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I am merely a speck and distraction from this other drama and from these adult women who loom large in his imagination. I feel like a child in a room full of grown-ups and they’re having conversations above my head I can’t participate in and I don’t understand.
It’s all very cosy and nice between them, two privileged white women talking about care of the Earth and the land as if they are distinct from the white people who are racist and those who have pillaged this burning, now volatile planet of ours. Maybe the answer is not to buy less but of higher quality, maybe the answer is just not to buy things. The individualised, curated and careful consumerism they both espouse is like trying to solve the problem with more of the problem.
It takes me a long time to realise that when the man I want to be with tells me he likes being seen with me in public what he means is, he enjoys what my skin colour says about him to other people.
I want the illusion rather than my self-respect.
Aren’t these wealthy aesthetes on Instagram merely another iteration of a class elite deciding what is good and what is not good, shaping our reality the way they always have just better disguised by technology which has the optics of transparency and democracy?
him. He is not interested in making me come as he feels it is my responsibility to make this happen for myself. My orgasm hovers at the edge but never envelopes me. What I enjoy is having the full glare of his attention on me uninterrupted for four hours, which is why I want to keep doing it.
If he could only stop being exactly who he is, we could be happy.
The things that drive me crazy about her are the things that drive me crazy about myself. She needs to be admired constantly, she needs praise and can’t stand criticism, she wants to be seen as gifted and unique. I realise after ripping her book from somewhere so deep from google the bots must have commended my IP address for the commitment I showed to finding it, that she is a whirling, hysterical princess in the same way I am. I expect people to do things for me in the same way she does, she cannot leave her parents the same way I can’t, she can’t have the man I want to be with the same as
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I’m not sure what I actually feel towards her anymore, all I know is I want to possess her in some way, even possess her absence.
Her lack of awareness of being a white woman borne of a white man in a country baked in the violence of European colonialism, dictating values that were and are already being practiced by Indigenous people before they were forcibly disinherited, is the way in which liberalism separates itself from the systems of racism and genocide and from the structures that organise the way the world benefits particular groups over others.
It is a certain kind of human built into a particular system whereby solid, physical things like ancestral land, a tree, the rivers, water and rocks become unreal next to the dreamt up, magical apparatus of the stock market and quarterly growth.
teenage trees imported and planted into the soil, which in time erases what is native because no one can remember what was there before.
I want to gain immortality because of my brain and not because of the potential of my womb.
Maybe this is me. I am the fathers caught in an unchosen generation. I will have to learn how to amplify who comes next. I am the stepping stone because it is not me. I am mediocre. I have the will and desire but ultimately zero talent. I have to reconcile myself to being ordinary. I am like everybody else.
I am a pit of self-loathing. He plunges care and love into me but it only makes me hate him even more. Both of us pretend this part of our relationship is a bad dream.
am used to living inside of shame, I am used to being on the outside breathing mist up on the glass begging to be let in. I am absolutely primed for this affair. It is toxic and familiar.
art. I want to say to her, so you have nothing but white innocence because you are not aware of the inherent violence of your hospitality, your food, your concepts of nature, your words, why do I have to carry the burden of history.
This abstract idea of ‘community’ was enough of a reason to police my behaviour, my body and my actions.
The fact of his being a man means he is coddled. The world does not demand any self-awareness from him.
Men’s bodies are a part of the workforce their whole lives as they never need breaks for menstruation, maternity or menopause. Men’s time is believed to be limitless. There is no shelf life for the man I want to be with like there is for me, there is no cliff face, he can be forever perusing. I have to have had a whole life before I am thirty, will be deemed old at thirty-five, yet he has the ability to remake his life at whatever age he wants, the possibility of starting afresh with a younger face is always open to him. He wastes women’s time, which to me is the most heinous crime he commits
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Except I’m not anything to him and nothing to myself which is why I stay, and he enjoys all of us, gets something whole out of a multitude of people and I put up with it because a bit of him is better than nothing at all.
This is whiteness. It is everywhere, pervasive, its assumption that it needs to be there to sanitise, to give order by creating a hierarchy. Whiteness on its own is empty, it is forceful in its insistence of its peculiar quality of absence.
She is able to disregard that America has always been a white European genocidal project, a settler-colonial state founded upon death and violence.
Her feeling sad about what happens when an unfair verdict is passed or yet another Black person is murdered at the hands of vigilantes or the police means she expects more from a country and its systems, which have always suppressed and dehumanised the Indigenous population it removed and the Black people it brought over in order to make a profit. She doesn’t understand what racism really is. She only posts the exceptional things Black people do on her grid.
It is heterosexuality as misogynistic fascist fervour. Men have all this power and this is the world they have created, where everyone experiences only slivers of snatched
No matter how much some say they respect women, each man, even the ‘good ones’, benefit from women’s low expectations of them as control is exerted via a climate of instability, fear and violence.
