Assalam Alaykum, everyone. Welcome to the first edition of The What, a new series where I share my favourite media and some of what I've been into each month.
i. READING
How is it possible to be loved and yet feel so deeply lonely?
As someone who dances with loneliness a lot, I was curious as soon as I saw the title of this essay. The author makes the argument that we feel lonely amid people that we love when they can't recognise or acknowledge our changed values— that sometimes our loved ones cannot recognise who we have become.
I stumbled on this gem as I scrolled through notes one day. Reading this felt like a revelation and in a way was my first introduction to an essay written about a feeling in such a form. The author paints a picture of grief— in grieving a place, a person, relationships, one's self. I don't think I can do justice to just how much I enjoyed it.
This piece is about the fear of being the person who gets too personal in a social gathering even when the gathering is based on being vulnerable. I've never quite gotten the rules on verbal social correctness and being the person who says too much has remained an anxiety of mine for a while. The author argues for the rule to be ignored and I agree.
The author traces a story about the violence of her great-grandmother and her family's genealogy and only discovers more violence through their history. The author's anxieties about becoming the worst parts of their ancestors is something I've heard echoed a lot of times from various kinds of people but what if our ancestors were more than their violence?
Have Kids Always Grown Up This Fast?
I have always been very fascinated by beauty culture and my complicity with the industrialisation of women's insecurities and this article encapsulates some of my thoughts on the recent panic over young girls and their beauty wishlists. If there was anything to be added, it would be how the desire of children to be grown up is increasingly exploited by the visibility they have on the internet but I think that may just evolve into another conversation entirely.
Consumerism, Capitalism, Girlhood, etc. Another gem about the rise in aesthetic definitions resulting from the encapsulation of womanhood to a thing easily understood and shared– the girls that get it get it– and how it all still falls flat because, at the end of the day, these definitions still cannot divorce themselves from the reality of womanhood within the patriarchy, capitalism and the woman as someone who consumes.
This deeply personal essay is about being in a psychiatric hospital, sexual abuse and from the way I read it, colonisation through language.
Toni Morrison’s Home. I have to read this book again. My favourite part is the sibling relationship and how it endures through difficulties.
Adair Lara's Naked, Drunk and Writing. A good introduction to essay writing.
Ava Reid's A Study In Drowning. Reid writes about sexual abuse and mental illness in a way that I’ve never read before. Love her work.
Good Prose. Did I mention I'm learning how to write good nonfiction?
Frankenstein. Reading this again because I think my mind is more refined from the last time I read it.
ii. LISTENING TO
iii. LOOKING AT
A lot of art via the Daily Art App. The above is one of my favourites.
Literary Magazines via the Libby App.
The sun in the morning.
My nails because no matter what I do, the skin of my cuticles doesn't look good.
My poetry notebook.
As little news as I can because the state of the world is doing me in.
iv. ENJOYING
Journalling: ever since I wrote in prompts that I feel resonated with how I wanted to live– noticed, said, feel, grateful for, remember & more– the process of this has been even more enjoyable.
Podcasts because I have to fill the learning gap in some way now that my attention span has gone off to war.
Poetry: reading it, studying it, writing it.
v. LOOKING FORWARD TO
Writing and submitting my work more.
Applying to more stuff because I require a job. (❗)
Restarting my mindful living series on social media.
Tadabbur.
Reading more complex subjects, doing more complex things are movement and playing the Lumosity daily games– I take the reports of a cognitive decline in the populace very seriously and would like not to have it.
vi. extras- favourite tiktoks this month.
If you don’t listen to music, please play 5 and 6 on mute.
Gen Z is this and that. The horror, ahhh! The title is pretty self-explanatory and can we stop with it already?
Plant Lilacs. Hear the hum of the air. Palestine paralleled against the Holocaust.
History, English and Critical Thinking. I have mourned and mourned the removal of history as a compulsory subject from the secondary school syllabus and I have no more tears to shed. But really, how does one think critically?
This Little Fun Thing About Fonts. Self explanatory.
Iceland managed to somewhat ward off a lava stream. I had goosebumps typing this. Someone in the comments recommended John McPhee’s The Control of Nature and I’m going to read it, not because I think we should control nature but because tales of people facing off the really dangerous aspects of nature remind me of faith just a little.
Thank you for reading this dispatch. If you’re interested in more, please support my work by subscribing and sharing this with your network.
PS: This feels like a good time to request book and documentary recommendations on Nigerian history. Leave them in the comments.
🍓🎧.
The essay you shared “The landscape has no doors,” is amazing. I never would have found it if not for you. Keep up the good work.
Soldiers of Fortune