You flip a switch —

It hollows out the world from inside
Like you’re the teeth that bite the mouth;
But these tongues have experienced
A worse fate than the lull of space and air.

They’ve been shown
That light will press past soft curtain — thick curtain — thin air
Until heat hits the sheets that confine sleep
Layer by layer
Cellulose into cell
The perimeter of the room intrudes you
Its gross dimensions press on their imagined axes
Demanding precision
Demanding that you map out hollows and blocks of matter
The places where it sinks and withdraws from touch
The space where it invades your space
Forcing you to know which way your nose is pointing
To feel the hairs on your knees
To hear the hum of expired air against septum
To blink past the dry of your retinae.

Good morning,
Space and air.

Whatever else you dreamt about,
Whatever else,
Here you are.

I initially published this poem as a visual & audio edit on my Instagram.
You can see here.

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(On the inside of home, mother is mother
And while father isn’t always father, he at least is sometimes there —
And you are sister, son, daughter, or brother
“Your family loves you, sweet honey bear”

But once you’ve left your home)
]]]you’ve left forever

Add some chaos, add some entropy
And the perfect descends into imperfection
Once you step )outside( the bounds of home
You’d better find a safe direction,
Something to grant you some sense of protection
Somewhere you’re not afraid to say your name
However foreign it may be
Where you can spell it without shame
Where they don’t shorten it for ease
Until then, don’t rely too much on affection
From your acquaintances, your friends, your lover
Do you understand? You’ve lost connection.
Now even mother isn’t mother[[[

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There once was a paper plane that flew to the end of the world. When it got there, it got scared. “I am just paper. A drop of water — a gust of wind — and I’ll never get back home again. I’d better glide back.” Then the world opened up, sucked in all air, and blew it away, sea spray on its wings making it thin and flimsy. “You got here; you can go further. You are not paper, but that which has learned to be with wind.”

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To look for adventure in the bodies of others is to look for trouble. Still, I search for a certain pull in the tendons, an unexpected flame of the flesh. This bartender has neither; pale eyelids fall lax against dulled eyes, a dead sheen making them look rotten in the night. His lips part. Is he forgetting how to speak? Maybe I’m drunker than I think.

‘Keeping it all on the one tab, yeah?’ The words stumble out with a delay, jump off the lacquered bar and force themselves past my lazy remove. Both of us look to Harry, who nods as he flicks his heavy hand and slaps it down on the wood, a sound swallowed by the roar of the crowd drinking itself numb. He’s working on his fourth Old Fashioned but still has nothing much to say.

‘So I went with the Rangie. After all that faffing about I thought, d’you know what? Might as well.’ He takes another sip, and I watch as the solid base of his glass refracts his mouth into an orange haze. ‘Lovely bit of kit. And it’s not like we’re still paying off the mortgage.’

My vodka hits the back of my throat, vapour burning down my chest. I hold back a retch. Like my last three drinks, I don’t really want it. But I need something to occupy my mouth, my bite, my spite. I put on my best smile, feigning ignorance; the line of my nose must look pretty from his vantage point. I force myself to look straight at his sloppy fish-shaped eyes—but my real gaze is searching for an escape, lands on the Spanish-looking guy with the taut arms, slips through the holes in his jeans, into a succession of dates taking us to his seafront Barcelonian apartment. I taste red sangria and paella, feel aloe vera cool my happily sunburnt skin, see endless summers on some beach with sand fine enough to stuff my ears. I bury myself in it, pacified by death or a universe where listening to Harry on a Thursday night in this miserable city will just be a bad memory.

What would it take? What would it take to leave and never come back? But looking into Harry’s eyes—upside-down clownfish, I decide—I can see clearly enough what it would take.

The frightening thing about the Harrys of this world is that they can tell you all about their pilates wives and their boarding school children as their hands wander, as they swipe their cards for your fifth ‘casual’ drink, as they haul you off during work hours to a dimly lit member’s club you can be grateful for finally getting into. To you, it’s adventure—right? To them, it’s charity. Charity that you, the gormless one-foot-on-the-corporate-ladder girl, will take as a sign that London is finally falling at your feet.

And you might as well feel that, for the first year or two. But in time you’ll realise that what’s really falling is something else entirely, falling hard while the Tower of London brick-bricks higher, trapping you between fractal bumps of cocaine and back-to-back meetings and bitter affairs—with guys just like Harry, promising to make you into a valued second, a sort of modern Anne Boleyn.

‘And d’you know, at my age, one tends to get a bit bored doing the same thing over and over again,’ he says, not quite saying that the thing he’s tired of doing is his wife, not daring to touch me yet, but toeing the line just like I’m toeing the line, for the immeasurable benefit of at least killing a few hours in this lonely, lonely city.

The grim facts hit me between two sips of vodka; the prospects are worse. I know his wife. We danced to ABBA two Christmas parties ago. I don’t remember his kids’ names, but I’ve seen pictures of them sprawled over sun beds in Sri Lanka. Still, I don’t question why I stay. Even as his lines turn more brash and his gaze sickly sweet, this still reads like fantasy; one preferable to my plastic apartment, to my polyester blend bedsheets, to my wardrobe of low-tier fast-fashion, tasteless waste that screams of my failure to successfully fuck this whore called London. Instead, I let it fuck me.

I stay out through the sixth vodka soda and the seventh, along with the other H&M-clad juniors being wowed by their first Soho House initiation. At the end of the day, we’re cheaper than prostitutes, and marginally more fun to hunt—but I see their tentative smiles are still clawing at the possibility of this being an innocent dream, of really being the boss’s favourite. In a better world, they’re would-be protégés. In this one, they’re tragically easy lays. They are me, only something has been done to me, and I’m not exactly sure what it is or when it happened; what’s worse, I don’t care.

Not anymore.

***

Stale air dries my throat. I stare at the oxidised zipper dangling at eye level, once silver, now brown. It belongs to a middle-aged woman probably heading home after a twelve-hour shift, hair tied back in the international style of waitresses—a style I once knew well. But the day ends in the same way as in my minimum wage days, drunkenly crawling through the bowels of a city connected through hollow veins of metal. I rake my mind for hints of what happened between drink seven and eight, manage to retrace my steps—out of the train car, up the escalators, through Soho, smoking the corner shop cigarettes Harry bought for me but wouldn’t smoke himself.

The train jerks forward. Although I’m seated, I still reach for the hand pole—only it’s not a hand pole at all, but some man’s arm. ‘Sorry,’ I mutter, my smile unreturned as he pulls away from me with a sneer. It’s funny, and it’s not, really, who we are to each other in this metropolis of nothing, connected and separated by tunnels of hollowed-out earth. There is no adventure in the empty core of a callous beast who only swallows you to spit you back out.

Harry shrugs. I might be saying this out loud.

‘It’s about time I got a pied-à-terre next to the office,’ he says, leaning in close enough for me to see the pores on his nose gape like the orange peel curled in his cocktails, lying as trash on Dean Street, getting pissed on by bankers. ‘Guess a hotel’ll have to do for now.’

His hands grab at my thigh, no longer shy. Even my vodka-soaked eyes can deceive—there’s no flame in his flesh. But like most scavengers shoved underground, I’ve adapted. I’ve learned to look for small pathways in the groove of a shoulder, in the bridge of a nose, that I could dive from into some new exploration, like a famished rat sniffing scent. I’ve become so good at finding flame, I can find it even when it isn’t there.

I can find in the city, too.

That’s why I don’t leave, I don’t—, I won’t shy away from Harry’s ballooning beer belly, won’t let myself shudder at the old man stench on his shirt, won’t let disdain fester into disgust. My body knows to act before I think; hand presses on his knee, lips part over his ear, teeth graze the prize in this rat’s maze.

***

We slip through the gardenia-scented hotel lobby like fish in water, under the unspoken pretense of daughter and father. The receptionist’s eyes are easily redirected from our lack of luggage to Harry’s platinum, all questions erased with a flick of his wrist. Welcome, sir. Room 32. We stumble in and all I see is mahogany, marble, money. Perched on the windowsill: a statue of a squatting woman balancing a ball on her forehead.

Harry’s voice carries across the half-empty space. ‘Bit of a late one, love. Oh, I’ll manage. Last train’s at 1. I can defini— Goodness, is it really? Well then, I’ll just get a car sorted. Soon.’

I’ve lost track of how many of these conversations I’ve heard. Always the same sweet inflection, as if they’re negotiating floral arrangements, a fine honeymoon suite, a surprise birthday party. Never letting loose the ravenous hunger underneath. Never betraying the craving to be filled.

Never the real man speaking, with balls and heart complete.

I escape to the washroom, run a bath to drown out the sound. I hope at least for Barcelonian water, if not Barcelonian sand. I watch the translucent stream imagining those hollow tubes of London bringing me escape, real adventure delivered to this room, as cheap and convenient as room service. Just one more time, I let myself picture that salty ocean, the kind that soaks into callouses and heals. But then I let the water run back into the underbelly of the city, dissolving into a slurry of shit, ejaculate, and dirty soap.

‘No time for a bath, I’m afraid, love,’ Harry calls from the other room as the light clicks off. ‘Now get back in here, nice and quick.’

He grunts. The metal buckle of his belt snaps open. I swallow. I obey.

Neither of us the victor, throats cut by one chain.

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When the day goes on too long
You tap into the weird vein
And let the other, defective jugular
Bleed out as it stretches towards the horizon
To cue the brutal, boiling music.

By this point you must be hungry
Temple pressed against the canvas
Drooling solvent onto yesterday’s work—
No wonder you’re tired when
The day goes on too long
And you slip into the weird vein
That covers up whatever crusted cerulean
Didn’t do what you would’ve liked it to do.

The pear won’t turn out blue
When the day goes on too long
So you must cut into the weird vein,
Into the dreadful, salted name,
And there it is, it’s smooth—the shade
That fits your worst the most.

At the end of the end of the end,
The weird vein cracks itself open
So let it tap
Into the rotten core of what is true
Until you bleed it clean—
It feeds on you.

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Want to connect outside of Substack? Feel free to find me on Instagram at @Teodora_Miscov or explore my published poetry books on my website www.teodoramiscov.co.uk.

They call them the querying trenches for a reason.

I realised this about three months into querying my debut novel. While the time I took preparing my query pack was half spent on polishing that damned synopsis, the other half I spent dreaming about how all my favourite agents would email me back upon receipt of my query.

My expectation: I’d become published by a Penguin imprint within the year. Naturally.

Now, as I look into the eyes of my friend Paula (also in the querying trenches, also eight months deep), I try to sweeten our depression-tinged conversation by ordering us a slice of carrot cake to share.

‘I just don’t know what else I can do,’ she says.

‘Start working on your next book. That’s what they all say.’

‘I did. I finished the first draft already.’

‘Then finish the second draft.’

We catch each other’s eye and, for a second there, I feel like the conversation is going to descend into that well-known pit of artist despair. That hole in the ground never feels too far away, ready to eat me whole.

Because here’s the dark side to artist circles: it isn’t all positivity, community, and support.

Sometimes, it’s mutually-enabled rot and self-pity.

The pity parties

Living in Bali for the last two years, I’ve been surrounded by aspiring writers all-round — but invariably, when we talk about taking our ambitions global, we always say the same things.

‘In this industry, it’s all about who you know. And I know nobody.’

‘As a white man writing poetry, I can tell you, I won’t get published this decade.’

‘Sure, she got published in Indonesia. But that’s just being a big fish in a small pond.’

‘It’s hard to make it in any industry. But in publishing, it’s damn near impossible.’

‘My friend who’s not a writer but has 50,000 followers just got her first book deal. With Penguin. And she can’t even write!’

‘If another person tells me I need to start making Instagram reels, I’ll kill myself.’

It’s hard to ignore all the negativity and keep on keeping on. Especially as someone circling the wellness-crazed expat community of Bali, I can’t help noticing that the beliefs we have around publishing are about as light as Kafka’s take on the government. We’re veering into paranoia and conspiracy — and we don’t need any gurus to come do a seminar to figure out that we’re doing it all wrong.

What us writers forgive in each other as passion, anyone from the outside might immediately recognise as neediness and desperation. After a while, our incessant complaining about rejections feels less like searching for support and empathy and more like straight-up entitlement.

No one promised that our words would change the world. No one promised that we’d be good enough writers after finishing our first, or second, or third novels. No one promised us a seat at the table. And that’s not what this is supposed to be about, anyway. This is supposed to be about art for the sake of art, not external validation and stamps of approval.

I say this with love, and holding my often-wet tissues. But what’s with the snotty noses?

If we’re writers, let’s write, and leave the business of publishing to those who do publishing. And maybe, if the gates aren’t opening, we need to trust that it’s because we’re just not good enough.

Yet.

***

‘You should see this rejection I got,’ I say, showing Paula my phone.

‘Wow. “Too dark for her tastes”? She actually said that?’

‘Mm-hm.’

‘Well, then. At least she personalised the email a bit.’

‘I got a more encouraging personalised one the other day, though,’ I say, showing her another email that sounds more kind — but, even I suspect, a tad generically kind.

‘Yes, that’s definitely a personal one,’ Paula says, pointing at my phone to where the agent said: ‘I don’t think that it would be quite right for me, but please do not give up.’

I slide the carrot cake towards Paula, and she has two rapid-fire spoonfuls.

‘She wouldn’t say “do not give up” to just anyone. Right?’

‘Totally.’

‘Totally.’

Click here to access the digital query pack for my debut novel, ‘Nobody’s Daughter’.

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Want to connect outside of Substack? Feel free to find me on Instagram at @Teodora_Miscov or explore my published poetry books on my website www.teodoramiscov.co.uk.

Memory? woke up this morning with a skull-splitting headache and one sock still on. Sheet marks imprinted the pattern of rest on her body, mostly over her thighs and face. I looked at these lines that covered her and resented their lie. She was anything but rested, and so was I.

We always get up at the same time, Memory? and I. It usually takes me a few seconds to catch up to her, like when you take an afternoon nap on holiday and it’s so hot and you don’t recognise the room so you don’t know where you are for a moment. It was like that this morning, too. I usually take a few minutes to lie in bed, and she allows me that, but she always runs before me to the kitchen to get the coffee machine going; at the table she greets me with a mocking, ‘Are we all up to speed yet?’

Memory? usually gives me a few seconds of peace to get at least somewhat caffeinated, and then inevitably begins her random, chaotic, useless soliloquy. This morning she chose to replay the happenings of Wednesday, 4th March 2020, 10:03 p.m. to 1:15 a.m. (estimation), Moscow Standard Time, with a particular focus on red neon lights, a blond Russian bartender who couldn’t speak an ounce of English (but tried, bless him), and two particularly unpleasant French girls. Anyway. I sipped my coffee and let her do her thing.

OPENING FILE >>>

4.03.2020-EVENING-SEQUENCE-1-22:07.mem

We arrived at that T-something District, on the late evening of the 4th March. We went up the stairs of a dilapidated block of flats that made us think of Raskolnikov. We thought, ‘I’m so happy I came,’ but were we? We were suspicious of the two French girls we had met in the hostel because they didn’t tip the waiter well, and spoke French way too much around us, when they knew — they knew — we couldn’t speak it. But we wanted to have a night out in Saint Petersburg before we left, so we pretended to like them for a few hours more. The sign outside the door announced:

БАР
(BAR)

but it looked like a regular apartment. We exchanged questioning looks with the girls, then went in first. ‘Cowards,’ we thought. But we said nothing and smiled.

4.03.2020-EVENING-SEQUENCE-2-22:10.mem

We walked in. It didn’t look sanitary. We loved it. We thought, ‘this is so cool.’ It was. In the first room, there were three Russian teenagers. It was dark. What we identified as great music was playing on a turntable. Later, we realised it was Gorillaz’ ‘Strobelite’. The second room was the last room of the bar. The place was small.

There were a БАР, БАР stools, a БАРtender and that was it. There was a red neon sign that coloured the waiter’s blond hair red. He looked fourteen. No, that’s stupid. He had tattoos. Sixteen, maybe.

The French girls were too shy, so they made us put in the order. We spoke no Russian, the БАРtender spoke little English. He called himself ‘stupid.’ We reassured him his English was good. It wasn’t.

We managed to order three Russian shots that had ostentatiously cheap vodka and sugary pineapple syrup in them. We took a sip and smiled. We wondered if the French girls would get stingy again and make us pay for the drinks. They didn’t, but winged about the price. We decided this was our last night hanging out with them.

4.03.2020-EVENING-SEQUENCE-3-22:13.mem

We went back to room one. More red neon signs. We sat down with the girls and sipped our drinks. The whole room was red. It was weird to be there with so many teenagers. The bartender kept coming in to change the song. It was vinyl. Every song was great. The French girls were talking about the constraints of living in Paris and how they didn’t want to look like the other French women did. We didn’t really care. We drank the sugary drink and made small talk. We checked our phone to see if our boyfriend texted, but he hadn’t.

4.03.2020-EVENING-SEQUENCE-4-22:45.mem

We had a feeeeeeeewwwwwwww more drinks. Possibly? Probably, Absolut. Absolutely only in order to numb the pain of the mindless conversation. We wished we had better friends. (Any friends.) But we had to travel solo, and it wasn’t that bad, and we were here now, so that’s that. As random as it was, it was better than binge-watching Tarkovsky and scrolling the ***Annoying but Lowkey Impressive Kardashianesque Continuum of Selfies***. We looked up at the wall above one of the Frenchies and thought the graffiti looked cool as hell in the projector’s light.

4.03.2020-EVENING-SEQUENCE-5-23:47.mem

WHAT IS THIS SONG I LOVE IT SHAZAM IT OH OKAY OH GORILLAZ I WOULD’VE NEVER GUESSED, I NEVER REALLY GOT INTO GORILLAZ DID YOU? NON, ME NEITHER BUT HOW COOL IS THIS HUHHHHHH

<<< ERROR

<<< CLOSING FILE

Memory? would’ve kept rambling on if I hadn’t slammed her head into the stove and poured her coffee down the sink. Even with blood running down her forehead, she’s still mumbling to herself.

OPENING FILE >>>

5.03.2020-MORNING-SEQUENCE-1-00:04.mem

— e got back to the hostel — stocky white Samoyed puppy! — see Dostoyevsky’s house tomorrow, need sleep — how many roubles for a pyshka? — and the French girls had fallen asleep already — but the time dizzerence — still no text from —

<<< ERROR

<<< CLOSING FILE

How is it possible? By the time I’ve finished the first sip of my latte, Memory? had already had three espressos, smoked half a pack, and retrieved six abstract sequences. Over two dozen images and sounds and faces are looping through my mind like hollow ghosts. With every passing one, my brain becomes more numb. He’s watching it all like projections on a white canvas.

‘Why not let her have her little bit of fun?’ he says, also giving her a little jolt with his foot. ‘You know how excited she gets in the mornings.’

‘But — what’s her point? It’s all just mindless rambling.’ I say, and she hears me somehow, over the sound of her own voice.

‘How about you tell me? What’s the point of you?’

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Want to connect outside of Substack? Feel free to find me on Instagram at @Teodora_Miscov or explore my published poetry books on my website www.teodoramiscov.co.uk.

The money of the soul is love
and the profit of life is us,
miraculously blowing our noses in front of strangers.

If I speak the language of capitalism,
so be it —
‘product of my environment’
and all of that bullshit.

Because
“Money doesn’t grow on trees”
said dad back then, teeth grinding,
and
“BE 1% BETTER EVERY DAY,”
yells the wall of my gym now,
and
I’m tired.

But I smile to myself
contemplating how it’s still easy,
despite the screaming nonsense preaching fear,
to be content
all fruity pulp in a fruit-loving world.

Even if they try to tax the soul out of us,
what about it?
Just look at the fleshy joy of it all
the God-sap holding together our coughs and our laughs —
it’s all a single grape
skinned
catching sun.

So:
“I am,” I say to the wall,
pressing past this thin shell of mine
all honey-yellow-gold
bursting.

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Forget about soul-searching to find your voice, essence, message. In the age of late capitalism, everything has to be packaged, marketed, shipped, sold — including our art.

It’s sad.

Instead of cooking up a storm in our private creative kitchens and testing out delightfully weird shit like guacamole-topped Pavlovas, we’re churning out can after can of repeatable, branded, algorithm-friendly Campbell soup.

And it’s not really my fault, nor is it yours. We’ve grown up on advertising, and grown into Instagram aesthetics. We know that if it doesn’t look good, people won’t want it.

So naturally, we think that growing a platform and an audience as an artist is supposed to look good in order to attract anyone at all. It needs to be branded with the same lo-fi filters, has to have a consistent call to action, needs to have some sort of repeatable hashtag structure if we are to be discoverable at all.

“Lower the exposure on that sunset shot, for God’s sake! Otherwise, how will people know I write dark, brooding poetry?”

Look at your Instagram feed. Look at your friends’ websites. We’re all curating ourselves like we have our artistic vision all figured out. We’re projecting the coherent voice of a 50-year-old artist, while we’re still sucking on our artistic pacifiers.

We’ve got no idea who we are yet. But the Big Branding Machine needs us to look like we have it all together, if we are to have a fighting chance for attention. It says: pick a colour scheme, pick a font, pick a niche, and stay there.

And I guess it makes sense. The world is busy as it is. Who can afford to waste brainpower on understanding a chaotic, incoherent, today-a-painter-tomorrow-an-avantgarde-piano-player mess of a person?

The only issue is that the artist has to be a mess of a person. At least when they’re starting out.

That’s the thing. We’re all young artists here on the Internet. For the most part, we’re not published, not popular, not widely read. This is the part of our lives when we get to experiment. When we go on side quests. In your favourite artists’ biography, this is the part that reads:

“Lugrezzio G. left home one night to study pottery in Rome; only before he got to Italy, he met some cool people who were practicing experimental calligraphy on the side of the road in Graz and decided to go with them instead. After three years of mastering obscure Gregorian chants, Lugrezzio then got a archery-related injury and pivoted into reverse glass painting. No-one could have predicted that, only two decades later, he will have transformed the field of interpretative dance forever.”

If Lugrezzio were trying to curate an Instagram brand at the same time, what would he have done? Likely, forced himself to go to Rome because he already had 200 engaged followers who knew he was going to do pottery and didn’t want to confuse them, or the capital-A Algorithm.

You get my point? Am I ranting? Am I falling outside of the usual ‘Dark Exotica Newsletter’ tone of voice? Well, shit. I’m getting nervous now.

To be honest, I’m not above any of this. My Instagram is all low-exposure brooding faces. I get worried over changing my font scheme too often. In some ways, I self-edit before my pen even hits the page.

Maybe I should be rebelling, and maybe next week I’ll be shifting into Gregorian chants myself — just to make a point. But do you see what I mean? Do you see how this incessant, narcissistic, cart-before-the-horse pursuit for an audience is fucking with the creative process and putting us all on a one-way road to mediocrity?

In this image-focused world, we keep forgetting that branding isn’t expression. Branding kills expression in order to achieve marketability. It’s static and dead. It’s not art.

But here’s the deeper, unspoken question: why are we even on Instagram at all? Why do we have newsletters? Why do we feel like we have to have some sort of online presence in order to ‘prove’ our seriousness? Why do we need to lock ourselves into a niche before we even really understand who we are as artists?

While in this world it seems like losing shelf appeal is the highest sin, we need to resist the urge to brand ourselves like cows and protect our artistic right to NOT KNOW!

Rant over.

Sending much love,
Confused Exotica

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I don’t mean that every book, painting, or film needs to feature nipples to qualify as good to me.

Because ‘obscene’ doesn’t just refer to the sexual. It’s anything ‘offensive or disgusting by accepted standards of morality and decency.’

Key words: accepted standards.

Good art, when it’s first created and born into the world, operates on the edges of society. It explores the questions we don’t dare share on Instagram — maybe even the questions we don’t dare share with our closest pinky-promise friends.

What if I secretly believe I deserve what happened to me?

Why do I only feel alive when I’m being degraded?

Why do I secretly wish for a worldwide catastrophe to hit?

It’s the job of the artist to drag himself, often kicking and screaming, into the parts of the subconscious and reality that are still distorted by shadows.

He journeys there. He stares it, whatever it is, in the face. He grapples with it, until he absorbs it into his being as part of his whole-being truth.

It’s because somewhere deep down, I’ve mistaken punishment for structure.

It’s because degradation silences the endless noise of my exhausting self-talk.

It’s because I’ve been feeling like the world is ending every day of my life, and a complete ruin like that would finally feel fair.

The artist gets the answer, or something resembling one.

And then he uses paint or clay or ink to give it shape, to show to other people with some level of accuracy and say: ‘Look, this thing that you didn’t want to see — I figured out something about it.’

Oftentimes, I feel like what we refer to as ‘art’ is actually just content. Advertising. The equivalent of repackaged microwavable dinners.

If content is concerned with mass-appeal and meeting the zeitgeist exactly where it is, so that it may gain popularity, then art is concerned with minimum appeal. With the unacceptable. With that which pushes the circle of things we can talk about to widen and widen.

This is what put Oscar Wilde in prison. Why Anaïs Nin got blacklisted. Why the Marquis de Sade got exiled.

I’ll always respect the artists who are courageous enough to share these dark truths — what I call the Dark Exotica. But even I sometimes come across pieces so avant-garde that they make me shudder.

Performances like the one featured in the first image, of Carolee reading from a scroll that she produced from her vagina. Like ‘Naked Lunch’. Like this photograph by Andres Serrano called ‘Piss Christ’, where he photographed a crucifix submerged in his own urine, to explore the line between sacred symbols and bodily realities.

I love that I was so shocked by this photo that I thought twice about including it in this article. I love that art can shake me this much. And it makes me realise how little this happens.

It takes a while to absorb these kinds of pieces. To understand what they really mean to say, and to analyse where my revulsion comes from. Most of the time, it’s some sort of shame or fear or unquestioned assumption that the artwork managed to accurately mirror.

Other times, if I’m honest, it’s just a shit piece of work that doubled down on shock value (e.g. ‘Tampa’ by Alissa Nutting).

Either way, that time I’ve spent engaging with the work is never wasted. Because the process of discerning between the two helps me create that one thing that makes my work as an artist truly mine: perspective. I think this applies to any of us living the creative life.

And I’d love to hear from you. What artwork shocked you lately?

The Dark Exotica Newsletter

Thank you for reading. Each Thursday, we look more deeply into ourselves and the world, finding beauty in the dark through creativity, philosophy, and art.

Subscribe now

Let’s Connect

Want to connect outside of Substack? Feel free to find me on Instagram at @Teodora_Miscov or explore my published poetry books on my website www.teodoramiscov.co.uk.

You made it here, so first of all — welcome.

Second of all — what the hell is Dark Exotica?

It’s a tough one to answer, because I’m still figuring it out myself.

Each post on here, whether it’s about the artistic life, the craft of writing, psychology, cultural commentary, or just some of my own prose or poetry, is an attempt at taming that beast.

If I had to give you a metaphor for Dark Exotica, I’d say: realising that a yellow-toothed smile can still be beautiful.

If I had to describe the opposite, I’d say: grind culture.

I’d say: straight lines.

I’d say: those neat little white neon lamps people have on their work desks.

Dark Exotica isn’t a newsletter about being richer, hotter, or even better.

It’s a newsletter about being more delightfully weird in our artistic expression. About cultivating a mind that is at its sharpest when it’s most delirious.

I write it so we can laugh together at philosophies of life that are too clean, too obvious, too algorithm-friendly.

Because God knows, we have enough of that.

About me

I’m a Romanian writer living in Bali. I’ve self-published two poetry collections — “Songs of God and Pleasure” and “Cheap Hotel Philosophy” — and my poem “]]]On The Outside[[[” appeared in the NYC-based Fragmented Magazine.

I’m currently querying agents with my debut novel, “Nobody’s Daughter,” an upmarket psychological fiction about the ways we become complicit in our own traumas. I’m also at work on my second, a contemporary reimagining of Greek tragedy set in the art world.

A few places to begin with Dark Exotica

• The self that writes is not the self that buys groceries
  (On living the double life of the writer.)

• Being an artist is cringe as hell
  (Why real creation always feels a little embarrassing, and why that’s the point.)

• The whore to whom you’re bound
  (On the sexuality of art, shame, and the filthy little corners where inspiration lives.)

• Double down on the nonsense, balloon heads
  (On how nothing makes sense anymore.)

Each piece is a door. Or a tunnel. Or a sewer?

Pick any.

And if you want to stay a little longer, you can subscribe below.

Either way, welcome.

Teodora

Thanks for joining the (often-depressing) party

Through the lens of Dark Exotica, we look more deeply into ourselves and the world, finding beauty through creativity, philosophy, and art.

Let’s connect

Want to connect outside of Substack? Feel free to find me on Instagram at @Teodora_Miscov or explore my published poetry books on my website.

Nothing reveals an artist more than their work.

But as revealing — sometimes even more so — is how they relate to their work.

Hanging out with writer friends, I’ve come to find surprising discrepancies between what people create and how they relate to it.

K. writes upbeat glitzy poetry about his no-cares-in-the-world trust fund life… and refers to his creative impulses as ‘the heavy cross he has to bear.’

F. writes dramatic short stories about the netherworlds of her twisted psyche… and makes five jokes a minute about this or that disturbing technique she found. ‘Look at this fucked up scene I wrote last night,’ she’ll laugh. ‘I think the blue gremlin represents my therapist’

In the spirit of self-awareness, I can admit that this same thing applies to me.

I’m not sad, but my work is

When I meet people in real life and we exchange Instagrams, they look baffled at my feed, then at me, then at my feed again — confused as hell. And I know why. My profile is a checkered grid of my forlorn gaze about to recite some sad girl poetry, while in real life I’m raving about how Dua Lipa’s disco era changed my life.

Invariably, they say some variation of: ‘Why do you look so depressed on there?’

That’s a reasonable question — because, if we ever met, you’d know that I laugh twice as much as I speak.

My answer always feels deeply honest and fundamentally dishonest.

‘I look depressed because I am very depressed.’

Then they frown. ‘You don’t look it.’

And the truth is, I don’t feel it. At all. Not when I’m living my normal life, detached from my ‘writing’ mindset. But when I pick up a pen or open up a blank document, what comes out is a fuckfest of depressive thoughts and dark plots. It’s not me writing, but this other me, and she always sighs like she’s just attended a funeral.

What’s happening here?

Why this separation between how we do art and how we do life?

Are we masking our true selves — the ones who supposedly come out raw in our work — when we talk to others? Or are we channeling some twisted twin/muse though our work — and find that actually they don’t have much to do with the self who lives our life day to day?

Where the fuckfest of depressive thoughts comes from

Some sort of answer might come from Margaret Atwood. In ‘On Writers and Writing’ (which, in all honesty, I wouldn’t recommend unless you want a good cure for insomnia), she explores what she calls the doppelgänger effect — the split between a writer’s day-to-day self and the shadow-self that emerges through the act of writing:

"What is the relationship between the two entities we lump under one name, that of 'the writer'? The particular writer. By two, I mean the person who exists when no writing is going forward—the one who walks the dog, eats bran for regularity, takes the car in to be washed, and so forth—and that other, more shadowy and altogether more equivocal personage who shares the same body, and who, when no one is looking, takes it over and uses it to commit the actual writing."

Margaret would say that my depressed Instagram feed makes perfect sense. Because when I sit down to write, I’m not the Teodora who laughs at her own dad jokes. I’m in the mirror world, where I’ve become the writer-Teodora, a shadowy figure that allows me to say what real me wouldn’t dare to, and channel truths I would not (or could not) consciously access.

How about your creative process?

Do you feel split in two?

Or three?

Four?

The Dark Exotica Newsletter

Thanks for wandering into this week’s dark little corner. Each Thursday, we look more deeply into ourselves and the world, finding beauty in the dark through creativity, philosophy, and art.

Subscribe now

Let’s Connect

Want to connect outside of Substack? Feel free to find me on Instagram at @Teodora_Miscov or explore my published poetry books on my website www.teodoramiscov.co.uk.

A couple of weeks ago, I was about to read my very personal, very raw poem at a open mic in Bali. It was tough. Not only had I not done many of these readings before, but this particular piece was the most honest thing I’d ever written — and shared so publicly.

And yet, there I was.

The MC called my name. I stood up, swallowed nothing once, twice. Dozens of people sat politely quiet and still, waiting for me to speak some skilful arrangement of words, when — my breath caught.

Suddenly, it hit me: I was preparing to do that cringe artist thing of oversharing personal experiences in front of a room of strangers in which, to add insult to injury, my fiancé also sat watching.

Of course, the poem was about him.

Was the fact that my oversharing fit the general conventions of poetry reason enough for me to stand in front of strangers practically shout: I FEEL LIKE A PIECE OF SHIT MOST OF THE TIME AND DO NOT THINK I AM ENOUGH FOR THIS HANDSOME MAN SITTING RIGHT THERE?

Did the fact that my words occasionally rhymed give me enough of a mask, did it create enough of a smoke and mirror situation, for me to be safe sharing this truth with all these people?

Short answer: no. It didn’t. Everyone would know my innermost fears and feelings, then sip their coconut water and go home with that knowledge neatly stored somewhere in the back of their minds.

Scary.

But I am a writer born into the era of personal development, so of course, I made Tony Robbins proud. I spoke my words. I somehow finished without crying. I sat my shaking ass down.

At the end of the night, I thought I did alright… And did my best to push the cringe awareness of what I had just shared out of my mind.

Then, some time after, I went to an artists’ circle where my writer friends and I discussed all the ways in which this exact scenario scares the shit out of all of us.

‘I have a deep fear of being perceived, I think,’ one of them finally got out.

I heard it. And I felt it.

I guess we all do this as artists. Our prime material is our pain; when we finish building the house of whatever muse has been obsessing us, the deepest secrets of our lives are smeared across the walls, floors, roof.

Oftentimes, those smears look like shit. At better times, they’re mango juice.

Whether we’re palatable or not, to an open mic audience or more widely, as artists we have the responsibility — and compulsion — of sharing our stories and perspectives. But we can’t do that without sharing that very personal, very scary thing: the self.

And sure, that can be cringe.

But here’s the thing: with being perceived also comes the possibility of being witnessed.

Maybe even to be witnessed by people we love and respect, who might actually understand us in something approaching our totality.

And isn’t that what this whole ‘life’ thing is about?

P.S. If you want to read some of those poems I agonise over — did you know I have two poetry books out? ‘Songs of God and Pleasure’ and ‘Cheap Hotel Philosophy’ are available worldwide, in print and kindle. So feel free to perceive me. I’ll try not to cringe.

The Dark Exotica Newsletter

Thanks for wandering into this week’s dark little corner. Each Thursday, we look more deeply into ourselves and the world, finding beauty in the dark through creativity, philosophy, and art.

Subscribe now

Let’s Connect

Want to connect outside of Substack? Feel free to find me on Instagram at @Teodora_Miscov or on my website www.teodoramiscov.co.uk.

This week, I’m stepping back from the world of depressing essays to share something closer to the bone. A poem in progress.

It’s called ‘Our daily bread’.

I see the feast of us
Spread out before me
We live on this, our daily bread
Salt and pepper off the shelf
And we have all we need, it seems
But here I sit
Quiet, wrecked
Choking on the crust of me
You left
On the napkin,
Off your plate

Good morning, baby
These breakfasts
Make up our life
It’s you, the dog, my fear, and I
Chewing on our love
Until the whole truth tastes guilty
When we sit down at this table,
Who are we really?

Across the joy-streaked years we’ve had together,
I’ve limped away
From the panicked wreckage
Of my slaughtered daughterhood,
The squealing suckling bled out dry
By some innocent, disgusting, girlish crime—
To this day, I’ve not
Figured out the guilt that’s mine
But I’ve done my best
To spare your tongue the bitter of my bile
I’ve held back my sickened grime
Bit it down behind this smile
And even now I drop honey
By the shaking spoonful
On the bread that warms our table—
I pray it sweetens me enough for you
Or at least,
I pray it sticks me to your elbow
With a gentle force
That’ll make you
Bound to me
Like tongue to cake

I am your woman
So I say

While inside me
I await the day
When I vomit
The foul parts of me
Even I can’t stomach
From my sorry mouth
Onto our table
And you’ll see me as I am:
Inedible.
Little more
Than the white blubber on a rancid steak
Catching in your wisdom teeth—
The me that me is
Underneath

But this morning, the light came through
Slanted. Strong.
I felt different—I felt you knew.
My eyes stared up
Willing the fleeting ray
Into some sort of kitchen sunrise
A light to wash me clean in domestic white,
Splendid in this old home made new
Splendid in this world, if only to you,
Bleached past the point of repentance
A holy communion we could share
If only granted yet again
The mercy of memory immaculate

But try as I may, I can’t be born again in front of you
Instead—
Could we dirty our hands black with our old selves
And still love each other like strangers do?

Please,
Let me feed you this broken body of mine
I’ll show you my grime
And not some saintly, dead, deceitful hue
If you bear the bitter, you might finally taste me as I am—
Somehow still sweet and impossibly new

Not disfigured, but improved
Soaking up the full horror of my truth
That I once feared would suck the marrow out of our loins,
That I once feared would make our love of love conditional and bent—

This mangled me
Rearranging in front of you
Until that single blessed day
When I can look straight into your eyes
And know
No distant silent father
Could ever take away from us
The miracle
Of swallowing each other
Whole.

The Dark Exotica Newsletter

Thanks for wandering into this week’s dark little corner. Each Thursday, we look more deeply into ourselves and the world, finding beauty in the dark through creativity, philosophy, and art.

Subscribe now

Let’s Connect

Want to connect outside of Substack? Feel free to find me on Instagram at @Teodora_Miscov or on my website www.teodoramiscov.co.uk.

Have you ever had that strange experience of meeting an obviously beautiful woman who’s convinced she’s ugly?

It’s disorienting—like watching someone violently scrub away at a stain only they can see. She’s berating the bend in her nose or that one acne scar, while you stare at her wondering what sort of dusty mirrors she’s got at home. But it’s not the mirror on the wall that’s distorted her reality. Her perception of herself—and even self-evident truths—are perverted not by facts, but by fiction. Her own personal mythology has taken over reality.

Here’s what I mean by that.

When we live our lives, we don’t see the moments that make it up as disjointed occurrences. Our minds put them together and create connections, linking it into a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. If someone were to ask you to describe your childhood, would you say: there was a mean man for a father, not many friends in school, and a general unhappiness? Or would you lean back on the chaise longue to say: It all started when my father beat the shit out of me for not sharpening my pencils, and then no one liked me because my pencils were always sharpened like a nerd’s, which made me depressed as shit?

Ridiculous example aside, you get my point. We can’t help but think about our lives linearly, as if they were a story and we were the heroes driving the action forward, bearing the indignities of fate—in the form of shitty fathers, a proclivity for depression, a tendency to think we’re fugly, etcetera.

This isn’t necessarily harmful. At the end of the day, it’s this ‘live storyline’ that helps us stay coherent. If we’re aware of what the story is and are in control of how it’s told—if we take hold of that damn pen—then this narrative can even be a useful tool for us to shape our lives. If, however, we fall into helplessly playing out stories we don’t like, acting according to a script we feel bound to, then freedom and reinvention are nearly impossible.

Going back to our pretty woman—she’s most likely acting out an old narrative. Maybe she was a frizzy-haired acneic misfit in middle school, got that terrible self-image bullied into her, and then forgot to update it when she grew into her beauty. No matter how many people stare at her gape-mouthed, she won’t get it. She’s reading the same old lines, without noticing the play, stage, and wardrobe have all changed around her.

It’s weird to say this as a writer, but narratives aren’t always great. Not when they take over the real author of our lives: ourselves.

So, if you’re a rich guy flinching at the bill like you're still broke…
If you’re a freelancer clocking in at 9 a.m. like someone’s still watching…
If you’re blasting Another Brick in the Wall like you're still mad about getting a B in Creative Writing...

What the hell are you doing reading those old lines?

DROP THE SCRIPT

The Dark Exotica Newsletter

Thanks for wandering into this week’s dark little corner. Each Thursday, we look more deeply into ourselves and the world, finding beauty in the dark through creativity, philosophy, and art.

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Want to connect outside of Substack? Feel free to find me on Instagram at @Teodora_Miscov or on my website www.teodoramiscov.co.uk.

I noticed that the office felt different (???) from the second I walked in. It was like— Maybe like the floor was dangling over some precipice or something. Like it might cave in any moment and I’d fall into the bowels of the city where, there, would be lots of smiling reptiles and email drafts and old computers. My stomach felt like acrid milk. I think it was the vertigo. Was this even the office? I guess I might’ve been dreaming. But then—

‘Joe. Finally. You grace us with your presence.’

My boss. Her ginger hair swirled around her head so much that I thought we might be underwater rather than on that weird precipice. Or even both. Underwater… precipice? An underwater precipice? Is that a thing?

‘Yeah,’ I said, trying to keep calm, just in case it wasn’t a dream. ‘Yeah, I’ve forgotten the toaster strudel in the dog’s house and then it stopped shitting.’

Wait. Wa— I— Did I just say that? And am I wearing clown trousers? Is that a hot dog I’m holding? Glue.

The walls dissolve into a pixelated screen. Projected on them are my failures. Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4 are all in the red. But it’s good. It’s good. Calm, calm.

‘Well then, maybe you should’ve washed it.’

She’s still talking normally? Her hair swirls everywhere. Then I realise the reason why it’s swirling is because she is head-banging to the office stereo, blasting AC/DC. I had no idea she’s a moshpitter.

I wonder if I should join her for a few seconds, or if that’d be impolite. But then she stops and just stares. Staring, I stare back—we both stare.

BOOM! The floor caves in. I knew, knew, knew it would! Sound gets sucked out of my ears as if by a vacuum cleaner. We’re not underwater nor on the precipice, but mid-air, a brutal breeze swooshes around me like some blowing waterfall. An airfall.

Around me: the clown pants (I’m naked from the waist down), my boss’s suspended curls, and the floating lyrics to ‘Highway To Hell.’ I glance at the bottom; will I see reptiles and files and resignation letters? But no. All that I can see at the bottom of the freefall is more freefall.

I fall. Not free.

Fall, fall, fall.

My boss’s voice resounds in the vacuum: ‘And I’m going do-o-ohohown. AAAAL THE WAaaa-YAaaaah-aAaaay!’

The Dark Exotica Newsletter

Thanks for reading this weirdness. This week was a bit funny; I wanted to share a piece of flash fiction I’d written recently. But normally, each Thursday we look more deeply into ourselves and the world, finding beauty in the dark through creativity, philosophy, and art.

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Want to connect outside of Substack? Feel free to find me on Instagram at @Teodora_Miscov or on my website www.teodoramiscov.co.uk.

In ‘Breakfast of Champions,’ Vonnegut tells a cryptic tale about free will. Like most great stories, it fails on a logical level, but hits deeply on an emotional one.

So it goes:

“Life was an experiment by the Creator of the Universe, Who wanted to test a new sort of creature He was thinking of introducing into the Universe. It was a creature with the ability to make up its own mind. All the other creatures were fully-programmed robots.”

So God created this being, called ‘The Man’. He managed to live amongst the robots just fine, and God congratulated him for managing to do so—then, he transferred The Man to a virgin island where he could make more beings himself by mixing cells shaved from the palms of his hands with the water of the sea.

Vonnegut continues the story:

“The Man often sauntered by the sea. Sometimes he waded in his Eve. Sometimes he swam in her, but she was too soupy for an invigorating swim. She made her Adam feel sleepy and sticky afterwards, so he would dive into an icy stream that had just jumped off a mountain. He screamed when he dived into the icy water, screamed again when he came up for air. He bloodied his shins and laughed about it when he scrambled up rocks to get out of the water. He panted and laughed some more, and he thought of something amazing to yell. The Creator never knew what he was going to yell, since The Creator had no control over him. The Man himself got to decide what he was going to do next—and why. After a dip one day, for instance, The Man yelled this: ‘Cheese!’ Another time he yelled, ‘Wouldn’t you really rather drive a Buick?’”

***

Vonnegut’s satire is absurd, but his point is deadly serious: what does it mean to actually make a choice, free of programming?

Fast forward to today, and it seems like we still don’t know.

All over the Internet, a new type of meme is becoming popular: people doing nonsensical, chaotic things and labelling them as ‘a surprising use of free will.’ These videos show people throwing birthday cakes off balconies, farting loudly in subway stations, throwing eggs into their kitchen counters, clogging public toilets, giving themselves food poisoning, slithering through the McDonald’s drive thru window, etc.

You get the idea.

I guess it’s… kind of… funny when you take it to the extreme. But the more gut-punching videos are those that hit closer to home, where people stop in their cubicles, ‘remember they have free will,’ get in their cars, and drive off.

Just a month ago I wrote an article about how we’re living in a culture of overwhelm, and I guess that this trend is exactly the kind of offshoot we can expect. People are stopping, looking around them, and realising they’re in the chokehold of systems as nonsensical as having to tip at self-checkout.

The question is, if ‘remembering we have free will’ is the opposite of our daily routine, then what is our routine? Being so steeped into the matrix that we act out of some previous programming we got too tired to question? And is our free will so reduced and worn down that all we can do, once we remember we have it, is fart in public?

What is it about the system we live in that leaves us so shackled even in our supposed self-awareness?

Maybe I’m looking too much into this, and this is just the kind of shocking thing people will do for likes and internet fame. But the fact that people are watching these videos by the millions is, I think, a hint into our mass psychology. And that hint is that people feel so stuck in this meat-grinder system that they are intrigued, and maybe even a bit mesmerised, when they see someone break out of it—even if it is just to throw eggs into a kitchen counter.

There’s no question that people long for that release in their own lives. Maybe questioning it all is the first step towards actual freedom. But perhaps we just don’t know how to tap into that free will—in a meaningful, non-destructive way—yet.

The Dark Exotica Newsletter

Thanks for reading this week’s exploration. Each Thursday, we look more deeply into ourselves and the world, finding beauty in the dark through creativity, philosophy, and art.

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Want to connect outside of Substack? Feel free to find me on Instagram at @Teodora_Miscov or on my website www.teodoramiscov.co.uk.

I recently came across a quote that blew my mind with its precision.

“The stupidity of people comes from having an answer to everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything... It seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than to ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties."
— Milan Kundera, Interview on ‘The Book of Laughter and Forgetting’ (1978)

It got me thinking about the craft of writing, and how I’ve always felt it’s about much more than simply making rational sense of the world. In my weekly critique club, one of the poets keeps saying that he hates when poetry ends on a nice neat conclusion, because it feels fake and completely at odds with what actually happens in life.

Yet again, the poets are right.

In a culture where we’re constantly told what supplements to take and how we should structure our workouts and what stocks to invest in and which politician is full of shit and which one isn’t, the world of books has to feel like an escape from all of that. Not just an escape into an alternate world, but an escape back into ourselves, where we can relax into the safe haven of our own intuition.

Martin Scorsese also has a great quote about this that has stuck with me for years:

“Don't tell people what to think. Show them a situation and let them make up their own minds.”

When I first started writing my debut novel, at the time called ‘The Cruelty of Summer,’ I had a lot to say on one topic: freedom. And what I had to say weren’t situations or questions—they were answers. A whole lot of answers that I felt were absolutely and undeniably right, that my novel was simply packaging in a semi-entertaining story.

I put a lot of pressure on myself, reading dozens of books on psychology and freedom, and writing my own 50-page academic dissertation on the topic before I even put pen to paper for my book. As a result, what came primary was not the tightness of the narrative, the truth of the characters, the resonance of the emotional arc—but the fact that I somehow had to transfer all of my ideas into readers’ heads, to supposedly help them become more free.

A noble goal—but, I see now, tragically misguided.

My book failed. Draft after draft, I realised that something just wasn’t coming together. The book didn’t feel like a book. It felt like five lectures held together by an anaemic glue of a story. It was only when I (very painfully) let go of the previous six drafts and began working on a complete rewrite that the story lost its teacher-giving-a-lecture energy and became a real story that people might actually want to read.

I’ve learned from those six drafts and five years of working on something that just wouldn’t work that I should always let questions and story be primary. Answers are the earned reward of the reader. I am focused on simply giving them a crystal-rich mine for them to get to work in.

So, I’m now asking you: do you want to give people answers with your art?

The Dark Exotica Newsletter

Thanks for reading this week’s exploration. Each Thursday, we look more deeply into ourselves and the world, finding beauty in the dark through creativity, philosophy, and art.

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Want to connect outside of Substack? Feel free to find me on Instagram at @Teodora_Miscov or on my website www.teodoramiscov.co.uk.

I seriously think the world is ending.

Not in a nuclear mushroom cloud sort of way—but in a deeper psychological way, which can feel just as real. I think most of us are trying to hold down a ballooning suspicion that shit is going deeply, deeply wrong.

Kanye’s wife is parading totally naked at the Grammys. Salaries are higher than ever, but we can buy less with our money than ever. Elon’s doing Nazi salutes at the presidential inauguration—and that’s apparently totally fine. Trust in the government is at an all-time low. There are apparently 72 genders, including genderfuzz and existigender. LA’s on fire. Not one of us seems to be actually mentally healthy. AI is fixing to take away our jobs and already, some of my smartest, most competent friends are becoming unemployed. In the jobs that we do manage to hold down, we’re likely to be asked whether we like to fuck men or women or miscellaneous, as if we’re prostitutes rather than middle managers. In the same powerpoint presentation we’re warned about the dire consequences of being inappropriate at work through sexual harassment, and the HR department remains completely oblivious to the irony.

The world is burning around us. And what are we doing? Scrolling Instagram desperately for any funny videos that’ll get our minds off it all for ten glorious fucking seconds. Having brownie-flavoured cheesecake. Liking, sharing, and subscribing. Posting about the war de jour as if it made a difference. Holding onto our income streams for dear life, trying to eek out a holiday here and there so we don’t go completely insane.

Because if not this, what else?

Capitalism might be breaking down at a rate that makes Dalí’s surrealism look vanilla, but we’re not the first batch of humans to go through this sort of frog-in-water situation.

Back in the good old USSR, people knew the system wasn’t working properly for a long time—but in the ‘80s it became obvious to anyone with eyes that things couldn’t go on as they had: economic growth had completely stalled, the markets had run out of food, Soviet soldiers were coming back from wars in body bags while the news droned on about supposed victories, jokes and criticism of the government became commonplace, people had grown to trust illegal traders more than the government, alcoholism became an epidemic, and people even stopped having sex—birth rates declined.

Everyone had checked out of the system mentally. But because most of the Soviet citizens had been born inside communism, they had no idea what the alternative would even look like—so, no matter how bad things got, they just assumed the system would somehow find a way to keep going.

Sound familiar?

But hey, at least the memes are good

For some reason, we all have this sense that the current system we live in is the final form of society, the best way that we’ve found to organise it. Our in-built status quo bias makes us psychologically resistant to even acknowledging that shit is going south, for fear that we might have to face the uncertainty of change—and we’ll prefer a dysfunctional present to that, any day. We’ll choose any other coping mechanism—anything but look the truth dead in the eyes.

We’ll deny and rationalise it away. Things will fix themselves, we say. It’s not so bad. If only Trump weren’t in power—if only the taxes were lower—if only we could get our hands on enough crypto—if only we all went vegan—if only we were all woke—everything would be fine.

We’ll romanticise the past. We’ll start dreaming about making America great again, about reverting to some imaginary golden age, the return of some imaginary great leader—because the future seems so damn uncertain. I’ve heard people say they wished we could reinstate communism, but do it right this time. I’m sure in some rooms, people say that about fascism, too.

We’ll try to escape. If everything’s going to shit, then why bother? At the very least, we can get our kicks before the whole thing burns up in flames—we can do our drugs, drink our alcohol, smoke our cigarettes, binge-watch our shit-ass Netflix shows, scroll endless Instagram reels, buy exquisitely murderous designer bags. We’ll probably not even notice that even our ways of escape are in-built into a system of controlled pressure valves.

We’ll try to win the game. If this is the system, then why not try to win? Why not, like my friend says, go balls to the walls? We’ll go for the promotion, go for the money, go for the fame. We might try to escape the generalised chaos by instilling absolute order within the limits of our own little lives—I’m a gym rat, I’m a biohacker, I’m a longevity bro, I have my ashwagandha and cordyceps every morning. Have you heard about our good lord Andrew Huberman?

We’ll go extreme. Far right, far left. Or maybe God was the answer all along—and we come full circle back to our parents’ religion, which at some point we rejected, but can’t quite remember why. We might become a full-on yoga girl. We might shave off all our hair and move to India.

We’ll give up entirely. We might stay in our job but ‘quiet quit’, pretending to care when mentally we’ve already clocked out—because why should we give anything of ourselves to a meat grinder system always tries to take more and never says ‘thank you’?

Capitalism is glitching—hard

So here we are, in what feels like the peak of materialism, consumerism, class divides, exploitation, globalisation, environmental destruction, yawning at news about aliens coming out of the ocean while worrying about whether we can actually afford gel manicures. I’m no political analyst, but fuck me, does all of this feel like a strange soup to be swimming in.

We live in a culture so fragmented that there isn’t even a counterculture. Celebrities are so afraid of being cancelled that they don’t say anything remotely controversial. We have no hippies or beatniks. Just millions of microcultures, microinterests, microgroups, adding up to a macroculture of overwhelm. What should we look at, pay attention to, focus on, when all of life demands our attention in 7-second increments at a time, when our brains were designed to pick berries and eat them in quiet, fire-lit caves?

Would it really be crazy to think that maybe this is not capitalism gone wrong, but capitalism reaching its final form? It all started as fair value for value; but in a system as corrupted by vice as communism once was, what we complicitly signed up for once is not what we’re getting today.

This paralysis we’re feeling is someone else’s profit. For 9 out of 10 of us, this quagmire will serve well to make us passive and disengaged. There’s too much to care about—so we stop caring. We keep going to work, keep paying taxes, keep shuffling Netflix for something, anything, oh dear God, to watch.

So what should we do? What do we do? I don’t know. I have no answers. As a writer, I guess, I’m writing about it. As friends, I guess, we need to start talking about it.

So tell me—do you also feel the world is ending?

The Dark Exotica Newsletter

Thanks for reading this week’s exploration. Each Thursday, we look more deeply into ourselves and the world, finding beauty in the dark through creativity, philosophy, and art.

Subscribe now

Let’s Connect

Want to connect outside of Substack? Feel free to find me on Instagram at @Teodora_Miscov or on my website www.teodoramiscov.co.uk.

It’s uncommon for me to walk into a place and feel humbled.

But when I saw the lotus-like formations of the Angkor Wat shape up against the lime green sunrise, the wild sounds of the rainforest waking up with me, the strangest mist rising from the damp ground, I knew I was about to witness more than just another archaeological site.

As the sunlight coloured in the details of the towers’ intricate patterns, I witnessed a statement about more than art and space and architecture; I witnessed something that was great on a momentous, bone-crushing scale, monstrous in its beauty.

Throughout my five-hour tuk tuk tour of the grounds, even as my soul swole up in me with all of these emotions… I still found myself thinking stupid thoughts.

My trousers don’t fit me well enough. I should’ve brought more sunscreen. Mom and I shouldn’t have had that shady Amok from the restaurant on the corner.

What I realised was that I couldn’t get over myself even for the few minutes required to be fully present in the face of true greatness.

It made me think… Can any of us actually enjoy this the way we’re supposed to?

Little intermission—here is a video I made after visiting Angkor Wat for the first time:

Your Little Self Meets The Big Juju

If you observe a random sample of tourists, even in a place like Angkor Wat, you will largely notice the same day-to-day behaviours repeated: taking selfies with smiles that disappear after the last flash, stealing stray moments to sit down, gaping at the sights quickly, moving on quickly. Even I sometimes catch myself on autopilot, nodding at the ancient friezes like they’re a YouTube ad I can’t skip.

We know we’re not in some second-rate museum, and that this isn’t the best way to enjoy such a place. When we planned the trip, most of us will have clicked ‘confirm booking’ with a mental image of ourselves in rapture, reaching some touristic level of Enlightenment upon arrival. We’ve waited years, lifetimes, to see these wonders of the world.

And yet, when we get there, ticket in hand, our own humanity gets in the way—we woke up too early and are too sleepy, we skipped breakfast to see the sunrise and now feel nauseous, we’re annoyed that our travel partner hasn’t been generous with the contents of their water bottle.

And even if we do manage to get over ourselves for a minute, it’s not too likely that we will connect with the majesty of Hindu cosmology or that of Suryavarman II. It’s more likely that we will have bought into a conveyor belt tour, found ourselves hurled from temple to temple, told some spark notes version of what we’re seeing, and hurried off to the nearest gift shop.

It’s not like we’re not trying to enjoy ourselves. We have the best of intentions. It’s just genuinely hard to stop our mind’s addictive overthinking pattern loops, and to figure out to do the touristic thing without shooting ourselves in the foot. All this bullshit gets in the way.

But maybe trying, despite our limitations, is the point.

And this is what I love the most about us humans: we try. We go to these things. We put our tired asses on uncomfortable thirteen-hour flights. We forget the conveyor belt experiences of the past in hopes that this time, we will steal one clear glance of that beauty we feel imbue of life every day.

Many were the times when I glanced over my shoulder to see a man and wife marvel at the Acropolis.

Many are the times when I saw children widen their eyes at the monkeys in Bali.

Many are the times when I nearly cried watching the face of someone who, in that perfect moment of recognition, managed to ignore their hurting feet and connect with what was in front of them: their own beauty.

And if our eyes ever intersected in that moment, I’m sure that it’d be worth dealing with all of the bullshit of the world.

The Dark Exotica Newsletter

Thanks for reading this week’s exploration. Each Thursday, we look more deeply into ourselves and the world, finding beauty in the dark through creativity, philosophy, and art.

Subscribe now

Let’s Connect

Want to connect outside of Substack? Feel free to find me on Instagram at @Teodora_Miscov or on my website www.teodoramiscov.co.uk.