my body so flourescent under these lights

[iwaslisteningtotherain]

15 years later

All I think about, when I look back on those times, is how such things would no longer be possible now. And how much I wish they were.

I used to be semi-tumblr famous. I started this blog in 2009, back when my life was very boring, and used to post a bunch of zoomed-in or overexposed black and white photos of myself coupled with bad poetry. in 2010 it saw me through various petty teenage dramas and then i started writing about left-wing politics and gained quite a following. i ended up fully radicalised, thanks in no small part to this website. i ended up running off to london and joining a commune, if you would believe it. 6 september 2010, i left my parents' house. i thought it would be forever. i lived on a commune in parliament square for a few days then went off to one in hounslow. i sat around a fire. i smoked drugs. i hung out with other runaway teenagers. i went to squat parties. i had several guys on the go at a time - all older than me, which is a bit problematic when i was 16, but i was enjoying myself. i met this turkish guy, who thought he could improvise playing the piano, and fully believed i had fallen in love. he dumped me after about a month and i was fully heartbroken. i looked him up on linkedin and he works for danish refugee council now. good for him.

anyway. i don't know if anyone i used to know in 2010 would ever come back to this out of curiosity. i honestly don't wonder about what happened to most of you. well, a couple of you, i do. occasionally. if you're still around, feel free to reach out.

i'm going to preface this by saying that it's not entirely a story of sadness or decline - or perhaps, at all. i'm not where i would have wanted to be in some ways but then in other ways, i'm in a better place than i imagined. things i wanted to happen haven't happened, but some good things happened that i never dreamed of, and some things i wanted have happened.

it's just that... globally, it is a story of sadness and decline, isn't it? and that's why i've been thinking about 2010 so much nowadays. i feel like back then, i was an angry 16 year old and i was positively desperate to find injustices in the world but there just weren't that many, were there? i mean, there were but... it was nothing like it is now. the rise of fascism. the decline of any respect for human rights, individuality, civil liberties. the rise of white supremacy. like, when israel first bombed a hospital in gaza, everyone was shocked and tried to claim it was hamas. then israel bombed all the hospitals in gaza and everyone was just ok with it. israel burned hospital patients alive and everyone was ok with it. israel killed ambulance workers and buried them in a shallow grave with their hands ziptied and everyone was ok with it. ice just shot a woman in the middle of the road and everyone's OK with it. but i'm not making this post to say things about politics which we all know or should know anyway. i just remember that in 2010 i was desperate to see the world as unjust but the UK and US at least were nothing like they are now and i had to work really hard to see it as that bad. whereas today we do live under fascism, not like what a teenager living in liberal capitalist society thinks fascism is, but actual fascism. and in 2010 it felt possible to run off to live in a commune. it felt possible to have hope, and to reject the system, and to say that my profession will be to sit around smoking and playing the ukulele and cooking over a campfire and painting, and that's going to change the world, and i could just do it, and i did, and i was unharmed.

anyway... anyway. yeah. i came back to school after the commune. i went to university where i made lots of friends and had a lot of fun. but after university, i didn't have as much as i thought in common with those people and i don't talk to most of them now. i was lonely in london after that. i qualified as a solicitor. in 2020, i met my half siblings and instantly hit it off with them and their many children and they are both my best friends and my family now. in 2021, i got into a toxic relationship which only lasted a year and a half before i stopped being an idiot, thankfully. i specialised in refugee family reunion law because it allowed me to get people out of literal warzones. i did get people out of literal warzones. i became quite good at it. i got into a situationship with a french violinist who i idolised back then but who now i'm realising may have been a bit of a narcissist. i've made really deep friendships with other immigration lawyers, who know the struggle. i was terrible with money and bought way too many designer handbags. i've sold them all now. i had an incredibly toxic boss. i got really into brazilian dancing and went every night. i've felt lonely a lot. i mostly eat supermarket ready meals. i've spent too many nights sitting in bed watching netflix. i somehow made friends with a posh group and occasionally get invited to balls.

anyway. i meant this to be a sad post because i do feel sad, a lot. i wish the world could go back to how it was before 7 october. i guess i want to preface this with acknowledging that I'm not Palestinian and will never know how tht feels. but being on the phone to people who were there, hearing bombs going off in the background, getting to care about them like i care about my own family and about myself, and then how it just went on and on, it got worse and worse, remember that picture of the girl's body which was torn in 2 and hanging off a fence? maybe you don't, because so many other horrors have happened. it created a permanent sadness in me. how could it not do? what other appropriate response is there? and now, the rise of fascism. i mean, i find what is happening in the us terrifying but of course, i'm not there, the thought that really hurts me is the erosion of refugee rights in the uk. i wish that karen from stoke on trent with the dead eyes could maybe look beyond her petty concerns for a second and wonder what it's like to have escaped from a prison in eritrea and then gone on to libya where you're detained in a massive warehouse with your child, raped and then you die of your injuries and leave your child alone. or to be a woman in afghanistan with no education, no work, not even able to leave the house alone. you know, in may we had the island of strangers speech, then we had the riots outside the hotels and the england flags everywhere, then they ended the right to refugee family reunion (or tried to), now they are saying refugees won't get the right to stay permanently for 20 years, and it's not just that, it's how you and the people you defend are constantly being portrayed as grifters, dishonest, immoral, criminal. you end up second guessing yourself. you can't present cases in the way you used to, unapologetically, because there's something in the air, isn't there? it's kind of a permanent hopelessness, now. a feeling that things are bad and they will only get worse. that this is a precursor to the complete erosion of the right to be a refugee.

anyway. i'm also incredibly burnt out. i'm sick of the drudgery of my work and the bitchy colleagues who belittle and undermine, i'm sick of the constant ridiculous home office refusals and their sheer stupidity, i'm sick of not having enough money to live comfortably, of being so emotionally exhausted by work that all i can do is doomscroll and rewatch my comfort show on netflix. i am starting a new job in october 2026, it's training to be a barrister, at... the best place, you know. i mean, it's great. it's great. but it's in immigration and... well firstly i'm exhausted by it and secondly i can't really escape the feeling that it's an area of law in its dying throes. that such people won't have access to the law soon. that there will be failure, decline and depression, that you will get cases where you are desperate to help the person but you just can't. i am going to be taking 6 months off work and fucking off to brazil for 4 months to dance. i hope i emerge from that rejuvenated and you know, all the things i always say i should be but never quite manage. like going to bed at a reasonable hour, and eating healthy, and showing up every day with a smile and a can-do professional attitude, and making time for enriching pursuits outside work. and being happy. but yeah. yeah. i do think that ultimately whatever happens in immigration law, being a barrister is inherently an exciting and interesting career. because i've been bored with my life for a while.

what else? well, i'm 31 now. i'm anxious about my weight and my face looking older and my cellulite and why did i dye my hair blonde, it looks crap. today i literally cried thinking about how ugly i am, and now i think that's actually quite funny. i still don't have a boyfriend but well, if you've made a good-faith attempt at finding one but all the men you meet are so fucking boring, what can you do? like....... that kind of lets me off the hook of being unwanted, doesn't it, because i have tried and i've gone on the dates and i've indulged in boring conversations witn boring men that are all the same and honestly, i would step over all their corpses for a packet of crisps, i would. but if you've made an effort and you have had offers but none of them are people you could bear to spend an hour with, let alone a lifetime, isn't it ok to be single? like, i love cats, and i love interior design, and i just want to buy a flat with a little garden for the cat (or even better, a bonded pair) and design it beautifully and actually cook nice meals and have people over, and freeze my eggs, and just like let that be enough, for once.

anyway. there's no great lesson to be gleaned from this. well there are historical and political lessons to be gained from my experiences, sure, but they are unfashionable. what's happening in the uk now is bad and it's going to get worse and there's no oh but it will make us stronger, and we live in interesting times, it's just shit, becuase it's just a place where everyone is poor and racist. in terms of personal life lessons from the last 15 years all i can say is that time goes on, and unexpected things happen. like sometimes unexpected things that are utterly heart breaking and sometimes, unexpected things which are good, which even i, firmly a pessimist, may have to acknowledge.

[queengreendown]

[iwaslisteningtotherain]

The connection works in the other direction, too: if you think that cruelty, for instance, is more important than other vices, that will already lead you in certain political directions. Judith Shklar, like her heroes Montaigne and Montesquieu, thinks that cruelty is more important than anything – that it comes first, as she puts it. She is good at detecting cruelty. She finds it, for instance, in the heart of some philanthropy, but unlike others who have made that discovery, she does not give up hating it. Moreover, unlike some others who hate cruelty, she is alert to the dangers of that hatred: in particular, its ready decline into a desolating misanthropy which can itself be a source of cruelty. It is essential to hold back misanthropy, which can destroy almost any virtue. What holds it back is not merely benevolence, or any other virtue; for Montaigne, it was uniquely friendship that ‘resists that avalanche of disgust which can at any moment overwhelm anyone’.

Resisting the Avalanche - Bernard Williams review of Ordinary Vices, Judith Schklar

[teesatztexte]

i am so determined to fall more in love with life. intentionally romanticising the walks i am on, the birds chirping, the blooming nature around me, the water in my cup of tea turning from a light peach tone to a dark pink, the poetry i write, the things i am learning, my handwriting, dozing off while sitting in ront of my window, all of it and more. I have to take a closer look at the little things that make my heart beat faster.

[iwaslisteningtotherain]

We say 'never again', but somewhere someone is being tortured right now, and acute fear has again become the most common form of social control. To this the horror of modern warfare must be added as a reminder. The liberalism of fear is a response to these undeniable actualities, and it therefore concentrates on damage control. [...] Given the inevitability of that inequality of military, police, and persuasive power which is called government, there is evidently always much to be afraid of. And one may, thus, be less inclined to celebrate the blessings of liberty than to consider the dangers of tyranny and war that threaten it. For this liberalism the basic units of political life are not discursive and reflecting persons, nor friends and enemies, nor patriotic soldier-citizens, nor energetic litigants, but the weak and the powerful. And the freedom it wishes to secure is freedom from the abuse of power and intimidation of the defenseless that this difference invites. [...] The liberalism of fear, on the contrary, regards abuse of public powers in all regimes with equal trepidation. It worries about the excesses of official agents at every level of government, and it assumes that these are apt to burden the poor and weak most heavily. The history of the poor compared to that of the various elites makes that obvious enough. The assumption, amply justified by every page of political history, is that some agents of government will behave lawlessly and brutally in small or big ways most of the time unless they are prevented from doing so. [...] The liberalism of fear in fact does not rest on a theory of moral pluralism. It does not, to be sure, offer a summum bonum toward which all political agents should strive, but it certainly does begin with a summum malum, which all of us know and would avoid if only we could. That evil is cruelty and the fear it inspires, arid the very fear of fear itself. [...] What is meant by cruelty here? It is the deliberate infliction of physical, and secondarily emotional, pain upon a weaker person or group by stronger ones in order to achieve some end, tangible or intangible, of the latter. It is not sadism, though sadistic individuals may flock to occupy positions of power that permit them to indulge . their urges. But public cruelty is not an occasional personal inclination. It is made possible by differences in public power, and it is almost always built into the system of coercion upon which all governments have to rely to fulfill their essential functions. [...] Systematic fear is the condition that makes freedom impossible, and it is aroused by the expectation of institutionalized cruelty as by nothing else.[...] What the liberalism of fear owes to Locke is also obvious: that the governments of this world with their overwhelming power to kill, maim, indoctrinate, and make war are not to be trusted unconditionally ("lions"), and that any confidence that we might develop in their agents must rest firmly on deep suspicion. Locke was not, and neither should his heirs be, in favor of weak governments that cannot formulate or carry out public policies and decisions made in conformity to requirements of publicity, deliberation, and fair procedures. What is to be feared is every extralegal, secret, and unauthorized act by public agents or their deputies. And to prevent such conduct requires a constant division and subdivision of political power. The importance of voluntary associations from this perspective is not the satisfaction that their members may derive from joining in cooperative endeavors, rather their ability to become significant units of social power and influence that can check, or at least alter, the assertions of other organized agents, both voluntary and governmental.[...] Nevertheless, it should be remembered that the reasons we speak of property as private in many cases is that it is meant to be left to the discretion of individual owners as a matter of public policy and law, precisely because this is an indispensable and excellent way of limiting the long arm of government and of dividing social power, as well as of securing the independence of individuals.[...] No form of liberalism has any business telling the citizenry to pursue happiness or even to define that wholly elusive condition. It is for each one of us to seek it or reject it in favor of duty or salvation or passivity, for example. Liberalism must restrict itself to politics and to proposals to restrain potential abusers of power in order to lift the burden of fear and favor from the shoulders of adult women and men, who can then conduct their lives in accordance with their own beliefs and preferences, as long as they do not prevent others from doing so as well.[...] To call the liberalism of fear a lowering of one's sights implies that emotions are inferior to ideas and especially to political causes. It may be noble to pursue ideological ambitions or risk one's life for a "cause," but it is not at all noble to kill another human being in pursuit of one's own "causes." "Causes," however spiritual they may be, are not self-justifying, and they are not all equally edifying. And even the most appealing are nothing but instruments of torture or craven excuses for it, when they are forced upon others by threats, and bribes. We would do far less harm if we learned to accept each other as sentient beings, whatever else we may be, and to understand that physical well-being and toleration are not simply inferior to the other aims that each one of us may choose to pursue. [...] This liberal prescription for citizenship, it is now often argued, is both a very unhistorical and an ethnocentric view that makes quite unwarranted claims for universality.  [...] To judge inherited habits by standards that purport to be general, even though they are alien to a people, is said to be an arrogant imposition of false as well as partial principles. For there are no generally valid social prohibitions or rules, and the task of the social critic is at most to articulate socially immanent values. All this is not nearly as self-evident as the relativistic defenders of local customs would have us believe.[...] Unless and until we can offer the injured and insulted victims of most of the world's traditional as well as revolutionary governments a genuine and practicable alternative to their present condition, we have no way of knowing whether they really enjoy their chains. There is very little evidence that they do. [...] A concern for human freedom cannot stop with the satisfactions of one's own society or clan. We must therefore be suspicious of ideologies of solidarity, precisely because they are so attractive to those who find liberalism emotionally unsatisfying, and who have gone on in our century to create oppressive and cruel regimes of unparalleled horror. The assumption that these offer something wholesome to the atomized citizen may or may not be true, but the political consequences are not, on the historical record, open to much doubt.

Judith Shklar, The Liberalism of Fear

[iwaslisteningtotherain]

Students and patients who have had consensual relationships with, respectively, their professors and therapists, tend to report similar emotional consequences, particularly the feeling of having been betrayed.... The betrayal in question is not a lover’s betrayal: the therapist or professor need not have cheated on or lied to the patient or student. Rather, it is the betrayal of the trusted authority figure who fails to live up to the implicit terms set by the therapeutic or pedagogical relationship. The student is betrayed...not by the sex itself, but by the “corruption of [teacherly] love” it represents... The student is not only, in the eyes of her professor-boyfriend, transformed from a student, whose needs he is meant to serve, into someone who is meant to serve his needs (his errands, his ego). She is also transformed in the eyes of her academic community as a whole She is unable to relate any longer to her other professors as her teachers; they are now her boyfriend’s (judgmental) colleagues... The problem with professor-student sexual relationships is not that they can involve no genuine love. It is that they involve the wrong sort of love. Speaking as a teacher to other teachers, bell hooks commands us to “[t]hink: how can I love these strangers, these others that I see in the classroom?” The love hooks is speaking of is not the exclusive, jealous, dyadic love of lovers but something more distanced, more controlled, more open to others and the world—though no less love for that... When a student’s desire is inchoate—do I want to be like him, or to have him?—it is easy for the teacher to settle it in the latter direction. And it is similarly easy when the student (wrongly) thinks that sleeping with the teacher is a means to becoming, or a sign of already being, like the teacher (“he wants me so I must be brilliant”) or when the student (wrongly) thinks that sleeping with the teacher is the best she can have... I am not saying that teaching can or should be entirely free of narcissistic satisfactions. But there is a subtle and important difference between enjoying the desires one ignites in one’s students before, or at the same time as, turning them away from oneself— and making oneself their wholly consuming object... Adrienne Rich famously described the institution of “compulsory heterosexuality” as a political structure that compels all women, regardless of their sexual orientation, to regulate their relations to women in a way that is congenial to patriarchy. One mechanism of that institution is the tacit instruction in how women should feel, or interpret their feelings, about those women they admire.... but another mechanism of compulsory heterosexuality is the instruction women receive in how to feel, or interpret their feelings, about the men they find compelling. Here, women are taught that it is not envy they feel, but desire: you must want him, it cannot be that you want to be like him. Regina Barreca, speaking of and to women who ended up as professors, asks: “At what point . . . did the moment come for each of us when we realized that we wanted to be the teacher, and not sleep with the teacher?”... The professor’s failure in such cases—that is, most actual cases of consensual professor-student sex—is not simply his failure to redirect the student’s erotic energies toward its apt object. It is a failure that involves taking advantage of the fact that women are socialized in a particular way under patriarchy—that is, socialized in a way that conduces to patriarchy—for the satisfaction of his narcissistic gratification. On a feminist understanding of workplace sexual harassment, its harmful effects are not merely contingent—not merely a matter of women having certain consistent psychological responses to certain patterns of male behavior. Instead, as Lin Farley argued early on, it is the function of sexual harassment to harm women in these ways: to police and enforce their subordinate roles both as women and as workers. Similarly, Vicki Schultz has argued that many prevalent forms of workplace sexual harassment are “designed to maintain work— particularly the more highly rewarded lines of work—as bastions of masculine competence and authority. Is it such a stretch to think that the function of the widespread practice of male professors making sexual advances on their female students is to impress on women their proper place in the university? That, insofar as women are allowed into the university, it is to play the role not of student or would-be professor, but of sexual conquest, fawning girlfriend, emotional caretaker, wife, and/or secretary?

Amia Srinivasan, Sex as a Pedagogical Failure

I feel worryingly seen by this...

[wellconstructedsentences]

“Something very beautiful happens to people when their world has fallen apart: a humility, a nobility, a higher intelligence emerges at just the point when our knees hit the floor.”

— Marianne Williamson

[iwaslisteningtotherain]

What can I say but thank you?

[naasirheydari]

It is will of heart that saves. Not discipline or strength. Even if you are completely sick, blind, and lost, desire for the good will hook into your heart and one day, you’ll wake up cured.

[penswordpress]

Strange to think that even today, when confronted with the autonomy of the Black movement or the autonomy of the women’s movement, there are those who talk about this “dividing the working class.” Strange indeed when our experience has told us that in order for the working class to unite in spite of the divisions which are inherent in its very structure-factory versus plantation versus home versus schools-those at the lowest levels of the hierarchy must themselves find the key to their weakness, must themselves find the strategy which will attack that point and shatter it, must themselves find their own modes of struggle.

Selma James, Sex, Race and Class (via penswordpress)

[akaleidoscopeofbutterflies]

A single event stole my teeth from my face My half moon i wore for a year was taken from me I need a new conversation Yesterday was a day i never prayed for but i was most thankful for Blessings disguised as late arrivals How many times i have prayed - may this be a turning point If i may tell one truth I have not lived a life i determined for over 4 summers I need an honest conversation with myself about preparing Why prepare for autumn or summer or spring when you see seasons from behind a window? Inside a cave you do not know how rain falls or how ice forms

tapnashey:  -Tapiwa Mugabe, tapiwamugabe.tumblr.com (via tapiwamugabe)

[hours]

“[V]iolence does not consist so much in injuring and annihilating persons as in interrupting their continuity, making them play roles in which they no longer recognize themselves, making them betray not only commitments but their own substance, making them carry out actions that will destroy every possibility for action.”

— Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (translated by Alphonso Lingis)

[yes-this-is-groot]

By: Lize Meddings

[soft-manic]

THIS

[starkswaters]

FANGIRL CHALLENGE ♔ ten movies {6/10}

↬ North and South (2004)

[iwaslisteningtotherain]

'Loyalty and obedience to wisdom and justice are fine; but it is still finer to defy arbitrary power, unjustly and cruelly used - not on behalf of ourselves, but on behalf of others more helpless.'

[softerworld]

A Softer World: 911

(it isn’t the storm that makes the ocean dangerous.)

buy this print

[misterracoon]

You are not lost. You are here. Stop abandoning yourself. Stop repeating this myth about love and success that will land in your lap or evade you forever. Build a humble, flawed life from the rubble, and cherish that. There is nothing more glorious on the face of the earth than someone who refuses to give up, who refuses to give in to their most self-hating, discouraged, disillusioned self, and instead learns, slowly and painfully, how to relish the feeling of building a hut in middle of the suffocating dust.

Ask Polly: Why Should I Keep Going?

by Heather Havrilesky

(via arabellesicardi)

[luthienne]

This is the end, isn’t it? And you are here with me again, listening with me: the sea no longer torments me; the self I wished to be is the self I am.

Louise Glück, from Meadowlands (via luthienne)