Nabila Tabassum Chowdhury > Recent Status Updates

It was both a calculated move and an aimless one. I possessed the force of a bullet, albeit one shot from a very shoddy gun.
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I didn’t want to be discovered, I wanted to be part of the discovery.

Music felt married to place, and the notion of “somewhere” predated the Internet’s seeming invention of “everywhere” (which often ends up feeling like “nowhere”).

How if the process had been demystified, less of a private club or a secret code, we wouldn’t have sat in the dark theater after we played, watching Codeine deliver a taut, deliberate set while we felt undeserving of having ever been onstage, blaming one another and ourselves, mad and heartbroken.

I am loving her for this kinda blunt honesty: "We practiced in the basement and recorded a four-track cassette tape so we could get a handful of shows in small bars—okay, in the corner of small bars, on a carpeted floor, during the day. Also, “handful” might be an exaggeration."

I was relieved that music had done exactly what I had always wanted it to do, which was turn me into someone else.

There I was, a puffy cloud on a couch, surrounded by women who were so clearly thunder and lightning, and I wasn’t even drinking a beer.
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People think that the digital age and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter nurture oversharing, but in 1992 there was nothing stopping me from treating any piece of paper like a personal diary.

(Like a lot of middle-class kids, I needed my punk rock and rebellion underwritten by my parents.)

There was a real power struggle to find a coalescence and to acknowledge commonalities in our disparities. We wanted to protect one another, to be inoffensive, inclusive, aware of our own shortcomings and faults, to improve and evolve, to make radical changes. Yet there was so much pressure on this single indie and punk movement, one that clearly couldn’t address all forms of personhood or inequality.

I needed other people’s outward manifestations of self to help me realize who I could be.
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The voice asked to be listened to but it did not beg or plead, it dared and challenged, it confronted but needed no reply from the listener.
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It was about knowing you were going to be underestimated by everyone and then punishing them for those very thoughts.

I felt unseen and thus sought out visibility elsewhere.
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I practiced being a daughter, a sister, someone who had a role and traditions. I existed half in my own family and half in others.
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I was learning two sets of skills simultaneously: adaptation—linguistic and aesthetic—in order to fit in, but also, how to survive on my own.
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Nevertheless, I went through the motions.

What a privilege it must be to never have had to answer the question “How does it feel to be a woman playing music?” or “Why did you choose to be in an all-female band?” The people who get there early have to work the hardest. Bikini Kill weren’t the first—they had predecessors and influences—but they carved, tore, and clawed out a space in music for which I am very grateful.

Eventually I was able to harness that tumultuousness, build on it and make it my own. It’s hard to express how profound it is to have your experience broadcast back to you for the first time, how shocking it feels to be acknowledged, as if your own sense of realness had only existed before as a concept. I felt like I could step inside something; it was a revelation.

Our signature song was one I’d penned called “You Annoy Me.” Sometimes I think I have barely moved on from that sentiment.
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How else could we identify another weirdo or outlier? These symbols intimated a belief system, a way of thinking not just about music but about school and friends and politics and society. It was also a way to separate yourself, to feel bold or try on boldness without yet possessing it.

Despite all my initial conflicts about trying to reconcile the father I had as a child to the one I have now, I am thankful that he is happy, that he did not waste another second. Now there is someone to know.

But I, too, felt confused. If he wasn’t himself during my childhood, then what was my childhood? What was I? When someone says, “That wasn’t me, this is me,” then I wonder how was I myself around a you who wasn’t? My father had been the constant, the territory, and now I felt like he was rescinding. There was no longer a placeholder. I would have to discover him anew.

I don’t know what that must have felt like, to realize you have a body at the age of fifty-five.

"... And then my father went out and bought cheap ornaments and we took them out of boxes and plastic and I realized it wasn’t Christmas that I wanted. What I wanted was a family."

Perhaps his reticence came from not being able to name what or who he was, or what he felt. So he stayed quiet, and he waited for the words to find him.

"Sometimes the dull detritus of our pasts become glaring strands once you realize they form a pattern, a lighted path to the present. I have to turn over and reimagine certain moments from my childhood and make them conform to a different narrative, a different outcome."

Sometimes the dull detritus of our pasts become glaring strands once you realize they form a pattern, a lighted path to the present. I have to turn over and reimagine certain moments from my childhood and make them conform to a different narrative, a different outcome.

Every1 read smthing 4m their journal abt my mother.As I listened I sensed tht within ths configuration of fellow patients my mother was a knwn entity,she felt cared 4 &safe,seen.But I was outside circle.My mother was a stranger 2 me.My sister was eager 2 b part of whatever 4m my mother was taking on;she melted,molded herself 2 d dynamic.I didn’t want 2 engage with illness;anorexia was what was taking my mother away.

"I felt sophomoric and callow, but I was only fourteen. Plus, I didn’t want a friend, I wanted a mom."

"She was crying, scared, frustrated, lonely. Her anxiety made her brittle, easy to anger. But I didn’t feel sympathetic. I felt fear, neglect. I felt resentment. My mother and I started to fight all the time. She was retreating from the world, a slow-motion magic trick. Meanwhile, I was getting louder, angrier, wilder."

"They wept streams of turquoise mascara while I stood near the paper towel dispenser and let them know that this was just how things were. This was life. Tough it out."

"I wasn’t the prettiest or the smartest one in school, I was desperate for a clear role among my friends, and now I had one. I was someone they felt sorry for."

"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."

"Only old Benjamin professed to remember every detail of his long life and to know that things never had been, nor ever could be much better or much worse — hunger, hardship, and disappointment being, so he said, the unalterable law of life."

“Fools!Do you not see what is written on the side of that van?”That gave the animals pause,and there was a hush.Muriel began to spell out the words.But Benjamin pushed her aside and in the midst of a deadly silence he read: “‘ Alfred Simmonds, Horse Slaughterer and Glue Boiler, Willingdon. Dealer in Hides and Bone-Meal. Kennels Supplied.’ Do you not understand what that means? They are taking Boxer to the knacker’s!”

"All the same, there were days when they felt that they would sooner have had less figures and more food."