the bad feminist

If an alien abducts me today and tries to scan my brain, our otherworldly friend would definitely be disappointed because what it will see is a sole sentence written in fine print: YOU RUIN EVERYTHING, YOU STUPID BITCH! (Coincidentally, this is a song title in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, a great musical tv show with a hot mess as a main character—the representation we messy bitches need).

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to that shitshow that is my mental space. Last fortnight I have decided to revive this blog by writing a piece that ended in a hopeful note. I wanted this blog to be the opposite of what I am actually feeling most days. I even named her “girl with paper wings”, a name I gave myself five years ago when I was a doe-eyed girl with the belief that my hopes and dreams would be good enough to make me fly. Perhaps, this is my attempt of bringing my old self back. Sadly, it is not working.

Trust me, I have tried myriad ways to romanticise my life. I even started a YouTube channel (you can check it out and please subscribe lol) just to convince myself that I having the best life by going to lovely places and inserting poetry in my videos because I so badly wanted to channel the art hoe and cottage core aesthetics. Tragically, pretending to be some main character of a cringey YA novel just does not make your mental anguish disappear. And it took me two years to admit that moving to a foreign country where you do not know anyone will not magically transform you into a new polished person.

It is about time for me to accept that I am no girl with wings. I am an angry and sad potato. I have been obsessed with projecting a fairylike version of myself who goes on delightful afternoon walks, listen to morning affirmations and do nothing but read books. I am no self-help pixie. My real hobbies include binge eating junk foods, drinking mixed vodka and having both an existential crisis and a stomach ulcer attack at 2:30 am. I spend lots of my time nursing my resentment by lurking on social media posts of the people who have wronged me. My weekends are spent binge watching the same shows with antiheroines (i.e. Fleabag, Search Party and of course, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend) and when I am sick of watching the lives of these fucked up characters, I google the nearest ocean and think of Virginia Woolf and her suicide note. “I feel certain I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate.” Same, girl. Same. And before I could think of sticking my head into the oven (I don’t want to burn my flatmate with me, she’s a good person, sorry Sylvie) I call the Beyond Blue hotline and say to the voice on the other line that it is nice to hear a voice that isn’t mine.

Sarah, the lovely and kind counsellor who uses her precious time to talk to messed up people like me at 4:00 am, tells me I should go to a GP and get a referral to see a medical professional because I have signs of depression and anxiety. Yes, Sarah, I know. “I don’t have a GP and I don’t have Medicare but I will find a way somehow. Thank you so much for your time, Sarah. The world needs more people like you.” I lie to the likes of Sarah every time because I don’t have the heart to tell them that I am too broke to get therapy and I would rather pay rent and live in a semi-beautiful apartment in misery than pay someone $200 to talk about my childhood and adult traumas and live in a bunker bed or worse in the streets. I know it has been said before and been talked about a lot but I am going to just repeat and scream it out loud, THERAPY IS SO FUCKING EXPENSIVE!

Is it the pandemic that has made me feel this way? Yes and no. Yes, because ever since Miss Rona came all of my sense of stability has been thrown out the window. And no, because these dark emotions whatever you want to call it (demons are too dramatic tbh) has been there since I was ten (childhood trauma, ammirite?). I am aware that I am not the only one feeling this way. As a matter of fact, I am part of a generation that makes self-deprecating and depressing jokes on the internet as part of our personality because we don’t know how else to talk about it. Does this comfort me? Not really. I wish we could find a way to talk about our little miseries without feeling guilty because our parents had it worse. I wish there was a way to say, “I am not okay.” without adding ‘lol’ or a bunch of laughing emojis. Because why would we be? We just saw the ocean on fire and it was as if we opened a gateway to hell. We just lost loved ones to a virus that has also eaten our days. So, I guess it’s okay to be sad and angry. It’s okay to not know when we’ll be truly alright. Nobody knows the answer (not even the billionaires who are having a dick race towards the outer space).

I should just go to sleep and hope for things to be better when I wake up…it will be alright, right?