Attempt twenty two

I met a man last night that I swore was a djinn. Eyes a dark brown, lightening when amused. An artist dabbling in the esoteric. His room an artist’s room, metal bowls with coffee and brushes to paint with, parchment paper with half-finished sketches spread across the old wood floor. A woman’s head, half painted, in the fireplace.

On the cushions on the floor, he wrapped himself around me and squeezed. His arms found all the hollows, wrist meeting waist, forearm tucked behind the small of my back. His mouth buried in my collarbone. Like some kind of animal, elegant, unrelenting, carnivorous. All I could do was surrender to the sensation. Feel my body unfold. Close my eyes. Allow myself to be devoured.

It took me a while to fall asleep next to him. I couldn’t relax. My foot would jolt, breath would catch, and I would wake with a start. In the morning, I felt hollowed out. I think he took something from me. He had drawn a new sketch late in the night, which was left on the table. A woman, whose gaze was direct but expressionless, confronted the viewer, hair the same shape mine had been in the shadows on the wall the night before. Guarding her, almost claiming her, was a tiger, mouth carved into a snarl. There was a calmness in their composition. And a mystery. Some distance that could not be traversed.

Everything is all wrong. I’m lost in the endlessness of this feeling. That the boat won’t right itself. That it will continue to be this hard. And so I run headlong into the kinds of experiences that I think will help wake me up, but if I’m not careful, I could just get eaten up instead.

Attempt seventeen

Watching someone die isn’t like watching them ‘slip away’ or seeing ‘the life fade from behind their eyes.’ It’s watching them get lost. They start to cross over and speak to the people they see there. ‘My mother and father are fine, thank you.’ They point, and gasp, and want you to look at what they see. The rivers of milk and honey. The terrifying face of the angel of death. The simple biology of a failing heart. An arm raises, then falls.

Not waving but drowing

One of my first memories of being in the water is my dad teaching me how to swim. There was a communal pool in our apartment complex in Avalon Cove. One summer, when I was 5, or maybe 6, he took me to the deep end. I had bright orange bands cuffing my upper arms and shuffled my way along the side to where it marked 6ft. An inch above my father’s head, if he stood flat on his feet.

I don’t remember the next part perfectly. Sometimes in the memory I have the bands on. He tells me to leave the side and I kick my feet frantically, thinking I’ll sink, and through unnecessarily fast pedalling, I stay afloat. It is a miracle to me, that through effort, my chin mostly stays above the water.

Other times, the armbands have come off. I kick off from the side and immediately sink. Panic, or survival, some innate human knowledge, drives my legs to kick. I stutter up to the surface and my dad’s hands are under my armpits, face solidly above water, spluttering.

I used to teach children how to swim. When learning how to make effort, they would sink, then panic or instinct or both would drive them back up again. Their little mouths would sputter, and their eyes would widen, maybe with fear, maybe with amazement. An acknowledgment that they were still alive, that they had learned something new about themselves, their small bodies and what they could do.

I want to know what my body has left to learn. I can walk, run, squat, lift weights, kick, swing, swim. I wonder what the echo of my belled foot against the ground would do. How the sound might travel up my ankle, calf, thigh. The ringing of 50 brass bells in my chest cavity. The two-piece band of my heart and my foot, chiming in time.

I want to know what my body would do next to someone else’s. What my eyes could do if they tried. What my hands could do when inspired.

My body is in control of my mind right now. When I was seventeen I had discipline. I am twenty seven and barely have the discipline to keep myself alive. To make good meals, to sleep on time, to put warm clothes on, to read something, to write. My hormones slide up and down an invisible scale and my emotions sing themselves out of my mouth, which is an obedient player to an autonomic conductor.

I sit up in my sleep. I forget to breathe. My heart slaps my ribs and my legs tingle when I sit. The join of my shoulder crunches as the ball moves within its socket. I feel dried up. The gears grind as I neglect to grease them, the doors groan and creak. I could dry out into dust if I just stopped moving.

Attempt thirteen

When I was a kid, my dad told me that I had this ability to make things happen. If I set my mind to something, if I wanted something, if I said I would make something happen, it did. Perhaps it’s in my name - Amani, Arabic for aspirations, desires, dreams. Something you want to come true. It’s been a characteristic that’s shaped my life so far. This year, I have felt a veil slip down. I know I want to do a lot of things. But I have stopped making them come true.

This year, also, a new emotion has come to characterise my life. Anger. It is a hand guiding mine as I move, a whisper that echoes up my throat like smoke, lingers at the edge of my words. I see it in my eyes when I catch a mirror. It accompanies me on walks, to work, to the bus, up the stairs to my front door. Anger is not new, but this anger, the way I catch it, the way it sticks, is new. I am scared of my own thoughts sometimes. What I want to do, where my thoughts go. How they have turned a corner into an alleyway and led me through mazes until I am so deep, that when finally look up, I realise I don’t know where I am anymore.

If I tried writing them so that they stuck somewhere else, would they stay? Here’s one: when I think of the man who raped me when I was seventeen, I imagine walking into his first gallery exhibition and taking a bat to his paintings. Pieces of frame shattering, glass flying. I imagine his face as he looks at me, hair airborne, panting, bat in my hands, and the force of my gaze nudging him a step back.

Here’s another: I’m in a bar in New York, and by chance, or by fate’s hands weaving our strings into another point of convergence, he walks in. He sees me at the bar counter. There is a bottle next to me. I feel his eyes, and my head raises. When I see him, without thinking, the neck of the bottle is in my hands, the body smashed against the counter, my feet are on the floor. His features have rearranged themselves from recognition to surprise and finally released themselves in fear - not at the jagged bottle in my hand, but at the expression on my face.

I know that my mind is powerful. I have made so many dreams come true. I am now coming to realise what happens when my mind comes up against itself. This reflection is a terrifying thing. If I were to break the mirror, I would only see its glare returned to me a thousand times in the glass. It is something that must be spoken to, touched, held.

Someone that has been stripped of their power is a terrifying thing, indeed. There’s much to be said about letting people take your power from you, that power cannot be taken, only given away. But I call bullshit. I have built back so much of my power, I have proved to myself that I have it. But I still feel this one sliver missing. This one piece that I gave away when I was young and naive and didn’t know better. When I was able to be manipulated so easily. When I was vulnerable and thought I was offering my love.

Giving someone love is giving away power, but it is returned when the person you give it to turns it into something else. The scale equalises, then disappears. Every relationship is a balance of power. I wish I didn’t see it like this. I can try not to. Every relationship is an opportunity. Or a missed one. For a friendship, an alliance, a love. I find myself walking past a missed opportunity every Sunday, feeling strange in the knowledge that I made that choice. That two paths really did diverge in a yellow wood, and I chose one, and I’m walking on it right now, and I will follow it til its end.

And also, that I have currently stopped at a crossroads, where I have been for nearly a year, and that my brain and my heart are telling me which road to take, and that my feet wont move. Behavioural science, from what I understand, is predicated on the fact that someone has to want to do something in order for them to do it. Or that they have to dislike the alternative enough to make them choose what you want them to choose. What am I doing? What do I want? What do I not want? Why can’t I move?

Attempt twelve

Sometimes you have to look into your past to understand how to go forward. I’ve been to two hometowns now and they both told me to move on. The past is a liminal space. It’s real and unreal, comfortable and awkward, familiar and alien. I’ve heard many times that nostalgia is an ache, but I understood it properly this time. When I stepped out onto the platform of Newark Airport station and took the train in the wrong direction, to New York. And I thought about the train going the other way, taking all the stops, Secaucus, Elizabeth, Linden, Rahway, New Brunswick, Princeton Junction.

I’m not sure the past is so seductive. How is it that even when I was longing to leave West Windsor when I was 16, I look back at 26 and see the sun drenched summers, the coolness of the pool and its iridescence as I exhaled my way down to watch the light drip through the oxygen bubbling back up to meet the sky? Two teenagers fooling around in the woods behind the library, a boy in a suit holding a bundle of flowers with all our friends giggling in the backyard, the waft of wisteria in a little pink room, the golden sheen that hit the curtains in the evenings, the sound of crickets, a cornfield, a swingset, cul de sacs, mailboxes with the flags up, open spans of grass we stood at the edge of, thinking we’d live forever?

I look at the boy now and he’s a man. The boyfriend in the woods is now a terse ex who likes rock climbing, the sight of a pool spins my breath into a series of puffs that lurch up the side of a ferris wheel, small towns make me nervous, the high rises around Avalon Cove make the bricks look duller, the World Trade Centres aren’t there anymore, it’s all strange. My feet know the way to the threshold of an old home but can’t step inside. I thought pure intuition would help, that I would just know where things were, but I didn’t. My body doesn’t know anymore.

Here, I feel uprooted. The metro takes contactless now. The exhibit of Impressionist art in the Guggenheim has almost stayed the same. I went to say hello to the boys. Van Gogh, Degas, Gaugin, their faces were all still there, but the placards had changed, with words like ‘colonial’ and ‘awareness’ neatly lettered on the walls. It’s funny, somehow.

There were some new places, too. A graveyard, where I had to remind myself that people are never really gone, that the people I love are right here, that my feet carry the memories of all the roads I’ve walked down, that every street light and train ride and shopkeeper are in my front pocket. That if I close my eyes, my body on the ground, the ceiling keeping watch above me, I can feel them pulsing in my wrist, my my temple, my neck. God is closer to you than your jugular vein.

Attempt eleven

I’ve been watching my friends go through friend breakups and now it’s my turn. I have become so disenchanted, so unenamoured, with him. I have fallen out of love, it has rotted on the tree, I wait for the wasted fruit to thump to the garden floor.

It’s an empty feeling. The last time I fell out with a friend was in high school, and we were both young and didn’t understand each other and if I knew how to hold them the way they needed to be held the way I do now, maybe we would have stayed friends. But my friend is ten years older than me and I thought he was grown up, that he knew.

What’s hard is seeing how you’re perceived in the reflection of someone’s eyes and knowing there’s nothing you can do to make them not see you that way. That for my former friend, people come and people go and that’s life. To be any other way is to be melodramatic. I have so few close friends. I count them on two hands, perhaps even just one. To have someone who knows you, who you ate countless dinners with and smoked endless spliffs with and laughed the kind of laughs that double your body over, simply say ‘I’m doing good’ and move on without you. It is a specific and cruel kind of heart stab. Because you have to be cruel back, at least to their face. You have to make your eyes go vacant and wear your heart like a fist and swallow every feeling to maintain the void between you.

I don’t want to want anyone who doesn’t want me. The first man I knew in my life taught me, is teaching me, the art of letting go. It’s not the art of losing; that’s too hard to master. It’s learning how to let go with grace. I don’t know how to do it. This is it, though, at the ripe age of almost 27, I am going to have to learn how to let go or be dragged or have my hand torn clean off. I don’t want to be torn apart. My mind needs to reconnect to the broken bluetooth of my fingers and prise them off, one by one, do not stick around for the ones who have already abandoned you. Abandoned is a strong word, but so is friend, and I feel ill, nauseous, that I have lost a friend. That he’s revealed a side of himself, has been revealing it, really, and I’ve been choosing not to see it, or at least hoping it wasn’t as bad until finally, last night, he came out of the shadows and I saw his careless face for what it was.

I do not offer my trust readily. I believe it’s something one has to earn through their actions and behaviours. But the day I met this man, I trusted him, because he was living with me, because his actions were more than divine. He watched a queer variety show with me and brought up a bottle of champagne; he made five star risotto; we ate it on the balcony and drank a Sardinian spirit so blue it was purple and played guitar and wrote under the dim London stars. He insisted on cooking and eating together. He taught me how to play chess, 20 years after Katie Harlow tried to show me and I refused to learn. I never beat him at a game, though every time, I came closer. We spoke about love and black holes and went to Istanbul and fought and laughed and debated and listened.

Small cracks appeared over time. How he didn’t understand my mental health when it took a turn. The judgment in his eyes when I took a month’s sick leave. Casual mentions of running to meet his first love if she ever reached out to him, even though he was beginning to see a girl. I hate disloyalty. It disgusts me. His placid face, his calm words, his lack of knowing, disgusted me. I don’t know what to do with this feeling, or how to purge it from my body, or how to move. Tonight, I just feel waves of nausea, waves of sadness, waves of disgust. I feel a jagged edge, a broken bottle, a terror rising, a soft breath blowing the foam back down into the pan.

Attempt seven

Every day around 5pm I feel the beginnings of a panic attack. It’s usually when I’m working from home, at the wind up of the day, when meetings disappear from my schedule, and I’m alone with my thoughts again. The panic attacks reappeared after years of dwelling quietly elsewhere. They started during the end of my old job, for rational reasons. They were a sign I had to leave. That was something good about them. The symptoms are different this time, as far as I can remember. Heart beginning to pound into a crescendo, then a relentless drum roll, morphing from rhythm to hum. A drone, perhaps like a raga box, opening its mouth to emit the sound of dread. The unconscious connection between my brain and my lungs powering down, and then gasping for air once my body realised I hadn’t been breathing.

I’ve learned to welcome them as a friend - I try, at least, to let them enter my home and sit down. It’s when I ignore them, forget to ask if they want a glass of water, that they tap at my shoulder like an errant child, peering around my chest with their hands whimpering at my waist. My stomach churns. I feel the acid burning inside me and find it astonishing that the strongest acid known to us exists in a perfectly formed cavity in our torsos. I’ve trained my mind to remain calm-ish. I’ve learned that smoking too much makes them come on more frequently. Covid, another cursed blessing, has forced me to reduce how much I smoke. When the attacks are bad, I feel my arms and legs go numb, then a pain in my chest. I’ve learned to prove to myself that it’s not a heart attack by breathing in deeply. The doctor said that if the pain worsens, that’s not a good sign. Sometimes the pain remains and I scare myself for a moment. Then I breathe again, because I have to, because that is still what my body knows to do even when my mind forgets, and the pain is the same or it slows, and I repeat this again and again and again until it goes.

For a while, I would look at my arms and legs and they would seemingly swell before my eyes. I would be in the shower shaving my legs and see my calves blossom before me, the flesh rising like dough. I’ve become so pale, the colour of atta. I would have to look at myself naked in the mirror, focusing on my legs through the lens of my eyes and not the lens of my racing mind, and stay there until my eyes had convinced me that my legs were the same, that actually over time I’d gained weight, and that this was the new circumference of my calves. And they were beautiful legs, perfectly good legs. I still do this, though my body balloons less frequently now.

I am too scared to go to the gym. To exercise again. And now it makes sense as I write this, because the first time I ever had a panic attack was when I was a swimmer. I had been swimming professionally for years at that point. I’d just had to beg for my spot back on the swim team because I’d taken off one season - one season! - to try crew. When I came back there was a new coach who said I wasn’t dedicated enough and denied me a place. I had to go convince him I was dedicated, that I’d just wanted to try something new. The truth was I’d felt bullied by a cadre of white girls on the team and I’d left for a fresh start. But I loved swimming, I loved the quiet discipline of it. I loved the feeling of my arms cutting through the water, my ankles flexing, the heady flip at the end of the pool to push off and spiral back to the starting block. I always thought I would come back to it. So I begged for my spot back on the team, and the coach assented.

When I got back on the team, I felt like I had fewer friends. I pushed myself hard in training to compensate. I was one of the fastest on the team, killed my first meet of the season. But when I emerged from the water after a race and made my way to the coach, pleased that I’d smashed a previous personal best, he simply looked at me and said ‘what was that?’

After that, things just weren’t the same. I couldn’t go to practice. I didn’t know why, I just couldn’t. And because I couldn’t articulate it, I frustrated my mother, who was paying ridiculous amounts of money for me to attend practice 6 days a week, 3 hours a day. I feel frustration at myself now. I’ve gained so much weight. In some ways, I enjoy it. I like the fullness of my thighs, the rolls on my stomach. But I feel weak. And sometimes I don’t like it, I want the pouch of my lower stomach to disappear as it pushes through my jeans, a small half moon refusing to wane. I sit at home and do nothing. At the beginning of the pandemic I went for 6 mile walks every day. I enjoyed them and the peace of mind they gave me through a period where I was dissociating. Being outside, looking at the Thames, seeing the lights on the other shore, the children walking past me, the people with their dogs, felt good. I gained weight then too, even though I wasn’t eating enough - I had no appetite. It turns out I had hormone problems after coming off the pill. I gained 20 pounds and someone close to me said they were worried about my health. The audacity of it, when I live in a four story walk up and was going for such long walks every day. It wasn’t about my health, it was about appearing anything other than slim.

I think working out would be good for my anxiety. But again, I just can’t seem to do it. I tried to behavioural-science myself into starting. I tried an app. I’ve been told to just do five minutes, and see how much I enjoy it. I’ve been told it closes an anxiety loop, brings closure to the moment. But I just don’t want to. I’ve asked myself why so many times. But it’s the same as swimming before - I just can’t. Do I need closure, somehow? Maybe I need to email that old shithead coach and tell him how I feel. What he did to me. But it’s not just him, is it - he was a trigger, nothing more. I don’t want to give more power than he deserves. I don’t think he is worth enough, don’t want to make him a main character in the story of my life.

Maybe it was the shock of being denied something I thought would always be mine. Maybe he told me a new story about myself, that I wasn’t dedicated. It was a shock to me. In almost every area of my life, if I think something is important I will throw myself into it. Loyalty is a value I put much stock in. Commitment is loyalty to something - to craft, to excellence, to the pursuit. When I want to know something I have 20 tabs open. When I was at practice I pushed myself so hard. Every time I think of the things I used to do I blow myself away. You would, too - an hour in the gym followed by 8000 yards in the pool. Practice before school, classes with wet hair, competitions afterward, followed by late nights studying for exams, cooking my own simple dinners.

And the thing was, I was shit at the beginning. I was the slowest on the team. I got in by a miracle. I got lapped every practice. But I went, every day, and I did the reps and I ran the miles and in two seasons I was moving up groups. I kept pace with the boys. I was placing at meets. I got my varsity letter. I became captain of the team. And then I left, because the pool was no longer a safe place, I no longer laughed hanging off the ledges between sets with the girls, we didn’t talk in the showers anymore. I know I don’t remember much. I probably, definitely said the wrong things, reacted in unhelpful ways. But what I remember is the feeling of being different, and alone, and when I left and joined crew I found new people and a new sense of enjoyment. I liked working my way up from the third boat to the first in a season. I beat everyone in the six mile runs we did. How could I not be committed to the things I wanted to do?

I hate that I have been believing this story about myself for so long. That a part of me agreed with that coach when everything I could see with my eyes told me otherwise. And how cruel, to say that to a teenager, an impressionable kid! I was fifteen, FIFTEEN. I wasn’t training for the Olympics. Even then I knew I would never get there, because as much as the Olympics are about hard work, they’re also about luck of the biological draw, but I never wanted to get there, either. I just wanted to be better than I was yesterday, and that’s the god honest truth. That’s how I live my life now, too - my north star moves but it is always there. I try new things and realise what I like and don’t like, what I’m good at and what I’m not. I learn about myself through the act of doing and then I just know what to try next. If it resonates with me, I continue on that path.

There are so many forks in the road. I take them one at a time. I don’t have a five year plan. My dad always told me ‘do what you love and the money will follow.’ Capitalist, but true. I’ve followed my gut and done what felt right and I’ve ended up here, in a wonderful place, with knowledge and skills and experience that, when I look back and connect the dots, make sense. I was meant to end up here. I was meant to be this person. And I didn’t get here by planning the whole journey out. I went out in the city and got lost. I wandered into relationships and jobs and wandered back out again. I meandered into a flat with a view that mirrored the one I had when I was eight and have stayed here for six years. It’s time to leave soon, I feel. The path is turning into a place I don’t want to go and I’m about ready to switch tracks.

I don’t know if this will help me begin to work out. The truth is that I have to do it. I know that the path I want to turn on is the one where I feel strong, where I can lug a suitcase up four flights of stairs and only take a few moments to catch my breath, to be able to ride my hips fluid over my lover’s lap, to feel a different kind of sexy. I can appreciate the body I’m in and resent the feeling of disliking it. How could I dislike it when it is so luxurious, when I can feel the ampleness of it? When studying art history we learned about the emotional power of a curve, how something about them automatically conveyed sensuousness, movement, life. Again - passion. Animus. The desire to be alive. I don’t want to erode this, I don’t want to become smaller by being smaller. I don’t want to subject myself to the court of other people’s eyes, I don’t want to give people the power to make me feel beautiful, desirable. I can desire myself, in a way. I don’t want to let anyone take that from me, because I think it’s important to want yourself.

I started writing again after so long. I switched paths, or at least decided to try another one, by taking up screenwriting. I watch a lot of Netflix with the subtitles on. I can’t help but pay attention to the dialogue, learning what I admire, what I think is too discursive, the clever things you can do with sound. I started this blog because I thought long form might be a better medium for my current thinking. A friend suggested I try writing a lyric essay. I’m getting excited by what I’m writing and want to write more. I feel it bubble up as I speak to people at work, my friends, the urge to tell them my theories and ideas. To share, to see their reactions, to engage them. I want to tell the whole world what I’m thinking. So I think this is the right track to stay on, for now. I can criss-cross between paths and pave a new hybrid and it’s really all up to me. If I want to do it, my body will. Today I lay on my dirty kitchen floor without a mat and did five minutes of yoga. I felt good and wanted to do more. I stopped. I hope the desire to do more will stay with me through tomorrow, and that I will act on it. If the track works, I’ll do it again, and again, and maybe then I will be off on a little adventure to somewhere I don’t know but look forward to meeting.

Attempt five

I’ve been irritated all day and have been trying to form a narrative about why. Lata Mangeshkar died over the weekend. Like many other sad diaspora kids, her era of music was one of my key connections to an amorphous notion of a motherland. All very nostalgic and deeply nuanced stuff to get into with power dynamics I need to learn more about to discuss, but suffice it for now to say she was the soundtrack of my childhood. I used to adore the music videos her voice was dubbed over, 11am Sunday watching on Zee TV with my mother. Sometimes my Nanijan would make a spritely face and sing her songs while she was cooking. My mum and I would shriek classics to each other in the car - she even does it now when I’m upset and she wants to cheer me up.

I don’t know the specifics of classical Indian music (and I’m sure that once I got into the research, I’d uncover lots about what classical means in terms of being dominated by a particular region - even music is political. And also that I’m definitely not using the right terminology at the minute and some Western umbrella term - apologies for my limitations, it’s something I want to learn more about). But I know that whatever I listened to when I was growing up continues to echo within me. That Lata Mangeshkar’s music is important to me because, for better or worse, it is part of who I am.

I was in the kitchen yesterday with some friends who are white and European. I told them I wanted to play one of her songs because she had died, and that she was a legend. Instinctively I knew to preface the song with a caveat, that their ears might do as so many other virgin ones have done, and reject it as shrill and dissonant. I mumbled something and pressed play. Immediately, their faces confirmed what I had worried about. This could have been confirmation bias except that one made a face as soon as Lata Mangeshkar started singing. He said the music was good but that her voice was too high. The other remained silent, and when asked what he thought simply said ‘she’s a legend.’ Politely neutral, likely covering displeasure. I could be wrong, but am I?

I turned the song off not halfway through, even though I’d initially said they had to sit through the whole thing. I wasn’t one of those kids who grew up embarrassed by the smell of my food at lunch, or who disliked wearing a shalwar kameez in front of their peers. Second-generation Asians were a majority at my school. But for the first time I felt a shock of real embarrassment, and that in turn made me feel shame. Why did I stop the music? Why did I not show that I valued my own culture by just letting the song play out, sit in the discomfort regardless?

I guess I thought it was too much. I’ve personally always felt afraid of being too much - too loud, too dramatic, too opinionated. I felt the same about the song - I thought it would be these things too. The yawping of the strings that ‘you wouldn’t expect’ to be in any kind of Indian music. The high pitch. The showtuniness of Bollywood. But then I got angry. My friends play Irish sea shanties all the time. They sing Italian ballads in deep registers, too low for me to ever sing along to. They fall in love with them for weeks at a time, play them at every opportunity. I give their music a fair try; sometimes it even grows on me. Some nights I ask them to play something else. But I give their music a chance.

Not that I don’t like it, but I’ve grown up on Western music. You don’t really have the option of ignoring it when you grow up in the UK or the US. In addition to the qawwalis and filmi music, my parents raised me on a diet of Missy Elliot, George Michael, Justin Timberlake, The Chumbawambas, Aaliyah, Tears for Fears, and good old Sting. The first artist I ventured out to ‘discover’ on my own was The Strokes. These two had the privilege of ignoring the music I’d grown up listening to. They didn’t know how ragas sounded, that the lyrics were poetry, that so many Westerns musical references used our music as their reference point (The Beatles, to name a big’un). It seemed so unfair.

‘Unfair’ might feel like a childlike reaction. I have to remind myself that how I feel isn’t unwarranted or childish. Music is an incredible gateway into culture. I could partly enter the worlds of my friends, but at that moment I felt they had no interest in entering mine. And didn’t I deserve to be seen? Didn’t I get to show them the sonic backdrop of my childhood? Sure, they might not have liked the music in the end, even after giving it a fair go. But I don’t need validation in the form of enjoyment - I just wanted to be able to share it with them.

Even now I wonder if this is too dramatic, too much. It’s just music. But music is the thing that makes your hair stand on end, calls your skin to taut attention, sends waves of pleasure through the center of your skull. It’s the beat of our hearts, the pounding of our feet as we walk, the metronomic cadence of our swinging arms. It’s at the core of us, in whatever way we experience it. Of course it’s important. So of course it’s worth sharing.

With all this being said, @discostan shared a post about Lata Mangeshkar. It said that in life ‘she was deeply tied to the RSS and the fascist ideology that is tearing India apart today. She was a lifelong diehard acolyte of Veer Sarvarkar, a key architect of Hindu supremacy, an open admirer of Hitler who believed non-Hindu citizens (especially Muslims and Christians) should be subjugated, and went as far to justify the rape of Muslim women as a political tool. She sang the theme song for Rath Yathra, the nationwide campaign for the destruction of the Babri Masjid. And beyond that she suppressed the careers of other singers, especially those of Muslim women, most notably Mubarak Begum. These are not rumors, and there is documentation of these facts available for those who want to search for them.’ I wonder how a woman who sang so beautifully of Allah could with the same breath, from the very same lips, support these things. It’s incredible how much people are capable of holding, of being, all at once.

This isn’t about cancel culture. Those who have said truly terrible things are never driven away from the spotlight- they remain on the book tour and talk show circuits, publish their crummy thought pieces in major media outlets. Their views, as ‘cancelled’ as they are, are heard and even amplified. Lata Mangeshkar received a state burial. She is known, loved, and honoured by many as the Nightingale of India, including by many Muslims, including by those who do not know these things about her, including by those that do and love her more for it. Even with her contradicting beliefs and actions, her voice still paved a path that allowed me to return to the amorphous, problematic, yet only notion of ‘home’ that I knew. Even though I know the concept of a homeland is made of sand and social constructs, is Gilroy’s undesirable ‘root’ instead of ‘route,’ it still meant something to me. What comforts me a little is knowing that despite her views, Lata Manganeshkar still consistently had my God’s name in her mouth. I wonder if that’s a form of rahma.

Another text we studied at university was ‘Death of the Author’ by Roland Barthes. In a very generalised nutshell, his theory posits that an author becomes irrelevant to the text when the text is in the hands of a reader. A reader will always understand a text in their own way, no matter what meaning the author wanted to impart. If you want a rough example, think about a tree. The tree that pops up in your head will be different to the one that appeared in mine. We could be thinking of pine and palm trees, or even linguistic and family trees. Even when we specify parameters and are told to picture an evergreen, the colours, textures, sizes, etc are different in our minds. If we can’t even picture the same damn tree, how are we meant to share the same understanding of terms like ‘love’, and esoteric texts like the Qur’an and the Bible? So in the transference of text from writer to reader, the power to shape the text isn’t with the author anymore, and their influence is present, sure, but their intention, what they ‘really meant,’ in some ways becomes irrelevant. Readers might want to study the life of the author to see if it informed the text, but it won’t really matter because that’s just one way of interpreting it and there are an infinity of other ways to read it, none of which are objectively better or worse than the other. Although perhaps they are subjectively better or worse, depending on the context you’re reading in, or because of what you’re looking to understand. Perhaps it matters sometimes. Is this one of those times?

Another question we ask a lot these days is ‘if the author is deemed ‘problematic’ or ‘cancelled,’ does that mean we ‘can’t’ consume or enjoy their work anymore?’ I think the answer changes all the time. There are too many contextual factors to consider, which we must consider all over again every time we have to ask the question. Will consuming the work profit the author? To what extent? Are we perpetuating an ideology if we consume their work? Is it our fault if we didn’t know about the author before consuming the work? Does their life impact how we understand the work, and to what extent if so? Can our consumption ever be truly passive? Are we making accurate decisions on whose work we want to consume if we don’t have all the facts? Will we ever have all the facts? Are the facts the right facts or misinformation? What if someone has been beloved (by whom?) for a long time, and then suddenly a scandal shows up, even after they’re dead? What if they meant something personal to me, or someone I love? What if I grew up listening to it? Do I have to stop? Do I continue listening with the knowledge of their (alleged or proven) misdeeds? Does that make me a bad person? Do I have to look someone up every time I listen to new music? Will the time I take to do that mean I have to listen to less music and lose the experience of flitting from artist to artist, of concentrating on the sound? Is this a realistic thing to expect a person to do? Is it a question of realism or of values? Should this be the role of the music industry? Who are they to judge someone’s life and decide whether their music should be made public? What if the people making those decisions are not representative of the majority voice? What if they are - and the majority is violent? If we compromise and only carry out due diligence sometimes, what’s the criteria to decide on when ‘sometimes’ is? What questions have I forgotten to ask? What questions don’t I know to ask? What is ethical consumption, indeed? The minute I think I’ve arrived at an answer, it is already departing.

Lata Mangeshkar directly quashed the careers of Muslim women, dehumanised them as war collateral. In some ways, she also unconsciously empowered them - the ones who turned to her music for comfort, and strength. Her songs held these Muslims and so many others as they grew up in London through the 60’s, gave them a glimpse of some kind of culture that they would reference as an aspect of their ‘home,’ ‘culture,’ and ‘identity.’ It’s hard to weight these things - but is it? Shouldn’t the dehumanisation of so many people point to an obvious decision? Can you in any circumstances justify people’s suffering? The answer, for me, is no, but I think it’s possibly the wrong question. Lata Mangeshkar’s positive influence does not ‘justify’ the harm she caused. But her positive influence also doesn’t have to necessarily be judged, or balanced against her harm - we could just hold all of these things at once, understand them all to be facts about her. Again, that’s a choice - one person may feel and choose that they can suspend judgment and just take the good for the good, the bad for the bad. Others may see this as trying to claim neutrality…but in the words of Desmond Tutu, ‘If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.’ They might feel we need to make a judgement, because only in naming what we find right and wrong within the current context of the binaries and social constructs of the world can we enact the changes we want to see.

On a personal level, I’m struggling to decide which kind of person I am. Or rather, I’m struggling to decide what choice to make, which will inform what kind of person I am. I don’t have some neat conclusion to reach yet - and perhaps never will. I know I don’t feel right giving up Lata Mangeshkar’s music entirely because of the personal value it has to me. Maybe I can download it from somewhere and keep it as a file so I don’t add to the streaming money her estate gets - risk mitigation, harm reduction. Perhaps this is still too close to neutrality.

I want to be the kind of person that can look at a situation and recognise the good in it - though not in a way that trivialises or minimises harm, or over-emphasises the good. That’s as far a conclusion as I can reach for now. Like the end of a cassette tape, my thinking loops back again and again to one point: the songs she is singing, the deity she is calling to, respectively come from the poetic traditions of Muslims, and the religion of Islam. Even in the stark ugliness of her beliefs and actions, even though it was not her intention, there was something she did that I thought was beautiful, that was good. And as much as I can’t escape the harm she caused, it feels wrong of me to see only the harm, to deny the humanity I find in her songs. How even listening to them now, I see myself with my mother, singing in the kitchen.

Attempt four

I feel like a rhizome. I know Paul Gilroy said ‘routes, not roots’ but man, searching for routes is hard. Hybridity can’t be black and white. Sometimes I feel like being brown is being in the middle. That being hybrid is being a never ending series of hyperlinks.

It’s messy, this. I don’t want to be a buffer race. I want to think being South Asian means more than being an in between of white supremacy, of anti-blackness. Isn’t there something unique about the position we are in that means we can offer something else? But everyone is an in between of something. An in between of all the infinities which means we’re never the start or the end. In the social construction of binaries, of us and them, of seeming opposites. We know what it’s like to be oppressed and the oppressor. Our culture is one of the OG melting pots, as far as my knowledge of history goes - but isn’t almost every culture in human history? But I get caught up in cubist thoughts again, some of which are right for the moment, some of which are not. I’m looking for a thread through this. A truth. But maybe hybridity means there isn’t a thread anymore. That all of the truths are the truth. Maybe we have to be comfortable with all of the angles, the different faces of the polygon, even if there is an infinity of them. It seems like there are so many opinions and yet there are only two remaining polarised, fixed twin stars that we fluctuate in between. I want to escape their orbit but I can’t because I am made of them. What do we do?

I am a part of everything and everyone that I’ve met, so who am I? What is a rhizome? We studied it in university and I just revisited the theory to see if maybe I can find some answers. The paper says that the tree is the ‘dominant ontological model in Western thought, exemplified in such fields as linguistics (e.g. Chomsky), psychoanalysis, logic, biology, and human organization. All these are modeled as hierarchical or binary systems, stemming from the tree or root from which all else grows.’ Like family trees, trees that show the split in country and blues music (‘explained’ on Netflix has a fascinating episode on this), filing systems. The paper then goes on to say a tree ‘does not offer an adequate explanation of multiplicity. A political implication of the tree is that it reinforces notions of centrality of authority, state control, and dominance’.

A binary is just a narrow point of view. Zoom out and you will see it’s part of a wider network. A rhizome is a bit like a root system. Perhaps if you are in between two particular branches, rather than only looking from side to side, we have an opportunity to look up and down and see all the other roots around us. ‘Unlike the tree, whose branches have all grown from a single trunk, the rhizome has no unique source from which all development occurs. The rhizome is both heterogeneous and multiplicitous. It can be entered from many different points, all of which connect to each other. The rhizome does not have a beginning, an end, or an exact center… Although a rhizome can be broken or injured in one location, it will merely form a new line, a new connection that will emerge elsewhere.’ We will always be somewhere within an infinite system. And because it goes on forever, it doesn’t really matter where you are in it. What matters is that you know you are part of it. And your place is to be within it.

I’m uncomfortable with the idea that existing in an infinite system means that things don’t matter. Things, on whatever scale, have consequences and impacts. And I think part of our humanity is knowing when to zoom in and zoom out, to see things from different perspectives. I’ve been so lost within the cubist thoughts. Lately I’ve been shapeshifting too quickly across different planes, and before you know it I’m whiplashed. I know that when I zoom to the level of our world, that the very arbitrary binary we’ve decided to live between has real consequences for the people living in them. That makes me angry, and I fight against it. Sure, if I zoomed to the level of the whole system, we would scarcely register. And maybe I should not bother engaging in the injustices I see and just do whatever I can to enjoy my time here. The universe is violent. Galaxies are born a dime a dozen, stars swallow themselves, their scars pinprick the fabric of space time. You can’t (yet) sew up a black hole. But I don’t want to split the cosmos with the horror of my actions. To tear my part of the collective soul apart. We are bound to each other. Our essence is tessellated together and we are both fractions but also composites. It’s just about the level you’re seeing it at, and where you derive meaning from.

‘Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above the ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away–an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost the sense of something that lives and endures beneath the eternal flux. What we see is blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.’ In a way, this is how I understand Allah, and how we can all have godly elements within us. Allah is the rhizome - the all encompassing being that, because it is made up of everything, is Al Hakeem, Al Waasi, Al Basir, Al Aleem. I’ve always loved how you can call Allah specifically through their different names. Everything else will always exist without us. That continuity is God. No matter how far the universe or universes expand, God will always encompass it all.

This is the thing that gives me peace. The thing we try to conquer is nothingness. We try to find ways above it, around it, but never through it. It’s strange then that the thought of dying, and of simply ceasing to exist, doesn’t seem so bad. Perhaps I’m trying to convince myself that I’m content my body will find its way into other things - the bellies of worms, soil, nutrients, roots. We are born to be generous, to give away every single part of ourselves. It is embedded into our DNA. And so that we are not born to die but rather to live, we seek passions, reasons to be alive, reasons to be present in this form before shapeshifting into the next one. Even nothingness has a shape. It’s delineated by all of the things that are.

Attempt three

I’ve discovered another angle in which I lack self-awareness. It’s the fact that I’m good at things. Even that start sets me off negatively and I feel trapped by it, this hand again that is pushing my head down constantly. I don’t like saying I’m good at things. I say I can do them. I can facilitate. I can host events. I can write papers. But I don’t say I’m good at them.

This became very clear today at work. My probation’s coming to an end and I was having a conversation with my line manager (LM). For context, the last place I worked was godawful. I started having panic attacks, I took a month off of work for stress, I felt that no one valued me, and I saw and was subjected to racism. Those words don’t come close to covering what happened. I wish I had some clever way to put it, some way to show how bad it was succinctly, but there is no way, and that isn’t the point. The point is that I came into my new role at a new company feeling broken.

We were partway through the conversation and I was poking and prodding at things and she must have heard it in my tone because she stopped me and said not to look for things that were wrong, because the reality was everything’s fine. That they ‘adore’ me. That I add so much. She listed off example after example of things I had done not just right, but well, and praised me for learning so much so quickly. She wanted to trust me with big projects once I had fully adjusted to the company and the new line of work.

And I started to cry. I told her it was hard to believe. That in my old place of work, they had left me alone. I said that. ‘They left me alone.’

It’s true. I had colleagues at my level, more people of colour who understood, but I didn’t have what I needed to do my job well. No team, no resources, leaders unable to understand and therefore address the problems. And yet I did it well. My mother told me she was proud of me for the work I did and the way I left. She said I learned so much and did good work. She said so many people of colour put their heads down and walk away, but I held every last one of the people who did me wrong to account in a respectful way. I didn’t let them get away with it. When I was younger, mum told us not to start fights but to always finish them. I finished it.

For the last real month in my old role, anxiety and the beginnings of what was likely depression had made me sluggish and avoidant. I worked slowly, stretching things over weeks. No one checked up on me enough to realise this. I was away from my computer putting on loads of laundry, checking my phone, looking out the window. I felt guilty for putting things off for so long, but the truth was, even if I did, who would know, or care? I called the doctor and he signed me off for two weeks, then another two. During this time I searched for new jobs. I looked for roles that paid lots and in organisations that shared my values. All I knew was that I needed to go somewhere would support me, in the corporate sense. I came back with a job offer and my resignation letter.

I thought so lowly of myself during this time. I thought I’d lost my work ethic - because my role is about anti-racism, and I had spent so much time not working and therefore not helping the people I was hired to help. And I wanted to help them. But as the eternal RuPaul says, ‘If you can’t love yourself, how the hell are you gonna love somebody else?’ I don’t fully believe that - you can still love them, still help them. But you can’t do it as fully as you could if you were at 100%. And my mum pointed out all the good things I did in my role, including at the end. She said that even the way I left would be helping people of colour in the organisation. Maybe it’s true. Maybe even if I couldn’t do all I’d wanted to do, I’d still done enough for someone.

My LM told me the other month that I had an incredible work ethic. I had to pause and reflect on the amount of work I had done since I had joined. And how well. There were minimal comments on my work. People trusted me to do more and bigger. My opinion was actively sought, and valued. And I even did it in a way that apparently made people feel I’d been there forever, a comment I heard multiple times. I do have an incredible work ethic. I just need to be well and healthy to make full use of it, which is more than reasonable considering that’s what all of us need. And I do have a good work ethic. Even in my life - the things I need to do are done, almost always in a timely manner. When I have a few down days, something inside me rouses itself and shakes me by the scruff of my neck. A matron rolling up her sleeves and declaring, ‘right, what’ve we got then?’

This inner voice seems to zing up when I’m at my lowest. I don’t know what it is. Apparently I’ve always been feisty. I slapped a girl for beating me at cards. I got the boy who cut me in line into a headlock. Even when I was 3, my dad threatened to throw all my video cassettes in the bin and I yelled ‘do it!” For as long as I can remember, I’ve always had the instinct to fight, which comes through in many ways. I like to challenge, I like to provoke, I like to debate, I like to be at the front. In a way, it’s even become my instinct to defend - to fight for the rights of people like me, people not like me. It’s become my instinct to preserve myself. Even at the brink of the darkest time in my life, when I could have ended my life through sheer apathy, I stepped back from the edge. I cleaned my room. Oiled my hair. Cooked something.

It’s in me to fight, for life, for the things I want, for the people I love. It’s something that’s seemingly always been at the core of who I am, and I’m lucky this was nurtured, mostly in a good way, by those around me. I’m learning to use it for the right reasons. Not letting it flare out naked from its jar. But I have a feeling that sometimes letting the leash go isn’t always a bad thing. Because I’m reacting for a reason. My thoughts will catch up.

I used to hate when people called me passionate. I thought it was a microaggression, a stereotype of a woman showing animus - you wouldn’t call a Wall Street broker passionate, you’d call him motivated. But I mind less now because it shows I’m alive.

Attempt two

All throughout the day I think things I’d like to write down. Then I sit down to write them and they disappear. It’s symptomatic of my life at the moment. One minute I think I have something nailed. The next minute, it’s floated out of my reach. I feel like I’m constantly grasping at dandelion seeds. You know the way they seemingly have their own air currents and disappear the minute you reach out to catch them?

I hate starting things. I can’t believe I formed such a strong opinion in a millisecond. But I think I’ve always been hasty. I don’t always think things through. Or I begin as deep in as possible because I don’t want to consider the start. I just say or do the thing and qualify it later, flesh it out, give it edges. It’s how I begin everything - projects, papers, even the way I speak.

It’s not that I don’t finish things; I do. I’d like to be more considered, although the first entry to this blog was a whole thought process on why I even started writing it. But I didn’t plan it, I just wrote the first thing that came to mind. I feel that way when I talk - like spilling the water but still filling the glass.

Maybe all the things I thought will come to me if I keep writing. Maybe I’ll articulate the things that really ‘mattered’ because only the things of ‘value’ stuck. But Gee and I told these students that what you think matters and to write it down as soon as you think something you want to remember. I think of Mad Men and the episode where Kinsey loses his big idea and struggles all night to remember it, and when he sheepishly goes to face Don in the morning he simply replies ‘It happens.’

How do things just happen? Isn’t there some kind of dandelion air current swirling events toward you? Do you step into their paths? Where is the agency someone must have exerted somewhere to propel it into being? What is behind the thing that will happen? What was behind the thing that happened? The first question is for strategists and king’s hands. Consultants. Writers. The second is for over-thinkers and psychologists. And of course there are overlaps in that venn diagram. Because everything has multiple sides.

I watched a tv show where they said that if you could visualise all possible outcomes then you will never be surprised. In my work I am trying to understand every angle but at some point I lose track. I am holding a cube with so many sides that it’s become spherical. These days I’ve been approaching conversation this way. What is this person needing from this interaction with me? Do I offer solutions or emotional support? What do I have the energy to give this person? What do I want to give them? If only one of us can get what they need, how do I respond? Will they register me putting my needs above their own as a quiet aggression? If I think this much before responding, does that make my answer inauthentic? What would my gut instinct even be before I’d morphed it into a cubist thought? Why is my view of conversation so transactional to begin with?

I learned about critical theories at university. I still can’t read a book without some kind of Marxist, post-colonial, feminist filter popping itself over the page. It feels like someone is shoving my head into the text like a bully shoving their victim’s head into the toilet. With all these perspectives swirling around me, more currents, I’m becoming tired and tired of myself being tired and tired that I am becoming the protagonist of an American bildunsgsroman who is ironic and self-aware but not aware that their self-awareness can never be all encompassing. That the one thing they can never truly be aware of is how other people perceive you. Who still thinks they can really put themselves in another’s shoes. We might connect with people, share similarities, but our experiences are singular. It’s things like that which make me feel really alone. I wish I could unknow it. I want to suspend the filters for a moment and see a moment for what it really is. But now I know there is no objective reality and boy is this getting trippy but there is no ‘what it really is’. It’s 11 pm and it’s fucking subjective.

Attempt one

Everyone’s started a newsletter. That’s a fact. But I don’t want to start a newsletter, or a Patreon. I like a good old fashioned blog. A diarised version of my life, for the public to see, circa the 00s. The rule is they have to start with some kind of nauseating introduction, something self-reflective, a reason for existing. I guess all good companies and books and movies have something at their centre that drives them.

I think I’m doing this because putting something on the internet forces you to have accountability - at least, that’s the first thing they taught us in school when it came to computer literacy. The current British PM might prove otherwise. But all of us who write for others to see know this. Although when there’s so much information on the internet, I wonder whether what I write really matters at all. That’s another thing all writers worry about- at least, the ones who even have a hope of being good. Although maybe that’s not true. I’m sure there were many self-assured white men writing treatises by candlelight thinking they were the shit. And it’s presumptuous to think I know what makes a writer good, as if there is an objective good.

The trouble is that I can’t seem to find my voice. Or rather, I keep second-guessing it. Writing right now, I think of Carrie Bradshaw. I think of my friends writing newsletters that ping into my inbox on the same day each month. I think of the clever ways they frame their thoughts, how they have punny section headers and points of view. I could go tumblr blog, all teen earnestness. But even that rawness is contrived, now, and I hated reading Catcher in the Rye in high school exactly because of Holden Caulfield. And then I cringe at myself for referencing Catcher in the Rye at the big age of not-eighteen-anymore. It’s like the catch-22 of phoniness. Why is it that your intense dislike holds a mirror up to you? Why do you become a phony when you’re trying so hard not to be one? Why do I have to write in public at all? Because I have so little discipline that even writing one page - one page! - in the journal I’ve kept by my bed for months in the hope that one day I will simply look over and pick it up, and begin, just hasn’t happened.

Jacob Sam-La Rose told me that if musicians have to practice every day, why shouldn’t writers? I wholeheartedly admit that right now I feel rusty. And a little silly. A middle school teacher taught us to write lists of ideas when responding to a prompt, because your brain gets out all the dead leaves and ‘easy ideas’ and toward the bottom of your list there appear the supposed gems. But I’ve already stopped and started at least three times and I had to make the decision to stick with something and keep going.

Discipline is something I used to be familiar with. Now, I feel like I don’t even honour my own word to myself. A corporate lady came in one day to teach the BAMEs how to be leaders. She said we had to start by honouring our own words to ourselves. ‘If you say you’re going to get up to go exercise at 8am, you have to do it. Because otherwise, you’ll let yourself down. And you’ll be teaching yourself that you can’t trust yourself.’ Apparently you can re-draw the contract with yourself, but all that negotiating must take a toll too at some point.

Self-awareness is really fucking annoying. I have to start writing from somewhere, so I guess for now, I’ll have to write like a phony. Maybe that’s my word to myself - I’ll use adverbs when I should make the verb sing, I’ll start with ‘And’ all the time to sound breathless but that is how talk, I’ll write too many long sentences in a row and forget to break them up with short, punchy ones. And it will all be worth it because I WILL HAVE WRITTEN SOMETHING, HA, TAKE THAT, I TRICKED YOU INTO WRITING SOMETHING and at the bottom here is the Big Thing you learned! Like a fifth grade teacher who gets you to write sentences, then shows you that if you break up the lines it becomes a poem. And you get so excited by the magic trick that you keep doing it and doing it until you become an expert in sleight of pen. If you trick yourself into doing something, does that mean you’re also breaking your word to yourself?

There are words on this page, which is more than I had fifteen minutes ago. I don’t know if I feel any better for it, although the physical sensation of typing a big bloc of words always feels satisfying. Do people use Twitter as a tool to learn conciseness? I think I use it to learn how to be funny. I envy the people who are able to fire off two sentences that are so pithy and perfect that half a million people react. As you can see, I’m not able to do that. But maybe it’s because I’m enjoying this so much, and really, it doesn’t matter if you read it, because what really matters is that I put it out for you to see.

So I’m gonna…do what I want. That’s the modus operandi - no discipline here besides the discipline of putting words on a page. I don’t care about the ideal blog post length to make sure people read to the end, or catchy headers, or even a name. I might post twice a day. I might do a drunk post at 2 am - whey! I’m going to use more than my lifetime’s share of exclamation points, what the heck are you going to do about it? I don’t even mind if you don’t get all the way down here. I’m not gonna know. Unless you come at me for coming at you about exclamation points, and then making a bad joke about it.

I’ve tried to behavioural science myself into discipline. It’s not working, and I’ve come to the obvious and yet somehow-only-now-obvious-to-me point that I just don’t want to do the thing. Or, haven’t wanted to do the thing. Right now, I’m actually enjoying this. That’s how it always is, isn’t it, that you forget how good doing something you love feels and then you do it again after a long time and wonder, why did I stop doing this? Maybe I felt like I didn’t deserve to do it. Where did I develop that judgment, or maybe even the word is self-loathing? I forgot what it felt like to write, to shed the words and feel like I’m saying something, and it doesn’t really matter what, because I’m saying something. Maybe that’s a dangerous path. But maybe it’s one we all have to take when we’re writing, even in private. We feel like we have something to say, something worth enough to record. And in the records, maybe someone else will know us. Even if we say it’s just for us, but don’t say ‘burn my journals’ before we die. Although if you’re reading this and I’ve just died, please burn my journals. Or don’t, if you think they would mean something to you. And please don’t think I’m planning to die anytime soon - I like living very much, and I still have a lot I want to do. But as a concept, I’m almost 100% at ease with death when I think about it. My God is merciful and that’s really all there is to it.

I guess you can’t really talk about writing without talking about creation, and with creation there is always some form of life and death. I wrote that thinking ‘what a pretentious thing for a 26 year old to write and does that even mean anything’ but it’s satisfying to connect this little thing, these little words, with all of creation. Even on a simplistic level. I was watching a YouTube video about space with Gio on the couch and the narrator said that if the universe is infinite, every single thing you can imagine will happen. There’s no higher or lower in that, there’s no better or worse. Anything I write will have something ‘better’ than it, and ‘worse.’ And within that there’s no point in trying to see where you are in the rankings because it genuinely doesn’t matter anymore - there will always be an infinity of things you’re simply in between. That’s the space I’d like to write in.