Margins and Margins

Marginal notes on womanhood, memory, and refusal. For the things that need someplace soft to land.

[marginsandmargins]

The structure rots and the plants reclaim, but I remember everything.

[marginsandmargins]

I don’t share my body with men who won’t politically defend it.

[marginsandmargins]

The gods are among us and they can’t survive. Why should I?

Why. Should. I.

[marginsandmargins]

“They’ll say I wanna be you, but I don’t wanna be that.”

Except it’s your inner self to your outer self.

It’s your outer self to your inner self.

It’s your sadness to your happiness.

It’s your happiness to your sadness.

It’s every change you wanted to make to be who you are to who you became.

It’s every breath you never thought you’d never live to take to every breath you’ve taken since.

I wanna be you, but I don’t wanna be that.

[marginsandmargins]

“just because there is new life around me doesn’t mean there is new life in me.”

[marginsandmargins]

The fact that Shield of Sparrows has a quote that says

“Praise is for the bedroom, Cross. Not the training ring.”

and then not have the MMC have a praise-giving kink in said bedroom is a crime.

Just finished Rites of Starling. Wow. Spectacular. 4.5 / 5 stars.

[marginsandmargins]

In the world of instant gratification, constant stimulation, doom scrolling, and perceived perfectionism, we have forgotten how to tell ourselves no.

[marginsandmargins]

To love is to be inconvenienced. 💙

[marginsandmargins]

It’s not that I think I don’t deserve dinner. It’s more that I think my current read should sustain me so well I don’t need to stop and eat until I’m done.

[marginsandmargins]

i’m no longer calling myself chronically offline. it’s more like chaotically offline.

i keep visiting the Internet and it’s a terrible time, every time.

here’s an itemized list of 33 years of grievance against the internet.

• for stealing my friends’ attention

• for wanting to go outside and do things but having to check the internet to know what those things are

• for not being able to keep up with my community and events without it

• for both sparking my imagination and yet stealing it

• for the negative feelings it gives me about my body

• for the constant, never ever ending stimulation

• for ruining my attention span

• for both the awareness and the depression. the big sad.

• for turning hobbies into performance and content

• for the late nights, the insomnia, the bad decisions I make lying awake in bed

• for the blue light that’s ruined my eyes

• for the poor posture, the neck pain, the carpal tunnel in my wrists and thumbs

• for the exposure to violence and trolls and incels and hate

• for the anxiety, the fear—everything that comes with the bad news in every headline

• for the algorithm, the manipulation. the mind games. the malice seared into my brain

something shifted. between childhood and here. it was gradual and then it was not. after covid, after tiktok. it stopped feeling optional.

it used to feel like a place but now it feels like a condition. i don’t think it’s broken. i think it broke us. and I think it’s working exactly as intended.

i didn’t ask for this. i didn’t have a choice. i didn’t have a chance to opt out of it.

we did not log on, we acclimated.

and I hate it here.

i try my best to stay away but how can you?

how. can. you.

[marginsandmargins]

We cannot shame ourselves into change, we can only love ourselves into evolution. 💙

[marginsandmargins]

I deserve to be well.

I deserve to take care of myself.

I deserve to eat, to nourish, to listen to my body.

I deserve a living space that supports my mental health.

I deserve access to medical care and pharmaceuticals that support me.

I deserve to feel better.

I deserve to connect, to communicate, to feel.

I deserve to feel better.

Even when I’m tired.

Even when I’m burnt out.

Even when I’m behind.

Even when healing feels like it takes three steps backwards.

Even when my nervous system is fried.

Even when I disappear inside exhaustion.

I deserve to be well.

I deserve to be well.

I deserve to be well.

It’s up to me to give myself what I deserve.

And I deserve to be well.

[marginsandmargins]

me, staying up too late rotting: this is fine.

me, the next day, exhausted: how could this happen?!

i hate being tired. i also hate having to go to bed.

i have learned nothing. (day 6 since lunar new year and i am already profoundly tired.)

and i am once again asking myself to go the fuck to bed.

[marginsandmargins]

i desperately need the internet to be (forcibly) removed from my life. let me google. let me check the news.

but for the love of god, don’t ever let me scroll again.

my wrists ache with self-inflicted carpal tunnel and I’m convinced scrolling has fully outpaced human anatomy.

scrolling feels like slow self-harm, but with memes, while capitalism ate my posture.

i would like to unsubscribe from infinity.

[marginsandmargins]

How much of my personality is just side effects at this point?

[marginsandmargins]

Store Bought Will Have to be Fine

Stopping your antidepressant feels like becoming yourself again. And honestly, it reminds me a lot of you. They say grief chemically alters your body on a cellular level. Grief-induced depression. And I never planned to continue your legacy of romanticized suffering.

I reject my inheritance of hard-earned generational trauma. It was a cycle I thought I’d already broken when I dodged your particular flavor of living. Turns out death leaves fingerprints on your nervous system.

I choose not to romanticize this.

So yeah — store bought will have to be fine. I’ll dose myself to happiness. I won’t let it break me.

I spent my teens becoming anything but you. I won’t let the demons get me now in my 30s just because your death ripped a hole in my skin and left me exposed.

I can’t let grief become my personality.

I love you. I miss you. I forgive you. I hope you can forgive me.

I won’t turn into you. Grief doesn’t get to keep me.

[marginsandmargins]

Skin remembers sorrow better than sunlight.

Pain tattoos while joy writes in chalk.

The body remembers impact,

not weather.

Joy leaves no scar.

Only evidence we have to believe.

Joy is something we have to believe happened.