A big part in why I’m a filmmaker is this desire to control my own narrative and have some sort of control over the difficult things that I’ve experienced, which is actually impossible but it gives the illusion of that. It makes me a very obsessive filmmaker, which I think you can feel in this film — this meticulous sort of desire to control time.

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When your body feels like a big deal, you need to sit with an even bigger-deal body. One that feels even more impossible to ignore. I am not going to tell you that I mean the ocean by this. Yes, the ocean is this cosmic body of water, rumbling of crashing waves and filled with beings beyond human comprehension. But there are others like this around you.

During my sociology degree, one of the first methods I studied was ethnography. Ethnography is a practice of studying people’s beliefs, actions, relationships, and culture in settings where normal life activities occur. I love observing the world around me, and the beach as a place for rest, pleasure and escape feels special.

During my teenage years, the beach always meant hyperawareness: tucking my stomach in, hiding possible traces of pubic hair, calculating my back’s angle, closing, crossing, turning my legs. A performance. But the beach was in all its nature against performance. The waves swallow you up and spit you out with such force that both bikini top and bottom end up stripped down — all your parts naked for the world to witness. Your hair is a mess of sand and saltwater and knots. Running feels impossible as each of your steps gets swallowed by sand. Walking out of the ocean’s mouth, you try hard at making your walk seem aesthetic and effortless but the sea keeps snatching you back in like a toxic lover.

I spent the first weeks of July debating on buying a swimsuit. There are such pretty polka dot ones, but my main reason was my belly that is more often than not round and bloated. I hesitated though because I love tanning my belly, it is always the first part of my body to become a shade darker, while my legs stubbornly bathe in their milky white.

Going to the beach with my yet again two-pieces, I realized I didn’t care. So many human bodies were around me — hundreds of bodies turned into a bigger-deal body than mine. None of them seemed to care about what jiggled or shone or expanded or stretched. All of them looked so different. I noticed that I hadn’t seen older bodies in swimsuits in a long time. I understood my screen wouldn’t remind me of the diversity of bodies there actually is in this world.

Just the way going outside can help you realize how small your worries are when you are stuck inside your own place, going to the beach did that to me when I was thinking about my body too much.

I know this isn’t always possible. But that day my brain allowed me to perceive outside of myself and notice the variety in bodies. I was having a less body dysmorphic day which definitely helped, and I took this lesson home with me.

Sometimes all you need is to be reminded how boring it would be if we all looked the same. How boring would it be to collect sea shells if they all looked the same?

I wish this was enough on most days.

It is a role I didn’t ask for. It is a weird thing to think about the powerlessness in being born. You are born, and there you are.

I have learnt that being a mother is often a choice, other times choice-less. One that is taken for granted, one that is imposed on you, one that you don’t think about too much because of course you’re meant to become a mother.

I’m trying to come up with this piece as I write it. It is about mothers and daughters, but not really, it is about a wound that I dare not touch, so I air it out. It is a thing I so desperately need to write about but I dare not to.

There are women who have made me feel like a good daughter. An epiphany. That daughter might not need mother to affirm it. That it is all a play on words. That it is about lying under a tree and feeling reassured by how easy the wind cradles its lush limbs. How I hear no one shame the tree for its heaviness. How mother is a synonym for cradle. How mother is a synonym for nurture. How my mother tongue makes me the daughter of a language. How I have always been a daughter and always will be, no matter the circumstances because there are women who hold me tight and make me believe.

I have learned to mother my inner child in therapy. Close my eyes, and imagine myself next to her, caressing her on those dark nights, let her be opinionated and loud, show no fear when she tells me she feels monstrous for being so angry.

There’s my sister bringing me a plate full of food for when cooking feels too big of a task: garlicky, squishy, olive oil glazed rice, perfectly cut florets of broccoli with seasoned tofu soaked in soy and miso. My best friend reminding me of how much sense my big emotions make. My grandmother not wanting to let go of my hand the last time we would ever get to see each other, whispering to my partner, Take care of her. My partner’s mother carefully arranging the bedsheets I would get a deep sleep in. My best friend’s mother embracing me.

There’s an ant on my leg reminding me that I’m actually not so scary.

It might not be hard to love me as a daughter after all.

But is daughter more of a giving or receiving? Maybe it is both.

I was born a daughter, a good one. I just wish I could have had more time to prove my potential. To have written you letters on mother’s day. To have massaged your tired feet. To have handed you my graduation certificate. To have made you tea. But maybe I was wrong in that too. Maybe there should never have been a test in how good of a daughter I could be. Maybe the fish needed to stop trying so hard to swim. If you spend so much energy trying to be something, moulding yourself into a gentle-kind-perfect daughter box, there can be no part of you that overspills — when all along the overspilling was the daughter.

I’ll leave you with the 15 books I’ve read these past six months. I’ll keep the reviews short but sweet — with a quote from each of the books. They are in no particular order, however, I decided to leave the four I didn’t thoroughly like for the end.

1. Oranges are not the only fruit - Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson had been on my Authors-I-Want-to-Read list for a long time now. When I found this vintage copy on Vinted, I took it as a sign to finally pick it up. A semi-autobiographical, coming-of-age novel about a protagonist named Jeanette who grows up in a strict Evangelical Christian home. She dreams of becoming a missionary but soon finds out her sexuality goes against everything she has been taught to believe and trust in. The structural order of the novel mirrors the very mythical element of the storytelling.

Themes: Coming-of-age, Queerness, Strict Religious Upbringing, Religious Trauma

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I found a photo of my grandmother of when she was younger. Younger than the version I got to love and know. For a split second, I saw my face in hers. The smooth, round skin under her chin that I so detest in myself suddenly became history. I thought maybe that could be a thought pattern I can mould for myself, whenever bad body dysmorphia creeps in. It is history. Yet, I know it is impossible to dismantle the centuries of patriarchal beliefs transferred from women to women in my line. Whenever I judge this skin, I know I’m judging my grandmother’s. Some days that is enough to stop me, others it isn’t.

Since I’ve gained weight and my skin got cushioned by more fat, it is all I think about on some days. But — wasn’t that all I thought about when I was super skinny? I remember wanting a round ass so badly. Now, I have one but there’s a belly to worry about. When I was skinny, people would say I looked sick. Now I look sick because I’m not skinny.

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I just wish I could peel back these layers of hate and shame and discover where and when it all started. If you’ve seen a C-section simulator, you can probably visualize these layers being cut open. There’s seven layers of skin to unwrap when you deliver a baby this way and that’s shocking, but I have the slightest inkling that this shame consists of many more.

Thinking about my body, staring at my body, speaking about my body, all these time-consuming and selfish actions go against my value system. Writing about my body irritates me; there’s so many more pressing issues I could be writing about, but I hope that by writing about my body, I cautiously unfurl these layers of useless obsession. Or maybe this is a lie I tell myself so I can continuously dwell on this.

Perhaps all I need to know is that I have a body, it allows me to do, consume and receive and perhaps that’s it? I actually don’t want there to be more. I want to decorate it with things I find pretty. I want to fill it with food I adore. I want to move it in ways I didn’t know I could before. That’s it.

Eight Bites

I read Carmen Maria Machado’s short story Eight Bites this week. The main protagonist decides to follow her three sister’s steps and get a bariatric surgery. The final goal is to be skinny and live around the eight-bite rule her mother taught her when she was young. You only need eight bites — after that, no more food!

The protagonist thinks:

I was tired of the skinny-minny women from church who cooed and touched each other's arms and told me I had beautiful skin, and having to rotate my hips sideways to move through rooms like crawling over someone at the movie theater. I was tired of flat, unforgiving dressing room lights; I was tired of looking into the mirror and grabbing the things that I hated and lifting them, claw-deep, and then letting them drop and everything aching. My sisters had gone somewhere else and left me behind, and as I always have, I wanted nothing more than to follow.

She’s frustrated about a world so persistent in reminding her of her body’s physicality. Maybe getting that surgery feels like the easy way out but — spoiler alert: it isn’t. There’s a ghost that will haunt her and outlive her. That will blame her for her ingratitude. How dare you not accept me for what I was? How dare you shrink me? How dare you amputate me like this?

There’s a line that made me pause. As simple and short and straightforward as it was, I had to really contemplate its meaning:

(…) why had I skipped over the phase where I was round and unthreatening as a panda, but still lovely?

Still lovely.

I wrote a little something for an Instagram post, which is what inspired this Substack:

I went back to bed the same way I had left it, just a little angrier.

There’s a toxin that most doctors have been infected with. The unfair thing is it doesn’t hurt them. The even more unfair thing is it hurts you. I wrote my Master’s thesis on this toxin because it poisoned me and so many other women. All I could do was put it on paper, as I do with most things that are rotten.

This specific toxin is composed of three organisms:

• patriarchy,

• andronormativity (the child of patriarchy),

• and lack of research (the grandchild of patriarchy).

Wandering Womb

Whenever a doctor tells you your pain might be a form mental illness, think of the late nineteenth-century diagnosis of hysteria. Back then, if you felt faint, a doctor would have suggested your womb dislodged and wandered all the way up your body. Your womb felt lonely and longing down there; maybe you just needed to have more penetrative sex to make it happy and healthy again? Your health was always judged according to your reproductive systems — referred to as ‘bikini medicine’.

The term andronormativity is the subconscious belief in holding male bodies as the default in medicine. Basically, white, middle-age, able-bodied men are normal and everyone else is — well, something they still haven’t found a way to mansplain. It is a problem that most medical research and procedures have only been tested on male bodies. Heart attacks present completely different in women than in men. In pharmaceuticals, women were excluded from clinical trials until early 1990s due to hormones and pregnancy risks. If medicine uses cost and time to justify lack of research on women, I ask why there is enough money to fund research exploring attractiveness levels in women who suffer from endometriosis? Or the impact of endometriosis on male partners?

The argument is often that women’s bodies are too complex, but if you have money and time to study something that contributes little to nothing to medicine, but merely perpetuates patriarchy, I say you have enough resources to study conditions that affect so many women. Conditions that mostly affect women are classified as lowest in the medical status hierarchy — this is certainly not because these aren’t terrible but because yes again, now we cough patriarchy .

In this month’s issue of The Sun, the magazine’s interview happens to be about this exact topic — Bias and Anti-Science Attitudes in Medicine. Rolonda Donelson says:

Our male-dominated society places less value on women in general, so they are more likely to have delays in medical care and not to be believed by their doctors.

We can’t speak of gender inequality in medicine without speaking of the horrifying trauma that has been done to black women — James Marion Sims performed surgeries on black women without anaesthesia because he believed black people didn’t experience pain.

My own health journey has taught me more often than not, that doctors won’t believe me. It is a traumatic kind of experience being let down by doctors, when they are the only source of care you’re taught to trust. You can’t know what it feels like until you have experienced it, but it’s similar to the sensation you get when you’re on a rollercoaster about to be thrown down a steep slope, only that the continuous track — the one you always take for granted — has vanished.

I was losing strength in my legs, experiencing constant dizziness, my normal heart rate was too high and got higher the second I moved or stood up, I suffered from terrible fatigue that got worsened when I overdid on a certain day. But doctors made me doubt my experience — even after receiving an official POTS diagnosis from a cardiologist. In the doctor’s office, it felt like I was transported into a different reality. Yes, the doctor is right, I shall walk home and all will be fine again, maybe all had been fine, I just needed to get out of bed, and go to the gym and walk more, all is fine, he’s right, all is fine. I will drink more water and not stress and stretch and breathe, and all will be fine, all is fine. But the minute I left the doctor’s office, the weakness was still there, the dizziness, the heart racing, the pain. Going to doctors cost me too much.

It’s just — what do you do when your health is deteriorating, but someone with the credentials to help you tells you it isn’t? You walk from one reality to another, not ever knowing which one is right or wrong. You see the heart rate that shoots up the second you stand up. You feel the weakness in your legs. You feel your muscles giving up. You feel the constant throbbing in your head. But now there’s also that other voice. It isn’t true, it isn’t true, it isn’t true.

In my teenage years, my mum always let me choose a magazine for our summer days at the beach. Don’t judge me for picking up a Bravo every single time. Thank god my mum never asked to look through it—it was probably so damaging to my teenage brain, but I can confidently say my taste has improved.

These are my magazine recommendations for your summer this year:

1. Cake Zine

   I found Cake Zine a few months ago and I’ve been intrigued by the themes they explore and their story curation ever since. Through the lens of food, they explore art, history and pop culture. Just picture: The sun hitting your skin, the seagulls screeching, the waves hitting the shore, a mocktail in your right(or left) hand, Cake Zine in your left(or right) hand. I’m already jealous of you.

   

2. Tummy Ache

   I may be biased for this one but Tummy Ache does know how to make the perfect magazine. Each issue focuses on a specific emotion and personal introspection. I wrote a piece for their Lazy Issue, titled Good Girl, where I explored autistic burnout and my failed attempt at being a good girl forever. Tummy Ache doesn’t just look good, it also delivers quality writing and art pieces.

   

3. Mother Tongue

   Mother Tongue explores topics linked to modern motherhood—in the broad sense—through stories about art, sex, pop culture, politics and more. Their content on Instagram is also SO good! When we think of media associated with the theme of motherhood, we often think the only logical audience to engage with such content are (soon-to-be)mothers themselves, but motherhood should be a universal interest and topic.

4. Girls Like Us

   I found this magazine while browsing in a bookstore and was immediately struck by it. Girls Like Us aims to give a medium to women and transpeople within arts, activism and culture.

   

5. Terrible People

   The scorching summer heat, bright sun and sweat may bring out the worst in some of us (it definitely does with me), so you might feel less lonely by reading a magazine focusing on the terrible side of human nature.

   

If you do end up picking up any of these after reading this guide, send me a message, tag me in a photo or let me know your thoughts on it! I love discussing books, magazines or any other kind of media on here. There are still so many other magazines I hope to recommend and read, and what joy it is to live in a world where there is always more media to explore.

Whispers in the Woods is a documentary directed by Photographer Vincent Munier, starring his father Michel, his son Simon and himself. Here, in the Vosges forests, his father taught Vincent about wildlife, and now they are passing down this knowledge to the next generation, Simon. Of course, the cinematography is stunning. The shots of the animals and nature are just breathtaking and make the whole experience of this documentary unforgettable. It is also incredibly moving when Michel starts pondering the high risk of extinction of the Western capercaillie. For a second, it really makes you reflect on the meaning of extinction and its terrifying consequences. It is grief for someone(thing) you might never come to know or see, as humans erase entire species and don’t stop to really think about what it is they are doing. Michel does.

I kept thinking how remarkable it was to see two man and a boy display their sensitivity and appreciation for nature without feeling the need to be rough; they didn’t for once think about themselves in the face of so much land and natural beauty, they distanced themselves and made themselves as little as possible to witness wildlife as it was. Maybe, if men understood how little they actually are in the force of nature, patriarchy wouldn’t be such a thing.

That same month, I read Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton. So, you could definitely say March was a month full of wildlife-related reflections for me. In this book, Dalton writes about her journey of raising a leveret into adulthood. Despite her growing attachment to the hare, she refuses to domesticate the animal and ensures the hare remains free and wild. It is such a tender book. One that teaches you so much about life through observation, silence and decentering. That was my main takeaway from the book and documentary: How would the world look like if we learnt to observe without intervention? How can we let go of this urge? Or at least, how can we learn to manage this urge?

She [The hare] has taught me patience. And as someone who has made their living through words, she has made me consider the dignity and persuasiveness of silence.

The hare lends itself as a symbol of the transience of life and its fleeting glory, and our dependence on nature and our careless destruction of it. But in the hare—and nature’s—endless capacity for renewal, we can find hope. If it is possible, as William Blake would have it, “to see a world in a grain of sand,” then perhaps we can see all nature in a hare: its simplicity and intricacy, fragility and glory, transience and beauty.

And this again, reminds me of North Woods by Daniel Mason. Over the span of centuries, we experience changes in the environment as different people move in and out of a cottage — this cottage that serves as our confidante in the story. We see how much changes, and how little changes when humans aren’t around, and how nature doesn’t struggle with the lack of human presence; as a matter of fact, it knows exactly what to do. It grows messily and wildly but the chaos is exactly what makes it alive.

I think our inability for passive observation derives from our belief in our superiority to nature—this binary between nature/human, that isn’t real. The thought that humans can do better, can think better, can feel better. But not everything needs our touch—climate change, animal abuse, threats to ecosystems prove that. I wonder what would happen if we no longer held on to this belief, or at least loosened our grip on it. I think many of our problems would dissolve.

What if we could hold both the grief and our failure to do better alongside each other, and start from there?

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I look around me very attentively: I analyse faces, bodies, moods, smells. My hyper-vigilance keeps me safe, of course it does. I have this deep-seated aversion to movement in a plane. The slightest shift from someone might throw off the plane. When I was little, this was much worse, and someone standing up to use the bathroom gave me the jitters. I would hold my breath and remain stiff.

There’s this Brazilian man sitting next to me and my partner. He’s in full business mode, making constant calls: reservations, meetings, ordering wines(?); supposedly a restaurant owner from what I could gather. The moment the plane is up, he falls asleep for those near three hours, picking right up where he left the moment we land, as if nothing had happened. The fact that we flew over various countries, traversing waters, skies, languages, lives, rocks, birds, is brushed off. But I see him making the sign of the cross. Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Maybe he does see this miracle for what it is after all? Maybe others can do that — speed through miraculous events unconsciously?

Was it maybe because this man had God and I didn’t?

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A box filled with notebooks and journals from my younger years (speaking as if I had lived any longer than 26 years, but it does feel that way) haunt me from the corner of my bedroom. I avoid going through them; they are filled with years of depression, loneliness and trauma. My own version of the Pandora’s box — only that mine isn’t a myth. Well, it is a myth to you. But not so much to me. I used to write my journal entries in German. I cringe at the sight of these entries. I wonder why I instinctively leant towards writing my trauma in German? The language I wasn’t supposed to be good at because I came from a line of Portuguese Immigrants. But I was good at it, and maybe that was the point.

Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative by Melissa Febos

I read Body work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative by Melissa Febos in the sun, sitting between two tall buildings forcing such strong wind, so immersed in Febos’ words that I couldn’t care less about the slight risk of it carrying me away.

Febos managed to remind me of how scared I am of getting caught up in intellectual ways of writing, reading and analysing — forgetting my why in my writing. The healing and freedom I have always found in writing down words. The telling of a story I am so scared to speak out loud.

I’m not capable of reading my past journals because they are filled with a darkness that feels bigger than myself. But at some point I needed to write it, for why else would I have filled so many notebooks? The thing is I didn’t know I would ever want OR need to look back at them, so I just wrote and wrote and wrote and never thought I’d have to face them one day again.

When an event triggers me I return to feeling powerless, and lonely, and feel as though my body gets transported into the smaller girl I once was. This time, with years of therapy and tools, I took the little girl for a walk and looked at the world around us. I sat down with Febos’ words and the commitment to finish this book:
- something to control
- something to achieve.

The right book at the right time.

I have a weird relationship with social media. I enjoy creating and posting and interacting with people who love reading and writing as much as me, though on most days I feel discomfort at the level of individualism it requires from us. How I’m trying to manage my sleep. Things I’ve been looking forward to buying. Media I have been consuming. Practices I have been implementing. Books I have been reading. How I’ve been spending less time on my phone. Books I didn’t enjoy. I get tired of the I.

I’m afraid my writing practice risks falling under this individualistic lens one day. I’m afraid it is all so I can prove to be worthy, intellectual, special. I don’t want my writing to be for others, when for so long it was my practice of survival. Many don’t know this about me, but I used to dream of becoming a professional dancer. It was all my life revolved around, until it started becoming so much about proving myself to others and performing and looking good, that all it did was lead to anxiety and having to step off. I still love dancing, though illness took that partially away from me, but I know now that I didn’t need to prove it to anyone. Dance had always just been my way of living in a reality that was too harsh.

Febos describes the practice of writing as one of returning to a truer version of oneself, of looking back at the ugly things we did, survived or ran away from and confess and hopefully turn it into something that will meet a reader that needs it. It is “an exercise in transformation”.

To William H. Gass’s argument, “To have written an autobiography is already to have made yourself a monster,” I say that refusing to write your story can make you a monster. Or perhaps more accurately, we are already monsters. And to deny the monstrous is to deny its beauty, its meaning, its necessary devastation.

Transforming my secrets into art has transformed me.

[…] we are giving this proof of our survival to each other.

I do not think that the vocation of writer is superior to any other, but I do believe it is the most useful life for me, the one in which I can most be of service to this questionable project of human civilization — partly because it is where my strengths lie, and partly because it keeps me stable enough to be available in other respects.

Writing offers me the practice of unconditional love, the one I wasn’t taught growing up. The one of looking back, understanding, accepting, confessing, forgiving, rewriting, and growing into a truer version of myself with a deeper awareness and understanding of what made me me. I didn’t know better. But writing teaches me to do so. It is the peeling back of layers of conditioning that never belonged to me. It gives me that gift. But it is also a gift to know that out there is someone who might read my story and feel a weight off their shoulders, a mutual I see you, shared between writer and reader.

But as Febos asks, isn’t it ironic that the practice that teaches you about unconditional love also demands that you test that love first? I’m not sure that if you read my story you will still love me after it, but it is only if I open up about it that I’ll find out.

So, it hasn’t been egocentric all along. How could it be when so many of us go through the same. It isn’t self-centered to take the individual experience to open up larger conversations. Febos writes:

The unspoken parts of experience: the lonely, the existential, the erotic — how was I to know they weren’t mine alone?

In books, I found an archetype that could hold my own sadness, the loneliness of consciousness and the implicit knowledge of its furthest extremes, that could even make it romantic. The role of writer was the first that suggested a way for me to fit into society, to be valued and legible to others, if I were to be consumed by my least nameable hungers, as I feared. Also, that I was not alone. Poets were the first people I found who named those absurd, ugly, unbearable, and ecstatic parts of being human. They are often better named by lyric means.

Recursion in nature

What if in writing we can contribute to nature’s process of replicating itself?

This weekend I saw a flower that held bigger versions of its inner tinnier flowers on the outside. A shape mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot coined fractals — a pattern that repeats itself through various magnitudes. I’m not sure if this specific flower would meet those criteria but it made me think about it (prompted by a conversation I had with my sister who studied this in literature).

Recursion shows us that self-similarity in nature is necessary, and encouraged. It doesn’t take away the beauty of snowflakes, the beauty of trees and clouds. I see the same in humans: we are made of self-similar little copies of us, but only when we zoom out and observe the whole, can we see the big picture. Despite what we are told in fast fashion (where new is always better) and hustle culture, self-similarity is found in almost everything, so why shouldn’t our art be part of it?

Through writing, we contribute to this process of recursion. By following similar writing as writers before us, rewriting tinier versions of us into someone we can understand and recognize today, we continue this pattern of shedding away shame, talking about that which hurts the most and reframing humanity.

Febos describes at the very beginning of her essay collection how mainstream criticizes writers who describe writing as a therapeutic medium because it is connected to the “female spheres of being” — memoirs, in this case. Yes, it turns out sexism really is at the root of everything.

That these topics of the body, the emotional interior, the domestic, the sexual, and the relational are all undervalued in intellectual literary terms, and are all associated with the female spheres of being, is not a coincidence. This bias against personal writing is often a sexist mechanism, founded on the false binary between the emotional (female) and the intellectual (male), and intended to subordinate the former.

I also wonder if this form of sexism can be connected to the judgment of autofiction by Anna Kornbluh, that According to Alina describes in her recent video. Why isn’t this genre that is so often occupied by women seen as a legitimate form of art as fiction written by men? This process of writing about yourself and your experience is less about self-obsession and more about finding a version of ourselves that we can understand and love better. No one judges nature for its self-similar patters, why should we judge writers for wishing to go back and peel back the necessary layers that will lead to more openness?

Febos reminds us of this:

There are geometric shapes that recur in nature, the shapes on which it is most possible to build, known by carpenters and tides and insects alike. We, too — in our rituals of healing, creation, and repentance — are performing a pattern that has recurred at the center of human life as far back as it is recorded. Why should our idea of intrinsic nature be confined to the biological, and who says that the spiritual, the creative, and the psychological do not manifest biologically? We know that they do.

I also kept on thinking: If the roles were switched, I would have just been graced for being a good girlfriend; instead I was the one being taken care of, so my boyfriend was just a miserable man. I keep returning to this, after hearing terrifying stories from friends whose ex-boyfriends had no ounce of caregiving sense in them.

The moment women become sick and disabled, they are no longer worthy to patriarchy because they are ripped off everything men want and need them to be. Of course, those are the same men that wish to marry and be fathers, when they can’t even grasp what “in sickness and health” truly means.

The Erasure of Reproductive Labor

After watching recently renowned movies — Hamnet, Marty Supreme, No Other choice, and The Stranger — I noticed they all involved this theme: the incapability of caregiving in men; in return, the taken-for-grantedness of women’s care for men. In all four of these movies, the men are so engulfed in their own desires, ambitions, and inner world, they forget, or rather take for granted the woman caring for them. Tithi Bhattachary asks : “If workers’ labor produces all the wealth in society, who then produces the worker?”

The invisibility of reproductive labor leads women’s care to be brushed aside, to be seen as natural and systematic, when in reality it is unpaid labour. I’m not only talking about the cleaning, and packing, and tidying, but also about the emotional and psychological work women so often do when it comes to men.

In No Other Choice, we see Man-Su’s wife continuously supporting him emotionally, keeping their family together and tolerating his many disappearances; even as his convictions lead him down a dark path, she is still there. In Hamnet, Agnes encourages Will to pursue his dreams in London, at the cost of rarely having him at home. Then, there’s the obvious self-obsession portrayed in Marty Supreme and the manner in which he sees his girlfriend(?) as a mere object for instant pleasure. In The Stranger, Marie brings pleasure and passion into the life of a man who gives her nothing in return.

Heteropessimism

The conclusion of these movies is one I have seen reflected in my own life. My boyfriend taking care of me is seen as a threat towards his manhood, whereas if the opposite were true it would be seen as an act of love. These movies may satirise the subject of heterosexual relationships but for women these depictions feel very accurate. I believe articles, such as Is having a boyfriend embarassing now?, have had their moment not because of a so-called ‘gender war’, but because women are tired.

Seresin has defined Heteropessimism as :

consist[ing] of performative disaffiliations with heterosexuality, usually expressed in the form of regret, embarrassment, or hopelessness about straight experience. Heteropessimism generally has a heavy focus on men as the root of the problem. That these disaffiliations are “performative” does not mean that they are insincere but rather that they are rarely accompanied by the actual abandonment of heterosexuality. Sure, some heteropessimists act on their beliefs, choosing celibacy or the now largely outmoded option of political lesbianism, yet most stick with heterosexuality even as they judge it to be irredeemable. Even incels, overflowing with heteropessimism, stress the involuntary nature of their condition.

Women showing their discontent with men (which isn’t mere dislike but stems from repetitive physical, psychological or emotional violence committed by men) doesn’t free them of desiring or being attracted or wishing for a relationship with a man. It’s just a deceitful path to tread. However, heteropessimism risks creating a sort of anaesthesia that feels good, “like a balm”, but isn’t leading us anywhere. Sure, let the rage out, let us shame men who have done terrible things, let us scream, expose, hurt, but in the end what does it men to continuously “remain secretly attached to the continuity of the very things we (sincerely) decry as toxic, boring, broken”.

Seresin uses Edelman and Berlant’s term “anesthetic feeling” to emphasize heteropessism’s aim “to protect against overintensity of feeling and an attachment that can survive detachment.”.

Heteropessimism’s anesthetic effect is especially seductive because it dissociates women from the very traits—overattachment and “the overintensity of feeling”—for which straight culture is determined to make us ashamed.

In other words, we end up using heteropessimism as an unhealthy coping mechanism, avoiding our real disappointment and frustration towards heterosexual relationships; never really looking for a solution or improvement as we continuously fixate on the wound and mock it for its inability to heal. Our sarcasm, mocking and repudiation “reveals something about the way we can remain secretly attached to the continuity of the very things we (sincerely) decry as toxic, boring, broken.”

Drummond (translated by Perry) suggests a countermove:

I think a practical way out of heteropessimism is to mimic some of the sexual and affective strategies of the queer community.” Redefining the hierarchies of relationships is the first step to realising that a man doesn’t have to define your whole identity. Seeing the importance of sisterhood and friendships is just as important — the concept of chosen family describing just how important friends can be. It all comes down to rejecting heteronormative ways of living.

Queering our world

I think the reason so many women are obsessed with Heated Rivalry isn’t only for the mere fact that two men prove they are capable of taking care of each other; it’s also because of the breaking down of heteronormativity and a way of imagining beyond what we know. The embracing and rejection of heteropessimism is possible at the same time. It is only understandable that in such a scary patriarchial, growing righ-wing environment where violence against women is normalized, we cling to the comfort of heteropessimism. Mocking, shaming, joking, belittling are a normal response to all the trauma we have (had) to endure. However, not staying in that static space but shaping our own individual world according to queer norms is a way out.

I started writing this Substack entry because I felt exhausted about consuming media that portrayed men incapable of caring for women, and was reminded of a time in my life where not only ableism dominated my life, but also the fact that I was a disabled woman, who was supposed to take care of her partner, not the opposite. I’m glad I don’t have men who share that belief in my life and will continue letting individuals who love me care for me as I will care for my loved ones.

I won’t centre heteronormative ways of living in my life, and will look for images of men caring.

I started experiencing bad dizziness the moment I decided to take up dancing again, after years of giving up on it due to severe anxiety. But here was yet another obstacle. Walking started becoming a marathon I didn’t sign up for. Standing up meant dizziness, weakness and pain; I can’t begin to describe how traumatising it is to confront the vulnerability of your body. Things most of us take for granted, such as walking, standing, breathing, sleeping, all of it became barriers to me. Whenever I had to leave home, I worried there would be no seating available; my heart rate would reach up to 170 BPM and my body would know no other way to cope than to collapse in a sea of strangers (even though my body had until now seemed immune to fainting as even a heartbeat of 200 BPM did not do it).

I write this now from a place of distance as my body is, most of the time, no longer my first worry of the day — and how privileged I am to be able to say this. What no one tells you is that there is a type of amnesia that happens after you become sick. In the pits of my sickness, a good symptom free day meant I had been lying about my state to everyone around me, until I’d get hit with it the next day yet again and remember how real it was. One of my biggest worries whilst sick was that I was fabricating this reality. Once again, what no one tells you is that the sureness of the medical system collapses the minute you’re really sick — the kind of sickness that doesn’t go away after two rounds of medications. If doctors aren’t there to help you and you don’t seem to get better, what do you do then? What path do you take next? If you can’t manage to feel better, it somehow becomes your fault. If your symptoms aren’t solvable, it is because you are causing them, it must be, there is no other explanation. So you leave the doctor’s office just hoping for this to be true; you’ll wake up the next day and tell yourself you’re not sick and it will go away, it has to. But it doesn’t, of course it doesn’t because you’ve tried this before, and it never has.

Sick Woman Theory
For my Master’s Thesis I interviewed several women suffering from chronic illness/pain about their experiences with medical encounters. Most had been gaslit, neglected and hurt by doctors who didn’t believe their sickness could be real. I had once been referred to a specialist after being diagnosed with POTS, only to sit in front of this specialist and have him look at me with wide eyes and tell me my condition was too complicated. For a moment, I thought he might not have understood me or I might have said something wrong. But I had clearly stated being referred to his practice due to his expertise in POTS. It was as if I was pointing towards the pen lying on his desk and said, Look at the pen, there, on your desk, can I have it, and he denied the existence of that pen. I still wonder about the many more things I could have said to him, if only I hadn’t been so tired and discouraged.

Johanna Hedva, a disability activist/writer, wrote in their essay:

Sick Woman Theory redefines existence in a body as something that is primarily and always vulnerable, following from Judith Butler’s work on precarity and resistance. Because Butler’s premise insists that a body is defined by its vulnerability, not temporarily affected by it, the implication is that it is continuously reliant on infrastructures of support in order to endure, and so we need to re-shape the world around this fact.

I’ve read Hedva’s essay now for the third time. In a society so deluded into thinking our bodies are machines meant to be controlled; a world that tells you that if you eat enough protein, if you work out consistently, if you take supplements, if you manage to gulp down celery juice every morning, you’ll be healthy, won’t confess that none of these things actually stop you from becoming disabled. If you tell them this, they’ll just call you lazy because the other option — realising the fragility of our bodies — just isn’t possible. Capitalism won’t allow you vulnerability. Naturally, we don’t allow ourselves to think about this because there is no system in place that will hold us if we need to be held, and that is too scary.

The disabled experience needs to be normalised so that we don’t have to live in a world where healthcare isn’t universal, in a world where people die because they can’t afford asthma inhalers, in a world where assisted dying is more accessible than proper care, in a world where eugenics is the root for how we treat disability.

Hedva writes:

“Sickness” as we speak of it today is a capitalist construct, as is its perceived binary opposite, “wellness.” Under capitalism, the “well” person is the person well enough to go to work. The “sick” person is the one who is not well enough to work.

What is so destructive about this conception of wellness as the default, as the standard mode of existence, is that it invents illness as temporary. When being sick is an abhorrence to the norm, it allows us to conceive of care and support in the same way.

Care and support, in this configuration, are only required sometimes. When sickness is temporary, care and support are not normal.

Reimagining disability requires questioning what we have always taken for granted. It takes learning from disability advocates, not leaving your home when you’re sick and further contaminate others, not glamorising hustle culture and burnout and learn to take care of each other as a form of resistance in a system so indulged in individualism. Again, I have to cite Hedva and let them be the one ending this piece:

The most anti-capitalist protest is to care for another and to care for yourself. To take on the historically feminized and therefore invisible practice of nursing, nurturing, caring. To take seriously each other’s vulnerability and fragility and precarity, and to support it, honor it, empower it. To protect each other, to enact and practice a community of support. A radical kinship, an interdependent sociality, a politics of care

We follow two sisters, Nora and Agnes, who are estranged from their father, Gustav. They meet him again at their mother’s funeral. As expected (I say ‘expected’ because of my first-hand experience with parents with ulterior motives) the funeral isn’t the only reason for Gustav’s return. He, a director, wishes Nora, an actress, to play in his next big movie. Since we as an audience have had the chance to partake in Nora’s complex feelings upon seeing her dad, it feels baffling to be faced with such a callous request after years of abandonment. Gustav’s lack of emotional intelligence feels like a punch in the stomach.

I could not stop seeing myself in Nora — in the mental gymnastics of forgiveness and disbelief. How at the very second she allows herself to play with the idea of possible concern and consideration from her father, he ends up disappointing her again. We see her adapt and retract the hope she allowed herself to feel for one second.

Nora embodies sadness and depression so beautifully. It isn’t in moments of colossal breakdowns and crying sessions but in the quiet melancholy, the numbness and casualness with which sadness becomes so intrinsic to her. There is a moment in the movie when Gustav accuses her of carrying too much anger. He says that it is difficult to love someone with that much anger. Another punch. Just as Nora, we are stunned by this accusation from the very one who moulded such a lonely, dark world for her.

A woman’s story by Annie Ernaux

Recently I read Une femme (A Woman’s Story) by Annie Ernaux. In this short, but deeply touching novel, Ernaux seeks to draw a realistic portrayal of her mother’s selfhood. She writes that she wishes to “capture the real woman, the one who existed independently from me.” (p.23) She doesn’t embellish or poeticise her mother’s harshness, instead she distances herself from her own emotions as her daughter and looks at her mother’s sternness through a sociological lens — that of poverty, patriarchy and conformity.

The familial ties in her book shed light on the complexities of mother-daughter relationships; just as Sentimental Value does with father-daughter relationships. None of these stories portray a parent as a monster, simply malicious for malice’s purpose. There are stories, pasts uncovered that won’t justify a parent for being a bad parent, but will contextualize and give meaning to some behaviors. Both movie and book show the distance that can occur between children and parents due to different historical backgrounds they lived in. In A Woman’s Story, Ernaux describes how her mother’s lower class background separates them. She hates it every time her mother reveals the slightest signs of her background - the words she uses, her tone of voice, the lack of culture.

The house in Sentimental Value

Sentimental value is a story about intergenerational trauma. It highlights how the past can still affect the present, which is especially depicted by the family house.

The theme of houses have been following me for these past few months. If you read my latest Substack on the walls that hold us — from The Safekeep to the North Woods to reflections about my grandmother’s house — you’ll know the importance physical homes hold. They are walls that carry histories that continue haunting their present inhabitants. Can depression and grief haunt a home? Can an ancestor’s pain feel as if it were your own? Can art hold all of this? These are question Sentimental value asks. Nora attempts to ease her pain, or maybe overlook it, through her acting career. Her father channels emotions he’s unable to talk about into his directing. All of them attempt to stay afloat by pouring their traumas and pain into their art, which by the end might be the only thing that keeps them connected.

In an interview, director Joachim Trier describes the house as a measure of time:

It’s the idea that, for the house, a human life is very short, because the house is a constant, in a way; it’s this longer, lasting structure. I thought that was a nice setup for a story about reconciliation, where the adult realization of the sisters that they’re not going to have their father around forever—even though he’s a complicated character—means they, in their own individual ways, have to reconcile their relationship with him.

Ultimately, the timelessness of the house reminds us of our smallness. It makes us aware of how in the span of centuries, we are only a speck of dust left in a house full of history. Nonetheless we are there and might continue to haunt the space long after.

Trier underscores the key themes of history and memory in the movie:

I think the film asks this question of the ambivalence of history and memory. On one level, we need to forget, to forgive a difficult parent. On the other hand, we owe it to the past to remember certain things, not to repeat those faults. And we owe it to the people who experienced certain things. That’s the space where we live in time, in between those two notions.

I’ll leave you with a small passage from a review that summarizes the movie perfectly:

Few films have captured so delicately the ache of trying to understand one’s parents while still resenting them, or the way time collapses when old wounds are reopened.

I began noticing that the books that speak to me most aren’t the ones with perfectly curated plots and structures - succinct, compact - and ticking off all the literary characteristics from a list that determines the brilliance of a novel. Because who really put together this list in the first place?

The list is political. The novels that are moulded from it are political. As Toni Morrison says in Unspeakable Things Unspoken : ‘Canon building is empire building.’ (p.8). Those in power will approve the words that serve their interests best. It isn’t teachers or writers or readers that decide the words that fill the Canon, but rather those who are most ignorant of this form of art get to establish that books like The Bluest Eye should be banned. It is no coincidence that I’m writing this during the Banned Books Week. It is a bit accidental because I didn’t plan on writing about the politics of books during this specific week but it isn’t surprising as discourse around censorship and political unrest soar.

Books are political, and I hope that the more we say this, the more we realize they aren’t mere inert receptacles but active instruments used to push agendas. Toni Morrison writes:

(…) the destabilizing forces are dismissed as merely political; the status quo sees itself as not— as though the term “apolitical” were only its prefix and not the most obviously political stance imaginable since one of the functions of political ideology is to pass itself off as immutable, natural and “innocent” (p.8)

The literary Canon will always beg not to be questioned. Morrison refers here to the neglect of Afro-American presence in American Literature but one can look at this from many different angles. The best American novels won’t be questioned because they will be described as superior and their quality will be praised.

Yet of what use is it to go on about “quality” being the only crite­rion for greatness knowing that the definition of quality is itself the subject of much rage and is seldom universally agreed upon by everyone at all times? (p.2).

With the rise of AI use, the need for ready-to-consume resources, and efficient means for fast outcomes, books may follow its course. Writers who challenge usual structures, use vocabulary that often demand a dictionary in hand, and most of all demand our time, will start to feel like too much work. After all, there is a machine that can do everything faster, better and for free. And because publishing follows what sells best, the books that will continue to rely on our time and energy won’t seem deserving anymore.

In his lecture, Vuong reads:

“If the voice is a kind of thumbprint of one’s personhood, if syntax a type of DNA, as I believe it is, then the homogenization of publishing is the greatest loss to that thumbprint, where to read a book might be to read only the faded residue of a unique writer, if a residue even remains; it is to read with grief.”

I hope we won’t lose our thumbprint and forget that words are our greatest gift. That we get to know each other’s uniqueness in the way our sentences flow, our commas move and our vocabulary expands. I hope we make time to be challenged by words that may seem difficult to comprehend at first, but that when we do, we feel like a part of us has blossomed and stretched. Just like my re-reading of On earth we’re briefly gorgeous has taught me things I couldn’t comprehend at first, I hope you read. I hope you read in resistance.

It’s also a story about friendship and how a good friend can hold you through the toughest times and the world will feel a bit more bearable. Lydia is that to Agnes. Their friendship changes, evolves and takes on different levels of maturity as they become older. But never do they stop caring and loving each other. There is so much intimacy in their friendship, in having held each other through all the wavering seasons and done what only friends - that are family - do for each other.

Loneliness becomes a character of its own while one navigates trauma; it’s the loyal companion in a room so silent, empty and misunderstood.

It is a genuine, realistic portrayal of the aftermath of trauma, and will also speak to those who have been in the shoes of mental illness, any kind. I could see myself in Agnes; especially in the eternal feeling of being trapped, numb and lost. In the face of time, it looks as if nothing changes and I kept thinking, She is missing out on so much, she is being stolen precious time of her life by something she couldn’t control. Agnes, wake up! But I know very well, it doesn’t work like that. I can’t shake her awake from her worst nightmare. That’s one of the most frustrating sides of mental illness. You consciously know time is running away from you, experiences are lost, people are moving on but you’re stuck in quicksand. The illness keeps sucking you in and as much as you fight it, it will eventually need to be let in. It steals years of your life, it steals your character and makes everything around you seem foggy. Much like Agnes, I spent my teenage years and early 20’s needing to figure out my brain and health, while others collected memories they’d later look back on and think, Our twenties really were the best time. My early twenties were hell and as much as I’d like to say trauma makes you special, it just makes you traumatised. Agnes’ empty and distant face in various scenes of the movie paints my life from that time.

It isn’t only sad and dark and difficult though! Infused with humour and moments of love and joy, Agnes’ story manages to soften your heart while discussing a hard topic such as assault.

It is rare to see media portray a genuine image of this kind of entrapment. Very often trauma or mental illness are used as launching pads for change or hope, but Eva Victor - director, writer, actor - made sure that wasn’t the case. Trauma doesn’t happen for a greater good, it sucks and it often, always, makes no sense.

Packed with humour and scenes mocking those in higher positions (people capable of helping Agnes and women in her situation, but refuse to do so), it manages as Victor themselves says, to “punch up at the people who are evil or boringly rude and really protect the lives of people who are doing their best”. The silence of the characters who have the means to help Agnes but refuse to do so speaks volumes.

The last scene of the movie - I won’t spoil it, I promise, but I have to warn you tears will be shed - was just so perfect and encapsulates the message Victor was trying to express with this piece of art. It is a movie that needs to be rewatched and studied.

What I’m trying to say is that growing up mentally ill sucks but the experience of being truly seen by this movie’s raw depiction of suffering and loneliness was so important. I hope those struggling right now feel comforted by this sincere, moving story about a woman who’s lost and hurt but finds that life isn’t so terrible with friendships that can save you and make living worth it.

Also the cat!!!!

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I’ve been thinking about (physical) places a lot and with it, the attachment we form to many of them.

I came upon the term Place Attachment when I was looking for a word to encapsulates the feeling of being emotionally bonded to a place. One of its many definition reads: “a multifaceted concept that characterises the bonding between individuals and their important places”1 Scientifically, this term has been categorised into a three-dimensional framework: person, psychological process, and place dimensions.2 The first characterising the actual person/group invested in a place; the second describing the emotions, thoughts and behaviours that arise from this attachment; while the latter frames the object of the attachment and its characteristics. This person–process–place (PPP) framework is embedded in all of our attachments to the places we love most.

My grandmother’s passing not only robbed me of future moments I had envisioned with her but also of her beautiful house. I still see her, sitting on her beloved chair on the left side of the kitchen, singing the way she always did. The smell of the fireplace, firewood crackling. The noise of the wood floor every time a step was taken. I was told many times to not run or stomp because the wood was old and fragile, yet I kept doing it and the floor never let go. That home was an extension of her and with her gone, so is the house. Left on its own, old, rotting away and being given back to its mountains, weeds and insects. Maybe because that house meant my summer holidays, my Portuguese roots, my grandmother, nature, my childhood, I might exaggerate its beauty but it truly felt fairylike and enchanting. Isolated in the forest, sitting at the edge of a mountain’s kiss. A river hugging its fringes, its force echoing over the entire place.

My grandmother was attached to her home. One summer, while Portugal experienced its yearly fires, she kept repeating she’d rather die in her home in a fire than lose it. That house wasn’t just an inanimate object, but an extension of her; it held all of her memories, her grief, her routines, her booklets. Her house saw more of her than any other person. It was a life held in those floors, belongings and smells. Memories everywhere. Walls buzzing with the love of the years spent being taken care of; and, in turn the delight of having taken care of all those who inhabited it over the years. My grandmother as its last companion.

I wish I could hold that house in the palm of my hands and never let go.

When I moved to Amsterdam with the aim of escaping and starting new, my studio held me through it all. In a therapy session, my therapist whose metaphors always made sense of my experiences, said something along the lines of ‘some people grow by setting roots where they were raised, while others need to fly away and grow somewhere else’. Of course, I got a butterfly tattoo after that.

This new place allowed me to make room for a new person, to let the burnt out version of myself exist without judgment, to end up turning into the me I am today, five years later. This studio - housing my boyfriend, my cat and me - made my world look so much bigger. And when the time comes that I leave these walls, I know I’ll be leaving my past versions here.

Books about places

In synchronicity, the two books I read this month talked about a house - about the meaning behind places. About places as a main character, as a being with a life of its own. Both North Woods by Daniel Mason and The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden beautifully capture the essence of a house, giving it a character of its own, a voice so distinct, you almost forget it is an object altogether.

Both novels remind us of the history of homes - how before us, there were others. A house isn’t a thing that we can keep intact forever. Ivy climbs up its walls, trees covers it in shadows, birds use it as a spot to rest. Ancestors linger in the house, making sure the traces of their lives aren’t undone with the changes you’ll bring about.

There is a before in every place.

North Woods reminds us of the many beginnings a house can hold, but that in the end the earth shall digest all of it. This book is divided into short stories that are somehow all interlinked, giving you a glimpse into a house’s history. The many foots that have stepped on that land over the years and the imprint of those who were there before. Each story carries something to the next chapter that wasn’t there before. We are lucky enough to see it all play out in front of us, while those encountering the land know nothing about the mysteries of its past.

The Safekeep reminds us that objects hold meaning. Isabel has created a life for herself that consists of rigid routines, solitude and silence. But Eva disrupts all of her certainties and it seems that with her presence the house comes to life. This novel has definitely become one of my new favorite books, not only for the beautiful writing and depiction of yearning, but the descriptions of the house are so clear, you can vividly imagine every scene. Can someone make a movie out of it? It would be SO good.

A reminder on Palestine

Not only can the theory on Place Attachment remind us of the importance of places to someone’s identity and well-being, it also shows us why being displaced feels violent. The genocide in Palestine isn’t only an attack on the land; it is an attack on identities, memories, meanings, stories. Place Attachment explains why Palestinians have such dedication to their land, and refuse to let go because it isn’t only a place they would be leaving behind, it would be their entire identity and love. It would mean letting someone strip away their history and people.

It seems everyone has the perfect routine, that brand-new waterproof mascara, that bright plumping lip oil, the perfect workout, the perfect meal, the perfect life hack and lastly but the one that plagues me most: the most structured, polished, clean, and productive thought process. The brain with its organised shelves, files perfectly stored, not one ounce of a second spent obsessing, worrying and depressing. All is polished, categorised and classified into something digestible.

My brain looks more like that scene in SpongeBob when he can’t recall his name and his mind fills with tiny SpongeBobs darting about, screaming, panting; fire everywhere, absolute chaos. And if you wonder about my use of mascara, I don’t apply it that often. For a few years, I stopped entirely because there were just too many tears and it just wasn’t worth the waste of product, but when I do, it is a five years old one, beyond its expiration date but somehow still doing what it’s supposed to and that pretty much defines all my other areas in life.

I message my friend, describing how unpolished and messy my thought process is and how frustrated I am about it. How not even lists help. She answers we have forgotten the nature of the mind’s messiness. That that’s how minds should be and we should stop aiming for constant tidiness in all aspects of our lives.

As I scroll on social media, I tend to forget that real life doesn’t look so curated. Just as my routine is a huge mess, so is my mind, and I keep trying to figure out how to make it make sense to me at least.

Compression culture not only has taken over our attention span, dopamine receptors, hobbies, work, ethics, but also the appearance of our thinking, the aesthetics of our lives, our routines with tidy schedules, filled to the brink from the moment we open our eyes to the moment we close them. Every minute is counted, and I rot away second, minutes, hours, days because the anxiety of squeezing everything into one productive, clear, categorised life leaves me feeling terrible about my neurodivergent brain that can barely tolerate transitioning from pyjamas to day clothes.

From managing time to managing thoughts, everything needs to be digestible to others. Not only are we incapable of postponing dopamine releases, we need our life to be a source of one - it need to be marketable.

I want to feel peace in the chaos of my mind. I want to simmer in the ideas racing through my mind without feeling guilty for the mess. I want to practice sitting with information I don’t quite get and befriend the discomfort; yet when I return from doom-scrolling, it feels as if an additional layer of resistance has gathered and the process of wanting to polish my entire life starts over again.

I won’t ever be able to speak of slowness without mentioning Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. I have been reading this book for a few months now, and I’m convinced each essay should be savoured on its own, just as I’m convinced a dessert should be eaten slowly, each bite individually as astounding as the first one. There should be a note right at the beginning, saying: Digest one chapter a week, don’t rush, let these stories simmer hope and change in you.

Indigenous knowledge and connection to the land will teach you about intention, gratitude and slowness. About doing one thing at a time, and accepting the mess without needing to act on the urge of immediately fixing everything.

There is one question that Kimmerer poses that hasn’t left my mind: “Why is the world so beautiful?” (p.41)

And she’s right. The question felt weird to me because, “Of course it is, why wouldn’t it?” But she’s right. The world could be ugly. The leaves and flowers, part of an ecosystem that keeps on changing, could be ugly; their function doesn’t rely on their beauty, yet they remain beautiful. Breathtakingly so. And if you really think about it, they are messy. They grow messily - on top of each other, twisting and turning, crooked and wrinkling - without order. Kimmerer writes about Indigenous agriculture - specifically about the Three sisters: corn, beans and squash. How these reciprocate when planted side by side and how easier they grow with each other’s help. However, modern agriculture persists in “uniformed crowds” by planting most vegetables on their own in long lines. Kimmerer observes hills painted by these long green lines, all even and unchanged, and writes:

I read across that hill a story about people who value uniformity and the efficiency it yields, a story in which the land is shaped for the convenience of machines and the demands of a market. (p.138)

I wonder if Kimmerer has figured it out for all us. If just like those hills, Western agricultural principles are being mirrored by our everyday lives. Not only have we become so enveloped by individualism, all standing on our own, refusing to ask for help, to work in community; we are the “uniformed crowd”. Making sure our thought process, just as our routines and consumptions conform to an aesthetics culture that respond to the demands of a market.

We look around us and see this same phenomenon in everything. Thoughts, bodies, agriculture, food, routines, consumption; all of it responding to “the demands of a market”. Marx would say our lives have become commodities.

There is more and more content on going analog, reclaiming attention in a digital age, low dopamine morning routines, the surge of commonplace notebooks, digital detox, and so many more forms of disconnecting from the digital world.

Reading this book, has made me wonder what would happen if each of us had land to tend to, to observe daily miracles bloom from our effort to care for something other than ourselves, or as Kimmerer would say - someone - to care for. I can’t deny the many times I’ve wished for a garden to tend to, a space to just sit in without further distractions from a reality that isn’t this physical one.

The sway toward analog living denotes our growing wish for more intention, attention, and slowness. For a garden, where our hands can get dirty, where watering plants leaves our hands wet and the physicality of it reminds us of our bodies.

I feel most alive next to bodies of water, when I’m just the observer of the tiny ripples, when ice cold water hits my feet, when I realize the magnitude of life this body carries - beyond what can be marketed.

Paying attention acknowledges that we have something to learn from intelligences other than our own. Listening, standing witness, creates an openness to the world in which the boundaries between us can dissolve in a raindrop. (p.300)

What would happen if we paid just a little more attention to the world around us today, tomorrow and the days after that?

March was filled with great books, a movie that will be engraved on my heart forever, lots of sweet treats (as always, they keep me going), my first ice cream of the year; and, a day of going out where I didn’t experience a migraine, light sensitivity, overstimulation, horrible leg pain, back pain or exhaustion, where I was able to appreciate the sun and my surroundings and got hit with the realisation that this is what most people experience most days. I keep these rare days tucked in a safe corner in my room as I do with my most of my precious belongings, for when I need a reminder.

Books

I am a slow reader and I’ve been embracing it. I remind myself that reading is no competition. I remind myself of my intention behind reading, which is to learn about writing, find inspiration, delve into a world and stay there for a little while; so, I keep a reading journal, where I devote a certain amount of time to log the quotes that I want to pay attention to, write a summary down, write about the characters and how they made me feel: I want to remember.

I finished reading two books:

• The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison (physical copy)

• The Lion Women of Tehran by Marjan Kamali (audiobook)

I was also very lucky to have received an advanced copy of Ocean Vuong’s new novel: The Emperor of Gladness (thank you Penguin Press), which I’m halfway through (reading it very slowly, enjoying every word, admiring the softness of the characters, finding time to feel).

The Bluest Eye is my second Morrison (after Beloved) and it has again proven the brilliance of her mind. I watched Morrison discuss her why for writing this book, in which she described her wish to tell a story about “the feelings of being ugly” from the perspective of the most vulnerable: a little, hurt, black girl.

I also enjoyed The Lion Women of Tehran, especially after having read and been gifted The Stationery Shop by a sweet friend. Historical Fiction will always be one of my favorite genres to delve into; Marjan Kamali manages to educate the reader on the political climate of Iran, while immersing us in Persian culture and presenting such beautiful characters. I do think Kamali doesn’t follow the “show, don’t tell” advice that is given to writers, which sometimes risks making the story too superficial and simple but I think the audiobook format me helped in that.

Tattoo

On the first of March, I got a tattoo. My grandmother’s house in Portugal. She lived (still weird to write about her in the past tense) for many years alone in the middle of the forest, surrounded by mountains, trees, a river and crickets. Her passing is a grief I’'ll carry around with me forever, but so is the laughter and games we shared in this home; and my belief that my love for writing and nature come from her. Growing up, I used to hate my name until I found out that Silvia means “spirit of the wood” and I somehow couldn’t think of a better name to encapsulate who I am. My grandmother lives on in my smile, my heart and my skin. I miss her everyday.

My twenty-fifth birthday

I have always dreaded birthdays. I have always felt so much pressure to be happy, to make the most of it, to have the best day of my life. Most of my birthdays have been hard, disappointing, exhausting and filled with anxiety. So, I’m still trying to figure out what works for me on this day. I have figured out that I like spending at least a few hours all by myself to reflect and rest; that I enjoy a slower pace and don’t have to push myself on a day that already feels draining. I still experience the constant anxiety of needing to do more, of needing to feel a specific type of way, but I mostly acknowledge it and remind myself that it is just another day. I try not to dread the passing of the hours and the feeling that midnight will reach and I lost my day, but seriously what was there to lose?

I don’t have many friends, but those I do are my whole world. I made sure to celebrate with them at night. But I spent my whole afternoon, journaling and reading by the lake near my place. On my birthdays, I always thank my younger Selves for having allowed me this life. I thank them for being the reason that I am still here today.

I asked my grandmother for a sign that she’s listening and this beautiful butterfly landed on a patch of grass by my side. She stayed a while, we talked; when I was ready, she flew away.

Movie: I’m still here

One of my wishes for this year was to watch more movies but I somehow find it so hard to sit down and put on a movie without forcing myself as if it were a chore - I think this comes from the need for incessant dopamine release. But that’s precisely my reason for wanting to watch more movies, they make me slow down, take things in, appreciate the cinematography, fill me with inspiration and always teach me something.

I went to the movies for the first time in a long long long time. I watched the Brazilian movie Ainda estou aqui. Watching a movie in my mother tongue made it even more moving. I always cry during movies, but this time, it wasn’t innocent tears; I had a desperate, uncontrollable outburst of crying (as silently as possible, of course). I felt a deep sadness for having rejected my Portuguese roots for most of my childhood and teenage years. I felt deep rage for all oppressive regimes. I thought of the suffering of this family, the deep despair of not knowing and being left with a void that could never be filled again. I thought of Palestinians. I thought of the past and the present. I thought of single mothers. I thought of how governments destroy lives in the blink of an eye, and how the world goes on.

In the kitchen, I hear mothers discussing how they wish they could lose some weight; how that specific tea made them lose a few pounds or how the order they placed on a new diet product advertized the other night on TV will hopefully cleanse all that needs cleansing. In the living room, I see fathers laughing, playing cards, screaming; no moment lost to the anxieties of appearance. The fluorescent light highlights their filled stomachs, their hairy arms, their sweaty foreheads, their yellowish teeth - but none of this matters, their carefree laughter casting light on the nervous condition of the mothers whispering their imperfections.

I wonder how I can break this suffocating bubble; allow these mothers to be human, to not lose their precious lives on sucking their bellies in, masking their wrinkles and shaving every last hair on their bodies.

Let the bellies take up space. Let the wrinkles do what they have to do. Let the armpits’ hair breathe.

I’m a hypocrite when it comes to the topic of body neutrality. I struggle to look into mirrors; or when face-timing loved ones, I’ll be checking the angle of my face, obsessing over my double chin, instead of listening to what they are saying. I lose myself in the process of erasing all that makes me me. And I’ll be doing this while I reassure my best friend that she’s beautiful. I’ll praise women online for being authentically themselves. I’ll write millions of notes on how women are more than their appearance, how the male gaze renders us passive objects, how obsessing over our bodies distracts us from what truly matters. But I’ll say all of this, sitting in front of my mirror picking on all that I wish could be different about me. Tucking my round belly in.

I remember someone mentioning on TikTok that as a disabled person with chronic illness, they had no interest in picking on their body’s appearance, not wanting to waste the already sparse good moments on criticizing their body. As my health ebbs and flows between weakness and fatigue, okay-ishness and burnout, pockets of energy and naps, I still waste good moments on the relentless thoughts surrounding my belly, my face, my legs.

What pushed me to write this essay was the new trend happening on TikTok where users transform a picture of themselves using an AI chubby filter, making them look “chubby”. A few days later, the Skinny AI filter made its appearance on my feed. This filter was shared alongside the text “seeing how I’d look skinny for motivation”. Thankfully, I saw a lot of people opposing this trend and commenting on the harm this filter poses to those whose bodies do look like the supposedly “chubby” filter. The spread of fatphobia and body ideals continues, and as someone who rarely frequents spaces tainted with such values, I was stunned by this ignorant side of the internet and how such filters were still acceptable. I’m grateful to the few people commenting under such posts: “This trend is basically mean girls outing themselves”, because YES to that.

I’m tired of my body being perceived as the most interesting thing about me - by both myself and society.

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From a very young age, I was taught that my appearance was the most important thing about me and I internalized this belief very quickly - from learning to compete with other girls about looks to constantly assess my body through the male gaze. Being continuously complimented for my looks - which translated into my skinniness - made these voices more powerful than my own, so much so that I didn’t even get the chance to shape my own beliefs around looks. This voice became harsher when I entered my 20’s and suddenly gained the weight I couldn’t before. To counteract this voice that felt so opposed to my own values, I cut my long hair into a bob, I started wearing more color, said goodbye to tight clothing, and the male gaze slowly lost its impact on me. Sure, I still feel it swaying effect on me from time to time, but the difference now is that I am aware of it. On a daily basis, I need to remind myself that these judgments don’t belong to me. I might spend much of my days reminding myself of this, but I’d rather do this than mistake these judgments for my own.

The truth is that as much as I fight these voices in my head, I cannot avoid having others inflict these beliefs on me. Someone might randomly comment on my weight gain and these voices will travel back, and take up energy that I wish I didn’t have to spend on them. Mirrors do the same. I might be walking outside and catch my reflection from a “wrong” angle, and these tiny fatphobic creatures will crawl back in, my brain welcoming them into my day. It’s the practice of knowing not to identify with my thoughts or emotions that saves me on a daily basis.

My background in sociology and disability studies made me critical of societal messages that deny the experience of certain bodies. One activist in particular taught me so much about self-acceptance, disability and the refusal to let others define your body. The Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde might be a small book, but until today it remains one of the most powerful writings I have ever read. Lorde recounts her experience of breast cancer and mastectomy; the day a nurse reproached her for not wearing a prosthesis - which Lorde clearly stated she did not feel comfortable with - as it seemingly perturbed the “morale” of the doctor’s office. This meant that publicly showing one’s experience of mastectomy could harm other women present in that doctor’s office, when in reality, most of those women were in need of a reminder that the loss of breasts wouldn’t mean the loss of themselves. Audre Lorde (1980) emphasizes:

Attitudes toward the necessity for prostheses after breast surgery are merely a reflection of those attitudes within our society towards women in genereal as objectified and depersonalized sexual conveniences. Women have been programmed to view our bodies only in terms of how they look and feel to others, rather than how they feel to ourselves, and how we wish to use them. We are surrounded by media images portraying women as essentially decorative machines of consumer function, constantly doing battle with rampant decay. (Take your vitamins every day and he might keep you, if you don’t forget to whiten your teeth, cover up your smells, color your grey hair and iron out your wrinkles…) As women, we fight this depersonalization every day, this pressure toward the conversion of one’s own self-image into a media expectation of what might satisfy the male demand. (p.57)

What would happen if it were possible to pull out the patriarchal threads that were sewn onto our minds? Would we be free to scream? Would we caress our round bellies? Would we bless the growing hair on our legs for shielding us from the cold? Would we appreciate the wrinkles for leaving footprints of love on our face? Would we love this body unapologetically?

I don’t want to leave this body untouched by my own love. How heartbreaking would it be to be gifted this body that belongs entirely to me and let it be ruled by a world that is incapable of knowing its depth.

Following Lorde’s words:

“I must consider what my body means to me. I must also separate those external demands about how I look and feel to others, from what I really want for my own body, and how I feel to my selves.” (p.58)

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I keep on thinking about writing about grief, but it just feels like scratching a wound that feels numb right now. So, why scratch it? Writing comes easier when the pain is fresh, but it also just makes the pain that much more real. I am aware that pain is supposed to hurt, but sometimes I just wish to ignore its presence altogether and to treat it as someone separate from me. So, how does it feel to be left out of my body, pain? How does it feel to be a separate entity all on your own? How does it feel to not have my body to spread darkness in? How does it feel to be you, pain? Suffocatingly you.

I’ve tasted grief in many tones, colors, textures and intensities. I have grown up with this deep ingrained belief that the more pain you are exposed to, the more you become immune to it. This belief has of course not served me in any way, especially when it comes to my health and to my sense of Self. Especially, when it has led me to autistic burnout. Especially, when I won’t learn that when something hurts, I’m not supposed to push harder. Especially, when I have to learn how to live all over again and who I am outside of constant pain. I’ve been learning that I am allowed to take painkillers and that I don’t need to fight a migraine on my own. I’ve been learning that I’m not lying when it hurts. I thank my sick friend for teaching me this. But, when it comes to grief, there seems to be an additional layer of cluelessness. They tell you to feel, and I just wish my therapist would have given me clearer instructions. My definition of feeling is not healthy, my brain can only live within extremes, so of course I’ll stay in bed all week while grief sleeps on top of my bloated belly and when it decides to wake up, I go on with life totally avoiding the weight it has left on my stomach. When it comes to grief, just like pain, there is no amount of exposure that will make you immune to it. When it comes to grief, just like pain, you need moments of concentrated exhales and distraction. 

I’ve been wanting to type the word “grandmother” for months now. I guess writing makes things real, and I’ve been wanting to avoid reality for some time. My grandmother is my biggest inspiration when I’m surrounded by simplicity, trees and crickets. Rivers, summer breeze, barley coffee, and the Portuguese language are her. Sitting on her kitchen chair singing imagined melodies and infusing the background air with what I never knew I should have held onto for a little longer. Every walk in a forest brings with it a scent that feels like her holding me tight. Before her passing, I used to excitedly tell my boyfriend that the forest smelled like my grandmother, as did bonfires, rivers, summer breezes, evenings. But, now and then I catch myself before blurting out her name and try to breathe in the forest’ scent in silence and let the pain simmer for a bit while holding onto the hope that maybe she’ll meet me in it. I’m not sure if my resistance to write about her in the past is because I’m in denial of her passing or because I feel her in everything around me. I am here, so she is too. I find her in my stubbornness, in my pleasure for the little things, or in the moments when I carry my books and notebooks from my bed to the couch. My grandmother used to carry her little notebooks everywhere she went, as if they were treasures that held onto truths she needed to protect, and only when she passed away did I notice that hidden language we shared. I want to think that I’ll see her and we’ll hold hands and we’ll compare our bulging, blue veins just like we used to. I’ll ask her questions that I didn’t know I needed to three years ago. I’ll keep the last tears of goodbye in a jar. I’ll swallow every piece of information and keep it warm. 

In the midst of my grief, my friend who's the biggest Taylor Swift fan suggested I listen to the song Marjorie and it has been one of the greatest gifts someone has ever given me. 

“I should’ve asked you questions

I should’ve asked you how to be

Asked you to write it down for me

‘Cause every scrap of you would be taken from me”

These words will always remind me of treasuring the little pieces of someone, that seem so little, but will mean the world one day. I’m glad I can find some of my grandmother’s scraps within me. Our similar teeth will always be our invisible string holding us together. Oh, how fortunate I am to see you whenever I smile. A string I’ll use to remind her that she still matters and lives on. Someday I’ll turn that invisible string visible and I’ll make a string phone, the ones we got taught as children - I’ll poke a hole in the bottom of the two cups and thread the string through them - but this time I’ll use it to hear your laughter on the other side.

Caleb’s new novel also left me with a reminder that I’ll carry with me for whenever grief decides to comfortably sleep on top of my belly again and make its weight apparent, whenever its outline remains on my belly after its long nap:

“Grief never ends, but we find a way to walk in the light someone has left behind, rather than living in pain’s shadow.”

I’ll walk in your light.