having a body has been one of my biggest burdens in life and I don’t say this out of insecurity or shame, but I mean I feel that having a body is a punishment to me in the way sisyphus is punished with pushing that boulder. i feel lonely. I crave intimacy. I crave physical touch. and each time i’m deprived of them I go back for more again and again. I get hungry and I have to keep fueling myself over and over again. something about it all is so boring.

having needs is a curse to me because it bursts the idea in my head that i’m an abstract concept. I could be doing something meaningful, writing, painting, whatever. or thinking about consciousness, desire, pleasure, depression, or whatever emotion or lack there of i’ve decided is weighing on me that week, and then my stomach starts hurting because i haven’t eaten or i ate too much because i seem to constantly forget i’m a real person with real consequences to too much excess of things. and suddenly i’m not an abstract idea anymore. i’m a girl with needs she doesn’t know how to manage properly.

i’m always attracted to the idea of becoming less of a body, not cause i hate being alive, but because I find it immensely inconvenient. it’s as annoying as having to fuel your empty tank constantly. it’s entitled and selfish. it gets tired, hungry, horny, embarrassed without your permission. it reacts before you decide how you feel. you can have the strongest boundaries, most intelligent opinions, and then you fall in love and your body isn’t particularly in agreement with your mind anymore.

but sometimes I enjoy being reduced to a body in the arms of someone. there’s such a relief in not having to think for a moment, being kissed and touched is very uncomplicated. having an appetite for another body sounds better to me. thats something I know I could do forever without getting tired.

because then again there are some appetites I absolutely have no interest in getting rid of.

sex. alcohol. being looked at hungrily. staying out when I should go home. buying things I don’t need but would like to own. wanting another drink even knowing the first 3 have tranquilized me enough. wanting someone who doesn’t want me.

I don’t really have a philosophical objection to appetite in general, I think I just have an objection to certain kinds of it.

I identify as a hedonist but apparently only under the conditions that flatter me.

it’s okay to me if I chain smoke 2 packs of cigarettes in one outing cause I feel like it. but having 2 sugar sachets in my coffee in the morning cause I had a bad day and I'm craving sweetness and warmth between my hands sounds too weak considering I don’t even usually like sugar in my coffee

I want pleasure but only when I can convince myself it’s a choice and not something like sadness taking over my body. i’d like to call it indulgence, sensuality, decadence, etc. but I refuse to call it a need.

though there is something perverse about how easily i’ll forgive my body if I get something good out of it. i’ll be so annoyed that im hungry again and my body wants to be fed even if it just ate as if hunger is some embarrassing demand that must be obeyed, but then i’ll willingly make myself tired, drunk, overstimulated, and call it the finer pleasures of life. then i’ll reach the conclusion that I don’t hate having a body per se, I just hate when it reminds me I don’t own it as completely as I thought.

which makes me realize how actually ridiculous the way we rank appetites is. sex is complicated, ambition is respectable. greed is ugly. beauty is sophisticated. intoxication is between either glamourous and cool or pathetic and depressing depending on how many you had, where you are and what you’re going through. hunger is also cute if you’re skinny, but disgusting if you’re fat.

we spend an absurd amount of time pretending some forms of desire are more dignified than others and trying to become coherent, rational, contained people. but the annoying thing is that we’re capable of dissecting desire yet while simultaneously being completely under its control.

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i’ve been thinking about exorcisms lately, which is inconvenient for someone who doesn’t believe in god. i don’t believe in heaven, hell, demons, divine intervention, or any of the infrastructure that usually makes an exorcism make sense. but i do believe there are things that overstay and unwillingly posses you. i believe certain versions of yourself develop a talent for surviving long after they’ve stopped being useful. i don’t think they haunt you because they’re unfinished. i think they haunt you because nobody ever informed them that their authority expired.

the strange thing about growing up is that nobody tells you you’re allowed to stop agreeing with yourself. we’re taught that consistency is a virtue so early that contradiction starts to feel like a moral failure instead of a sign that you’re alive. if you wanted one thing at eighteen and something completely different at twenty-four, people ask what changed, as though change itself needs an explanation. i’ve never understood that. nobody asks a tree why it doesn’t look like it did in november. nobody demands an old building justify every renovation. only people are expected to preserve an uninterrupted narrative, as though the highest achievement of a human life is being easily summarized.

i think that’s why i like the word exorcism. not because it suggests violence, but because it assumes there comes a point when negotiation is no longer productive. we’ve become obsessed with making peace with every version of ourselves. every article tells you to hug your inner child, thank your younger self, integrate every experience, honor every chapter. maybe. but i don’t know why every former version of me deserves a permanent seat at the table simply because she arrived first. gratitude and authority are two different things. i can appreciate what someone did for me without continuing to let her make decisions on my behalf.

i’ve started wondering if identity is mostly paperwork. not in the poetic sense. literally. everything seems desperate to convince you that you’re the same person you were yesterday. your passport does. your degree does. your medical records do, even your social media. every application begins with the assumption that there’s one continuous person moving through time collecting experiences like stamps. but that’s never been what it feels like to me. it feels more like inheritance. every few years i wake up inside a life assembled by somebody else. she chose the apartment. she chose the major. she chose who to love. she chose what to fear. then she disappeared without leaving instructions, and somehow i’m responsible for maintaining everything she built.

i don’t think we talk enough about how bizarre that is. imagine inheriting a stranger’s house every five years. you wouldn’t feel guilty for repainting the walls. you wouldn’t insist on keeping furniture you hate because the previous owner liked it. you’d understand that stewardship sometimes means renovation. but when it comes to personality, we become amateur historians and hoarders. we preserve beliefs that no longer fit simply because they have provenance. we confuse longevity with truth.

which is why people stay in those years long toxic relationships, or stay friends with their mean ‘best friend’ from high school.

there are opinions i’ve carried around for years that i can’t even remember forming. that’s what unsettles me most. not that i was wrong, but that i forgot there was ever a moment of choosing. somewhere along the way, preference hardened into identity. ‘i’m just the kind of person who...’ has to be one of the most dangerous sentences in the english language. every time i hear myself say it, i wonder who i’m quoting. was it actually my conclusion, or was it something repeated often enough that it became indistinguishable from my own voice? i’ve inherited so many ideas about myself that i sometimes can’t tell the difference between memory and repetition.

maybe possession isn’t dramatic at all. maybe possession is anything that continues speaking for yourself. an old fear. an old dream. a version of yourself that was built for circumstances that no longer exist but keeps taking space anyway. people imagine possession as losing control. i think it’s closer to forgetting to update the manual. something keeps renewing its own access because nobody ever revoked it.

that’s another thing religion understood better than we do. rituals weren’t magic tricks. they were administrative announcements. they marked a jurisdictional change. after this day, this person belongs to a different life than the one they belonged to before. i don’t envy the theology. i envy the clarity. secular life has no equivalent. we drift from one identity into another so gradually that we don’t notice the transfer until we’re living according to rules we no longer believe in.

the internet has only made this stranger. everyone says it remembers everything, but i don’t think that’s the real problem. the real problem is that it treats every version of you as equally relevant and everything gets stored. a photograph from six years ago appears beside one from last week with absolutely no sense of proportion. the algorithm has no concept of emotional chronology. it doesn’t know that one girl had no idea what she was talking about and the other one barely does either. it presents your life as a flat surface where every opinion, every haircut, every certainty exists simultaneously. maybe that’s why so many people feel trapped inside their own histories.

if i could invent a secular exorcism, it wouldn’t involve holy water or latin or smoke or chanting. it would begin with a question nobody ever asks: who is still making decisions here? not who made them originally. who is making them now. whose voice do you mistake for your own because you’ve heard it for so long? whose logic are you still obeying out of habit? which conclusions have quietly become constitutional law despite being written by someone with almost no experience of the world?

i don’t believe in god. i just don’t think every part of me deserves indefinite tenure.

does this mean i think everyone should wake up every month and leech onto a new identity? absolutely not. i don’t think there’s anything particularly interesting about treating identity like fast fashion, cycling through aesthetics and personalities. that’s not transformation. that’s just consumption.

this also isn’t a defense of becoming whoever happens to be standing closest to you. there are people who borrow entire lives from other people. they inherit tastes, opinions, accents, ambitions, even ways of laughing, then mistake imitation for self discovery. i’m not talking about that either. if anything, i think that’s another form of possession. there’s nothing more unsettling than a person who has outsourced the work of becoming someone to everyone they’ve ever admired with thousands of Pinterest boards of people they want to become.

what I believe is that identity should be treated with an expiration date, not because it isn’t real, but because it is. and thats the sad truth. you cant expect your lover to treat you the same years later just like you cant do to yourself. every version of yourself is built in response to a particular world. eventually the world changes. eventually you do. the tragedy isn’t becoming someone different. the tragedy is continuing to defend a personality that solved problems you no longer have.

maybe the point isn’t to become someone new every few months. maybe the point is to stop treating every previous version of yourself as constitutional law. there’s a difference between having a history and being governed by it. i don’t want a different identity every month. i just don’t think i owe permanent loyalty to identities that have already finished their job. I dont need to be the same defensive girl with extreme trust issues anymore who abandons everyone at the slightest misunderstanding because im not in the same environment that forced me to be her.

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for the past few years, there has been a small but noticeable trend of young women accidentally reinventing twentieth century french theory through playlists.

because ever since i saw someone claiming Lana Del Rey is Hegelian I can’t help but notice it.

this is perhaps the consequence of letting women read philosophy and scroll on pinterest simultaneously .

and every few months someone discovers that their carefully curated collection of religious imagery, erotic melancholy, american decline, bodily horror, martyrdom, and doomed longing bears an uncomfortable resemblance to something a dead frenchman spent six hundred pages trying to explain. the realization usually arrives too late. by then the pinterest board has already been made.

ethel cain presents a particularly severe case of this phenomenon.

what makes ethel cain difficult to write about is that everyone reaches for the same handful of words. religious trauma. southern gothic. americana. girlhood. violence. all of these are true. all of them are useful. none of them quite explain the peculiar atmosphere of preacher’s daughter.

because preacher’s daughter is not simply interested in suffering. it is interested in what suffering does to desire.

most contemporary discussions of desire assume that desire is fundamentally optimistic. desire points toward fulfillment. desire seeks happiness. desire moves us toward the good life.

ethel cain completely contradicts this.

again and again, her work returns to people who want things that are bad for them. not accidentally. not because they don’t know better. “please just go easy on me I am young and naive, I don’t know what I need” Tempest, Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You (2025). they move toward danger with their eyes open. love and destruction appear so tightly intertwined that separating them begins to feel impossible.

reading georges bataille for the first time feels a little like discovering that it wasn’t just me and ethel cain going through it.

and i regret to inform you that there is textual evidence

in eroticism, bataille writes that “eroticism is assenting to life up to the point of death.”

it is one of those sentences that sounds profound until you spend enough time with it and realize it is actually quite alarming.

what bataille means is that desire is not primarily about comfort or preservation. desire becomes most intense at the point where ordinary boundaries begin to dissolve. eroticism fascinates us because it threatens the stable, self contained individual we spend most of our lives trying to construct and maintain.

in other words, the self does not merely seek pleasure.

sometimes the self wants to disappear.

once you notice this phenomenon its pretty easy to hear ethel cain through this 20th century philosopher.

take perhaps her most devastating line: “god loves you, but not enough to save you.”

what makes the lyric so unsettling is that it separates two ideas we desperately want to keep together. love and protection. meaning and survival. grace and rescue.

the lyric proposes a possibility that modern culture finds almost unbearable: what if being loved does not guarantee being spared?

then bataille arrives at a strangely similar conclusion from the opposite direction.

for him, the experiences human beings describe as sacred often emerge not despite danger but through it. religion, sacrifice, ecstasy, eroticism and these are all attempts to brush against something larger than the isolated self. they do not protect us from dissolution. they bring us closer to it.

suddenly a great deal of preacher’s daughter begins to look different.

the album’s religious imagery is often discussed as evidence of trauma, which is certainly part of the story. but trauma alone cannot explain the intensity of its spiritual atmosphere. christianity in ethel cain’s universe functions less as a belief system than as a weather pattern. it hangs over everything.

churches, mothers, daughters, blood, hunger, ghosts.

the language changes but the structure remains remarkably old.

people search for transcendence.

they find catastrophe.

they mistake one for the other.

bataille spent much of his career arguing that the sacred and the terrifying have always been entangled. modern people like to imagine the sacred as clean and comforting. historically speaking, it rarely is. sacred spaces are full of blood. sacred stories are full of suffering. sacred experiences often involve some form of symbolic death.

ethel cain understands this instinctively.

her songs are populated by beautiful things that are rotting.

a home that feels haunted.

a love story that feels predatory.

a memory that feels like a wound.

an america that appears simultaneously holy and abandoned.

at times preacher’s daughter feels less like an album than a prolonged meditation on the possibility that transcendence and destruction may be closely entwined.

which brings me to the lyric that perhaps feels most bataillean of all.

on “sun bleached flies” Preacher's Daughter (2022). ethel sings: “if it’s meant to be then it will be”

at first glance, this sounds passive, even comforting. something like “live, laugh love” the sort of thing embroidered on a pillow or reposted on pinterest over a grainy photograph of a sunset. but within the context of preacher's daughter, it feels closer to surrender.

not the surrender of optimism but the surrender of exhaustion. the recognition that some forces are larger than individual will. the acceptance that control may have always been an illusion.

bataille would have recognized this immediately.

one of his most famous claims is that “the whole business of eroticism is to destroy the self contained character of the participators.”

the sentence sounds worlds away from ethel cain’s music.

and yet both seem to circle the same question.

what if the deepest human longing is not for happiness?

what if it is for escape?

what if the self occasionally grows tired of itself?

what if love, religion, memory, desire, and art all become compelling because they offer temporary relief from the burden of being a separate person?

these are dangerous questions.

they are also, unfortunately, the questions that make preacher’s daughter feel so enormous.

did georges bataille predict ethel cain?

prolly not…

but he did predict that people would continue searching for transcendence in places where common sense advised against looking. he predicted that desire would remain stubbornly irrational. he predicted that human beings would continue confusing salvation with surrender.

most importantly, he predicted that somewhere in the future there would be an audience willing to sit through seventy five minutes of religious dread, american decay, cannibalism, longing, death, and grace and emerge saying that it was one of the most beautiful things they had ever heard.

on this point he was absolutely correct.

and also the french theory seriously needs to stop appearing to me in my spotify playlists. the french were never supposed to be involved.

there is a line in La chimera (2023) dir. Alice Rohrwacher that I carry with me in a way that feels almost physical: tu non sei fatto per gli occhi umani. You are not made for human eyes. it sounds to me like a law of nature, the way gravity is indifferent to the body it pulls downward. it simply places something out of reach.

i think about how rarely we accept that now; that something might exist without reference to us. that beauty might not be relational. that meaning might not need (or want) a witness. we live inside the assumption that art reaches completion only when it is seen, named, interpreted. visibility has become proof of value. if it is not visible, it is treated as wasted, dormant, unfinished.

and yet so much of what we call art was never meant to be encountered in this way. it was meant to be buried, sealed, guarded, turned inward. it belonged to the dead, to the divine, to time. tombs were not invitations or tourist attractions. icons were not images in the modern sense; they were thresholds, sites of devotion, not objects of casual regard. to look at them now feels like a misunderstanding we have institutionalized.

we tell ourselves we are preserving these things. but preservation so often means exposure. light. glass. labels. explanations. cages. we extract objects from the conditions that gave them meaning and place them into environments where they can be consumed without consequence or conscious. there is something deeply modern about this ostentatious heroism; the belief that to see is to save.

in La chimera, this ostentation is stripped away. art is not elevated; it is heavy, dangerous, morally unstable. objects are pulled from the earth where they were meant to remain, not because they ask to be seen, but because someone insists on seeing them. the gaze becomes acquisitive. looking is not reverence; it is possession. to see is to take.

there is destruction is being seen. once something is fully visible, it becomes susceptible. it can be categorized, reproduced, corrected, compared, adjusted, edited, judged. it enters circulation. its edges are smoothed by familiarity. people can’t accept natural form anymore, always smoothing out the edges of things that were never meant to be smooth. Alice rohrwacher wrote “In a world like today, in an era of artificial intelligence, where we have more and more specialization, the most human element you can find is an error, or a mistake. That is the kind of breach, the break within reality that opens up the world and shows us another world.”

we like to think of mystery as indulgent, romantic, unnecessary. but mystery is structural. it protects what cannot survive explanation. when art is overexposed, it does not die, rather, it hardens. it becomes durable at the cost of being alive.

i think about how impatient we have become with anything that resists immediate understanding. if something does not explain itself, it is called elitist. if it does not translate cleanly, it is dismissed as obscure. we have mistaken legibility for generosity. we demand that art justify itself to us, as if it were a guest in our home rather than something that existed long before we arrived.

this hunger for clarity feels new. or maybe it only feels louder now. everything must speak. everything must declare its meaning. silence is treated as a failure of communication rather than a condition of depth. and yet the most enduring human experiences: grief, desire, faith, devotion, rarely arrive with instructions.

this is where the question of sight begins to feel unstable to me. i find myself wondering whether art exists for those who cannot see it, and i am unsettled by how quickly that question reveals its own assumptions. blindness is often treated as absence, as deprivation. but blindness does not negate aesthetic experience; it exposes how narrow our definition has become. touch, sound, memory, rhythm, duration, these are not lesser modes of perception. they are complete forms of knowing.

music does not require an image. language does not require light. love does not announce itself visually. if art were dependent on sight alone, it would be one of the most fragile human inventions. and it is not. art has survived darkness, burial, silence, forgetting. perhaps because it was never only visual to begin with.

if art collapses without the eye, then perhaps what we were defending was not art, but a habit of looking.

there is something arrogant in the way we center vision, as if the eye were the highest authority. as if what cannot be seen cannot be known. as if the world does not continue in our absence. blindness, in this sense, is not a limitation but it is a reminder that the eye is only one witness among many.

i return again to the idea of being seen. to how exposure changes not only art, but people. how once something is fully visible, it becomes vulnerable to interpretation that does not care about its survival. to be seen is to be available. to be available is to be altered.

i recognize this in myself. the desire to make things visible before they disappear. the desire to be seen before i am forgotten. and alongside it, an equally strong desire to protect what feels most fragile. i think about the things i have written and immediately wanted to take back, not because they were untrue, but because they were too legible. because once spoken, they belonged less to me.

the works that feel most honest to me are the ones that resist me slightly. not because they are superior, but because they are intact. because to name them too precisely would flatten them. because explanation can be a kind of erasure.

perhaps obscurity is not arrogance. but fidelity; to the complexity of the thing itself.

when something tells us it is not made for human eyes, it is not rejecting us. it is reminding us that we are not the measure of all things. that art does not exist to be consumed, decoded, or possessed. that some forms of beauty are not relational. they do not need us.

i do not believe we should stop looking. but I am no longer convinced that looking is always an act of care. i believe we need to learn how to look less greedily. how to accept that not everything opens itself. that some things survive precisely because they remain partially unseen.

maybe art is not for human eyes or it just for a certain kind of looking. a looking that does not demand clarity, that does not rush toward ownership, that leaves something untouched even after encountering it.

there is restraint in that and these days restraint now feels almost radical.

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i keep circling the feeling of being empty. having a hole in your heart that is so loud and out there that I can even notice when I look at myself in the mirror. but if i look at it directly, acknowledge it, address it, it’ll solidify into something real and then i’ll have to deal with it. currently it’s easier to let it leak into everything else. the way i walk. the way i write. the way my brain either turns completely hungry or completely full.

everything is exhausting and cruel and I can’t help but hold onto something that never asked to be held this tightly. i feel overfilled. like my emotions are spilling into places they don’t belong. grocery store aisles. car rides. moments that should be empty and peaceful but aren’t.

i think about permanence more than i should. about how some things get to stay while others dissolve in the background. i think about skin and time and how certain marks are allowed to outlive us. i am jealous of your tattoos and how long they will stay with you long after i go. the thought feels ugly when i say it out loud. envy disguised as longing. longing pretending to be philosophical.

there was a version of the world where everything almost worked. I know its there somehow and its a place I can never visit. its far from perfect. but its where I would probably feel most content. but can contentment and happiness even coexist? i’ve been wondering that since a conversation with a friend. what I know is i don’t trust happiness. it feels invasive, like it shows up uninvited, rearranges everything, and then leaves before you can ask it to stay. but contentment is the one that scares me. it makes you still. stuck. unable to move. happiness at least feels feral, loud, and reckless and leaves fingerprints everywhere. contentment doesn’t touch things. it sits inside you and waits. it lowers the ceiling without you noticing. and suddenly you’re always ducking and calling it comfort.

it makes you believe this is enough. like a threat. like a promise. it makes your wanting feel embarrassing. childish. something to grow out of. so you start starving yourself. you say no before anyone else can to make yourself smaller less demanding so they dont notice you exist and decide to leave. you become quiet enough to ignore and overlook and forget to be spoken to but never quiet enough to disappear.

the worst part is how convincing it is. how it feels like maturity. like healing. like becoming someone calmer and better and easier to love. meanwhile something in you is still scratching the walls. still wanting and wanting and wanting and you pretend not to hear it because hearing it would mean movement and movement would mean risk.

and the second you ask for a little more, not even demandingly just reminiscently at the times you used to be happy at first, everything changes. the air changes. you feel it immediately. that’s when you know they don’t coexist. contentment doesn’t survive desire. it can only exist if you agree to stop asking. it will give you just enough to stay. just enough to lie still. never enough to feel alive.

i don’t think happiness disappears when contentment arrives. i think it gets buried. watching. waiting. and sometimes late at night it scratches from underneath just to remind you what you gave up. sometimes i can’t tell if i’m at peace or just too tired to reach for anything else.

i don’t know when things become inevitable. when a feeling stops being a phase and starts being a pattern. i keep asking myself if intensity is just another form of misunderstanding. if wanting something badly is the same as wanting it wrong.

sometimes it feels like my emotions rot instead of resolving. like i leave them in the basement of my mind for way too long and they come back altered. heavier. meaner. way less willing to explain themselves. i press on them to see if they still hurt and they do just in smaller, and definitely way more humiliating ways.

i don’t trust my own urgency anymore. i don’t know if it’s intuition or damage. if the ache is pointing toward truth or just repeating itself because it learned the shape of my body. i confuse hunger with destiny. i confuse longing with proof. i convince myself that if something hurts this much it absolutely MUST be real even when it’s only just familiar and the pain is simply just comfortable.

there’s something frightening about realizing a feeling might not be temporary. that it might not be passing through but settling in. unpacking. rearranging the furniture. teaching me how to live smaller to adjust to it. i keep waiting for it to leave and instead it keeps learning my schedule.

maybe inevitability isn’t loud. maybeit doesn’t arrive like a disaster. maybe it shows up as repetition. the same thought returning in different fonts. the same want knocking no matter how many times i pretend not to be home.

and sometimes i wonder if i’ve mistaken obsession for depth. if the thing i call intensity is just me refusing to let go of something that can’t hold onto me. if wanting something this badly isn’t devotion or courage but a failure to imagine a life where i don’t have to ache to feel alive, successful, desired, adored.

anyway.

what I know for sure now is that I fear desire will rip me open again and find me too rotten to attain.

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there is a particular cruelty in how things come to end. not with rupture, not with spectacle, but with the slow dull fade of paint exposed to sun, fabric worn by too many washes, the familiar way a fruit turns at its core before it shows its rot. you do not notice until you do, and then you can no longer see anything else.

i have always wanted things to last. even as a child i got into hours and days of tantrums whenever something i love would break, or even disappear with no trace. even my little kid brain believed that as I lost something, I lost a part of me.

what no one explained to me was that stability is not guaranteed. that objects warp, people shift, arrangements loosen without asking permission. I thought care was enough. I thought if I tended, if I guarded, permanence might be earned.

so when something falters, I am not only disappointed, I am bewildered. I find myself immensely shocked even though the lesson has repeated itself more times than I can count. it should not surprise me, but it does. I wanted stability and I believed in it, and when it fails I feel exposed, as if my faith itself were a flaw.

I do not think of myself as reckless. I am not someone who craves the rush of collapse. I am someone who craves the opposite: the steady hand, the ground that does not shift. and maybe that is why the breaking unsettles me so deeply, because it reveals how little control devotion really has. you can hold something with all the steadiness you can muster and it will still soften, fray, dissolve in your hands.

sometimes I watch myself in these moments and I see the performance in it. I see the way I act shocked, the way I linger over the ruin as though my disbelief might bring it back to life. but the performance is not staged, it is instinct. I wanted forever, and I am still surprised when forever does not arrive.

I like to think I am practical, but this makes me sentimental. I light candles knowing they will burn out, and when they do I still feel the small wound of it. when someone brings me flowers, each time I discard them I feel a trace of betrayal. if I believed only in decay, none of this would sting. but I believe in what holds, and so I am startled each time it doesn’t.

the shock that comes with decay is the closest thing I have to commitment, the only ritual I know when permanence slips away.

but I don’t want my life to be a collection of withering. for once, I want something to take shape in between my palms without collapsing, and to show me that i’m worth being held onto.

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i opened my phone in the morning and by the time i had finished breakfast i had already read a love letter written in 1824 a manifesto drafted in 1968 and a critique of a film that had not even been released yet. someone i had met once 7 years ago was mourning a cat and someone i would never meet again was sharing the precise coordinates of a street protest across the world. every century every voice every event collapsed into a single afternoon that smelled faintly of coffee and dust. the weight of it was strange and dizzying but also familiar as though this had always been the way the world worked even before it was visible on a screen.

i scrolled and i felt history pressing against me pressing me against it. the past was not past, it was here in the same feed as a photograph of a child’s birthday cake as a critique of a president as a meme that somehow captured grief. political upheaval and romantic longing were equally intimate now equally performative now equally immediate. it was a landscape without borders or context every tragedy every joy flattened into pixels and text and reactions that could not possibly carry the weight they were meant to.

yet the collapse was also illuminating. it revealed the fragility of attention and the enormity of the world and how impossible it is to measure one against the other. i thought about the way cities endure their own histories quietly and stubbornly while we rush past screens imagining ourselves connected across time. i thought about how memory itself becomes performative when witnessed and shared and how grief and joy have never traveled in the same way before. a private sadness becomes a public artifact a historical note becomes a meme a moment of celebration becomes a warning or an elegy and we are left inside it all and outside of it all simultaneously.

by mid-afternoon i had read confessions of love from people long gone critiques of governments long dissolved and commentary on art that had not yet been imagined. each post seemed urgent because each post carried its own tiny universe. i tried to separate myself from it but could not because social media is not a window it is a hall of mirrors and every reflection is a whisper and a shout all at once. i put the phone down and the city seemed to pulse in tandem with the feed. streetlights caught the sun as though they were incandescent from another century the hum of traffic sounded like voices past and present overlapping and i felt the simultaneous weight of what had been lived what was being lived and what would be written long after i had stopped noticing.

evening came and the screen dimmed but the sensation lingered. the centuries had not truly collapsed they had only been visible to me in a way that left me unsettled and awake. the world is always more crowded than we can hold and yet more intimate than we imagine. i sat with a cup of tea and thought about the letters i would never write the protests i would never attend the history i would never witness directly but could feel pressing against the present pressing against me pressing against everyone who paused for a moment to look at the same screen and realize that all time was happening at once and nothing would ever feel quite the same again.

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i keep noticing hands. maybe because whenever i look at mine i remember my mom because we have the same hands, maybe because i have been watching too closely, staring at them the way you stare at someone you know by heart and still think, i do not really know you at all. they are always moving, arranging, signing, opening, closing. i think of all the choices i have made and how every one of them was carried out with my hands. the mind imagines, the heart insists, but the hands execute.

a signature on a lease, a coffee cup lifted toward the mouth, a cigarette raised between the lips, a paintbrush held to create art, fingers strategically moving through an instrument to create rhythm, a hard grip on a lover you don’t want to let go, a door slammed or held open for someone, the half wave of a goodbye that turned out to be permanent. hands make the verdict visible.

when i was a child i studied the way my mother’s fingers curved around a teacup, the way she cut vegetables with a quick certain rhythm. i remember thinking, one day my hands will know things the way hers do. and now they do, except they also know other things: the heavy weight of absence, the quiet gesture of love that is not spoken, the trembling edge of hesitation.

hands keep a record the mind cannot. they have held strangers i no longer remember, letters i no longer own, objects i no longer carry. if i sit quietly enough i can feel the memory in them, the echo of pressure and texture. they do not forget.

i think of how we hold each other, the most simple and the most profound act. we do not clutch a lover with our minds, we do not comfort a child with our intellect, we do not say goodbye with an idea. we hold and we release. all of it happens in the hands.

and what i cannot decide is whether hands are obedient or defiant. sometimes they betray us, trembling when we want stillness, reaching when we have sworn we will not, writing a message we know should never be sent. other times they are more loyal than thought itself, steady in crisis, unflinching in care, carrying the body forward when everything else resists.

to watch someone’s hands is to know them in a way that words conceal. lovers reveal themselves in the unconscious drift of touch, in the way a thumb lingers against skin or a palm opens easily or does not. grief reveals itself in fists, in nails pressed against flesh, in the restless turning of a ring.

maybe this is why i keep looking. because the face can perform and the mouth can lie but the hands forget to disguise themselves. they are always too busy doing what they have always done: deciding, remembering, holding, letting go.

i look at mine now, the faint veins rising, the knuckles softening, and i wonder how much they already know about me, more than i will ever write down, more than i will ever admit.

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i don’t know how else to say it but some of you sound embarrassing. every time i scroll through substack it’s the same recycled noise: men and being skinny. entire essays orbiting those two things like there’s nothing else in the world worth writing about. you take your heartbreak, your calorie counts, your mirror selfies and you stretch them into content and then wonder why you don’t feel full.

being beautiful and skinny is the least interesting thing about you. and if that’s all you ever talk about then you’re not interesting at all. it’s exhausting to watch. it’s like you’re locked in a tiny box that you’ve mistaken for the entire world. there are a thousand other things happening every second. grief. joy. politics. art. family. loneliness. actual life. and you keep choosing to reduce yourself to whether or not a man looked at you and whether or not your stomach is flat.

and the wild part is you think it’s deep. you think you’re saying something new. but i promise you, you’re not. it’s been said a million times before in magazines, in diet books, in sitcoms, in cheap instagram captions. you’re not uncovering anything. you’re just feeding the same machine that eats women alive and spits them out thinner and sadder.

and the worst part is, it’s not even just ‘hot’ girls, even girls who consider themselves ‘ugly’ talk about nothing else rather than how ugly they are and how being ugly is ruining their lives. no it’s not. you’re ruining your own life by reducing yourself to your looks when you are so much more than that and could be doing a thousand different other things that obsess over your reflection but you’re choosing to be ugly AND stupid.

i don’t buy the excuse that it’s just what people want to read. you give people more credit than that. people are hungry for honesty, for strangeness, for real stories. they want to know how you fell apart and what glued you back together. they want to know about the ugly fight with your mom, the weird hobby that keeps you sane, the moment you realized you were wrong about everything. you could be writing that. you could be expanding the conversation. but instead you’re circling the drain.

and yes those posts go viral. of course they do. they go viral because they’re easy. because they confirm the same old script everyone already knows. but easy is not the same thing as meaningful. virality is not the same thing as value. and if you’re chasing that fine. but do not confuse it with art.

it kills me to see women shrink themselves on the page in the exact same way they shrink themselves in life. smaller. smaller. smaller. more relatable. more palatable. more marketable. until there’s nothing left but another essay about being hot and alone.

this obsession is not even new. women used to be embarrassed to even admit they cared about beauty. mary leapor wrote in the 1700s that if a woman was ugly she was despised, if she was pretty she was betrayed. victorian women writers used to bend over backwards to prove they were serious, apologizing in their prefaces because they knew being seen as shallow or vain would destroy them.

now it has flipped. instead of hiding it, women brag about it. the shame is gone but not in a good way. the same trap that kept women small has become the main subject. bodies are no longer the thing keeping you out of literature, they are the literature. you turned the cage into a brand.

and modern writers admit it openly. they learned early that if they punished and controlled their bodies, people respected them. one essayist said it flat out: “women who punish and control their bodies are respected.” that truth is disgusting but it explains everything. this obsession isn’t empowerment, it’s survival training. it is women cutting themselves down because they still believe that is the only way they will be seen.

you girls are slowly murdering off real literature and journalism with your insecurities and lack of personalities. best seller books these days are ‘a guide to being skinny’ and ‘how to attract men’ and headlines are ‘girl loses 10 kg and 2 days’. do better.

you could be so much more than that.

au café existentialiste feels like one of those places that only exists in your head at first, a corner table with a chipped cup of coffee cooling too quickly, someone across from you staring into the foam as though it could yield a philosophy, and maybe it can. i think about how the café became the accidental temple of existentialism, not because coffee itself carries meaning, but because it is a drink that asks you to sit, to linger, to wrestle with time passing. tea too, though in a quieter way. coffee jolts you awake, forces your eyes open, while tea lets the seconds expand like steam curling from the rim of the cup.

existentialism is always circling around the tension between freedom and absurdity, between the weight of choice and the sheer fact that we exist without reason. in that sense, coffee is the perfect symbol of bad faith and good faith alike. you can sit at the café all morning pretending to be a writer, staring at your notebook as if identity could be summoned with enough caffeine. but you can also embrace the ritual as nothing more than what it is, hot bitter liquid, sipped slowly or too quickly, a way of inhabiting the moment without justification.

tea on the other hand feels more like sartre’s nausea, though in reverse, where he is overwhelmed by the too muchness of being, tea makes you aware of the delicate smallness of it all. the steeping leaves, the translucence of the liquid, the way you are forced to wait. it is not about leaping into action but about recognizing that even waiting is a choice, a kind of being in time. the japanese tea ceremony could almost be called an existentialist ritual, every gesture intentional, every pause meaningful not because god decreed it so, but because we decided to give it meaning.

and maybe the most existential thing about both is how they do not try to be each other. coffee does not dilute itself into gentleness to please the tea drinker, tea does not harden itself into bitterness to impress the coffee crowd. each stays what it is and in that way each reveals a kind of authenticity, a refusal to exist in bad faith. coffee calls one audience, tea another, but the point is not which is better, it is that both gather people who are searching for a way of being, a rhythm of thought, a ritual that feels like their own.

and maybe that is comforting actually, to think that even in something as ordinary as morning coffee or evening tea, we can find the whole concept of existence.

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I think with TikTok and the ongoing epidemic of fake weird people and people’s desire to try so hard to be poetically unordinary and idiosyncratic, there are beautiful thought provoking psychosexual films like Secretary, The Piano Teacher, Belle de Jour, Videodrome, and Crash that get boiled down to "freaky" movies when they are so much more complex than an aesthetic that looks good on a shelf, and that is a representation of what happens when repression erupts into ritual.

I keep circling back to one line in Secretary. “Why do you cut yourself, Lee?” “I don’t know.” “Is it that sometimes the pain inside has to come to the surface, and when you see evidence of the pain inside you finally know you're really here? Then, when you watch the wound heal, it's comforting... isn't it?”. Sometimes the body answers before the mind can. A mark appears and suddenly the pain has form. I am here. I left a trace. I think about how unfair it is that relief can arrive in such a brutal way, and how honest it is too.

Then I think about cars at night. The flashes of a highway, the pressure of a car speeding past you. I think of Crash. The way people lean toward impact because impact is the one thing that does not lie. Metal and glass do not pretend to care. They do not curate. They answer force with force. In that film the scar is not a symbol, it is a diary entry. You can run your fingers over it and read. I hate admitting how seductive that is. That a wound can feel like a certificate of presence. The most honest picture.

Sometimes the presence is a deliberate need to erupt. In The Piano Teacher, Erika is all discipline, all form, a life practiced until it gleams. Then the bathroom. The razor. The small slice that says none of this polish touched the center of me. It is not spectacle. It is domestic. A mother calling from the other room. Dinner cooling. Blood dripping like a secret you do not intend to share, you’re too polished for that. Later she walks out of the recital hall with a fresh wound and keeps walking. No collapse. No performance of suffering. Just motion. The steadiness of it terrifies me. There is something so plain about her hurt that it becomes a kind of refusal. I will not be arranged for your comfort. I will not pretend this is the night my life becomes a tidy narrative about healing. I will go home with my pain still mine.

Sometimes the pain can be converted into ritual. Into rules. Into something with aftercare and checklists and words like yes and stop and this is where it hurts and this is where it helps. Secretary gets this impulse. The difference between a secret cut and a scene that is negotiated is the difference between drowning alone and learning how to breathe underwater with someone counting for you. "Just a scoop of creamed potatoes, one slice of butter, and four peas". The world still presses. The wound still shines. But it is held. There is an adult in the room. Maybe the adult is you, finally.

I used to think Belle de Jour was only about masochistic elegance, until I reached the ending. Séverine sits beside her husband, who has been broken by a violence she did not plan, and she imagines him whole again. He turns his head. He speaks. For a moment the room warms. She has not been forgiven by the plot. She has not earned a miracle. She simply dreams one and lets herself believe it, just long enough to breathe. Then the fantasy falls away. The chair is still a chair. The body is still a body that will not answer. I find that braver than any confession can be. Not the brothel. Not the afternoon ceremonies. That moment at the end, when she allows herself a vision of repair that reality cannot supply, and then she lives with the difference. Some desires do not dissolve. They have to be carried.

It would be easier to glue these movies together and pretend they are arguing one tidy thesis about desire. I do not think they are. Each one feels like a different room in a house I do not yet know how to live in. Some rooms are bright and strict. Some are velvet and locked from the inside. Some smell like gasoline. I move between them and the same question keeps lingering. What will it take to feel real today. Evidence shifts. For Lee it becomes a ritual that replaces the blade. For Erika it remains the blade. For Séverine it is a staged humiliation that turns shame into oxygen. For James and Catherine in Crash it is the sudden honesty of an accident. For Max in Videodrome it is the body as antenna, the cut that becomes a mouth, the prayer no one admits is a prayer when he says “Long live the new flesh.”

Cinema make this worse and they make it clearer. Videodrome is not prophecy anymore, it is Tuesday. You scroll and scroll, you tell yourself that a flood of images will fill the hole, and then you realize the flood teaches you to want hardness because only hardness resists the tide. A bruise is stubborn. A scar says try to scroll past me. A wound interrupts. The danger is obvious. The escalation does not stop on its own. Intensity becomes a measure of truth and then you keep turning the knob until the dial snaps off in your hand. Or you can keep trying to desperately open a door with a key that won’t fit. I do not like how familiar that sounds.

I want to talk about tenderness without making it sound like a solution. There are people who will never ask for gentleness out loud. They will ask for a version of it that looks like the opposite. A confession that happens with the lights on and a safe word sitting between two mouths like a piece of fruit someone will bite when it is time to stop. It is not a fix. It is a way of letting the body speak in a language it already knows. Sometimes the body needs to tremble, to flinch, to break open a little, in order to feel present. But there’s a difference between being consumed and being seen. Being consumed is vanishing into someone else’s hunger. Being seen is surviving inside it, being held there, not erased by it. And the body always knows the difference, even when the surface looks the same.

And then there is the life outside the room. The ride after eruption. The grocery store after a fight. The walk home from a hospital where you did not tell the full story. Crash puts that life right beside the wrecks. The ordinary hour before the extraordinary impact. How you buckle the seat belt with the same hands that will later touch a new seam in your skin and call it beautiful because you have to call it something. I wonder how much of our days are spent naming things so we can keep going. I wonder who taught us to save our gentlest words for the hardest objects.

I keep thinking about music when I think about The Piano Teacher. How practice promises transformation and delivers control. How control and transformation are not the same. The metronome can be perfect while the heart still beats uneven. There is a kind of loneliness that grows in the gap between mastery and feeling. Erika represents that. If you have ever excelled at something that did not touch you where you needed touching, you know that ache. Excellence parades as intimacy and then vanishes when the lights come up. The blade is not about failure. It is about misfit. A body trying to square itself with a life that has been polished to a shine that blinds.

Other times I think about faith. How confession works only if someone is listening. How a prayer without a listener is just breath. Belle de Jour ends on the possibility that fantasy can be a listener when people cannot. That does not make fantasy a lie. It makes it a tool. An instrument you play when your hands are too tired to lift anything heavier than a wish. I am grateful for wishes that do not save me but keep me from going under. If the price of one more minute of air is a daydream, I will pay it.

What do I actually believe about the desire to bleed? I believe it is a desire for truth that can be touched. I believe it is a request for witness. I believe it is sometimes a risky request, and sometimes the most human one we have. I believe none of these films glamorize it as much as they refuse to hide its intensity. They look at the places where the mind cannot keep pace with the body, or where the body cannot keep pace with the life that was built around it, and they do not turn away. I do not want to turn away either.

There is a temptation to tidy this up, to declare a lesson and deliver a careful finale. I keep thinking about Séverine’s last look, and about Erika’s coat darkening, and about Lee’s small, careful gaze when she watches a wound knit itself closed, and about that soft line near the end of Crash, “Maybe the next one.” None of those moments point to a thesis. They are moments that admit how badly a person can want to be touched by reality, even when reality is not kind. The touch does not redeem anything. It only confirms that you are here.

If you don’t recognize yourself in any of this, maybe it’s because you only see these films as moodboards. But if you do, I hope you find a way to stop silencing yourself through wounds. Sometimes it’s therapy. Sometimes it is a journal and a friend who does not flinch. Sometimes it is a ritual that is safer and slower than the one your body asks for first. Sometimes it is art that lets you put your hand on the glass and feel your own warmth coming back at you. I do not trust cures. I trust forms. I trust language that does not pretend to be enough and tries anyway.

I am not going to pretend these films solve anything for me. They keep me honest. They keep me from mistaking performance for feeling. They let me watch people attempt the same high wire walk by very different routes. And they remind me of a simple, unsentimental mercy. A mark is not proof that you are broken. It is proof that you were in contact with something. You get to decide what to call it. You get to decide how to carry it. You get to decide who sees it and who does not.

I wish there were kinder ways to be convinced we exist. Sometimes there are. Sometimes there are not. On the days when I forget, I put the films back on and let them be harsher than my own mind and also gentler and I listen for the line that names what hurts without decorating it.

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Laura Palmer had always had no chance to survive. That is not a spoiler, that is how it begins. Twin Peaks begins with her chained up in plastic and it was already decided she was going to die before we were introduced to her. The instant her face appears in that homecoming picture, she comes into existence as less of a person and more of a haunt, an accumulation of the memories of others, rumors, and projections of everyone in the town and around. She is not only doomed because of the situations she happens to be, but because of a narrative she is trapped within.

Laura gets split in two by the town saint or sinner, angel or addict, homecoming queen or sex worker. She becomes two-dimensional which ever version people want to hold on to. Isn’t it that sometimes stories do this? They reduce individuals to archetypes since it is simpler than retaining the contradictions of a genuine person. Even written in The secret Diary of Laura Palmer: “my life is whatever the other person in the room wants it to be. Therefore, when i am alone, my life is nothing.”.

We only hear the actual voice of Laura in her diary. Yet even that is not safe. Her most intimate secrets are handled as an additional tool of the plot, the focus of human analysis by other humans. What is stolen by the narrative machine is even her inner, most deepest parts of her life.

By the time Fire Walk With Me is created, David Lynch permits Laura to actually be a character rather than a metaphor, and it is tragic. She is not only a dead girl in the lake but a teenager desperately fighting to survive in a cycle of abuse she does not think that she can ever get out of. It puts her destiny in the film so much as it appears as fate rather than chance and the cosmos itself appeared to doom her to pain. She does not have the freedom to exit the frame that is her narrative.

Then after 25 years later when we are being taken back by The Return, Laura is still not being liberated. She is pulled, pulled back into the dream, into Coopers frenzied attempt to reverse her death. But even at that she is dragged out of reality whilst she is screaming. She is always the girl that gets killed, always in the house of some obsession.

Perhaps the most haunting thing is the fact that Laura turns into a mirror. All characters superimpose their projections on her. She is the golden daughter that can do no wrong, at least not to her parents. In the eyes of her friends she is the inaccessible queen. To the men that lead her secret life, she is a fantasy to be devoured. She is the mystery to Cooper, which he struggles to solve. Even Laura becomes lost in the mist of all such projections. She is never really seen by anyone including us. And this is another form of doom: to be what other people put you out to be, all the time.

Because in reality this does really happen all the time. When a girl is missing, they categorize her pictures, her Instagram, her past, they construct their own Laura Palmer of fragments in their minds. The media determines whether or not she was pure enough to empathize or reckless enough to justify her own tragedy. The headlines grow into a moral verdict: the bad girl, who knew better and the good girl lost to soon. Rarely just a normal person with contradictions just like any other human being who lived and mattered.

The same happens to even celebrities. They are made into icons, or morality lessons, saints or ship wrecks. Marilyn Monroe, Amy Winehouse, Britney Spears, women who lived messy complex lives, but were devoured by the roles they were created to fulfill by other people. They couldn’t be smart yet broken, happy yet self destructive, strong yet weak. They had to be one thing, and one thing only, until that one thing lead to their demise or trapped them forever in cultural amber.

This happens to your average woman even in smaller, quieter forms every day. The colleague who is labeled as the sweet one or the party girl until these labels stick so hard that she would never be the same again. The smart girl, or the wild girl, in high school, who carries that narrative with her long after she’s grown out of it. Once people have written your role, it’s almost impossible to go off script.

It’s even worse through social media. On the internet, people have shrunk themselves to their “aesthetics”, “cores”, edited and fake pieces of life that feed the appetite of other online users who become investors in the limited and consumable contents offered to them. A single viral photo, a single moment and a single mistake and now you are labeled. You are the girl who was named the crying girl on the internet because of a video of you crashing out and being vulnerable on camera, you are the girl who went dancing with the wrong boy and you are the girl who said something offhand that the internet then turned into a defining trait. The ghost of Laura Palmer is ubiquitous: in the ability of society to tell its stories about individuals before they are even known, and how we then insist upon never allowing them to be anything different.

What Twin Peaks reveals to us of Laura is the brutality of this process. She is commemorated, analyzed, idealized, condemned, sexualized, grieved yet she can not just be mere Laura. We have spent decades repeating that in our world young women are reduced to emblem of innocence, heartbreak, non conformity, or self destruction, and their true and powerful voices, such as the diary of Laura, are lost under the cacophony of all the other voices of narration.

By all means, Laura Palmer is doomed by the narrative. The town she lives in makes her a symbol. The show turns her into something of a mystery. The mythology turns her into a sacrifice. And us, as the audience, are keeping her alive by re-enact diagrams of her demise in perpetuity, and making it into a form of entertainment.

She is the heart of Twin Peaks, sure, but it’s a heart that keeps getting consumed by the story built around it. Just like so many hearts in the real world.

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By no means does the body break at once. Its emergence to come apart can be too subtle to notice at first, the dragging of steps, the stumble in the step, the pause where there was once fluent movement. There is no warning, only an increasing gap between the ability and the intention. The muscles become rigid where formerly they were supple. Joints resist. Organs talk behind your back. What used to be a tool of improvisation turns into a collection of disruptions. Every motion is re-thought, every every gesture denied or negotiated. The body once submissive, begins to assert its presence by psychological reactance. This is not a loud collapse, but an accumulation of disobedience. A slow burn of chaos. And yet, within the disruption, lies clarity. The body demands a new vocabulary, a new way of being. It no longer becomes invisible. It is the centerpiece, not out of vitality, but out of rejection. This phenomenon is not either tragic or redemptive. It is merely a remapping of experience, a clash with the edges of the flesh and a reconciliation with what it is like to inhabit a body that no longer will always work as it is supposed to.

There are moments when the body stops being a habitat and transforms into a thing - something alien to the purpose, something that is unfamiliar in terms of touch or shape. Illness, trauma, and psychological rupture do not always announce themselves through violence. Sometimes they come without a crash without a rumble but some little quiet turn of familiar things to near unknown. What responds to will or desire becomes a process with its own unreadable logic.

There is no better rendering of this estrangement than that found in Franz Kafka The Metamorphosis where Gregor Samsa actually wakes to find himself to be an insect, not as a metaphor but fact. The grotesque body is not symbolic; it is material. His flesh had turned against him, acting on its own account, rebelling without warning or reasoning. But in the monstrous new form Gregor has the same consciousness. He does not see the change within the horror, but rather the sad resignation of one that is already used to disconnection. There is the no scream, there is no panic. He merely tries to get up to work, still caught in the chain of the absurd obligations of a life he no longer physically occupies.

Even prior to his transformation, Gregor was already disoriented- a traveling salesman working a job he hates and alienated from genuine communication, providing to his relatives with whom he had barely any warm feelings towards. The metamorphosis only brings this state of his alienation to the surface level, which however had existed very long unspoken. Now, the body no longer conceals that disconnection. It wears it.

The horror of The Metamorphosis does not lie exclusively in the insect form itself but in the frame in which it leaves Gregor. His body turns into something that is done to him. No longer a vessel of autonomy, but rather a cage of consciousness. He continues to have desires of opening a door or helping his sister but his body fails to respond. It writhes. It collapses. It resists. He is a mind completely sealed in an object.

The same alienation hangs over Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, in which depression blunts the border of self and body. Esther Greenwood becomes more and more detached as she moves through the world physically becoming more opaque. “I couldn’t feel my body,” she writes. The body under depression becomes not as monstrous as in Kafka, but unreachable. A blurred outline in the corners of one’s vision. It exists, but is inaccessible, operating on a level that does not go with meaning or motivation any more.

In both cases, the body ceases to be transparent. It interrupts. It misbehaves. It starts to stop being me, it starts to be it, a malfunctioning site, a stranger behind the skin. This experience is not merely about pain or dysfunction. It is about narrative dissonance, i.e., the body is no longer consistent with the image of the self. The transformation can be either physical or psychological or even both. And yet it is but one effect, estrangement. One is outside the body yet entangled within the body.

The illness unthreads the deception of control. The body is subservient. Illnesses remind us how insignificant the power we have within the body is. With good health, the body vanishes into the back burner, it thinks, plays and acts without question. It executes in a very mechanical way thought and feeling, acts the intention. To the point where we think that we are in charge. And this mastery is a fiction. Sickness takes away that illusion. Then all of a sudden the body is unpredictable, it is no longer a silent companion but something with its own agenda. What could be done without much effort, now gives resistance, hesitation, disintegration. Everything gets negotiated down to the smallest things. Movement slows. Language falters. And with that shift the body is no longer familiar, it is something to deal with and in some cases even to be afraid of.

According to On Being Ill written by Virginia Woolf, betrayal starts with the denial to maintain the grammar of everyday life. She writes, not about catastrophe, but about the gradual, dizzy reorganization of the world that illness require. “Considering how common illness is,” she observes, “how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings… it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.” She suggests illness is not merely a physical state but it is a condition of perception. The sick body sees differently. It has a different sense of time. A once familiar world is distorted at the boundaries, like seen through water.

In Mrs. Dalloway this perceptual disintegration is portrayed by the character of Septimus Warren Smith, who is traumatized as much physically as psychically. The thought/sensation boundaries are eliminated - the world is too vivid, too noisy, too inexpressible. The perception is intrusive. Words buckle. “He could not feel,” Woolf writes, “he could reason; he could read, Dante for example, quite easily… but feeling had gone out of things.” Illness is not just disembodiment in this case but a form of narrative breakdown, due to meaning becoming unhinged, and the self gives in, untethered, suspended in pieces.

Where Woolf maps the dissolution of coherence through illness, Joan Didion does it through grief (another form of somatic rupture). In The Year of Magical Thinking the body becomes a platform of disbelief, in which loss tries to be undone. The mind spins logic around what the body cannot bear. She writes: “Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.” The betrayal is not only in the terms of death, but in the body’s stubborn participation in the world after it. She continues to breathe. She shops for groceries. She cannot stop checking for her husband’s shoes, as if his return was simply delayed.

Grief not only exists in the brain; it drags the body in its ceremony. Appetite disappears. Sleep distorts. Time distends. In Didion, the body in grief becomes dysfunctional, not through pain, but through a loss of orientation and structure. The body goes on, but the self fails to recognize its own persistence. The betrayal is not dramatic; it is ordinary and natural. And that is truly its cruelty.

Throughout these writings, illness whether chronic, psychic, or grief-bound, the body is no longer the secure location of comfort. There is lack of forward movement, only the whirling of perception around the absence of control.

Being in disagreement with the body is not rare, it is human, just in many cases, it cannot be articulated. When we are ill, traumatized, grieving or fractured psychologically we are revealing unconsciously how we have assumed that the body will keep up, it will maintain, it will satisfy the idea that it is our body. When that supposition fails, it bequeaths a rather odd and painful estrangement: between thought and sensation, will and function, presence and absence.

It is that distance which literature has a concrete form. It also becomes the locus where not only the betrayal of the body is vocalized, but it is visualized as the locus of disorientation, dysfunction and disembodiment are given form. In such texts rupture is not something to fix. It is something to witness. Kafka’s vermin, Woolf’s dizzy perception, Plath’s numbness, Didion’s bodily grief do not offer resolution. They offer recognition.

This is the secreting influence of these stories; how they enable us to remain in discomfort, how they enable us to live with the body’s rejection rather than against it. They give the alienation its name. They follow its lines. By doing that they make room in which the self, fractured, however, is perceived.

The body reappears, again and again, not as home, but as torment. A presence both intimate and estranged, familiar and resistant, always shifting beyond reach.

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it seemed to me that i was out of time all these years. i have always lived with that sneaky little panic in the background that stays in your chest and follows you above your head when you believe that everything you do is shutting a door behind you. i would always go crazy over this identification with that fig tree metaphor in The Bell Jar, all those trails of my many lives, all those possibilities of my many selves, hanging as fruit, and that terror that they will all turn to rotting fruit and fall to the ground unless i found a way to sprout one and become one of them before all the others did.

for as long as i can remember i held onto that thought as if my life depended on it. i chose to dumb myself down to just one version of myself to fit in with just one thing. in The Bell Jar, the fig tree metaphor isn't completely about indecision. it’s drenched in that fear of not being enough no matter what path you take. like: even if you do choose something, will you be good at it? will it fulfill you? or will you still feel like you're not measuring up? it was exhausting carrying that burden around every day, lying to myself and everyone around me that i can confidently pick a fig and bite into it without looking back. but i was always looking back. always wondering about the other figs, the ones i left behind. and at the same time, terrified that the one i picked wouldn’t be sweet enough, or ripe enough, or worthy enough to justify the sacrifice of all the others. it felt like no matter what i did, some version of myself was dying off. and no one talks about the grief of unlived lives, the versions of yourself you don’t get to experience because you were too busy trying to be consistent, successful, or easy to understand. i thought choosing meant growing up. i thought narrowing myself down meant becoming real. but it mostly just felt like loss. like being forced to amputate parts of myself in order to be taken seriously. and even then, i still didn’t feel like enough.

i do not believe that i am supposed to be one thing. i do not think any of us should. I believe we are created to evolve, to discover, to be vastly ludicrous and astonishingly incompatible. and perhaps the fear to choose is not the wisdom of sorts, it is only the fear, in a new disguise of the clarity. i do not want to represent the girl looking at the tree. i wish i could climb up it. admire everything. eat what i can lay hold on. because what if, there isn’t one fig that leads to a good life? what should we do with the thought that not choosing is not the risky thing, perhaps it is believing that we have to? i contemplate everything in me that i have ignored, squelched, and discredited because it did not elegantly fit into the narrative i imagined that i had to tell. silent yearnings, big contradictions, bizarre obsessions, the dreams with the minimum wage or even no wage at all. i mourned them, thinking they were distractions or mistakes. were they not true, sure, in about the same degree as other things? what if they were just as true as anything else? what if they were me, too?

there is so much shame in being unfocussed. in not involving a five-year plan, in changing it, in initiating one thing and abandoning it. but isn’t the failure to finish things sacred as well? perhaps it means that you actually listened to your gut when it told you something wasn’t right for you anymore. perhaps you became too big to wear it. perhaps that is an indicator of being alive, not failure.

i am beginning to think that finding yourself a bit lost is some sort of freedom. not knowing precisely who i am, means having room to continue becoming. it is a mess, sure. it’s scary. just floating through without a gravitation towards something. but it has something authentic in it. Something that says: i do not come here to act out a life, i come to live one. to be affected and transformed and re-formed by what i love and by what i lose. i need to be open to the self i have not experienced yet. the world will not always endorse that. it prefers clarity and labels. it prefers individuals who choose to stay in a lane. but i prefer to be illegible over limiting myself into a life that seems too small to fit me. i’d rather be a question rather than an answer.

Though Sylvia Plath is one of my favorite writers, i find the whole idea of the metaphor incomplete. i believe that we are able to live more than one live in this life if it weren’t for the crushing expectation to become just one. i think we can go up and down the branches, and take a bite of whichever whenever we please. we can drop the pressure to become just one perfect thing.

i may not know who i am these days, but i am not lost. it’s all in the beauty of free falling and discovery.

I can recall wasting a good amount of my life out of fear of expectations. But the thing is, this fear, it’s not within me. This fear is bigger than me in every way that it can’t possibly fit inside me, it towers over me, its weight crushing my chest like a boulder. It follows me around, a dark entity, forcing itself to be seen, to be considered, to be valued, heard.

The weight of expectations is something I did not notice was crushing me until very recently; I assumed it was a natural feeling. But is it really normal to miss out on life because of the fear of someone seeing me without the heavily fabricated and edited version of myself that I present to the world? I have always feared and avoided being perceived as nothing less than a dream girl, I do not present my flaws on my sleeve. My imperfections are tucked out of reach, out of eyesight. I let her roam freely, my true self, only when the lights are off and there’s no one there to see. But how long will I be willing to keep this going?

Since our youth, we are programmed to put in extra effort and look good for our firsts: first day of school, first day of college, first date..etc, which is quite honestly absurd. You present yourself, not as your purest form, but as a form that is built through meticulous effort, and through that, they expect you to confine to being that edited form, to commit to being her. Most of the time, I doll myself up to feel beautiful and highlight my features, but people persist to define me, to perceive me as this doll, even whilst knowing there’s cracks underneath. My purest form is cracked, with blemishes, and a bit of insanity. I would rather be seen for what I am during any first sighting. I would rather someone be interested in me, approach me, want me, while i’m in my purest form than any other.

I have spent all of my teenage life afraid of being pure and bare. And I say “all” not “most” or “some” with all intention and honestly. There is not one day I let someone see me for my soul and not my looks. I have built every impression anyone had of me, based on my looks, and left no room for anything else, mostly because I have invested more in my looks and my outer appearance in general more than I have ever nourished my soul. I did not work on my hobbies until I reached 18, which was when I realized that I need something in life that makes me excited, rather than something about me that makes other people excited, if you know what i’m saying.

On my 19th birthday, I stopped putting effort in my looks altogether to experiment with this new profound feeling of having being educated and talented and not needing to make up for something lacking in my personality. It felt great, washing my face whenever I wanted, feeling free, without the weight of a shield, insecurity, or of having to fix something about me. What really made this experiment profound is when I realized that I was not treated any differently. Not in the slightest.

I do not care for my looks, I use it as a form of expression, as an outlet for creativity nothing more. I only want to be seen for my soul. I want to not just be looked at, but to be acknowledged. My biggest fear is to be liked for my looks rather than for an abstract emotion. I wear ribbons on my soul. I feed my soul, provide for her, and cherish her too much for her to not be considered. She is inside me, begging to be seen, to be known, to be loved. Please don’t reduce me to the surface, look past it and see the person beneath.

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People always have trouble understanding other people. They see someone sitting on a chair unconventionally, holding a fork with their fists, having mysteriously symbolic tattoos all over, or dyeing their hair colors that don't belong to nature, and they don’t understand it. They don’t understand why. So they shrug it off by calling it weird. That’s what being weird is, undecipherable. Not understood. Not even bothered to be understood. And that’s what we all are to the majority of people in our life. Unless you have everything there is to know about you on your sleeve, people will see you weird. So why is it that humans find this relentless desire to understand the people around them within them? And why do we eventually give into it?

Mystery is scary. Not knowing why something is the way it is leaves room for unpredictability. Thus, you will be avoided. But in the modern world, you will be desperately stalked on all your social medias, being stripped away from all your penetralia, just so someone can search for meaning within anyone that isn’t themselves. People will desperately try to unravel you for their own peace of mind. To have something, someone to discuss on their Saturday morning brunch, rather than facing their own selves, discussing what really matters. Through you, they find escape. Not from the world, but from themselves. In your mystery, they forget that they are mysteries too. In your oddness, they get to ignore their own.

People thrive on certainty. We crave answers, labels, explanations, something concrete to hold onto. We are hardwired to seek patterns, to decipher the “weird”, and to place everything into manageable boxes. The beauty of letting things swirl freely, flowing into whatever wavelength they choose, is just too much to bear for those who need to give everything a label. When faced with something or someone who defies these patterns, the discomfort that arises is almost palpable.

Why do we eventually give into it? Why do we let their need to understand nudge us into offering pieces of ourselves, neatly packaged and explained, just to quiet the questions they never asked? We give in because, somewhere deep down, we crave the simplicity of being seen, of having our oddities justified, even if it means losing the magic of being untamed. We surrender, just a little, because it’s easier to let them fill the gaps than to remain a beautiful mystery they can’t unravel.

The truth is that you must embrace your weirdness without trying to explain it, to float somewhere between what makes sense and what doesn’t. It’s in that space where freedom hides, away from the need to fit into something tidy. "Weird" is just the word we use for those who won’t be boxed in, who roam beyond the rules and let themselves exist in ways that can’t always be put into words. It’s not a chaos, but a quiet kind of magic, found in the places where understanding ends and curiosity begins.

Today I will peel an orange and eat it like an apple. I will order two different coffees for myself, walk around while holding them both between my palms to feel the warmth and comfort twice as much, as I sip them both one at a time. I will walk around halls with an oddly specific numbered pattern that only I understand and that will definitely look odd to those around me. But that’s okay. I will remain untouched by the limits of others’ understanding.

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