If You Like The Word “queer” Reblog.

Sometimes it's just you and your unconventional wardrobe against your mental illnesses and neurospiciness.

me looking at the person i like: i am enamored even with the way your fingers move, with the way the light plays on your skin, with your freckles and your smile and your laughter, with your voice, with how you get around the things you love, with your humor,  me aloud: what’s up asshole

  ― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body

[text ID: To love someone is firstly to confess: I'm prepared to be devastated by you.]

Eldest daughter

“Your double chin is showing”

That has reached my ears while I was dealing with my clothes in a bathroom. It’s not that I am easily triggered, I am truly not though each word coming out of my mom’s mouth is like a bullet.

“I don’t mean it as a compliment, nor as an insult. It’s just what it is”

I only have one thought in my mind - backhanded. My mom is just like any other ethnic mom says what she wants because for the first time in her life she has an authority over someone. She finally gets to be the boss and find a scapegoat. Motherhood is the only space for women from traditionals and ethnic households to seek control and people who would finally listen to each of their bitchy words. Even if it means that your children, particularly your daughters, would be those people.

And such phrases come out so randomly, I frequently try to get inside her mind and comprehend what drives her sudden urges to put some salt onto my wounds.

And I truly am trying to become the mom from 11th episode of “How to get away with murder” and gravitate towards forgiveness. I truly do.

But this same womb that carried me will eventually become the cell.

Oh to be able to heal your ethnic mom, to become her, to sink into her and be one big piece like we once were. Yet I am aware of the fact that the more I sympathize the more I idealize her, and her “double chin” comments.  

But perhaps this is faith. The faith of an eldest daughter in an ethnic family. The faith that is full of generational curses and traumas that I will cut off.

I love my mom and this is why I will never be like her.

Francisco Goya and Gustave Doré Gothic Hatchings

“The second half of a man’s life is made up of nothing but the habits he has accumulated during the first half.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Demons

One of the worst realizations that I have ever made is realizing that all I ever wanted was to be loved by my parents. I never would've turned out like this if they just loved me unconditionally.

I agree with you SO MUCH. The core value of the dark academia subculture is academics, hunger for knowledge, love for knowledge. It is disheartening to see people completely ignore that part, and focus on the 'aesthetic'. At this point it has just become a fashion trend.

I find it funny that it is widely believed that the dark academia phenomenon was born on tiktok. Maybe I’m too old now (even though I’m not) and I’m starting to think like bitter old people who observe the changes around them and stubbornly can’t accept them? I remember when dark academia reigned supreme on tumblr, when we used to read, watch, listen, take photos and share it all while getting deeper and deeper into the dark corridors. Years later, I get the strong impression that we were doing it tired of the world around us growing so fast - a reality that was slipping more and more out of our hands, that was harder and harder to keep up with. We were just kids on the internet sharing sad quotes and “aesthetic” photos on our blogs. Dark academia was some sort of universe to escape to after a hard day. Something along the lines of video games. Today, dark academia is a negation of everything it originally carried with it. Once again, tiktok has appropriated it as an online aesthetic and subculture to spend more money, to pressure others to spend more money; to make certain demands and set the bars. The moment dark academia went beyond tumblr, it automatically ceased to be this imaginary universe, created for fun, and became a capitalist game. 

I hate that I’m taking this tone, but it’s hard for me to stop myself. After all, tumblr has always been a place where you can be mad, sad, happy all you want, without the specter of being cancelled. Ok, we’re anonymous here, but most of us are also total individuals who didn’t care too much about this platform besides our own blog. So yeah, I’m disappointed that dark academia reigns supreme on tiktok, and stores are starting to have special “dark academia fashion” tabs. I guess the only positive aspect of this is that it only raises the discussion of eurocentrism and elitism in literature and filmography that is identified with dark academia. Now that it has gone out into the real world some of the items in the “dark academia syllabus” can have negative effects if approached uncritically. And we all know how critically one approaches things on tiktok….

I’ve always wanted to complain about it a little bit. Am I alone in this? Do I sound pathetic and oh god - like a boomer? I just hate tiktok SO MUCH. And I used to love dark academia, SO MUCH.