a ramble, because the words flow best when the clock chimes midnight. also because i’m incredibly busy right now and i so wish that i could write properly.

sometimes i feel so overwhelmed i just have to sit on my bed and bang out a mini essay to clear my head. this was one of those days.

resurrected from an abandoned draft on my notes app, written at 12:19am, 18 months ago on 29 november 2021, so confused it’s cute.

now the words are kind of silly, but sometimes it’s good to look back and smile too.

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the jagged runways we choose to walk on, the fragile armour we encase ourselves in, the corners of our lips we so forcefully tilt upwards despite the inexplicable urge for them to droop like wilting flowers trying to survive their last days.

these become the daily mundanities of life; they show how we present ourselves to the world, to the point where the culmination of numbing pretense and minor dissatisfactions make us lose sight of our true identities.

i write and i write so that perhaps words will form sentences symbolic of the remnants of my broken self; i try to make sense of the world by encapsulating bubbles of escaping emotions into neatly packed passages so that perhaps one day i will finally understand what my existence means and what i am meant to do in the world.

i note the use of the phrase ‘meant to do’, implying a future that has already been decided for me, that there are pre-existing ideals of what one should do. i do not enjoy entertaining the fact that our culture of thought interferes so much with individualism – it’s almost disturbing to realise that so much of what goes on in our head comes from the ideas and expectations decided and passed on by generations ahead of us; yes, there have been slight modifications due to societal progression but our thoughts are ultimately not our thoughts.

i have to dig deeper into the roots of construction to understand why we think and feel and act the way we do. instead of detangling my thoughts, this in-depth scrutinization of life opens me up to even more questions and leaves me all the more bewildered – and some may argue that it is counter-productive but even though the entanglement of questions exacerbate my jumbled state of mind, i need to know. i need to know everything in the entire world. and i only have time for this if i am not stifled by these aforementioned daily mundanities, if i don’t have to live in a world of pretense (and i try not to), if only life didn’t keep throwing obstacles at me.

mum and i in new york, waitrose bag and all; dishevelled but we’re dressed up!

i came to write about the simultaneous beauty and the atrocity of the world because if there’s one thing i know, it’s this: as long as there is one good thing that life offers, then life is worth living. i cannot continue sinking into the realms of self-pity and despondency because the more i succumb myself to this sort of negativity; the more it pulls me in like quicksand and the harder it will be to get out.

i’m struggling to stay afloat – the last thing i want is to drown.