Vivat Libertas

So this  is the best I can come up with after an absence of over a month?! Not quite - there is better still to come - but for now I am blogging in my spare time, in between studying, exams and trying to make sure that I actually get to university come September. So pardon me if my posts aren't always deep and thought-provoking; it's not like they ever are, anyway. Those of you who know me will know that I absolutely adore books. Right now I have hundreds huddled against each other on my shelves and curled up on my floor for lack of space. If I'm engrossed in a book or a magazine, you're probably not going to get a peep out of me till I'm done - if I even acknowledge your existence. (I'm really rude to people when I'm reading, because I blank out everything that isn't a rectangle with writing on it. Sorry!) I love their shape, their feel, their smell, their covers. And when ebook readers first took off a couple of years ago, I wasn't too impresse...

So this all started with an absolutely terrible event. I've lost my mind like I haven't done in a long time, so this post isn't going to be at all coherent. Have fun deciphering my mental scrabblings, guys. Long story short, everyone's alive. Everyone now wants to move on - except me. But why? you might ask. Moving on is desirable, the end goal after trauma. Not moving on is for weaklings, attention seekers and other such - to put it impolitely - absolute fuckheads that no sane human being wants to associate with. The trouble with me is that I think too much. It's certainly better than doing the opposite, but I don't think in straight and clear lines or elegant curves: I think in circles, tangles, swerving in sharply as I spin towards the centre of the proverbial downwards spiral. It's not good for me. Sometimes I think a lobotomy would help. It's especially odd, as in depression most activity of just about anything in the body is reduced - that...

Shit like this is why I won't go back to being a feminist any time soon. Some feminists are complaining about how we can't criticise any concepts or institutions, like marriage or wearing make-up, because some women enjoy these things. Quelle horreur! Whatever can  we do, if we can't criticise other women's choices? Explode righteously? Their justification for criticising the choices of other women? Because they're not made in a vacuum: they're made in a repressive, kyriarchal society that has a vested interest in making women complacent and content in their own oppression. I'm going to concede something right now: choices are definitely, definitely, definitely not  made in a vacuum. They are made chained to kyriarchal standards, drowning in them even. But every single person, no matter their privilege, is bound by these chains - so no-one can claim to be uniquely liberated. And this is one main reason I don't believe you should  be criticising the...

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Content note: suicide, self-harm, purging. I can't really be bothered to think up a good title for this; I'm too angry. As a mentally ill person, I absolutely beg anyone who's reading this right now not to romanticise mental illness. I beg anyone who's reading this right now to spread the word, to tell their friends and family and loved ones and children, to go and shout it from their roofs that mental illness is a terrible thing to live through. Please don't wonder why I care so much: I live through this. Rather, wonder why I don't welcome it. I've seen people defend the romanticisation of mental illness with the justification that it's better than demonisation - the trouble is that it's not. They're two sides of the same thing: a refusal to deal with mental illness honestly. And here's why. I'll start with demonisation first, because it's simpler to understand and to explain. This demonisation is dehumanising, as it st...

Content note: sexual harassment, rape threats, suicide attempts Before I start, here's the standard disclaimer: I'm a white cis het-passing but actually bisexual middle-class able-bodied but mentally ill woman. So this is written from a perspective that's really rather privileged and might just be whitesplaining drivel. If it is, burn it. Anyway... Sex-positive feminism seems to have gotten a pretty bad rap over the years as being overly simplistic, centring on the experiences of privileged women, and erasing and oppressing asexual people, among many other things. So by all rights, I should be sneering at it and turning away from just another vehicle that only works for certain privileged groups of women. And besides, I'm not even a feminist anymore, even though I miss being a feminist and a lot of the time I wish I could go back, particularly for the feel of community. Why do I even give a shit? I'll concede this right now: a lot of criticism of sex-posit...

Well, I never thought I'd be putting photos of my face on the interwebs for everyone to see - so any photos are what I actually look like. I'm ugly, I know. Usually, selfies are considered by patriarchal society as being "slutty" (how I hate that world) or vain. However, not-so-recently there's been this idea going round that selfies, far from being attention-seeking or cries for help, are empowering and actually pretty good things to do. I actually have a pretty tangled opinion on selfies, so I need to write this to untangle it and actually make some sense in daily life. I'll say one thing first: I completely disagree with calling selfies slutty. They range from perfectly innocent to sexy and seductive, but no actual promiscuity is ever involved because it's a static image. Even if it's a highly sexualised static image, no sex is going on. The kinds of people who say this are also usually more than happy to look at entire pages full of hot women...

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It occurs to me that I really, really don’t mind staying up till midnight doing maths; in fact, I actually quite enjoy it. Yes, you heard me correctly – I am that strange, unnatural and perhaps slightly broken person who genuinely enjoys mathematics. I’ve talked about it before, I think, how I consider maths an elegant and beautiful language to work with. But more than that, it’s just…well…it’s fun. I find it a very natural language to work in, and I enjoy learning more and more of its grammar and vocabulary every day. It calms me down when I need to relax and fires me up when I see something new. More than anything, it just makes sense: from the relatively simple equation F=m dv/dt to the beauty that is Euler’s relation, it’s elegant and precise and, to my mind, deeply intuitive.