Edited by: Aanvi Chhiber
When I was 11, I would leave my journal on the dinner table and hope that my father picked it up. I am 21 now, and I keep my ‘vent’ profiles1 on a public setting, very much okay with people organically stumbling upon it.
This sort of thing usually signals deceit, and is useful to craft specific narratives that aid specific purposes. except I have never been anything but authentic in any spaces that engage with the self — I simply wanted to trigger exchanges — with people, and about things that I could not explicitly ask for. there were conventions (will come back to them later, multiple times, through publications, pieces, years and careers) around it.
In my teenage years, I was told that even if you and your parents were separately watching the same erotic drama on TV, you could not just go up to them and try to bond over it. that it is not typical to go up to random women in your university lifts and try to extend solidarity over experiencing a man who just does not take the hint at a thursday-night party. if someone wanted to befriend you in a class of hundred, chances are they would never make a move.
I understood early that people’s lines between the private and the public, the interior and the spectacle, the casual conversation and literary analyses: were slightly more rigid than mine. it was also not particularly kind to negotiate with other people’s boundaries.
but it was not fun either. i was ravenous, promiscuous even — for high-stakes, personal, scandalously honest conversations outside my immediate friend group.
When I was younger and more obnoxious, I would complain about the “lack of sincerity” epidemic and play that one Matthew Healy song on repeat.
(“and irony’s okay i suppose, culture is to blame”)
These days, I just think about the intersections of trauma, shame, and late-stage capitalism individualism and try to steer away from the “I’m so special” territory.
The game changer though, was discovering that the only thing that invites sincerity has always been sincerity itself.
Most of my access to other people’s vulnerability began with me offering them mine. at the dining table. while I look away and let them pick it up on their own terms. effectively pspspspsp (footnote) conversations, commonality and eventually communities.
pan to: an online mention of my television watchlist that was strategically not protected from my mother’s viewership anymore. a tongue-in-cheek twitter thread about the male student who repeatedly seeks out younger women, that triggered an echo of “ugh you TOO?” among the university’s twitter community. a public post on the internet like this (see below) from a time when i was struggling to not eat lunch alone.
Now, do I do this to create collective discourses through the personal narrative? Do I just have a debilitating attention deficit that makes me seek out stimulation this way? Is this a function of not having a cult-y group of friends I can be mysterious with? Am I trying to create a gen z rega jha moment? Do I just need my ex-lover to perceive me somewhere because he does not live next-door anymore? Did papa never believe stories about my day growing up so I just need someone to validate that things in fact, happened? I will figure that out in individual psychiatry.
I have, however, grown to decide that origins of desire can be less relevant than the intentionality you handle it with.
so in the meantime, i campaign for the blog again. in all its overshare-y, narrative/poetic/rant/rave/didactic/agony-aunt voice interwoven with everyone else’s — picked from elevator small talk, tapris, snarky subtweets, and actual responses to a rhetorical “what is wrong with you?” question — and i do through a space like this. This is what went wrong, and right and everything in between. It is her campus, if you hear about it from her. women must flirt with the long-form. instead of mimicking or appropriating masculine notions of structure, ration and reason – revel in the excesses. excesses of length, of description, of feeling. This piece is an invitation.