a quiet rebel

|She/they| an average overburdened law student trying to get through life 🌷painfully self aware🌷 ✨just another commie queer I guess ✨

[neuroticmidmights]

Even as I convince myself that it was better without you , I know one thing - you taught me how to laugh . You taught a sad , desperate, miserable person . Laughter .

Only with you could I joke . You . Saw the “funny side” in me . Only you . Only you saw the joy and the darkness in me the way it was . All mixed up together . In one beautiful , messed up symphony.

But even you didn’t know . The full pain . But you stayed even as you felt the full effects of it . I loved you for that , staying as I dissociated , cried , hurt myself . Shouted at you . About things that weren’t your fault .

Wait . You convinced me they weren’t your fault . You made me sorry for my rage .

If you taught me how to laugh , I also never cried more than when I was with you . You made it unnecessarily hard . You promised change . Only to do nothing . Again and again . You promised , this time it’s different . Again and again .

Eventually, I gave up . Long before I told you . I stayed on for four months you know . Begging you , waiting for you , to change . Ultimatum after ultimatum .

But you taught me how to laugh . A special laugh . Just for you . Just with you .

We could laugh at any bad situation . We could fight against the world together , for a better world together . We could joke about how fucked up we were . We always stuck the funny bone in each other . In this bleak , hurtful world - that was almost enough to stay .

Even as we broke up and we both cried , I joked . To make you laugh . And I did . That’s what we’ll always have - the ability to make each other laugh .

That wasn’t enough to stay though .

And I’ll laugh and love and smile again . I still do . There’s communion , there’s community , there’s friends , there’s comrades . There is my conviction . To always fight, struggle and win and find the happiness in the process .

But every time I laugh . A part of me will break . Because I’ll remember how much you loved my smile . And I’ll remember how much I love yours . And we’ll be around each other in the same circles , stealing glances . Feeling just a little pain when the other smiles or laughs . Because we both know it’s not the same , as when we could do that to each other . Make us smile / laugh .

[neuroticmidmights]

Want

Love me like the ray of sunshine that hits you the first thing in the afternoon blaze,

Blinding just for a moment, until the shock vitiates into sweet, warm serendipity ,

Love me like the sweet caress of the autumn breeze even as it foreshows the coming winter,

Guiding softly to colder times, staying forever alive in nostalgic sighs .

Let your love destroy me like the unfaltering might of a hurricane unprepared for,

Let your love drown me , leave me stranded at the mercy of the violent waters,

But love me .

Love me and give me the warmth of the sun, the changing tides of the ocean,

Love me and give me your changing seasons, the versatility that nature offers ,

Love me till you become one with me - like the storm I adore , be the calm before and the agony after.

-Ramnit 🍂

[ayy-spec]

It’s normal for a parent to get overwhelmed. It’s normal for a parent to think about how their life could be different.

If a parent is having thoughts about or urges to abandon their family, they deserve to have a support system of adults to help them through their issues. They deserve mental health care from people who won’t judge them for the way their stress is manifesting.

It is NOT normal for a parent to tell their child that they are having these thoughts. It is NOT okay and it is NOT healthy for either the parent or the child.

If your parent ever told you “when I was driving home today I almost just kept going” when you were little, or said “I’m so sick of waking up here every day” when you were a teenager, that was not okay. 

It was not your fault that your parent was feeling that way and it was NOT your responsibility. It was not appropriate, helpful, or healthy for them to do that to you. 

You shouldn’t have heard that, and you didn’t deserve it. I’m sorry that you were given such a burden.

[resiliencewithin]

I am healing for me.

I am not healing for work. I am not healing to return to being a productive member of society.

I am healing for my own stability, wellness, health and contentment.

[neuroticmidmights]

Sharing a poem I wrote in 2020. At that point in my life, I was really , really ruminating seriously on the point of living. It was all very hopeless. I felt stuck, I felt as if nothing would ever change. I was going through serious issues at home , my mental health was at an all time low and I had no avenues of support .

Today , I am SOO happy to know that I took the right step in not giving in to that hopelessness in the way I wanted to at that point in time . I remember how hopeless things were for the 17-year-old me who could literally see no future where she was not entirely miserable. I remember what it felt like to feel like there was no tomorrow. Today, I know that while everything didn’t get rosy, I am glad she persevered .

If you are struggling today, from my own experience, I can promise you that you have it in you to get through this . And your future self will thank you for getting through your darkest hours . One day, you will be glad in your life, you will be happy . One day, you will heal . Life won’t get all rosy all of a sudden , but slowly gradually , it will start to get better . You will start to feel better . I used to hate it when people told me that “it gets better” because I never thought it could, but today , I know that it does. You can do this .🤍

Anyhow, without further ado …. Here’s the poem .

The cliffside

On The cliffside , and she was staring at the pit ,

And wondering if to fall or to let it go .

The sunset sky and the throbbing waves ,

And the storm in her heart as she saw it all in front of her .

The colours of autumn , with the nostalgia of the fall ,

The coming spring , with the flowers bright and the trees tall ,

The winter , that left her shuddering and poor ,

The summers and bathing in the cliffside pool .

The storms that came and left with swiftness ,

The loneliness the fragrant summer wind felt ,

The desperate footsteps in the muddy snow ,

The unsteadiness with which the flowers died and left her alone .

She saw it all and took her step ,

Whether for the worse or for the best ,

On the cliffside she stood and drank in ,

The waves , the wind and left with a lot unsaid .

[phoenix-knight]

I hope every beam of sunlight that hits my face

Shines on flowering plants too

There's a lot I've received from nature

I hope to repay what is due

The mud i dig my toes into

The bark i scratch against

The leaves which turn translucent as i hold them towards the sun

The rain drops I play with

Comforted by the sound of thunder

The crashing of the waves...the chaos

I've long since taken shelter in the storm

A safe place to unleash the volatile emotions inside me

Too intense to endure, too big to repress

Always fighting to claw their way out of my ribcage

My chest becomes tight, something's trying to escape from my insides

I've never experienced a calm

Only the violent lashing of the whip across my back as I shield my inner child against the world

It has been tiring more than you will ever know

The exhaustion has seeped through the floor

It's leaking through everything i Adore

I think. I'm tired of running forward

Was i ever facing forward?

No space and time can fix me

I would fix myself if i wasn't so lazy

I wished for a thousand stars

A thousand lifetimes to be loved

I've given more than I have

I want to be loved like death's embrace in the frostbitten woods.

Tight, persistent, devoid of breath

Forget all the pieces i left

In your lap, in your mind, in your memory

For time resents me in fierce enmity

[neuroticmidmights]

Rant

Is this how I imagined myself at this age? Is this where I thought I would be at nineteen, ohhh so close to twenty ….. lying in my bed, wiling away the time, barely existing. No, ten years ago , I thought I would be LIVING through my teens, that they would be the best years of my life. Were they ?? I don’t know . I haven’t seen the rest of my life yet , have I ?

My life seems to be a series in “I hope it gets better”. After a while, I can’t help feeling it’s been quite a long time since I have been using the same refrain. It’s been a bunch of long journeys that lead to the same dead ends. The same momentary relief . Then, back to the old desolation .

No matter how hard I try, life sends me back into a place that’s lonely, broken and hurt. I thought adulthood , it’s freedom , being away from my parents would be it . It wasn’t. I have all the opportunities the earlier me would have killed for , but no drive left. I feel soulless , hopeless, stuck in a mind that refuses to work WITH me . No, my brain and my body constantly seem to be working against what my better senses want for myself .

I feel stuck …. again. I know it’s just the winter, the long hours of introspection, the pain of being back at my parents home. I know that ten days in , back at uni , I won’t think of all this . Life will be an adventure again. Until I hit rock bottom again.

At this point I know, that though the “it gets better” isn’t guaranteed , the “it might be worse” will definitely prove to be true . And sometimes, I just feel that all of it’s on me . January will pass, and I will hate myself less after a good nights sleep, but I can’t help feeling that I have wasted away the good years of my life. And though a lot of the fault falls on shitty circumstances and bad caregivers, I can’t help but feel that at this point of my life , I should be more in control of myself. I should be the one making it better. Not lying in bed like a lazy rut. Wasting away.

[neuroticmidmights]

Hopeless

There’s an immense hopelessness in being stuck in a home whose inhabitants you foster the deepest hate for. It’s painful to hate your family , because no matter what they have done to deserve that hate , you want to love them . You want to like them . You are supposed to . That’s what everyone - society , media , friends , institutions , tells you .

It’s isolating to have complicated relationships with family . Your family trauma feels like something you should keep to yourself . People will judge you for speaking about it . They wouldn’t understand . They wouldn’t understand how the slightest of micro-aggressions can make you reach a breaking point as they cumulate into a daily , hourly thing . They wouldn’t understand how it’s like to be on your toes for every conversation with certain family members . They wouldn’t know what it’s like to have to plan escape plans . Or the pain of not having any .

Toxic families kill you from inside . If you are a person who wants a better life, refuses to give in to the cycle ; attempting to recover from the pain caused by the family can be so painful . Especially if you are still dependant on them , have to see them regularly ( or even sometimes). They still hold power over you , emotionally . They have a pattern of destroying you since childhood . It takes immense strength to stop them from having that effect on you , and it may take many years in several situations . It’s so hopeless in the meanwhile . Toxic , abusive , manipulative family may seem to be your own personal death sentence . It’s so hopeless here .

[neuroticmidmights]

Trauma

This may be controversial , but sometimes I feel like I was better off when I was living through it . At least, then I knew it was wrong, the experience was there with me , a fresh wound , unhealed. When I was living through it , I was angry , I knew what had happened was wrong , oh so wrong. My experience was veritable to my soul, because it was my reality then , untainted by the foreign perspectives of a future self .

Now , with all the time that has passed , all I am left with is this trauma . And I don’t know what to do with it . The experience is far enough to not be my reality anymore, in fact, it’s far enough for me to have healed myself into a much better reality than I ever imagined possible for myself . The downside? When I look back, I don’t see the experience with the anger of my past self going through the abuse. Indeed, I am extremely doubtful of the veracity of her hurt . How can I be even slightly okay today if what my past self was experiencing was true ? Maybe there were two sides to it ….. maybe now that I am so far away from it , I can look at it from some “perspective” . Maybe I can heal from forgiveness . Damn, I was so vehemently opposed to forgiveness when it was my reality, my present .

It’s too hard to be empathetic to your past self when they are constantly coming in your way. Several days , I barely believe that I am traumatised . Until suddenly , I black out as some new memory arises, until suddenly some sharp words from my mother trigger the rage of the abused child, until I am reading my not-so-recent journals and can go back and feel that it was all indeed true. It happened. And then , the past is a burden that threatens to crush me at every moment, all the while I pretend to be carrying no baggage . Because I have to carry my trauma with me , quietly . Beautifully . Gracefully . Because nobody wants to hear about it . It’s all in the past right ?

Maybe even if your friends do want to talk about it , you don’t anymore . It’s all in the past right ? It’s all in the past right ? It becomes a constant refrain , a lie you are feeding yourself . Because your abuse lives in the trauma you are left with . The burden that so far hasn’t gotten easier to carry, just easier to live with . Until the days when you can’t …..

[neuroticmidmights]

“Loneliness is but a search for belonging.”

I am convinced that for most people ( if not all) there is something intensely lonely about becoming an adult . There is immense pain in being responsible for yourself in this world , in actually facing society as an adult capable of making their own decisions . There is immense freedom in adulthood from the perspective of a child, but it comes with the price of a loneliness that chokes you from within .

Your socio- economic conditions influence your autonomy in the world , your place in society - your material condition , determines in several ways the responsibilities and chances you have in life . My reason for pointing this out is because social life and “adulting” do not come and go in a realm separate from the material world . As you are thrown into the “adult world” , you face the crisis of identity , the pressure of conformity , the alienation of living in what bell hooks called “a loveless world”. These struggles permeate to most experiences , regardless of social background, although said background influences to great degree the intensity and nature of such struggle .

This universal experience of loneliness is explained by alienation. This alienation reflects the nature of the society we live in , a society that commodifies individuals , makes them into mere tools for productive activity . This alienation is reflected in the struggle to find identity and in the struggle to find community as we enter adulthood.

When we are children , society recognises we need community, as seen in the emphasis most societies place on the conventional family structure . We need someone to lean on . But as we grow up , we are told to become self - sufficient , productive members of society . That’s fair, even necessary . BUT , as the protective shield of childhood is lifted from your life, you are faced with the reality of a society based on selfishness. Wanting to know who we are as individuals becomes essential for survival in a situation where you are thrown into a world where you are suddenly “on your own”. It’s essential to identity, an identity those of us who are “adulting” are now forming for ourselves . And we are faced with a ruthless society .

A part of the crippling loneliness of early adulthood comes from the conflicting forces of conformity to what capitalist society requires of you( in terms of being “productive members” of the system) in order for your survival as placed in your social context(example -what society expects from you as a woman), vs. the identity you form for yourself that may fall within or outside the social norms, but nevertheless clashes with the social expectations on you. You are alienated from society , in this clash between your identity and the social demands on you .

What hurts even more is that as you face this crisis of identity (vs. society) in your life, you are often lacking a community to rely on , to support you . By “community” I mean people you choose to be your loved ones, people who you can respect, trust, love and support ( and who do the same for you). But such community is hard to find in young adulthood , when friendships are not given the same place in life as relationships arising from cohabitation/ romance / blood family. It’s hard to form relationships of trust and love when you feel that none of them are as important as the one you OUGHT to be looking for - a relationship of monogamous romantic love leading to cohabitation, with the eventual aim of procreation. This emphasis on exclusive romantic love as the ultimate key to a prosperous personal life (called amatonormativity) is a primary reason community of other kinds, the kind one often seeks and/ or forms in young adulthood is undervalued by society, and by oneself. Love is so much more than monogamous romantic relationships, and the lack of emphasis on community , on “chosen family” , on relationships that aren’t conventionally structured , alienates one further .

Hence, the loneliness of adulthood . A broken society leads to broken people, lonely people, people alienated from each other. Fixing our own perspectives may , in ripples, help fix society. A realisation of these causes may not set us free from the loneliness, that may require a full social revolution, requires a deep change in the systematic causes of capitalist alienation , but personally; providing recognition to community and understanding the dialectic between identity and conformity in society, has helped me look at my own loneliness with a less self- hating , more nuanced perspective . Loneliness is but a search for belonging. And to seek to belong and to seek love, is only to seek fulfilment , to seek love, to seek a better world .

[perfectquote]

“Trust yourself. You’ve survived a lot. And you’ll survive whatever is coming.”

— Unknown

[neuroticmidmights]

💛

[neuroticmidmights]

Holiday update 🤎

It’s hard , huh? Pretty hard, being back home. You feel like you are a helpless child again . You take deep breaths , counting , then re-counting, from one to hundred , then up to a thousand , waiting for them to stop fighting . And then you remind yourself just how futile it is . Haven’t you been waiting for 19 fucking years now ? And it’s a pretty stupid wish anyhow , the only thing they stop fighting for is to unite to criticise you .

Although you do feel like you don’t need them for that anymore. Don’t you criticise yourself to a shockingly unhealthy level every day and smilingly call it “self-awareness”. Don’t you look at the mirror and wish you were thinner before your mum even has the chance to tell you? It doesn’t even matter if you try to go against them in rebellion . Don’t you look at the shade you are wearing and hear her voice calling you a slut , even when you bought it just because you knew she would hate it ? It’s not about them anymore , is it? It’s just that you hate yourself .

Will you ever be able to stop it ? Stop hearing the voice of disapproval in your head, second guessing every decision you make ? Stop blanking out every time there are raised voices ? Stop flinching every time someone moves too swiftly towards you? Stop dissociating for days, locked in your room , when you are home for holidays?

Your mom asks you to let the past be the past , but how can you when it is alive in you today? When every action you take screams of the indelible effects of a less-than-happy childhood ? And really , mother, how can I let the past be the past when you let it keep repeating before my eyes? How can I let the past be the past when it is etched in the walls of this house, the pitch in your voice and the tension in my sister’s eyes? No, the past lives on , and that’s what the holidays remind me of .

[neuroticmidmights]

An Introduction

Well, hello, I guess !! I was sitting in my room , reflecting on myself and my life, as one does on the “too lazy to get out of the bed” kind of winter break days . And I realised , that I have become too comfortable in myself at the moment . This year has been one of self reflection , unbelievable growth, and resilience and emotional healing that the person I was a year ago couldn’t have imagined herself to be capable of. And a result of this “character development” (as you may call it) has been that after all the growth I have experienced in the past few months, I realise that I am , now, in a limbo. Spiritually, emotionally and mentally; I need to self reflect . I need to keep going on this path of self-development I have embarked upon, and this blog is one of the ways I intend to do that .(and also , a much admired classmate’s blog was my inspiration to choose this medium)

Writing here regularly , at least until my winter break gets over, is my New Year’s resolution. I was looking back at my diaries , my journals , my photo albums . Recording my thoughts , I have found , is the best way to keep moments alive in the future. This blog is going to be my inspiration to do just that … my thoughts on media I consume , my life experiences , my future plans , my mental health.

Well, that was an introduction to my plans for this blog, my reasons for keeping this . But what about me , the author ? I am a young woman nearing my twenties, a self-assured law student who is more sure of herself and less secure about her life, a person of great integrity . A few things that are crucial to my identity are my queerness, my mental health struggles and the way I have overcome them(and continue to do so), my ability to be extremely passionate about every thing I take a deep interest in, my love for music , literature and art of any kind, and my political lineation , which is deeply tied to my moral conscience.

That was a brief introduction to me and this blog! See you soon :>