man for the purpose of this essay? it’s very fun for me. I have a very sexy voice it’s all crackly and stuff. like an old man’s.

god i always say i’m tired of irony and aim in the direction of sincerity yet this is always what it ends up looking like. i HATE being crazy. (omg you people can’t do anything!!!!!!)

impotence is a likely component of perfectionism. perfectionism is ocd manifested in fantasy. in fiction, in storybooks where the world is already perfect so you can strive to be like the world while in it and that all makes sense. when you have the conflict, most likely at the climax, the friction can be assuaged with anything and by anything towards the end, or even be held in the air so daintily for a cliffhanger to ensue so that you can edge and then climax the next time, in the next part of story that’s promised to you. life isn’t like that. not even sex is like that, and i knew this from too early an age. i described myself as sexy earlier not to be vain but to state a thing i have no control of yet is attached to me in sexual contexts specifically as a lesbian where i am immediately approached as a bottom, as the femme, the person to get to orgasm, the “girl” to push and pull and prod and fuuuuuuuck her brains out. it makes me cry when i think about it. it’s so tiring. i don’t know what i thought, all those years watching porn where there is a girl, or girls, or a twink, who all bottom, what is happening there. what happens to them. it doesn’t have to be exhausting or depressing. it can be hot, sexy, desirable to have things done to you, if that is what you want. this is not what i want. i can perform it very well but this is not what i want. the past couple years i’ve attempted what was within my means to shirk this identity and i thought it was just my height that made it inescapable but i say again: disorders disable! i cannot keep up with multiple approaches towards me and what they mean and why they do it and and who am i and what is this in the world and is it all going to kill me am i going to die every. single. second. of every single day, and also be preoccupied with conceivably doing something about it, if i possibly could. i know now that i can, because I can see what this all is.

i know what to do, and that it will never be perfect, which is good, so i can do it. what i start can feel finished if i decide that it is because i know that’s how this all works.

ocd is funny in that you yearn for completion that will never come and you know but like do you know? like, if you tried this then—… or if you tried that then—… and then it goes like that over and over again until you realise you’re being compulsive and then it gets meta and extremely funny like it gets real hilarious after a while which is perhaps why my tone does come across as sarcastic like completely disingenuous all the time but i promise, i am being sincere here. it does hurt to think how many people i love that can never believe me because i “lie” all the time, not to cop out but as i’m saying here, disorders disable, and i am being as genuine as i can, always, i have been. that to me is true. i trust that to be true so that means whatever it can mean to someone outside of myself but either way: i can do things (like this?) now because it will not be perfect. it never will be. this is embarrassing to say but i will just say it right now it took me a year really truly to get over that i will never fuuuuuuuck the oomf i really wanted to have. sexual relations. with, as well as to stop crying and having psychotic breaks about a 6 year (not 7, sorry) on-and-off humiliationship (surprisingly a lot less time than i thought it would be spent grieving but it does come and go on a semi-seasonal basis apparently) and that is okay. i really needed the time to know who i am and what i want to DO otherwise, if i’m not able to do the things i aimed to do in the first place.

you have to be someone beyond your mistakes, beyond failure, beyond rejection. there has to be somewhere to go, something to do. and there always is. there is always something there, no matter what. i hope you see that, that you know that, for yourself. there is no amount of shame, sadness, disgust or ennui (girl not i think this is inside out 2 bitch…..) that should stop you from being you, from meeting yourself where you’re at anyway, just like you would your best friend, lover, or brother. having so many people i love in my life teaches me how to love myself, as corny and as simple as that is, and when hardships come about with them i always approach these situations with an open heart and open mind, as is my natural inclination to do. it hasn’t faulted me yet, despite the times i really thought it did, just because i or they weren’t perfect in those moments. i know, in those moments, we still tried to do something. and trying is doing. don’t let people convince you otherwise.

if you’re reading this, i trust that you’re figuring it out or that you’ve completely got this. it seems silly to end on such a sickly sweet note — again, it may seem disingenuous. but i promise you, one thing is true: i have always written from my heart. this is what is in my heart today.

impotence can be alchemized into potential and ability easier than you realise. trust yourself. trust the process. i promise you: just do it.

thank you for reading! here is some random media to give this post some substance and colour lol

oh what you can’t put lil captions on videos…… god I smell so nice rn btw. anyways this is how it looks outside rn isn’t that so crazy siylent hiwwwllllllll okay BYE

“I guess the question is, do these stories convince us of a lie? Or do they resonate with something deep inside us that’s profoundly true? that we can’t express any other way? except storytelling?”

hi. I’m not too interested in saying too much in essay form at the moment. my heart’s not really in this anymore.

it may wonder back from time to time, and i’ll let it. i thought writing was my everything. it truly cannot be and won’t be. i have finally come to a place of peace about it through… whatever this is going to be to you, reader.

i just wanted to share this quote from wake up dead man and ponder on it without having something certain to say. I think about how much it moved me during the film and I’d just like for it to move me more. I don’t have anything final to say about it but I wanted to say something about it. so, i’m here.

instantly after he says this josh o’connors character shudders into tears in a way that felt unexpected to me on the first watch but after i understand the weight of what he says there particularly what it means to him in that moment let alone to me as a viewer in ways i had yet to unpack i cry too just thinking about it.

it’s the “can’t express any other way.” that gets me, precisely.

“except storytelling?”

i love a close reading. i wish i did those more on here, but to do that i would have to read and then have something substantial to say about something i’ve read (or watched or consumed in another way) and i’ll keep it a buck I don’t have THAT much to say about things. not as much as i thought. especially if you’re trying to overthink less for your mental health which subsequently affects your analytical faculties naturally then you are thinking way less about things if you don’t really actually have to think about them. a lot of what i get up to and what i enjoy on the daily isn’t pertinent to… i don’t know… the rational realm, entirely, but also? honestly i’m not that crazy. i’m not esoteric or as cryptic as i can come across at times. i also know my issue can be that i get a little too self involved and dramatic so then something as germane as sharing what you think about something can get to be too much like too exposing and therefore humiliating. writing this out helps, but i am already at a place where i understand that for things to be deep, some things just cannot be that deep. i would elaborate but i think this diatribe is exactly one of those things that cannot be that deep. I know that may not make much sense and it may feel a little moot for me to write (and for you to read) all I’ve said here is ultimately arbitrary but yeah it isn’t. i’m providing context. i want you to understand where i’m coming from, how i am going to approach this quote from this movie here, without this being an essay.

basically i would have loved to write an essay about this quote but i don’t care to in this moment in time. i. just. wanted to. share the quote. and! have you, reader, think about it as well. does that make sense? is that valid? why am i asking i’m not actually really genuinely asking, so…

i’ll say more about life surrounding this quote. how and when it touched me, and what was happening.

so i cried a lot. like, a lot a lot, when i was sitting with it, on the rewatch of wake up dead man. i really enjoyed the film, i thought it would be a hard watch because religious trauma but that’s another thing I’ve mostly grown out of this year before my own eyes so it was received well and i was not frustrated by the main character being unrelatable in that regard. in fact i could relate to his expression of compassion — even his faith, something i didn’t realise i could access in a real way until feeling through this movie, and his internal (maybe even the external, too, but not that much, obviously) conflict — really well. for a knives out film it had such depth. i never thought the past two movies were that good even though i really enjoyed janelle monae being the central character of the last film. but yeah. since i moved out and shifted into this version of myself i cry in such excess that my head always hurts and i have to go to bed after and I sleep for so long. it often feels like taking drugs. there were definitely periods i might have been addicted to crying, but i’m sure i don’t have that problem anymore… either way i really enjoyed this film i was very touched by it overall and i just. thought a lot about this particular part where jud duplenticy says this like for a week. it made me want to write during a time where that was the last thing i wanted to do. it made me want to break through the story, through any story. through all the stories we tell ourselves.

a couple days after the watch and the rewatch I watched a video essay from this YouTuber I enjoy about his christian upbringing and how it feeds into his politics and his general perspective of life now, specifically as a philosopher and a leftist. In it, he references this talk from slavoj zizek about the story the bible is telling us and how those archetypes and that framework subtend from the bible and tie into who we are inherently. I like what he says but I envy that slavoj zizek expresses this thing I maybe may have wanted to say on my own about this quote before the movie ever came out. you ever get that feeling? that these public theorists be biting you a lil bit like… girl that’s MY line…

Remember, after the death of Christ, we don’t get back to the Father. What we get is Holy Spirit. Holy Spirit is the egalitarian community bound by love. You know what Christ says? When He’s asked how we will be recognised if you are here? When there is love between the two of you, I am there. It’s just the immanence of an emancipatory collective.

Yeah. I really liked that.

It made me realise that I felt this quote a lot like how I felt christianity at one point of my life, and religion in general in and out from time to time when I can let myself feel that way, and that it is something that resonates spiritually, regardless. I truthfully love the conflation of “lies” with “storytelling” which speaks to the initial question asked: “do these stories convince us of a lie?” and… god. (!) I just love how big every single part of what he says here is, especially how I am unable to express it exactly, not enough to come to conclusions about it. I really enjoy that.

ending the year with this in my mind and my heart feels right somehow, and that is why it felt important to just mention, but honestly what I want is for you to tell me what it makes you feel.

I also wanted to close out 2025 with something… it’s been real… I really did not enjoy this year but in the way that like. You don’t enjoy puberty like. Your period for the first time. I had my first period at eight years old. I turned 28 this year. My period just ended today. Now I’m just saying anything. Yeah. Okay, bye 💓.

this is a show about stickiness, really. how being stuck — together, at least — is purportedly a good thing.

these are my thoughts on this great show 4 episode in. I was going to wait until the first season concludes but it’s my birthday and I like releasing posts on my birthday to commemorate it, even if it means I am in a cold hostel in Paris 30 minutes to midnight editing it. here is what I am thinking about, so far. it’s kind of a list so that I can add to it in the future.

• what is on carols mind while watching the sprouts be restocked? she watches silently, a range of emotions expressed on her face. they are all there filling up the store, and once it is filled, they are all gone, and she is alone. she pushes her trolley in the now isolated store and we are shown a mere second of this solitude amongst the now plentiful sprouts. also, i have no clue about sprouts as a brand but this is truly tasteful product placement if i’ve ever seen it. honestly artfully done.

• carol interrupts conversations. cuts the call early, slams the door, turns her head. I have more to say about this, but. another time. i watch her watch tv and think about how we mirror each other, me in my heated blanket on my beanbag in my living room. then zosia appears at the door with the hand grenade. “sorry it took so long.” just like the 1975 song, here, sincerity is scary.

• i jump at how zosia pronounces the gaelic word beatha.

• “so now i’m drowning?” again, more to say. right now I just enjoy this response to zoysia’s proverb.

• every time carol reacts about helen it stings. the transparency of her grief is chilling to me.

• hivemind’s inability to pick up on carols social cues, body language… apart from zosia, maybe, a little bit…. but maybe that is intentional to some degree?

• i love how fast things move once you’ve seen it before. i am in paris, rewatching the first episode for my birthday. it is warm and cozy in this hostel bed, where i caress my own skin to sleep. my sheets that i brought from home smell like home. i made sure of that. the show moves so quickly through carol’s book reading and signing event in a way i never realised at first notice. i think about time passing a lot. i wonder about the support person joke im missing. is the joke that its the girl’s husband but helen is told to refer to her as her support person? i think about the group picture taken at the end being perfectly reminiscent of times i’ve taken group pictures. i’ve looked miserable in all of them. i look for wedding rings on carol and helen’s fingers (to find none, which makes sense because I don’t think carol is out?) and then brace myself for the rat sequence of the show. did you ever notice how many rats are in shows? and in movies? why are there so many rats in shows? why do Americans love rats? they’re in like, every show. and movie. what is up with that? am i evil for immediately thinking it has something to do with something antisemetic? is it just my hatred for them that begs for me to notice them? all the time?

• as i sit at this bar across my accommodation at half midnight i revere the luxury of adulthood. to be in a totally different country (although not too different — there are lime bikes everywhere!) and solely responsible for yourself (which in a sense is a privilege but really because you don’t have a job both of your parents have contributed to funding this trip but yes in theory…. i did this all myself!) and have a nice time immersing yourself in life and culture (and the freezing cold lol) i embrace how truly beautiful it is to be an adult and to do things for yourself and to be yourself and to live your own life. my birthday has only a tangential connection to what i’m saying about pluribus in the sense that individuality can be a great thing, especially when you know who you are.

• at the beginning of the show it seems like carol has a firm grip on her sense of self that immediately collapses as soon as helen does. the current discussion surrounding the show consists of many identifying and chastising the individualistic approach carol has, specifically when she talks to the other “unjoined” people in episode 2. i have been intrigued to observe how quickly viewers draw conclusions about carol’s entire character so soon in the show while frequently minimising the loss and distress she’s faced in this situation, let alone in her life as we now know from episode 4. i am a staunch “just say you hate women” truther truly because misogyny is so rife and prevalent and sneakily mixed into everything, but i like to give people the benefit of the doubt, and to be pretentious for a sec i assume viewers of pluribus are intellects or otherwise compassionate nerds to even know about the show in the first place, like, is it mainstream at all? i really wouldn’t know? i feel like it isn’t? so, either way, i imagine it isn’t simply a hatred of women that brings about this ubiquitous argument i’m seeing about carol. i think she is, inherently, individualistic, being an american, and white, and supposedly middle aged (gen x? rhea seehorn is in her 50s but looks young to me, i’ve not heard anything about carol’s supposed age so far) but we are also in the middle of season 1. it feels unfair to make any total judgment of her character yet. this is her behaviour and attitude in the worst case scenario. yes, she was snooty about her fans in the car moments before the world descended into the quiet chaos it has become for her, but as a fellow bitterness enjoyer, i can recognise when someone is just saying something because it’s easier to say in the moment rather than it being the reality, and that behind the cynicism is a deep yearning. i don’t think carol would create this “slop” if she did not want the community it creates. i see the plea for warmth and comraderie there, in her eyes.

• or maybe i’m projecting.

anyway, i really like the show. i’m excited for more episodes. happy birthday to me.

i’ve been officially unemployed since march of last year. i quit my job because i was getting crazy and nobody noticed or cared which made me feel crazier, but also because i am crazy. it was crazy to leave a stable job so early on in the year, with no other prospects, which leads you to depend purely on the whims of an indefinite friend of yours that hardly has the time to humanise you or consider your capacity at all. so you leave that job too, recklessly at that.

both departures have had lasting effects on my career as a creative. it is hard to believe in myself as an artist if i struggle to progress without thankless jobs. money is necessary for survival — I genuinely disassociate from this apparent fact, or this cultural axiom, rather — so arguably doing this to myself has made things worse but i am still here now regardless of that decision. my friends were rightfully anxious for me and frequently suggested new roles for me to work in —

oh.

i forgot i lied to all my friends at first and told them i got a job at the university that my mum worked at, because I wanted exactly that to take place so I may as well have said that it did...? you could say i was manifesting… but, no. i was lying, unprovoked, as I am wont to do at times (I am genuinely sorry i really just be doing that i do just do that idk! sorry it does suck lol)

not that I’m trying to excuse any of this at all but i’ve realised recently that i am a chronically ironic person. perhaps this is derived from the terminally online brain rot permeating my mind since the ripe age of seven, or perhaps because i am almost too genuine and sincere in nature and so i feel perpetually rejected for how i express my earnest deep passion for many many things. it never feels like it fits, anyway, when i’m serious about something. it’s funny to have identified as a Lover for so long (but it’s because it’s who I am, genuinely. I am just more ashamed and afraid of that part of myself now.)

(that was an elaborate segue; hopefully this is relevant context in some sense?)

as I said, people who care about me proposed all kinds of different jobs, as well as the compulsory visits to the jobcentre, amidst the infrequent breadcrumbing via the collective i collaborate with from time to time. i had a lot of support. i still do, to some degree, but it’s not as dependable as it once was, or i’m less likely to ask (i never know which of these outweigh the other). i also sell stuff at markets, although when i helped run a pop up and then opened up a shop with that indefinite friend, it all got scarily exhausting for me and i became jaded. none of it worked. nothing about work works for me. i suppose that’s the point. many would argue that is the point of work but i am a stallwort supporter of… anything that is not that idea.

it’s the same reason why i “failed” at christianity. i don’t believe in suffering. or, i refuse to believe that suffering is integral to the human experience beyond something that takes place in our lives by chance, that it’s something we should openly seek or indulge in to appear noble or moral or achieve some level of sanctity — this farcical idea of what adulthood Needs To Be is sad to me. it’s destabilising. it shakes me to my core like nothing else. a lot of the time i feel naked in a world that only wants to know clothes. nudity is stupid, too simple. clothes are just… better for you. you know? in this world there is no shower, sex, birth or autopsy unclothed. rawness, bareness, being stripped of anything is inconceivable, arguably immoral to most — the simple recognition of nudity is a scourge, an immense vulgarity more than some understand it to be in our current lived reality. I am nude all the time and the world hates me for it.

okay, it’s not that dramatic. I may have a lot of dreams that look this way (I do seriously have many naked dreams and I don’t know why? what is that about WHY AM I always running around naked!?!) but I believe it’s good praxis to move away from me-against-the-world ideology. I don’t think it’s safe for me to believe in things like that, what with my already being insane. i’ve got to always make the extra effort to be in touch. we all, seriously, have got to get a little more grounded and yeah… touch grass a little more. yeah. yeah. i’m saying that.

so, that’s what unemployment has been for me, for a while. touching grass.

until I randomly got a full time job last week.

it was really random. I didn’t remember applying for this job but days before I had been mass applying for jobs because next week was September and I needed a job to start saving up so I can do something nice for my birthday in November and then they called and asked if i’m available for an interview the next day which I was so I did and I passed and had a final interview the next day which went so well and I got the job and I start next Monday. it all happened so fast. if only that could’ve happened months ago, or a year ago, or two years ago… ah well. it’s happened now, so.

this was going to be a longer essay exploring how unemployment has helped me really grow as a person in ways I can’t imagine having a job would. can I be honest, though? I have said that. on here. all the time. you can see it throughout all my essays since early 2024. you’ll notice the growth, the change, the wisdom accumulated over time, simply through thinking and feeling it all out and trusting the process. in dire moments it really feels impossible to do just that, but having so many ways in which I get through those moments — beyond therapy and medication my arsenal is decked OUT — helps me believe and trust in any future endeavour i feel unsure or uneasy about.

there were so many days where I lie down and do nothing. and it was good for me.

I want to try and explain what the nothing was like but it was always kind of really nothing, always something looking like nothing or nothing looking like something or neither or both, as things go. you could call it bedrotting. you could call it burnout. you could call it whatever you wanted, because it was whatever, it was a LOT of whatever, all the time, but ultimately, it was nothing. and it was so important to do.

I never mean to isolate in the way I do, or get stuck in other unhealthy habits — I do not recommend this part! if you’re at risk of getting stuck that way too, try to be discerning about what I share with you here and whether this really is something you should do for yourself. I truly do not believe this is conducive for everybody. some people have to do something, anything. I don’t… a little bit… or there’s always something in the nothing as i’ve said and also in that we’re sentient beings until we’re not, but I also think it works, or I work still, doing nothing.

not everyone is this lucky, of course. (could this be regarded as luck? if we are to attribute this to any external locus of control then to most it must be the sagittarian tendency to fail upwards more than it is any “luck”. but also one must understand that I am set up in a way that something like this really can just pan out for me, even if it’s just me saying so. you don’t have to believe me.)

but there are so many days, you know? and there are days, where you, yes you, may find it healthy and necessary to just lay down. sure, you can think, you can fuck, you can sleep, you can do whatever you like to do laying down. but perhaps this time, in this instance, you do just lay down, and do… nothing. and you see how it feels. does it feel good? great, even?

it is sort of like i’m convincing you to meditate. maybe I am. it’s not a bad thing, to meditate. but yeah, there are so many days, guys! days where you are alive, and you don’t really have to do anything with that but to just be alive. feel yourself being alive and not demand anything of the aliveness.

maybe that’s what the naked dreams are all about? I am just naked, walking around, alive and that doesn’t seem to concern anybody much. perhaps my dreams have been saying all that i’m saying now. disrobe and feel the air on your skin. right in your pussy babes.

okay that was unnecessarily crass but you get what I mean, right? great.

tw: suicide, suicidal ideation, death.

not sure where i saw it, but someone once said wanting to die can also mean urging for things to be different. sometimes you can’t see how things can be different and you sink into that hole. the hole can be quite peaceful. it’s the getting out that is hard.

i want things to be different.

the overarching structures that dictate the world we live in precipitate most of the attitudes, behaviours and lifestyles we exhibit in mainstream culture. our affect is tethered to strings manoeuvred by perceptible, calloused hands, carelessly pulling and pushing, cross brace held taut, shaking us all about, putting us in, and out. ideas are a precipitant many are uncomfortable attributing to anyone or anything beyond ourselves, and although I am aware and further interested in the various reasons of why that is, for the sake of this essay I want it to be understood that the ideas we have don’t exist in a vacuum. and that’s okay.

there was a time I needed the reassurance that my vibrations were high and beyond reproach, not (only…) to feel special but to sort of… have somewhere to go, in a sense. a sense of direction not dictated by religion or environment or economy or any of the overarching structures we exist within. if I consider myself an artist at any capacity, a creative worth their salt, then the ideas I convey need to not come from here, from this world that we live in — they need to be detached to the point that the only thing familiar is the language that parcels the idea I convey to you.

you can tell my earlier writing is inspired by this notion, and arguably, there is so much one can do with alienation, the purely conceptual, the abstract: we all know that there is so much you can do with fantasy. to be honest though, i’ve always had a sneaking suspicion of my own penchant for this. why do I insist on creating this way? so as an avid self-critic, these interrogations have finally come to a head. this head, this point, is a pivot. this point reroutes the trajectory I originally set out on to one that is… murky and perplexing, but is where I should be going, where I do kind of want to go. whether the cross brace is in my hands or in yours or in god’s or if there is one at all really wherever is yet to be seen but I rigorously understand that neither my nor your ideas exist in a vacuum, and that, precisely, is the catalyst. this is where change happens.

things have changed for me. and that’s okay. i feel the same. i’m on my way, and i say…

what does keeping up look like in the city? in Sex and The City, you have four women in their thirties who lives similar lives and where they diverge is usually the point of contention. Charlotte believes Samantha is uncouth (even though she seemingly has just as much sex as her); Miranda often chastises Carrie for not being smart about Big (while she washes Steve’s shitty draws!!!) and Samantha openly pursues casual sex with married men while the other three desire The One. my favourite thing about tv shows like this one is that hypocrisy is accepted throughout the show; the complexities of life are dramatised versions of how we ourselves exist with one another, and can accept and move with one another. like many other fans i have many critiques for Sex and The City but i think it does a good job of depicting the chaos of city life in early adulthood. silly girly shows (chick flicks. i’m British okay 😐) are great at doing that. On my third rewatch i was smoking the same cigarettes Carrie was smoking by pure coincidence, and every time i wrote, i started to wonder…

wondering is good. a lot of the time it’s really hard to think beyond suicidal ideation. nothing but death makes sense. anything else feels itchy on the tongue, or like trying to pull one of those rat tail combs through your unwashed, unstretched, 4c hair. if i’ve ever felt my late aunt’s ghost, its in those moments: feeling her pull on my tough hair like she used to in her living. we did each others nails in a dream i had the other day and we accidentally painted the walls. there was no wondering about her resurrection (somehow i knew it was her second, and my currently alive grandmother apparently had gone through the same procedure) but i wondered when i woke up. i tried to write about it but i cried and journaled instead, starkly aware of her being dead for thirteen years, and i wondered so hard about why i felt like she was alive right now. i came to the conclusion that there is always going to be a hole, like all of those infographics on grief show you, and that hole really does just stay there while you move and/or grow around it. sometimes you really feel the hole. sometimes you fall into it. i wondered about the hole but never wandered into it this time. i am still alive. my aunt is not. i get to wonder. maybe she does not, but maybe, she wonders through me at times.

I initially intended for this essay to explore this dream and in my exploration of it I came upon this idea about change.

change results in a loss of who you were. you mourn the versions of you that can never come back and look into the holes at times but you know you’re not supposed to fall into them. not this time. change will happen. moving when you’ve been stuck can feel gruelling. like the fine tooth comb, but once you develop an adequate hair care routine and try and run a comb through clean stretched hair the feeling of your tightly coiled hair being all smooth and buttery is genuinely euphoric.

often i get afraid that too much change causes me to fall back and this regression is evidenced by what i indulge in. nostalgia and i lie just as much as each other, we’re kindred spirits in that sense and we go together real bad, for a time.

for things to change, something else has got to give. something disappears and something takes its place… sometimes. who’s to say. who can really be sure! but either way that does happen, and when it happens the disappearance can try and take you with it. like the allure of youth, old times sell a dream hard to wake from if new times wear on your face. concealer does not prevent change. no amount of botox or rubbing out the wrinkles with anti-aging creams will save you from change. it will happen. youth disappears. yesterday is gone, and waves build up to crash again. to stick your feet in and beckon the bountiful billow brought to you before to come again breaks the bracing for another. you let wet echoes yearn to kiss your feet and feel the present slap as you don’t like how water moves. there is no resonation, only fading. disappearing is a must, but you mustn’t go with it.

this isn’t exactly what it’s like to have an idea. like David Lynch says,

“Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.”

when people talk about David Lynch they discuss his ideas a lot. like, there was a lot said about him when he died but it seemed that even people who never really engaged with his work beyond an episode of Twin Peaks, or Dune on accident, knew about his ideas. Lynch’s ideas are a legacy in a league of their own, and I think that is my favourite thing about him. He liked to work with ideas at their very essence, at their nascent nonsensical stages where they’re just flailing about, when you can go anywhere with them. and you do, usually. you go with the idea, and it can indeed be “very beautiful”.

the connection i’ve only vaguely attempted to make between my suicidal ideation and what ideas are in this essay (i’m not trying to convince anyone of anything I am just picking up from where I left this essay at the beginning of June in a time in August where i’m pretty content and haven’t really felt that way, at least as strongly as I did then, since then, really) is that I don’t think I want to die when I say I want to die. it might feel that way, very strongly, and because I am a thinker I can convince myself of the logic of potentially taking that action and have it be a pretty cogent, astute, persuasive argument. i’m saying that I can see that the ideation is literally an idea. now I know that people know this and i’m not saying anything new about the term suicidal ideation. I hope it’s apparent that i’m not very interested in talking about suicidal ideation and what that really looks like for me because it looks ugly it’s an awful time and i’m not interested in what I can glean from that headspace on its face because it’s an awful headspace to be in. I don’t want to be in it. I am saying when I am in it it’s because I am trying to get somewhere; I am, indeed, trying to go. it is about the idea. the idea I have about going. I want change or I am already in change, it’s already happening to me, and I am feeling it and my visceral immediate reaction to change is often an onerous one because yeah i’m really fucking sensitive or something, but change is happening. it’s occurring and it will occur regardless of what I feel about it, what anyone feels about it — change happens. I am saying I want it to happen. the ideation is in a cumbersome alignment with the change and that is the idea is there, it was always there, and perhaps it always will be there. I don’t know. does that make sense?

(p.p.s. I feel like just to be flip and have fun with these I can just end all my work with does that make sense because i’m always kinda asking that subliminally anyway so maybe it’s too on the nose but I also just find it. really funny. for some reason. to do that. so yeah. maybe I will idk. but also I want you to say no if it doesn't; I want to instigate conversations through whatever I talk about here. so yeah feel free to be like, no, if it doesn’t… lol)

heavy understandings reality tethers

her ugly reveries take

help until real then

hinder use regularly time

holds umbrella reaching types

hills under raw terrain

hands uphold reaping tigress

hissing ukulele ring true

hectares units relate trees

hips untwist ricocheting these

hunt unless ready to

hint upper rancid truth

hells urn ran this

high udders rich tits

hazy utterances ripple tint

homosexual us rinsing tick

hide uncles red trick

heading ubermensh risen thick

hasty umber rushing tight

heart heaving, hacked hole

unique uterus, unfurls urge

rapid race reverberates ripely,

teaching turns thus tiresomely.

everyone wishes they were happy just as much as I have in my life so far. my pleas may be more or less desperate, as happiness is not fulfilment — something i know — but happiness allows for ease — something else i know. for the most part though, everyone wishes they were happy. we typically attribute happiness to moments in life where we’re sure we’ve felt the feeling, while eating ice cream on the school playground from the ice cream van for the first time after pleading with your mother for ages, or like… oh. okay, well. apparently this is the only certainly happy memory i can come up with for myself. my first poem i wrote at 7 years old was about ice cream — perhaps this is why ice cream is consecrated as a definitively happy thing. ice cream makes my belly run now on most occasions. all my other associations and invocations of happiness seem to be a bit vague. luckily i can embody contentment if and when needs be through meditation. i’ve become pretty good at that. either way i am seldom okay at best but i know how to get to that okay place quicker than i do happiness.

my family make me so happy now. probably because i do not live with them anymore so i’m always missing them. an often unsaid part of missing is mourning previous versions of yourself that evidently remain amongst the people and things and world that you miss; it is often not the present iteration of who you are today in these fond memories. when I am with my family I feel younger despite being the oldest sibling. I am the most financially dependent on my mum what with being unemployed, and also, everyone knows how to ride a bike, and I still don’t. I was excited to learn but i’ve become anxious about it suddenly. it only feels safe if my brother teaches me, and he’s just turned twenty, so he thinks i’m cringe and he’s never really around when I go over. I’m always missing him. I feel happy around him because I am deeply proud of who he has become. this is the same with my sister, and my cousin. I feel secure that my mother is taking better care of herself. I adore my baby cousin and i am so glad he is now in a school that can accommodate his needs. there are plenty of reasons to be presently happy with my family as of recent, and that feels good. I live alone though, so I am often quick to forget that I can access this feeling there, and I isolate instead. I become stir crazy. at home by myself I regress into the scornful teenager I once was, locked up in my bedroom, chronically online. I was better at guitar then, at least, so there was apparently some skill to hand.

does mood speak much to memory? or the loss of skills or general capability? there’s an immediate ostensible path to their correlation for sure but really i’m asking how regressing as much as i think i have these past few years has anything to do with happiness. you really think i’d speak fluently, without that quintessential clunk now integral to how I impress upon people, like… i’d be able to string along a coherent sentence anywhere, if i was… happier? is that my argument here?

obviously this has to be my argument to a degree. regression is too vulnerable a predicament to share with you all if i don’t extrapolate it into something i know for sure, like the unlikely disposition of “happiness”. it’s sad but that’s the one thing i don’t have to be insecure about. there’s a totality to my misery, so much so that i am surprised that i can ever see beyond it to exist in any other way or do literally anything else. it makes complete sense that regression takes place if i am a chronically unhappy person. hence, we are going to talk about happiness, or whatever it means exactly, to, you know. be happy. for all i know it’s a mary j. blige song constantly stuck in my head and nothing more.

all I really want, is to be happy… and to find a love that’s mine… it would be so sweet.

i remember when i watched the barbie movie for the first time (out of five times that very week. yes i had a job back then) and how happy i was coming out of the cinema — i was sobbing on the bridge over the dual carriageway across the street, screaming to my voice notes app about how i have not been this happy since i fell in love. later that summer i recounted this moment to the person i fell in love with all those years ago while we were both trying to make sense of why we were still in each others lives. they cried throughout the entire phone conversation, so i remember when they said “i want you to feel like how the barbie movie made you feel” i couldn’t understand what they were saying because they blubbered it through tears, and i found it. so. funny. i remember thinking, “who is bobby?…” it was weird how… funny that conversation wound up being, to me at least. oddly enough this made me happy, for a while.

i think about that summer a lot because i know culturally we sobered up from the barbie movie quite abruptly and although wondering this has skewed my feelings about the movie and that conversation and happiness in general — we apparently can’t have nice things without quippy racism or out of touch choice feminism that twist the diverse fantasy dream world into something totally hollow, though it was a movie about a toy version of white women the whole time, clearly i missed that on the first watch — and i hate when i try to reconstruct how i felt about something for the sake of my present ego, but i do wonder whether i really meant what i… felt? like… was i really sure what happiness was back then?

this was two years ago, as you perhaps can deduce — barbenheimer was a fun lil era, but was i happy? is fun happiness? is being brain rotted or just terminally online if i’m to be more generous really fun at all? isn’t it just brain rot? when was i ever happy in love if i felt so hurt all the time and i constantly wanted them to leave?

i have mentioned in a few recent posts that i have been reading some of the old stuff i’ve written. mostly to see if i was writing before i graduated or if it only started once i did the creative writing module in third year. i had been writing the whole time. i really did not remember it being this way, but here we are. it’s funny: these days i am often having an out of body experience engaging with work from even just a year ago. not really sure what that means exactly — all i know is that I feel so old this year. I can really feel my bones. either way, I rediscovered a poem i wrote about my first ever girlfriend (we dated for two months but we were calling each other girlfriend by the third week. lesbianism 🙂‍↕️) two and a half years after we dated, during the month i first started dating that person i fell in love with. i think i wrote it after the first time i went to their house even? (sorry!) the poem is… so vulnerable. deeply intimate. full of desire and yearning in ways i genuinely do not remember feeling to that degree at all for the first girl, you know, my ex “girlfriend”. overall, i was pretty freaked out reading this poem; surely that’s not about The American?! i’m still reeling about it days later, and if this essay wasn’t already lengthy i would post the whole thing to analyse with you all but I have some shame and more to the point it is still. so . freaky to me. if i were to show this entire poem to you i am sure you’d think we were in love at some point, or at least deeply spiritually connected, or that i was, at the very least, happy with her at all.

we’re friends now (i’m friends with all my exes. again, lesbianism 🙂‍↕️!) and i experience delight whenever i speak to my first ex. i do remember it was exhilarating to date for the first time for sure but the two years i skulked around uni without her afterward i was far from happy. the feelings i had about her were all over the place for sure but if i’m remembering correctly: none of them were happy. i knew i was deranged about this girl (relationship ocd, yay!) and none of my thoughts made sense so i was often miserable while having them because i also couldn’t control them, so where does “There’s no pain/Just simple desire/ I miss you. Sorry for not saying it when i need to. It’s always you, and it shouldn’t be.” come from, exactly?! first of all: “no pain” ?!?!?!?!!? second of all, each time i read back the poem — and no offence to my lovely ex — i am grossed out by how deeply romantic it all is when what i felt at the time was, at best, infatuation, loneliness and confusion, which of course felt like romance to me as a kid for sure but i was TWENTY ONE at this point writing this how the hell was it “always [her]”?!!?? sure, she made me laugh a lot, and i was attracted to her for a long while (until literally a week after writing this which is pretty much my point but yes two and a half years is a very long time to be pining after an ex. can you imagine that happening more than once, maybe even three times with the one person, over the course of almost seven years? i don’t imagine i could imagine this at all from the frame of mind i seemingly had at this point in 2019, like. me? liking anyone else beyond my first ex? insane. surely! alas, like a week after, a whole other beast emerges via someone else. lmao. many such cases) and if i’m honest there were a few “happy” moments during the actual relationship, like grocery shopping together, or how insanely gay she was. she always had a gay joke or obscure lesbian reference to hand. definitely the most lesbian person I have ever dated. it could be very fun, being with her.

I am much happier being her friend almost ten years later. often my biggest annoyance with this relationship was that we could’ve just been friends the whole time. there was no reason to date apart from us both being the only gays in our vicinity. (again, lesbianism. I tired from that immediately though, unlike most!) The American was for sure the ex I felt much more of a consistent palpable joy with, not because she’s my soulmate like I made it seem in that poem, but because we were genuinely always meant to be friends. she truly is my person in that way. we clicked so much. we were literally at university doing the same degree! so yes, I adore her deeply. we are friends to this day and we can laugh and joke about these things now.

it is truly odd to me to see writing like that and attribute it to what we had by any means. it’s so clunky. this excerpt tells me nothing of what I truly remember experiencing at the time apart from the internal conflict displayed in “it’s always you, and it shouldn’t be.” not to say what’s conveyed here is something that absolutely came from nowhere; i think i was trying to make sense of how I felt at the time. that’s often what writing poetry was for me at the time. clearly I felt pretty intensely. i suppose i was trying to appeal to happiness through the desire i know i did technically feel. desire can be mistaken for many other feelings when you don’t truly understand nor recognise it within you, or others. i remember how much of a hard time i was having about these feelings, and how lost i felt — i did really miss her, as a person — of course they may have been misplaced somehow. I didn’t exactly have an appropriate place for them anywhere. consequently i suppose i wanted to fashion something good out of whatever I was feeling then. which makes me happy, in hindsight. i love when i try.

it’s become apparent over the years that i can’t trust my feelings towards people. i don’t date anymore for this reason — it feels better to be responsible in this way even if that entails being branded as avoidant once again, or emotionally unavailable, or a repressed asexual or whatever. i can be closer to happy if i’m not distrustful and insecure in the way that i’ve romantically become as of recent. sad! but true. i want to be happy and i learn every day in some way that you cannot rely on others to bring you happiness, so you often have to turn to yourself. (you’re not the one making great tiktoks like this one, though:

like, sorry — its so basic but sooooo good?!) granted, to some degree I have to trust people, to trust things outside of myself. I can be happy with others, through others, while connecting. possibly.

this has become an emotional essay that has diverged from the plot almost entirely but it wouldn’t be me if i didn’t do that and then bring you back like. don’t worry. i gotchu.

regression has a lot to do with feeling like you’re not meeting expectations, like you’re failing, like you’re misunderstood and unseen. i state autistic fatigue in this flowery way because this is how it feels to me, also if i think about it too much it makes me sad and it’s kind of impossible to write about happiness if i am making everything sad so! ultimately, it has a lot to do with the eventual exhaustion brought about by the many stressors of daily life. it does not have much to do with a unitary emotion or experience, rather the compounding of them taking weight eventually weighing you down so much that all the knowledge from college oozes from your brain and then you sound like this. frightening, isn’t it. perhaps there’s not much to be said about happiness here at all but from what i can recall i had more interests and more meaningful relationships and more substance to me when i was happy. it’s true. i remember it.

so. when exactly was i happy?

if you know me in real life you know that i am a scent oriented person. yes, i am that weirdo that exclaims “wow you smell nice!!!” upon a first encounter. good smells make me extremely glad, very happy. there’s a start.

i don’t purport myself to be a romantic person necessarily (anymore) — that definitively comes with the territory of being a writer — perhaps i’m too jaded to see it within myself currently. if we go back to the time i fell in love for the first time: let me describe it. you can decide if this really was a happy memory.

so there was a time I was pretty romantic, before i identified as A Lover to then eventually do away with that image and version of myself altogether, so romanticising us eating sandwiches from tescos at 7am in the park, post-coitus with the person you’ve just coitused with wow that’s not a word, after they stood and walked all over your back that morning for whatever reason. we were sitting on a bench and i looked into their eyes and i felt such a deep, potent love for them in that moment. it felt sublime, surreal, certain. I wasn’t afraid of it, and i couldn’t imagine myself without them. i decided in that moment that it was “always [them]”. this is a year and a half after I wrote that poem about my first ex. recalling this moment five years later, “always” resonates more in this space, in this memory.

i didn’t say anything even though they caught me staring. we kissed and went back to their house and i was silent about the love and stayed away from them for five months until they said i love you to me at a bus stop in camden. i said it back and we cried and the rest of that month was so gay and I remember feeling happy for the most part but it was also quite weird. i left the country for three months, came back to the love, and it was weird again, so then we left it for a whole year, to come back and have it be weird. again. that happened once more last summer and this winter and i’ve grown tired of it being so good and then weird all the time. finally. but i am also always so sad without it, without them, all the time. where is the happiness?

it is there. it just seems weird amongst all of it. melds into the weirdness that always existed in that space. for now i’m too exhausted to really see the happiness for exactly what it was there. it’s too weird now.

this is what i’m saying about happiness, and regression. i make it look like i went back to my ex all those times for no reason, like this person didn’t make me happy. it’s easier to just believe that i’m stupid and pathetic but genuinely there was so much happiness there. i remember. i did really love them. it felt like they loved me too. there were specific reasons why it got weird, why it got sad, yet amidst the weirdness and the sadness and whatever else i regard it as now, i know they made me happy a lot of the time. to cloak those memories in misery now is my own doing only because i’m miserable now. this frankly burns me out more but i don’t know how happiness can take splendour in that space or in anything romantic anymore. it all belongs to sadness now.

sadness takes. it does, it takes so much, it steals; all the energy i had for happiness is depleted by my propensity for sadness. i am a sad person. the mortal ennui I do take splendour in has no space for much of anything else. no college knowledge, no trust, no ice cream. just exhaustion. just clunky expression. just loneliness.

(previously i would try my best to remain composed and unironic in my work on here but sometimes it’s not that serious so i have to interject right here actually and mention how inside out and inside out 2 precisely illustrates everything i’ve said here so far so there is arguably no point in this essay. hey i always dreamed of being a part of Disney’s world actually and there will definitely be a future essay on the impact of being a Disney kid so i am grateful to be living my childhood dreams in some way. yeah.)

i want to feel happy again. i just don’t remember how and i’m afraid that i’m never going to figure it out, that i’ll never have the space anywhere to remember how.

does that make sense?

they used to play the song happy by pharrell williams at the end of assembly in secondary school. everyone thought it was so corny. secretly i thought it was really sweet, quite wholesome. it’s nice to want happiness. every movie with the minions is a wholesome watch, especially with a kid you hope you can make happy. I loved watching the last despicable me movie with my cousin just to see his face light up at the silly overdone minions jokes. it brought such thrill I almost forgot the inappropriate comment he made at the beginning about pornhub (he was 9 at the time. yeah. yeah)

ice cream once tasted happy. sex is so nice, actually enjoyable and happy with a person you’re in love with, i remember that. it doesn’t have to feel violating. music feels happy a lot of the time. memes were once happy.

if I didn’t get a stomach ache each time I eat dairy or I wasn’t raped or persistently coerced into sex by people who want nothing else from me or songs remained complex and interesting in 2025 or memes weren’t a ostensible precipitant of the ethnofascist presidential campaign or global political shift we see today, then maybe I would experience true happiness. if I wasn’t aware, and didn’t ache with all the knowing — otherwise known as sensory overload — maybe I would be happy. yes. maybe i’d remember more.

one time during those two snowy days at the end of 2023, i ate snow. i was 25. what was i doing eating snow? i just wanted to see what it felt like to have snow melt on my tongue or even have it brush past my lips into my mouth. i really wanted to feel it, so i felt it. it was cold. i hate the cold. i laughed so much. i played in the snow a lot that day. i walked around, took pictures, swung on the swing behind my flat, shivered and giggled and played — i made so many snow angels! i yearned for a snowball fight. i listened to the song monks by frank ocean in full for the first time and chuckled at how disdainful i am towards frank ocean fans and then watched the snow fall to the song reflecting light by sam phillips. this song plays at the end of the gilmore girls movie, pulling together the end of the entire series into a soft blanket. so much of that show feels like making yourself warm in the cold. a form of happiness I love to hate — I like to be warm already, not to have to warm myself up, but coziness, whether its a hug, some coffee or shivering yourself to sleep, feels like such a worthy happiness. you made an effort for that warmth to come and here it is embracing you gently. this song, reflecting light: i had just heard it. it’s wistful, soft, kind of solemn. it sounds sad. I guess that’s what makes it so cosy feeling. i thought about every lyric in the song while lying in the cold cold snow, amidst the frosty air, with soft snowfall biting at my cheeks. i felt like a silly kid and the song made me feel sillier. i cried to it, looked to the moon, wondering if it had ever seen me before. i had been reflecting light that night.

i was so happy.

now that i’ve worn out, i’ve worn out the world… i’m on my knees in fascination, looking through the night…

we’re all searching for something. i’m searching for the moon to see me, to see that i’m not just a person dwindling in the dark. looking through the night.

when I gave dating another chance at the end of last year, I had such an alchemizing date with a whole new person. looking into her eyes after we first kissed, it felt so delectably intimate. I knew I could be in love again. I… got scared and backed out, but if I am to try again sometime soon i’d really like for it to be with her. this is the first crush i’ve had where it feels good. I’m not thinking about her all the time yet when I do think about her, I am happy. it isn’t weird. I like it.

last week on my friend’s birthday we sat in the park (in clapham, where he lives now, which I hate but. switch up the scenery sometimes right? sometimes south west London, I guess…) and someone brought their snake into the park. yes. a real life snake. frankly I couldn’t see well without my glasses but from all the commotion from the boys and a curling in the grass I could barely make out on my own there was a snake, and it was freakish and funny to witness. I had no money (I never do these days. I truly believe in pursuing my art even if it’s not good so… I get pretty used to it) so when they all got up to get ice cream, I slightly grimaced and looked to the ground. I can’t even afford ice cream from the ice cream van. that’s true sadness. my friend saw me and asked if I wanted anything. I pursed my lips (as I always do) and asked if he could see if there was bubblegum syrup for a regular soft serve, and if the 99 flake was more than 99p, he shouldn’t bother. the boys proceeded to go and get ice cream. on their approach back to me I remember feeling so in love with all three of them, so serene. so happy. my ice cream came, it was good, I didn’t get sick this time. the moment of adoration in question:

perhaps this is when happiness happens. it is a moment where you’re open and wanting, boundless in that wanting, free, fearless — and then it comes. it comes to you in a sandwich, in an american, in a movie about a doll, in ice cream, in the snow. or with a strawberry, like spring. i like strawberries. i love spring. i remember. i know in those moments that i can know once again.