I think about it a lot, if I were to run away from everything. I like my life, and yet there is something so suffocating about it. To break free, to cast off the chains of human restrictions and just wander for the rest of my time from place to place, never tied down by anything, is a dream. It will only ever be a dream for me. Living vicariously through these characters, I get to experience this total liberation and lack of responsibility without actually going anywhere.

My life is a winding pathway that must go somewhere, though I often wish that it led to some kind of portal to somewhere completely different. I am a high achieving student, I will go to college and study law, I will get a steady job, I will live a normal life like how it’s meant to be. But I will always yearn for the life of a wanderer. As I suffocate from the chokehold of societal expectation and normal mundane routine, I will remember movies like After Hours, Before Sunrise, Nowhere, Taxi Driver, etc. The idea of having nowhere to be, to just simple walk around and experience with no one expecting anything of me but to live, it thrills me to my core. My life will never be this way. I will forever be trapped within the confines of reality. And this is probably what draws me to this life - how far away reality is when you live in no one else’s reality but your own. I wish to escape reality, to constantly live on the brink of whatever is beyond.

Life is about experience, and yet now we are supposed to forget this and mindlessly get up, work, go home, sleep, repeat. We live passively in a constant state of thinking that this is what’s best. This is what kills me about capitalism and big companies’ needs to keep us on our knees - we work so much that we never get to live or experience anything with meaning. I am plagued by thoughts about working and studying and I can’t ever seem to catch a breath between one thing and the next. Life moves so quickly that often we forget that we are alive, and that there is no limit to our capacity for living. Sylvia Plath lamented once that ‘I am so limited’, and for so long I felt that way. Limited not only by my physical circumstances but by my own brain and conscience. The only thing I want out of life is to forget this conscience and live for the sake of living. I wish to wander the depths of the world with no one counting how much time I am wasting, with no clock telling me that I have to forget all of this in the morning. I wish to truly live, and everything about this life stops me from doing it. I will likely never be free, but as long as I am conscious of this desire it will kill me a little bit every day.

But maybe it’s a good thing. An 18 year long chapter of my life is over and I’m ready to move on a bit and grow up. Serendipitously, I’ve been completely obsessed with Bob Dylan recently and his song ‘it’s all over now, baby blue’ has been hitting me where it hurts. From the first time I heard it, it got me thinking about endings and new beginnings. It’s heartbreaking, your world falling apart around you when you don’t feel prepared or ready to move on yet. If we could, I’m sure a lot of us would stay kids forever and never have to endure the pain of being alone in the world. That’s how I see adulthood - being thrown into the world, responsible for everything one does (Jean-Paul Sartre reference!).

In the song, he tells us to ‘strike another match, go start anew’. In such a sorrowful song we’re left with this hopeful message - before you is an endless amount of possibilities. You can do anything now, become anything, go anywhere. Figuratively speaking of course - since economic restrictions can prevent a lot of this tangible change, but if we can even adhere to the principle of moving on, striking another match, becoming the person that we wish to be - I believe that we can.

I had a really hard time turning 16 and 17, really trying to accept that my childhood is almost over and I just couldn’t do it. I wrote a book at 16 and a lot of it is about my fear of moving on and growing older, wishing to stay in the present for as long as possible. But after only two years my perspective has completely changed. I don’t know if it’s just general maturing or if I just got sick of hating my life all the time, but something clicked in my mind that made me genuinely look forward to the future rather than fear it. I can’t wait to move onto new things, I think I’d die if I had to stay in teenhood, what feels like an eternal purgatory of self hatred and emotional turmoil.

I’ve learned to stop fearing new beginnings. I can’t wait to explore all of the different aspects of life and my future. My fig tree is full to the brim but I will take every fig within my reach, savour it, and I won’t let any fig go to waste.

What I find is that sometimes, once they find out, they practically hang off of me. They’re weirdly physical and get very comfortable breaking a boundary that I wouldn’t dare to cross out of the blue for fear of being seen as predatory or creepy. I don’t mind it, but what makes me start thinking is just how comfortable they are practically feeling me up.. it’s as if I’m their experiment, their portal, into what it’s like to be with a girl. And it’s confusing for me! This straight girl is all over me one minute, acting as if we’ve been together for so long, then ten minutes later she’s with her boyfriend acting as if she wasn’t grabbing my whole ass minutes prior..

I get emotionally attached to girls so easily it’s embarrassing. A girl talked to me a few times last year and it took me months to get over her and let her go. And sometimes I wonder whether I have bad luck, the girls I actually end up having feelings for are always either straight or live half a country away. The only girls I feel real connections with are ones that would pick any man over me in a heartbeat.

I think the reason that straight girls do this is because queerness is so foreign to them. I’m so different to what they deem attractive and I think that perhaps the confidence to be myself and appear so differently to what is typically expected of women is what really intrigues them. It’s cool to be gay now and they wish to jump on the trend without the commitment of actually living a life as an oddity.

And it’s nice to feel wanted. I’m like their imaginary friend - they love me and want to talk to me all the time until they come back into reality and go back to men who treat them like shit. They use me as a way of escaping their boring heterosexual lives and they know I have nothing better to do than to go along with it. I’m just this desperate lesbian who they use to see how the world works from a different perspective. But when I see them in relationships I feel this pang, because I know I’ve never had that and there’s a possibility that I never will. And I know I’d be a lot more okay with that if I hadn’t been ‘love-bombed’ by these girls who I know will never feel the same way.

I may write as if I feel resentful towards these girls, but I don’t. Sometimes I miss them so much it’s as if we had actually been together once. I think I just miss the feeling of a girl liking me, even if I was an experiment.

I’m definitely overthinking this whole thing but I’m really curious as to whether this happens to other people.

I’m not calling Clairo or any other celebrity fake or deceitful, it’s the nature of their jobs - to commodify themselves in order to sell their product. To be famous you must create a self-brand, where something unique about you might be your ‘identifier’. Think of Chappell Roan’s curly red hair. This is all part of a meticulously crafted persona that is shown to the world in the form of an admirable (and often beautiful) person.

If you’ve ever seen the movie ‘Perfect Blue’ (1997), you’d see what I mean. Mima shows a certain image of herself to her fans - A cute K-pop idol. But as soon as she starts to show the public a different side of her, a part of her that doesn’t fit to her celebrity brand, her fans feel betrayed and don’t ‘know her’ anymore. The truth is that they never knew her. As she realises that she doesn’t have to cater to what her audience expects of her, she realises that she doesn’t know herself at all. ‘Perfect Blue portrays people perceiving us in ways we don’t choose and that perception becoming reality. It is a story of duality, of identities at war with one another.’

She finds that the public’s perception of her has taken over her whole life and she must finally distinguish which identity is truly hers.

This is the curse of celebrity. When everyone ‘knows you’, everyone has an opinion of you, yet none of them have ever had a two minute conversation with you. They ascribe traits to you because to them you are a character that is customisable, a canvas of which they can paint with whatever colours and shapes they want. Every inch of your body is observed and every mannerism they see you make is perceived and interpreted. It’s like a prison where you are constantly observed, like you are the subject of a science experiment of which you know nothing about. You are a celebrity and therefore you are trapped in an eternal panopticon with no way to escape.

We’ve seen the effects of constant public observation on celebrities, specifically young women thrust into the spotlight. Britney Spears, Amanda Bynes. These women are violated by the public eye and it feels inescapable. When everyone thinks that they know you, you start to question whether you even know yourself.

Something we tend to forget is that celebrities are human too and we must treat them as such. Paparazzi and media outlets can strip these celebrities of all their humanity and act as if they are objects to gaze at in awe without any thought to their personal well-being. It is dehumanising to be treated as an image to be perceived, when all perception is critique. If you are famous, you have to be perfect and that is the only thing that determines your worth as a person.

Unfortunately to make it in the writing industry people have to know your name so even I have to commodify myself in order to sell books. If you enjoyed this you might enjoy my short story collection, The Melancholia of the Grotesque! Thank you for reading, I hope I provided some insight into a situation I pretty much have no experience with, this is purely observation but I wanted to put it into words <3

I find myself drawn back to the past constantly. Whether I dream about it or I see someone who I used to be close with and has become a stranger over the cruel passage of time, I will never cease to contemplate the past. It’s like a shadow that perpetually follows me around and never lets me do anything without it being considered. I constantly wish for nothing more than to go back to the past and enjoy it while I had that time left, because now it’s gone and everything has changed. Being stuck in the past is a unique type of prison, since it is purely in my own head and self-inflicted. I wish that I could go about every day with this immense weight of the past lifted off of my shoulders but I doubt the possibility of me ever letting go.

“No one descends into himself so long as he remains a slave of the past or of the future.” Emil Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born

I wonder if my younger self would hate me. In a way, I hate her. Only because she didn’t appreciate what she had and now it’s gone and I mourn the day I lost my innocent wonder about the world. Sometime in the past few years I have become sick, not physically but figuratively. The past eats away at me like a parasite and leaves only the worst parts of me to show the world. I will never be a child again and I must accept this.

“When you’re a child, everything is simple, you have little to no worries or responsibilities and you’re taken care of. You’re told to enjoy it while it lasts, but you spend every waking moment wishing you were older.” Katie Seaver, The Melancholia of the Grotesque

I mourn the loss of my childhood yet I do remember the sorrow I felt each day, fear of the unknown and complete isolation from other girls my age. There’s always been something there that stops me from being like the others and it made me stick out like a sore thumb as a child. I always overdid jokes, never understanding them the way they understood each other. This horrible feeling of never belonging made me feel so isolated from everyone in my life, especially those my age. I had friends of course but never a best friend. I have never had anyone who I can tell everything and it made me feel so worthless back then. My childhood was clearly not all sunshine and rainbows, yet I still wish every day that I could go back and stay there forever.

“The same feeling of not belonging, of futility, wherever I go: I pretend interest in what matters nothing to me, I bestir myself mechanically or out of charity, without ever being caught up, without ever being somewhere. What attracts me is elsewhere, and I don't know what that elsewhere is.” Emil Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born

I miss some people so much it’s as if they’re dead and I never had the chance to say goodbye. Yet most people I miss I still see, walking past me in the hallway. We’re strangers now but I can’t forget the intimate details of their personalities and their bedrooms, how am I supposed to forget them like I never fell in love with them a little bit? I’ll always subconsciously find something to love about anyone I interact with, so how do I just let them go once they’re done with me? Forget breakups. I mourn old friendships sometimes more than I mourn the people themselves. The ghost of our friendship haunts me and I’ll never be able to escape from it entirely. It drives me crazy knowing that the people who I wished to keep in my life forever left. I fought for them to stay but they never did. Now I walk by them, we might exchange a split second of eye contact before they ultimately dismiss me and the bond we shared years ago. I doubt they ever think of me yet I think of them daily. It’s a weird kind of obsession I have with wishing to be back in the past with the same people, people who have since changed entirely. I don’t know who I am looking at, as time has taken them and warped them into people I barely know. But once I did know them and that version of them is now gone forever.

“People waste so much of their lives waiting and wishing they were somewhere else, doing something else, and so they can never truly enjoy anything.” Katie Seaver, The Melancholia of the Grotesque

I miss the simplicity of life, when nothing was expected of me and I could just be. Of course I wished to have things to do and so I occupied myself with YouTube channels and art projects, I even had small businesses because I was always so obsessed with starting early and being successful. I yearned for a job and yet at the ripe age of 17 have never had one. Time has stripped me of the delight I felt as a child waking up every morning and getting to go to school. It was pure, simple, fun. And now everything I do has weight put on it as I am no longer a child free of responsibility. My choices affect my life and it feels like nothing I do is done out of freedom. Because since getting older, I have felt this sense of freedom drift from my grasp. I’m no longer free in this world, I am trapped in a body that is constantly working against me and a mind that tries to tear everything I do into shreds.

“I missed the simplicity of childhood for all of the years after I was done being a child.” Katie Seaver, The Melancholia of the Grotesque

“I like to shape the present in the image of the irretrievable past” Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights

I might never stop yearning to go back to the past, to a simpler time when pressure wasn’t stacked on my shoulders like bricks. There’s something so painful about mourning the past that you let slip from your own fingers.